"Culture and Corruption": Paterian Self-Development versus Gothic Degeneration in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 2003 by Clausson, Nils

the Victorian homosexual world had evolved into a secret but active subculture, with its own language, styles, practices, and meeting places. For most middle-class inhabitants of this world, homosexuality represented a double life, in which a respectable daytime world often involving marriage and family, existed alongside a night world of homoeroticism. (Showalter 10)

Dr. Jekyll's account of his youth, in particular, is described in a way that must have struck a responsive chord in contemporary homosexual readers struggling against what conventional morality-and more recently the law-regarded as "irregularities" and "degradation," and who were forced, as a result of their dual nature, to "conceal" their "pleasures":

And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as . . . I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection . . . I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life.

He goes on to refer to "such irregularities as [he] was guilty of," adding that he

regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. . . . I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress. Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside the restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering. (Stevenson 75-76)

Jekyll's language here-"concealed my pleasures," "profound duplicity of life," "so profound a double-dealer," "laid aside the restraint and plunged in shame"-would certainly not be out of place in Dorian Gray, and a "profound duplicity of life" combined with a "morbid sense of shame" perfectly describes the lives of many gay men at the time. Later in his "statement of the case," Jekyll describes the feeling of liberation that accompanies his transformation:

Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures. I was the first that could plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings, and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. (80-81)

What Jekyll has accomplished through science is what many contemporary homosexual men desired: the ability to safely lead a double life. They, too, longed to "plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability" and then be able to "strip off" their conventional respectability and "spring headlong into the sea of liberty." Indeed, that is precisely what Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas did-with ever increasing recklessness.