The Purple Thread of Doom: Aestheticism and Dysfunction in the Works of Oscar Wilde

By Sara Gonzalez Spring 2020

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a baccalaureate degree in English in cursu honorum

Reviewed and approved by:

Submitted to the Honors Program, Saint Peter’s University May 7, 2020

In Loving Memory of Rabbie 2014-2020 May you have all the raisins and bananas your little heart desires in Heaven. You won’t have to chew on God’s ankles for them.

Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Scott F. Stoddart for undertaking this project with me. He helped me fashion my high school fascination into something tangible and mature, and his kindness and dedication have been nothing short of extraordinary. I would also like to thank Dr. Rachel Wifall, Dr. Jeanette Wilmanski, and Lauren Squillante of the Honors program for their patience throughout this process. I would like to thank Dr. William Luhr for his support and his knowledge of the Victorian era, Dr. Michael K. Walonen for teaching me how to think and write, Dr. Raymond Conlon for his wisdom and humor, and Professor Brian Morgan for encouraging me to nurture my writing skills. If there is anyone who has witnessed my character development over the past four years, it is Dr. Katherine S. Wydner. She took me under her wing when I was a freshman and supported me as I found my direction in life. My friend and colleague Bianca Cantillano has known me for just as long. I thank her for her lively spirit and her wisdom that seems to go beyond her years. I would like to thank Nicole Font for her Lord Henry-like influence and urging me to “be afraid of nothing.” Her intelligence, wit, and (good) advice have always charmed me, and I am proud of the person she has become. I must thank my best friends Dominique Brown and Amber Malik for putting up with me going MIA once in a while and enduring my lengthy monologues. Their love is as rare as rubies and their loyalty as precious as sapphires. My English Capstone class—Matthew Blumensteel, Amber Camacho, Khier Casino, Marina DeSantis, Jenny Martinez Rojas, Hector Pena, Aliyah Rawles, Annel Reich, Mahreen Shahzadi, and Tania Velez—has been supportive of me and I must thank them for bringing me into their fold. Special thanks to my high school teachers Mr. Steve Saullo and Mr. Stephen Nyarko. They knew I was meant to wield the pen, but I didn’t listen. I soon found out that beakers shatter into pieces when they’re dropped. Pens don’t, though. Finally, I thank my sister Yolanda, my number one fan, for first introducing me to the curious world of the Victorians through Sherlock Holmes. It all just went downhill from there.

Abstract Late 19th century Irish poet, playwright, and novelist Oscar Wilde challenged the norms and hypocrisy of Victorian society through his life and works. He was a follower of aestheticism, a counter-cultural movement that embraced “art for art’s sake,” which rejects the idea that art should advance a social or moral cause. Instead, beauty was upheld as art’s only aim. The movement’s reach soon went beyond the arts and crossed over into life, taking with it the amorality and detachedness that should be only applied to art. This thesis will demonstrate the incompatibilities between aestheticism and life that appear in three of Wilde’s works: the fairy tale “The Happy Prince,” the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the play Lady Windermere’s Fan. This will be performed through the application of Wilde’s aesthetic triad of the artist, critic, and public within the medium of life. Each text’s conflict is a result of the failure of one or more persons of the triad to adhere to their roles.

Table of Contents Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………………6 Wilde’s Aesthetic Theory ……………………………………………………………………….11 The Art as Artist in “The Happy Prince” ……………………………………………………….18 The Spectator as Art in The Picture of Dorian Gray……………………………………………32 The Artist as Critic in Lady Windermere’s Fan ………………………………………………...53 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………………70 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..73

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Introduction In The Importance of Being Earnest, Gwendolyn Fairfax explains why she never travels without her diary: “One should always have something sensational to read in the train” (363).

The waiting room of a doctor’s office does not have much in the way of “sensational” reading material—unless one counts old magazines and health brochures. That would be a matter of taste, though Oscar Wilde makes it a point that there is such thing as having bad taste. I decided to take my work with me and bring along my copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray to read while I waited. A woman seated to my left peered down at my book. With curiosity, she asked if I was reading a romance novel. Having had the book for so long, I had gotten used to its cover and it never occurred to me that others would give it a second glance. It features a portrait by John

Singer Sargent, a 19th century American expatriate famous for his scandalous Portrait of

Madame X. Appropriately titled Man Wearing Laurels, the portrait depicts the top half of a muscular youth with a crown of laurels encircling his head of thick, black curls. Light from an unseen source shines from his right, leaving the left side of his pale face and body in dark shadow. The weak light barely illuminates the background which forms an even greater contrast with his body. The young man’s eyes are heavily obscured, and it is as if one is looking into two empty voids.

I explained to the woman that the novel has some romance but it is mostly about beauty.

Dorian Gray, the beautiful young man who is afraid of growing old and losing his beauty, unknowingly gives up his soul to trade places with his portrait. The portrait takes on what would have been his: his age and the sins of his actions. Dorian no longer has a conscience, so he acts without remorse, and with every bad action, an imperfection is added to his portrait. The romances in The Picture of Dorian Gray are doomed to fail because Dorian cannot give or receive love. He rejects the love of an actress, Sybil Vane, and of the painter of his portrait, Basil Gonzalez 7

Hallward. At this point, I could not discuss the novel any further without some context, so I began to speak about Oscar Wilde and how he sought to challenge the norms of Victorian

England through his life and work. I explained that homosexuality was considered a crime in the late 19th century and Wilde was tried and convicted for “gross indecency.” The very novel I held in my hands was used to implicate Wilde at his own trial.

I finished speaking to find that I had the attention of everyone in the room. One man somberly recalled the old adage of not judging a book by its cover. Some asked to take pictures of the cover so they could recommend the novel to the book lovers in their life. Others asked if there was a movie. I immediately realized that what I did on that one day, Oscar Wilde did on a daily basis. With grace, forethought, and wit, he made commanding attention an art. Wilde wrote and lived according to the doctrines of Aestheticism, a movement that redefined the creation and purpose of art and literature. It contended with the common Victorian propensity for moralizing and pushing for social reform. Those who utilized their creative talents were known as “artists,” regardless of their discipline. Artists did not concern themselves with relaying a moral or taking a side in social or political issues in their works. Instead, they were focused on creating beautiful works of art, and beauty was the only standard by which a work of art’s value is judged.

The movement was mocked and satirized, not only for its moral aloofness but for the lifestyles adopted by its followers, the aesthetes. Aestheticism was also a way of life, and the aim of life, according to an aesthete, was self-improvement. This was best realized through pleasure and surrounding oneself with beautiful things. Although there were several prominent figures in the movement, no one lived it quite like Wilde. He found his fame in America in 1882, where he traveled across the country and delivered lectures on the movement (Eckhardt et al. 12). Wilde laid out its doctrine and instructed on fashion and house decoration. Americans, beholding such a Gonzalez 8 grandiose character from across the Atlantic, were both bewildered and amazed (Ellman 166).

Caricaturists took to depicting him in his outlandish garb with a sunflower in one hand and a lily in the other, and his name and image were used in advertisements (Holland 58). With his newfound fame, Wilde returned to England where, as an Irishman, he was also an outsider. He eventually got married and had two sons. Now having a family to support, Wilde became more dedicated to writing. In 1890, he shook the nation with The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel. Many took offense to its indifference toward morality, but others lauded it for its philosophical examination of human nature (Ellman 323). Wilde soon dominated the stage with his plays, and successfully veiled his critiques on society’s hypocrisy and sensitivities with effortless wit and humor.

In 1891, Wilde became smitten with the beautiful and reckless Lord Alfred “Bosie”

Douglas (Holland 141). This was a bad romance that marked the beginning of a downward spiral and led to his fall from grace. Bosie’s hate for his father, the Marquess of Queensberry John

Sholto Douglas, was greater than his love for Wilde. He urged Wilde to pursue legal action against Queensberry after he left a libelous card calling Wilde a “posing sodomite” (Holland

158). This was a futile endeavor because Wilde stood no chance against the Marquess. Wilde withdrew the charges after the first trial, but enough evidence was gathered to lead to his arrest.

In a rapid turn of events, he was found guilty of gross indecency two trials later on May 25, 1895

(Ellman 477). Wilde was sentenced to two years in prison with hard labor, the severest punishment allowed under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 (Ellman 409).

Bereft of freedom and all things beautiful in prison, Wilde searched for beauty in his suffering which only intensified when he would receive letters from friends -- none of them would be from Bosie. He took it upon himself to address his unbearable silence. From January to Gonzalez 9

March 1897, Wilde penned a lengthy letter to him, originally called In Carcere et Vinculis, Latin for “In Prison and In Chains.” Robert Ross, Wilde’s ex-lover, faithful friend, and literary executor renamed it De Profundis, or “Out of the Depths” (Ellman 510). In the letter’s first half,

Wilde bitterly recalls their tempestuous relationship and presents a catalogue of grievances against Bosie. Still, he finds it in his heart to forgive him and accepts partial responsibility for what transpired. In the second half, Wilde fluctuates between humility and arrogance as he reflects on his life.

In an extended metaphor, he compares his life to a garden. Only the fruit of the trees that stood in the sunny side were appetizing to him. The trees in the shadowy side bore the ugly fruits of pain, poverty, despair, and disgrace, and he wanted nothing of them. Now that he sits in jail, he must taste each one of them. Never once does Wilde regret living for pleasure. Rather, he regrets living exclusively for it because it limits self-improvement. He writes,

The other half of the garden had its secrets for me also. Of course, all this is

foreshadowed and prefigured in my art. Some of it is in “The Happy Prince,” some of it

in The Young King, notably in the passage where the bishop says to the kneeling boy, ‘Is

not He who made misery wiser than thou art’? a phrase which when I wrote it seemed to

me little more than a phrase; a great deal of it is hidden away in the note of doom that like

a purple thread runs through the gold cloth of Dorian Gray; in The Critic as Artist it is set

forth in many colours; in The Soul of Man it is written down, and in letters too easy to

read… (922).

The purple thread of doom begs to be loosened.

This thesis will expose Wilde’s critiques of aestheticism and the stifling society that prompted its development in three of his works: the fairy tale “The Happy Prince,” the novel The Gonzalez 10

Picture of Dorian Gray, and the play Lady Windermere’s Fan. This will be performed through the application of Wilde’s aesthetic triad of the artist, critic, and public as it is outlined in his essays “The Critic as Artist” and “The Decay of Lying.” The conflicts that arise in each of the three works of fiction are the results of one or more persons of the triad not adhering to their roles. This occurs because life interferes with the dynamics of the triad. Between life and art, life is the more dominating medium. Wilde shows the incompatibilities that form when a theory meant for art encroaches on life.

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Wilde’s Aesthetic Theory In a general sense, aestheticism is a devotion to beauty (Johnson 1) and it is derived from the Greek word aesthesis, meaning “perception” (Hamilton 93). Aestheticism was an English artistic and intellectual movement that began in approximately 1868, the year art critic Walter

Pater started publishing essays on the topic (Johnson 62). It reached its peak in the late 1880s and early 1890s before going out of vogue around the turn of the century when writers began to adopt realism and naturalism. Aestheticism was a reaction to Victorian standards of morality and art, based on the Puritanism of the 16th and 17th centuries. The middle class adopted the traditional Puritan values of industry, temperance, and productive activity. With their influence, they established this as the “public tone” of society (Johnson 19). The Victorians had a progressive view of the human race so they pushed for good morals and social change, and they believed that the arts should aim to promote the same. Aestheticism protested this notion and countered with the idea of “art for art’s sake.” The only aim of art is to be beautiful, not to promote social and moral causes.

R.V. Johnson prefers to call the aesthetic movement a “tendency” rather than a movement (1). Even before 1868, there was already a common tendency toward beauty, and “art for art’s sake” was only one out of many aesthetic ideas (9). The study of beauty began in the

18th century with aesthetics, a branch of philosophy. German philosopher Immanuel Kant was its most influential thinker, and he held the idea that beautiful objects must be “purposive without purpose,” Art should produce an effect on the spectator as if they have a purpose even though it has no purpose (Burnham).

In 1848, a group of ambitious young artists studying at the Royal Academy formed the

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Sir John Everett Millais, and William

Holman Hunt were unsatisfied with the influence of Renaissance painter Raphael and other high Gonzalez 12

Renaissance figures on the current art scene, finding that its conventions stifled individual expression. They aimed to go back in time before Raphael and recover medievalism and naturalism (Johnson 42).

Though Rosetti, Millais, and Hunt shared a common goal, they had differences in temperament and opinion (Johnson 42). While Millais and devoutly religious Hunt depicted religious subjects with care, Rosetti approached them with the same spirit as Arthurian legends

(Johnson 43). He opposed didacticism and was “in favor of the artist’s exclusive loyalty to his personal vision” (Johnson 44). By 1853, the three parted ways, marking the movement’s second phase (Greenblatt 509). Rosetti became part of a new trio when he befriended designer William

Morris and painter Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones. In the 1860s, he began painting what he believed to be the ideal female beauty using Morris’s wife Jane as his model (Von Eckardt et al.

42). These are the paintings of which he is most known. Rosetti’s artistic attitudes and choice of subjects in this second phase had the most influence over aestheticism.

The Pre-Raphaelites had support from John Ruskin, the first major art critic of the

Victorian Era. In 1850, he came to their defense when Millais’s painting Christ in the House of

His Parents was criticized for being too detailed and realistic (Greenblatt 509). Ruskin was an avid traveler and his book The Stones of Venice, published in three volumes between 1851 and

1853, is a record of his observations made during his travels to Venice of Byzantium,

Renaissance, and Gothic architecture (382). Though primarily a work of art theory, the book demonstrates Ruskin’s disposition toward social critique. Of interest to him was the kind of society that existed to have produced and appreciated such architecture and he took this opportunity to criticize England’s capitalistic society (382). Ruskin condemned industrialization and mass production because it provided fuel for materialism and a justification for Gonzalez 13

Utilitarianism (Hoffman and Hynes 200). The demand for products that were quickly and cheaply made was an insult to the labor and imagination of craftsmen, resulting in societal division and alienation of the worker. Ruskin proposed that the creation of art and architecture and a return to craftsmanship would instill a cohesive national identity (Eckhardt et al. 32).

