Paradox and the Preface to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian
Gray
Eric Pudney
ENGK01
Spring term 2010
English Studies
The Centre for Languages and Literature
Lund University
Supervisor: Cecilia Wadsö-Lecaros
Contents
Introduction
Art and the Artist
Art and Morality
Art and Money
Conclusion
Works cited
1
2
6
10
15
17
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Introduction
The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in the July 1890 edition of Lippincott’s
Monthly Magazine, and immediately attracted a great deal of hostile attention from the
London press. Many of the original reviewers were outraged by what they regarded as the
immoral stance of the novella. Wilde defended his work wittily and eloquently in letters to his
harshest critics. Even before the first version of the story was published he had begun work on
an extended version, which was published in 1891. He expanded the story, adding a number
of important scenes such as the visit to the opium den and the character of James Vane, but
also toning down some of the suggestive dialogue between the three main characters (Bristow
lii-lv). Just before the 1891 version of the novel was published, a series of twenty-three
aphorisms appeared in The Fortnightly Review under the title ‘A Preface to “Dorian Gray”’.
Many of these maxims were taken, in some cases word for word, from letters he had written
to his critics, and the Preface was also included in the 1891 edition.
As the editors of two scholarly editions of the novel point out, one key purpose of the
Preface was to defend the work from previous criticism and to pre-empt new attacks on it
(Gillespie 3n; Bristow lvi). However, there is more to it than that; the Preface also deals with
ideas that are among the major concerns of the novel, and it serves to highlight the fact that
Dorian Gray is a novel about art. Most critics are content to assume that it represents “the
major points of [Wilde’s] aesthetic creed at the time” (Gillespie 3n) or serves as a kind of
“manifesto” (Bristow lvi) for Aestheticism.
It seems to me there is a tension between the two functions of the Preface. It was
written as a defence of the novel, and statements made in the heat of argument might well be
oversimplified or even entirely misleading. To take a concrete example, one aim of the
Preface was to defend the novel from thinly-veiled claims that it contained homoerotic
elements. These claims were in fact accurate, as nobody today would try to deny. So is it safe
to assume that the Preface can be regarded as a straightforward statement of the novel’s
ethical and aesthetic standpoint?
Wilde’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, did not think so. According to Ellmann, the
Preface “flaunted the aestheticism that the book would indict” (297). For him, the novel was
not a celebration of Aestheticism but its “tragedy”: a conclusion diametrically opposed to
those of many of the original reviewers. Ellmann’s position is more convincing, but ultimately
I think it represents the novel as more coherent than it actually is.
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Wilde has often been compared to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
(Brown 113). He shared with Nietzsche a refusal to build a coherent intellectual system and a
scorn for consistency. In this paper I will look at some of the most famous statements in the
Preface, which set out a particular view of art in relation to the artist, morality and money. I
will compare these statements with the evidence of the novel itself, in order to show that the
novel both supports and contradicts the ideas put forward in the Preface, complicating its
alleged status as an Aestheticist “manifesto”. I will draw in a number of Wilde’s essays,
which help to illuminate his aesthetic thought and reveal the central place of paradox in his
work.
Art and the Artist
The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. (Dorian Gray 5)
By arguing that art is what matters, rather than the character of the artist, Wilde may have
been anticipating some of the more personal criticism of his work. The reader should be
focusing on the book itself, the aphorism suggests, rather than attacking the author. It also
implies that Wilde remains hidden: the novel cannot be seen as self-revelatory. This is a
convenient position for Wilde to take, since some of his angrier critics came as close to
explicitly condemning the book for its homoerotic elements as was possible in late Victorian
public discourse. If art hides the artist, then such elements would not tell us anything about
Wilde himself – or so the aphorism might suggest. But the statement is more than just an
expedient way of defending its author. There is a serious point here, and as Isaac Elimimian
points out, this point is repeated in Wilde’s essays The Truth of Masks and The Decay of
Lying (626). Elimimian argues that it represents a recurring theme in Wilde’s work.
The Picture of Dorian Gray itself engages with the idea of art concealing the artist in a
variety of ways. Most clearly, in the very first chapter, Basil Hallward tells Lord Henry that
he will not exhibit the picture because “I have put too much of myself into it” (9). This could
be taken as echoing the idea that art should conceal the artist – which would imply that Basil’s
attempt to create art has failed. Houston A. Baker takes this view, arguing that Basil
has an ideal conception of the role of the artist, and he realises from the outset of the novel
that he has not lived up to his conception…The artist has put into the picture his own idolatry
and worship of the physical embodiment of his ideal…Hallward’s concession to his own
egocentric desires has, in effect, corrupted the ideal. (352)
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On this view, the novel is a cautionary tale for the artist, in which Basil’s failure to hide
himself, and his artistic imposition on Dorian, lead to disaster.
