Picturing Dorian Gray: Resistant Readings in Wilde's Novel

Picturing Dorian Gray: Resistant Readings in Wilde's Novel MICHAEL PATRICK GILLESPIE Marquette University A PATINA OF PLURALISM surrounds a range of diverse contemporary readings of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Nonetheless, the disposition to privilege a particular methodology or interpretation, excluding all other approaches and the insights that any alternative offers, still dominates readings of the novel. In fact, a survey of recent studies underscores a sense that the conservative intellectual tendencies that informed the earliest responses to Wilde have changed only marginally over the past one hundred years.1 This atavistic inclination, often concealed by the vocabulary of a much more liberal approach, does not offer an adequate response to a work as imaginatively digressive as Dorian Gray. Lacking the hermeneutic ingenuity to produce genuine insights into possible receptions of the novel, such tendencies in fact blunt aesthetic pleasure through recapitulations of received ideas—redundancies occluded in a way that impersonates innovation. By taking a form that limits conceptions of Wilde's characters to predictable archetypes or that restricts views of the narrative to validations of one's ideological positions, critics have confused means and ends and have imposed premature closure upon the creative process. Although inherently different in their approaches, the two most prevalent forms of response to Dorian Gray follow similar epistemologies . They both draw support for their arguments by focusing on the impact of a single dominant element upon the development of the discourse. Thematic approaches like those of Philip Cohen, Houston Baker, and Donald Dickson generally rely upon analogues to archetypal situations or ethical imperatives. Ideological views like those expressed by Ed Cohen and Regenia Gagnier explore relationships between historical conditions and fictional representations.2 While individual critics may use these methods to produce sophisticated analyses, a rigorous ELT : VOLUME 35:1 1992 epistemological examination of such approaches reveals interpretive limitations in the basic arguments and suggests the need for a hypostatic perception—acknowledging the presence of an aesthetic metasystem that amalgamates various perspectives without erasing inherent diversities—to support a genuinely pluralistic methodology. The thematic approach proves immediately susceptible to such a critique, for the final, book-length version of Dorian Gray repeatedly disrupts the pattern of linear, causal narrative development so important to this type of criticism. As the discourse progresses, Dorian's physical beauty, for example, receives a very different sort of treatment from that given it in the first two chapters of the novel. Emphasis shifts from the man to the portrait, and the ambivalent forces that dominate Dorian's consciousness render a single perspective of his nature inadequate : "[H]e would sit in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other times, with that pride of individualism that is half the fascination of sin, and smiling, with secret pleasure, at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own."3 This passage coincidentally marks the point in the narrative where conventional, linear interpretations begin to lose their consistency . Simple thematic concepts—like seeing the novel as a modern morality tale—fail to address a protean personality like Lord Henry that develops beyond their narrow Manichaean polarities. Archetypal approaches —whether based on Narcissus or on Faust—prove no more satisfying in light of Dorian's increasing concern with ontology, for such views cannot go beyond their obsessions with a single trait.4 Ideological attitudes, while promising a more complex assessment of the ambiance surrounding Dorian, still succumb to the circumscription imposed by polemical assumptions. Ed Cohen, for example, explores the power of extra-textuality through an examination of the tension arising when the homoeroticism inherent in Dorian Gray confronts the societal prohibitions that shape a work's reception. Cohen's essay raises a number of interesting points, but its impact remains problematic because of a determination to proselytize rather than to analyze. Basing his argument on the assumption that Wilde wrote the highly sensational homoerotic novel Teleny, Cohen reads Dorian Gray as a political document , a manifesto of the dandy whose sexual preferences offer an open challenge to conventional values. The analogy suggests interesting interpretive possibilities, but unfortunately Cohen offers little evidence to support his basic premise—the ascription...