Since Ruskin encouraged purposeful art, he was wary of those who consumed and created beautiful objects solely for an aesthetic experience. A sense of beauty was important for a healthy society but beauty was subordinate to goodness and truth (Johnson 11). In his book

Modern Painters, Ruskin wrote, “The picture which has the nobler and more numerous ideas, however awkwardly expressed, is a greater and a better picture than that which has the less noble and less numerous ideas, however beautifully expressed” (10).

During the late 1860s, aestheticism as it is commonly known today began to develop. The new idea of “art for art’s sake” opposed Ruskin’s didacticism. Ethical, religious, and philosophical sentiments were determined to be no longer relevant to a work of art’s value and only served to detract from its beauty, the sole criterion by which a work of art is judged

(Johnson 14). In his influential book Studies of the History of the Renaissance published in 1873, art critic Walter Pater outlines aesthetic doctrine. Pater was not interested in defining beauty or developing a formula by which to measure beauty. Beauty was not a “bloodless abstraction” but an experience (3); it was a gathering of impressions formed through enjoyment of the arts and literature. It is Pater’s insistence that life itself is to be treated “in the spirit of art” (12) that drove the movement into a new direction. Aestheticism came to have a total of three distinct applications: as a view of art, as a view of life, and as a tendency in the creation of arts and the critical theories used to analyze them (12). Gonzalez 14

Since Pater helped widen its scope, aestheticism soon had its own devotees. The aesthetes were, by definition, people who appreciated beauty. Johnson notes that there have always been aesthetes even before the 19th century (10). However, notions of the “aesthetic life” in the 1870s were so formalized that it became its own subculture. In 1882, Walter Hamilton defended the aesthetes in his book The Aesthetic Movement in England. He writes that aesthetes are “they who pride themselves upon having found out what is the really beautiful in nature and art, their faculties and tastes being educated up to the point necessary for the full appreciation of such qualities” (97). Aesthetes surrounded themselves with beauty in their homes, personal. The more confident aesthetes, such as Wilde, were identified by their unconventional, if not dated, tastes in fashion. This may have appeared to be counterintuitive because it implied participation in the very materialism aestheticism opposed. However, Hamilton argues that aestheticism is not about the accumulation of beautiful objects. One can have “riches without taste” and still be vulgar, while “taste without money” can have a lasting effect (114). Beauty was not limited to objects, and part of being an aesthete was learning how to recognize beauty everywhere (Eckhardt et al.

37).

Mainstream Victorians thought of life as a “moral struggle.” Aesthetes preferred to approach life as if it were a “spectacle” rather than a “battle” (Johnson 19). To be “spectators” of their own lives, aesthetes must be emotionally detached. This stoicism allowed for a pleasing was a way to deal with life’s disappointments. It also allowed one to not feel burdened by guilt when one made a mistake. The only option was to learn from it and move on. The public became aware of this cult of beauty in the late 1870s, and material satirizing the “aesthetes” was popular by the early 1880s. The most notable is Sir William Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan’s Patience, a successful comic opera staged in 1881. Hamilton writes that Patience showed the public Gonzalez 15 aestheticism in a “highly-spiced and dangerously exaggerated form” (131). Oscar Wilde took advantage of the opera’s popularity to go to America and deliver lectures on aestheticism. Other prominent aesthetes were poet Algernon Swinburne, painter James McNeill Whistler, and illustrator Aubrey Beardsley.

Having met both Ruskin and Pater as a student, Wilde looked to their theories for guidance, though he was more inclined to Pater. Wilde called Renaissance his “golden book,” and later confessed that it had a “strange influence” over his life (De Profundis 19). He borrows

Pater’s idea of impressionistic beauty but amends his idea of the aesthetic life. In “The Decay of

Lying,” “The Critic as Artist,” and “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Wilde presents his own aesthetic theories of art.

The artist is the one who creates the work of art. Wilde uses “nature,” life,” and “reality” to signify all that exists outside of art. In Nature, the artist sees nothing worthy of imitation because Nature is cruel, imperfect, and unreliable (Decay 970). Nature has “no suggestions of her own,” so what people claim to find in Nature is what they bring to her. Romantic poet

Williams Wordsworth, a Lake Poet, was never truly a Lake Poet. He only went to lakes and

“found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there” (978). The artist chooses what is worthy of portrayal and how to portray it (Critic 1020) and he is free to use subject matter from

Nature but avoid imitating it. The artist takes Nature’s imperfections—her “lack of design” and

“curious crudities”—and perfects them in his art (Decay 970). The aim of art is to lie and tell

“beautiful untrue things” (992). He must abstain from expressing social and moral sympathies because such concerns belong to the sphere of reality.

The critic interprets the work of art. As an aesthete, the critic has a refined artistic taste and knows what to look for when he is observing a work of art. Interpretation is not performed in Gonzalez 16 the sense that the critic “simply repeats in another form a message that has been put into his lips to say” (Critic 1032). A critic must realize and develop his own “personality” before he can understand the work and personality of another person, and this will make his interpretation more “satisfying” and “convincing” (1033). This can be done through “intensifying one’s individualism” (1033). Individualism is a theory that emphasizes the living of life on one’s own terms. Wilde rejects the perceived selfishness of this way of life:

A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it

wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses. Under Individualism

people will be quite natural and absolutely unselfish, and will know the meanings of the

words, and realise them in their free, beautiful lives. Nor will men be egotistic as they are

now. For the egotist is he who makes claims upon others, and the Individualist will not

desire to do that. It will not give him pleasure. When man has realised Individualism, he

will also realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously. (Soul 1101)

The act of criticism is a creative, individual act because a critic unconsciously draws on the knowledge he has gained from experiences. Wilde considers the critic as a kind of artist because the critic engages with the work of art as the artist engages with the world (Critic 1026). There is no truth or one set interpretation to be found in art because truth varies from critic to critic. Truth in art is simply one’s last mood (1047). The critic aims to find beautiful meanings and chronicle his own impressions (1028). This is how critics keep works relevant for every age.

The public is educated on how to view the work of art by the critic. Wilde had little respect for the public because he believed them to be close-minded; they were the reason aestheticism was developed in the first place. In “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Wilde writes: Gonzalez 17

The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually

asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell

them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of

seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their

thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. (1090)

“To be beautiful” is not among these requests. An artist should never make his art “popular” to please the public (1090). Rather, the public should “try to make itself artistic” (1090) and learn how to form impressions, and the critic assists the public with this. With the work of art at the center, the artist, critic, and public can be brought together to form a triad. This triad will be used in the next three chapters to make sense of the relationships among characters occupying those roles in Wilde’s works.

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The Art as Artist in “The Happy Prince”

The Happy Prince and Other Tales was published in May 1888. This was Wilde’s first work since The Duchess of Padua in 1883, an early and relatively unknown play that was not performed until 1891 for a three-week run. During a visit to Cambridge University to see a production of the Eumenides, students asked Wilde to tell an entertaining story (Ellman 268). He told what he would later call “The Happy Prince,” the first of five fairy tales that would comprise the volume. Its publication established his reputation as an author. A House of Pomegranates, his second book of fairy tales, was published in 1891.

Richard Ellman writes that Wilde’s fairy tales are presented like “sacraments of a lost faith” (299). That faith is aestheticism, but several critics have failed to see “The Happy Prince” as such. Instead, they see it as a didactic tale that instructs on morality (Jones 84). Two critics claim that “The Happy Prince” shows that Wilde believes in the “moralist nature of art”

(Kirvalidze and Samnidze 354). Robert K. Martin takes a biographical approach and believes that Wilde “dramatizes himself as the Happy Prince” (76), serving as evidence of Wilde’s

“change of heart, a rejection of hedonism and aestheticism and acceptance of involvement in the human condition of suffering brought about through love” (74). This is all in an attempt to explain the tale’s inherent sadness, but as Wilde writes in “The Critic as Artist,” it is easier for people to sympathize with suffering than with theories, especially dangerous theories (1044). Its sadness stems from an entirely different reason.

In his book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales,

Bruno Bettelheim offers a psychoanalytical perspective on the fairy tale genre and how it engages with the mind of a child. The fairy tale simplifies situations so that the child can process the problem “in its most essential form” (8). A child’s choice to align with the hero of a fairy tale Gonzalez 19 and reject the villain is based more on who stirs his sympathy and who stirs his empathy rather than on concepts of right and wrong (9). Bettelheim writes, “The child identifies with the good hero not because of his goodness, but because the hero’s condition makes a deep positive appeal to him” (9). The hero of Wilde’s fairy tale is the Happy Prince, a sentient statue placed high about the city on a pedestal. His “condition” is a simple chain of cause and effect; the Happy

Prince sees sad people and wants to help them but he cannot move. With indulgent descriptions of the Happy Prince’s appearance, Wilde ties the child’s sympathy for the Happy Prince to his beauty. When the Happy Prince gives up his jewels and gold, a child feels conflicting emotions.

The townspeople who take down the ruined Happy Prince are portrayed as unsympathetic because their actions and dialogue operate against the hero. However, the Happy Prince would have not met with his fate if he had not given his beauty to the poor.

Though occupying a genre aimed toward children, “The Happy Prince” engages in the

“storytelling seduction” of adults by using the discourse of children (Goodenough 336). The adults who read “The Happy Prince” to their children would also finish the story feeling conflicted, and Wilde takes advantage of this. While the tale “accommodates the Romantic child,” it also provides a “screen for the intellectual subversive” (Shewan 38). Although Wilde writes about the misuse of aestheticism, he also reveals the hypocrisy of Victorian society’s demand that the arts should advance social change. The Happy Prince is intended to be a beautiful but useless work of art, but having seen the reality of suffering, he wishes to cross from the sphere of art into the sphere of art to alleviate it. He assumes the role of the artist and wants to distribute to the poor his jewels and gold, his works of art. The Swallow is the critic and acts as a “messenger” (Wilde, Happy Prince 287) between the Prince and the townspeople. Though informed in aesthetic theory, he is not permitted to communicate his own interpretation. The Gonzalez 20 townspeople, who have always seen the Happy Prince as a work of art, do not recognize the

Prince’s movement into life, and his actions go unappreciated. Although they do not know, the townspeople are complicit in the Prince’s downfall. Bettelheim writes that when concerning the instruction of children, the dominant culture in a society wishes to pretend that the “dark side of man” is non-existent (7). Through the destruction of the Happy Prince, Wilde exposes this dark side of society.

Wilde uses language to emphasize the Happy Prince’s role as a work of art and his separation from reality. He wields adjectives of different types to move the reader to “construct a world of visions, of wonder” (Rahman 102). Color adjectives are “linked with richness, beauty, and fascination” (104), and the description of the Happy Prince conjures up an image of a beautiful work of art: “High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy

Prince. He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large red ruby glowed on his sword-hilt” (Wilde, Happy Prince 285). Luthi writes that

“Among metals, the folktale prefers the precious and rare: gold, silver, copper…The rare, precious object is set off against its environment and stands alone” (27). Luthi uses an example of a golden or copper horse, an unrealistic image that not only does not naturally occur in the

“real” world, but because the “brilliance of its color alone strongly contrasts with any horse in real life” (27). Similarly, the Happy Prince is aesthetically distanced from reality. As a “royal

Eros,” (Knight 38), he is placed on a column to be elevated above the sadness of mortal life.

The townspeople respect this distance between themselves and the Happy Prince because they possess the correct aesthetic mindset. They represent the public, and they play a significant role in the Happy Prince’s image and fate. The townspeople see him as a beautiful work of art; they understand that art fulfills no purpose but to be beautiful, and if it is not beautiful, then it is Gonzalez 21 worthless. One Town Councilor wishes for others to perceive him as “a man of artistic tastes,” so he looks up at the statue and says, “He is as beautiful as a weathercock.” After some thought, he adds “Only not quite so useful” (Wilde, Happy Prince 285). The narrator tells the reader that the

Town Councilor is compelled to add that final segment because he realizes his error in comparing the statue to a useful item. A work of art is not supposed to be practical, and he does not want the people to think of him as “unpractical.”

In addition, the public sees the Happy Prince as an escape from reality. In “The Decay of

Lying”, Vivian reveals that “lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art”

(Wilde 992). The artist is not bound by the real world. Vivian explains the relationship between art and life: “Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment” (978). Life can be cruel and nature is indifferent to human lives, and for art to mimic life with all of its imperfections makes it not beautiful. In “The Critic as Artist”, Gilbert says that art “can teach us how to escape from our experience, and to realize the experiences of those who are greater than we are” (Wilde 1041). A mother and her young son stand before the Happy Prince and the spoiled child is crying “for the moon” (Wilde, Happy Prince 285), a beautiful and unattainable thing. She gently reproaches her son and says, “Why can’t you be like the Happy Prince? The

Happy Prince never dreams of crying for anything” (285). Then, a “disappointed man” gazes up at the statue and muses, “I am glad there is someone in the world who is quite happy” (285). The townspeople gaze up at the Happy Prince and see him as an ideal, and that is his purpose.

Lying is the aim of art, and the Happy Prince unintentionally participates in deception.

The public perceives him as only a statue, but to the Swallow and the reader, he is a conscious Gonzalez 22 being who can think, speak, and feel. This complicates the artist/critic/public triad because the work of art has dissolved the boundary between art and life and the public is unaware of this.