Baker’s reading is not wholly convincing, for a number of reasons. Shifting all the
burden of blame onto Basil seems unfair. After all, it is Dorian who wishes for eternal youth,
and Lord Henry who acts as the “Mephistophelian” tempter. Baker’s implication that Basil
has corrupted Dorian is undermined by the fact that he, and also the picture he has created, act
as a kind of “conscience” for Dorian. More serious is the question of Basil’s conception of art.
Baker asserts that it is “ideal”, but is corrupted when Basil puts himself into the artwork,
which would imply that Basil’s view is similar to the one expressed in the Preface. In fact
Basil’s view of art is strikingly at odds with that of the Preface:
‘Harry,’ said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, ‘every portrait that is painted
with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the
occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the
coloured canvas, reveals himself.’ (11-12)
Although Elimimian rightly points out that the idea of the artist’s concealment is a recurrent
theme in Wilde’s essays, there is also support for the opposite view in the same writings. For
example, in The Decay of Lying we are told that “[t]he justification of a character in a novel is
not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel
is not a work of art” (79). In The Soul of Man, “A work of art is the unique result of a unique
temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is” (248). It is difficult
to square this view with the idea that the finished artwork should somehow ‘conceal’ the
artist, since art here is presented as being entirely dependent on the character and personality
of its creator. The clearest opposition to Elimimian’s view arises in The Critic as Artist, in
which Gilbert says,
All artistic creation is absolutely subjective. The very landscape that Corot looked at was, as
he said himself, but a mood of his own mind; and those great figures of Greek or English
drama that seem to us to possess an actual existence of their own, apart from the poets who
shaped and fashioned them, are, in their ultimate analysis, simply the poets themselves. (CW
Vol. 4 184)
A writer, according to this, simply is his characters – and in fact, Wilde famously wrote that
there was much of himself in all three of the main characters in Dorian Gray, too (Gillespie
ix).
Perhaps the most important problem for Baker’s argument is that Basil’s painting is
not a failure; on the contrary, it is great art, as Lord Henry makes clear (32). Basil’s view of
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art suggests that the personal feeling he has put into the painting is precisely what makes it so
great. Towards the end of the fourth chapter, Lord Henry is (as usual) holding forth on the
relation of artist to art:
“Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence
is that he has nothing left for life…The only artists I have ever known who are personally
delightful are bad artists…The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets
makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the
poetry that they dare not realize.”
“I wonder is that really so, Harry?” said Dorian Gray…“It must be, if you say it.” (68)
This intriguing passage supports the idea that artists put themselves into their work, but then
complicates this by declaring that a “really great poet” is completely “unpoetical” (68), and so
presumably is not revealed in his everyday character by his work. This represents a synthesis
of the two positions I have discussed, which shows how artists both pour themselves into their
work and at the same time cannot be ‘revealed’ by it, precisely because their individuality and
energy is transferred into the art they create. But this apparent solution is immediately
followed by what looks like a warning. Dorian’s comment, as well as indicating the extent to
which he is dominated by Lord Henry’s ideas, is a signal to the reader to be wary about
coming to any definite conclusion.
Sybil Vane is another example of an artist. A great actress when Dorian discovers her,
she is transformed by love for him into an incompetent. When Dorian takes his friends to see
her perform, she is unable to act the part of Juliet with any kind of feeling. But when he meets
her backstage, “[h]er eyes were lit with an exquisite fire. There was a radiance about her”
(100). Until this point, all her emotional energy has been channelled into acting; her actual life
has been devoid of any drama or passion. When she meets Dorian, the situation is reversed
and she gains an emotional life at the expense of her artistic talent. Lord Henry, after Sybil’s
death, says that “the girl never really lived, and so she has never really died”, and argues that
Sybil was merely “a reed through which Shakespeare’s music sounded” (120). It would
appear that there is in this case nothing for art to conceal. Behind the actor’s mask is –
nothing, or perhaps just another mask. For the true artist, life is the illusion, not art: art has
much greater force than the mundane business of reality. Another actress, Sybil Vane’s
mother, shows her appreciation of this when she says goodbye to her son. James Vane,
furious at the relationship between his sister and Dorian, swears to kill “Prince Charming” if
he hurts Sybil:
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The exaggerated folly of the threat, the passionate gesture that accompanied it, the mad
melodramatic words, made life seem more vivid to [Mrs Vane]…She would have liked to
have continued the scene on the same emotional scale, but he cut her short. Trunks had to be
carried down and mufflers looked for…The moment was lost in vulgar details. (85)
Mrs Vane has an artist’s sensibility; she prefers false emotion – art – to the tedium of “vulgar
details”.
