9

‘Withered, Wrinkled, and

Loathsome of Visage’: Reading
the Ethics of the Soul and
the Late-Victorian Gothic in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Kenneth Womack

As a literary phenomenon, the Victorian gothic manifests itself in

fin-de-siècle literature both as a subversive supernatural force and as a
mechanism for social critique. Envisioning the world as a dark and
spiritually turbulent tableau, the fictions of the late-Victorian gothic
often depict the city of London as a corrupt urban landscape charac-
terized by a brooding populace and by its horror-filled streets of terror.
In The Three Impostors (1895), for instance, Arthur Machen offers a des-
olate, hyper-eroticized portrait of London and its invasion by a chemi-
cally altered degenerate race of pagan beings. In one of the more
chilling portrayals of London’s citizenry, Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of
Satan (1896) narrates the Devil’s progress through the city’s ethically
bankrupt environs as he searches for someone – indeed, anyone – with
the moral strength to resist his temptations. He does not succeed. At
the conclusion of The Sorrows of Satan, the Devil ascends the steps of
Parliament, walking arm-in-arm with its acquiescent ministers. The
characters in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) encounter a similarly
troubled London cityscape. In the novel, a desperate and lonely Robert
Holt wanders the city in search of lodging only to confront the super-
natural insect, metaphor for London’s spiritual vacancy in the form of
a giant beetle. Finally, in The Lodger (1923), Marie Belloc Lowndes
depicts the mean streets of 1880s London in her fictional account of
Jack the Ripper’s murderous exploits in the city’s notorious East End.
The novel’s chilling atmosphere of suspense, fear and horror – as with
other works in the genre – underscores the manner in which the
Victorian gothic provides a critique of the moral and spiritual value

168

R. Robbins et al., Victorian Gothic

© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2000
 Kenneth Womack 169

systems of London and its forlorn inhabitants. Each volume also nar-
rates – in one form or another, human, insect or otherwise – the cor-
ruption of the soul.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Oscar Wilde likewise investi-
gates the ethics of the soul through his own well-known portrait of
aesthetic narcissism and fin-de-siècle decadence. Yet in the novel’s
Preface, Wilde writes that ‘no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical
sympathy in an artist’, he coyly adds, ‘is an unpardonable mannerism
of style’ (1991, 69). During the novel’s initial serialization, the
popular press severely rebuked The Picture of Dorian Gray for its osten-
sible lack of moral import. A reviewer in the 30 June 1890 edition of
the Daily Chronicle described the novel as ‘unclean’ and a ‘poisonous
book’ with ‘odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction’. In a 5 July
1890 notice in the Scots Observer, yet another reviewer complained
about the novel’s ‘false’ morality, ‘for it is not made sufficiently clear
that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life
of cleanliness, health, and sanity’ (cited in Beckson 1998, 271). Wilde
swiftly replied to the growing horde of critics, arguing, rather ironic-
ally, that The Picture of Dorian Gray was in fact too moral: ‘All excess,
as well as all renunciation’, Wilde soberly concluded, ‘brings its own
punishment’ (cited in Ellmann 321). While the novelist’s con-
tradictory stances regarding his narrative’s ethical properties seem
purposefully beguiling, few critics deny the moral fable that functions
at the core of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Although Colin McGinn, for
example, evaluates the novel in terms of its humanist agenda in
Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (1997), he neglects, as with other Wilde critics,
to consider the role of the Victorian gothic as the mechanism via
which Wilde achieves his moral aims regarding the soul and its
function as the repository for humanity’s notions of goodness and
evil – the essential qualities that define our perceptions about the
interpersonal fabric of the self.1
An ethical reading of Wilde’s novel reveals the ways in which the
novelist exploits the fantastic elements inherent in the Victorian
gothic as a means for fulfilling his decidedly moral aims in The Picture
of Dorian Gray. Ethical criticism, with its reliance upon contemporary
moral philosophy, affords readers with a paradigm for considering the
contradictory emotions and problematic moral stances that often mask
literary characters. Ethical criticism also provides its practitioners with
the capacity for positing socially relevant interpretations by celebrating
the Aristotelian qualities of living well and flourishing. As Martha C.
Nussbaum reminds us in The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in
170 Victorian Gothic

Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, the ethical study of literary works offers a
powerful means for interpreting the ideological and interpersonal
clashes that define the human experience. The ethical investigation of
literature, she writes, ‘lays open to view the complexity, the indetermi-
nacy, the sheer difficulty of actual human deliberation’. Such humanis-
tic criticism, she adds, demonstrates ‘the vulnerability of human lives
to fortune, the mutability of our circumstances and our passions, the
existence of conflicts among our commitments’ (1986, 1314). By focus-
ing our attention upon the narrative experiences of literary characters,
ethical criticism provides a powerful mechanism for investigating the
interconnections between the reading experience and the life of the
reader.
An ethical reading of Wilde’s novel – concerned, as it is, with the soul
and our perceptions regarding the nature of goodness – demands that we
devote particular attention to these issues and their relevance to such a
reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray. In her important volume of moral
philosophy, The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch elaborates upon the
concept of goodness and the ways in which our personal configurations
of it govern human perceptions regarding the relationship between the
self and the world. Murdoch’s paradigm for understanding goodness
functions upon the equally abstract notions of free will and moral
choice. ‘Good is indefinable’, Murdoch writes, ‘because judgments of
value depend upon the will and choice of the individual’ (1985, 3).
Postulating any meaning for goodness, then, requires individuals to
render personal observations about the nature of this precarious
expression and its role in their life decisions. Although Murdoch con-
cedes that goodness essentially finds its origins in ‘the nature of concepts
very central to morality such as justice, truthfulness, or humility’, she
correctly maintains, nevertheless, that only individual codes of morality
can determine personal representations of goodness (89). ‘Good is an
empty space into which human choice may move’ (97), she asserts, and
‘the strange emptiness which often occurs at the moment of choosing’
underscores the degree of autonomy inherent in the act of making moral
decisions (35). Individuals may also measure their personal conceptions
of goodness in terms of its foul counterpart, evil, which Murdoch defines
generally as ‘cynicism, cruelty, indifference to suffering’ (98). Again,
though, as with good, evil finds its definition in the personal ethos
constructed by individuals during their life experiences in the human
community.
Because such ontological concepts remain so vitally contingent upon
personal rather than communal perceptions of morality, Murdoch
 Kenneth Womack 171

suggests that their comprehension lies in the mysterious fabric of the self.
‘The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion’, she observes, and
‘goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to
respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness’ (93). In
Murdoch’s philosophy, goodness manifests itself during the healthy
pursuit of self-awareness and self-knowledge. The soul, as the product of
such an intrapersonal quest, functions as the repository for goodness and
evil, as well as the essential material that comprises the self. Moral
philosophers often conceive of the soul as a vast entity that consists of
our innate emotional senses and desires. In Love’s Knowledge: Essays on
Philosophy and Literature, Nussbaum elaborates upon the concept of the
soul, which she sees as ‘shaped and structured by the needs and interests
of an imperfect and limited being. Its characterization of what truth and
value are is distorted by the pressure of bodily need, emotional turmoil,
and the other constraining and limiting features of our bodily humanity’
(1990, 248). The soul operates as a conflation of sorts between bodily
desires and individual value systems, and the harmony between these
two elements produces a kind of moral beauty. Robert E. Norton describes
the soul’s capacity for moral beauty as ‘both the motivation and
manifestation of virtue’ (1995, 48) and associates ‘moral purity and
goodness with a kind of beauty of soul’ (1995, 96). As the essence of a
given individual’s humanity, then, the soul consists of spiritual and
emotional components that define the sensual and virtuous qualities of
our selves.
‘To choose a style’, Nussbaum writes in Love’s Knowledge, ‘is to tell a
story about the soul’. For Wilde, the literary style of The Picture of
Dorian Gray manifests itself in his appropriation of the Victorian
gothic as his novel’s narrative means. ‘Form and style are not inci-
dental features’, Nussbaum argues. ‘A view of life is told. The telling
itself – the selection of genre, formal structures, sentences, vocabulary,
of the whole manner of addressing the reader’s sense of life – all of this
expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what matters and what
does not, of what learning and communicating are, of life’s relations
and connections’ (1990, 259, 5). In this manner, the Victorian gothic’s
supernatural elements make possible Wilde’s narration of Basil
Hallward’s artistic rendering of Dorian Gray, the painting of whom
functions as the basis for the ethical debate that undergirds much of
the novel: should we, as human beings, pursue our id-driven desires for
sensual gratification and external beauty for the price of a hideous
soul? Wilde employs the paradoxical Lord Henry Wotton as the voice
of The Picture of Dorian Gray’s moral deliberations and Dorian’s soul as
172 Victorian Gothic

