Inspired by

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

  BASED ON THE LIFE AND TRIALS

  The centennial of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial and exile inspired a rash of works about the brilliant man of letters. Director Brian Gilbert’s film Wilde (1997) features Stephen Fry as Wilde and provides a rich portrait of the author’s life; it is based on Richard Ellmann’s 1988 biography (see “For Further Reading”).

  Perhaps the most appropriate tribute to Wilde was the proliferation of plays dedicated to his memory. Thomas Kilroy’s The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde (1997) deals with Wilde’s often unnoticed wife and the mother of his two children. The Judas Kiss (1998), by David Hare, develops the twin themes of love and betrayal as it focuses on Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. In Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997), playwright Moisés Kaufman weaves together court transcripts and Wilde’s own writing and quotations. Kaufman’s widely successful play even makes a character of Queen Victoria, who approved of the Gross Indecency laws that remained in effect until 1967.

  FILM ADAPTATIONS OF THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

  With its visual drama, The Picture of Dorian Gray lends itself readily to cinema. MGM’s lavish, big-budget production appeared in 1945, adapted and directed by Albert Lewin. The transmutation of Dorian Gray, played by Hurd Hatfield, into an emotionless fiend is seamless, and the film garnered three Oscar nominations (including one for Angela Lansbury, who plays Dorian’s victim Sibyl Vane) and earned the award for black-and-white cinematography. What audiences are most likely to remember, though, is the painting of Dorian, by Ivan Albright, glowing in Technicolor—the only element of the film that was shot in color. Albright’s hideously realized Picture of Dorian Gray (1943-1944) hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.

  OPERA

  American composer Lowell Liebermann premiered The Picture of Dorian Gray at the Opera de Monte Carlo on May 8, 1996. Dialogues between Dorian and his portrait are presented as duets between a tenor and the orchestra; as the opera progresses, the music gradually disintegrates as the dramatic arc leads to Dorian’s absolute corruption. Liebermann has also composed classical pieces based on poems by Stephen Crane, William Butler Yeats, Walt Whitman, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

  SEQUELS

  In 1997 British poet and literary biographer Jeremy Reed published a sequel to Wilde’s novel that is vaguely pornographic and hallucinatory in tone; it is titled simply Dorian. At Reed’s hand, Wilde’s cruel hero survives the destruction of his portrait to become an opium addict and a master of the occult arts. Dorian has an affair with Lord Henry Wotton and meets Oscar Wilde upon his release from prison in 1897. (Reed also edited The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Lippincott Edition, which restores many of the references to homosexuality that Wilde was forced to write out of the book, and which features illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley.)

  In a modern adaptation of Wilde’s novel, Will Self, with Dorian: An Imitation (2003), brings Dorian Gray to June 1981, the summer of the royal wedding of Charles and Diana. Basil Hallward is now a video installation artist in whose piece “Cathode Narcissus” a naked and perfect Dorian appears on a series of television monitors. The video Dorian becomes aged and diseased, and many of his friends contract AIDS and HIV-related illnesses. Dorian’s criminality transmutes into murder as he knowingly infects other men with the disease he carries without symptom.

  Comments & Questions

  In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

  COMMENTS

  Oscar Wilde

  Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them.

  —from the Scots Observer (July 12, 1890)

  Lord Alfred Douglas

  [Some people] have decided that the late W. E. Henley was a “great editor” and a “great critic.” If Henley had been anything approaching either of these two things he would have seen and appreciated the value of Oscar Wilde; and if we refer to any of the much-lauded and much-regretted reviews or journals which were conducted by Henley, we find that so far from appreciating Oscar Wilde it was he who led the attack against him, an attack which was conducted with the utmost malevolence and violence. . . . The subject of the first great attack made by Henley on Oscar Wilde was “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Henley affected to think this was an immoral work, and denounced it as such. Now, anybody who having read “Dorian Gray” can honestly maintain that it is not one of the greatest moral books ever written, is an ass. It is, briefly, the story of a man who destroys his own conscience. The visible symbol of that conscience takes the form of a picture, the pre sentment of perfect youth and perfect beauty, which bears on its changing surface the burden of the sins of its prototype. It is one of the greatest and most terrible moral lessons that an unworthy world has had the privilege of receiving at the hands of a great writer.

