Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

Ethics and Aesthetics in "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

Author(s): Dominic Manganiello
Source: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Dec., 1983), pp. 25-33
Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish Studies
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Ethics and Aesthetics in the Picture of Dorian Gray 25

Ethics and Aesthetics in

The Picture of Dorian Gray
by
Dominic Manganiello

In The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde examines frankly the consequences of substituting an
aesthetic for an ethical conscience. He raises a fundamental question about the aesthete's creed:
how can art, which is imbued with good and evil, be both aesthetically beautiful and morally
destructive? Lord Henry Wotton uses Wilde's language of paradox and the circular and
contradictory logic of The Critic as Artist, but he cannot be taken simply as Wilde's mouthpiece.
He ultimately challenges the basic premise of the book, that of transformation. Dorian and Basil
Hallward also reveal aspects of Wilde's psyche. Basil through his portrait and Lord Henry
through his word painting both recreate Dorian in their own image and likeness. This narcissism,
whether linguistic or sexual, acts as a central metaphor for indulging in sterile and fruitless
actions. Wilde compounds his book with not one but three versions of the Faust legend to
reinforce this point. The Picture of Dorian Gray is at once an attack on dualism (the soul/body,
art/life split) and an exposure of the aesthetic attempt at reconciliation as a widening of that split.

Dans le roman The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde examine franchement les consequences de
l'echange d'une conscience ethique pour une conscience esthetique. II pose une question
fondamentale au suject du credo de l'esthete: comment peut Tart, penetre du bien et du mal, etre a
la fois beau et destructif de la moralite? Lord Henry Wotton se sert de la langue de paradoxe et de
la iogique circulaire et contradictoire de The Critic as Artist, mais il n'est pas simplement le porte
parole de Wilde. Lord Henry enfin defie la premisse centrale du roman, celle de transformation.
Dorian Gray et Basil Hallward revelent aussi certains aspects du psycholgie de Wilde. Basil, au
moyen de son portrait, et Lord Henry, au moyen de sa peinture verbakem reconstruisent Dorian
selon leurs memes images. Cette narcissisme, linguistique ou sexuelle, fait fonction d'une
metaphore centrale de s'adonner aux actes steriles. Pour accenetuer ce point dans le roman, Wilde
emploie pas une, mais trois versions de la legende de Faust. The Picture of Dorian Gray est a la fois
une offensive contre le dualism (l'ame/le corps; l'art/la vie) et une divulgation que la tentative
esthetique a serrer cette fente sert en effet a l'elarger.

Commentators often claim that Wilde subordinates ethics to aesthetics

in The Picture of Dorian Gray.l In fact, Wilde does not keep these spheres
absolutely distinct. Initially he transposes them only to bring them back
together in the end. This interrelationship deserves reconsideration. Wilde
himself seems to have pointed the way to such a reflection when he voiced a
concern about his novel identical to that Coleridge had about his narrative
poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner": the moral lesson, rather than
being repressed, asserts itself too obtrusively.2

The Canadian Journal Of Irish Studies, 9, 2 (December, 1983) 25-33

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 26 Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