the object of Lord Henry’s intellectual whimsy. In addition to calling

into question the ethics of the aristocracy in his novel, Wilde avails
himself of the Victorian gothic as a means for engendering a philoso-
phical discourse on good and evil, as well as on the mysterious proper-
ties of the human soul.3 An ethical reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray
not only allows us to speculate about Wilde’s moral aims in his depic-
tion of Dorian’s increasingly repulsive soul, but also to interrogate the
Victorian gothic as an ethical construct in itself.
As with the novel itself – which John Stokes describes as being from
‘that bottomless pile of Gothic stories’ (1996, 37) – the character of
Dorian Gray combines elements of aesthetic decadence with the
Victorian gothic. As he roams through the ‘dim roar’ of the novel’s
desolate London setting, Dorian vacillates between states of pro-
nounced ennui and musical euphoria (Wilde 1991, 71). As Basil com-
pletes the portrait, for instance, the eternally posing Dorian complains
of boredom: ‘You never open your lips while you are painting’, he tells
the artist, ‘and it is horribly dull standing on a platform and trying to
look pleasant’ (1991, 83). Conversely, Wilde punctuates Dorian’s most
intense life experiences, particular his aesthetic ones, with musical
images. Talking to Dorian, Wilde writes, ‘was like playing upon an
exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow …
with all the music of passion and youth’ (1991, 99). Dorian’s beauty
informs every aspect of his persona, from his external appearance to his
capacity for inspiring confidence in every person he encounters: ‘Yes,
he was certainly handsome’, Wilde writes, ‘with his finely-curved
scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. There was some-
thing in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour
of youth was there, as well as youth’s passionate purity. One felt that
he had kept himself unspotted from the world’ (1991, 83). As an
exquisite combination of youthful good looks and a pleasant out-
ward demeanor, Dorian enjoys the worship of nearly everyone he
meets, especially Basil and Lord Henry.
While Dorian ultimately subscribes to Lord Henry’s ontology of new
Hedonism, Basil proffers the moral philosophy that the young aesthete
clearly – given the novel’s tragic conclusion – should have accepted.
Devoted both to his craft as well as to his subject, Basil espouses a theory
of moral beauty simply too realistic for Dorian to imbibe, stricken, as he
is, with his ostensibly fleeting good looks. In sharp contrast with the
fin-de-siècle decadence that surrounds him, Basil’s philosophy of the soul
argues for a healthy balance between our inner and outer selves, between
our spiritual centres and the external images that we present to the world.
 Kenneth Womack 173

‘The harmony of the soul and the body’, Basil cautions, ‘we in our
madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is
vulgar, and ideality that is void’ (1991, 79). In his portrait of Dorian, Basil
clearly attempts to strike a balance between these two vital elements, so
much so that he initially refuses to exhibit his latest creation and unleash
it upon an aesthetically absorbed late-Victorian society. Basil fears, cor-
rectly, that the painting will consume ‘my whole nature, my whole soul,
my very art itself’ (1991, 75). Perhaps even more troubling, the artist con-
fesses that Dorian’s ‘personality has suggested to me an entirely new
manner in art, an entirely new mode of style’ (1991, 78). This all-encom-
passing sense of artistic style, a kind of decadence in itself, frightens the
painter even more, for he perceives the unsettling wave of aestheticism
that characterizes fin-de-siècle London, particularly evidenced by Lord
Henry’s mindset.4
Unlike Basil, who champions a theory of moral beauty founded upon a
balance between body and soul, Lord Henry advocates the separation
between these two forms of experience. Lord Henry, in the words of
Amanda Witt, ‘cultivates the attitude of observing his own life, rather
than actually living it’ (1991, 91). At times a caricature of the dis-
interested upper class, Lord Henry subscribes to a range of effected
homilies and aphorisms. In one instance, he proudly proclaims that
‘there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and
that is not being talked about’. The philosophy of new Hedonism that he
delineates in the novel – and which Dorian, to his detriment, literally and
figuratively absorbs – can only function by separating fully the spiritual
from the corporeal self.5 ‘Beauty, real beauty’, Lord Henry remarks, ‘ends
where an intellectual expression begins’ (1991, 72), adding that ‘Beauty is
a form of Genius – is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explana-
tion’ (1991, 88). Lord Henry’s decadent philosophy challenges its
subscribers to elevate their desires for aesthetic experience and fulfillment
over interpersonal consequences, to achieve a total separation between
their ethical obligations to their community and their needs for self-
indulgence: ‘I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and
completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every
thought, reality to every dream’, Lord Henry observes, then ‘I believe that
the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all
the maladies of mediævalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal – to
something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal’ (1991, 85).
Lord Henry’s late-Victorian philosophy of new Hedonism also proposes
a striking counterpoint to notions of goodness as espoused by such con-
temporary moral philosophers as Murdoch, Nussbaum, McGinn and
174 Victorian Gothic

