"In a mirror that mirrors the soul": Masks and Mirrors in Dorian Gray

"In a mirror that mirrors the soul": MASKS AND MIRRORS IN DORIAN GRAY By Donald R. Dickson (Texas A & M University) In recent decades scholars have generally agreed that The Picture of Dorian Gray retains its position in the literary canon because of the "pre-modern" critical and aesthetic theories upon which the novel is based. The failure of Dorian, it has been noted, to achieve the aesthetic ideals of Wilde's generation clearly sounds the death knell of the Aesthetic Movement even as it heralds the ennui of the fin de siècle. As a carefully constructed novel, Dorian Gray has attracted only moderate interest, perhaps because the rather mechanical plot bears such an intriguing relationship to Wilde's own life. In fact, Wilde's damnation of his young aesthete is now usually adduced as evidence of an intense selfconsciousness of Wilde's own fall, a quality that Arthur Symons, in his bellwether essay "The Decadent Movement in Literature," identifies as the most striking characteristic of the Yellow Nineties. No one can deny that the novel dramatizes the central aesthetic problem of its time, a problem that Wilde also struggles with in his essays. The tragedy of the artist depicted in Dorian Gray, however, is more artfully contrived than many critics seem willing to grant. Plot is not the only formal resource of the novel that Wilde uses to fashion his work. By placing what seems to be the most significant structural device—the notion of mirror images that reflect the masks of the characters—in the foreground, we can begin to appreciate that the novel's aesthetic design is far more subtle than having the plot damn the beautiful but fated protagonist. Wilde himself tried to direct criticism away from the novel's outrageous innuendous and towards its aesthetic design. Attacked on all quarters, Wilde parried with the moralistic reviewers of the Lippincott's Monthly Magazine version by countering that the plot itself produced a rather plain moral—though this, he conceded, was "the only error in the book." Most of the public furor over the perversity of Dorian Gray should no doubt be judged in light of the prevailing Victorian standard of moral earnestness as a mark of "sincerity," as Karl Beckson urges. In the eyes of his contemporaries, Wilde's carefully cultivated role as public sinner spoke louder than any protestations he made on behalf of his novel. Thus, despite his own best efforts in his defense, even a sympathetic critic like Walter Pater responded to topical interests rather than to the novel's serious concerns : Clever always, this book, however, seems to set forth anything but a homely philosophy of life for the middle-class—a kind of dainty Epicurean theory rather—yet fails, to some degree, in this; and one can see why. A true Epicureanism aims at a complete though harmonious development of man's entire organism. To lose the moral sense therefore , for instance, the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr. Wilde's heroes are bent on doing so speedily, as completely as they can, is to lose, or lower, organization, to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development. Not even Pater seemed to recognize that Wilde's intention is to show the failure of the aesthetic ideal, not its triumph. One of the few who responded to the subtleties of Dorian Gray was Arthur Conan Doyle, to whom Wilde wrote in reply: "The newspapers seem to me to be written by the prurient for the Philistine. I cannot understand how they can treat Dorian Gray as immoral. My difficulty was to keep the inherent moral subordinate to the artistic and dramatic effect, and it still seems to me that the moral Is too obvious" (Letters, p. 292). The "too obvious" moral refers of course to the main narrative sequence and the fate of Dorian. As concerned as Wilde was with the "artistic and dramatic effect," we ought to consider how other elements contribute to the form of the novel. One consequence of neglecting the aesthetic form of Dorian Gray has been to undervalue the emblematic episode involving Sibyl Vane that creates basic expectations about...