We have inherited a version of Oscar Wilde (created out of some of his

most wily pronouncements in his critical essays) as a fin de siecle
Nietzschean struggling in his life and art to transcend the categories of good
and evil. In The Critic as Artist particularly Wilde strikes the characteristic
pose of antinomian polemicist against the Philistine respectability of his
age. He employs the language of paradox as a way of unsettling conventional
assumptions and of driving to a new and possibly dangerous vision. "What is
termed Sin is an essential element of progress," he holds; "without it the
world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless."3 Sin (with its florid
capital S), in other words, is a chameleon agency which enables man to
liberate his personality by transforming acts or passions that are normally
considered vile or ignoble into elements of a richer and more variegated
experience. By rejecting the current notions of morality, Wilde concludes, sin
becomes paradoxically one with the "higher ethics." Wilde translates these
higher ethics as aesthetics because they alone "make life lovely and
wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, variety and change."4
This transvaluation of words recalls the policy of Milton's Satan: "Evil be
thou my good." Sin no longer ravishes the beauty of the soul, as in the
traditional view, but rather helps it to flourish. The modern pilgrim's progress
is made possible only by contravention of the moral law. By making ethics and
aesthetics exchange places, Wilde reverses the usual hierarchy of value.
This reversal remains problematic, however. Despite his apparent
triumphs of contradiction, Wilde does not succeed completely in ousting the
traditional meanings of words like sin. His own meaning is blurred by what he
himself called a "mist of words": "I throw probability out of the window for
the sake of a phrase, and the chance of an epigram makes me desert truth."5
This tendency towards desertion of truth or of logical validity becomes
pronounced in the conclusion to The Critic as Artist where Wilde insists that
aesthetics are ultimately higher than ethics since only through art can "we
attain to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of
those to whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciation of
the ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the
soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm."6 We are contronted
here with the double irony of an individual who, while maintaining that sin
doesn't exist, desires to sin and yet, at the same time, is said to be incapable of
sinning. As a result, Wilde acknowledges the existence of sin in the very act of
denying it. In essence the idea of sin is, as Joyce pointed out, the pulse of
Wilde's art.7
It is the pulse, in particular, of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The strange
case of Dorian has been described in terms of Matthew Arnold's division of
life into Hebraism and Hellenism, attitudes for which Lord Henry Wotton is
chief spokesman.8 He is all for the Hellenic ideal which sponsors what Arnold
calls "the spontaneity of consciousness", as opposed to the Hebraic ideal of

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Ethics and Aesthetics in the Picture of Dorian Gray 27

"strictness of conscience" which inculcates a sense of sin or what Lord Henry

calls "all the maladies of medievalism". He abides by a new hedonism which
promotes pleasure as the only good. Like Pater, Lord Henry celebrates
experience as an end in itself and the enjoyment of the intensely lived moment
of beauty regardless of moral standpoints:

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men

gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a
mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in
the formation of character, had praised it as something that
taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there
was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active
cause as conscience itself. All that is really demonstrated was
that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin
we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times,
and with joy.9

We notice, however, that in formulating his doctrine Lord Henry follows

Wilde's own ambivalence in The Critic as Artist. If the future would be the
same as our past, wallowing in the senses would lead to moral insensibility, to
stagnation rather than expansion or, in effect, to a determinism grounded in
Sisyphus-like hopelessness. In adopting a sensationalist philosophy of curing
the soul by means of the senses and the senses by means of the soul, Lord
Henry exhibits the circular and contradictory logic of an asceticism achieved
by self-titillation rather than self-denial, by wakening rather than deadening
the senses. He cannot escape the sense of sin either, for he claims the only way
to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. In short, as Wilde remarked, Lord
Henry appropriates Martin Luther's dictum, Esto peccator etpecca fortiter
(Be a sinner and sin in earnest).10 Despite all semblance to the contrary, Lord
Henry's aesthetic philosophy retains an ethical base.
When Wilde says in his celebrated preface to Dorian Gray that an artist
has no ethical sympathies he means, like Keats, that he takes equal pleasure
in conceiving the evil as in conceiving the good: "Virtues and wickedness are
to him simply what the colours on his palette are to the painter."11 But in their
application these are far from being neutral tones. Wilde has Lord Henry, for
instance, look at morals from a painter's perspective and conclude, "Sin is the
only real colour-element in modern life."12 By implication grace or virtue is
hueless. Wilde's own cast of mind comes into play here, and this accounts for
the attraction of Lord Henry. "But he is honest," as Isobel Murray puts it, "in
examining the consequences of these doctrines."13 In his book Wilde raises a
fundamental question about his own aesthetic beliefs: how can art, which is
imbued with good and evil, be both aesthetically beautiful and morally
destructive?