others. In Murdoch’s ethical paradigm, the concept of goodness relates to

a given individual’s capacity for perceiving the ‘unself’, or that person
living within us who attempts to approach the world with a ‘virtuous
consciousness’. Such a lifestyle possesses the possibility of producing a
beautiful soul. In Lord Henry’s philosophy, however, what matters is
‘one’s own life’, as opposed to the lives of the others with whom we live
in community. New Hedonism, at least in Lord Henry’s postulation,
urges its adherents to pursue pleasure at any cost. ‘Individualism’, Lord
Henry argues, ‘has really the higher aim’ than endeavouring to share in
the ethical codes of one’s society (1991, 134). The philosophy of new
Hedonism also eschews morality in favour of pleasurable experience.
Although some experiences initially may be spiritually distressing or ethi-
cally unsatisfying, Lord Henry contends that their iteration should
produce nothing but pleasure once the individual has inured his or her
conscience to the soul-purging qualities of such experiences, no matter
how sinful they may prove to be. ‘Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it
[experience] as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical
efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that
taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid’, Lord Henry
remarks. ‘But there was no motive power in experience’, he adds. ‘All that
it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past,
and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do
many times, and with joy’ (1991, 118).
Delivered with the confidence and verbal precision of his station,
Lord Henry’s aesthetic philosophy proves too enticing for the naïve
and impressionable Dorian to ignore and serves as the catalyst for the
Faustian bargain that he strikes in the novel. ‘A new Hedonism’, Lord
Henry tells the young aesthete, ‘that is what our century wants. You
might be its visible symbol. With your personality there is nothing you
could not do. The world belongs to you for a season’ (1991, 88). Yet
Dorian, inspired by Lord Henry’s philosophy, dares to possess the
world for more than a mere season. While staring at his portrait, ‘the
sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation. He had never
felt it before’ (1991, 90). Fearing the day when time finally robs him of
his youthful good looks, Dorian initially vows to kill himself when he
grows old. For Dorian – with Lord Henry’s theory of beauty still ringing
in his ears – living in anything other than a state of exalted beauty
seems simply unfathomable:

There would be a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen,
his eyes dim and colourless, the grace of his figure broken and
 Kenneth Womack 175

deformed. The scarlet would pass away from his lips, and the gold
steal from his hair. The life that was to make his soul would mar
his body. He would become dreadful, hideous, and uncouth.
(1991, 90)