Though he is regarded as beautiful, his participation in life makes him ugly according to aesthetic standards. The Charity Children look up to him as an “angel” and “disappointed” people see him as an escape from reality but he, too, is caught up in their plight. His very name implies that he is happy, but happiness escapes him. The Happy Prince is not solid gold as the

Swallow initially believes. A thin layer of gold covers his body of lead, a gray metal of lesser value. Wilde subverts the expectation of a heart of gold by giving the Happy Prince a heart of lead. A heart of gold describes the heart of a noble, generous person. The Prince himself is aware of this and does not believe that his heart of lead, an inferior metal, best encapsulates his compassion. It is a superficial concern of his but this internal physical imperfection is only one of many examples of ugliness he must confront.

With sadness and regret, he remembers his life as a human. The Happy Prince was a prince who lived at the Palace of Sans-Souci, a French phrase meaning “without worries.” The

Happy Prince played with his friends in the palace garden in the daytime and led the dance in the

Great Hall in the evening. Like a true aesthete, he lived a life of pleasure and was happy “if pleasure be happiness” (286). A “lofty wall” prevented sorrow from entering, and the Happy

Prince lived and died not having shed a single tear (286). Now, he stands on a tall column that rises higher than any wall and tears are all he knows. He is forced to confront what had been withheld from him, and there are no courtiers or servants to help him cope with his sadness.

Now, the Happy Prince is dead but he does not immediately cross over into the afterlife upon death. It is possible that he is living in limbo, or a purgatory for aesthetes because he has not experienced all life has to offer. This includes the suffering he now feels as a literal work of Gonzalez 23 art, and his suffering is compounded by his inability to take action: “My feet are fastened to this pedestal and I cannot move” (287). The Happy Prince uses the possessive pronoun “my” to claim ownership over the city and the poor, indicating that he feels responsible for them. The Happy

Prince tells the Swallow, “I can see all the ugliness and all the misery of my city, and though my heart is made of lead yet I cannot choose but weep” (286). The public appreciates beauty, but in their pursuit of beauty, the weakest suffer. The town is comprised of people of different socio- economic classes, and they are called not by their names but their occupations. Namelessness is a common feature in fairy tales and they serve to “facilitate projections and identifications”

(Bettelheim 40). This allows children and adults alike to identify with these roles and assign people they know to them. Belonging to the lower classes are a seamstress, a playwright, a match girl, and starving and orphaned children. It is their hardships that upset the Happy Prince.

For instance, the seamstress must embroider passionflowers on a satin ball gown for one of the Queen’s maids, but she is distracted because her son is ill with a fever. He wants oranges but she cannot afford them. In Victorian England, oranges and other tropical fruits such as lemons, bananas, and pineapples were delicacies. Since they could not be grown in the temperate climate of England, they had to be imported, making them more expensive (Graham 66). To have a bowl of fruit as a table centerpiece was a symbol of wealth. In working-class families, children were given oranges as Christmas gifts. By this time, it was already known that oranges could aid in the prevention and treatment of scurvy and other diseases that result from nutrient deficiencies. An orange is a modest luxury compared to a hand-embroidered satin ballgown; the seamstress works for the wealthiest people in the land and they pay her so little that she cannot even afford an orange. Gonzalez 24

The playwright must finish a play for the Director of the Theatre but he struggles because he is cold and faint from hunger. He embodies the trope of the “starving artist,” complete with a garret with a hole in its roof. He has given up the comforts of a stable job to dedicate his life to art. The Happy Prince, who is well-acquainted with beauty, picks up on the playwright’s romantic aura: “His hair is brown and crisp, and his lips are red as a pomegranate, and he has large and dreamy eyes” (Wilde, Happy Prince 288). Though he looks to beauty for inspiration, the playwright cannot afford to live in finery. The best he can do is work next to a vase of violets, and even those are withered. It is well past the time to discard them but the playwright hangs on to them because he cannot replace them. It is all the beauty he has.

The structure of society in “The Happy Prince” allows poverty so extreme that a child must seek employment. The little match-girl’s father forces her to work and threatens to beat her if she does not bring home enough money. She is so young that she clumsily drops her matches into the gutter because she still has not fully developed her fine motor skills. Though it is winter, the match-girl has no shoes or stockings and her “little head” is bare (289). If her father loved her, he would make sure that she is adequately dressed to withstand the cold if she is to be outside all day. It is possible that her father deliberately deprives his daughter of clothing because he wants adults to buy her matches out of pity. The match-girl’s health and safety are sacrificed for pocket change.

The seamstress, the playwright, and the match-girl are all exploited for their labor. They are expected to produce an object of value for someone else, whether it be a pretty dress, a well- written play, or money. In each case, the laborer cannot do their job effectively because of their living conditions. Those in power do not care, but no concern for the weakest and most vulnerable can be expected from a society governed by Mayors and Town Councilors of Gonzalez 25

“pompous egocentricity” and taught by vapid, “speciously intellectual” Professors (Shewan 40).

The Queen does not make an appearance but she is represented by one of her maids. The maid is the only oppressor out of the three cases who presents their side of the story and makes her selfishness known. When her lover muses on the power of love, the maid ignores him and wonders about her dress. She says, “I have ordered passion-flowers to be embroidered on it; but the seamstresses are so lazy” (Wilde, Happy Prince 287). Cohen notes that before flying over the palace, the Swallow flies over the cathedral. He writes, “The flowers’ symbolic significance jars ironically against her callous materialism and indicates the great spiritual distance that separates palace and cathedral” (87).

Since “The Happy Prince” is a fairy tale, it comes as no surprise that the animals are anthropomorphized, and they, too, appreciate the statue for its beauty. The Swallow is a little bird who is passing through town and takes delight in the Happy Prince. As an aesthete, he indulges his senses in beautiful objects. As a “natural and capricious egotist,” (Shewan 40) the

Swallow does whatever he deems best for himself with little input from others and at times, comes across as vain. The swallows in “The Happy Prince” migrate south to Egypt for the winter, but he stays behind because he is attracted to a beautiful Reed with a “slender waist”

(Wilde, Happy Prince 285). After six weeks, he decides that she is a lost cause and leaves her for her “feminine ways” (Knight 38). The Swallow flies over the city and looks for a place to sleep.

With an air of self-importance, he says, “I hope the town has made preparations” (Wilde, Happy

Prince 286). The Swallow settles between the Happy Prince’s feet to rest, satisfied with his

“golden bedroom” (286). When drops of water fall on him, he recalls how the Reed liked the rain, but that was due to her “selfishness” (286). Despite realizing that the water droplets are not Gonzalez 26 raindrops but tears rolling down the Prince’s cheeks, the Swallow is still rather offended and tells him, “You have quite drenched me” (286).

The Swallow does not identify with the Prince’s moral obligation to humans, and this is understandable because he is a bird. As far as he is concerned, humans mean nothing to him. He recalls the previous summer when two boys would hurl stones at him whenever they saw him

(287). Of course, the Swallow was never hit because he “comes from “a family famous for its agility” but it is still a “mark of disrespect” (287). He says that he is expected in Egypt and he does not wish to delay the journey by one more night. The Swallow offers sensual descriptions of the land of Egypt and its splendor. He describes nature as if it is a work of art such as a

“painting, a sculpture, or a piece of jewelry” (Wood 166). He tells the Happy Prince,

My friends are flying up and down the Nile, and talking to the large lotus-flowers. Soon

they will go to sleep in the tomb of the great King. The King is there himself in his

painted coffin. He is wrapped in yellow linen, and embalmed with spices. Round his neck

is a chain of pale green jade, and his hands are like withered leaves. (Happy Prince 287)

However detached the Swallow perceives himself, he has more to do with the lives of humans than he believes. In the same way that he is a bird among humans, the aesthete regards himself as one separated from the public because of his refined tastes. He seeks pleasure, not suffering, but he does not realize that much of the beauty and pleasure he surrounds himself with—luxurious clothing, fine literature, and the very matches used to light his cigarettes-- are the results of human labor. The Swallow must learn that it could have been people like the seamstress and the playwright who strung the King’s chain of pale green jade and laid down the bricks of the

Temple of Baalbec. Just as the Happy Prince is forced to see the underbelly of pleasure from his pedestal, the Swallow is made to confront this reality. Gonzalez 27

The Swallow soon gives in only because “he is convinced of the Prince’s earnestness by the beauty of his face in sorrow” (Shewan 40). The Swallow is the intermediary between the

Happy Prince and the townspeople, or the artist and the public. He is the critic, and though he has an aesthetic approach to art, he is not allowed to express it to the public. The Swallow calls himself the Prince’s “messenger” (Wilde, Happy Prince 287), one who delivers another person’s message with no input from themselves. The Happy Prince, as an artist, wants to give his art a purpose. Giving art a purpose signals a surrender to reality, and in his surrender, he degrades himself. He directs the Swallow to pick off him his gemstones to help the seamstress, the playwright, and the match-girl.

Although the precious gemstones are beautiful, the poor cannot keep them to admire and must sell them because they need the money. The Happy Prince does not ignore this reality; he trusts that the playwright will sell the sapphire to the jeweler and use the money to buy firewood

(288). Beautiful art is of no use to the poor when they are worrying about their next meal. The people they assist do not know the origin and nature of the gifts because the Swallow as a critic is absent. He does not linger to instruct them on how they should think of it or what they should do with it, or that a beautiful statue is being torn apart at the moment for their sake. The seamstress is asleep when the Swallow delivers the ruby from his sword hilt. The playwright finds the sapphire of the Prince’s eye resting on an arrangement of withered violets and believes it is from a “great admirer” (289). The match girl mistakenly calls the sapphire of the Prince’s remaining eye a “lovely bit of glass” and runs home laughing because she will be spared from another beating (289).

All that is left of the Happy Prince is his gold covering. Now that he is blind, he asks the

Swallow to fly over the city and note what he sees. While the rich are “making merry in their Gonzalez 28 beautiful houses,” beggars sit at the gates, and starving children with “white faces” look out at the “black streets” (290). Under a bridge, two hungry boys huddle together for warmth but a watchman kicks them out. Rahman points out that up to this point, “gold” is used to describe the

Happy Prince. The Swallow takes shelter in a “golden bedroom” between the statue’s feet, and tears run down the Happy Prince’s “golden cheeks” (286). It is when the Happy Prince asks the

Swallow to strip off his gold and distribute it to the poor that gold stops being an adjective and instead becomes a “material noun” (107). Gold is no longer something to be admired; it is to be used. The Happy Prince desires that his gold be used to effect change among the poor, affectionately referred to as “[his] poor” (Wilde, Happy Prince 290). When his gold is removed, he is “dull and grey.” Whatever is described as “colorless” lacks “attraction, appeal, or charm”

(Rahman 10) so according to these parameters, the Happy Prince lacks attraction. The Mayor says that he is “golden no longer.” In this statement, gold reverts back to an adjective because it aligns with what the public thinks of him—as a work of art only to be admired.

When an artist has a “conscious aim” with his art, he moves from the sphere of art into the sphere of action (Wilde, Critic 1022). Humans do not live long enough to see the results of their actions, and those in the future can misinterpret what is originally intended. The Happy

Prince’s actions do not bring about long-term change. He never realizes that he will always weep because the poor will always be poor. His gold leaves and gemstones are traded for money that will go out as quickly as it came in because poverty will continue as long as society is cruel and corrupt. The Mayor calls the ruined Happy Prince “no better than a beggar” (Wilde, Happy

Prince 291). Upon seeing the dead Swallow at the feet of the Happy Prince, the Mayor demands that a proclamation be made declaring it illegal for birds to die at the bases of statues. At the

University, the Art Professor says, “As he is no longer beautiful, he is no longer useful” (291). Gonzalez 29

After the statue is melted down, the Mayor decides that the metal be used for a statue of himself.

Nothing is changed for the better.

Although the actions of the Happy Prince and the Swallow are worthless in the sphere of art and powerless in the sphere of ethics, their feelings of love and compassion are not ignored.

God asks one of his Angels to bring him the two most precious things in the city. When the

Angel returns with the Prince’s cracked leaden heart and the dead Swallow, God says, “You have rightly chosen, for in my garden of Paradise this little bird shall sing forever more, and in my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me” (291). The Swallow gives up his Egyptian paradise and the Prince gives up his gold out of compassion for the poor but in heaven, they receive replacements that are even more beautiful because of their perfection. John Allen Quintas writes, “[Wilde] decried Victorian ethics and intransigent moral positions but not moral truths, truths of the human heart,” and compassion and love are among those truths.

Although the Swallow fails as a critic, Wilde shows his “metamorphosis” as an aesthete

(Griswold 105). Bettelheim writes that to find a “deeper meaning” in life, “one must be able to transcend the narrow confines of a self-centered existence” (3). Love purges the Swallow of his vanity and selfishness and instructs him on how to share his life with another person. He puts off his journey to Egypt for the pretty Reed, and as the Swallow courts her, he asks with “selfish imperiousness” (Griswold 104), “Shall I love you?” He leaves the Reed because he is a traveler and she cannot move from her spot by the river. Similarly, the Happy Prince is fixed in place and the Swallow is initially attracted to his beauty, but he comes to have a love he does not need to question. Every day that passes, the Swallow announces his departure, and the Happy Prince asks him to stay to carry out his mission. The Prince tells the Swallow, “The living always think that gold could make them happy” (Wilde, Happy Prince 290). He shows him the mystery of Gonzalez 30 misery and the price that is paid for beauty. The Swallow watches as the Prince gives up parts of himself, and he is moved. Even after the Happy Prince bids the Swallow to leave for Egypt, he refuses to abandon him. “You are blind now,” the Swallow says, “so I will stay with you always”

(289). Although he is not fit to survive the winter, the Swallow decides to stay as the days grow colder. Even when the Prince is eyeless and gray, the Swallow still loves him. Wilde tackles

“one of the child’s, and the artist’s earliest lessons: the proper balance between egoism and altruism” (Shewan 39). To experience the beauty of love, one must be willing to experience the ugliness of suffering to become a well-rounded individual.

