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Performativity and Becoming Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde’S the Picture of Dorian Gray

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Performativity and Becoming Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde’S the Picture of Dorian Gray ACTING OUT GENDER: PERFORMATIVITY AND BECOMING LORD HENRY WOTTON IN OSCAR WILDE’S THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY BURAK IRMAK Istanbul Aydin University Abstract: The paper examines performativity in the Nineteenth Century Victorian Novel, especially the resistance to dictated male performativity and its results , illustrated in novels by male authors such as Oscar Wilde, in his “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and its character Lord Henry Wotton. Trapped by the male roles dictated by society, Lord Henry finds relief in talking to other people about his desires. In a platonic teacher-student relationship, he leads Dorian into his desires and finds escape from his stereotypical gender through him. Key words: masculinity, Oscar Wilde, performativity, Queer Theory, Victorian literature 1. Introduction The topics of sexuality and gender in The Picture of Dorian Gray have been discussed for decades. However, little has been said on issues like what happens when gender norms are opposed by the characters in the novel and how the consequences of those actions were shaped by Oscar Wilde. When it comes to Queer Theory, most academics preferred dealing with sexuality in Dorian Gray rather than performativity and the Heterosexual Matrix of Victorian high society. Performativity is a term best explained by Judith Butler (1993, 2004) in her books on queer theory. According to her, gender and sexuality are an ongoing mode of becoming. The world is like a stage and we are the actors on this stage, where we perform our duties and roles. We are teachers, students, engineers, men, women, bisexuals, heterosexuals, gays, lesbians and so on. We play our roles as expected from us by society, and we usually perform unconsciously. Any problem in this world can be viewed within this theory of performativity; therefore, it is important to discuss Wilde’s novel from this point of view. The paper will examine performativity in the Nineteenth Century Victorian Novel, especially the resistance to dictated male performativity and its results as reflected in Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray ; special attention will be paid to the character named Lord Henry Wotton, who arguably shows characteristics of Wilde himself. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault (1978:3) explains how gender was perceived in the 19 th century: “A single locus of sexuality was acknowledged in social space as well as at the heart of every household, but it was a utilitarian and fertile one: the parents’ bedroom”. This means that any other form of sexuality was considered illegitimate. For people with illegitimate sexualities, Victorian Society created punishments and ways of othering them. Again Foucault says: The brothel and the mental hospital would be those places of tolerance: the prostitute, the client, and the pimp, together with the psychiatrist and his hysteric - those ‘Other Victorians’, as Steven Marcus would say - seem to have surreptitiously transferred the pleasures that are unspoken into the order of things that are counted. (Foucault 1978:4) B.A.S. , vol. XXI, 2015 78 There were other ways of punishing those who deviated from normative sexuality. The Criminal Law Amendment Act, for instance, punished a person who committed a buggery act to penal servitude for life and for a term not less than ten years. Oscar Wilde, who suffered because of the Amendment Act, writes: “I must say to myself that I ruined myself” (Wilde 1997:1071), which makes it clear that he felt guilty for his sexual experiences. In addition, he states that: “I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace.” (Wilde 1997:1071). His moral dilemma could be seen in his works and this peaked when he was put into prison. Some writers, such as Jeff Nunokawa, defend the point of view which states that Oscar Wilde is similar to Lord Henry Wotton for their defiance of “the Love that dare not speak its name” (1997:157) and for “praising specific ones” (1997:158). According to him, while Oscar Wilde praises specific feelings and thoughts, Lord Henry “endorses every feeling, thought, dream, and impulse, rather than any particular” (Nunokawa 1997:158). However, what they had in common was their talking about desire, which should have been avoided in the Victorian Period. Nunokawa defines Lord Henry as an advocate for “sexual passion” (Nunokawa 1997:160). Another similarity between the author and his character is, as Duggan (63) puts it, that “Dorian lives according to what Lord Henry professes”, which is very much like a pederastian