Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray': Scandalous Origin, High Morals or Double Life?, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray': Scandalous Origin, High Morals or Double Life? e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! INTRODUCTION The composition of The Picture of Dorian Gray was determined, like so many of the events in Oscar Wilde’s life, by chance: Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle were dining with an American pulisher, J.M. Stoddart, and during the course of this dinner Stoddart commissioned both of them to write for Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Conan Doyle has taken up the story: Wilde’s contribution was The Picture of Dorian Gray, a book which is surely upon a high moral plane, while I wrote The Sign of Four. As soon as he received the commission Wilde wrote softly – the sad history of Dorian Gray was no doubt one carried in his head – and the story appeared in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s. Although Conan Doyle may have considered Dorian Gray to be a ‘high moral plane’, his opinion was not shared by the first reviewers who condemned the work for its speculative treatment of immoral or at least uncomfortable subjects. Charles Whibley, in the Scots Observer, declared that ‘Mr Oscar Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better unwritten’ (the ‘again’ refers to Wilde’s earlier essay on Shakespeare’s admiration for a boy actor, The Portrait of Mr W. H.); and he went on, ‘…he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys’. This was an unambiguous reference to a homosexual scandal of 1889, which had compromised both Lord Arthur Somerset and a number of Post Office employees who frequented a male brothel in Cleveland Street. Wilde made a spirited reply to this and to this and to other damaging attacks, and in the month of its publication declared to an acquaintance that the story would be ‘. . . ultimately recognized as a real work of art with a strong ethical lesson inherent in it’. To Conan Doyle himself he wrote, ‘I cannot understand how they can treat Dorian Gray as immoral.’ That may be so, ut there can be no doubt that the public controversy unnerved Wilde: book publication was planned for the following year and he took care not only to add chapters which are of a more conventional Victorian nature (specifically the sub-plot concerning the putative revenge of James Vane upon Dorian Gray) but also to give a less ‘purple’ tone to those passages which might be described as homo-erotic in spirit. It is possible that he had written the first version too quickly, or with the thoughtlessness of inspiration, and did not realize that it was as self-revealing as it now seemed to be; but, despite the changes he made, the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray marked the first stage in Wilde’s long descent into open scandal and eventual infamy. The point was that Dorian Gray presented in oblique form an image of the double life which Wilde himself was leading at this time, and there are some critics who believe the book to represent Wilde’s need for confession if not expiation. His adolescence had been in certain respects a conventional one, but his years after Oxford were marked by his pose as an Aesthete. Then in the spring of 1884 (in his twenty-ninth year) he married Constance Lloyd; their first child, Cyril, was born a year later. It seems at first to have been a happy marriage, despite the sharp remarks about matrimony made in this novel, and Wilde ritired into an obscurity only alleviated by his brief editorship of Woman’s World. But in 1886 he met a young man, Robert Ross, who became something more than a disciple: it is from this date that Wilde began to engage in homosexual pratictices and to become part of a ‘Uranian’ circle in London. So by the time ‘Dorian Gray’ was published in Lippincott’s, there had already been rumors about his behaviour, and the taint of a clandestine life meant that there were occasions, when he was snubbed in public places – this is, of course, the life to which Dorian Gray is forced to become accustomed in the novel, and there is no doubt that Wilde Is drawing directly upon his own experiences in order to furnish that atmosphere of scandal which fills its last chapters. But there were certain other parallels with Wilde’s own life which made the book’s reception peculiarly important to him. When he was at Oxford he became a close friend of Frank Miles, a painter, and through Miles he met the homosexual aesthete Lord Ronald Gower. It seems possible that both Miles and Gower are represented in Dorian Gray by Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton, just as the philosophies of Pater and of Ruskin (whom Wilde had also met at Oxford) animate the more theoretical disquisitions in the novel. There is much here, also, that might act as an emblem of Wilde’s own emotional life - not just in the note of mystery and secrecy which is struck at the beginning, but in the mood of ennui and even despair which envelops the narrative at the close. That Wilde himself was prey to such feelings is not in doubt; in his correspondence there is a sense of world- weariness and personal failure (of being ‘burned out’, as he claimed in 1880), and of his belief that he was walking upon an artificial stage. This novel is more than a veiled account of Wilde’s sexual predilections, it is also an exploration of that accidie which afflicted him in his private moments. Oscar Wilde was also an intensely superstitious man – although it cannot be said that his numerous visits to palmists and to fortune-tellers materially assisted him – and the Picture of Dorian Gray is from the beginning invaded by the idea of fatality and doom. The tone is introduced very early, in some of Basil Hallward’s first words to Lord Henry Wotton ‘. . . we shall all suffer for what gods have given us, suffer terribly’. And it was when Wilde himself was suffering in just such a manner, while locked up in a cell within the confines of Reading gaol, that he returned to this theme and meditated upon its annunciation in the novel which he had composed only seven years before his great fall: ‘ Doom’, he wrote in the famous prison letter that was later to be called De Profundis, ‘that like a purple thread runs through the gold cloth of Dorian Gray.’ In the novel itself there are strange anticipations of Wilde’s own eventual fate: Here, one should never make one’s début with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age. Shades of the Marquess of Queensberry appear in a further sentence, which Wilde also remembered in his prison cell: I say, in Dorian Gray somewhere, that ‘a man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies’ . . . And it might be pointed out that, on their second meeting in July 1891, Wilde gave a copy of this book to Lord Alfred Douglas, the young man who in so many ways is prefigured in the character of Dorian Gray and who would be the catalyst of Wilde’s ill fortune. Never has a novel been surrounded by so many portents. And never has a novel so marked out its author. Before its publication Wilde was perhaps best known for his fairy stories – The Happy Prince and Other Tales had been published in 1888 – and