On the phenomenon of Oscar Wilde and his Picture of Dorian Gray, notwithstanding The Soul of Man under Socialism
My (1980) copy of the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde with an Introduction by Vyvyan Holland has been on my bookshelves for many years without having been opened. Only after watching the (2018) film The Happy Prince which details Wilde’s last days in Paris, did I pick up the volume bound in black, and on opening it to read some of his un-readable poems, I started at the beginning with the Introduction by his son Vyvyan. The biographical details are all well known, so I fast-forwarded to the first work: The Picture of Dorian Gray, one of the most-read English novels (or is it a novella?) of all time. Being Wilde’s only novel, it has assumed the mantle of his literary genius. As a socialist, I then fast-forwarded again, to his essay The Soul of Man under Socialism.
Am I raking over old coals? At first I thought so, but then I saw, in quick succession, two articles in the Guardian about The Picture of Dorian Gray, so I must be quite up-to-date. So, there is a one-woman, multi-media theatre-show of Dorian Gray (albeit made in Australia) – which is quite bizarre considering that Oscar Wilde’s contemporary reputation was mainly based on his theatre pieces rather than on his novel. Next there is a British political allusion, the ‘Dorian Gray economy’ meaning to explain the hidden, ever-growing misery of the failing British economy, just like Dorian Gray’s hidden portrait. Maybe the Guardian commentator should have referred to Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism instead, to suggest a solution rather than expound on the problem.
When reading The Picture of Dorian Gray for the first time in 2023, one is, of course, as a sort of retired working class reader, thrown off-course into an era of unimaginable Victorian upper-class London where the lords and ladies cavort in an endless parade of dinner parties, wondering after a while if Lord Henry, the great conversationalist who has turned cynicism into an art form, could have been the real thing, wondering further that such an impossibility can only be explained by Lord Henry being Wilde’s alter ego, i.e. how he would have turned London up-side-down as a Lord without having to face the consequences as Wilde, the commoner, did. It is not quite clear to me though who corrupted whom: did Lord Henry corrupt Dorian or did Dorian corrupt himself by engaging in the Faustian conceit, giving himself eternal youth in exchange for his portrait hideously ageing instead. Without a Gretchen to save him, his descent into hell is inevitable. Lord Henry, as such, is only a bit player that lays the slippery groundwork for Dorian to slide onto. Lord Henry, we assume, will happily continue doing his rounds, from opera to country mansion to London courts, dispensing his wicked epigrams, long after Dorian’s untimely death. In some ways this is an uncanny recall of Wilde’s erstwhile introduction into homosexual sex in around 1886:
According to Daniel Mendelsohn (2008), Wilde, who had long alluded to Greek love, was "initiated into homosexual sex" by Ross, while his "marriage had begun to unravel after his wife's second pregnancy, which left him physically repelled".
Followed by the even more uncanny premonition – Dorian Gray having been published in 1890 – of Wilde meeting Lord Douglas in 1891, the cause of his celebrated downfall. Whatever possessed Wilde to write Dorian Gray, one can discern the autobiographical environment Wilde was in at the time: his rise in London society as an artist of renown, playing his part to the hilt as a dandy who has a great classical education to back up his fantastic conversational skills, as displayed by Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray, not to speak of Dorian himself as he develops his wayward personality. The epigrammatical pronouncements tumble forth in a torrent of witticisms, at once with a philosophical depth and a sound critique of a shallow upper-class society, the idle rich who have nothing better to do than to manage their estates as a repository of questionable artistic riches - only Lord Henry and Dorian himself can live up to the real thing. To lead up to the first dramatic eruption, the conversations are peppered with what Lord Henry considers the value of love and women, the latter not necessarily required, apart from having to be beautiful: “Women are a decorative sex” remarks Lord Henry. So, when Dorian announces that he is in love with an actress, Lord Henry retorts that this is a rather commonplace ‘début’. Since Wilde was fluent in French, one must, of course, expect much French when it comes to love: “A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do”. Young Dorian begs to disagree but there is the little problem of Sibyl Vane being of rather common ancestry, living in rather common circumstances, and as such one can expect disaster. When Dorian discards her like a cheap suit his aristocratic youth is somewhat tainted by the common reader, i.e. what a terrible thing to do to the poor girl. In Lord Henry’s eyes it was only to be expected. That she topped herself is only confirmation of having enacted a tragedy on stage. Since Sibyl had betrayed Dorian as an artist-actress, he too comes around to the conclusion that he was hard done by her. When Wilde describes the proletarian milieu in some detail (see also his take in The Soul of Man under Socialism), including the bizarre scene of Sibyl’s 15-year old brother James migrating to Melbourne in Australia as an indentured labourer, only to promise he will come back and kill anyone who might hurt Sibyl, we do get the suspicion that this whole scenario is a conceit for further use along the story-line that goes increasingly down the gurgler. Sure enough, some 18 years later James resurfaces at the opium den, finding out that Prince Charming aka Dorian is there in disguise, only to be prevented from killing him by way of Dorian showing his still youthful face. Even more bizarre is the way that James gets killed when he gets in the way of a shot being fired by one of Dorian’s hunting nobilities. Happy to have gotten rid of this threat to his life, Dorian can build up to the climax of his Faustian bargain: murdering Basil, the artist who had painted his portrait – The picture of Dorian Gray – and was just about to find out what was going on. Getting rid of Basil’s corpse by blackmailing his former scientist friend who dissolves the corpse in acid is the macabre end of that ‘thing’ (Wilde’s favourite epitaph for unpleasant ‘things’), which some literary critics have described as Victorian Gothic along with such masterpieces as Bram Stoker’s (1896) Dracula. It is of course a nice touch that Dorian, in wanting to knife to shreds his portrait, is knifing himself to death.
