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

[oursin]

There's something about how Dorian ruins/corrupts people, as if he himself is a really evil drug, that he addicts other people and doesn't care - but my memories of the text are at present overlaid by a recent watching of the black and white movie version. (It really banalises the Sibyl narrative, even if she is played by a very young Angela Lansbury.)

[melannen]

Yes, that's my tumblr allegory! He definitely does not leave his friends better off than he found them. But that can't be the very specific thing that Basil saw documentary evidence of.

Honestly, the Sibyl narrative is fairly banal in the novel. Maybe in the novella it's less dragging. That's the point at which I originally got bored and wandered off. Wilde is so clearly also uninterested in her.

[oursin]

In the movie it becomes a stock seduction tale - he beguiles her with 'if you really loved me...' and then goes 'I thought you were a different, really pure, woman, begone'. Sigh.

[melannen]

I mean in the book, it's basically "I love her, for she is not like other girls!" followed by "Oh wait, she is like other girls, never mind."

I own a bad Victorian novel titled "Not Like Other Girls", I should actually hate-read it someday.

[oursin]

Some while ago I did a rant on Diane Johnson's book on Mary Ellen Meredith (nee Peacock which posits her as a rare creature unlike other Victorian women - who were all lying on sofas being meek and submissive and bearing masses of children to their tyrannical husbands when they were not having hysterics? - pointing out that (and this was just off the top of my head) Ada Gordon later Lovelace, the Bronte sisters, Florence Nightingale, a certain Miss Mary Ann Evans, Barbara Leigh Smith later Bodichon, and Josephine Butler, not to mention Princess Alexandrina Victoria, were all born within the same decade. That is quite a lot of women to be Not Like Other Women, they could form a club.

[dragoness_e]

You overlooked one of my favorites from that era, Amelia B. Edwards.

[oursin]

Fell just outside the relevant dates to be born within a decade of Mary Ellen (b. 1819). But honestly, a plethora of Victorian women who were not the utter wimps being posited that she was Not Like!

[rydra_wong]

There's something about how Dorian ruins/corrupts people, as if he himself is a really evil drug, that he addicts other people and doesn't care

Yes, I was having a reread because of this discussion, and aside from all the decoy-trollery about what specific Unspeakable Depravity Dorian himself has committed that Basil has seen evidence of, this was what caught my attention this time around.

If one reads without looking for Implications (even though Wilde has scattered them so temptingly over the text) or trying to figure out "the most terrible confession I ever read", what Basil says is that everyone who's become close to Dorian has made awful life-ruining decisions, of fairly diverse kinds.

But it hit me that to a reader now, that's maybe MORE disturbing and interesting than the various possible depravities - "I don't know what you're doing but everyone around you self-destructs while you remain unharmed."

Much creepier and more of a horror story than "Oh, maybe he went to a Satanic orgy or something".

[lannamichaels]

If one reads without looking for Implications (even though Wilde has scattered them so temptingly over the text) or trying to figure out "the most terrible confession I ever read", what Basil says is that everyone who's become close to Dorian has made awful life-ruining decisions, of fairly diverse kinds.

But it hit me that to a reader now, that's maybe MORE disturbing and interesting than the various possible depravities - "I don't know what you're doing but everyone around you self-destructs while you remain unharmed."

Someone who enables all the worst in others, egging them on, and keeping his own shoes clean is a very very realistic horror story. Also now I can just imagine the advice letter column, and I haven't ever actually read The Picture of Dorian Grey.

[rydra_wong]

Someone who enables all the worst in others, egging them on, and keeping his own shoes clean is a very very realistic horror story.

Yes! Which really struck me on this reread, when I'd previously been paying attention to the melodramatic Gothic horrors and aesthetic stylings.

And it makes some of the melodrama snap into place more: oh, of course James Vane oh-so-conveniently gets shot by mistake, if the nature of Dorian's whole supernatural thing isn't just Eternal Youth/Spooky Portrait, it's that he's immune to consequences (except those he inflicts on himself). Damage bounces off him to land on everyone else around.

[dragoness_e]

Interesting--there's a classic horror villain who is a lot like that: Lord Ruthven. Everyone he companions, male or female, self-destructs or is ruined in one way or another. Ruthven is doing it quite deliberately, though why is never said, IIRC. Either he's an asshole, or it's a diabolic obligation on his part (being an immortal vampire has to come with some kind of price, no?)

[melannen]

Yes! And that interpretation is super interesting because it absolutely leaves open a supernatural reading where Dorian Gray did nothing wrong - he was just cursed to destroy the people around him.

(There's also a non-supernatural version where a lot of Dorian's friends had nervous breakdowns, attempted suicide, or went mad because non-neurotypical people tend to find each other. It isn't Dorian's fault that all the people in his set who were already not coping with life looked at him and found a kindred spirit! Practically everybody in my friend groups is either in psychiatric treatment or should be and nobody is poisoning us, we just found each other. Another thing that's like Tumblr...)

The episode with what's-his-name at the opium den really says things in that interpretation too - because that points up that Dorian isn't intending to drive all his friends to ruin, isn't really sure why it's happening, finds it disturbing, and wants to help them if he can! He just isn't very good at helping, and also has a little bit of an object permanence problem when it comes to relationships, I can relate. (Also, honestly, the boy in the opium den still seems halfway to think that's preferable to going back home to his family and Dorian did him a good turn - and maybe he's right. He's the only one of Dorian's 'victims' we actually see.)

I actually find that version really interesting!

But the "most terrible confession I ever read" - assuming the confession itself wasn't a complete lie - makes it hard to really buy the "Dorian did nothing wrong!" read. He clearly has done something more depraved and harmful than just generally being careless with people and a bad influence. (And murder.)