David Weir - Decadence and the Making of Modernism
Decadence = elevation of art over nature. Opening pages juxtapose art and nature by pairing the
dandified Lord Henry and the as yet uncorrupted Dorian, first in Basil’s studio, then in his garden.
The dual setting (studio/garden) suggests a balance of art and nature, a balance that is transposed
by Basil into a yearning for a ‘harmony of body and soul’ that will be the basis of a ‘fresh school’ of
art. For Basil, the artist, Dorian is the visible symbol of this ideal, but for Lord Henry, the aesthete, he
becomes the ‘visible symbol’ of a ‘new Hedonism’ whose basis is pure sensation. Lord Henry’s
influence is complete, instead of harmonising soul and body, art becomes a means of separating
them, as the device of the portrait illustrates. Art is therefore a corruptive force, dividing rather than
unifying reality. The decadent elevation of art over nature is thus allied to the theme of moral
degradation, as Dorian’s affair with the actress Sibyl Vane illustrates.
W.B. Yeats
‘There is no great literature without nationality, no great nationality without literature.’
This supports the view that ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ belongs in the clearly defined context of
Victorian England. Without Middle class respectability Wilde couldn’t have rebelled against the social
norms of Victorian society and challenged conventional views about marriage and sexuality.
Klingopulos
The early Victorians had a sense of purpose from their communal attempt to improve ‘the condition of
England’, a moral purpose. By the end of the century when Wilde was writing, many writers felt that
these middle-class values were Philistine and hostile to ‘Art’.
The Aesthetic Movement promoted the idea of the aesthetic experience being an end in itself. Wilde
presents this ‘crudely’ as meaning sensual indulgence and moral indifference ‘New Hedonism’.
The novel could be said to be anti-Victorian especially when considering the Preface which was
added to the second edition. Yet ironically Wilde’s tale also presents a moral lesson.
Peter Ackroyd
‘Wilde swings ‘between epigram and tragedy, between the celebration of individualism and the
assertion of doom… In the conversations of Lord Henry and the behaviour of Dorian there is clearly a
sense in which Wilde is continuing to celebrate the triumphs of a truly individual life and to suggest
that, in the perfection of personality, self-expression can be turned into an art. And yet this world of
self-assertion and self-development is one that is seen to fall apart. For beneath the brilliant surface
of Wilde’s prose there is the mordant gaze of the moralist, and it would not be too much to say that
on occasions there was a Puritan lurking behind his mask of the Aesthete or the Dandy. He loved
the bright world which he created, but he also allows it to be destroyed… In his own life he saw
through his ‘pose’ and even courted his eventual destruction; in his fiction, he raised a world in his
own image and then condemned it for its emptiness.’
Robert Mighall
‘duplicity is an essential part of existence in late-Victorian society… Dorian is an extreme version of
an unacknowledged norm’
‘Wilde’s novel resembles that other great tale of doubling and transformation …’Strange case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde’’
‘It is certainly a ‘coded’ text, directing those in the know to understand its hints and suggestions’ –
many coded references to homosexuals and homosexual relationships e.g James I’s favourite,
Philip Herbert Dorian’s ancestor
Scientific reasoning of heredity explains Dorian’s actions as well as the supernatural and Gothic
dimension
Dorian is ‘haunted by his ancestral legacies’…’diminishing Dorian’s moral responsibility for his
actions’.
‘it can be suggested that heredity provides a key to his actions and a scientific alternative to the
‘moral’ emphasis’
‘Physiognomy – the widespread belief that an individual’s appearance, particularly his face or her
face, reveals character’ - ‘what happens to the portrait is only fantastic because it happens to
canvas and paint rather than flesh and blood’
‘Dorian brings his moral life to the portrait, confusing art with life, and ethics with aestherics’.
‘Henry is being true to his cynical and amoral self’ in Chapter 8 – “But don’t waste your tears on Sibyl
Vane. She was less real than they are’. i.e. Sibyl is a literary creation and should be regarded as
such. This is ’consistent with Wilde’s own views on art and ethics’.
‘Art is destroyed by life and morality’
Walter Pater
There is always something of an excellent talker about the writing of Mr. Oscar Wilde……, the form of
dialogue is justified by its being really alive.
A wholesome dislike of the common-place, rightly or wrongly identified by him with the bourgeois,
with our middle-class—its habits and tastes—leads him to protest emphatically against so-called “
realism “ in art;
In Dorian Gray he is true certainly, on the whole, to the aesthetic philosophy of his Intentions ; yet not
infallibly, even on this point: there is a certain amount of the intrusion of real life and its sordid
aspects—the low theatre, the pleasures and griefs, the faces of some very unrefined people,
managed, of course, cleverly enough. The interlude of Jim Vane, his half-sullen but wholly faithful
care for his sister’s honour, is as good as perhaps anything of the kind,
. As a story, however, a ‘ The Picture of Dorian Gray’, partly supernatural story, it is first-rate in artistic
management ; those Epicurean niceties only adding to the decorative colour of its central figure, like
so many exotic flowers, like the charming scenery and the perpetual, epigrammatic, surprising, yet so
natural, conversations, like an atmosphere all about it. All that pleasant accessory detail, taken
straight from the culture, the intellectual and social interests, the conventionalities, of the moment,
have, in fact, after all, the effect of the better sort of realism, throwing into relief the adroitly-devised
supernatural element after the manner of Poe, but with a grace he never reached, which supersedes
that earlier didactic purpose, and makes the quite sufficing interest of an excellent story.