So, is this a cautionary tale? Don’t be tempted by the devil’s work? Do stay within the realm of a Christianity that has a blind eye for the clergy’s sexual abuse of boys and girls but not for cardinal sins against the rule of God? Or outside the church (again we will refer to The Soul of Man under Socialism), to preview Wilde’s downfall, whereby an avowed atheist like the Marquis of Queensbury can nevertheless bring to bear the laws against sodomy? Wilde’s consensual sex with Ross would be within the British laws of today but sex with under-age rent-boys is not. Was Dorian’s crime solely to want eternal youth by selling his soul? This ‘thing’, the ‘soul’ (to mock Wilde) is a preoccupation in all of Wilde’s work that remains unquestioned – it is taken for granted as a law of nature. Given his qualified belief in science (and psychology) he might have risen above, or at least addressed the question of the soul, i.e. does it even exist? The atheist Marquis of Queensbury might have been more enlightened in this respect than Wilde. Obviously, Wilde, as the supreme Hellenist, has no problem with pederasty since the soul – in the form of spiritual love – watches over the physical pleasure that is supposedly derived from it. As such The Picture of Dorian Gray, as the title suggests, has as its central theme only the question of beautiful youth versus ugly old age. As Lord Henry exclaims:
“… and youth is the one thing worth having … some day when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you feel it, you will feel it terribly.’
I don’t understand this obsession, not only because I am 74 years old as I write this, but because the Hellenistic ideal seems to be the adoration of the old by the young, as the old Socrates was accused of having seduced the youth a bit too much with his subversive philosophies about the shortcomings of the polis of Athens. Oscar Wilde being some 36 years old when writing his Dorian Gray might have been in some crisis about getting old(er) but his revulsion of old age is a bit of a mystery other than the age-old (no pun intended) obsession with having eternal youth, which in my estimation is simply a psychological disorder predicated by the fear of death that old age is said to imply. Seneca was not worried too much about having to commit suicide due to having reached a ‘ripe’ old age – ‘ripe’ being a marvellous metaphor in this context. Indeed, Wilde’s fascination with ‘old’ artefacts that decorate the various mansions of the rich and famous seems to be contradiction of terms. His love of ‘cut’ flowers in beautiful vases is the ‘age-old’ subject of ‘still-life’ of painters. In modern times the 82-year-old Al Pacino is celebrated for fathering a child with a 29-year-old ‘young’ woman. Of course, it would never do for a 29-year-old ‘young’ man to love a 82-year-old woman. Such is age-old misogyny to which Wilde also falls victim. So, all in all, Wilde’s main theme of ‘youth’ in his Dorian Gray is an ‘old’ chestnut but he did it beautifully with a new twist, regaling us with witty conversation and Victorian Gothic. The underlying drama does perhaps not quite live up to a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy where beautiful young ‘things’ meet untimely deaths. There may be some unintended truth in the scene when Sibyl explains her wilful indifference to playing Juliet that night, namely her complaint that ‘acting’ love and death is a pale shadow compared to the real thing, while Dorian and Lord Henry (even Basil too) see it the other way round, in that art should never imitate sordid life, adhering to the elitist dictum of l'art pour l'art, as phrased by Wilde’s favourite poet Gautier. Wilde’s own take on art and artists is expounded in detail in his The Soul of Man under Socialism, whereby the personality of the artist is the sole arbiter of art, dedicated only to himself. Art that is composed for an audience in mind is but shallow art, or no art at all. A romantic notion that Wilde himself did not realise the least in practice, what with his clever theatre pieces that played to an audience that finds pleasure in being mildly insulted for their own foibles. Wilde made a career and a small fortune out of it.