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 28 Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

Dorian is fascinated not only by Lord Henry's attempt to substitute an

aesthetic for an ethical conscience, but also by the power of the language in
which this substitution is couched:

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, how
vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what
a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to
give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of
their own as sweet as that of viol or of flute. Mere words! Was
there anything as real as words?14

Dorian portrays his mentor whom he calls "Prince Paradox" as a lord of

language, a linguistic Pygmalion who, through what Rimbaud called the
alchemy of the word, can mould a new creature out of formless matter. By
mistaking words for things, however, Dorian reifies language and himself as
well. The result is that Lord Henry treats his disciple as malleable clay, and
recreates Dorian as a verbal image or "echo" of himself:

To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry
there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed
back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to
convey one's temperament into another as though it were a
subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that -
perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited
and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and
grossly common in its aims . . . There was nothing that one
could not do with him.15

"Language," as Victor Hamm explains, "unlike marble, pigments and

musical sounds, is immediately and essentially expressive of ideas. . . The
literary artist expresses implicit moral judgements."16 By recreating Dorian
in his own image and likeness, Lord Henry engages in a linguistic narcissism,
and his word-painting becomes as much as Basil Hallward's portrait a magical
mirror of Dorian's soul.
This narcissism, whether linguistic or sexual, acts as a metaphor in the
novel for indulging in sterile and fruitless actions. The reification of language
leads inevitably to a reification of love. Lord Henry, for instance, depicts the
relationship between Basil and Dorian as nothing more than a "romance of
art" between a painter and his subject. "Someday you will look at your
friend," he tells Basil, "and he will seem to you a little out of drawing, or you
won't like his tone of colour, or something."17 Basil admits he has put too
much of himself in his portrait of Dorian Gray or that, in effect, he is in love
with his own image. But he complains that Dorian nevertheless treats him as
an object d'art, as "an ornament for a summer's day." Dorian in riposte makes
the same counter-accusation: "I am no more to you than a green bronze

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Ethics and Aesthetics in the Picture of Dorian Gray 29

figure." It is ironic, too, that Dorian accuses Sybil of regarding him merely as a
person in a play when he responds to the role she plays as an actress, not to
Sybil herself. He will always be in love with love itself, as Lord Henry says.
When Lord Henry, moreover, tells Dorian at their final meeting, "I am so glad
that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture,
or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art," Wilde
exposes with dramatic irony the extremes to which a displacement of art and
reality can be taken. Lord Henry for his part realizes that he, too, lives in a
self-enclosed world of his own making when he admits that by experimenting
on Dorian he is actually experimenting on himself.18
Dorian initially adopts Lord Henry's narcissistic perspective on art and
life, but eventually recognizes its limitations. Lord Henry claims, on the one
hand, that art has no influence upon action and, as a result of annihilating the
desire to act, that it is superbly sterile. On the other hand, he links art and
crime as merely methods of procuring extraordinary sensations.19 Wilde,
however, suggests that art can and does transmit or generate criminal
impulses. Dorian translates Lord Henry into a living book of proverbs that he
must put into practice.20 The language of paradox, with its semantic reversals,
becomes a mirror too. As Lord Henry cuts life to pieces with his epigrams,
Dorian cuts Basil and finally himself to pieces with a knife. The correlation
between verbal and actual vivisection is resounding. When Dorian himself
takes to art, he finds that every face he draws bears a striking resemblance to
Basil; in other words, that his art reflects his own evil.21 Dorian has not only
been poisoned by a book, but also by Lord Henry's words.
But words can also offer a potential for good. Basil urges Dorian to
pronounce words from another book which would evoke a change of heart.
Dorian considers this a volte-face instead, and refuses to do so: "These words
mean nothing to me now."22 When Wilde has Lord Henry himself quote from
scripture, however, there is considerable irony: "what does it profit a man if he
gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" Blind to things unseen and to the
appositeness of these words to Dorian's situation, he proceeds to register his
disbelief in the soul and claims that art has a soul but man does not. Dorian's
incisive retort is supported by the painful evidence of his own experience of
having the stages of his soul's metamorphosis x-rayed, so to speak, by the
portrait:

The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and

bartered away. It can be poisoned or made perfect. There is a
soul in each one of us. I know it.23

By arguing that art catches the conscience of the individual, Dorian discovers
that Lord Henry may possess the words of eternal youth, but not of eternal
life.
Selling one's soul to art necessarily implies the existence of a moral order

