the picture of dorian gray a portrait of the wild reader

The Picture of Dorian Gray: A Portrait
of the ‘Wild Reader’
Sunggyung Jo, University of Utah
Abstract
Paul Jay claims that we need to pay renewed attention to the aesthetic to
address and incorporate everyday experience into our academic
discussions. Clearly, at stake here is the opportunity to reconceptualise
the symbiotic relationship between literature and ordinary readers.
In this essay, I propose a concept that I call ‘wild reading’ through which
to understand sensuous, and potentially violent, acts of reading texts, as
represented in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The novel
repeatedly portrays reading as an act of wild, sensual submission to
seductive ‘texts’, as if one were succumbing to the charms of an
irresistible lover. I am going to focus on, and analyse, particular scenes
in the novel, by means of which I will conceptualise and discuss the
notion of ‘wild reading’ as performed by Wilde’s characters. Ultimately,
I suggest ‘wild reading’ as a useful aesthetic category for our own
everyday experience of reading and as a vehicle through which we might
understand actual readers’ desire-driven acts of imagination triggered by
a seductive text.
Keywords: Oscar Wilde, erotics of reading, phenomenology of reading,
aesthetics of the everyday, reader response theory, feelings and affect,
subjectivism
Victoriographies 11.1 (2021): 58–76
DOI: 10.3366/vic.2021.0409
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/vic
A Portrait of the ‘Wild Reader’
Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when
he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his
conception of the beautiful.
– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890, p. 255
In the 1960s and 1970s, Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation (1966) and
Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (1973) provided persuasive
models to discuss the experience of reading through the economies of
pleasure and jouissance, as well as the erotics of reading. The legacy of
these approaches permits us to reconsider The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891), in terms of influence, seduction, or poisoning which are key
aspects of the practice of reading depicted in Oscar Wilde’s novel.1 This
essay aims to reclaim the reader’s agency by elaborating on how
seduction occurs between text and reader – and even between individual readers – through an analysis of the acts of reading represented in
Wilde’s novel.
A number of scholarly efforts have attempted to illuminate the
various sensory/sensuous modes of reading in Wilde’s works, such as
reading as ‘feeling’ in Dorian Gray (Freedman), or reading as a sensuous
encounter with Wilde’s seductive texts (Boyiopoulos).2 While my
interests also lie in such sensuous experiences of reading, this essay’s
main interest lies not only in describing, but also in proposing a new
analytic concept – one I call ‘wild reading’ – in order to conceptualise
the delicate interplay between sensuousness, readerly freedom, and the
risky potential for violent feelings and responses elicited in the reader.
Here, I mean to tease out the nuances of the seductive text and one’s
power as a reader – not only the reader of the novel, but especially the
novel’s characters who function as readers and are engaged in reading
acts – as one takes control and penetrates the text through the act of
interpretation. This is a particular mode of reading, as I will explain, that
is as much about sensing as about interpreting.
I propose the concept of ‘wild reading’ as one particular mode
of engagement with texts that is exemplified by Wilde’s Dorian Gray.
The novel repeatedly depicts reading as an act of wild, sensual
submission to seductive works of art as if one were succumbing to the
charms of an irresistible lover. Dorian Gray helps us understand the
characters-as-readers’ desire-driven acts of imagination. Wilde’s novel
shows us that reading is not simply a passive or receptive state of mind,
as some might argue, but an act that produces pleasure – whatever the
content of that pleasure might be – and that even alters (in both positive
and negative ways) the life of a reader, as we will see in the various
transformations of Dorian Gray. In order to demonstrate this, I will
59
Victoriographies
analyse particular scenes in the novel, by means of which I will
conceptualise and discuss the notion of ‘wild reading’ as performed by
Wilde’s characters.
The terms ‘wild reading’ or ‘sensuous reading’ in this essay might
resonate with such notions as Susan Sontag’s ‘against interpretation’,
or ‘surface reading’ or ‘reading against the grain’ as defined by
Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus (9). I should note, however, that
those terms are highly conceptual and ethical constructs – rather than
the descriptive ones they wish to be. My term ‘wild reading’ is meant
mainly as a mode and model or a form of reading constructed and
performed in the novel: ‘wild reading’ is a vehicle for pursuing erotic
pleasure, or, using the OED definitions of ‘wild’, ‘giving way to sexual
passion’, sometimes in a ‘licentious and dissolute’ manner (‘Wild,
adj.7b’).3 ‘Wild reading’ can thus be understood as a reading act
which entails a certain potential for violence (or the qualities of
cruelty and violence) in both literal and figurative ways – an act that
could result in some damage either to the reader or to the text one
reads.
Indeed, the term articulates a certain playfulness, intermingling
sexual desire and the desire for knowledge in the reader’s fetishistic
obsession with seductive texts. The term marks the subtly violent,
invasive, and destructive nature of this Wildean reading – in its
relationship to Wilde’s text that notoriously does not ‘tell’ what it
means and recoils from the readers’ gaze. Consider in the novel’s
opening, as an example, Lord Henry Wotton’s relationship with Basil
Hallward and his picture, in which Lord Henry reads – and almost
penetrates – Basil’s hidden interior when Basil tries to hide his secret
desire for Dorian Gray from him. Lord Henry simply ‘smile[s], and,
leaning down, pluck[s] a pink-petalled daisy from the grass, and examin
[es] it’ (11). Here, a sexual dynamic is hinted at in the text’s subtle
comparison of Henry’s reading with a violent, neo-sexual activity:
Lord Henry ‘plucks’ a flower and ‘examines it intently’ as a metaphorical
substitute for Basil’s untold secret. I would argue that the representation
of reading as a form of violence is a pattern in Wilde’s novel: Dorian Gray,
taken as a whole, continually highlights the ways in which Basil’s
(and Wilde’s) art is corrupted, penetrated, and mangled ruthlessly by
Henry Wotton and Dorian Gray who function as sophisticated readers.
