Not so sparkly: The Death of Dorian Gray

HUM 2212: British and American Literature IFall 2012

Dr. PerdigaoNovember 19-26, 2012

RIP Dorian Gray

Additions• Chapter III—Lady Agatha’s

• Chapter V—Vane family

• Chapter XV, XVI, XVII—new chapters: Lady Narborough’s (fin de siècle, fin du globe (149)); London’s Chinatown—Adrian Singleton, James Vane; Gladys (Duchess)

Performative• Postmodern identities, as performance

• Narrator: “Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.”(119)

• As “spectator” to own image, painting, his diary, his text

• Dorian as “mad” or “playing a part” with Basil (130)

• With Alan Campbell: “‘There is no good in prolonging this scene’” (142)

• Dorian to Basil: “Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him” (131)

• The monstrous

• “‘My one quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature’” (161).

• “‘I would say, dear fellow, that you were posing for a character that doesn’t suit you. All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime. It is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder’” (175).

A final performance?• Lord Henry: “‘You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is

afraid it has found. I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets’” (179).

• Lord Henry: “‘You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be. As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all’” (180).

Class conflicts• From “corruption to corruption” and now “culminated in crime” (144)

• Dorian: “‘I don’t wish to know anything about them. I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.’” (126)

• “I know how people chatter in England. The middle classes air their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend that they are in smart society, and on intimate terms with the people they slander.’” (127); living in the “native land of the hypocrite” (127)

• English society as “all wrong” (127), Basil agrees

• Basil: “‘what a lesson! what an awful lesson!’” (132)

• “‘Culture and corruption’” (173)

• Lord Henry: “‘Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. . . . I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations’” (175-176).

Decentered centers• “‘I believe in the race,’ she cried.”

• “‘It represents the survival of the pushing.’”

• “‘It has development.’”

• “‘Decay fascinates me more.’”

• “‘What of Art?’”

• “‘It is a malady.’”

• “‘Love?’”

• “‘An illusion.’”

• “‘Religion?’”

• “‘The fashionable substitute for Belief.’”

• “‘You are a sceptic.’”

• “‘Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.’”

• “‘What are you?’”

• “‘To define is to limit.’”

(162)

Puppy-ism• As “used by a reviewer for the St. James’s Gazette and by Wilde in a

response,” meaning “affectation or excessive art in costume or posture” (356).

• Puppy

• a young dog, esp. one less than a year old.

• 2. Fox Hunting . a foxhound that has hunted regularly for less than one season.

• 3. pup ( def. 2 ) .

• 4. a presuming, conceited, or empty-headed young man.

1486, “woman's small pet dog,” from M.Fr. poupée  ”doll, toy” (see puppet). Meaning shifted from “toy dog” to “young dog” (1591), replacing M.E. whelp.  Also used about that time in sense of “vain young man.”

• http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/puppydom?qsrc=2446

Sparkle Puppies! YAY!

More Sparkle Puppies! YAY!

SO SCANDALOUS• “West End scandals” or “Cleveland Street affair”: “several sensational trials

of telegraph boys procured for a gay brothel at 19 Cleveland Street that catered to swells and aristocrats” (354)

• As Victorian Watergate (354): Prince Albert Victor (“Eddy”), eldest son of Prince of Wales and second in line to the English throne

• Lord Salisbury, prime minster, involved in cover-up, sensational trials

• Libel suit by Henry James Fitzroy, earl of Euston, against Ernest Parke, editor of the North London Press, January 15, 1890; “libel without justification”; Parke sent to prison for a year (354)

• Months before Cleveland street affair, Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.”—idea that Shakespeare’s sonnets were dedicated to and written for a young actor Willie Hughes (354)

SO SCANDALOUS• “hysterical reaction” to The Picture of Dorian Gray

• “Morality” issue, questions about male friendships as well as treatment of vice and crime, “poisonous atmosphere of sin and corruption” (355)

• Causes “sensation”

• Naïveté in culture—prevailing code to suppress any notion of unpleasant things (355), aspects Victorian middle class “simply did not wish to acknowledge or think about” (356)

SO SCANDALOUS• Three prosecutions involving Wilde, the first introducing The Picture of

Dorian Gray into evidence, 1895

• First trial was Wilde’s charge of libel against the Marquess of Queensberry, card, his son, Alfred Douglas—with advice of estranged son, try to have the Marquess put in prison

• Edward Carson as barrister and former classmate

• Issues of “art and morality” introduced in court

• Tries to prove that Wilde was a corrupt person and exercised a morally bad influence on Douglas

• Wilde’s counsel, sir Edward Clarke, concedes justification for libel, then all expect Wilde to leave the country, doesn’t, two trials to follow (357): first results in hung jury second brings conviction, two years of hard labor

SO SCANDALOUS• Simon Joyce, “Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime”

• “By 1869, Leslie Stephen (writing under the pseudonym of ‘A Cynic’) was bemoaning the ‘perceptible decline’ in the style of murder, while The Spectator echoed the same theme thirteen years later, predicting a more prosaic era in the history of crime, ‘in which evil is stolid, and careful, and prudent, and obtuse.’ Late Victorian readers could of course look to popular fiction—to Gothic novels, sensation fiction, and the Sherlock Holmes detective stories—for a more elevated style of criminality, or to newspaper accounts of Jack the Ripper: indeed, it became a commonplace of contemporary commentary to highlight how strikingly literary these murders appeared, with noticeable parallels to Poe, Sade, and especially to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).” (410)

• “The privileged offender is, in a sense, a cultural fiction, the product of a wish fulfillment which had the useful effect of diverting attention away from genuine social problems of poverty, unemployment ,and labor unrest that had recently begun to reassert themselves. The desire to see crime itself as a fine art is key here, since it concentrates on exceptional and essentially motiveless actions.” (Joyce 412)

A New Ripper?• Dorian Gray as “shift[ing] attention away from lower-class crime” (Joyce

412).

• Dorian as “another Doctor Jekyll, or even a possible Ripper suspect” (414).

• Wilde trial as reality vs. fiction (420)

• Influence over Sibyl Vane and other “aristocratic youth” as transgressions, across class lines and sexual mores