The book’s final example of an artist is Dorian himself. Although he does not act or
produce art objects, Dorian can still be seen as an artist – or perhaps rather a kind of antiartist. Although it is Basil Hallward who originally paints the picture it is Dorian who, by his
moral transgressions, alters it from its original form and creates from it a new vision which
can hardly be said to belong to the everyday world of “vulgar details”. Of course, he makes
the picture ugly rather than beautiful, which is why I suggest the term anti-artist to describe
him. Throughout the novel, ugliness is associated with reality and life (see Dorian Gray 214),
and beauty is associated with art and illusion. But this distinction is blurred by Dorian’s
relationship with the painting itself. The beautiful, ‘real’ Dorian does not reflect the sinful
reality of his existence – instead, the painting does, while Dorian remains beautiful.
Meanwhile the painting, although a work of art and a ‘false’ representation of Dorian, is not
beautiful but ugly, until the natural order of things is restored at the end of the novel. This
situation produces another reversal, too. The artist (Dorian) conceals art (the painting) in a
very literal sense – the painting is locked in the attic, hidden from public view. But Dorian
continues to ‘reveal’ the artist – himself – to the high social circles in which he moves and is
adored for his looks.
There is another sense in which Dorian can be regarded as an artist. His abandonment
of Sybil, and her subsequent suicide, is Dorian’s first step along the road to damnation. But it
is also represented as a moment of artistic beauty, as Lord Henry explains:
It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt
us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their
entire lack of style…Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty
crosses our lives… Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the
play. Or rather we are both. (117)
The use of the word ‘tragedy’ – which of course can denote a theatrical genre as well as an
event in real life – hints at something interesting: the idea that life can itself become a form of
art. Later in the passage Lord Henry suggests that a person can be both actor and audience,
which brings up the question of Dorian himself. Dorian is a devotee of the arts in all their
forms (audience). But it is also suggested that he is himself an artist (actor), for whom “Life
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itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts” (149). As Lord Henry points out towards the end
of the novel, Dorian has created himself as a work of art: “Life has been your art. You have
set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets” (248). Dorian Gray is both artist and
artwork; his life is his canvas, his sensations are his colours, and his sins are his paintbrush.
Or, as the Preface puts it, “[v]ice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art” (5). The
distinction between artist and artwork collapses in the character of Dorian Gray, and so do
notions of concealment and revelation. After all, which is the ‘real’ Dorian Gray – the
beautiful young aesthete or the twisted, hideous sinner? One of the original reviewers of the
Lippincott’s edition, Julian Hawthorne, commented perceptively that “Dorian never quite
solidifies. In fact, his portrait is rather the more real thing of the two” (Hawthorne 80). Or
could it be that both Dorian and his portrait are both true and false, simultaneously?
Art and Morality
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or
badly written. That is all. […]
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of
art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
(Dorian Gray 5)
The first of the maxims above is perhaps the most famous and discussed of the statements in
the Preface. Its meaning is fairly clear: it asserts that works of art – books – are to be judged
by aesthetic standards, not by moral standards. As Wilde put it in a letter to the St James’s
Gazette, “the sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate” (cited
in Beckson 67). Of course, plenty of readers and critics have found what they consider to be
moral instruction in the novel, but Wilde clarified his point further with the second of the
maxims. So the position of the Preface seems to be that, while there may be moral content in a
novel, the novel is not to be judged on the basis of that moral content. It is worth repeating
that this part of the Preface is at least in part a defence against accusations of immorality from
some of the book’s reviewers. Moralistic reactions, according to these maxims, are beside the
point and reveal that the reviewers are not really qualified to judge the book. The Preface goes
further than this, too: in suggesting that “[i]t is the spectator, and not life, that art really
mirrors,” (6) it implies that the critics themselves are degraded – not the novel.