Furthermore, the term ‘wild reading’ is useful not only because it puns
with the author’s name, but also because the basic meanings of the
word ‘wild’ conveniently introduce the dialectics between reading, erotic
joy, and destructiveness that characterise the novel’s particularly
seductive textuality.
60
A Portrait of the ‘Wild Reader’
Here, my sense of reading is both literal and metaphorical: it
includes the reading of actual books, but also considers the appreciation
or reading of artistic objects, such as works of art and artifice that we also
broadly define as text. My sense of text, then, includes any object that can
be read, such as people and artwork, and even the nonmaterial,
including situations and various types of silence. Similarly, in his
discussion of Wilde, Kostas Boyiopoulos conceptualises a text as ‘any
object of desire’, such as the face of one’s beloved (2). I provide analyses
of silences, and, later, of one’s own self-image reflected in a mirror, as
other forms of texts in Wilde’s novel: ones which could mean something
highly sensuous and seductive in nature – and, often, even more
sensuous and alluring than verbal/linguistic signs – at least to those
who could recognise and read their meanings.
Seduction and Sensuous Reading
In Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton, Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell
contend that ‘The Portrait challenges the very notion of empirical,
historical truths by exposing the intense desire and psychical investment
that underscores our apperception of works of art’ (246). Indeed,
Dorian Gray as a whole seduces the reader into the eerie and intense
sensations produced by its erotic and gothic contents. It could then be
seen as a vessel for addressing various modes of reading, in which the
emphasis is repeatedly on defining the relationship between reading and
desire. Wilde himself is very concerned about who his reader is, and
about how one should read (and use) his book. In his ironic Preface,
Wilde not only tries to identify an ideal reader, but also dismisses most
readers and their insensitive reading acts. In Wilde’s treatment, the
reader seems at times an unsophisticated consumer or destroyer of art
and at other times a source of hope in his or her ability to recognize true
art. The Preface deliberately constructs a picture of the audience and the
critics as ‘bad’ readers and potential destroyers of art: ‘Those who find
ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming’
(DG 3). Wilde also proclaims that the act of interpretation, trying
to unearth hidden meanings, is problematic: ‘Those who go beneath
the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at
their peril’ (3).
The novel begins with the dynamics between a seductive text and a
sensual reader by depicting Lord Henry Wotton savouring seductive and
fragrant odours in an artist’s studio: ‘the rich odour of roses’, ‘the heavy
scent of the lilac’, and ‘the more delicate perfume of the pin-flowering
thorn’ (Wilde, DG 7). Wilde’s text captures these scents on the page as if
61
Victoriographies
to create a seductive scent of its own, and then continues with the
description of Lord Henry lying languidly in the artist’s studio, gazing at,
and pondering upon, these sensuous objects that surround him – he
himself being one of them – in Wilde’s text:
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying,
smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton
could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured
blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able
to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the
fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk
curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind
of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid,
jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is
necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.
The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long
unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt
horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more
oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant
organ. (7)
Alongside the visual images in this passage (‘Persian saddle-bags’,
‘honey-coloured blossoms’, ‘the long tussor-silk’, and so on), Wilde’s
language accentuates acoustic elements (‘the sullen murmur of the
bees’ and ‘the bourdon note of a distant organ’) to let the reader share
in its rich, Keatsian sensuousness (7). And at the centre of the still
‘picture’ the text draws for us, as opposed to the actual painting which
will soon be introduced, is Lord Henry Wotton, gazing and listening
silently, seduced by the ambience and cutting a seductive image himself,
merging with the sensuous objects in the room. If we read closely, we see
that it is not just the sensuality of the entire space that Wilde’s text is
describing; in fact, Henry’s eyes, ears, and brain, which are sensing the
details of the exotic ambience, are also themselves the focal points of this
opening scene. In this passage, Lord Henry notices unusually beautiful
blossoms in the garden – almost poisonous or dangerous so that one is
‘hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs’ (7).
Like a connoisseur of art, he appreciates the artist’s garden as a whole,
noticing its ‘momentary Japanese effect’ – in other words, he is able
to read the text in a sensitive manner (7). Finally, he is attuned to the
sound and movement of the bees circling in this garden as the only
active agents in the gloomy and static scene of which he is a part.
Wilde’s text highlights the ways in which sensuous signs seduce, and
can be appreciated by, those who are able to recognise – that is to say,
the select reader – the scene’s sensual and aesthetic qualities.
62
A Portrait of the ‘Wild Reader’
Indeed, as if Henry is himself a bee, or the movements of his thoughts
resemble those of the bee, his languid eyes and brain silently ‘circl[e]
with monotonous insistence round’ the beautiful objects in the artist’s
room (7), sipping their aesthetic and exotic values.
Equally notable is the conspicuous tension or seduction between
the sensual objects that proliferate in the scene and Henry Wotton’s
quiet and subtle appreciation (like the bee’s movements) of them. This
interaction between sensuous materials and Lord Henry’s visual,
olfactory, and auditory senses, takes place before the portrait of
Dorian Gray is introduced. This initial dynamic between an exotic and
seductive text/picture and an appreciative reading subject mobilises the
novel’s own thematics of reading, seduction, and desire at an early stage.
Wilde’s opening passages make it clear that such sensuous responses to
texts are at the centre of the novel’s concern. Wilde’s novel goes beyond
exhibiting a merely casual and mechanical interaction between a text
and a reader. Rather, it draws our attention to a peculiar and highly
aestheticised, sophisticated, sensuous, and erotic mode of reading,
such as that performed here by Henry Wotton.