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 30 Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

or the Hebraic impulse which cannot, finally, be so easily dismissed. Dorian's

picture becomes "the visible emblem of conscience" and a "symbol of the
degradation of sin" as it looks out at its subject from the canvas and calls him
to judgement: "what the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the
painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty and eat away its
grace."24 Wilde unmistakeably reverts to the traditional dichotomy between
sin and grace that he refutes in The Critic as Artist and that Lord Henry refutes
here. Dorian's cold-blooded murder of Basil, the voice of conscience, and its
symbolic re-enactment in his stabbing of the portrait, represent the individ
ual's ultimate rebellion against ethics and the moral dimension of art. But
Wilde does not sidle here. Conscience is an interior law written in the heart;
transcribed as such it cannot be effaced or destroyed. Nor can the external or
"objective reality" under which it operates.25
Lord Henry's ideal of self-development, of a harmony between soul and
body, leads ironically to a fragmentation of the self. Dorian's predicament can
perhaps best be described as that of Jung's modern man in search of a soul.
What drives him to war with himself is the intuition or knowledge that he
consists of two persons in opposition to one another: "The conflict may be
between the sensual and spiritual man or between the ego and the shadow."26
The dilemma, as Wilde presents it, involves a disjunction between the
psychological/aesthetic and the theological/spiritual. Dorian admits that his
psychology of "insincerity" or duplicity is merely a method by which he can
multiply his personality and ultimately evade moral responsibility: "I am too
much concentrated on myself. My own personality has become a burden to
me. I want to escape, to go away, to forget."27 By distancing the self the
aesthetic soul could conceivably be myriad, but the human soul would remain
personal and single. Dorian must choose between dissociation or "alienation"
and unity of being or at-one-ment.
What hinders Dorian from regaining his lost self, however, is his romance
with his own corrupt nature.28 He becomes in the process a male counterpart
to the beauty and horror of the Medusa so beloved of the decadents. Wilde
provides us in this context with a gloss on the passage in the epistle of St.
James about the man who looks at his natural face in the mirror and
straightaway forgets what kind of person he is.29 In that glimpse of the mirror
of truth, the Gospel, he sees his moral countenance as it really is, but only for a
moment. He then leaves and fails to translate the divine Word into action.
Wilde focuses constantly on art as a mirror of false and true images of the
self. A modern day Narcissus, Dorian exchanges his "original self' or soul for
the reflection he grows increasingly enamoured of, becoming, in Blake's
phrase, "idolatrous to his own shadow."30 Wilde revamps the Faust legend to
blend it with the "curious artistic idolatry" of which Basil speaks. Basil
refuses to unveil his portrait for public scrutiny for fear he has bartered his
own soul away. Lord Henry, in turn, can also consider Dorian his own

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Ethics and Aesthetics in the Picture of Dorian Gray 31

