Ambiguous reception of the novel and plot allusions.

Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Preface

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless. OSCAR WILDE

The artist and his creation.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only published novel written by Oscar Wilde, first appearing as the lead story in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine on the 20^th of June in 1890. The central image of the novel is paradoxically a moralising work of art (a portrait) that depicts the immoral life of Dorian Gray.

This novel is the ideal example of the paradoxical plot. It tells of a young man Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward who is greatly impressed by Dorian's physical beauty and becomes strongly infatuated with him, believing that his beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. Talking in Basil's garden, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil's, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry's world view. Espousing a new kind of hedonism, Lord Henry suggests that the only thing worth pursuing in life is beauty, and the fulfilment of the senses. Realising that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian cries out, wishing that the portrait Basil has painted of him would age instead of himself. His wish is fulfilled, plunging him into a series of debauched acts. The portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin being displayed as a disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of aging. Due to Dorian’s request the fantastic, unusual phenomenon takes place: depicted Dorian Gray ages physically, his painted face get covered with wrinkles, his beauty dies, while real Dorian remains young and handsome.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is considered to be a model of the intellectual novel of the end of the 19^th c. O. Wilde embodied his most valuable thoughts about life, which defined his own life style. The Picture of Dorian Gray is also considered one of the last works of classic gothic horror fiction with a strong Faustian theme. It deals with the artistic movement of the decadents, which caused some controversy when the book was first published.

“To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim”, - is said in the author’s preface to the novel. Though a powerful spring of autobiographical elements can be noticed in this piece of art and this subjectivity adds psychological authenticity. In a letter, Wilde stated that the main characters of The Picture of Dorian Gray are in different ways reflections of himself: “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.”

The most famous version of the novel creation was the fact of Wilde’s getting acquainted with the model of one painter who amazed him by his perfect beauty. That event led to the conversation which later was depicted in the house of Basil Hallward and touched one of the eternal problems of the art – relationship between life and art, and combined with this one – moral and art, ethical and aesthetic in life:

“How sad it is!” murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. “How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June... If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that – for that – I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!”

Under the influence of Lord Henry, Dorian begins an exploration of his senses. He discovers an actress, Sibyl Vane, who performs in Shakespeare plays in a dingy theatre. Dorian approaches her, and soon proposes marriage. Sibyl, who falls in love with him, rushes home to tell her skeptical mother and brother. Her protective brother, James, tells her that if her love ever harms her, he will kill him.

Dorian then invites Basil and Lord Henry to see Sibyl perform in Romeo and Juliet. Sibyl, whose only previous knowledge of love was through the love of theatre, suddenly loses her acting abilities through the experience of true love with Dorian, and performs very badly. Dorian rejects her, saying that: “Yes,” he cried, “you have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been! You are nothing to me now.” When he returns home, Dorian notices that Basil's portrait of him has changed. After examining the painting, Dorian realizes that his wish has come true – the portrait's expression now bears a subtle sneer, and will age with each sin he commits, while his own outward appearance remains unchanged: “In the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed. The expression looked different. One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. It was certainly strange”. He decides to reconcile with Sibyl, but Lord Henry arrives in the morning to say that Sibyl has killed herself by swallowing prussic acid. Over the next eighteen years, Dorian experiments with every vice, mostly under the influence of a "poisonous" French novel, a present from Lord Henry. Wilde never reveals the title but his inspiration was possibly drawn from Joris-Karl Huysmans's À rebours (Against Nature) due to the likenesses that exist between the two novels.

One night, before he leaves for Paris, Basil arrives to question Dorian about the rumours of his indulgences. Dorian does not deny his debauchery. He takes Basil to the portrait, which is revealed to have become as hideous as Dorian's sins: “An exclamation of horror broke from the painter's lips as he saw in the dim light the hideous face on the canvas grinning at him. There was something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing. Good heavens! it was Dorian Gray's own face that he was looking at! The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely spoiled that marvellous beauty. There was still some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual mouth. The sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue, the noble curves had not yet completely passed away from chiselled nostrils and from plastic throat. Yes, it was Dorian himself”.

