The Picture of Dorian Gray

[melannen]

So I'd had the Gutenberg Picture of Dorian Gray up in a window since I got back into From Eroica With Love for a bit last summer, because every time I get back into Eroica I think I should finally read Dorian Gray! and I got about halfway through and wasn't super into it and got distracted. But I needed one more book to finish off my Goodreads challenge so I picked up where I left off on New Year's Eve.

And - I realize this is probably not meant to be my main takeaway, but - I am stuck on what Dorian Gray was supposed to be up to that was so terrible. Like okay, he's clearly a bit of a sociopath, but (before the murder, let me clarify this, before the murder), what is it he was doing that made everybody edge away from him in fear and disgust?

It clearly wasn't murder, because when he actually does commit murder it's pretty obviously the first time. Also, given the thing with the bird-shot later, murder isn't really enough to make you persona non grata in that community, as long as you go about it the right way. He has to have done something that is less legally risky than murder, but worse in the eyes of high society than killing somebody.

I guess it could be homosexuality, or homosexuality/promiscuity/adultery/seduction combined, except whatever it is, Basil Hallward seems to be certain that Dorian wouldn't do it, and I find it difficult to believe that anyone who was voluntarily friends with Sir Henry would be shocked that someone was engaged in homosexuality/promiscuity/adultery/seduction. (Maybe this was more clear in the uncensored version such that it makes sense? But, really, Sir Henry.)

I mean, it could be making a point about how the love that "dare not speak its name" gets transmuted into all unspeakable things when it can't be spoken of. Or just that Dorian was a generally bad influence on people (he does seem to have been something of a one-man tumblr, showing you all culture and art and beauty but also slowly teaching you a new concept of normal until you can't interact right in other society anymore and also carelessly picking at all your weak points until any hint of mental illness you have is magnified into suicidal despair)

- except that Basil Hallward has clearly been given evidence of a specific, delineated crime he is accused of. So it can't just be a general aura of unspeakability and bad influence-ness.

It could be violent rape but honestly Dorian just doesn't seem the type.

It doesn't seem likely it's any kind of financial malfeasance, because there's no hint that Dorian has money troubles or really difficulty living within his (considerable) means (And, notably, gambling is never really mentioned as a vice of his). It doesn't seem likely it involves children either, because there's no evidence people younger than teenagers exist at all in the world of the novel.

Drugs? But this was the late 1800s, who wasn't doing drugs? Surely not political opinions or activism, Dorian would find that crass.

Black magic? There's a bit about his dive into mysticism there, it seemed to be making a point that he wasn't really tempted by the occult. Unless maybe people could just sense the spell with the portrait in his vibes. (I thought for a moment that the poisonous book bound in yellow paper must be The King In Yellow but it's a few years too early, so perhaps instead The King In Yellow is the book bound in yellow paper.)

I think I am hampered here by thinking of the other Victorian literature I've read in the past few years, that being such things as The Great God Pan, Sins of the Cities of the Plain, and Ellis's Sexual Inversion. Even Flatland, written for schoolboys, has state-sanctioned cannibalism and an explicit orgy scene and also does not ever flinch from lamplighting its own hypocrisy! The Victorians were fucked up, but they knew it. What is it that Dorian Gray did that is so much worse than anything in The Great God Pan or Sins of the Cities of the Plain?? What's left??

Is the point that we don't know what it is and therefore we imagine the worst thing we can imagine? I'm just. Having trouble imagining anything worse than "The Great God Pan", and besides I don't actually think Dorian at his worst is as morally corrupt as the men in "The Great God Pan". Of course, I did go right from reading Dorian Gray to listening to a murder podcast to put myself to sleep, but it's not like the Victorians had a shortage of lurid true crime to read before bed if they wanted, either.

But lurid true crime and Sins of the Cities, certainly Abbott and Ellis, and really even Arthur Machen, are of a different class than Wilde. And there's definitely an aspect in a lot of Victorian horror where the true wrongness comes from being out of your place; maybe the things Dorian did weren't actually that bad by middle-class Victorian standards but they still had to be unspeakable in a Duke's drawing room. (Maybe they were unspeakable to Dukes because middle-class people did them!) That's something I don't think I'll ever understand naturally. But surely Dorian Gray wouldn't knowingly do anything middle-class!!

I think there may be something else tripping me up, and it's something I've been thinking about in terms of other reading too: just how much different the experience of reading is in the internet age. It's entirely possible Wilde wouldn't have been able to, or dared to, get his hands on Sins of the Cities of the Plain even if he'd known it existed, whereas I can just pull a full-text copy off the internet on a whim. There's a whole chapter in Dorian Gray that's just Dunsany-esque lists (though again, pre-Dunsany! This is one of those books that has made itself trite by defining an aesthetic and genre that outgrew it, which is certainly a very Dorian Gray thing to do--) of beautiful and exotic things, and even twenty-five years ago I would have pored over them carefully to try to remember all the things that I might never find another reference to. Today I just skimmed it and made a mental note to go back to the chapter someday and wikipedia them all. There really isn't anything that's unspeakable because it's unlearnable anymore.