The passages that follow the scene of Henry’s initial reading again
highlight the unusually erotic nature, and the significance, of Henry’s
act of reading. The novel moves its attention to the actual picture of
Dorian Gray, as well as Basil Hallward’s pleasure and anxiety as creator of
the beautiful picture. In this moment, Basil’s effort to hide the portrait is
frustrated by Henry’s direct commentary: ‘“It is your best work, Basil, the
best thing you have ever done”’ (8). Not only does Henry counter Basil’s
attempt to conceal, but the narrator now employs the same sensuous
language used in the opening scene: ‘Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows,
and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke
that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy opium-tainted
cigarette’ (8). Here, the novel draws a parallel between the intrusive
presence of the reader (Lord Henry) and Henry Wotton’s sensuality,
encapsulated in Wilde’s extravagant language. The strong scent and
seductive movements (‘such fanciful whorls’ [8]) of Henry’s cigarette
surround, and linger over, Basil’s picture as if Basil’s mind were
vulnerable to Henry’s influence, and as if Henry penetrated Basil’s art
as well as the artist’s mind. The unspoken meaning of Basil’s painting,
which is his repressed desire, is in danger of being read by both Lord
Henry and the novel’s actual reader for the first time, and the text
provides a cue for the tension that arises between Basil, the creator of art,
and Henry, the sensuous reader of the Wildean narrative.
What also starts to take shape in the opening to Dorian Gray’s is,
I would argue, the dynamics of eroticism and seduction between text and
63
Victoriographies
reader. At first, Wilde’s opening paragraphs appear to pay attention to
the seductive and erotic nature of art: first Wilde’s own text overloaded
with sensual signs, and then Basil’s picture. Soon, the power dynamic
shifts and is almost reversed: the power of seduction quickly lies with the
threatening, and dangerously penetrating, as well as potentially violent
practice of reading performed by Henry. Here and throughout the
novel, the characters as readers mirror the actual reader’s consumption
of an artwork (oftentimes against, or in spite of, the will of the artist).
By offering an excessive number of images, artworks, books, and
sensuous objects, such as jewels and perfumes, Wilde’s novel, in a way,
makes itself a vehicle for reading as an act of consumption, whereby both
the novel’s characters and the actual reader can perform the desired
practice of intense and sensuous reading.
The novel’s concern with acts of reading is illustrated in
Lord Henry’s peculiar ability to read and detect erotic sensuality.
Upon hearing from Basil that he is ‘afraid that [he has] shown in
[the picture] the secret of [his] own soul’ and that ‘there is really very
little to tell’ (10, 11),
Lord Henry smiled, and, leaning down, plucked a pink-petalled daisy from
the grass, and examined it. ‘I am quite sure I shall understand it’, he
replied, gazing intently at the little golden white-feathered disk, ‘and as for
believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite
incredible’. (11, emphasis added)
Henry does not quite explain what ‘[he is] sure [he] shall understand’,
while the text instead suggests Henry has access to the secret through the
figurative descriptions of his ‘pluck[ing]’ a pinkish daisy and ‘gazing’
fixedly at the interior of the flower, like a bee, sipping nectar (11).
Wilde’s metaphors here express Henry’s pleasure in invasively excavating
the meaning of Basil’s words – or, rather, of his silence. In Epistemology of
the Closet, Eve Sedgwick discusses the performative aspects in the ‘silence’
of/toward the closet: ‘that silence is rendered as pointed and performative as speech, in relations around the closet’ (4). In her analysis of Dorian
Gray, Sedgwick pays close attention to Basil’s way of freezing his own
homosexual desire into his picture of Dorian Gray and of repressing that
desire through the purified, aestheticised ideal of art. Sedgwick keenly
observes that Basil’s artistic production is, however, an ironic process by
which the artist’s ‘self-reflexive abstraction’ or ‘the figuration of figurality
itself’ specifies, rather than erases or blurs, ‘a very particular body, the
desired male body’ (167). What Sedgwick highlights here is the
performative nature of the homosexual closet in its contentious
relationship with socio-cultural conceptions about homosexuality.
64
A Portrait of the ‘Wild Reader’
Sedgwick further argues that various societal restrictions on
homosexuality offer Wilde aesthetic (and political) possibilities in
representing queer beauty, queer desire, and queer pleasures.
According to Sedgwick, the novel’s oscillations between form (art) and
content (love), or between an ‘empty secret’ (as a ‘form’ of art) and
an ‘open secret’ (as the ‘content’ of homosexuality), reflect Wilde’s
artistic strategies of deviation, or equivocation, through which he can
successfully multiply – and specify – the particular pleasure/desire of
homoeroticism (164–5). In Sedgwick, these are particular pleasures to
be drawn from the performative closet (Wilde’s Dorian Gray being a form
of the closet) in its resisting, and sometimes conforming to, various social
repressions of homosexuality. Here, what Sedgwick shows us is a new
perspective on pleasure by suggesting that silence (in the sense of both
closeting others and being closeted) has much to do with eroticism
and pleasure.
