The Flower and the Beast: A Study of Oscar Wilde's Antithetical Attitudes Toward Nature and Man in The Picture of Dorian Gray

37 THE FLOWER AND THE BEAST: A STUDY OF OSCAR WILDE'S ANTITHETICAL ATTITUDES TOWARD NATURE AND MAN IN THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY John J. Pappas (Douglass College) Recent critics, focusing on The Picture of Dorian Gray as the work in which Oscar Wilde manifests most clearly his opposed tendencies and psychological dislocation, have indicated the relevance of nature to any discussion of Wilde's inner conflicts.1 Eut the character and severity of Wilde's antitheses in Corlan Gray in respect not only to nature itself, but to man's place in nature, have not teen fully explored. Nor has the effect of those antithetical attitudes upon certain aspects of the language of his novel - specifically, the descriptions and images of flowers and beasts - been fully examined.2 The word "nature" has a variety of meanings in Dorian Gray that are not always in complete consonance with one another. We find, for example, that Wilde, capitalizing the first letter of the word, suggests at different times that "Nature" is the ultimate power determining man's fate; that it is the essential standard of truth by which a. man's actions are judged; and that it is a teacher instructing man in how to live. More frequently, in referring to birds, clouds, breezes, sunlight, and so forth, Wilde focuses on what for man are the immediately perceivable and recognizable aspects of the surrounding physical world. This external nature is at times presented as though it is no more than the sum of those aspects or qualities directly perceivable by man. At other times, however, Wilde suggests that the perceivable phenomena - the birds, the breezes, the flowers - are the function of an immense, impersonal, and ineluctable process, and that this process is the ultimate reality of nature. Wilde also uses the word "nature," without a capital letter, to refer to the essential self or unique identity of an individual human being. Clearly, there is nothing new in the use of the word in this sense, or in the appearance in one literary work of the word both with and without a capital first letter, with each form of the word representing very different realities. But Wilde's use of the term in these ways does point up the preoccupation in the novel with the problem of man's relationship to nature and does suggest at least the possibility of the kind of confusion about man and nature that finally manifests itself in Dorian Gray. Yet the antitheses in the novel and, ultimately, in Wilde manifest themselves not so much in the different ideas of nature presented as in the opposed attitudes toward a given idea. In other words, it is not simply that a character conceives of nature as a teacher and as an impersonal process, but that when he does conceive of nature as, say, process he both abhors it and fervently accepts it. 38 Take, for example, Dorian and the insouciant Lord Henry Wotton. Both men are appalled by nature as it reflects itself in man; yet both of them appeal to nature and embrace it. The aspect of nature that especially horrifies the two of them is the experience of aging. Their persistent references to it are always negative. Indeed, Dorian's aversion to it is so strong that he voices the wish that the portrait done of him by his artist friend, Basil Hallward, would grow old while he himself remained young. Yet the real nemesis of Lord Henry and Dorian is neither old age nor the destructiveness of time, to which frequent references are made in the novel.3 Though they never identify it as such in their own minds, what really appalls both men is physical process,4 the continual functioning of the material aspect of man, for it is this that actually causes aging and its attendant afflictions , to say nothing of death. Insofar as both men abhor old age, they are reacting against this fundamental characteristic of man's nature. However, If the two are obsessed by the horrors of growing old, they are equally obsessed by the pleasures of youth. For both Lord Henry and Dorian, to be young is to...