"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 first half of this passage could easily be Lord Henry's project for Dorian's self-realization, and the last lines actually echo Lord Henry's own words: "The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives" (DG 90: 186). In Wilde's view, says Richard Ellmann, "Sin is more useful to society than martyrdom, since it is self-expressive not self-repressive. The goal is the liberation of the personality" (310). "One can fancy an intense personality being created out of sin," Wilde wrote in "Pen, Pencil, and Poison" (Soul of Man 103). Since "Wilde's notion of individualism," as Jonathan Dollimore explains, "is inseparable from transgressive desire and a transgressive aesthetic" (40), and since the Gothic portrays sin as self-expressive, not self-repressive, it is hardly surprising that Wilde would have found the Gothic aesthetically appealing. The problem is that fin-de-siecle Gothic texts like Jekyll and Hyde and The Great God Pan include not just the traditional Gothic theme of transgression but also the fin-de-siecle theme of degeneration, and the discourse of degeneration on which these texts draw is, quite simply, incompatible with the Paterian goal of self-development.

"Degenerationism," says Kelly Hurley in The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siecle, "is a 'gothic' discourse, and as such is a crucial imaginative and narrative source for the fin-de-siecle Gothic" (65). When viewed from the perspective of such fin-de-siecle Gothic texts as Jekyll and Hyde and Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan, the corruption mirrored in Dorian's picture is not so much "a visible symbol of the degradation of sin" (DG 90: 220) as it is a sign of his degeneration.7 The Great God Pan was published as a novella in 1894 by John Lane, who also published Wilde's Salome, but an extract from it had appeared in December 1890 in a short-lived magazine called Whirlwind. In Machen's Gothic tale of degeneration, a doctor performs an experiment designed to open a young girl's "inner eye" to the continuing presence of the Great God Pan. Although the girl dies, the experiment succeeds and she gives birth to a child, Helen, the result of her mother's coupling with the primordial Pan. Helen, who then becomes the focus of the story, reveals to a series of admiring men the horror that lies beneath the surface of their conventional lives, driving them to madness and death. When Helen dies, she degenerates, passing through all the stages of evolution as she reverts to the primordial slime. "The paradox of The Great God Pan," says Punter, "is that the visitation which liberates the human being from the repression of false assumptions also destroys the barriers which retain human individuation: the liberation of desire returns man to his primal associations with the beast and destroys the soul" (264).

A similar paradox of sexual liberation leading to destruction and degeneration takes place in Dorian Gray. Like Dorian, Helen-that both have Greek names cannot be accidental-seduces her male victims and then reveals to them something so horrible that they go mad and commit suicide. (Helen Vaughan's victims commit suicide when they learn her unspeakable secret; Dr. Lanyon dies of shock when he learns Dr. Jekyll's secret; and Alan Campbell commits suicide after he disposes of Basil Hallward's body by decomposing it in acid.) Dorian exercises a fatal sexual power over young men, especially young aristocrats. In his final, fatal confrontation with Dorian, Hallward asks,