Vision and Self-Consciousness in The Picture of Dorian Gray

In Chapter Seven of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian returns home after severing his relationship with Sybil Vane and aimlessly wandering around the town during the night. He is heartbroken that Sybil, once an artist who self-consciously performed her roles, is now merely acting out her own personality. Entering his house, his eye "fell upon the portrait Basil Hallward had painted of him" (Picture 89), and the expression of the portrait is different from what he remembers:

The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.

He winced, and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed in ivory Cupids, one of Lord Henry's many presents to him, glanced hurriedly into its polished depths. No line like that warped his red lips. What did it mean?

He rubbed his eyes, and came close to the picture, and examined it again. There were no signs of any change when he looked into the actual painting, and yet there was no doubt that the whole expression had altered. It was not a mere fancy of his own. The thing was horribly apparent.

(Picture 90)

Dorian's struggle to understand the nature of the change in the portrait, whether illusion or fact, justifies recent critical interest in Wilde's conception of consciousness in this novel. Critics have read Dorian Gray in the context of late nineteenth-century theories of the material nature of the mind, especially the empirical and positivist approaches that dominated late Victorian thought.¹ In this paper, I shall argue for the importance of examining Wilde's conception of self-consciousness rather than consciousness per se. In the above scene, Dorian's viewing of his portrait differs from him seeing his face in the regular mirror, the oval glass; for Dorian, scrutinizing the portrait is primarily a self-conscious act. There were "no signs of any change," and yet the changed expression is "apparent" to his mind; it is something invisible but present. In addition, if the changed expression is not merely apparent, but "horribly" apparent, Dorian's viewing of these invisible changes points to a form of awareness that is not simply bodily nor simply metaphysical. How these two aspects relate to each other forms the focus of this paper. The ensuing self-consciousness, as I shall argue, depends on both sensory feelings and reflexive evaluation as performative agents of cognition. Another reason for exploring this configured form of subjectivity is to reconsider our selection of contextual references. Apart from Wilde's interest in nineteenth-century naturalist epistemology, we may also need to take into account his more metaphysical interests; therefore, instead of drawing on only British scientists such as Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, T.H. Huxley, and W.K. Clifford, or only European philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche, I shall focus on a few meeting points of these two major strands of thought. Wilde's position should help us map out historically some of the challenges that European philosophy faced in late Victorian England, as metaphysical interests interacted with a distinctly material and positivist ethos, particularly concerning theories of the mind.

Viewing the Intellect

Dorian looks into the oval glass to see if there have been any changes to his face. These bodily changes would account for the altered expression in his portrait, and thus provide a persuasive and verifiable cause for that impression. The direction of his observations is from the mirror to the portrait, from factual evidence to something artistic and unexplainable. Here, the portrait serves as a metaphorical and fantastic mirror. In revealing a different expression of Dorian, but initially denying him any traces of epistemological lead, the portrait forces him to give up briefly his reliance on an empirical episteme. It reveals how the visible, as a material presence, may work with the invisible, which the senses alone can access but cannot sufficiently verify. Indeed, Dorian, "[l]ike Gautier," as the narrator of The Picture of Dorian...