We like the hero, and, spite of his, somewhat unsociable, devotion to his art, Hallward, better than
Lord Henry Wotton…, and his somewhat cynic opinions, which seem sometimes to be those of the
writer, who may, however, have intended Lord Henry as a satiric sketch.
It should be said, however, in fairness, that the writer is impersonal: seems not to have identified
himself entirely with any one of his characters
But his story is also a vivid, though carefully considered, exposure of the corruption of a soul, with a
very plain moral, pushed home, to the effect that vice and crime make people coarse and ugly.
We need only emphasise, once more, the skill, the real subtlety of art, the ease and fluidity withal of
one telling a story by word of mouth, with which the consciousness of the supernatural is introduced
into, and maintained amid, the elaborately conventional, sophisticated, disabused world Mr.
Wilde depicts so cleverly, so mercilessly. The special fascination of the piece is, of course, just
there—at that point of contrast. Mr. Wilde’s work may fairly claim to go with that of Edgar Poe, and
with some good French work of the same kind, done, probably, in more or less conscious imitation of
it.
Julia Prewitt Brown
The story opens on a world without formal religion where art has become the central inspiration
Wilde situates the characters in a world of urban wealth and self-conscious connoisseurship, of
exquisite sensibility and surfeited appetite.
(Evidence – description of ornamental objects in the upper-class settings)
it is art that has released the desire and hunger in Dorian to explore and experience thet lie outside
the norm he has known. The painting has burdened him with this new consciousness of life.
The painting functions as mirror to the Victorian age, telling the ‘truth’ which the age itself wishes to
deny.
Wilde is showing that our relation to works of art is the measure of our spiritual sickness or health
 Lord Henry wants to own the painting, like an obsessive voyeur

Basil created it, yet is willing to be separated from it;
 Dorian sees the painting as a document of his own guilty past; and for that reason, he tries to
destroy it. But in destroying it, he inevitably destroys himself, with which development the novel
neatly arrives at the central point of Wilde’s moral-political aesthetic ‘Art is a symbol, because man is
a symbol’. If you destroy art, you destroy humanity. Like Sybil Vane, who dies when she ceases to
be able to create art on stage, Dorian perishes the moment he severs his relations to art.
Ironically the painting both preserves and destroys his soul, it depletes and extends the self. It is
near and familiar, yet strange and remote, a marketable commodity yet a sacred presence, fixed yet
mutable, contained yet open, dead yet alive. Bound to this collision of opposites by the covenant of
language (trading his soul for eternal youth), Dorian cannot free himself from the painting anymore
than the self can exist without the soul. Art is a burden and a reproach and a reminder of what is lost
and forgotten. The aesthetic movement was therefore concerned not simply with art, but with art in
life.
Wilde explores the difference between the relationship of the upper-class to art and the working-class
relationship with art:
The educated and aristocratic classes exist in a competitive relation to art and try to dominate it,
Dorian keeps the portrait under lock and key.
The working class unknowingly imitates art and is therefore dominated by it. Sybil, James and Mrs
Vane all live out their personal lives in the thrall of either melodrama or tragedy.
Norbert Kohl - Oscar Wilde – Conformist Rebel
‘perhaps the fascination lies in the highly dramatic mix of supernatural fairytale – the magical
painting, and conventional moral issues.
Wilde described the novel as ‘an essay on decorative art’ – a comment that should no t be taken to
literally, for it is meant mainly as an attack on the truth-to-life of the naturalists and their ‘scientific’
view of reality. There is a contradiction between Wilde’s demand that fiction should extend the
‘sphere of introspection’ as indeed twentieth-century novelists have chosen to do – and his
classification of Dorian Gray as ‘ an essay on decorative art’, but the contrast is reflected in the
imbalance in the book between psychology and aestheticism. So Wilde’s position is like LH’s in that
he would like to write a novel ‘as lovely as a Persian carpet, and as unreal’, but in fact is far more
fascinated by ‘scientific analysis of the passions’ and the mysterious link between body and soul.
H A Baker
‘Lord Henry Wotton represents instinct and Basil Hallward represents conscience’ – Wilde believed
that these characteristics should be merged rather than separate or a choice.
Jessica Menz
1. ..he could have saved his life by listening to women’s voices..
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Narrow-minded/childish
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Morality linked to survival
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Suggests women have a redemptive role
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Women’s voices tend to be presented as shrill and unattractive in the novel/women not
heard
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‘ Love is a more wonderful thing that Art’. – women in touch with reality and emotions/
Dorian and Lord Henry remain detached.
2. CRITIC: The whole novel is shaped by a certain misogynistic culture
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Culture is distorted – L Henry and Dorian not independent in their thinking but easily
influenced by fashionable trends in fashion and thinking /ideas.
3. Women pose a threat
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Ironically , Henry and Dorian /Dandyism adopt feminine characteristics
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Suggest men are insecure. what do they fear?