In a fit of anger, Dorian blames the artist for his fate, and stabs Basil to death. He then blackmails an old friend named Alan Campbell, who is a chemist, into destroying Basil's body. Wishing to escape his crime, Dorian travels to an opium den. James Vane is nearby, and hears someone refer to Dorian as "Prince Charming." He follows Dorian outside and attempts to shoot him, but he is deceived when Dorian asks James to look at him in the light, saying that he is too young to have been involved with Sibyl eighteen years ago. James releases Dorian, but is approached by a woman from the opium den, who chastises him for not killing Dorian and tells him that Dorian has not aged for the past eighteen years.

While at dinner one night, Dorian sees Sibyl Vane's brother stalking the grounds and fears for his life. However, during a game-shooting party the next day, James is accidentally shot and killed by one of the hunters. After returning to London, Dorian informs Lord Henry that he will be good from now on, and has started by not breaking the heart of his latest innocent conquest, a vicar's daughter in a country town, named Hetty Merton. At his apartment, Dorian wonders if the portrait has begun to change back, losing its senile, sinful appearance, now that he has changed his immoral ways. He unveils the portrait to find that it has become worse: “A cry of pain and indignation broke from him. He could see no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. The thing was still loathsome--more loathsome, if possible, than before--and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilled. Then he trembled. Had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed? Or the desire for a new sensation, as Lord Henry had hinted, with his mocking laugh? Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves? Or, perhaps, all these?”.

Deciding that only a full confession would truly absolve him, but lacking any feelings of guilt and fearing the consequences, time comes and he decides to destroy his portrait – the witness of his dishonour and insidiousness. In a fit of rage, he picks up the knife that killed Basil Hallward, and plunges it into the painting. His servants hear a cry from inside the locked room and send for the police. “When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was”.

Aestheticism in the novel

Aestheticism is a strong theme in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and is tied in with the concepts of the double life and of paradox. The aesthetic program of O. Wilde is represented in two bright statements of his own. Firstly, “Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art”, - art doesn’t have and mustn’t have anything in common with the truth, shown via fate of Dorian Gray. Secondly, art exists by itself and often it forestalls its epoch, and this epoch’s moral: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all… The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.”

Each sin of Dorian Gray mars the beauty of his portrait. As Richard Ellmann, Wilde's main biographer, remarked with respect to the contradictions in this novel:

“ The Picture of Dorian Gray is a critique of aestheticism, which is shown to bring Dorian to ruin; yet readers have been won by Dorian's beauty and regretful, rather than horrified, at his waste of it, so that he has something of the glamour of a Faust rather than the foulness of a murderer and drug-addict. And Wilde, feeling that the book had too much moral, subverts it with a preface which expounds sympathetically some of that aesthetic creed by which the book shows Dorian corrupted.”

When in 1895, Oscar Wilde was prosecuted for ‘unnatural vices’, The Picture of Dorian Gray was used in evidence against him. Many critics found indications of Wilde's homosexuality and decadence in the novel. Although Wilde quipped that “caricature is the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius”, the complexity of his life and work has often been explained away by reducing him to caricatures like “the homosexual martyr” or “the superficial wit”. Sinfield, for instance, explains that in the nineteenth century, Wilde's effeminacy was not specifically associated with homosexual behaviour, but in general with the elegance and refinement of the aristocracy. The dandy and the femme fatale liked to play with the conventions of gender roles.

In The Decay of Lying, Wilde explored the relation between art and truth. He concluded that, “although art consists of beautiful lies, it may confront someone with hidden sides of his or her personality”. Likewise, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is art which brings to light Dorian Gray's decadent nature. This happens when he identifies himself with the hero of a decadent novel which Lord Henry gave to him:

“For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it.... The hero, the wonderful young Parisian, in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life written before he had lived it”.

Wilde, for instance, wrote about Dorian Gray: “He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead”.

The opposition of art and life, art and moral generates further oppositions that overfill the novel. Everything that is bright, glossy, wonderful is connected with art, everything grey and prosaic – with life. Dorian loves even his bride until he can imagine her as a literary heroine - Juliet, Ophelia, Rosalind, Beatrice, Cordelia:

“To-night she is Imogen,” he answered, “and to-morrow night she will be Juliet.”

“When is she Sibyl Vane?”

“Never.”

As soon as Sibyl Vane is really in love she ceased living the imaginary life of her characters on stage, Dorian’s love passes away. When Sibyl tragically finished her life, Dorian didn’t spill a single tear аnd confessed to his friend: “How extraordinarily dramatic life is! If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears”.