The fact that the Happy Prince and the Swallow are degraded as a result of their selflessness shows the tale’s ambiguous conclusion on morality. Justin T. Jones writes, “Once

Wilde subjects one of his fairy tale characters to moral correction, that character is in danger of losing his otherworldly beauty or his love of beauty for its own sake—both gifts of the supermoral realm of art” (885). “The Happy Prince” demonstrates the improper use of art. The

Happy Prince steps out of his boundaries as a work of art so under the rules of aestheticism, he is doomed to fail. However, his failure is a symptom of a larger problem. Art can be amoral, but life cannot. Those in society—the Mayor, the Town Councilors, and the Royals—who have the power to provide assistance to the poor and restructure society to prevent poverty from flourishing do not use that power for the better. If poverty is so prevalent that a statue and a bird need to step in to alleviate it, then society is failing miserably. Wilde cleverly embeds his critique of Victorian society in the tale’s tragedy. If the British public demands that a work of art imitate reality and be used to advance a social or moral cause, then they are very much aware of their own faults. Instead of working to remedy it through the proper avenues of law and government, they place the burden of change on the arts. Suffering is prolonged when it is perceived as a gold Gonzalez 31 mine for story ideas. Wilde must have had a quiet satisfaction knowing that adults would read this tale to their children and sympathize with the Happy Prince, not catching that they too like for art to sacrifice its beauty.

Gonzalez 32

The Spectator as Art in The Picture of Dorian Gray

Wilde wrote and submitted his typescript of The Picture of Dorian Gray as a serial to

Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890. Its content troubled editor J. M. Stoddart who felt that publishing it in its entirety would damage the magazine’s reputation. Without Wilde’s consent,

Stoddart omitted words, sentences, and passages that referred to sexuality, specifically homosexuality (Frankel ix). Despite this censorship, The Picture of Dorian Gray still managed to irritate the sensitivities of the British press. For the 1891 republication as a novel, the text underwent a second revision, and this time, it was Wilde who significantly downplayed its homoerotic undertones and expanded it from thirteen to twenty chapters.

To quell the anger of the critics, Wilde attached a Preface in defense of his novel which he felt to have been misunderstood in its first appearance. Since then, The Picture of Dorian

Gray is rarely reprinted without the Preface (Frankel 237). However, the Preface has often been printed alone without its accompanying novel because it is regarded as Wilde’s “artistic credo” or his “manifesto” (Frankel 238); it outlines his aesthetic theory of art and the roles of the artist, critic, and spectator in the work of art’s making, interpretation, and reception. The Preface is key to understanding the characters’ roles not as individuals but “symbols that move in a shadowy world of wit and terror” (Nassaar 37). This chapter will reference both the Preface of the 1891 novel and the text of Wilde’s unedited typescript before submission to Lippincott’s.

While “The Happy Prince” is about the misuse of aestheticism, The Picture of Dorian

Gray is about its abuse. The protagonist Dorian Gray is a young man of immense physical beauty. He attracts the attention of Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton who represent two different aesthetic visions of art. Basil, the artist, paints his portrait, and Lord Henry, the critic, offers an interpretation of its meaning to Dorian, the spectator. This web of relations would Gonzalez 33 conform neatly within the artist/critic/spectator triad if it is not for the artist and critic’s fatal mistake of seeing the work of art and the spectator as interchangeable. This leads them to conflate the rules of art and the rules of life into a single entity, allowing their artistic theories to form their own “picture” of Dorian. The spectator is manipulated into living life like a work of art, but unbeknownst to Basil and Lord Henry, Dorian is granted a wish to exchange places with his portrait, making him a living and breathing work of art. Since he lives in the real world and not an abstract, idyllic world of art, Life “gets the upper hand” (Wilde, Decay 1053) and he is destroyed.

In the Preface, Wilde describes the role of an artist. An artist creates beautiful things and expresses everything using “thought and language” as “instruments” and “vice and virtue” as

“materials” (Wilde, Dorian 3). The artist does not use art to prove anything or communicate

“ethical sympathies” (3). In Wilde’s view, the purpose of art is to “reveal art and conceal the artist” (3). The subjects portrayed in art form “the moral life of man” (3) since they are drawn from real life. However, the “morality of art” itself is derived from how well the artist perfects life, an “imperfect medium” (3). The morality Wilde speaks of in art is not the common good/bad morality. In that sense, art is amoral. Instead, art is good when it creates a distance between itself and life, and art is bad when it closes this distance and simply imitates life.

Basil Hallward fulfills the role of the artist in The Picture of Dorian Gray; he is a talented, reclusive painter who violates these aesthetic principles as he paints Dorian Gray’s portrait. Wilde is quick to establish Basil’s curious relationship with the public within the first chapter. Basil navigates with much secrecy and cautiousness when dealing with the public. He is notorious for his “curious reserved habits,” often disappearing without telling anyone where he is going. To Basil, secrecy makes the commonest thing delightful (Wilde, Uncensored 60). He only Gonzalez 34 attends social functions to remind the public that artists are not savages, aware that avoiding ethical sympathies in art contends with England’s moralist spirit. Basil once caused a stir when he suddenly disappeared from the art scene. Excited by a potential scandal, the public formulated

“many strange conjectures” (58). In a society that interprets art as “autobiography,” his duty as an artist is to depict an “abstract sense of beauty,” (68) and as a lover of beauty, it is possible that he disappears to search for new material for his artwork.

Two months prior to the novel, Basil finds a thing of beauty. Only this time, it is not with the delight of secrecy. Out in the open, surrounded by the “overdressed dowagers” and “tedious

Academicians” (62) of high society at an event, he locks eyes with Dorian Gray and is so overcome with terror that he needs to flee. Basil tells Lord Henry that his “cowardice,” not

“conscience,” stirs him to run (63). He does not feel guilty about loving Dorian—he is afraid of the public finding out. Basil has always been his own master and has allowed nothing to influence his art, and he knows that this will change if he initiates contact with Dorian. Dorian will “absorb” his soul and art, and the whole world will know. Basil eventually does meet

Dorian, and even if he had not asked Lady Brandon to introduce him, Basil feels that they would have spoken because they were “destined to know each other” (63).

Basil reveals that he is no longer satisfied with his aesthetic theory and believes that

Dorian has the potential to help him distinguish a new theory of art. In Dorian, he sees a “fresh school” that embodies the “perfection of the spirit that is Greek” (67): the “harmony of soul and body,” (67) or in Sheldon W. Liebman’s words, “the union of feeling and form” (449). Liebman quotes Basil in the 1891 extended edition of the novel when he writes, “Dorian is the ‘visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream’” (449).

Basil is speaking about the Greek ideal, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick expands on this very ideal Gonzalez 35 in her book Epistemology of the Closet. She emphasizes the divide between Victorian Christian and Greek pagan concepts of the body and soul. In Christianity, the body, or the “flesh,” is gendered female. Partaking in its pleasures, whether it be men desiring the female body or women desiring to express their sexuality, leads to condemnation of the soul so the body must be tamed. The ancient Greeks, however, gendered the body as male and had no qualms about enjoying it (136). Basil’s portrait of Dorian Gray goes beyond the aesthetic superficiality of form and color. When he confesses his love to Dorian, Basil says, “There was love in every line, and in every touch there was passion” (Wilde, Uncensored 144). This is why Basil refuses to exhibit the portrait. It is painted with feeling, and “every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter” (61). He recalls how he was offered a great sum for a landscape but could not part with it because during its creation, Dorian Gray was seated next to him. Basil is afraid of the world knowing of his “idolatry” (144).

Basil’s convictions about art and its purpose echo those of art critic John Ruskin, one of

Wilde’s influences. According to Ruskin, a good artist has the “responsibility of a preacher”

(Ruskin, Modern xli). He must be “possessed by a vision of the world” and have a commitment to improving society through his art (Sturgis 36). Ruskin writes, “Nothing can possibly present itself to [the artist] that is not either lovely, or tractable, and shapeable into loveliness; there is no

Evil in his eyes—only Good, and that which displays good” (Selections 57). This opposes pure aestheticism which he fought “not because he feared what was lovely, but because he thought it was too important to divorce from what was good and true” (Rosenberg 21). To Basil, Dorian represents “the ideal of the body, perfect beauty, as well as the ideal of the soul, selflessness”

(Liebman 449). Christopher Nassaar writes, “The painting is Basil’s masterpiece because Dorian is the flawless manifestation of Basil’s lost innocence” (40). Dorian is everything good and Gonzalez 36 beautiful to Basil, and this is reality to the artist. Basil is aware that he must convey an “abstract sense of beauty” and understands that his painting is a violation of traditional aesthetic principles because it has been tainted with reality. However, it is never truly tainted with reality because

Basil is telling his truth, not the truth. He may feel out of place in society, but Basil, along with

Ruskin, holds the very Victorian notion that physical beauty is an indicator of moral goodness.

Basil confronts Dorian about rumors of his debauchery and refuses to believe them. He says,

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. If a wretched

man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the

moulding of his hands even…but you, Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face, and

your marvelous untroubled youth—I can’t believe anything against you. (Wilde,

Uncensored 182)

Frleta writes that Basil “selfishly” keeps Dorian away from the influence of others, not to protect him from a “bad society,” but to protect “his own artistic ideal” (19). When the painting is unveiled, Basil comes face to face with the truth and he cannot handle it. Through Dorian, Wilde challenges the idea that beauty always equates with the good; lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the true aim of art. The painting fulfills this purpose because Basil painted it with a false reality in mind, and he is punished because that false reality relays a moral, and art must be amoral.

When Lord Henry Wotton meets Dorian, he begins to understand Basil’s fascination. He determines that Dorian’s unspoiled nature can come of great use to him so he and Basil vie for

Dorian’s attention. Sheldon W. Liebman writes that although Basil Hallward threads the needle with the purple thread of doom, it is Lord Henry Wotton who weaves the thread (443). The

Preface describes his duties as a critic, stating he must “translate into another manner or a new Gonzalez 37 material his impression of beautiful things” (Wilde, Picture 3). Critics who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are “corrupt with no charm” and critics who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are “cultivated” (3). The “elect” are those “to whom beautiful things mean only

Beauty” (3). Lord Henry is both critic and aesthete, and his aesthetic theory operates within the medium of life rather than art. This is problematic because in his interpretation of the portrait, he imposes impractical, destructive standards normally reserved for art on the portrait’s living subject.

Lord Henry is an intellectual, and he arrives at his theory of human nature through years of scientific inquiry. He engages in “vivisection,” (Wilde, Uncensored 100) and having spent years vivisecting himself, he moves on to others. The field of psychology is promising to him, and he wonders if further development of the science will reveal “each little spring of life” (102).

The words “impulses” and “instincts” as they are used in The Picture of Dorian Gray hold scientific significance, especially in regard to Lord Henry’s relationship with reality.

Though not explicitly stated, Lord Henry borrows tenets of his theory from biologist

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. In his article “The Influence of Darwin on Literature,”

William Irvine discusses Darwin’s bombshell ideas and how intellectuals of the Victorian era reacted to them. Humans were not intelligently designed by a creator but were evolved by “a combination of chance, blind mechanism, and ruthless cruelty” (621). In The Descent of Man,

Darwin applies his theory of evolution to the human race and attempts to explain common notions of morality. The capacity to feel sympathy for suffering is an instinct, and an accompanying action performed in an attempt to alleviate suffering is also instinctive. Sympathy. coupled with action among members of a community. allowed it to develop. As human civilization flourished, actions were “intellectualized” and humans connected them to good Gonzalez 38 morals (Boddice 12-13). Biologist Thomas Huxley was comfortable with the fact that “man was simply a more intelligent ape who had begun to progress in civilization by learning to speak and to obey some instincts and control others” (Irvine 622), the “others” being immoral instincts.

Poet Laureate of Great Britain Alfred, Lord Tennyson was “haunted” by the theory and feared its

“hedonistic consequences” (623). Irvine writes, “The Origin of Species had clearly indicated that man was an animal. Those who accepted this proposition were confronted with the ancient naturalistic alternatives: man should seek his destiny or happiness in terms either of epicurean pleasure or of stoic reason” (622-623).

Lord Henry’s very first flirtation toward Dorian is to discourage him from philanthropy because he is too “charming” (Wilde, Uncensored 72). According to the theory of natural selection, nature selects for those who have favorable attributes. Irvine writes that in essence, evolution is “the mass slaughter of failures” (621). Similarly, Gilbert in “The Critic as Artist” points out that humanitarians are devoted to “securing the survival of the failure,” (Wilde 1042) a nod to “survival of the fittest.” Lord Henry does not deny that man is subject to the same forces of nature as any other organism. The poor are “hopeless failures,” and Dorian should not waste

“the gold of his days” on altruistic efforts (Wilde, Uncensored 79). Lord Henry also acknowledges that civilization necessitates the suppression of certain impulses. Humans are

“haunted by the memory of the passions of which [they] were too much afraid” (79) so Lord

Henry encourages Dorian to be fearless and search for “new sensations” (79).

In line with this thinking, Lord Henry’s theory takes up Walter Pater’s theories of art, published in his Studies of the History of the Renaissance in 1873, intending it as a defense of aestheticism. He offered interpretations of works of art produced during the Italian and French

Renaissance that centered around “impressions,” the effects a work of art may have on oneself. Gonzalez 39

Pater also identified the period’s revival of Hellenism as its most significant distinction. Despite the book’s influence on art theory, it became more notable, even infamous, for its Conclusion in which Pater’s theory crosses over from art into life. Life is but a “short day of frost and sun” and the most effective way to make the most out of it is to gather impressions through experiences.