In the scene above, as a precise example of that aesthetic
potentiality of the closet, the mutuality of silence between Basil and
Lord Henry could signify something more than simply closeting their
desires. What we might also understand by their silence is the operation
or existence of seduction, and the active exchange of an erotic meaning
between an artist (Basil) and a sensitive reader (Lord Henry). Despite
or, perhaps, due to, Basil’s reserved verbal signs and the silence in telling
Henry that ‘there is really very little to tell, Harry’ (11), Lord Henry still
manages to detect the incredible meaning Basil is afraid to tell. Basil’s
silence, as a sign of repression, signals to Henry that there might be
something erotic in Basil’s untold secret. As if Basil’s silence were a
nonverbal text, Lord Henry decodes its meaning, savours some erotic
pleasure by re-enacting eroticism in touching, plucking and reading, the
pink daisy as a figure of Basil’s erotic, nonverbal text. Consequently, in
Wilde’s novel, the silence of the other person does not seem to merely
resist a forbidden sexual knowledge to be exposed or recognized, rather,
silence functions as a seductive text by which a closeted desire is felt or
sensed and read by sensitive readers as Henry’s smile indicates.
According to Alan Sinfield, such an indeterminate moment of silence
‘arouses expectations that exceed the closure’ and, thus, ‘there is a great
deal to play for’ (10). Here, the efficacy and performativity of silence are
specifically interlocked with, or depend on, the work done by Wilde’s
metaphors, whereby meanings are exchanged but are not fully divulged
in any literal sense.4 As Forbes Morlock rightly points out, meanings are
constructed in Wilde’s novel mainly ‘by metaphoric extension’ (71).
Accessing meaning in Dorian Gray then requires the reader’s ability to
apply what they already know – or what is ‘somehow already inside’
65
Victoriographies
in Morlock’s words (71) – to the text that won’t tell in any explicit
manner. The figure picking a flower – the bee, Lord Henry, Wilde,
and/or the reader – unmistakably suggests, however, that the text’s
erotic meaning is still readable and enjoyable by those who recognise the
sensuality of Basil’s silence.
The Stylistics of ‘Wild Reading’
The erotic exchanges between Basil and Henry, and Henry’s peculiar
ability to read sensually in the novel’s opening scenes, function as a
model for the sophisticated, sensuous reading act repeated throughout
Wilde’s novel. This is a reading act by which one perceives or
senses – and, more importantly, enjoys – a certain sexual meaning
that is not literalised on the textual surface. The meaning of the text is
accessible only to those who have the ability to recognise, and are
seduced by, its unspokenness and unspeakableness. This idea of the
knowing reader resonates with Wilde’s own distinction between readers
‘in the know’ and ‘[t]hose who have never known a lover’s sin’ in the
poem, ‘Charmides’ (1881): ‘Those who have never known a lover’s sin/
Let them not read my ditty, it will be/ To their dull ears so musicless and
thin/ That they will have no joy of it, but ye/ To whose wan cheeks now
creeps the lingering smile,/ Ye who have learned who Eros is, – O listen
yet a-while’ (lines 109–14; Charmides 18). This ability to read the
unspoken can also be contextualised in Wilde’s own definition of ‘love
that dare not speak its name’: ‘“The Love that dare not speak its name” in
this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man […] It
is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. […] The world
mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it. (Loud applause,
mingled with some hisses)’ (Hyde 236). Here too is suggested that there
are those who must maintain silence and that there are still those in the
know who will recognise such silences.
Freedman points out that Dorian Gray is a peculiar text wherein ‘you
are what you feel’ (42, emphasis added). He adds that ‘the body is […]
the vehicle through which some more fully vibrant form of experience
may be captured’ (42). In a way, Henry’s smile in the opening scene
could be evidence of his sensuous, superior, and sophisticated body that
could feel (while it does not tell) the sensuality of Basil’s untold secret.
Thus, Wilde’s novel promotes a particular type of reading, a means of
sensing and feeling the world – ‘through every possible sensory avenue’,
in Freedman’s words (42). This system of reading as sensing of the body is
also Wilde’s response to Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ in The Renaissance. Here,
Pater formulates a Decadent, aesthetic selfhood governed by sensory
66
A Portrait of the ‘Wild Reader’
experiences that he calls ‘movement’ in the following: ‘It is with this
movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images,
sensations, that analysis leaves off – that continual vanishing away, that
strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves’ (188).
Wilde’s fiction probes into the inherent features of this form of
sensuous reading (partly of the body and about bodily pleasures) – a
distinctive mode of reading as sensing/feeling, different from other
purely hermeneutic activities. Here, although I see the body as an
important agent with which to feel and sense nonverbal, erotic signs,
I acknowledge S. I. Salamensky’s reluctance in understanding Henry’s
pleasure as something entirely of the body. Salamensky claims that
we have to acknowledge the difference between sex and sexuality
(difference between the actual/physical and the psychic/linguistic). In
doing so, she maintains that Henry’s performativity could be understood
better in the latter term (sexuality) which engages closely with the realm
of language.
Furthermore, the plucking metaphor referred to above suggests
the implicitly violent and destructive nature of this Wildean reading.
In this section, I will show how such ‘wild reading’ negotiates a thin line
between passion and destructiveness, whereby the reader’s passionate
act of reading could lead to an uncontrollable, violent force at any
moment, beyond the reach of text (or writer). Partly due to the
licentiousness and immorality involved in the act, ‘wild reading’ can also
be an act of defiance: in fact, ‘wild’ denotes a state ‘not tame, not
domesticated’ (OED adj1), and this could be connected with ordinary
and untamed readers’ subjective reading practices that might render
society’s hermeneutic or moral codes useless. ‘Wild reading’ is indeed a
‘defiance’ in Wilde as a means of resisting boredom in conforming to the
society’s standards of morality (OED adj1) – and thus, as ironic as it
might sound, a mark of one’s delicate and superior sensibility in the
Wildean world of aesthetes.