Also in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward's affection for Dorian Gray is idealised as a source of inspiration for a new art. This discrepancy between high ideals and brute reality can also be found in the character of Dorian Gray. Dorian Gray attempts to transform his life into a refined work of art for which he rejects all conventional morality, but he ends leading a life of utter debauchery. As Dorian Gray used his personal beauty as mask in order to indulge certain forbidden appetites, Wilde seems to have used his aestheticism as a smoke screen. Furthermore, Dorian's invisible degeneracy secretly infects his companions as a disease does.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the discussion of whether art is sterile or “infectious” continues. Dorian Gray blames Lord Henry of having poisoned him with a book: “Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that. Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to anyone. It does harm.” Yet, Lord Henry stresses the sterility of art and replies: “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.”

Richard Ellmann comments on this: “Wilde thought that his art moves its audience to self-recognition, but this does not mean that his art urges its public to reproach and to reform the world. Dorian Gray, for example, discovers his beauty through Basil Hallward's portrait, but the knowledge of his beauty awakens his vanity. This does not mean that the painting makes him vain, but that the painting confronts him with his beauty and his reaction reveals his innate narcissism. If Dorian Gray had not been vain from the outset, he would have reacted to the discovery of his beauty in a more sound way”. As one of the maxims in the Preface states: “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde exposes the demonic side of art as he shows that its moral effects depends on the moral standards of its spectator. Art may refine someone but also further corrupt weak people like Dorian Gray.

Because Wilde viewed art as potentially moral and immoral in its effects, it is hard to maintain that he believed in reforming his audience through his art. It is true that Wilde urges his readers to live up to the beauty of art, but he, at the same time, acknowledges that every form of beauty (in life and in art) is founded on evil and suffering. When Lord Henry has heard about Dorian Gray's unhappy childhood, he, for instance, concludes: “The mother snatched away by death, the boy left in solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man.... It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow”. Wilde urges his readers to recognise that both evil and good belong to human nature and that both are necessary to enjoy life. Whereas the decadent like Dorian Gray decides to yield totally to his evil impulse and tries to find pleasure and beauty in evil and corruption, Wilde insists that one should keep one's good and bad side in balance.

Although Dorian is hedonistic, when Basil accuses him of making Lord Henry's sister's name a “by-word”, Dorian replies: “Take care, Basil. You go too far”, suggesting that Dorian still cares about his outward image and standing within Victorian society. Wilde highlights Dorian's pleasure of living a double life. Not only does Dorian enjoy this sensation in private, but he also feels: “keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life” when attending a society gathering just 24 hours after committing a murder.

This duplicity and indulgence is most evident in Dorian's visits to the opium dens of London. Wilde conflates the images of the upper class and lower class by having the supposedly upright Dorian visit the impoverished districts of London. Lord Henry asserts that: “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”, which suggests that Dorian is both the criminal and the aesthete combined in one man. This is a recurring theme in many of the Gothic novels of which The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of the last.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a third person narrative with neutral or godlike omniscience. For example, in the first chapter, when the narrator presents the characters to the reader, he already predicts the disappearance of Basil Hallward in order to create suspense: “... Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement, and gave rise to so many strange conjectures”. In spite of this, Wilde, sometimes, restricts his godlike omniscience and invites the reader to interpret the blanks. The secret, with which Dorian Gray blackmails Alan Campbell, is only suggested by Campbell's fear to be disgraced: “A groan broke from Campbell's lips, and he shivered all over. The ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece seemed to him to be dividing time into separate atoms of agony, each of which was too terrible to be borne. He felt as if an iron ring was being slowly tightened round his forehead, as if the disgrace with which he was threatened had already come upon him”.

Except for the rejection of Sibyl Vane, the murder of Basil Hallward and a visit to an opium den, Dorian Gray's vices are never specified, but only exhibited by the deformity of his portrait and hinted at by vague rumours that he ruined the reputations of many women and corrupted various young noblemen. These various interpretations indicate that The Picture of Dorian Gray tries to reflect the different ideological views of the readers instead of proposing a new system of norms: “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim”.

Not only does aestheticism affect the narrative strategies of The Picture of Dorian Gray, but also its subject matter. Wilde's novel treats the downfall of a decadent aesthete. This has important consequences for the nature of Dorian Gray's vices. A decadent aesthete does not just yield to the temptations of sin, but he is determined to find beauty and pleasure in sin and corruption. Dorian Gray tells about his quest for new sensations in different spheres of art, like perfume, music, jewels, tapestries and embroideries.