As to what kind of experiences, Pater did not discriminate: “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end” (119). He urged others to “be forever testing new opinions” and

“courting new impressions” without giving in to the “facile orthodoxies” of others or one’s own

(120). He dismissed personal accountability:

The theory, or idea, or system, which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this

experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some

abstract morality we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has

no real claim upon us. (120)

For this reason, the book became popular with young people. Although Pater removed the

Conclusion from the second edition of the book, he could not take back the influence he had on

Wilde. Lord Henry adopts the language of Studies of the History of the Renaissance and becomes a Pater-like figure, feeding Dorian ideas and setting him loose on the world. Hearing Dorian passionately declare his love for Sybil amuses him, and through an internal monologue, his intentions are revealed:

Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect,

the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was

the effect of Art, and chiefly the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the

passions and intellect. But now and then a complex personality took the place and

assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, Life having its Gonzalez 40

elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting (Wilde, Uncensored

101).

Lord Henry takes it upon himself to be the complex personality who unveils all of life’s secrets to the young Dorian Gray, a “brainless, beautiful thing” to look at when there are no flowers in winter (59). Like Basil, Lord Henry wants a reinstitution of the Hellenic ideal of harmony of the body and soul. He wants man to “give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream” (74). Sedgwick writes that the language of his manifesto is “less persuasion than seduction” (137):

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it- and your soul grows

sick with longing…You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-

white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have

filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain

your cheek with shame (Wilde, Uncensored 74-75).

In calling desire “temptation” and imagining its violation of Dorian’s “rose-red youth” and

“rose-white boyhood,” Lord Henry uses a “seductive rhetorical force” that depends on society’s

“(unnamable) prohibitions attached specifically to the beautiful male body” (Sedgwick 137).

Naturally, Dorian’s beauty and youth will fade with time and so will his fiery passions and impulses. This is the ugly truth Lord Henry reads in the portrait. Measured against the standards outlined in the Preface, Lord Henry is “corrupt without charm” and this makes him a bad critic.

Comfortable with his life, he prefers to assume a passive role and observe how Dorian will choose to carry out his theories.

Much of the text is devoted to developing how Basil and Lord Henry think about Dorian but little attention is given to how Dorian sees himself. The Preface offers detailed descriptions Gonzalez 41 of the roles of the artist and critic but not much is said about how the public can see art for themselves. Dorian is the public, or the spectator since he is a lone figure. Wilde simply writes,

“It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors” (Picture 4). As “the most magical of mirrors” (Wilde, Uncensored 136), Dorian’s portrait fulfills its duty for him both before and after he switches places with it and transforms one work of art to another.

Before meeting Basil and Lord Henry, Dorian’s mind is like a blank slate; he demonstrates nothing particularly subversive or scandalous in his reputation. While Basil’s disappearances make for hot topics in conversation and Lord Henry’s aphorisms intend to provoke reactions, Dorian is the odd one out because he is a participant of mainstream Victorian culture and does nothing interesting. He has no occupation because he lives off his inheritance, and his only talent is playing the piano. Dorian is a favorite among dowagers; Lord Henry’s aunt

Lady Agatha sings duets with him at charity events, and Lady Brandon, who thinks of him as a

“charming boy” (64) invites him to a gathering at her home. It is at this gathering where Dorian meets Basil and begins his initiation into knowledge and experience.

Basil is enamored with Dorian’s “simple and beautiful nature” (70) but he reveals one damning personality flaw. He tells Lord Henry, “Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain.” Dorian makes him feel that he has given away his “whole soul” to a man who “treats it as a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity” (68). Though, Basil admits that he flatters him “dreadfully.”

Dorian, perhaps unconsciously, understands the power dynamics of his relationship with Basil.

Basil’s excessive flattery makes him appear sycophantic and unworthy of respect, and Dorian treats him accordingly with disdain. This is a crack in his porcelain exterior; it signals his Gonzalez 42 capacity for cruelty and foreshadows his treatment of those who love him, namely Basil and

Sybil Vane.

When Lord Henry makes his appearance, he drives a wedge between Dorian and Basil.

Dorian gravitates towards Lord Henry because he performs the more useful function as critic.

While Basil makes Dorian aware of his beauty, Lord Henry makes him aware of beauty’s impermanence. In a retrospective statement, Dorian makes a distinction between the two:

Years ago, when I was a boy, you met me, devoted yourself to me, flattered me, and

taught me to be vain of my good looks. One day you introduced me to a friend of yours,

who explained to me the wonder of youth, and you finished a portrait of me that revealed

to me the wonder of beauty. (188)

With regards to life, “beauty” is not as applicable alone as it is when it is coupled with “youth,” a word that implies a limited amount of time and warrants action. Since Lord Henry’s specialty is life, he supersedes Basil as an authority figure to Dorian.

Dorian may have grown weary of Basil’s flattery, but that does not mean he dislikes flattery. Lord Henry flatters him, too, but he extends his flattery below the surface. He catches

Dorian inhaling the scent of lilacs and approves: “You are quite right to do that…Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul…You are a wonderful creature. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know” (77). To have Dorian be more inclined to act on Lord Henry’s words, Lord Henry needs to give him a false sense of autonomy and make Dorian feel that he is the one in control.

When Basil finishes the portrait, Dorian looks at it “as if he had recognized himself for the first time” (81). Art mirrors the spectator, and with Lord Henry’s influence, Dorian recognizes his own fading youth: “If it was I who were to be always young, and the picture that Gonzalez 43 were to grow old! For this—for this—I would give everything! Yes: there is nothing in the whole world I would not give!” (82) Although Basil and Lord Henry have been seeing Dorian as a theoretical work of art, it is in this moment that his wish is granted, and Dorian literally becomes the work of art. This is not revealed until he makes his first mistake later in the novel.

Dorian comes to another realization about himself—that Basil only likes him for his beauty. Dorian has already shown irritation with Basil’s excessive compliments but Lord

Henry’s ideas allow Dorian to articulate the true nature of his relationship with Basil. He tells

Basil, “I am less to you than your ivory Hermes, or your silver Faun. You will like them always.

How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose” (82). Basil rebukes Lord

Henry for giving Dorian ideas, but he shrugs and says, “It is the real Dorian Gray, that is all”

(82). Lord Henry has a point. He does not deny the reality of aging and this is why he offers the aesthetic alternative of practicing a “new Hedonism.” Still, Lord Henry relies on broad suggestions that are not well-defined, and his aim is to see how Dorian will internalize his words.

The critic’s interpretation tramples over the artist’s intention and is successfully imparted to the spectator. From this point on, Dorian starts drifting away from Basil, preferring the company of Lord Henry who instructs him on how to live as an aesthete. Dorian adopts Lord

Henry’s teachings as his own so much so that his speech is no longer his own. Lord Henry’s wife

Victoria recognizes one of her husband’s maxims in conversation with Dorian and says, “Ah, that is one of Harry’s views, isn’t it, Mr. Gray?” (89) This takes place only one month into Lord

Henry and Dorian’s friendship. John Paul Riquelme notes how Wilde uses the process of “dark doubling and reversal” throughout the text to comment on this Paterian aestheticism (497). He writes, “The duplication produces not a repetition of Pater but a new version of his views that says what he cannot or will not articulate” (497). This is demonstrated through Wilde evoking Gonzalez 44 the myth of Narcissus and Echo to demonstrate Dorian’s doubling and reversal of Lord Henry.

Lord Henry calls Dorian “Narcissus” because of his beauty, but Dorian is better suited as

“Echo.” As Lord Henry’s “empty echo,” Dorian is his double and repeats his views with no meaningful transformation or counterargument (507). Just as echoes repeat only the last few words of what is said and distorts them, Dorian distorts Lord Henry’s teachings when he repeats them through practice. Since Lord Henry is committed to words, Dorian’s actions are the reversal of his words and expose their hidden corruption. The irony is that even though this is true, it is exposed through Dorian’s portrait which remains hidden. Since Lord Henry does not know the full extent of Dorian’s actions, his data is incomplete so any conclusions he draws from his experiments are false.

Lord Henry inspires Dorian to set out on adventures and roam the streets of the East End at night. He recalls how Lord Henry describes London “with its myriads of people, its splendid sinners, and its sordid sins” and concludes that among this, there must be something delightful for him (Wilde, Uncensored 92). Dorian stumbles upon a shoddy theatre, and now that his artistic tastes are refined, he finds that every aspect of his theatre experience repulses him. His private box is “horrid”, the stalls are “dingy,” the drop scene is “vulgar,” and the orchestra is

“dreadful”. The house is decorated with Cupids and cornucopias like a “third-rate wedding cake.” Romeo and Juliet is being staged, and Dorian is offended to see Shakespeare performed in a “wretched hole of a place” (94). But Dorian’s search for beauty among the hideousness is over for the night once he finds it in Sybil Vane. She is the actress who plays the lead female in every

Shakespeare play, and this time, she is Juliet.

Dorian describes Sybil as if he is writing a poem. She has “a little flower-like face, a small Greek head with plaited coils of dark brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion, Gonzalez 45 lips that were like the petals of a rose” (94). One moment, her voice is like the “tremulous ecstasy that one hears just before dawn when nightingales are singing.” In the next moment, it is like the “wild passion of violins.” Sybil’s beauty enthralls Dorian but only because her beauty is attached to her acting. Lord Henry is conscious of this, but chooses to remain silent because he does not wish to intervene in his experiment. Before he and Basil go to see her performance, he tells Basil in passing, “Your portrait of him has quickened his appreciation of the personal appearance of other people” (105). It is Lord Henry’s interpretation of the portrait that clouds

Dorian’s understanding of Sybil, not Basil’s portrait. In an act of detachment, Lord Henry shifts the blame away from himself. Now, Dorian cannot separate Sybil the artist from Sybil the art, and this is evident in his description of her art:

One evening she is Rosalind, and the next evening she is Imogen. I have seen her die in

the gloom of an Italian Tomb, sucking the poison from her lover’s lips. I have watched

her wandering through the forest of Arden, disguised as a pretty boy in hose and doublet

and dainty cap. She has been mad, and has come into the presence of a guilty King, and

given him rue to wear, and bitter herbs to taste of. She has been innocent, and the black

hands of jealousy have crushed her reed-like throat. I have seen her in every age and in

every costume. (94-95)

Dorian sees Sybil as an artistic figure who transcends the confines of time. Her very first words to him display a childlike innocence: “You look more like a Prince” (97). This amuses Dorian who observes that he is seen as “merely as a person in a play” because Sybil knows “nothing of life” (97)—an ironic statement coming from Dorian. All she knows is art, and this is why she identifies Dorian as a character straight out of one of the plays she knows so well. Gonzalez 46

Sybil embarrasses Dorian in front of his friends with an awful performance. It is not her

“nervousness”; it was “simply bad art” (114). Getting up to leave before the third act, Lord

Henry calls her a “commonplace, mediocre actress” (115). He tells Dorian to take comfort in knowing that he will have a wonderful time initiating her into a life of reckless pleasure as Lord

Henry has done with Dorian: “If she knows so little about life as she does about acting, she will be a delightful experience” (115).

After the play, Dorian confronts Sybil for having made him “suffer” (116). Sybil tells him that she had believed that her acting was the “one reality” of her life, but after meeting

Dorian, she experiences love for the first time. To those who are curious about Dorian, Sybil refuses to disclose his name, only referring to him as her “Prince Charming.” She does this because she has a secret; Sybil learns that there exists a reality apart from her art and that it is the true reality. Sybil testifies to love’s inability to be tamed. She tells Dorian, “I might mimic a passion that I do not feel, but I cannot mimic one that burns me like fire” (117). Now that she knows love, to mimic it on stage is “profanation” (117). Sybil is aware of reality not being mirrored in her art, and by definition, this qualifies as aesthetic art. This is why Dorian is attracted to her, but the moment she rejects the falseness of her art and accepts the reality of love, he rejects her in turn. As a work of art himself, Dorian cannot permit reality to enter his world if he wants to remain beautiful.

Dorian has achieved Lord Henry’s level of cold detachment as a critic. The news of

Sybil’s suicide by poison does not affect Dorian, and this disturbs him. He confesses to Lord

Henry that he cannot feel because he sees her death as “a wonderful ending to a wonderful play”

(130). Dorian arrives at this conclusion on his own and this impresses Lord Henry. Seeking to reassure Dorian, Lord Henry plays the critic and offers an impressionistic interpretation of Gonzalez 47

Sybil’s death. Since Dorian only sees her as a work of art, Sybil “never lived, and so she has never really died” (133). She simply “played her last part” as a “strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy” (133). Though he cannot feel it, Dorian is aware that he was “terribly cruel” to her, but Lord Henry downplays this, quipping, “I believe that women appreciate cruelty more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts” (132).

By the time Basil visits Dorian, any trace of guilt is extinguished. As a fellow artist, Basil has always respected Sybil because he believes that they share the Ruskinian goal of

“spiritualizing” the age (112). He observes her influence on Dorian and considers the possibility that she can also change society the same way. To those who have lived “sordid and ugly” lives,

Sybil can instill a “sense of beauty.” To those with hardened hearts, she can “strip them of their selfishness” and make them cry “over sorrows that are not their own” (112). Basil is distraught over her death, but when he runs over to Dorian’s home and finds him nonchalant, he is horrified. Dorian defends himself: “A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, enjoy them, and to dominate them” (138). To feel sorrow and love means to yield to a force greater than oneself. Dorian opts out of reality because he is not willing to give up his self- control, and Sybil disgusts him because of her willingness to submit to life. Lord Henry pinpoints the exact reason why Dorian falls out of love with her: “The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away” (133). Lord Henry and

Dorian want to think of themselves as detached; in reality, they handle Sybil’s death with insensitivity.