Anyway, my best guess at the terrible unspeakable thing Dorian is doing that scandalizes even Lord Henry's friends, that is not as bad as murder but worse than killing people, is either making and breaking secret betrothals, or blackmailing people into sex. But neither of those feels quite right either.

Comments

[ivyfic]

That chapter is explicitly a list of all the other gay literature so anyone else interested can go look it up.

Unfortunately, I read Dorian Gray twenty years ago so don’t remember it well enough to help with your main inquiry.

[melannen]

Huh, I would not have considered that, because I mostly remembered it being about music and embroidery and gems, but sure enough, there are a lot of literary reference! I guess I shouldn't have skimmed. Although it also wouldn't have occurred to me that even in the 1880 the Satyricon was something somebody looking for dirty books would need to be told about (of course I learned about the Satyricon via books on werewolves, so I have no room to talk.) I think it's actually more a summary of queer history than specific literary titles? But yes, I can see it serving that purpose! Another thing the internet changes the need for. (I was amused to see that there was a contemporary review that actually cross-referenced Dorian Gray with the scandal that Sins of the Cities was RPS of, so his detractors were also doing the work...)

I think, on re-read when it's not 11:30 after a twelve-hour drive, that it was mostly meant to be sleeping with young men, and maybe even more specifically sleeping with young men *carelessly* so you don't leave them better off than you found them. And the popular imagination making that seem worse. But I'm still not sure what the specific "Your name was implicated in the most terrible confession I ever read." which is clearly meant to be worse than just sodomy (especially since it was a woman's confession.) Maybe some kind of extreme S&M kink well beyond the innocent birching, genderplay and incest in Sins of the Cities? Or some kind of sexual coercion which also implicated other people in the coercion.

[ivyfic]

I read this twice as a teenager--once on my own, for which it was a great mystery story with no thematic meaning, and once for a class on Oscar Wilde in college. That class turned out to really be the teacher's excuse for teaching a class on his Big Gay Life, but in that, he pointed to that chapter as the decoder ring for all things gay for those similarly inclined at the time. As an onramp, Wilde was both popular enough and not-really-a-secret enough that him leaving a road map makes sense, though dang it's a boring chapter to read.

I think you are just meant to think he's bad because of the gayness? Also thematically the book is kind of about the pervasive quality of wickedness and how tied it is supposed to be to ugliness. But yeah--it's been too long for a more in depth understanding than that. I could go look up my college paper on it...

[melannen]

I didn't actually find it boring! I can enjoy a good, lengthy, lapidary listing of decadent, fabulous things and the decadent, fabulous people who have known them before. But it is - like there's three really distinct ways to experience those listings: one is as a peek into mysteries, exotic wonders that maybe you will only ever have this glimpse of, or you have to remember this glimpse so that if you ever meet it again you can connect it together and get a wider picture: oh, this Satyricon is the one in Baring-Gould! Oh the Hastur in Chambers I have met before in Gaiman! That's how I experienced them as a teenager, reading Dunsany and Lovecraft and Coleridge for the first time. And increasingly I think that's the best way to experience them: as little whiffs of scent that drift by with a flash of a dream that builds on another dream. Certainly with people like Dunsany that's the only way you can, because a lot of his have no other existence! But that's a remaking of the experience of reading something like Nennius or a Physiologus or Bishop Pontoppidan: these compilation books that date from a time where a person might only ever see one book on a subject, and what's in that book is all they will ever know, which was the usual experience from the invention of books right up to the 1700s, when suddenly with the Victorians and public libraries and much cheaper books it becomes a lot more possible for the average person to cross-reference. And that's when you start getting these lists of exotica, real and not, as an aesthetic choice, a building of atmosphere, in fiction.

But there's also like, if you live a life of learning about wonderful things, you will eventually get to where you find one of these lists and (if it's not imaginary) you recognize many of the things on the list. And nothing kills the wonder of one of those lists of wonderful things than the sinking sensation that you know more about the things on it than the person writing the list does. Dorian Gray's isn't as bad as some! I mean knowing the real thing is often way more interesting than just the bit on the list, but, you know, "Oh yeah I just read a BBC article on Dhaka muslin's complicated tragic history with colonialism and how Bangladeshis are using socialism and modern gene sequencing to bring it back" doesn't evoke quite the same *feeling* as the contextless line the Dacca gauzes, that from their transparency are known in the East as “woven air,” and “running water,” and “evening dew”.

And then the third way to experience it, which is as a list of intriguing-sounding things to stick a post-it on to look up later and cross-reference and get the full story. Which the internet makes super easy, at least for a lot of things, and would have been a lot harder in Wilde's day, which makes me really intrigued by the idea that this was at least part of the original intent. I would be super into a very annotated version of that chapter that really digs into what Wilde might have been expecting his audience to get out of all the things in the lists!