Perhaps on a Freudian note, Oscar’s relationship to his mother Lady Jane Wilde – who lived to the age of 74 in 1896: in being close to her and always listening to her advice (even if flawed as her advice to stay in London to face the trial, when friends advised him to leave for France), Oscar may have developed a negative Oedipus complex, horrified to ever consider his sacred mother as a sexual object. The proclivity of his mother’s catholic beliefs (she had Oscar baptised secretly) may have projected the Holy Virgin image which Oscar tried to reconcile with his mother. That Oscar rose above such potential psychologically damaging inferences is testament to his belief in himself as an artist of genius. Only in misjudging his own influence – Lord Henry says that his credo is never to influence anybody or be influenced by anybody – did Oscar Wilde, as advised by his mother, make the mistake of defending himself in a trial that was bound to go against him (as he had been warned by his friends). Again, maybe his mother’s influence made him believe that he is a Christ-like figure that must accept the vile judgement of man, for the redemption of mankind. The terrible consequences of the prison term with hard labour were, however, anything but Christ’s heavenly ascent. His mother died while he was in prison – a mortal blow from which Oscar could not recover. He suffered the prison degradation, not willingly but in despair. His belated flight to France after the prison sentence had all the hallmarks of a Dorian Gray, destined to end in an early death, not in a mansion in London but in a sordid apartment in Paris. Down and out in Paris. Not a sign of the man of high culture. As someone who in an earlier incarnation had penned the play Salomé in French, one would have thought he would use France as a base to write in French about everything that was wrong with Britain, seriously, maybe an up-date of his The Soul of Man under Socialism, an analysis of art under capitalism, nationalism, racism and a creeping fascism, instead of cavorting with Lord Douglas and rent-boys as in the days of old, dazed by cheap absinth.
Let us therefore look closer at that promising polemic, known to be his only ‘political’ article. Critics may have this wrong as The Portrait of Dorian Gray as well as his other works are full of politics, be it slaying the House of Commons, mocking the clergy and most of all, attacking the ‘fourth estate’ which he calls the only estate left in Britain, the vulgar judge and executioner in matters of public opinion, the apartheid of the classes, the sordid consequences of the wage slavery, the moral pretence of the Lords and Ladies, the evils of charity (in line with G B Shaw), the accumulation of money whereby everyone knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, to quote one of his bon mots. As such it should come as much of a surprise that that The Soul of Man under Socialism is not an attack on socialism and/or communism – Oscar Wilde as a collector of objects d’artneeds lots of money for such a purpose – but is an affirmation of the central thesis: the abolition of private property is necessary! The abolition of all government and authority is necessary!
“… by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting cooperation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition …”
Sounds like Proudhon, Marx and Engels? Sure, but how to achieve this utopia? Wilde says that a map without utopia is useless – well said indeed! So, what is the road to utopia? First the dictatorship of the proletariat? Certainly not, says Wilde, because authoritarian socialism is anathema to freedom.
“It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.”
Who will volunteer? The landed gentry? The industrialists? Who will convert private property into public wealth. Did Adam Smith propose such a scheme to arrive at the ‘Commonwealth’? Did he trust the invisible hand of the free market to get there? Can the market ever be free? Wilde’s romantic notions are ever so laudable but without a roadmap to get there we will have little hope to get there. Or maybe there is?
“… Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism.”
Sounds like a dreadful contradiction under Marxist dogma, according to which socialism is distinguished by collectivism – the opposite of individualism, which is the hallmark of capitalism. However, Wilde does not equate individualism with selfishness, greed and all the other negative connotations one can lay at the door of rabid capitalism: for him Individualism – with a capital I - means the realisation of the true self which is socialist in nature. To develop one’s personality in this way is all that is required. It is the single aim in life. One might say, in almost religious terms that Jesuit liberation theologians prefer, that the God-given soul of man is a holy socialist spirit. Wilde goes on to point out that Christ was such a man: dismissive of property, family, marriage, man’s authority over man, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
All sounds very good except that we need socialism first for such a development to take place, to become individualists with socialist souls expressed. One might argue that reading The Soul of Man under Socialism is a first step, since the arguments in favour of socialism presented are infallible, as they should be. Lord Henry, the artful cynic, might put up a sign: if you cannot read this you should enrol in a reading class. Or if you can read, as Lord Henry does, one would first read what the fourth estate has to say about such matters, and be told that Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism is a lot of nonsense, or more likely, a treasonous agitation, punishable by being sent to a penal colony in Australia. Even assuming that the pen is mightier than the sword, Wilde’s pen has not been successful to-date in changing the world, or Britain, or London, or the West-End, or any place, making it a better place under socialism. If you are reading this, I am equally pessimistic that you will be convinced to convert your private property – if you have any - into public wealth. I am not even convinced myself, despite my theoretical agreement with Wilde on his take on socialism, to give my one-acre plot to the Commonwealth, lest a clever property lawyer acting on behalf of the Crown will immediately put it on the free market for sale.
To implement Wilde’s conversion to ‘voluntary’ socialism, the only solution I see is that a burst of cosmic rays from deep space will occasion a mutation in the DNA of every living cell on earth, expressing socialism as a genetic trait. Only good can come of it, whether it is Individualism or Collectivism. With all material needs provided for humanity, I will propose an unhappy toast to Oscar Wilde:
“Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness.”
(Chameleon, December 1894)
Mendelsohn, Daniel (2008). "The two Oscar Wildes". How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays by Daniel Mendelsohn. New York: HarperCollins. p. 218.