The Picture of Dorian Gray actually corrupts the Greek principle of that beauty is necessarily good and that evil is disgusting. Dorian Gray disrupts this classical principle about beauty by using his personal charms as a mask and by finding pleasure in the decay of his soul. Dorian Gray summarises his immorality in the last chapter: “He knew that he had tarnished himself, filled his mind with corruption and given horror to his fancy; that he had been an evil influence to others and had experienced a terrible joy in being so; and that of the lives he had crossed his own it had been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to shame”.

Dorian Gray's portrait aestheticises his moral conscience. Morality becomes a matter of aesthetics. Dorian Gray is only concerned with his sins insofar as they mar the beauty of his portrait. Lord Henry is fascinated by Dorian's artistic amorality. When Dorian Gray cries: “I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.”, Lord Henry replies: “A very charming artistic basis for ethics, Dorian! I congratulate you on it!”

The novel is saturated with the detailed descriptions of refined parlours, house and rooms of Dorian Gray. The hero admits: “I love beautiful things that one can touch and handle. Old brocades, green bronzes, lacquer-work, carved ivories, exquisite surroundings, luxury, pomp--there is much to be got from all these”. The sceneries in the novel have a shade of artificiality and polishness: “The sky was pure opal now, and the roofs of the houses glistened like silver against it”. As for the natures’ beauty Wilde paid attention to the flowers’ depiction, mostly one can notice orchids and tulips on the pages of the novel: “The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn”.

The Picture of Dorian Gray conveys Wilde’s aesthetism to its fullest in the system of mail characters of the novel and their behaviour, portraying thoughts and beliefs of the author. That’s perhaps why critics stressed many times that lord Henry Wotton – the counterpart of Oscar Wilde. Indeed this hero airs the dearest thoughts of the novelist. The reader meets salon dweller, preacher of pleasure and luxury like the author used to be. The image of Dorian Gray, a person with strong artistic temperament, persuades in reality of the conflict between art and life, art and nature, art and moral.

In the meantime, the protagonists of the novel – Dorian, Lord Henry, the painter Basil Hallward – can be treated as the elements of the theoretical-aesthetical scheme, intricately created by Oscar Wilde in his philosophical-symbolic novel. Their personality and character reveal themselves in many dialogues which cover almost every page of the book, showing the specific philosophy of life of each one and in total – of the author himself. They show different attitude towards life.

Lord Henry – is the embodiment of the philosophy of delectation. He is refined aesthete, enamoured of the Beauty and marked off everything ugly and plain in life. This aspiration for ignoring everything but beauty made him not only listless but also cynic. Awaking Dorian’s desire to enjoy life at any cost, he didn’t muse at all upon the possible consequences of this behaviour for the lad and other people. Lord Henry’s egoism – is the egoism of the aesthete who appreciates the existence of the real life but doesn’t care about it. Even Sibyl’s suicide was estimated by Lord Henry not from the ethical point of view, but from the aesthetic one. The death of the young actress was the tragedy that could please tastes of the both aesthetes.

Being a gifted disciple of Lord Henry, Dorian only at first was embarrassed over the event. Only little time would pass and he would say the following: “It seems to me to be simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded”. Dorian and Henry replaced moral feelings with the beauty endearment. They don’t want to accept that in reality every action definitely wears its ethical meaning. The guilt for Sibyl’s death remains the guilt, Basil’s murder – is a murder. Though Lord Henry doesn’t act amoral, his cynicism is all words and posing, which are his real self. He is annoyed by everything natural and appears to be a theoretician and a preacher of that philosophy, which leads Dorian’s life.

Basil Hallward, the painter is the incarnation of the idea of the art serfdom. He creates beauty and there’s nothing more for him but his art, but he’s kind, has good, caring, loving heart, which is in his every painting. Dorian Gray’s portrait was his masterpiece. That is why from the very beginning Basil doesn’t want to exhibit it, as it would mean to uncover his soul, its deepest motions to everyone who decides to have a look at it. Basil admired his own masterpiece to such extent that he already couldn’t differentiate it from the original, from real Dorian. He divinizes the lad, became his good friend and found his muse. For him ethical and aesthetic are indivisible like beauty and goodness. His tragic death was inevitable as he sacrificed himself to art. He suffered as he felt dreadful disparity between ideal content laid in his creation and life that had broken his dreams about harmony.