While the Preface does not deny that Dorian Gray has some moral content, the precise
nature of it is a controversial matter. Wilde himself, in his letters, said that the moral was
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obvious: “all excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its punishment” (cited in Gillespie
365). Other critics disagreed; the Scots Observer’s reviewer thought that “it is not made
sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of
cleanliness, health and sanity” (cited in Gillespie 366). The Daily Chronicle thought the
book’s ending was a “sham moral” and objected to “the creed that appeals to the senses ‘to
cure the soul’” (cited in Gillespie 364). However, some early reviewers liked the book,
including The Christian Leader (Bristow footnote xviii), and a Mr Charles Whibley found
“lots of morality” in it (Selected Letters 83).
In general, the Lippincott’s edition was more warmly received, and more likely to be
interpreted as ‘moral’, in the US than in Britain. This was most likely because of the
sensitivity in Britain about any suggestion of homoeroticism in the wake of the ‘Cleveland
Street Affair’, in which several aristocrats and a member of the royal family were implicated
in the trials of prostitutes at a gay brothel that catered to the upper classes (see Gillespie 3478). In fact, the fiercest critics of the Lippincott’s edition of Dorian Gray all allude to its
homoerotic content. An editorial note in the St James’s Gazette is particularly telling:
Mr Wilde says that his story is a moral tale, because the wicked persons in it come to a bad
end…We simply say that every critic has the right to point out that a work of art or literature is
dull or incompetent in its treatment – as The Picture of Dorian Gray is; and that its dullness
and incompetence are not redeemed because it constantly hints, not obscurely, at disgusting
sins and abominable crimes. (cited in Gillespie 359)
This is as close as any contemporary critic came to an explicit condemnation of the novel’s
homoeroticism. It seems unlikely that the story would have aroused anything like so much
indignation were it not for this feature of the narrative.
Contemporary criticism is less disturbed by this aspect of the novel, but this has not
settled the debate about whether or not it is a “moral tale”. A surface reading would certainly
suggest that it is. Dorian Gray dies in his attempt to destroy the picture that represents his
conscience, as the St James’s Gazette acknowledged. Some critics accept this as the moral
message of the novel: “Dorian Gray distorts [Lord Henry’s] doctrine and becomes a fallen
dandy…finally, in self-inflicted death, Dorian meets the punishment of excessive self-love”
(Roditi 54-5). Others blame Basil for his sin of “idolatry” (see, for example, Joyce Carol
Oates 421 and Baker 352). Another reading, referred to by Baker, regards Lord Henry as
Mephistopheles and Dorian as Faust, making Lord Henry the villain. In short, a variety of
moral or ethical readings of the novel are possible.
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Other critics reject ethical readings. Julia Brown argues that Dorian perishes not
because of his sins but because of his attempt to destroy art (80). This would suggest that, as
Wilde himself put it in The Critic as Artist, “[a]esthetics are higher than ethics” (CW Vol 3
204). Another recent book on Wilde refers to the novel’s “moral relativism”, and argues that
the problem lies in working out what ethical or aesthetic approach to life the novel is “actually
endorsing” (Guy & Small 183).
Examining the text in order to decide on the moral attitude of the novel itself is
beyond the scope of this essay, but it is uncontroversial to state that a variety of different
readings are possible and have been articulated by critics, and that the novel is constructed in
such a way as to make these multiple, mutually exclusive readings possible and even
inevitable. The purpose of this paper is slightly different: to examine what the novel says
about the ethical characteristics of art in general and compare this with the statements in the
Preface. One interesting aspect of the novel with regard to this question is the fact that it
features a novel that might well be described as ‘immoral’ as part of the plot. Modelled on A
Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, the little yellow book, given to him by Lord Henry, has a
corrupting effect on Dorian: “It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to
cling about its pages and to trouble the brain…For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself
from the influence of this book” (Dorian Gray 146-7). The word ‘influence’ is critical here.
Leaving aside the commonsense Victorian idea of what an immoral book is – one with a
pernicious influence on the morals of the reader – the word is significant within the novel
itself. Lord Henry explains why to Dorian early on in the novel:
All influence is immoral – immoral from the scientific point of view. […] to influence a
person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his
natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are
borrowed… The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is
what each of us is here for. (Dorian Gray 24-5)
The novel, then, contradicts the claim made in the Preface that there is no such thing as a
moral or immoral book, and it does this very clearly and unambiguously by depicting a book
that is immoral “from the scientific point of view” (exactly what that qualification means is,
again, not relevant here). Wilde himself, in letters to his critics, described his own book as
“poisonous” (cited in Gillespie 365), and so likened it to the little yellow book in Dorian Gray
at the same time as defending it from accusations of immorality. It is difficult to see this as
anything other than an act of pure mischief.