Dorian soon learns that there is a grave difference between Lord Henry and himself.

While Lord Henry can always be detached, Dorian can never be detached because his conscience Gonzalez 48 manifests in his portrait. He notices the first blemish when he comes home after rejecting Sybil, not knowing that she has committed suicide. His smile in the portrait is marked with “a touch of cruelty” (122). As he wonders if he treated her too harshly, he vacillates between regret and pride. Dorian’s first thought is to blame Sybil: “It was the girl’s fault, not his” (121). As Dorian looks at its “beautiful marred face,” “a sense of infinite pity, not for himself, but for the painted image of himself, came over him” (122). He finally resolves to ask Sybil for forgiveness and proceed with the marriage but this attempt at doing good has a dimension of selfishness.

However, after Lord Henry interprets Sybil’s death, Dorian becomes more comfortable with his marred portrait. He decides that he will live his life and take “real pleasure” (136) in watching it morph as it filters out the shame of his actions. The portrait that earlier reveals his beauty to him now reveals his sin. As “the most magical of mirrors,” art literally mirrors the spectator (136).

One day after Sybil’s death, Dorian receives another declaration of love. Though Lord

Henry and the reader are privy to Basil’s secret within the first chapter, it is still concealed from

Dorian until Chapter Seven, the novel’s halfway point. After declaring a month earlier that he would not allow the portrait to be exhibited, Basil now changes his mind and Dorian panics. He then remembers what Lord Henry once said to him, “half seriously and half in jest,” “If you want to have an interesting quarter of an hour, get Basil to tell you why he won’t exhibit your picture”

(143). As his terror dissipates, Dorian assumes a persona of detached curiosity in preparation for what is to come. Sensing an opportunity for amusement, Dorian prods Basil into baring the secret of his soul. Basil makes this confession: “I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly. I was jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself” (144). Dorian feels nothing but “infinite pity” for Basil because he has allowed himself to be “dominated.” Like Sybil, Basil is willing to give up part of himself to maintain Gonzalez 49

Dorian. While Sybil gives up her art, Basil risks his reputation, which is more serious. He tells

Dorian, “You don’t know what it cost me to tell you all that I have told you” (146). Dorian’s reply is dismissive and heartless: “What have you told me? Simply that you felt that you liked me too much” (146). Dorian does not recognize the full weight of Basil’s sacrifice because he does not recognize love. Though Dorian demonstrates a capacity for cruelty before falling under

Lord Henry’s influence, aestheticism has exploited this and has rendered him unable to love.

Carroll writes, “As an aesthete devoted solely to sensual pleasures, Wilde’s protagonist repudiates the idea of affectional bonds, and it is that repudiation which produces the mood of guilt and horror in which the novel culminates” (288). Since Dorian loves nobody but himself and has no conscience, he begins to hurt others for pleasure.

About a decade later, Basil encounters Dorian and confronts him about rumors of his debauchery. Dorian, tired of Basil’s illusions, unveils the portrait which is now beyond recognition.

An exclamation of horror broke from Hallward’s lips as he saw in the dim light the

hideous thing on the canvas leering at him. There was something in its expression that

filled him with disgust and loathing….The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely

marred that marvelous beauty. There was still some gold in the thinning hair and some

scarlet on the sensual lips. The sodden eyes had kept something of the liveliness of their

blue, the noble curves had not yet passed entirely away from the chiseled nostrils and

from plastic throat…It was some foul parody, some infamous, ignoble satire. (Wilde,

Uncensored 187)

While Basil takes in the full horror of the portrait, Dorian once again assumes a detached persona. Dorian watches him with the “passion of a spectator” and adopts a “strange expression Gonzalez 50 that is on the faces of those who are absorbed in a play” (188). There is a disconnect between

Basil and Dorian; Dorian cannot recognize the weight and sincerity of Basil’s emotions because he cannot be made to feel guilty. Basil begs Dorian to pray with him for repentance and says, “I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished” (189). This calls us back to Chapter One, when Basil tells Henry that Dorian’s portrait will expose his idolatry. He speaks of these sins in a Christian sense but they double as sins in the realm of art. Basil infuses the portrait with love and goodness and Dorian lives his life with detachment and apathy. Simply put, Basil subjects his art to reality and Dorian subjects his reality to art, and they are both wrong. By appealing to his conscience, Basil is forcing reality back into Dorian’s life, and for this, Dorian stabs Basil to death.

Dorian sends for Alan Campbell, a reclusive chemist who can dispose of Basil’s body.

Wilde does not explicitly state the nature of their relationship but he heavily implies that Dorian and Alan are ex-lovers. Five years prior, they had been great friends, “almost inseparable” (197).

They bonded over music and their “intimacy” lasted for eighteen months (198). Now, whenever they met in society, “it was only Dorian Gray who smiled: Alan Campbell never did” (198). The public notes that Alan has changed. He is “strangely melancholy” at times, always leaves early when Dorian comes to parties, and has entirely given up music (198). Alan is loath to see Dorian but he must obey Dorian if he wants his career and reputation spared. Dorian intends to blackmail him with a letter, and though its contents are not disclosed, it is clear that the letter exposes Alan’s secret. He tells Alan to look “purely from the scientific point of view” (201), instructing him to emotionally detach himself from the situation so it will not interfere with his actions. Alan disposes of Basil’s body and Dorian thanks him: “You have saved me from ruin,

Alan” (206). There is a bitter irony in that statement because it is Dorian who “saves” Alan from Gonzalez 51 ruin. Alan has a guilty conscience because he is complicit in Dorian’s crime, so he commits suicide.

Hetty Merton, a beautiful village girl, is Dorian’s new conquest. He planned to take her away from her home and ruin her, but he decides against it, hoping that his good action will reverse some of the portrait’s damage. It does not, however, because Dorian once again does good only out of vanity. He cannot feel condemned or absolved for his actions because he has no conscience; his only instinct is to preserve the portrait’s beauty. Though the portrait’s blemishes are results of an exercise of his own free will, Dorian denies responsibility even until the very end. He “could not forgive” Basil for painting the portrait. The murder was “simply the madness of a moment,” (215) and Alan Campbell’s suicide is by his own hand and has nothing to do with

Dorian. Dorian looks at the portrait and makes a decision to put an end to this reality: “It had been like a conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it” (216). When he slashes it from top to bottom, Dorian’s conscience flows back into him. As he lays there

“withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage,” the portrait shows him “in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty” (217). Beauty no longer belongs to Dorian because he is no longer a work of art. He passes back into the sphere of reality and reassumes his burden.

Though Basil and Dorian are punished for their transgressions, Lord Henry remains unscathed because he submits to a life of contemplation and practices nothing of what he preaches. He knows better than to live according to his artistic theory that will have disastrous consequences on his social life. The only misfortune that befalls him at the conclusion of the novel is mundane compared to the grisly deaths of his friends: his wife leaves him for a pianist.

With all his epigrams on the topic of marriage, Lord Henry should have expected it, and perhaps he did because he takes the situation in stride. Lord Henry’s aestheticism is a way to sidestep Gonzalez 52 reality, not conquer it as Dorian believes. Joseph Carroll writes, “What Pater and Lord Henry fail to understand, is that the ‘self’ cannot be cultivated or ‘developed’ in isolation from its relations with others. Nor can it be developed with an emphasis on isolated moments of sensation; it bears within it the burden of all its past acts” (295). Riquelme suggests that just as Dorian is Lord

Henry’s echo, The Picture of Dorian Gray is Wilde’s echo of Pater. Wilde does not reproduce

Pater’s theories but presents them “darkly, in shades of gray” (504). With Basil and Ruskin’s theories rendered ineffective as well, Wilde emerges as the Dorian figure to both Pater and

Ruskin in the battle for aesthetic thought.

Although there is a glaring difference between Basil and Lord Henry, to say that they simply represent the tension between good and evil would dismiss the novel’s intricacies. In his analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Houston J. Baker recalls a point Wilde makes in “The

Critic as Artist.” Wilde advocates not for the separation of “conscience” and “instinct,” but for a reconciliation between the two (Baker 355). Dorian is destroyed because he cannot find the proper balance. Had he met Mrs. Erlynne of Lady Windermere’s Fan, the focus of the next chapter, Dorian would have learned how to live on his own terms and recognize love when it finds him.

Gonzalez 53

The Artist as Critic in Lady Windermere’s Fan

Following the success of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde wrote Lady Windermere’s

Fan in 1891. It would be the first of four society plays. Christopher Nassaar notes that the play’s scope of high society, its witty exchanges, and its demonstration and critique of social norms has its roots in comedy of the Restoration era, a time during which drama was reconceived after a long period of Puritan rule (75). Similarly, Victorian England was experiencing a revival in drama starting in the 1860s, developing in the 1870s and 1880s, and reaching its height by the

1890s. Wilde endeavored to bring “real life” on stage with Lady Windermere’s Fan, hoping it would counter the “absurd melodrama” produced earlier in the era (Nassaar 75).

Unlike “The Happy Prince” and The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lady Windermere’s Fan does not directly involve the interpretation of a physical work of art in the artist/critic/public triad. The play focuses on the aesthetic life, so life itself is a work of art. Lady Windermere is an artist who operates as her own critic. She has allowed the moralistic public be her critic and shape the way she sees herself. When she learns that her husband may be having an affair with a fallen woman by the name of Mrs. Erlynne, her interpretation of her life falls apart. She seeks the assistance of Lord Darlington, a critic who offers a destructive, amoral reinterpretation better suited for a painting than a person. Mrs. Erlynne, the true critic, steps in before Lady

Windermere suffers from the consequences of accepting Lord Darlington’s offer to flee England with him. Through Mrs. Erlynne, Wilde offers an aestheticism that respects life as the dominating force yet retains its devotion to beauty and individuality. Interweaved with this is a demonstration of the disparities between men and women in both aesthetic living and Victorian society. Gonzalez 54

Lady Margaret Windermere is a typical member of mainstream Victorian society. She believes that England is in a state of moral collapse and that she is of a small elect that still upholds traditional notions of right and wrong. Lady Windermere tells Darlington that she was taught “what the world is forgetting, the difference that there is between what is right and what is wrong” (Wilde, Lady 387). She thinks of herself as “something of a Puritan” (387), conceiving good and bad as absolute truths and casting judgments on others.

Lady Windermere is aware that she, too, is subject to others’ scrutiny as well and fiercely guards her reputation from blemish. Her house is widely respected because she does not welcome anyone about whom there is scandal (389). The Duchess of Berwick lauds it as “one of the few houses in London” where she feels safe bringing her unmarried daughter and her wayward husband (389). Before admitting Lord Darlington into her home in Act I, she tells her servant Parker that she is at home to anyone who calls (385), indicating that she does not want to give the semblance that she is having a private audience with a man when her husband is not home. Lady Windermere reproaches him for his flirtatious behavior the previous night and bids that he not repeat it at her ball (386).

Lord Darlington is not fazed, though, and he presents a seemingly hypothetical situation of moral ambiguity to gauge how far she is willing to compromise her Puritan standards.

However, Lady Windermere allows of no compromise (387). She does not believe that if a husband is engaging in an affair that the wife has the right to be “vile” and seek the company of another man as a form of retribution (388). Her use of the word “vile” is extreme, as Lord

Darlington notes, because it implies that the wife chooses to seek company because of her wicked nature, not because she is wronged. She believes that neither women nor men should be Gonzalez 55 forgiven for committing a fault, and they should make no attempt to rejoin the society that ruined them or rejected them (395).

Lady Windermere overestimates her own moral aptitude and extends that idealization to her husband Lord Arthur Windermere, and the public perpetuates this idealization. Lord and

Lady Windermere are a power couple in their social circle so the scandal that touches them stirs curiosity and pity. Gossip travels fast; Lady Windermere is the last among the “distressed” society women to know about her own husband’s supposed affair (391). The Duchess of

Berwick is the one who delivers the news to Lady Windermere, and she lets her know that the other society women sympathize with her as they look upon Lord Windermere as “being such a model husband” (391). Lady Windermere expresses her disbelief at several points and believes that he loves her too much to be incapable of infidelity. The Duchess recalls how she in her youth “was like that once” (392) and gladly takes it upon herself to dismiss her pure ideals.

However, the Duchess’s alternatives are no better. The public enforces double standards and believes that men are naturally inclined to cheat on their wives. Since all men are

“monsters,” their wives must learn how to manage their wandering husbands. The Duchess says,

“Men don’t matter. With women it is different. We’re good. Some of us at least” (389). When

Lord Windermere asks his wife to invite Mrs. Erlynne to her birthday party that evening to help her reenter society, Lady Windermere refuses because that would signal her endorsement of a scandalous woman to the public. She plans to smack Mrs. Erlynne with her fan if she makes an appearance, telling her husband, “There is not a good woman in London who would not applaud me.” (396). Lady Windermere’s Fan challenges this flawed moral system and proves it to be ineffective when utilized to evaluate human lives. Gonzalez 56

Lord Darlington marks the first appearance of the aesthete, a recurring character type, in

Wilde’s four society plays. Lord Darlington is followed by Lord George Illingworth of A Woman of No Importance, then by Lord Arthur Goring of An Ideal Husband, and lastly by Algernon

Moncrieff of The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde’s aesthetes vary in temperament and beliefs, and he subverts the notion that the aesthete must be a static, detached character who abides by stringent guidelines. While Lord Goring and Algernon are amusing, well-adjusted characters who stay true to themselves while loving generously, Lord Darlington and Lord

Illingworth are men who have not found that balance and gravitate toward an extreme aestheticism.