This practice of ‘wild reading’ permeates Wilde’s novel becoming
the characters’ active means of sensing and absorbing the sophisticated
sensuality of art. As a notable example, Dorian Gray self-reflexively
appropriates the metaphor of ‘bees’ in which the reader’s practice
of ‘wild reading’ is implied. In Chapter 2, Wilde’s text repeats the
metaphors of bees and smiling (those used in the opening scene) to
represent the sensuous, destructive qualities of reading all over again.
This time Lord Henry is not merely an appreciator of art but a seducer
(a bee) who would coax and penetrate Dorian’s interior. The seduction
and penetration by the bee take place during Lord Henry’s private
meeting with Dorian Gray in the garden that borders Basil’s studio,
67
Victoriographies
the same sensuous garden that is observed by Henry in the novel’s
opening scene. Henry gives his eloquent speech about the ‘new
Hedonism’ (23), to which Dorian listens attentively. Compare the
earlier garden scene, with the following in which Dorian reads a similar
set of erotic signs:
Dorian Gray listened, open-eyed and wondering. The spray of lilac fell
from his hand upon the gravel. A furry bee came and buzzed round it for a
moment. Then it began to scramble all over the oval stellated globe of the
tiny blossoms. He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that
we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we
are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or
when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls
on us to yield. After a time the bee flew away. He saw it creeping into the
stained trumpet of a Tyrian convolvulus. The flower seemed to quiver, and
then swayed gently to and fro. [… Lord Henry and Dorian] turned to each
other, and smiled.
(24, emphasis added)
In this passage, Lord Henry’s implicit penetration of Dorian mind is
dramatised. Much as he had previously examined ‘the little golden
white-feathered disk’ of a pink daisy when pondering Basil’s meaning
(11), Lord Henry now enacts a similar process: like the ‘furry bee’ that
Dorian observes, Lord Henry ‘scramble[s] all over the oval stellated
globe of the tiny blossoms’ (24), the small flower here becomes the
emblem of Dorian’s unknown desire, yet another secret text. As Morlock
aptly puts it, ‘Lord Henry’s speech fertilizes young Dorian’s mind as the
bee’s passage works to pollinate the flower’ (70).
In this scene, we encounter the same elements of rich eroticism and
seduction: Henry mangles the interior of the flower, stays for a while
there, and makes Dorian ‘smile’ as above. This scene could symbolise the
loss of Dorian Gray losing his virginity. In fact, a certain joy is exchanged
between the bee and the flowers. And it is the joy of the flower as above
which draws our attention in the passage: the flower is as much affected
and joyous as the bee by the touch, with its ‘happy’ and sensuous, almost
orgasmic, movement as above: ‘The flower seemed to quiver, and then
swayed gently to and fro’. Then, turning to each other, both Lord Henry
and Dorian Gray smile in silence; they read in each other’s faces the sure
sign of joy. This passage illustrates Dorian Gray’s initiation into ‘wild
reading’. The eroticism of this scene depends on Dorian Gray’s reading
(sensing in silence) the erotic signs provided for him – first given by
Lord Henry and then by the objects in the garden. As was the case
in Lord Henry’s reading scenes, Wilde’s self-conscious narrative here
does not simply describe the garden; rather, it draws our attention to
68
A Portrait of the ‘Wild Reader’
Dorian Gray’s perception and his wildly intense reading of all the erotic
signs in the garden. Henry’s earlier lecture about a ‘new Hedonism’,
addressed to his new pupil Dorian, functions as an an aesthetic mask
which disguises the erotic meanings: ‘Be always searching for new
sensations. Be afraid of nothing [….] A new Hedonism – that is what our
century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your personality
there is nothing you could not do’ (23).5 Dorian as a reader now sets
these erotic meanings in motion, in both great fear, as in ‘He watched it
with that strange interest in trivial things [...] when things of high import
make us afraid’ as above – and pleasure, transforming the natural world
into a set of erotic signs.
Dorian is staged as a ‘wild reader’, one ‘open eyed and wondering’,
who watches the bee’s penetration of flowers ‘with that strange interest in
trivial things’. Alerted to the context of Henry’s new Hedonism, Dorian
begins to perceive exotic signs and absorbs their sensuality in his own
‘closet’ of silence. Dorian’s ‘strange interest in trivial things’ in the scene
above denotes quite clearly the powerful movement of Dorian’s thoughts
and sensations he feels. In the process of watching the bee, Dorian Gray
performs the very act of ‘wild reading’ – like Wotton, he is another
aesthete and supersensual reader. Here, Dorian is not only seduced but
also utterly changed (pollinated) through his voluntary excavation of
sexual meaning and pleasure. Again, it is Lord Henry who provides
Dorian – and also the novel’s readers – with this particular model of
sensuous ‘wild reading’. Not only does Dorian adopt this model of
reading, but he also elevates and refines it via his ongoing performances
of ‘wild reading’ throughout the novel.
The narrative suggests and propagates the enactment of such
aesthetic reading by its characters, but this mode of reading is also the
one by which the novel can best be read and appreciated. In other
words, the novel’s meaning largely depends on the reading public’s
enactment of this new mode of ‘wild(e) reading’ in order to guarantee
recognition of the particular aesthetics constructed in this novel and
thus the future of the work itself. I suggest that the novel plays with a type
of innate sexual knowledge or desire that not only mirrors but also
instigates the desire to read, excavate, or penetrate erotic, pleasurable
meanings, a sensuous knowledge available to select readers both within
and beyond the text.