Ambiguous reception of the novel and plot allusions.

About the hostile reactions to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Vyvyan Holland, Wilde's son, wrote: “The English Press was almost unanimous in its condemnation of the book. The ostensible objection was that it was prurient, immoral, vicious, coarse, and crude. But the real reason for the attack was that it did so much to expose the hypocrisy of Victorian Englishmen who, living in one of the most vicious cities in the world, kept priding themselves, sanctimoniously, upon their virtue”.

Oscar Wilde retorted with letters to the St James's Gazette, the Daily Chronicle, and the Scots Observer. He defended his novel by a publication of a list of epigrams in the Fortnightly. He later added these epigrams as a Preface to the novel. This Preface contributed to the ambivalence of the novel. While the novel warned against the excesses and dangers of a decadent aestheticism such as the one promoted by Wilde himself, the Preface vigorously defended this theory of art despite all its possible faults. As R. Ellmann observes: “Wilde the preface-writer and Wilde the novelist deconstruct each other”.

Wilde's frivolous aestheticism was responsible for the absence of moralising in The Picture of Dorian Gray. It was this moral ambiguity that most Victorian reviewers could not accept as it endangered the authority of all Victorian values. This can be proved by comparing the reception of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890-1891) with that of R. L. Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), which can be read like a detective story in which the lawyer Mr Utterson investigates why the respectable Dr Jekyll protects the repulsive Mr Hyde, who has trampled a little girl and later even murders an MP. Only at the end, when the corpse of Hyde is discovered in Jekyll's cabinet, does Utterson find out that Jekyll and Hyde were actually the same person. In a letter which Jekyll wrote to Utterson just before he (transformed in Hyde) committed suicide, he repudiates his double life. Unlike The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was favourably received by the literary press at the time of publication, although some critics were conscious that it exposed the hypocrisy of Victorian respectability.

The same idea that one will become perverted when one totally suppresses one's lusts, can be found in Lord Henry's advice to Dorian Gray, when he declares: “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.” Lord Henry insinuates that temptations are only unhealthy when society takes an unhealthy attitude towards them. Both novels use the doppelgänger-motif. Furthermore, Dorian Gray as well as Dr Jekyll commit suicide when they do no longer control their doubles. Yet, both novels differ from each other in moral tone and the treatment of the relation between evil and beauty.

While critics praised Stevenson for having written a sensational tale with a plain moral, they charged Wilde with a lack of moral earnestness and frivolity. Wilde, the aesthete, refused as a narrator to moralise. In his poetics, vice and virtue were just raw materials for the creation of beauty. Moreover, the possible confusion between the views of the narrator and Lord Henry intensifies the moral ambiguity of the novel. In many ways, the narrator's moral detachment resembles that of Lord Henry Wotton who states in chapter six: “I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do”.

Another convincing resemblance we do find between the image of Faust and Dorian Gray. Wilde himself stated that: “in every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust”. As in Faust, a temptation is placed before the lead character Dorian, the potential for ageless beauty; Dorian indulges in this temptation. In both stories, the lead character entices a beautiful woman to love them and kills not only her, but also that woman's brother, who seeks revenge. Wilde went on to say that the notion behind The Picture of Dorian Gray is “old in the history of literature” but was something to which he had given a new form.

Unlike Faust, there is no point at which Dorian makes a deal with the devil. However, Lord Henry's cynical outlook on life, and hedonistic nature seems to be in keeping with the idea of the devil's role, that of the temptation of the pure and innocent, qualities which Dorian exemplifies at the beginning of the book. Although Lord Henry takes an interest in Dorian, it does not seem that he is aware of the effect of his actions. However, Lord Henry advises Dorian that: “the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing”; in this sense, Lord Henry acts as the devil's advocate, “leading Dorian into an unholy pact by manipulating his innocence and insecurity”.

In his review of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which he published in the Bookman of November 1891, Walter Pater made a remark concerning the Epicurean message of Wilde's novel: “Clever always, this book, however, seems to set forth anything but a homely philosophy of life for the middle class – a kind of dainty Epicurean theory rather-yet fails, to some degree, in this; and one can see why. A true Epicureanism aims at a complete though harmonious development of man's entire organism. To lose the moral sense therefore, for instance, the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr. Wilde's heroes are bent on doing so speedily, as completely as they can, is to lose, or lower organisation, to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development”.

