Just finished reading Oscar Wilde’s `The Portrait of Dorian Gray’ and like any other great piece of literature it’s going to take me a while to digest the bulk of the ideas contained within– but I’ll give a few initial impressions anyway.
For a start, I think Wilde succeeds superlatively well in giving sophisticated voice to the aesthetic and moral sentiments underpinning a certain `aristocratic’ worldview, at least in the guise under which it held sway over much of late Victorian English nobility.
This was a worldview held together by a clear notion of the limits of the role of the nobility in instilling moral purpose: namely by the idea that although the gentry had an important duty to maintain a facade of conventional moral propriety as an example to the rest of society, it needn’t go beyond the surface appearance of such. For in this view morality was nothing more than a means of imposing order and stability on a savage and chaotic mass and therefore need not detain those whose role it was to oversee this rabble.
So that while the `proper’ conventions should be (must be) adhered to on all the `appropriate’ occasions, the preservation of an outward appearance of rectitude was in itself sufficient to maintain overall moral order and to fulfil the exemplary role assumed by the upper classes. Indeed, the whole elaborate, ritualistic, system of etiquette, in which these conventions were embodied, served to distinguish class and good breeding and had grand aesthetic value in itself (much like the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church with which Wilde along with so many other late 19th century decadents were enamoured).
In place of any simplistic, bourgeois, sense of obligation to commonly understood notions of ethics or moral obligation was a commitment to the perfectibility of experience through the arts and through bodily pleasure. Correspondingly debauchery and excess was to be tolerated, and even implicitly encouraged, as a sign of worldliness and refinement – as long as it were done discreetly so that there was never any open lapse in proceedings such as would breech decorum and cause scandal.
To inhabit this dual world of masks and shifting roles where the real thrill lay in committing outrages by night and cosily resuming one’s lofty public office by day meant taking part in a very cynical game. But this is the world so utterly embraced by Dorian Gray, the young aristocrat who thanks to the mysterious workings of some occult mechanism (perhaps something as simple as Noel Edmond’s cosmic ordering) takes on the ability to inhabit a further dual role: both as a beguiling object of desire, an idol and muse, and as a predatory libertine, hungry for pleasure and experience and resolutely callous to the consequences. For Dorian Gray discovers that he has become immune from the ravages of sin and time, and can pursue his depravities free from any outward physical blemish — indefinitely.
The only catch is that while his own beauty remains undiminished, the ruinous effects of his lifestyle start to work themselves on to the lifelike portrait of Gray caught at the peak of his youthful grace – the very portrait which incites him into make his fervent prayer that the effects of the passage of time on his dazzling looks might be stayed.
But this seems no catch at all. Once he has hidden the portrait away beyond the reach of prying eyes, fate itself seems to take a hand in protecting Gray from the terrible consequences of his actions: at one point his youthful visage itself stays the hand of his would be murderer, a young sailor hell bent on avenging Gray’s mistreatment of his sister – for the man who wronged his sister all those years would not be this young.
The wonder of the book, in my opinion, lies in the irresistible brilliance of Lord Henry’s epigrams, dispensed as effortlessly as from the lips of some wizened Eastern sage. And with their utter contempt for the artless, sincere and ugly, set in opposition to the pursuit of beauty and pleasure for their own sake free from any self-imposed ethical inhibitions and society’s dreary pieties, Wilde perfectly distils the essence of the aristocratic ethic mentioned above. Lord Henry’s teasing paradoxes are – along with an unnamed book which Lord Henry gives him to read – enough to seduce Dorian from his initial youthful earnestness on to the path of amorality and physical excess.
Gray takes greedy advantage of the license offered both by his agelessness and by his prominent social standing, and rather understandably his arrogance begins to snowball quite quickly. He thinks he can get away with anything – and he does, leaving behind him a trail of broken lives, and at least one corpse. He pays no mind to the necessity for discretion and reputation so that his name becomes blacker and blacker — he’s still invited to some of the best parties though. Finally, it is his arrogance, which has now attained to gargantuan proportions, that leads him onto his final act of destruction, the one that proves fatal. So that the book seems to be saying that Gray is not up to the demands conferred upon him by his kind of immortality, that perhaps no mere human being is – and that in the end our ideals should always be unobtainable.