view of Wilde: “the older man teaching the young boy the ways of life and warfare, how to become a man” and “…sex was a big part of this interaction between men and boys” (Duggan 64). But reading such relation was opposed by Sinfield when he said “ The Picture of Dorian Gray invokes the queer image, to some readers at least, despite at no point representing it” (qtd. in Richler 1); Sinfield clearly opposes Nunokawa and Kosofsky Sedgwick by emphasizing that the latter’s search for a “gay scenario” does not really work, since “Wilde was neither gay nor homosexual” (qtd. in Luckhurst 1995: 337). Barbara Charlesworth also discusses the similarities and differences between Lord Henry and Oscar Wilde; she points out that three male characters (Lord Henry, Dorian Gray and Basil Howard) have some of Oscar Wilde’s characteristics. Wilde himself in a letter to a friend says that Dorian Gray “contains much of me in it. Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry, what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be.” (qtd. in Caroll 2005:290). In The History of Sexuality, when talking about the confinement of sex in the Victorian Period, Foucault (1978:3) says that “on the subject of sex silence became the rule.” Articulating the word loudly was out of the question. That is why The Picture of Dorian Gray was shocking to the Victorian reader: Lord Henry Wotton talks about the strictly forbidden. He says “The only way to get rid of temptation … is to yield to it” (Wilde 1997:16). Stuck in the male role of husband, dictated to him by society, Lord Henry finds relief talking to other people about his desires, the things he wants to do and the things he could not do. In a platonic teacher-student relationship, he leads Dorian within his desires and, in this way, he finds an escape from his never-ending cycle of stereotypical gender. This teacher- student relationship is very clear in the novel, with the dominance of Lord Henry over Dorian Gray. Luljeta Muriqi (9) explains: “In regard to his pedagogic role, Lord Henry realizes this, quite early in the novel, at his very first meeting with Dorian”. A fictional character, Lord Henry plays many roles in his life, which he performs mostly unconsciously. Butler says: If gender is a kind of a doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing, it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical. 79 ROMANTIC TRANSGRESSIONS AND VICTORIAN SUPERHEROES On the contrary, it is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint. (Butler 2004: 1) In this “scene of constraint”, Lord Henry finds relief in his new found pederastia teacher role. He embraces it and uses it as an escape from his other performative roles. His roles can be described as a teacher to Dorian, a frustrated husband and a high socialite. I do not think that we can be entirely sure which role is more dominant in his life, since all of them are equally important to him. But we will analyze each of them, trying to establish their consequences and the connections between them. Throughout the novel, most of Lord Henry’s roles are heterosexual normative roles. Butler (1993:126) says that “heterosexual privilege operates in many ways, and two ways in which it operates include naturalizing itself and rendering itself as the original and the norm”. His “natural” roles do not put him in danger. However, one of the roles he performs takes him to a place from where he cannot come back. As he is a teacher of desire, he turns Dorian into a personification of his own desires and the result of his escape from the normative gender. His teacher role, however, causes the collapse of his married life in the end. This is not just a punishment for Lord Henry Wotton, but also a warning to Oscar Wilde himself, who is gender resistant and ends in prison, carrying a sense of regret in his heart all the time. Lord Alfred Douglas, a young aristocrat, and Wilde’s intimate friend, sees Wilde’s days in prison from a different perspective however: he thinks that Oscar Wilde did not regret what he had done; “Bosie”, as Wilde called him, comments on Wilde’s De Profundis : I am convinced it was written in passionate sincerity at the time, and yet it represents a mere mood […] which does not even last through the 250 pages of the book. (Hyde 1963:208) After a careful analysis of each performance with his interaction with other characters in the novel, we can see the results. Although he wants to resist the norms of the society, since he is still a part of it, he will not be able to escape the destiny written for him by society through Wilde’s pen. 2. Lord Henry’s role as Dorian’s teacher To understand Lord Henry as a teacher, we need to know the student-teacher relationship in Ancient Greece, since Oscar Wilde studied Ancient Greek in Dublin and Oxford and was very much interested in Greek culture and literature.
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