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Even if books, and artworks generally, can be ‘immoral’ in the sense that they have a
poisonous influence it does not necessarily follow that they should be judged on this basis.
Perhaps, as Wilde argued in letters to his critics (Beckson 67) and in the Preface, aesthetics
and ethics are simply separate spheres and we should ignore the corrupting influence of a
novel when judging its artistic merit. The trouble is that the novel does not support this
reading either. Instead, beauty and goodness are inextricably linked throughout the story, as
are ugliness and immorality or sin. This connection is not original to Wilde; as Crowell
argues, the Victorians tended to equate morality with beauty and immorality with ugliness
(617), and Wilde was no exception. Dorian relies on this connection in order to evade
punishment for his sins:
Even those who had heard the most evil things against him -- and from time to time strange
rumours about his mode of life crept through London and became the chatter of the clubs -could not believe anything to his dishonour when they saw him. He had always the look of
one who had kept himself unspotted from the world. (147-8)
Dorian is the exception that proves the rule: his picture becomes hideously ugly because of his
sins, rather than Dorian himself, but this is only because of the Faustian pact he has made. His
sins are still linked to ugliness, and his outward beauty is what makes people think he is good.
Even Lord Henry, after years of friendship, is so fooled by appearances he tells Dorian late on
in the novel that “[i]t is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder” (244). Basil also reinforces
the connection between ugliness and sin, when telling Dorian about a commission that he
turned down from a man on the grounds that “[t]here was something in the shape of his
fingers that I hated. I know now that I was quite right in what I fancied about him.” (172)
Physical beauty or ugliness, then, is in most circumstances a reliable guide to moral worth.
This obviously undermines the idea that ethics and aesthetics can be separated. The
Picture of Dorian Gray seems to insist on the link between beauty and goodness even more
than other contemporary novels. In fact, although many novelists may have reinforced
“[n]ineteenth century conventions of physiognomy [which] demanded that the human body
display either virtue or corruption in its limbs and features” (Crowell 617), there were plenty
of exceptions in Victorian fiction. Steerforth in David Copperfield, Mr Preston in Wives and
Daughters, and the eponymous heroine of Lady Audley’s Secret are all physically attractive
characters who are morally dubious or even evil. By contrast, in Dorian Gray, the connection
between evil and ugliness is inescapably clear.
This is not to say that the novel is, in fact, moral or moralistic in its outlook. Rather, it
connects beauty and virtue in such a way as to subordinate the latter to the former: aesthetics
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are higher than ethics. Dorian suffers from occasional attacks of guilt, and at one point he
confides in Lord Henry:
“I know what conscience is, to begin with. It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest
thing in us. Don't sneer at it, Harry, any more -- at least not before me. I want to be good. I
can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.”
“A very charming artistic basis for ethics, Dorian! I congratulate you on it.” (113)
Conscience, according to Dorian, is not based on sympathy for others or a particular code of
behaviour. It is based on the sense of beauty, and is fundamentally self-regarding, in keeping
with Wilde’s thoughts on individualism. Dorian does not feel ‘guilty’, in the normal sense –
instead, he is concerned about the beauty of his own soul. One way to read the novel, then, is
to regard it as a book about “how aesthetics can become ethics” (Allen 26). On this view,
conscience is reduced – or perhaps raised – to a form of personal vanity.
It might now seem safe to reach the conclusion that the novel puts forward an ethics
based on a conception of the beautiful life, and there is a strong case for this, but there is also
one problem. This view relies on accepting the perspectives of the three main characters, all
of whom are deeply flawed in various ways. Even the supposedly brilliant Lord Henry ends
the novel as a rather tame middle-aged divorcee whose wife has run off with another man
(243). Despite the fact that Lord Henry’s aphorisms and Dorian’s experiments in selfdevelopment take up almost the entire novel, there is just enough space for a quick glimpse of
an alternative viewpoint. It is expressed by Lady Monmouth, who seems not to serve any
other purpose in the novel, but is described by her cousin Lord Henry as “very clever, too
clever for a woman” (208). She tells Lord Henry that he “value[s] beauty far too much” (223),
and this one sentence casts a shadow of doubt over everything.