Lord Darlington assumes the role of the critic for the first half of the play. His manner and “parading” of “Pater-like phrases” (Ellman 363) recall Lord Henry Wotton of The Picture of

Dorian Gray. Lord Darlington seeks to shock people with paradoxes and subversions of social conventions. Lady Windermere and her peers believe that they are the last refuge for morality in the age, but Lord Darlington has a different perspective: “Nowadays so many conceited people go about Society pretending to be good, that I think it shows rather a sweet and modest disposition to pretend to be bad” (Wilde, Lady 386). He finds it absurd to “divide people into good and bad,” preferring to sort them according to how much charm or tediousness they possess

(388). Philip K. Cohen notes that “the amoral alternative criterion he offers resembles that of beauty” criticized in The Picture of Dorian Gray (186). As with Lord Henry, Lord Darlington is charming, and no one takes him seriously. He is not known to execute his philosophy, and his musings are regarded as delightful prattle to listen to over tea. Lady Windermere genuinely thinks him better than most other men, and the Duchess says, “What a charming, wicked creature. I like him so much” (Wilde, Lady 390). Gonzalez 57

The public greatly underestimates Lord Darlington’s influence. He steps in to “console”

Lady Windermere at her most vulnerable and instructs her on how to interpret her own life.

Ellman writes that the difference between Lord Darlington and Lord Henry Wotton is that Lord

Darlington means what he says and honestly believes that Lord Windermere is wronging Lady

Windermere (363-364). To stir her into action, he takes her words from Act I, twists them, and throws them back at her to justify her running away with him. She claims that life’s purification is sacrifice, so Lord Darlington imagines what it would be like if she does not take the initiative:

“In a week you will be driving with this woman in the Park. She will be your constant guest— your dearest friend. You would endure anything rather than break with one blow this monstrous tie” (Wilde, Lady 404). Sacrifice implies a submission to another person that one deems to be more worthy of oneself. Lady Windermere would be sacrificing her happiness for the happiness of her husband and his mistress—a humiliating choice because she thinks highly of herself.

Lord Darlington tells her, “One has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely-- or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands” (404). He tempts her with individualism and the prospect of living her life on her own terms, and Lady Windermere is susceptible to it. Having lived two years of marriage according to the terms of another individual, her own life crumbles when the myth she created around him is dispelled. Lord Darlington’s plea for Lady Windermere to act on her desires is reminiscent of Lord Henry’s insistence on Dorian seizing the moment. He tells her,

“You said once you would make no compromise with things. Make none now. Be Brave! Be yourself!” (404)

Lord Darlington holds no illusions about society’s power and admits that its voice matters a great deal. However, his loss is nothing compared to what Lady Windermere will lose. Gonzalez 58

Women are held to higher standards than men, and she will take a hard fall. It is not known if

Lord Darlington intends on abandoning her once they leave England. However, we can look to

Mrs. Erlynne’s life to form a prediction. Her seducer took her away from her home only to abandon her. Twenty years later, he remains anonymous while judgements are still being heaped on Mrs. Erlynne. In a similar way, Lord Darlington will emerge unscathed and Lady

Windermere will never be permitted to reenter society. The aesthetic life favors men over women, and Lord Darlington is not conscious of the fact that he is a man and he will not suffer as much for “being himself” as Lady Windermere will.

Even if Lord Windermere does not love her, Lady Windermere will be abandoning her six-month-old child. Strangely, she does not think of her child even once. Lady Windermere is hosting a ball celebrating her twenty-first birthday, or her “coming-of-age” as she calls it. There could have not been a more appropriate occasion to provide a backdrop for her self-discovery and initiation into experience. Lady Windermere is “afraid of being [herself]” (404), and here, she recognizes that her desire to do as she pleases is coming from within herself. Lord

Darlington simply helps her to realize it. She is afraid because she is confronting the very instincts she has been taught to stifle, and she is uncomfortable about learning the breadth of her capabilities as an individual. When Lady Windermere leaves a letter for her husband before running off to Lord Darlington’s home, she rationalizes her decision by asserting her power: “It is he who has broken the bond of marriage—not I. I only break its bondage” (408). Sitting in his chambers, she starts to reconsider: “But will he love me always, this man to whom I am giving my life? What do I bring him? Lips that have lost the note of joy, eyes that are blinded by tears, chill hands and icy heart. I bring him nothing” (410). Dejected, she concludes that her actions have made her life “hideous.” Gonzalez 59

Mrs. Erlynne intercedes and becomes the critic of the play’s second half. Particular about her looks and attuned to beauty, Mrs. Erlynne is another mode of the aesthete. Rodney Shewan calls her an adventuriére, or social adventuress, borrowing the term from George Meredith’s An

Essay on Comedy (158). Meredith describes the character type:

She is clever, and a certain diversion exists in the united scheme for confounding her.

The object of this person is to reinstate herself in the decorous world; and either, having

accomplished this purpose through deceit, she has a nostalgie de la boue, that eventually

casts her back into it, or she is exposed in her course of deception when she is about to

gain her end (96-97).

Wilde makes the adventuriére a dandy, “a figure not merely capable of pleading her cause against convention, but whose life embodies a criticism of convention” (Shewan 158). Stage directions indicate that she makes her entrance at Lady Windermere’s ball “very beautifully dressed and very dignified,” and she “sails” into the room as if it is her own (Wilde, Lady 400-

401). Her first sentence to Lady Windermere is a compliment on her illuminated terrace and how it reminds her of “Prince Doria’s in Rome” (401). Like an “édition de luxe of a wicked French novel,” Mrs. Erlynne conducts herself with confidence and dignity, and not a hint of shame darkens her aura (402). The awareness and astuteness that colors her dialogue sets her apart from the other women as it reflects the exclusive knowledge she has gained over years of looking from the outside in. Mrs. Erlynne knows exactly what to say to the society women to earn their trust.

She tells the Duchess of Berwick that she disproves of people marrying more than once, and whatever she says to Lady Jedburgh pleases her so immensely that she is invited into her home for the coming Thursday. Mrs. Erlynne returns to Lord Windermere and says, laughing, “What a bore is it to have to be civil to these old dowagers!” (402). Gonzalez 60

Disparagingly known as “that woman,” Mrs. Erlynne is Lord Windermere’s alleged mistress. Society is ignorant of the truth, and this is best for all parties involved. If the public knows, shame will befall Lady Windermere and Mrs. Erlynne will always be barred from reentering society. Mrs. Erlynne abandoned her husband and her infant daughter to run off with her lover who abandoned her. Twenty years later, she stands before her now grown daughter,

Lady Windermere, having lived half of her life branded as a fallen woman. Much like Lord

Henry Wotton and Dorian Gray, Mrs. Erlynne practices emotional restraint to cope with reality.

She distances herself from her own actions, past and present. To suffer needlessly over decisions that cannot be retracted is pointless, and the only option is for her to move forward. Mrs. Erlynne does not share conventional notions of repentance, telling Windermere that vowing to live as a nun or a hospital nurse for the rest of her life are ideas of “silly modern novels” (425). To live a life of repentance allows the world to know that she has made a mistake and that she refuses to let it go, and her refusal to let go only encourages the world to always see her for her mistake.

Like a true aesthete, she says. “What consoles one nowadays is not repentance, but pleasure”

(425).

Mrs. Erlynne takes the initiative and blackmails her son-in-law into reintroducing her into high society. When Lord Windermere confronts her about it, she is indifferent. Shrugging her shoulders, she says, “I saw my chance, it is true, and took it” (424). Mrs. Erlynne does not acknowledge the ethics of the act of blackmail. Instead, she makes a purely aesthetic judgement, calling it an “ugly” and “vulgar” word. It is something she feels that she must do to lift herself out of poverty, and she never expected her actions to yield negative consequences, as she depended on the love Lord Windermere has for his wife to protect all parties involved. Had it not been for the public, her business with him would have been carried out in secrecy. Gonzalez 61

Now, for the first time in her life, Mrs. Erlynne’s feelings betray her aesthetic sensibilities. When she finds Lady Windermere’s break-up letter to her husband, a love she never knew she had for her daughter rises to the surface of her being. The stage directions for Mrs.

Erlynne’s character in the final two acts dictate more than once that in moments of high emotion, she “assumes the dandy’s mask” (Shewan 163) and never allows others to witness the full extent of her feelings. Lady Windermere rejects her efforts to take her back home and says with great contempt, “You talk as if you had a heart. Women like you have no hearts. Heart is not in you.

You are bought and sold” (413). Before replying, Mrs. Erlynne “starts with a gesture of pain.

Then restrains herself, and comes over to where Lady Windermere is sitting. As she speaks, she stretches out her hands towards her, but does not dare to touch her” (413). When her daughter bursts into tears and holds out her hands to her “helplessly, as a child might do,” Mrs. Erylnne

“is about to embrace her. Then restrains herself. There is a look of wonderful joy in her face”

(413). In Act Four, Lord Windermere questions her intentions behind appearing at his house after the previous night’s drama. She speaks, and “in her accents as she talks there is a note of deep tragedy. For a moment she reveals herself.” “Hiding her feelings with a trivial laugh,” she says,

“For twenty years, I have lived childless—I want to live childless still” (425).

For twenty years, Mrs. Erlynne has avoided attaching emotions to actions of moral ambiguity to spare herself from guilt. She forbids herself from physically and verbally expressing her love for her daughter because her actions will be tainted with emotions and the regret that comes with having abandoned her as an infant will haunt her. Mrs. Erlynne is proud of the kind of woman her daughter has become, and to imagine her daughter throwing her life away makes Mrs. Erlynne suffer. She confesses to Lord Windermere that it is the first and only time she has experienced a “mother’s feelings” and she never wants to have those feelings again: Gonzalez 62

“They were terrible—they made me suffer—they made me suffer too much” (425). A proper aesthete knows how to adapt to any situation and see it as an opportunity for self-improvement, and Mrs. Erlynne interprets her intense suffering over her daughter as a purging: “If suffering be an expiation, then at this moment I have expiated all my faults, whatever they have been; for tonight you have made a heart in one who had it not, made it and broken it” (413). This

“expiation,” or repentance, is nothing like the repentance she dislikes. The public would love nothing more than to see her shrink back in their presence and wear her shame like a scarlet letter, but Mrs. Erlynne will not give them that satisfaction. Her suffering convicts her more effectively than the glares and whispers of dowagers because it comes from within her being. It is not forced or provoked by society but derived from her own untapped capacity to love. Mrs.

Erlynne repents for herself and the innocent daughter she wronged, not for others; it is simply none of their business. It is more genuine and personal that way.

Mrs. Erlynne is the true critic of the play. She reverses the influences of the public and

Lord Darlington on Lady Windermere and properly interprets her life. Just as Mrs. Erlynne can enter a room and immediately spot an object of beauty, she can also examine a life and bring attention to its beautiful aspects. First, she identifies Lord Windermere’s love as a reason for

Lady Windermere to return home. Mrs. Erlynne says, “I tell you that your husband loves you— that you may never meet with such love again in your whole life—that such love you will never meet—and that if you throw it away, the day may come when you will starve for love and it will not be given to you, beg for love and it will be denied you” (412). The Duchess of Berwick is responsible for convincing Lady Windermere that there is no love in marriage. Art reveals the spectator, and the Duchess of Berwick projects her own problems and insecurities about her wayward husband onto Lady Windermere’s life. Lady Windermere is susceptible because the Gonzalez 63

Duchess comports herself as a woman of experience when truly, Mrs. Erlynne is the woman of experience. Aestheticism considers experience as the key to living life to the fullest, but when a female aesthete searches for experiences, society condemns her for taking control of her own life. Also, aestheticism does not, in Pater’s language, stress the “fruit” of experience. The fruits of Mrs. Erlynne’s experiences have been bitter because her experiences have backfired. She knows that men can be cruel and manipulative but that they can also be loving and devoted. Mrs.

Erlynne focuses on Lady Windermere’s life, and recognizes that Lord Windermere’s love is rare, selfless, and beautiful as opposed to Lord Darlington’s selfish love.

Lady Windermere refuses to believe her, instead choosing to hurl ad hominem attacks at

Mrs. Erlynne. However, she does not care what her daughter thinks of her and wastes no time defending herself. “Believe what you choose about me. I am not worth a moment’s sorrow. But don’t spoil your beautiful young life on my account!” (413). Mrs. Erlynne finally brings her to her senses when she calls attention to the other beautiful thing in her life: her child. Lady

Windermere never once considers her six-month old son Gerard, and the only time she mentions him unprompted is during her first conversation with the Duchess. The Duchess, remembering that the child is male, offers her sympathy: “I’m so sorry. Boys are so wicked. My boy is excessively immoral. You wouldn’t believe at what hours he comes home” (392). This is another baseless statement of hers that generalizes the morality of a whole sex.

Mrs. Erlynne takes a wiser, non-judgmental approach towards her grandson, telling her daughter, “God gave you that child. He will require from you that you make his life fine, that you watch over him. What answer would you make to God if his life is ruined through you?”

(413). This plea combines an appeal to Lady Windermere’s religious convictions and Mrs.

Erlynne’s own aesthetic ideas. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “fine” as “pure, Gonzalez 64 perfect; of the best or very high quality” (“fine, adj., adv., and n.2”). Lady Windermere’s duty to her son is to ensure that his life is of the highest quality—a life which through its perfection, achieves beauty. Even if Lord Windermere had “a thousand loves,” Lady Windermere must stay with her son so she can instruct him on how to live. Mrs. Erlynne saves her daughter from a

Dorian Gray-esque aesthetic downfall.