‘The Finest Portrait’ of the ‘Wild Reader’
After the encounter with Henry at Basil’s garden, the focus of the novel
shifts from Basil’s acts of artistic creation to Dorian’s acts of reading and
69
Victoriographies
consuming art. From the novel’s inception, it is clear that Dorian is not
an ideal object for Basil’s artwork but a desiring subject; also, he is an
avid and destructive reader. That Basil is mostly absent in the novel even
before he is murdered by Dorian testifies to the greater attention paid to
Dorian as a ‘wild reader’, reflecting his burgeoning desire that increases
throughout the novel. Dorian is a newly-born artist of sorts procreated in
both Basil’s art and Wilde’s novel – whose re-creative capacity only
intensifies as he reads more books and gathers more artifacts. In some
ways, Wilde’s (and perhaps Basil’s) ‘finest portrait of modern times’
(25), The Picture of Dorian Gray, is a portrait of the ‘wild’ reader (Dorian,
Lord Henry, or possibly the actual reader) who hunts for – and
intensifies – wild, sensuous pleasure in consuming art objects.
Dorian’s own excessive acts of creation are clearly suggested and
evidenced throughout the main plot involving the gradual, but complete
degradation of Basil’s original painting. Additionally, the most noticeable scenes of Dorian’s readerly creativity are found in Chapters 10 and
11, in which we learn that Dorian reads a yellow book, a gift from
Lord Henry:
His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was it,
he wondered. He went towards the little, pearl-coloured octagonal stand
that had always looked to him like the work of some strange Egyptian bees
that wrought in silver, and taking up the volume, flung himself into an
arm-chair and began to turn over the leaves. After a few minutes he
became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had ever read.
It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of
flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things
that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of
which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed (97).
This passage first reminds us of the earlier scenes in which Lord Henry
provides Dorian with a verbal ‘text’ about the new Hedonism, and both
savour the erotic sensuality through their shared experience as readers.
The particular seduction in this scene is activated through their shared
experience of reading the same book – again, reading is an important
vehicle that enables the exchange of desire and pleasure. As if the yellow
book were an extension of Lord Henry’s own body, the familiar bee
metaphor and the extravagant language, as in ‘the little, pear-coloured
octagonal stand’, ‘exquisite raiment’, ‘the delicate sound of flutes’ as
above, surround and seduce Dorian again. Dorian is instantly fascinated
by the book’s alluring presence and, soon afterwards, by its contents. In
this scene, Dorian encounters a second awakening (the first occurs
during his reading of Henry’s lecture). As though there were a
70
A Portrait of the ‘Wild Reader’
richer and deeper realm of eroticism, Dorian’s eyes are opened
even wider than at the moment he was stung by Lord Henry in Basil’s
garden: ‘Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made
real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually
revealed’ (97).
Dorian’s practice of ‘wild reading’ reinforces life’s pleasures and its
sensuousness: ‘For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the
influence of this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that
he never sought to free himself from it’ (98). The seductive book, like a
new lover, provokes Dorian’s desire to ‘recreate life’ once more and
achieves a new ‘aim […] to be experience itself, and not the fruits of
experience, sweet or bitter as they might be’ (101).6 Accordingly,
subsequent chapters include scenes that illustrate Dorian’s excessive
accumulation of experience and sensation. Wilde’s novel compiles all
the sensuous objects Dorian gathers for years to gain new sensations of
life; and, as a consequence, Chapter 11 indeed consists of a long (and
tedious) list of Dorian’s accumulation of those artifacts.7 As though
Dorian could make time stand still, his artistic fetishes crowd and linger
on the pages of this long chapter, which stifles plot development
temporarily. At the same time, the novel’s language appears transformed
hideously – to such an extent that one might consider this bad,
amateurish prose (increasingly repulsive, like the picture). Dorian’s
destructive and excessive identifications with the book – and his morally
corrupted interior – are played out in the novel’s pages and prose. As
though Wilde’s novel and Dorian were one and the same body, or the
novel were a mirror of what is being written inside Dorian, Dorian Gray
presents a new, defiled textual surface to its reader.
Consequently, what is created in Dorian Gray is a heap of
meaningless ruins – a haphazard collection of random artifacts – and
Dorian’s fascination – and a sense of ennui he feels – with them.8 In
fact, Dorian Gray’s reading acts match Wilde’s own conception of the
ideal reader proposed in his preface to Dorian Gray. Dorian is indeed a
reader who persistently resists ‘go[ing] beneath the surface’ of any
artwork: he does not expose or articulate encoded messages in
metaphors while simply feeling and enjoying the sensuality of their
secrecies (3). The resistance to ‘going beneath the surface’ then allows
Dorian to indulge in sensations from different surfaces of artworks, an
indulgence that the novel calls ‘the worship of the senses’ (101). Such is
a convenient position for one who does not have to engage in any serious
intellectual or moral aspects in appreciating art. As if it were Wilde’s plan
to campaign for this new model of reading, the book continually attends
to the ways that Dorian consumes artifacts and mimics their styles in his
71
Victoriographies
own destructive and ruinous ways: throughout chapter 11, he collects
sensual objects ranging from perfumes to musical instruments, to jewels,
to textile and embroidery, and to ecclesiastical vestments (98–115). The
reader of Wilde’s novel observes that most artistic objects, including the
portrait, lose their profound intellectual meanings and are instead
transformed into mere personal possessions as sources of temporary
sensations and pleasures. From this perspective, the novel could be
considered a testing ground in which the monstrous practices of ‘wild
reading’ are examined, staged and even propagated. Indeed, as a
surrogate of Wilde’s ideal reader, Dorian faithfully enjoys the beautiful
sensations art objects offer him – and Wilde’s novel is transformed into a
new surface accordingly, as a result of Dorian’s own syntheses of different
styles in art. Not only is Dorian re-created by reading the poisonous book,
but Wilde’s text is also seemingly re-written by Dorian through his
emulation of the books he reads.