Art and Money
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The
only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless. (Dorian Gray 6)
These two maxims draw a clear distinction between art objects and useful objects, an idea
which is not originally Wilde’s. This view of aesthetics can be traced back to Immanuel Kant,
whose work Wilde had read (Roden 156; Brown 70). In the Critique of Judgement Kant wrote
that “the liking involved in taste for the beautiful is disinterested and free…All interest either
presupposes a need or gives rise to one; and, because interest is the basis that determines
approval, it makes the judgement about the object unfree” (52). In other words, an interest in
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something corrupts the freedom and purity of aesthetic judgement by introducing compulsion.
Wilde expanded on his position in a letter to a curious reader:
A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a
moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of
course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with
the flower...It is a misuse. (Selected Letters 96)
Here, the “misuse” of flowers is explicitly tied to economic transactions – to sell a flower is to
ignore, and perhaps even to corrupt, its essence. This distinction, between economically
useless but transcendent art on the one hand, and inartistic but useful commerce on the other,
has become a familiar one in the humanities. From its Kantian roots, the idea has developed
into what Barbara Herrnstein-Smith memorably dubbed “the double discourse of value”:
On the one hand there is the discourse of economic theory… on the other hand, there is the
discourse of aesthetic axiology… In the first discourse, events are explained in terms of
calculation, preferences, costs, benefits, profits, prices, and utility. In the second, events are
explained…in terms of inspiration, discrimination, taste (good taste, bad taste, no taste), the
test of time, intrinsic value, and transcendent value. (127)
This distinction is anticipated both in the Preface and in the novel. Lord Henry wants to buy
the picture and asks Basil to name his price, but apparently more in hope than expectation: he
does not seem in the least surprised or upset when Basil announces that he cannot sell the
picture because it belongs to Dorian (33-34). Clearly, this does not fit in with normal ideas
about property ownership, according to which Basil, as its creator, owns the painting. But all
three men are happy to accept that, in some aesthetic or spiritual sense, the picture truly does
belong to Dorian. And perhaps the most famous expression of the separation of artistic from
economic value appears in the novel, when Lord Henry says that “Nowadays people know the
price of everything and the value of nothing” (57).1
However, the novel again refuses to give the reader such a simple picture or conform
to any consistent view of art. In the passage discussed above, although Basil refuses to sell the
picture to Lord Henry, and although Lord Henry’s offer (“I will give you anything you like”)
suggests that the value of art is beyond money, the painting is nonetheless described as
“property”, and an offer to buy it is made. So the dividing line between art and money, even
in this early passage, is not quite as clear as the Preface might suggest. Money is a recurring
Wilde repeated this phrase in the third act of Lady Windermere’s Fan, where he also complicated it with the
reply: “CECIL GRAHAM. What is a cynic? [Sitting on the back of the sofa.]
LORD DARLINGTON. A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
CECIL GRAHAM. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and
doesn't know the market price of any single thing.”
1
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presence throughout the novel, and is often associated with objets d’art. The most extreme
example of this gleeful attitude to wealth is the heavily Huysmans-influenced Chapter 11,
which describes in detail Dorian’s obsession with precious stones,
such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that turns red by lamplight, the cymophane with its
wirelike line of silver, the pistachio-coloured peridot, rose-pink and wine-yellow topazes,
carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous, four-rayed stars, flame-red cinnamon-stones,
orange and violet spinels, and amethysts with their alternate layers of ruby and sapphire. (156)
These stones are beautiful things, but their beauty is partly dependent on their high monetary
value. Shiny pebbles can also be nice to look at, but Dorian does not collect them. It is hard to
reconcile this passage with the idea that art is entirely distinct from the grubby world of
commerce, where value is equated with price. This is also hinted at in the descriptions of the
Jewish manager of the theatre where Dorian meets Sybil. According to Dorian, this character
“told me once, with an air of pride, that his five bankruptcies were entirely due to ‘The Bard,’
as he insisted on calling him. He seemed to think it a distinction.” (64) Lord Henry assures
Dorian that the theatre manager is right. Apart from this explicit link between money and art
made here, it is worth noting that Jewish people were popularly associated with money and
commerce at the time, so this combination – Jew and devotee of the arts – is significant.