Dorian soon finds himself unable to distinguish between himself and

the picture, describing it as ‘part of myself’ and the ‘real Dorian’ (1991,
93–4). Unbeknownst to himself at the time, Dorian enters into a super-
natural bargain of sorts when he wishes he could change places with
the picture: ‘If it were only the only the other way!’ he pleads. ‘If it
were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow
old! For that – for that – I would give everything!’ (1991, 90).
The ethics of his Faustian transaction and of his absorption of Lord
Henry’s philosophy only become known to Dorian after his brief asso-
ciation with Sybil Vane, an aspiring young working-class actress from
London’s East End. Night after night, Dorian watches as she performs
in various Shakespearean plays, taking on a myriad of fictional identi-
ties while remaining, in Dorian’s envious words, ‘more than an indivi-
dual’ (1991, 115), a beautiful soul in her own right. Unconcerned with
her lower-class origins, Dorian falls in love with the youthful actress:
‘Sybil is the only thing I care about’, he tells Lord Henry. ‘What is it to
me where she came from? From her head to her little feet, she is
absolutely and entirely divine. Every night of my life I go to see her
act, and every night she is more marvelous’ (1991, 114). In short,
Dorian admires Sybil for her ability to create genuine, beautiful souls
upon the stage. He reveres her capacity for taking fictional characters
and imbuing them with the physical and spiritual aspects of real life
that Dorian, whose external beauty depends on stasis for its endurance,
simply cannot grasp. Yet Dorian’s love for Sybil collapses after she
gives a lifeless performance in Romeo and Juliet. After the play, Sybil
appears ‘transfigured with joy’ because her incipient relationship with
Dorian had freed her ‘soul from prison’. Before encountering Dorian,
the only reality that she knew existed on the stage; after meeting
Dorian, however, ‘suddenly it dawned on my soul what it all meant’,
she explains, vowing to give up the theatre and its artificiality (1991,
140–1). Dorian subsequently chastises Sybil for her change of heart, for
her implicit denial of Lord Henry’s philosophy.
After he leaves a distraught Sybil in her dressing room, Dorian
strolls alone among London’s desolate gothic streets: ‘He remembered
wandering through dimly-lit streets, past gaunt black-shadowed
archways and evil-looking houses’, Wilde writes. ‘Women with hoarse
176 Victorian Gothic

voices and harsh laughter had called after him. Drunkards had reeled
by, cursing, and chattering to themselves like monstrous apes. He had
seen grotesque children huddled under doorsteps, and heard shrieks
and oaths from gloomy courts’ (1991, 143). When he returns home
after experiencing his dark night of the aesthetic soul, Dorian per-
ceives a change in Basil’s portrait of him, ‘a touch of cruelty in the
mouth’ that had not existed there previously (1991, 144). Suddenly
remembering his wish for eternal youth and its spiritual conse-
quences, Dorian decides to return to Sybil in order to forestall the spir-
itual demolition of his soul. As he bathes in the warm glow of his
romantic feelings for the young actress, Dorian repeats her name over
and over again to the music of singing birds. ‘I want to be good’, he
later tells Lord Henry. ‘I can’t bear the idea of my soul being hideous’
(1991, 149). After he learns of Sybil’s suicide, however, Dorian chooses
to devote himself entirely to a lifestyle of hedonism in the tradition of
Lord Henry’s philosophy. Having already tasted the pleasures of deca-
dence, Dorian resolves to avail himself of sin with the knowledge that
he can do so without being challenged by a guilty conscience: ‘Eternal
youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and
wilder sins – he was to have all these things’, Wilde writes. ‘The
portrait was to bear the burden of his shame’ (1991, 157). In this
fashion, the picture becomes Dorian’s ethical doppelgänger, his wilful
sacrifice for a decadent lifestyle and the means via which he will
preserve his youth.
Dorian embarks upon his life of debauchery with the aid of a book
given to him by Lord Henry. Essentially a handbook for decadent
living, the volume – a yellow, paper-covered French novel – influences
Dorian’s progress toward total spiritual and ethical ruin. 6 ‘The whole
book seemed to him’, Wilde writes, ‘to contain the story of his own
life, written before he had lived it’ (1991, 174). With his new Hedonist
education at the hands of Lord Henry complete, Dorian engages in a
protracted life of crime and corrosive sensuality in gothic London. At
the age of 25, Dorian’s aristocratic social standing begins to erode
when an exclusive West End club threatens to blackball him. In addi-
tion to consorting with thieves and coiners, Dorian brawls with foreign
sailors in the Whitechapel area. Suddenly the subject of numerous
rumours and upper-class gossip, Dorian becomes associated with scan-
dals involving the suicide of a ‘wretched boy in the Guards’ (1991,
193); the disappearance of Sir Henry Ashton, who fled England in
disgrace; and the diminished reputations of the young Duke of Perth
and the son of Lord Kent. ‘Women who had wildly adored him, and
for his sake had braved all social censure and set convention at
 Kenneth Womack 177