The most powerful text Dorian reads is, however, none other than
his own portrait that hangs in his attic. Ellen Crowell suggests that ‘in
Wilde’s world of art, complete ruin is an aesthetic impossibility’ (601).
Dorian’s ‘wild reading’ and ‘wild’ creativity truly culminate in his
unceasing gaze at – and ‘wild reading’ of – his own picture as the most
powerful visual text in the novel. While Dorian’s expenditure on books
and artworks offer various means to create his own style of dandyism, it is
the portrait with which he is genuinely and consistently obsessed: ‘Often,
[…] he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door
with the key that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of
the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him’ (99). As if to look at
a mirror (Dorian is indeed looking at a mirror in this quoted passage),
Dorian sees his own image in the picture and the self-reading in turn
triggers Dorian’s imagination. Once the picture stages the ideal and
eroticised image of Dorian’s body in the novel’s opening pages, it begins
to reflect and mirror Dorian’s own desire and vulgar thoughts after
Dorian’s Faustian pact. Dorian is now obsessed with both the mirrored
image of his beautiful body and its corrupted interior that becomes
increasingly visible on the painting’s surface: ‘He grew more and more
enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the
corruption of his own soul’ (99).
In some sense it is the reading of his own visual text (the picture)
that becomes the primary source of Dorian’s own readerly creativity as
dangerous imagination. The picture of Dorian Gray is thus the most
powerful text among the many texts he reads in the novel that stir his
unruly desire. Dorian himself compares his picture with a diary one can
read as he leads Basil to the room upstairs where the picture lies: Dorian
72
A Portrait of the ‘Wild Reader’
says, ‘I keep a diary of my life from day to day, and it never leaves the
room in which it is written […] That shall be given to you upstairs [….]
You will not have to read long’ (120, emphasis added). One might think,
then, that what is at stake is the issue of Dorian’s narcissistic, obsessive
self-reading and its dangerous effects. Wilde’s narrative oftentimes
compares Dorian’s looking at the picture with his looking at a mirror.
One of the noticeable examples is found when the first sign of
corruption appears on the picture right after Dorian coldly takes leave
of Sibyl Vane: ‘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’ (72–3). Indeed, there
are many similar instances of Dorian’s Gray’s mirror-gazing (both
symbolic and literal) in the novel where Dorian’s narcissism is
brought up.
However, Anne Hollander adds an alternative, creative dimension
to viewing the act of mirror-gazing merely as the narcissistic
preoccupation with oneself:
Far from seeing objectively, the mirror gazer is engaged in creating a posed
studio portrait of himself, not even a candid shot. He is without choice in
the matter if he meets his own gaze. What he puts into the mirror may be
just as self-deludingly ugly as it may be flattering – the impulse is simply
creative, not self-congratulatory – but in any case the mirror viewer must, so
to speak, always watch himself looking at himself. Under these circumstances the unguarded face is impossible to see, and so to judge; and
indeed such a sight is not the usual desire of anyone seeking his reflection.
The very act of consulting the mirror presupposes some will to create an
image, to fill the frame deliberately – in fact, to run the risks undertaken by
Narcissus. To learn the truth is somehow secondary to creating a truth.
(392–3, emphases added)
What Hollander suggests here is that mirror-gazers are artists, creators of
self-images. She describes the creative impulse of the mirror gazer
through which the seemingly objective act of seeing turns the pose into
complex transactions of desire that involve the creation of a desired
image. What her argument also seems to suggest is the dynamic between
looking/reading and creating, that is, the act of viewing/gazing involves
a dynamic process wherein the identifications and self-conscious
separations between the ‘viewer’ and the image take place simultaneously. Hollander’s assertion that ‘in any case the mirror viewer
must, so to speak, always watch himself looking at himself’ (392), she
implies the moment of mergence between viewer/reader and creator as
one aspect of this dynamic.
73
Victoriographies
According to Hollander, the primary significance of the act of
mirror-gazing or self-reading (as I would call it) lies in the advent of a
subjective and psychological creation. The mirror viewer has ‘the will
[or desire] to create an image’ (393) and is thus transformed into
an artist of sorts as the one who projects desire onto their own surface.
The effect of this constant modification and recreation of self on the
reader’s actual life could be twofold: one is to have a super-sensual and
highly posed, ideal body desired by many; the other is to fall prey to
multiple, impersonal gazes and to offer oneself as another erotic
body/text to be read and penetrated ‘wildly’. In fact, Wilde’s novel
shows us that both are the case with Dorian Gray, our self-conscious
poser and mirror gazer.
‘Wild(e) Readers’
Christopher Castiglia states that ‘to return “queer style” to aesthetic
theory is […] to conceive it not as an escape from but as a powerful
engagement with […] collaborative invention […] of creation, of the
powers to imagine what has not-yet-been, what’s been left […] to the
interior states of fantasy, daydreaming, and as, Wilde would have it, art’
(120). I agree with Castiglia’s claim that reconceptualising aesthetic
theory through Wilde’s ‘queer style’ would help us to better understand
the workings of fantasy in one’s interaction with art and the pleasures of
our aesthetic experience. My own term ‘wild reading’ similarly invites us
to consider the contents of one’s aesthetic experience via specific forms
and concepts – but, in contrast to Castiglia’s queer style, ‘wild reading’ is
meant to explore modes or styles of aesthetic experience relatively free
from any pre-established hermeneutic structures or meanings attached
to them. In a broader sense, ‘wild reading’ helps us understand our own
enraptured, sensuous, or even obsessive, reading of Wilde’s Dorian Gray.
That is, it is a style that is both specific to Wilde’s novel (created in it and
performed by its characters) and general in terms of its applicability to
Decadent Literature. Furthermore, this style of reading describes how
Wilde’s novel (as well as Decadent Literature) is supposed to be read.
