"The Wilde Child": Structure and Origin in the Fin-de-Siècle Short Story

27? "THE WILDE CHILD": STRUCTURE AND ORIGIN IN THE FIN-DE-SIÈCLE SHORT STORY By Jan B. Gordon (SUNY at Buffalo) •Tell me what you saw there,' he said. -Tell me the truth. I must know it. I am not a child.' (Lord Arthur Savile to Mr. Podger, the medium, in "Lord Arthur Savile-s Crime")* At least a part of Dorian Grays dilemma involves a confrontation with his past. He is yet another of those Victorian orphans whose very existence is predicated on a terrible violence. It is to be recalled that his grandfather had had his father killed when Dorian's birth did not conform to class expectations. Sir Henry Wotton enjoys the role of a tutor in its real etymological sense, "one who watches." But he who supervises the education of a child is really symbolic of the presence of an absence; it is a short step from Sir Henrys role as a surrogate father to his existence as a "Lord" to Dorian in the dialectics of the new faith of hedonism. Like David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Heathcliff, and even Dorothea Brooke, the beautiful Dorian Gray must assume a role in a bildungsrornan, that nineteenthcentury pilgrimage through adversity and into vocation. Yet, the outcome of Dorian's journey is decidedly different, for this pale Apollo loses rather than gains identity. His return to "nothingness" is as symbolic as the rings through which his identity is established on the last page of The Picture of Dorian Gray,· rather than education, his journey has been characterized only by self-reflection. He moves from a pastoral existence on the first page of the novel (the din of London streets can barely be heard among the synaesthetic mysteries of the garden) to an increasingly interiorized journey where he often loses his way. Faces become anonymous at the same time that his existential space becomes confining: opium dens, theatres, and urban preachers who speak of salvation in the process of splitting the soul from the body. The imagery of the last chapter of the novel is the imagery of the labyrinth into which Dorian's aesthetic has led him. Yet, the novel also begins with a labyrinth. The opening scene moves through a window and thence into a room in the middle of which is a large portrait at whose center in turn lies Dorian's visage. This is all a way of saying that, structurally at least, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel that really does not progress at all, that in"Tts ending is its beginning and vice-versa. As if to accentuate this thematic motif, the cautious reader notices that time flows backward in the novel, as befits the career of a young man attempting to retain eternal youth in the figure of some ageless work of art: "And when winter came upon it, he would still be standing where spring trembles on the verge of summer" (p. 88). Yet, to return all the way, isto start where Dorian commences: the nothingness of ontological discontinuity which, in its aesthetic representation, is the blankness of the poem that is all margin - Wilde's idea of the perfect aesthetic statement. But between its beginnings and its endings is a scene that suggests a departure from the traditional developmental novel. Despairing of 278 the changed feature of the "portrait," Dorian Gray carries it upstairs to a secret, albeit cluttered (what secrets are not, after all?) attic: He had not entered the place for more than four years not indeed, since he had used it first as a play-room when he was a child, and then as a study when he grew somewhat older. It was a large well-proportioned room, which had been specially built by the last Lord Kelso, for the use of the little grandson whom, for his strange likeness to his mother, and also for other reasons, he had always hated and desired to keep at a distance. It appeared to Dorian to have but little changed, (p. 98) The setting for much of the violence that ensues is the nursery of the child, the place where the loss of one's parents and the...