defiance’, Wilde writes, ‘were seen to grow pallid with shame or horror
if Dorian Gray entered the room’ (1991, 186–7).
In addition to his chosen life of crime and social iniquity, Dorian
feeds his exaggerated licentious desires during his search for new
arenas of sensual fulfillment. In one instance, he considers joining the
Roman Catholic communion, not for spiritual reasons, but rather,
because the ‘Roman ritual had always a great attraction for him’ (1991,
178). Dorian also becomes an avid collector of beautiful objects and
searches for yet other venues for assuaging his aesthetic needs. At one
juncture in the novel, Dorian devotes himself entirely to the study of
music, constructing an elaborate room with a vermilion-and-gold
ceiling and walls of olive-green lacquer in which to serenade himself
with the pleasing strains of Schubert, Chopin and Beethoven. As a col-
lector of sensual objects, Dorian accumulates perfumes from the Far
East, painted gourds from Mexico, rare and expensive jewellery, tapes-
tries and embroideries once housed in the palaces of Northern Europe,
and various ecclesiastical vestments. Dorian assembles his orgy of
material possessions to provide himself with a ‘means of forgetfulness’,
Wilde writes, with ‘modes by which he could escape, for a season, from
the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne’
(1991, 185). Hidden in the attic above his palatial London home lies
the picture, which grows even more ghastly as Dorian’s evil exploits
continue to mount. At 38, Dorian soothes his fears in opium dens in
remote London, where ‘the heavy odour of opium met him’, Wilde
writes. ‘He heaved a deep breath, and his nostrils quivered with
pleasure’ (1991, 224). All the while, Dorian earns glowing praise for
his decadent lifestyle and his lack of meaningful social or artistic
endeavour from Lord Henry, his hedonist master and tutor. 7 ‘You are
the type of what the age is looking for, and what it is afraid it has
found’, Lord Henry tells him. ‘I am so glad that you have never done
anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced any-
thing outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself
to music. Your days are your sonnets’ (1991, 248).
Dorian’s life of debauchery begins to collapse, however, with the
confluence of his murder of Basil and his dogged pursuit by James
Vane, Sybil’s vengeful brother. Dorian kills Basil after the artist insists
that the aesthete show him the picture of Dorian’s rotting soul. Basil
reacts in horror as he glimpses the portrait of Dorian’s foul inner life
being slowly corroded by ‘the leprosies of sin’ (1991, 199). After he
stabs the artist to death for condemning his evil lifestyle, Dorian stares
disinterestedly at Basil’s lifeless body as a woman on the street sings in
a hoarse voice. By murdering Basil, Dorian attempts to rid himself once
178 Victorian Gothic

and for all of the artist’s irritating moral influence. As Stephen Arata
observes in Fictions of Loss in the Victorian fin de siècle, ‘The contrast
between the lovely Dorian and the hideous portrait can be taken to
stand for the difference between Henry’s ethic and Basil’s’ (1996, 64).
In this instance, Henry’s hedonistic philosophy wins out yet again.
Dorian finally begins to re-evaluate his decadent existence after
experiencing James’s stubborn effort to exact revenge for the untimely
death of his sister. After spotting him in a London opium den, James
follows Dorian to a social occasion at the home of the Duchess of
Monmouth. James startles Dorian into a ‘death-like swoon’ after
pressing his face against the window of the conservatory. ‘The
consciousness of being hunted, snared, tracked down, had begun to
dominate him’, Wilde writes (1991, 233–4), and Dorian conceals
himself in the Duchess’s house.
After the Duchess’s brother accidentally kills James during a shoot-
ing-party the next day, Dorian experiences a ‘cataleptic impression’ –
a cognitive, philosophical phenomenon that, according to Nussbaum
in Love’s Knowledge, ‘has the power, just through its own felt quality,
to drag us to assent, to convince us that things could not be other-
wise. It is defined as a mark or impress upon the soul’ (1990, 265).
Relieved to have survived James’s efforts at revenge, Dorian resolves to
devote himself to goodness. ‘I wish I could love’, he tells Lord Henry.
‘But I seem to have lost the passion and forgotten the desire. I am too
much concentrated on myself’ (1991, 238). Despite Lord Henry’s con-
siderable protests, Dorian demonstrates his intentions to adopt an
ethical lifestyle by opting not to destroy the innocence of Hetty
Morton, a girl in the village near the Duchess’s estate. Shocked by his
sudden change of heart, Dorian ‘determined to leave her as flower-like
as I had found her’ (1991, 243). As Dorian symbolically rises from the
piano – the producer of the sensual music that served as the sound-
track for his evil life – he confesses to Lord Henry that ‘I am going to
be good’ and that ‘I am a little changed already’ (1991, 249). Yet when
he later checks the picture for evidence of his ethical renewal, he
discovers ‘no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of
cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite’,
Wilde writes. ‘The thing was still loathsome – more loathsome, if
possible, than before’ (1991, 252).
Rather than being the product of a genuine shift in moral attitude,
Dorian’s aspirations toward goodness result from his own vanity, as
well as from his apprehension regarding the potential loss of the self
that he adores above all others in his community. In this manner, the
novel’s faux cataleptic impression confronts readers – and perhaps
 Kenneth Womack 179

