The novel that I am going to discuss is a novel that changed my life, and also that was taken to sum it up completely. As a piece of evidence it proved, many respects, to be my downfall; to make sure that it could no longer be denied that I was, according to the standards of the society in which I lived and whose morals I was so concerned with exposing. I speak, of course, of The Picture of Dorian Gray, that novel through which, as it was said at my trial, a line of immorality and depravity ran like a purple thread.
As my only novel, I suppose that some must consider it to be a life’s work in some way, or at least to contain all that it was that I considered most important. Certainly, into the mouths of Henry, Basil and Dorian I found myself putting thoughts that had, at times occurred to me, but at the same time I cannot say that I saw this as simply the only point of my activity. Still, if I had to introduce the novel in order to reflect on it now I would describe it as something of a contradiction. It is necessary to understand something about my work before being able to explain this fully. Perhaps, it reminds me slightly of a poem that a wrote: The Harlots House. Here I tried to describe the sense of excitement, and of course the sense of danger, that could come from attempting to give unbridled reign to one’s aesthetic impulses. When I wrote lines like; ‘We watched mechanical grotesques, / Making fantastic Arabesques, / The shadows raced across the blind,’ (2000, 30) I wanted to make sure that my readers would know and understand the dangers of the world of the sense, just as much as its thrills. Of course, I was knew of the danger of sensual indulgence, both for the soul and for the body, but I didn’t think people would take prudishness seriously, especially not from me. When I would have my hapless moral lovers state ‘The dead are dancing with the dead’ (ibid). it was as much to demonstrate the paucity of the life led in the open, as much as it was to show genuine moral concern.
Nonetheless, my satires were well known enough that I did not expect anyone to take my novel too seriously, or at least, not to feel as if they could entirely trust me. Of course, as I had Henry say in it, ‘Conscience and cowardice are really the same things’ I meant it. Nonetheless, there was something that I found truly disgusting about the way that our Victorian life insisted on living in this terrible bad faith. Everything felt simply for amusement, or for moral pressure: ‘When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people’ (2012, 5). I put those words into the mouth of Jack, in The Importance of Being Earnest. I repeat them now because at times this was precisely the kind of boredom that I found myself confronting, both within myself and within those whom I knew in London and outside it. I cannot say that I was sincere, or that I was insincere. Rather, so much of what I wrote revolved around a combined sense of freshness and tiredness that I would find the in the world. All social life, it seemed, was performance. I wanted my art to be something more.
More than anything, I would say that my novel, my Dorian was my attempt to give life to these contradictory impulses. By this, I do not mean, of course, that I wished to teach anything or to be didactic in any kind of way. Such a thing could not be worse; could not do more to sully the tenderness and care that is required if anything like beautiful art could be produced. Rather, I wanted to seriously consider the soul in its forms as it was found in our contemporary age, and to do so by studying what could make it great and what could make it depraved. Of course, some criticized my basic idea of the Faust motif, and of some of my sermonising, but I stand by it. The cure the body by means of the soul and the soul by the means of the body: this is what I had wanted to show in the novel, the necessary dualism of life and the world that we live in meant that true happiness could only be pursued by a few. I now look at my novel as the attempt to show that what it might mean for this to pursued in all of its possibility, and of course what that itself might need in order to even be a possibility at all. Needless to say, I also think on the novel as something as something of a superior ghost story. For what is art without that little prick of fright?
I remember saying once that ‘most people simply exist’ and that to live is truly an exceptional thing (1998, 1). I stand by this, but of course it should apply to my novel too. It was an attempt to make art live in and for itself, not simply as it exists in and through things. Whether this attempt succeeded or failed is truly not for me to, although I certainly wouldn’t trust of my critics either. It seems then, that you must make up your own mind. To do so, I urge only that you use both your soul, and the body that encases it.
- Wilde, Oscar. Collected Poetry of Oscar Wilde. London: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 2000.
- The Importance of Being Earnest. London: Penguin, 2012.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, London: Penguin, 2003.