All of the main characters are rich, and their lifestyles are described in sumptuous
detail. Lord Henry does not have a mere clock: it is a “Louis Quatorze clock” (55). Basil
Hallward’s studio is shaded by “long tussore-silk curtains” (7). Dorian, perhaps aping Lord
Henry’s taste in furnishings, has a screen “of gilt Spanish leather, stamped and wrought with a
rather florid Louis Quatorze pattern,” (111) and when he steps into his “onyx-paved
bathroom” he wears a “dressing-gown of silk-embroidered cashmere wool” (109). All the
objects that Wilde describes so lavishly are clearly beautiful objects, and the definition of an
artwork (according to the Preface) is simply that it is beautiful. But so many of the art objects
in the novel are, in fact, useful in a literal sense: they are functional objects. Dorian wears his
dressing-gown; Lord Henry’s clock tells him what time it is; Basil’s curtains keep the light
out and stop people looking in. In a lecture on Art and the Handicraftsman, Wilde claimed
that “People often talk as if there was an opposition between what is beautiful and what is
useful. There is no opposition to beauty except ugliness: all things are either beautiful or
ugly, and utility will be always on the side of the beautiful thing” (Essays and Lectures 64).
This view is implicit in the descriptions of the beautiful possessions and surroundings of the
rich, and the great emphasis placed on loving descriptions of furnishings. Of course, as well
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as being literally useful, these objects are also expensive and therefore economically useful.
When Dorian reads his letters, he finds among them
a rather heavy bill for a chased silver Louis-Quinze toilet-set that he had not yet had the
courage to send on to his guardians, who were extremely old-fashioned people and did not
realize that we live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities; and there were
several very courteously worded communications from Jermyn Street money-lenders offering
to advance any sum of money at a moment's notice and at the most reasonable rates of interest.
(109)
It makes sense to claim that a flower is not made to be sold – and perhaps also a painting,
such as Dorian Gray’s portrait, which is given away. But can the same be said about a toiletset, or a dressing-gown? These are clearly products made with the intention of being sold. But
even if we were to accept that these objects are so beautiful that they in some way transcend
their status as commercial products, the passage links art to money, and thus undermines the
Preface’s view. Why keep mentioning money in connection to art, if it belongs to a separate
sphere?
“Unnecessary things” – that is, artworks – are described here as the “only necessities”.
This paradox makes more sense when understood in the light of Wilde’s essay The Soul of
Man. In it, Wilde argues that individuality is of overriding importance, and that selfdevelopment is the proper aim of life (Lord Henry offers a similar argument in favour of selfactualisation; see Dorian Gray 24-5). Self-development is only possible if the individual does
not have to spend his or her time worrying about money, which is degrading. Wilde is critical
of those altruists who try to help the poor, because ‘helping’ them only prolongs their misery.
The poor are not worth bothering about because they have no hope of achieving the beautiful
life that Dorian reaches for: individual greatness, not collective harmony, is what justifies
human existence. From this point of view, it is too late for the poor; only the rich have any
hope of achieving self-actualisation, because only the rich are free from the “vulgar details” of
everyday reality.
There is a clear distinction drawn between rich and poor characters in the novel. As
Lord Henry puts it, “the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial.
Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich” (92). Edouard Roditi
complains of the novel that “From the brilliantly lit society with which the author seems so
well acquainted, we step straight into a dim slum-land...whose denizens are all stock
characters from almost ‘gothic’ melodrama” (51). This criticism seems justified, but perhaps
it is not so much a failing as a dramatisation of the view that the poor are degraded by their
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poverty. This degradation – which here reduces them to simplistic, threatening caricatures like
James Vane, makes them less real than the rich, because they are unable to develop their
selves. (Of course, this creates yet another paradox in view of the association between
ugliness/poverty and reality which I mentioned earlier.) In The Soul of Man Wilde seems to
anticipate this kind of criticism when he comments that “[s]tarvation, and not sin, is the parent
of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so uninteresting
from any psychological point of view” (CW Vol. 4 245).
From this point of view, and in the absence of the kind of socialism Wilde proposes as
a solution, money becomes absolutely vital. It is a necessary condition for individual
development, and the characters seem to be well aware of this. Lord Henry, despite his
witticism about the difference between price and value, reveals this in conversation with his
uncle:
“…I want to get something out of you.”
“Money, I suppose,” said Lord Fermor, making a wry face. “Well, sit down and tell me all
about it. Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything.”
