Fallen Nature and Infinite Desire: A Study of Love, Artifice, and Transcendence in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Á rebours and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.¹

Even during his lifetime, readers of Oscar Wilde’s work often noted the author’s interest in Catholicism. Yet the specifically religious dimension of his corpus has rarely come into examination by critics.² This article focuses on one small part of this larger question: the influence of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel, À rebours (1884),³ upon Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–91).Huysmans’s novel was a key initiator of the “decadent” literary movement in France and has been generally acknowledged as influencing Wilde’s novella. Although Huysmans’s book was regarded as corruptive in The Picture of Dorian Gray itself and was singled out during Wilde’s 1895 sodomy trial as an example of the latter’s deviant inspirations, it was also considered a deeply religious and even Catholic work, and its influence upon Wilde’s novella was just as ambivalent.⁴

Critics have not often explored the relationship between À rebours and The Picture of Dorian Gray at length, even aside from the question of religion. But the fact of that relationship is evident.⁵ Wilde never concealed his indebtedness to À rebours in the novella, and anyone acquainted with both works will recognize that he alluded to this inspiration. At a key turning point in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian’s eyes fall upon the “yellow book”⁶ that his friend, Lord Henry Wotton sent to him. His impression is worth noting:

It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying . . . to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still called sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jeweled style, vivid and obscure at once. . . . The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling to its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of its sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows.⁷

The “yellow book,” had a profound effect upon the practical and theoretical approach to life for Wilde’s hero. Similar to À rebours’s main character des Esseintes, Dorian grew increasingly detached from reality and cynical. As he related to Lord Henry Wotton, he had been “fascinated” by the book, but he had not exactly “liked” it. “Ah, you have discovered that?” Lord Henry replied (275). Dorian was won. The hero of Huysmans’s novel “in whom the romantic and scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the book seemed to him to contain the whole story of his life, written before he had lived it” (276). Wilde’s novella then asserts twice that Dorian Gray had been “poisoned by a book” (290, 352).

The impact that À rebours had upon Dorian Gray was profound. But the influence of Huysmans’s novel upon The Picture of Dorian Gray as a whole was just as significant. The present study argues that Wilde took from Huysmans’s novel a basic perspective upon the role of beauty in life. À rebours provided Wilde with a plot-driving model, an aesthetic, which was ethical...