Since Wilde's Epicureanism and his aestheticism refuse to place good above evil in life as well as in art, the novel leaves unclear whether its author prefers wickedness to moral behaviour. This produces the novel's ambivalence in its morals; a stance that Victorian reviewers could not accept.

Orthodoxy and the “natural” laws of society, which most Victorians took for granted, were exposed by artists and thinkers like Wilde and Shaw as outdated ideological constructions. In his fictional autobiography of Oscar Wilde, Peter Ackroyd captures this loss of divine laws, as follows: “I [Oscar Wilde] was reading Balzac then, and I can still recall the chilling interview of the criminal Vautrin with Lucien de Rubempré, when he saves Lucien from an impulsive suicide by instructing him in the invisible laws of society; by persuading Lucien,..., that he could work those laws to his own benefit. ‘There are no longer any laws’, he whispers to him with ineffable sweetness of true evil, 'merely conventions: nothing but form.’... What had before been an instinct with me became a principle.... Everything seemed to me to be like its own parody - I do not speak of society, for that was its only truly remarkable attribute. But I believed then that almost all the methods and conventions of art and life found their highest expression in parody. I have made that clear in all my work, just as I announced it in my dress and in my behaviour”.

It has to be noted that Dorian Gray's fascination with the corruption of his soul, as revealed by his portrait, reminds Lord Byron's characters. Yet, Wilde does not just imitate Lord Byron; he gives this theme a decadent flavour. While Lord Byron wrote in a letter to his future wife on September the 16th, 1813: “The great object of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even though in pain.” Wilde wrote in De Profundis that his desire to experience everything in life except pain and suffering had been his main mistake: “... that I wanted to eat the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul.... My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sungilt side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom”.

Similarly, Dorian Gray's hedonism was doomed because of his denial of the transitoriness of youth and beauty. Dorian Gray particularly resembles Lord Byron's creation of the “Fatal Man” (like Don Juan and Manfred) who destroys himself and the unlucky women who come into his life. Yet, Wilde, the Decadent aesthete, remained a man of contemplation like Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray, whereas Lord Byron, the fiery Romanticist, was a man of action like his literary creation of the Byronic hero.

Wilde as a critic insisted that art does not reflect reality or its author, but mirrors the reader or the critic who interprets the work of art: “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors”. Since art has no existence in itself, it can express nothing but itself. It is only through the imagination and interpretation of the reader that art is made alive. Wilde, the novelist, deliberately played with different allusions about Dorian's sins in The Picture of Dorian Gray in order to invite the readers to interpret the novel in their way.

Questions for further analysis:

1. Are the changes in the portrait occurring on the painted surface or in Dorian's mind? Could it be Dorian's perception of the painting changing instead of the painting itself? “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors”.

2. The triangulation of characters here: Basil, Lord Henry, and Dorian – is suggestive of three sides of one self? The artist, the critic, the subject.

3. The doppelganger theme.

4. Problem of ethical and aesthetic in the Preface.

5. Lord Henry Wotton’s image. The idea of “new hedonism”. The motif of “Faust - Mephistopheles” in the novel.

6. Paradoxes of the novel. Symbols used (portrait), mythological reminiscences (Narcissus, Adonis, Apollo, etc.)

Bibliography

1. Гайденко П. П. Трагедия эстетизма. Опыт характеристики миросозерцания Серена Киркегора. М., 1970.

2. Соколянський М. Незнаний Оскар Уайльд // Всесвіт. – 1998. - №7. – С.137-139.

3. Ackroyd, Peter, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, London: Penguin, 1993.

4. Beckson, Karl (ed.), Oscar Wilde. The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, 1970.

5. Bulfinch, Thomas, The Golden Age of Myth and Legend, Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1993.

6. Ellmann, Richard, Oscar Wilde, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987.

7. Hart-Davis, Rupert (ed.), The letters of Oscar Wilde, London: Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd,1962.

8. Holland, Vyvyan, Oscar Wilde and his world, Thetford: Thames and Hudson, 1977.

9. Hutcheon, Linda, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, New York and London: Methuen, 1980.

10. Sinfield, Alan, The Wilde century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment, London: Cassell, 1994.

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