  It is characteristic of what we may call the “Henleyean School” of criticism to confuse the life of a man with his art. It would be idle to deny that Oscar Wilde was an immoral man (as idle as it would be to contend that Henley was a moral one); but it is a remarkable thing that while Oscar Wilde’s life was immoral his art was always moral. At the time when the attack by Henley was made there was a confused idea going about London that Oscar Wilde was a wicked man, and this was quite enough for Henley and the group of second-rate in telligences which clustered round him to jump to the conclusion that anything he wrote must also necessarily be wicked. . . . Wilde, putting aside his moral delinquencies, which have as much and as little to do with his works as the colour of his hair, was a great artist, a man who passionately loved his art. He was so great an artist that, in spite of himself, he was always on the side of the angels. We believe that the greatest art is always on the side of the angels, to doubt it would be to doubt the existence of God, and all the Henleys and all the Bernard Shaws that the world could produce would not make us change our opinion. . . . He stands alone, a phenomenon in literature. From the purely literary point of view he was unquestionably the greatest figure of the nineteenth century. We unhesitatingly say that his influence on the literature of Europe has been greater than that of any man since Byron died, and, unlike Byron’s, it has been all for good. The evil that he did, inasmuch as he did a tithe of the things imputed to him, was interred with his bones, the good (how much the greater part of this great man!) lives after him and will live for ever.

  —from The Academy (July 11, 1908)

  James Joyce

  The pulse of Wilde’s art [is] sin. He deceived himself into believing that he was the bearer of good news of neo-paganism to an enslaved people. His own characteristic qualities, the qualities (perhaps) of his race—wit, generosity, and a sexless intellect—he placed at the service of a theory of beauty which, according to him, was to bring back the Golden Age and the joy of the world’s youth. But if some truth adheres to his subjective interpretations of Aristotle, to his restless thought that proceeds by sophisms and not by syllogisms, to his assimilations of other natures, alien to his own, as the delinquent is to the humble, it is the inherent truth in the soul of Catholicism: that man cannot arrive at the divine heart except through that sense of separation and loss called sin.

  —from Il Piccolo della Sera (March 24, 1909)

  QUESTIONS

  1. How is Wilde’s defense of The Picture of Dorian Gray in the Scots Observer similar to his preface to the novel? Is the preface also a defense?

  2. Do critics today consider the morality of both the artist’s life and his or her art? Are these factors separate or are they inextricably linked?

  3. In literature, as perhaps in life, the supernatural is often a metaphor for the psychological. If the transformation of the painting is psychology made visible, whose psychology? Are we to understand that Dorian does ugly things or that he does things that he considers ugly—or that the society around him considers ugly?

  4. Is sin ugly or beautiful? Can you do saintly things that are ugly?

  5. At the end Hallward and Dorian are dead and Lord Henry is a defeated and disappointed man. Are they punished (perhaps unconsciously self-punished) for their sins? Or are defeat and disappointment inevitable parts of the human condition?

  6. Wilde said, “I can resist anything except temptation.” Lord Henry says similar things. Analyze a few of his sayings. What is funny, or at least striking, about them?

  For Further Reading

  BIOGRAPHIES

  Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. 1987. New York: Vintage, 1988. The now-standard Wilde biography, even though many critics have had cause to find fault with it, in both its reporting of the facts and its assumptions. Written by the redoubtable twentieth-century biography-based scholar of Anglo-Irish literature, known also for his biographies of Yeats and Joyce.

  Harris, Frank. Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions. New York: Covici, Friede, 1930. Written by a friend of Wilde. Includes reminiscences by George Bernard Shaw and Lord Alfred Douglas.

  Hyde, H. Montgomery. The Trials of Oscar Wilde. London: William Hodge, 1948. Revised 1962 (paperback edition: New York: Dover Publications, 1975) and 1973. Trial commentary from contemporary newspaper reports and trial proceedings.

  Pearce, Joseph. The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde. London: Harper-Collins, 2000. Takes Wilde’s Catholicism more seriously than Ellmann does; very detailed and informative on this subject.

  Sherard, Robert. The Life of Oscar Wilde. London: T. W. Laurie, 1906. Wilde’s first biography, written by a friend and contemporary.

  BIBLIOGRAPHIES

  Mason, Stuart (pseudonym of Christopher Millard). Bibliography of Oscar Wilde. 1914. London: Bertram Rota, 1967. First Wilde bibliography, by a close friend of Robert Ross; provides details on editions of Wilde’s work and includes information on reviews, parodies, manuscript sales, etc.

  Mikhail, E. H. Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978. The most comprehensive bibliography when it was published; includes discography.

  Mikolyzk, Thomas A. Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport. CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. Includes chronology through Wilde’s 1909 reinterment, Wilde’s books and periodical publications, books partially or entirely on Wilde, and articles and dissertations.

  Small, Ian. Oscar Wilde Revalued: An Essay on New Materials and Methods of Research. Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1993. Provides editorial recommendations and outlines recent critical discussions and changes in approach to Wilde studies.

  ———. Oscar Wilde: Recent Research. A Supplement to Oscar Wilde Revalued. Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2000. The most up-to-date assessment of Wilde criticism and its new paradigms; extremely helpful.

  BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON THE 1890s

  Beckson, Karl. London in the 1890s: A Cultural History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Covers everything from anarchism, socialism, and feminism to prostitution, Decadence, and scientific advances; considers the relationships to literature of Wilde’s milieu.

  ———, ed. Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890’s: An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose. Chicago: Academy Chicago, revised 1992. Very useful, representative anthology of poetry; short prose, both fiction and nonfiction; and some drama; includes, for example, Wilde’s Salome and some poems and translations by John Gray.

  Jackson, Holbrook. The Eighteen Nineties. 1913. New York: Capricorn, 1966. Account written by one who was there; subject to selective memory and point of view; includes a chapter on Wilde.

  Lambourne, Lionel. The Aesthetic Movement. London: Phaidon, 1996. A very helpful coffee-table art book and cultural history with beautiful color illustrations exemplifying representative Aesthetic art and architecture.

  McCormack, Jerusha Hull. The Man Who Was Dorian Gray. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. By John Gray’s only objective biographer.

  Nordau, Max. Degeneration. 1892. English translation, 1895. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Quintessential contemporary anti-Aesthetic/Decadent rant; hyperactive, surprisingly entertaining. The author makes Wilde a target for his aestheticism, his eccentricities, and his admiration of immorality.

  Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Originally published as Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Oxford World Classics. Edited, with a new introduction, by Adam Phillips. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. The volume that established Pater as a leading proponent of the idea that life should be driven by an appreciation of beauty and profound ideas. While some contemporaries found the book morbid and lacking in scholarship, it strongly influenced undergraduates of the day; Wilde called it “the holy writ of beauty.”

  WILDEANA

  Beckson, Karl. Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Indispensable collection of reviews.

  ———. The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia. New York: AMS Press, 1998. Extremely useful alphabetical listing of people, places, topics, and events germane to Wilde studies.

  Hyde, H. Montgomery, ed. The Annotated Oscar Wilde. London: Orris, 1982. Complete Wilde texts with liberal annotations and useful, entertaining illustrations.

  Mikhail, E. H., ed. Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1979. Firsthand accounts of Wilde from both people who knew him well and those with more limited contact.

  Wilde, Oscar. Complete Letters. Edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. Huge, well-annotated one-volume edition.

  CRITICISM

  Coakley, Davis. Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish. Dublin: Town House, 1994. Focus on Wilde’s Irishness.

  Cohen, Ed. Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities. New York: Routledge, 1993. Seminal text on this subject.

  Knox, Melissa. Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Psychoanalytic biocriti cism; sometimes considered controversial for its approach and focus on Wilde’s alleged syphilis infection.

  Sinfield, Alan. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Excellent study of Wilde’s and the 1890’s homosexual context, delineating the contemporary linkage of effeminacy for the first time with homosexuality.

  SELECTED TOPICAL BOOKS FEATURING GOOD CHAPTERS ON WILDE

  Hanson, Ellis. Decadence and Catholicism. Cambridge, MA: Har vard University Press, 1997. Important, very entertaining study of the topic in the works of Wilde, Richard Wagner, Walter Pater, J. K. Huysmans.

  Mahaffey, Vicki. States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. A theoretical approach to Wilde’s Irishness.

  a Monstrous slave in William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.

  b Suggestive of what Walter Pater, whom Wilde admired at Oxford, wrote in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873): “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”

  c Poisonous shrub that bears drooping clusters of yellow flowers.

  d Coarse brown silk fabric from India.

  e Reference to Japanese design, which strongly influenced the Aesthetic movement.

  f Droning bass note.

  g Beautiful young man of Greek mythology who is beloved by the goddess Venus and Persephone, and who is killed by a wild boar.

  h In Greek mythology, a beautiful youth who falls in love with his own reflection.

  i Church of England.

  j Crowded party.

  k Insignia of English knighthood.

  l Beautiful young man who was a favorite of the Roman emperor Hadrian.

  m Well-known firm of London art dealers.

  n Poorest section of London.

  o Romantic composer Robert Schumann’s evocative 1848 piano piece Waldszenen, op. 82.

  p In London, East End district with large immigrant population, home to many clubs for working-class men’s “improvement”; site of Jack the Ripper murders.

  q Wilde’s reference here is to the Bible, James 1:27: “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the father is this . . . to keep himself unspotted from the world” (King James Version).

  r Small social club.

  s In London’s fashionable Mayfair neighborhood.

  t Pout (French).

  u Most fashionable English public (that is, private) secondary school.

  v Relating to the period in classical Greece, and implying a respect for reason, civic responsibility, and other ideals, including love between men.

  w Large-flowered vine.

  x Star-shaped.

  y Morning-glory vine.

  z Messenger of the Greek gods (Mercury in Roman mythology).