Lady Windermere’s Fan demonstrates the failure of two critics who lie at opposite extremes. Lord Darlington is a Paterian aesthete and subscribes to living a life of pleasure. There is truth in the idea of asserting one’s individuality and autonomy. However, this must be executed with an awareness of reality, revealing how the consequences of one’s actions affect reality for oneself and others. The amorality in aesthetic art cannot cleanly transfer to the medium of life. If Lady Windermere does as she pleases, the lives of her family and her own life will be needlessly ruined, all for a caprice. Lord Darlington fails as a critic because his theories are too impractical for the real world. The public holds considerable power in shaping the way artists are perceived. Although they are the least qualified, they believe themselves to be apt critics. The Duchess says reverently, “There is nothing like Nature, is there?”; one of the ideas in

“The Decay of Lying” is that Nature, or reality, is indifferent and unreliable. The public believes whatever they see and hear to be reality, and this is why they are misinformed about Mrs.

Erlynne. After meeting Mrs. Erlynne, the Duchess retracts her initial judgement and thinks of her as a “most attractive woman” with “sensible views on life” (405). The Saville girls who first spot

Lord Windermere frequenting Mrs. Erlynne’s house, “who never talk of scandal but remark on it” (391), now suddenly always talk scandal (405).

Like “The Happy Prince” and The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lady Windermere’s Fan names a physical object in its title. Lady Windermere’s fan is a standard manual hand fan used to Gonzalez 65 regulate body temperature. In the Victorian era, fans were more for fashion than for function. M.

A. Flory, a contemporary of Wilde, writes about fans and their significance in his book A Book about Fans; The History of Fans and Fan-Painting. A fan embodies the artistic trends that existed during the time of its production (36). The mount of the fan was made of luxurious fabrics and was often embellished further with feathers spangles, beads, pearls, jewels, and gold leaf. Fans were even painted with natural landscapes, portraits, and rustic scenes or scenes of polite society. Wood, bone, tortoise shell, and ivory were materials used in the handles and blades of fans, and these were finished with carvings, engravings, or fretwork. Antique fans were traded and collected like works of art. Flory writes that the fan “is the emblem of pleasure, treasured as the precious souvenir of some happy day, the date of which is never forgotten. For this reason, a fan is chosen for the first gift to a young girl entering life” (66-67).

It is because of custom that Lord Windermere gives his wife the fan on her coming-of- age, “quite an important day” in her life (386). No detail is given as to the composition of Lady

Windermere’s fan. It is only known that it bears her Christian name and that it is widely regarded as beautiful. The fan is used as a plot device but it also serves to represent Lady Windermere’s life, and the way each character perceives the fan corresponds with how they see Lady

Windermere. Lady Windermere believes herself to be a model for good morals. When she learns that Mrs. Erlynne is coming to her ball, she declares that she will smack her across the face with it. She remarks, “A useful thing, a fan, is it?” (400) Utility makes it unbeautiful, especially in the way she will wield it as a correctional tool. Lady Windermere sees herself in a position where she can deal out judgment. At the party, Lady Windermere is still upset at her husband, but conceals it well. Lord Windermere calls for her, and before she goes to him, she asks Lord

Darlington to hold her fan. There is no reason why she cannot take it with her, so this only serves Gonzalez 66 to signal her gaining trust in Lord Darlington. She ends up not carrying out her threat because at the sight of Mrs. Erlynne, she drops her fan to the ground. The one who picks it up is Lord

Darlington. Now that her life is falling apart before her eyes, Lord Darlington is willing to pick up where Lord Windermere left off. Upon entering Lady Windermere’s house in Act One, Lord

Darlington spots the fan on the table and says, “And what a wonderful fan! May I look at it?”

(385) Her life would be wonderful with him in it, in his mind.

When Lord Windermere discovers his wife’s fan at Lord Darlington’s residence, her mistake is both exposed and obscured. Mrs. Erlynne comes out of hiding to save her daughter and claims to have taken the fan by mistake. She risks losing her newly gained position in society, but so would have Lady Windermere if she is found out. This is a sacrifice, or “life’s purification” (404), a concept Lord Darlington rejects. The mother and daughter share the same first name of Margaret, the name inscribed on the fan. Now that Lady Windermere is initiated into experience, the lives of both Margarets are the same. The irony is that Lord Windermere sees the fan as a testament to his wife’s goodness. When Mrs. Erlynne makes contact with it, he can no longer bear the sight of it and will not let his wife use it again. While Lord Windermere sees the fan as “soiled,” Mrs. Erlynne simply sees it as “pretty.” Lord Augustus, an imperfect man who accepts his own and Mrs. Erlynne’s imperfections, “holds it gracefully” in her opinion.

Lady Windermere gifts the fan to her mother, demonstrating that she is submitting to a life of experience and unconsciously forgiving her mother for her past mistakes.

There is another, more significant meaning of “fan” that Wilde toys with in Lady

Windermere’s Fan. Christopher Craft points out that Wilde uses Wilde uses the “ambivalence of the pun for the affined purposes of pleasure, transvaluation, critique” (38). This is best Gonzalez 67 demonstrated in his later play The Important of Being Earnest but Wilde offers a preview of his talent for wordplay in Lady Windermere’s Fan that is not often discussed.

A fanatic is a “visionary” or an “unreasoning enthusiast” ("fanatic, adj. and n.").

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its shorted form, fan, came into use in the late 19th century. A fan is defined as “an enthusiast for a particular person or thing ("fan, n.2."). Many fans follow celebrities, a word also in use during Wilde’s time. A celebrity is “a person, esp. in entertainment or sport, who attracts interest from the general public and attention from the mass media” ("celebrity, n."). A celebrity gains fans when she creates an appealing image of herself, and a celebrity loses fans if she tarnishes her public image. There is an often a divide in how a celebrity acts in her private and public lives so her fans base their adoration on a carefully crafted image.

The public are fans of Lady Windermere because she lives the ideal Victorian life. Lady

Windermere is well-mannered and is faithful to Lord Windermere, a “model husband” with a respectable job. She openly endorses living a moral life and she practices what she preaches, and the Duchess of Berwick lavishes praise on Lady Windermere for having maintained a good reputation. Lord Windermere idealizes his wife as well and believes her to be good. He sees her as the foil to Mrs. Erlynne: “You and she belong to different worlds. Into your world evil has never entered” (429). Lord Windermere says this not knowing what his wife has done the previous night.

Lord Darlington is a fan of Lady Windermere because of her beauty and gentle nature.

He is an obsessed fan and wants her all to himself, even being jealous of Lord Windermere and wanting to take his place as husband. Lord Darlington’s confession to Lady Windermere could be seen as disturbing because he is willing to completely submit to her: “My life—my whole life. Gonzalez 68

Take it, and do with it what you will. . . . I love you—love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly, madly!” (404).

Lord Darlington says that there can be no friendship between men and women; there is only passion, enmity, worship, and love. In their article ‘“I’m Your Number One Fan”— A Clinical

Look at Celebrity Worship,” Randy A. Sansone and Lori A. Sansone examine the personality traits of an obsessed fan, or a “celebrity worshiper.” They found that a celebrity worshiper may exhibit narcissistic tendencies, sensation-seeking, cognitive rigidity (inability to change mental sets), and poor interpersonal boundaries (39). As an aesthete, Lord Darlington seeks out sensations and thinks highly of himself. He has no sense of propriety and openly flirts with Lady

Windermere in public, refusing to stop even when she asks (Wilde, Lady 386). Lord Darlington only considers how taking Lady Windermere for a wife can benefit himself and does not adjust his thought process to account for the differences between Lady Windermere and himself.

Mrs. Erlynne is the only person who sees Lady Windermere’s true nature. If the public and Lord Windermere see Lady Windermere for who she is, they would leave the fanbase because she would betray the image they have of her. Lord Darlington is too blinded by fascination to perceive her flaws. Mrs. Erlynne sees her daughter with all of her flaws and fears but does not stop being her fan because she does not hold illusions about human nature, preferring realities to ideals which are “dangerous things” (427). She praises what Lady

Windermere has accomplished for herself and urges her to get her life back together. Achieving celebrity status gives one fame, fortune, and respect, and to throw it all away and become a washed-up celebrity is a foolish mistake.

Lady Windermere’s Fan is a play about Lady Windermere’s number one fan, Mrs.

Erlynne. She is the best representation of the aesthetic critic. Her initial detached manner is a Gonzalez 69 survival mechanism, and it has served her well until the night of the ball. Love is teased out of

Mrs. Erlynne’s heart but tied to that love is suffering and for once, she does not recoil in the face of suffering. Rather, she confronts and reinterprets it. During her final conversation with Lord

Windermere before leaving England, Mrs. Erlynne “begins to understand that all her life she has been preparing for that ‘climax,’ that crucible of her life” (San Juan 51). She refuses to reveal her identity to her daughter because she wants to protect Lady Windermere’s ideals of her “dead” mother, a virtuous young woman with black hair as opposed to Mrs. Erlynne’s red. To safe face, she gives an excuse on aesthetic grounds: “Margaret is twenty-one, and I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not” (Wilde, Lady 425). Through the character of Mrs. Erlynne, Wilde presents a well-rounded aestheticism equipped to take on life’s ugliness. He also demonstrates the struggles of a female aesthete living in a society that scrutinizes her every action and abiding by a creed that does not consider the consequences of those actions. Instead of casting judgement, the play studies the self-development of a mother and daughter who learn not a lesson in morals, but a lesson in love.

Gonzalez 70

Conclusion

The artists, critics, and spectators of Wilde’s works struggle because they force life to operate within the framework of aestheticism, and only those who can form a compromise between art and life survive. In “The Happy Prince,” Wilde criticizes the Victorian public’s demand for art that advances a moral or social cause. He disguises his treatise as a fairy tale for two reasons: to teach a child their first lesson in aestheticism and to dupe an adult into unknowingly disapproving of their own behavior. The Happy Prince steps out of his role as a work of art and crosses into the role of an artist, dedicating parts of himself to the poor because the public does nothing to alleviate the suffering of their own people. With their insistence on art with a purpose, the Victorian public strips works of art of their jewels and gold.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde turns his attention to aestheticism. He criticizes the theories of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, and in having the work of art double as a human being,

Wilde demonstrates the disastrous implications of each man’s theory. While Ruskin believed that the artist should create art that is beholden to nature and work toward the common good,

Dorian’s portrait shows that Basil’s perception of reality is flawed. Wilde addresses Pater’s conclusion in Studies of the History of the Renaissance and exposes it for its poisonous idea of living with reckless abandon. As a detached spectator, Lord Henry is uninitiated into experience and is unfamiliar with human emotions. The portrait shows the dirty residue of guilt left over from Dorian’s actions that would normally burden his soul.

In Lady Windermere’s Fan, Wilde finally offers his alternative to Victorian moralism and pure aestheticism. He puts forth an aestheticism that respects life as the dominating force yet retains its own devotion to beauty. Through Mrs. Erlynne, Wilde shows that the aesthete cannot remain a static, passive spectator of their own lives. Just as gold must be refined by fire before it Gonzalez 71 can be shaped into jewelry, Mrs. Erlynne must pass through the fires of suffering and be purged of her faults before she can properly carry out her duty as a critic. Love burgeons in her heart, and though it hurts, she heeds to it.

There is no doubt that Wilde’s works heavily engage with the issues of his time.

Aestheticism, the Pre-Raphaelites, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater are topics unlikely to make it outside of an art history or Victorian literature class. The upper class sensibilities and customs of

Wilde’s characters are of a bygone era, and some of his jokes and innuendoes are not easily perceived by modern audiences. Still, there is a reason why his works are still revisited and revived. The Importance of Being Earnest is his most produced play followed by An Ideal

Husband. The Picture of Dorian Gray has been adapted to film and stage several times, and

Dorian Gray himself appears as a character in Showtime’s Penny Dreadful (Cotter) and the

Netflix original series The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Clarke). His fairy tales have been set to music and translated into dance, the most recent production being “The Happy Prince” by the

Australian Ballet (Stewart). English personality Gyles Brandreth is the author of The Oscar

Wilde Murder Mysteries, a book series that features Wilde as a detective. Brandreth is also

Honorary President of The Oscar Wilde Society, a literary society which, according to its constitution, aims to “advance the education of the public in the works of Oscar Wilde by promoting knowledge, appreciation and study of his life, personality and works”

(“Constitution”).

Wilde has not been forgotten simply because he refused to allow it to happen. As a student, he said to a friend, “I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other, I’ll be famous, and if not famous, notorious” (qtd. in Ellman 46). Wilde focused on building an image around himself that would persist long after he was gone, seeking to shock and charm the world Gonzalez 72 with his wit, humor, and lifestyle. He subverted convention with puns and paradoxes and infused that same subversive spirit into his works, breaking down and redefining concepts of individuality, love, suffering, and forgiveness. As long as human civilization endures, there will always be a cause for rebellion. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Oscar Wilde, Richard

Ellman concludes his work with this statement: “Beyond the reach of scandal, his best writings validated by time, he comes before us still, a towering figure, laughing and weeping, with parables and paradoxes, so generous, so amusing, and so right” (589). Though Wilde writes in

De Profundis that most people’s “thoughts are someone else’s opinions” (926), I must agree with

Ellman.

Gonzalez 73

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U of Illinois P, 2016.

Burnham, Douglas. “Immanuel Kant: Aesthetics.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, www.iep.utm.edu/kantaest/ Carroll, Joseph. “Aestheticism, Homoeroticism, and Christian Guilt in The Picture of Dorian

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"celebrity, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2020, www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/29424. Accessed 7 May 2020. Clarke, Emma. “6 Literary References in Netflix's Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.” Evening Standard, 29 Jan. 2020, standard.co.uk/stayingin/tvfilm/netflix-chilling-adventures- sabrina-literary-references-a4343866.html Cohen, Phillip K. The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde. Associated UP, 1978. “Constitution.” The Oscar Wilde Society, oscarwildesociety.co.uk/constitution/. Cotter, Padraig. “Penny Dreadful: What Dorian Gray's Portrait Looks Like.” ScreenRant,

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