"creation" because, as he says, "to influence a person is to give him one's

soul."31 Wilde compounds his book with three versions of the Faustian pact to
make a telling point about the relation between art and life. In his final
meeting with Dorian, Basil recognizes that his folly imitates Pygmalion's, that
he falls in love with his own painting come to life and worships the work of his
own hands. He then offers Dorian the possibility of a counter-transformation
through the mercy of the divine Artist in whose image his soul was originally
fashioned.32 Lord Henry, on the other hand, to the end exalts rather than
renounces his idolatry. He believes Dorian remains unscarred by the pursuit
of sensation for its own sake. In allowing no possibility for the deterioration or
the progression of the soul, or for an art which mirrors this process, Lord
Henry challenges the basic premise of Wilde's book, that of transformation.
Or, to put it another way, Lord Henry, Wilde suggests, mistakes the
fabricated mask for the original face.
Narcissism ultimately proves fatal because it provides at once an image of
the self and all that the self is not; it distorts as it reflects. Dorian moves
uneasily between the extremes of iconolater and iconoclast. His attempt to
annihilate his true image and its visible emblem results in his own annihilation,
a cracked looking glass of the self. The portrait remains a mirror nonetheless,
something by which we can see, in retrospect, Dorian in his pristine
innocence. The full portrait, however, is Wilde's book because it alone
captures the chiaroscuro of Dorian's life.
It becomes, of course, the medium through which artist and spectator see
themselves too. Everyone, Wilde said, sees his own sin in Dorian Gray.33 In
being temporarily attracted by Lord Henry, Dorian acts as a double for the
reader who is thereby reminded of his own corruption. The Picture of Dorian
Gray is a three-dimensional portrait of the artist as well; Lord Henry, Basil
and Dorian reveal aspects of Wilde's own psyche.34 And he seems to have
taken the implications of his novel to heart. The end of Wilde's life reads like a
counter-Dorian Gray where author and fictional hero exchange destinies. As
Joyce aptly remarked, Wilde "closed the book of his spirit's rebellion with an
act of spiritual dedication."35
This curious story of spiritual metamorphosis functions as a parable about
the dangers of the self-referential nature of both life and art. Wilde reverses
the child-like innocence of the fairy tale game of "mirror, mirror on the wall"
to the Gothic horror of an adult seeing himself hideously transformed. In this
hybrid fictional world evil is regarded simply as a mode through which the
hero hopes to realize his conception of the beautiful.36 The failure of "Prince
Charming" to awaken sleeping beauty, however, is ultimately the result of a
failure to mediate between beauty and moral truth. But Wilde has proposed
this mediation all along, and this in turn gives the story what he himself called
its "ethical beauty".37

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 32 Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

NOTES

I See, for example, Robert Keefe, "Artist and Model in The Picture o
Dorian Gray, " Studies in the Novel, 5(1973), 63.
2In a letter to Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilde wrote, "My difficulty was to ke
the inherent moral subordinate to the artistic and dramatic effect, and it still
seems to me that the moral is too obvious." Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde
ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (Oxford, 1979), p.95.
3 Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Collins, 1971), p. 1023.
4 Ibid., pp. 1023-4, 1058.
3 Selected Letters, p. 95.
6 Complete Works, pp. 1057-8.
7 The Critical Writings of James Joyce, eds Ellsworth Mason and Richa
Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1959), p. 204.
8 See Jan B. Gordon, " 'Parody as Initiation': The Sad Education of Dorian
Gray", Criticism, 9(1967), 367.
9 The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford Universit
Press, 1981), p. 58.
10 Selected Letters, p. 93.
II Ibid., p. 82
12 Dorian Gray, p. 29.
13 Ibid., introduction, p. xxii.
14 Ibid., p. 19.
15 Ibid., pp. 35-6.
16 Quoted in W.K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon, (London: Methuen, 1970), p.
90.
17 Dorian Gray, p. 12.
i* Ibid., pp. 12, 26, 53, 217, 59.
19 Ibid., pp. 218, 213.
20 Ibid., pp. 218,46. Dorian tells Lord Henry, "That is one of your aphorisms.
I am putting it into practice, as I do everything that you say."
21 Ibid., p. 163.
22 Ibid., p. 158.
23 Ibid., p. 215.
24 Ibid., p. 119.
25 This is Isobel Murray's point, p. xiv.
26 Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York and London, 1933), p. 347.
27 Dorian Gray, p. 205.

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Ethics and Aesthetics in the Picture of Dorian Gray 33

28 Ibid., p. 128. "He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, and
more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul."
29 St. James 1, 23-4. It is clear that Wilde has this passage in mind because he
makes Lords Henry quote the phrase "unspotted from the world" (From the
Epistle, St. James 1, 26). See Dorian Gray, p. 15.
30 This is from Jerusalem, plate 43. See Northrop Frye, The Secular
Scripture, (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p. 108.
31 Dorian Gray, pp. 11, 57, 17.
32 Ibid., p. 157-8.
33 Selected Letters, p. 82.
34 Wilde explained his own personality in terms of the characters who
peopled his novel: "Basil Hallward is what I think I am; Lord Henry is what
the world thinks me: Dorian is what I would like to be - in other ages,
perhaps." Selected Letters, p. 116.
35 The Critical Writings of James Joyce, p. 205.
36 See Dorian Gray, p. 147.
37 Selected Letters, p. 84.

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