Dorian himself – with an unusual ethical construct, the anti-epiphany.

Stultified by his own hypocrisy and his ‘mask of goodness’, Dorian
chooses to destroy his decaying soul: He ‘would kill the past, and when
that was dead he would be free’, Wilde writes. Dorian ‘would kill this
monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he would be at
peace’ (1991, 253). Taking up the knife that he used to murder Basil,
Dorian stabs at the picture. After servants hear an agonized cry and a
‘crash’, they enter the attic and discover a splendid portrait of their
master in all ‘his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor’,
Wilde writes, ‘was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his
heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage’ (1991,
254). By attempting to eradicate the picture that serves as a record of
his unethical life, Dorian succeeds in destroying himself. While the
novel’s deus ex machina conclusion, a virtual cliché of gothic fiction in
general, suggests a number of narrative possibilities, 8 Dorian’s
supernatural demise nevertheless results directly from his Faustian
bargain and the ethically vacuous existence that he deliberately
pursues.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian’s adherence to Lord Henry’s
hedonist philosophy clearly manifests itself in his spiritual and physical
destruction. Dorian’s soul expires, William Buckler astutely observes,
because of the ‘inevitable consequence, not of aestheticism, but of an
ugly, self-deceiving, all-devouring vanity that leads the protagonist to
heartless cruelty, murder, blackmail, and suicide’ (1991, 140). Wilde
employs the Victorian gothic as the express means through which he
characterizes the corrosion and ultimate demise of Dorian’s soul.
Because Wilde relies on the supernatural and the grotesque as means for
narrating Dorian’s spiritual digression in The Picture of Dorian Gray, the
Victorian gothic clearly operates as an ethical construct in Wilde’s
novel. Ethical criticism, with its interest in exploring the trials and
tribulations of human experience and their intersections with the act of
reading, simply affords us with a mechanism for recognizing a given
writer’s humanistic agenda. In The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein,
Philosophy, and the Mind, Cora Diamond argues that through ethical
criticism ‘we can come to be aware of what makes for deeper under-
standing and an enriching of our own thought and experience; we can
come to have a sense of what is alive, and what is shallow, sentimental,
cheap’. The ethical critique of literature reminds us, moreover, that ‘it is
our actions, our choices, which give a particular shape to the life we
lead; to be able to lead whatever the good life for a human being is is to
be able to make such choices well’ (Diamond 1991, 303, 373). In The
Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde avails himself of the Victorian Gothic in a
180 Victorian Gothic

stunning depiction of what transpires when human beings make

ineffectual choices and sacrifice their own senses of moral beauty by
elevating the aesthetic pleasures of the body over the spiritual needs of
the soul.

