‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ Suggests Aestheticism Gives Way to Decay
‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, by Oscar Wilde, reviewed.
You will know the story. A beautiful young man, seeing his likeness in a painting, says he would sell his soul so that the likeness aged and not he. This happens: the Dorian Gray shown in the artist Basil Hallward’s image grows old and hideous while the real Dorian Gray keeps his youth and beauty. And Dorian puts those good looks to work. Pressed on by the aristocrat Lord Henry Wotton, he lives a life of rampant pleasure-seeking and leaves a trail of destruction in his wake. His painting bears not just the signs of his ageing, but of his sinfulness. With every immoral act Dorian commits, his picture grows more grotesque.
It is a Faustian story, then. Dorian trades something of moral and spiritual value for worldly benefit, and pays a high price for it. Lord Henry Wotton is a mephistophelian figure, always trying — more than not, successfully — to induce Dorian to live more selfishly. He gives Dorian a copy of a yellow book, a ‘poisonous French novel’ based on Huysmans’ À rebours (Against the Grain), which becomes a kind of anti-Bible for him, driving him deeper into sin.
Lord Henry Wotton is a mephistophelian figure, always trying — more than not, successfully — to induce Dorian to live more selfishly.
The question Wilde asks has to do with the limits of aestheticism: do they exist? And he suggests that aestheticism — the view that beauty exists for beauty’s sake, that art exists for art’s sake — is liable to evolve in hedonism, which is always ultimately destructive. This is a curious suggestion, because it seems to imply that art ought to have some moral content, as Dr. Johnson believed. Carlyle wrote that literature should ‘instruct or delight’. Dr. Johnson believed it should instruct and delight. He aimed to write his own Lives of the Poets, for example, in such a way ‘as may tend to the promotion of piety’. There is nothing inherently odd about suggesting that art ought to have some moral content; but Wilde was a signed-up proponent of aestheticism. It is interesting that the prosecutors used such a moral novel, due its mention of ‘unspeakable sins’ — a bit of guy-on-guy, basically — in Wilde’s trial for indecent behaviour.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is deceptive in its simplicity. The plot, as I have sketched it, gets going more or less from Chapter One; but it unfolds in a slow and horrifying way that reflects the insidious nature of evil: the way it starts with carelessness and goes through amorality to conscious wickedness. In Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning gives a real-world example of this slide into evil. He describes a group of normal, middle-aged, working-class men who over a series of years during World War II gradually mutated into a death squad responsible for the mass shooting of Jews.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is deceptive in its simplicity.
From the first, Wilde writes in a style that is highly evocative, even sensuous, and really rather hypnotic in its intensity:
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
His dialogue however, is marked more by the clipped style of his witticisms:
‘It was not conscience that made me do so: it was a sort of cowardice. I take no credit to myself for trying to escape.’
‘Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.’
If The Picture of Dorian Gray in any way reflects Wilde’s views, then they were more nuanced than his acerbic epigrams and comic plays would suggest. He was satirist, who attacked the more of his day as hypocritical and shallow. At the same time, he embraced aestheticism and made beauty his highest value. Yet he knew that such an outlook could lead to moral degradation. It is interesting, I think, that Wilde flirted with Catholicism throughout his life, finally converting in 1900.
