"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

As Elaine Showalter has pointed out, the homosexual nature of Hyde's pleasures is even more strongly hinted at in the manuscript of the novel:

In his original draft of the manuscript, Stevenson was more explicit about the sexual practices that had driven Jekyll to a double life. Jekyll has become "from an early age . . . the slave of certain appetites," vices which are "at once criminal in the sight of the law and abhorrent in themselves. They cut me off from the sympathy of those whom I otherwise respected." (112)

Whatever Stevenson's own sexuality,6 Showalter is surely right when she says "Stevenson was the fin-de-siecle laureate of the double life" (106). The description of Jekyll's appetites as "criminal in the sight of the law" is especially revealing when we realize that the novel was published in the same month as The Criminal Law Amendment Act went into effect. Many homosexual readers of the novel in early 1886 must have linked it to the public debate on criminalizing private male-to-male sexual acts and to their own double lives. Even if a modern "gay" sexual identity was still embryonic, it is hard to believe that members of this subculture could have read Jekyll and Hydewithout seeing the relevance of Jekyll's double life to their own lives. So when Wilde came to write Dorian Gray-the story of a man who "felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life" (DG 91: 135)-he would have found in Jekyll and Hyde a recent model for using Gothic fiction to explore the double lives of closeted homosexuals in late-Victorian England.

In addition to the obvious Gothic theme of the double, Wilde adapts-and modifies-several other conventions of earlier Gothic fiction. In Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic, Anne Williams identifies several conventions "familiar in gothic narratives from Walpole to the present: a vulnerable and curious heroine; a wealthy, arbitrary, and enigmatic hero/villain; and a grand, mysterious dwelling concealing the violent, implicitly sexual secrets of this homme fatal" (38). Wilde transforms the innocent heroine into the (initially) innocent Dorian; the wealthy and enigmatic hero/villain into the wealthy, aesthetic, and epigrammatic Lord Henry (who, Satan-like, tempts Dorian in Basil's garden); and the mysterious dwelling concealing violent, implicitly sexual secrets into Dorian's townhouse with the locked attic that hides his not so implicitly sexual secret. (The word secret occurs 37 times in the novel.) Wilde also appropriates a convention common to Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, and The Great God Pan: the scientific experiment with unexpectedly horrific consequences. In Jekyll and Hyde an experiment transforms Jekyll's personality. Wilde's novel is also the story of an experiment: Dorian's development is explicitly characterized as the result of an experiment that Lord Henry, the Gothic scientist in the role of decadent aesthete, performs on the young Dorian. Lord Henry had always been enthralled by the methods of science, but the ordinary subject-matter of science had seemed to him trivial and of no import. And so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others. Human life,-that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. (DG 90: 203-04)