Notes
1. In ‘Ethics and Aesthetics in The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Michael Patrick
Gillespie offers yet another ethical critique of Wilde’s novel, although, as
with McGinn, he fails to consider the role of the Victorian gothic as the
engine of the novelist’s moral debate regarding the sanctity of the human
soul, opting instead to read the novel in terms of the ethical nature of its
aesthetic elements: ‘Through the actions of its characters’, Gillespie writes,
The Picture of Dorian Gray’s ‘discourse establishes within us a sense of the
wide-ranging aesthetic force that ethics exerts upon a work of art. Further-
more, Wilde’s novel gives us the opportunity to enhance the mix of our
aesthetic and ethical views by extending our sense of the possibilities for
interpretation beyond those delineated by our immediate hermeneutic
system’ (1994, 153–4).
2. For a useful definition of ‘ethics’ and discussion of its emergence as a viable
reading paradigm during the past decade, see Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s
chapter on ‘Ethics’ in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin’s Critical
Terms for Literary Study (2nd edn, 1995). ‘Understanding the plot of a narra-
tive’, Harpham writes, ‘we enter into ethics. Ethics will always be at the
flashpoint of conflicts and struggles’, he continues, ‘because such encounters
never run smooth’ (1995, 404). As Wayne C. Booth observes in The Company
We Keep: an Ethics of Fiction, ‘the word “ethical” may mistakenly suggest a
project concentrating on quite limited moral standards: of honesty, perhaps,
or of decency or tolerance’. In Booth’s postulation of an ethical criticism,
however, ‘ethical’ refers to ‘the entire range of effects on the “character” or
“person” or “self”. “Moral” judgments are only a small part of it’ (1988, 8).
3. In Fictions of Loss in the Victorian fin de siècle, Stephen Arata rejects the notion
that Wilde appropriates an ethical rhetoric in The Picture of Dorian Gray, con-
tending that ‘here as elsewhere Wilde rejects humanistic notions of the
organic and autonomous individual’ (1996, 61). Yet a comparison of Wilde’s
divergent characterizations of the competing ethics of Lord Henry and Basil
suggests otherwise. Wilde clearly derides Lord Henry’s ambiguous philoso-
phy of new Hedonism through its expositor’s pompous and malformed
discourse, while arguing in favour of Basil’s theory of moral beauty through
the devastation, and ultimately the death of, Dorian’s soul.
4. In this instance, Basil clearly fears the rise of aestheticism because he senses
the erosion of the ethical and cultural value systems of his community, a
process that William Greenslade describes as ‘degeneration’ in Degeneration,
Culture, and the Novel, 1880–1940. ‘Such fears at the fin de siècle were at work
shaping institutional practices – medical, psychiatric, political – and their
assumptions’, Greenslade writes. ‘Degeneration facilitated discourses of
 Kenneth Womack 181

sometimes crude differentiation: between the normal and the abnormal, the
healthy and morbid, the “fit” and “unfit”, the civilized and the primitive.
Degeneration’, he adds, ‘was, in part, an enabling strategy by which the con-
ventional and respectable classes could justify and articulate their hostility to
the deviant, the diseased, and the subversive’ (1994, 2). Despite his espousal
of a new Hedonism, Lord Henry also registers anxiety about the lower classes
and the disenfranchised in The Picture of Dorian Gray. As an anti-Hedonist,
Basil ironically demonstrates little affinity for the practices of degeneration
and proves to be remarkably tolerant of the lower classes, particularly
evinced by his enthusiastic approval of Dorian’s relationship with Sybil.
5. In Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity, Gillespie reminds us of the illogic
inherent in Lord Henry’s philosophy, an anti-ethical system with little
concern for consistency or reason. ‘As the novel progresses’, Gillespie writes,
‘one finds that each of these points of view contributes to a more detailed
illumination of the discourse and in doing so blunts inclinations to privilege
any one of these perspectives over the others. New Hedonism in fact defines
itself only through the symbiotic support of multiple systems of values, and
any effort to view it in isolation would prove reductive’ (1994, 61).
6. In Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellmann speculates about the book’s identity. At his
trial, Wilde conceded that the mystery book was Joris-Karl Huysmans’s
À Rebours (1884), although it also has thematic similarities to Walter Pater’s
Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). According to Ellmann, in the
first draft of The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde entitled the book Le Secret
de Raoul, by Catulle Sarrazin. ‘This author’, Ellmann writes, ‘was a blend of
Catulle Mendès, whom he had known for some years, and Gabriel Sarrazin,
whom he met in September 1888, and the name of ‘Raoul’ came from
Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus’ (1988, 316).
7. In Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles, and Imitations, John Stokes notes the interest-
ing similarities in the interpersonal dynamics of the relationships between
Lord Henry and Dorian and between Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, the
novelist’s youthful lover and aesthetic protégé (1996, 11).
8. For a thorough analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray’s sudden and mysterious
conclusion, see McGinn’s Ethics, Evil, and Fiction. ‘What Wilde has done is to
condense the general theme of his book into this final scene’, McGinn
argues, ‘giving it literal expression, so that Dorian’s odd ambiguous status,
suspended between life and art, is represented’ (1997, 135).