Here, readers in the text reflect readers of the text: the former work both
as mirrors of – and as models for – the latter. ‘Wild reading’ is not only
the novel’s aesthetic mode, but also a mutual construct between the
novel and its readers (both inside and beyond the text) who imitate and
even manipulate this literary style in their own modes of aesthetic
interaction.
Dorian Gray resembles those sensitive ‘young men’ in Wilde’s
‘The Decay of Lying’ who ‘have committed suicide because Rolla
74
A Portrait of the ‘Wild Reader’
[a character in Pizarro or the Death of Rolla: Tragedy by August von
Kotzebue] did so’ (311). These young men treat art as a giver of new
aesthetic styles and forms to their own lives; ‘imitation of life’ here is then
the Wildean reader’s mode of emulating the imaginative power in art
(311). And these readerly activities in Wilde model its actual readers’
ways of reading texts. That is, Dorian’s reading acts mirror Wilde’s
readers’ mental activities in transforming the novel into the shapes of
their own desires. Michel de Certeau’s commentary on readers is highly
relevant to those passionate readers: they are indeed ‘travellers [who]
move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching
their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt
to enjoy it themselves’ (174). Wilde’s readers, too, are invited to tarnish
the surfaces of the text in their passionate reading of it, using Wilde’s text
to reflect their own secret desires and dreams. Wilde’s novel reminds us
that reading occurs at the border between ungovernable desires –
fantasies, projections, and anxieties – by slyly suggesting how readers
(both inside and outside the text) may discover an outlet for their
dangerous emotions and desires.
Notes
1. Throughout this essay, my text of reference is the Norton Critical Edition of The
Picture of Dorian Gray, hereafter Dorian Gray.
2. Or, even more broadly, the relations between reading and the senses (Michael
Syrotinski and Ian Maclachlan), and sensual reading in Marcel Proust’s works (Adam
Watt).
3. Some other OED definitions of ‘wild’ that are relevant to my concept of ‘wild reading’
include: 1. ‘not submitting to moral control; taking one’s own way in defiance of
moral obligation or authority; unruly, insubordinate; wayward, self-willed’; 2. ‘Giving
way to sexual passion; also, more widely, licentious, dissolute, loose’; 3. ‘Fierce, savage,
ferocious; furious, violent, destructive, cruel’ (‘Wild, adj.7a, adj.7b, and adj.8’).
4. In a related discussion, Michael Patrick Gillespie provides an extensive (contextual
and textual) analysis on Wilde’s ambiguity and ambivalence, and their various effects
on Wilde’s actual audiences. For instance, he points out that ‘an aura of ambivalence
and ambiguity increasingly mediates relations among Wilde, his writing, and his
readers […] as an element that enhances our imaginative pleasure’ (57).
5. Here, too, Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ is alluded to in Wilde’s prose. For Pater, ‘our one
chance lies in […] getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time’ (190).
6. Wilde references Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ here again: ‘Not the fruit of experience, but
experience itself, is the end’ (Pater 188).
7. This list relates to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884) and its reputation as the
book on which this ‘poisonous’ text is based.
8. The chapters on Dorian’s reading the yellow book are surprisingly boring and lacking
in quality. Not only does Dorian Gray appear bored, the actual reader of the novel can
get bored due to Wilde’s prose. For a more detailed, provocative discussion of ennui
in/out of Dorian Gray, see Jeff Nunokawa.
75
Victoriographies
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’. Representations
108.1 (2009): 1–21.
Boyiopoulos, Kostas. The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Wilde, Symons, and Dowson.
Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 2015.
Bristow, Joseph, and Rebecca N. Mitchell. Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History,
Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.
Castiglia, Christopher. ‘Aesthetics Beyond the Actual: The Marble Faun and Romantic
Sociality’. American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions. Eds Cindy Weinstein and
Christopher Looby. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Crowell, Ellen. ‘The Picture of Charles Bon: Oscar Wilde’s Trip through Faulkner’s
Yoknapatawpha’. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 50.3 (2004): 595–631.
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984.
Freedman, Jonathan L. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity
Culture. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Gillespie, Michael Patrick. Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity. Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 1996.
Hollander, Anne. Seeing through Clothes. New York: Viking Press, 1978.
Huysmans, Joris-Karl. A Rebours. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Hyde, H[arford] Montgomery. The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Regina (Wilde) v. Queensberry,
Regina v. Wilde and Taylor. Notable British Trials, vol. 70. London: W. Hodge & Co, 1948.
Morlock, Forbes. ‘“That Strange Interest in Trivial Things”: Seduction in Derrida and
Dorian Gray’. Parallax 12.3 (2006): 65–77.
Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Ed. Donald L. Hill. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980.
Salamensky, S. I. The Modern Art of Influence and the Spectacle of Oscar Wilde. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990.
Sontag, Susan. ‘Against Interpretation’. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York:
Dell, 1966. 3–14.
Synfield, Alan. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Movement. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994.
Syrotinski, Michael. Sensual Reading: New Approaches to Reading in Its Relations to the Senses.
Lewisburg Pa.: Buknell University Press, 2001.
Watt, Adam. Reading in Proust’s A la recherche. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.
‘Wild, adj. and n.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2020.
https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.lib.utah.edu/view/Entry/228988?rskey=pnL0da&
result=1&isAdvanced=false#. Accessed 28 November 2020.
Wilde, Oscar. The Artist as Critic. Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Ellmann.
New York: Random House, 1969.
———. Charmides and Other Poems. London: Methuen, 1919.
———. The Picture of Dorian Gray [1890]. Norton Critical Edition. 1st ed. New York:
Norton, 1988.
76