“Yes,” murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; “and when they grow older
they know it.” (41)
As Dennis Denisoff argues, “[i]t was in Wilde’s time that the concepts of art and culture
became inseparable from issues of consumption” (Roden 120). The novel shows great
awareness of the emergence of a consumer society, and one feature of this is the continual
smoking of cigarettes that the main characters engage in. Lord Henry tells Basil and Dorian
that “[a] cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one
unsatisfied” (93-4). What makes a cigarette “perfect”? It is precisely the fact that it is
unsatisfactory; so the smoker needs to smoke more, and buys more cigarettes. The celebration
of consumer capitalism sits uneasily alongside the insistence that art and the artistic life are
wholly distinct from the economic world. The position of the novel, once again, turns out to
be much more complex than the Preface suggests. Even if exquisite experience and the beauty
of art do have a value that transcends the mundane world of commerce and economic
exchange, it does not follow that this world can be ignored or escaped. Furthermore, such
artistic treasures and beautiful experiences are only available to those who can afford them.
The novel satirises romantic views of art even as it puts them forward.
Conclusion
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The Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray was written in order to defend the novel against
the criticism the 1890 version had already received, and this is one reason to be sceptical
about the extent to which it can be taken at face value. At the same time, it is clear that the
Preface deals with ideas that constitute major themes within the novel. In some cases, the
language of the Preface relates in a very direct and literal way to ideas presented in the novel,
and here the novel often directly contradicts what the Preface has to say. For example, the
idea that books cannot be immoral is contradicted by the ‘poisonous influence’ of the yellow
book Lord Henry gives to Dorian, and the view of art argued for in the Preface is contradicted
by Basil Hallward’s opinion – which is supported by the greatness of his picture.
But the Preface is not just straightforwardly rejected by the novel. In the case of the
relation of the artist to art, the novel both supports and contradicts the Preface’s view, and
then complicates the question by blurring the distinction between art and life, concealment
and revelation. With art and morality, the statement of the Preface appears to be supported by
the importance attached to Dorian’s experiences and Lord Henry’s philosophy, only to be
undermined very directly and literally by the presence of an immoral book in the novel itself,
and the linking of beauty and moral goodness. In the case of the statement “all art is quite
useless”, the novel seems to share a romantic view of art as something that transcends
everyday monetary value while at the same time undermining and even mocking this view. It
should not come as a surprise that paradox is a feature of the novel. Pithy, amusing
paradoxical statements are a feature of all of Wilde’s writing, from the society plays to the
essays, and Dorian Gray is no exception. But in the case of Dorian Gray at least, the
paradoxes are not limited to dialogue: they are built into the plot and the imagery of the novel
itself.
What lies behind all this paradox? It is, of course, tempting to engage in biographical
explanations for Wilde’s love of contradiction. His own double life as a gay man who was
also married and a father of two is difficult to ignore. Other critics have pointed to his AngloIrish origins as a source of his “double nature” (Roden 249). But whatever truth there might
be to these speculations, it is dangerous to attempt amateur psychoanalysis on a patient who
died over 100 years ago, and whose mind we only have access to through writings which the
writer himself declared to be unreliable. Another common tactic is to regard the novel, and
Wilde’s other writings, as political or subversive. There is, no doubt, something to be said for
this argument; according to Richard Ellmann, Wilde provided “an anatomy of his society, and
a radical reconsideration of its ethics” (cited in Crowell 617). But this is only part of the point.
The novel is more than just a simple satire; the commitment to paradox runs much deeper.
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Many critics have tried to find a coherent system of thought in Wilde’s writings (see for
example Smith and Brown). This amounts to looking for something behind or beneath all
those paradoxes. “Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril” (6), warns the
Preface (although we take the Preface at its word at our peril too).
Paradox in Dorian Gray is not just being used to make a point; paradox is the point.
Contradictory opinions are expressed simultaneously in Wilde’s work. The novel touches on a
wide range of issues in ethics and aesthetics without coming to definite conclusions, and the
Preface puts forward one version of the Aestheticist philosophy which the novel stops short of
fully rejecting or embracing. The novel is (among other things) an intellectual game in which
ideas are set out in opposition to each other, generating paradoxes and contradictions which
are left unresolved: as the admittedly unreliable Preface says, “[n]o artist desires to prove
anything” (5).
This is one way to look at the novel. But, in the light of everything I have said in this
paper, it might seem foolhardy to think that a definite conclusion can be reached. So I will end
with a final paradox, from The Truth of Masks, which both supports and undermines my
conclusion:
Not that I agree with everything I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely
disagree… For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose
contradictory is also true. (CW Vol. 4 228)
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