Victorian Façade and Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’
How Oscar Wilde thwarted Victorian Sensibility!
Oscar Wilde’s Contemporaries
Authors in the Victorian Age had newly explored the genre of novels. The novel, however new, had opened the paths for a deeply personal exploration of society and individuality. Jane Austen explored topics like womanhood, marriage and explored feminism in her own meditative way. On the other hand, Charles Dickens explored the themes of education, struggle between classes and the disjointedness of the bourgeois. Later Victorian authors paved the way for the realism of the twentieth century but excluded the discourse on sexuality as the Victorian sensibility was not to be tampered with.
The ‘Victorian Sensibility’
Victorian Sensibility was an uninscribed set of conduct to which the English masses were supposed to subscribe. It was strongly embedded in Christianity and orthodox morality. It emerged out of the “barbarianism” and the unrepressed display of sexuality which was thought to corrupt the people, especially in childhood. While several modern intellectuals thought that Victorian morality caused repression of sexuality, Michel Foucault stated that the rigid reprimanding instead led to an outburst of sexuality as hypothesized in History of Sexuality.
‘The Picture Of Dorian Gray’, The Trend Breaker
Victorian literature often solicits a division between the mind and the body. While the body is not represented, the narrative is circumscribed around the mind. Another solicited division is between good and evil, as the union of good and evil was unsettling to Victorians.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) thwarts almost all of the principled notions held dear by Victorian London. It unites good and evil through the character of Dorian. Dorian is a timid, innocent young man who is made perversely obsessed with his beauty by Lord Henry, a hedonist, another individual trait frowned upon. Dorian is driven to an unfathomable extent of obsession, whereupon, he kills his dear friend and the painter, Hallward.
There is a dichotomized London at the display. A London where Dorian visits opera houses and the homes of the royal families and another London where he visits taverns and gamble houses to indulge in his vices. Scholars also suspect subtle portrayal of homosexual relations between Lord Henry and Dorian, and Dorian and Basil. This tangent is used against Oscar Wilde in court when he was tried in 1895. This proves to be not only blatant repression of sexuality but also aestheticism which Wilde strongly stood by and consequently wished to rid literature of its political and social implications.
While the novel was scandalized in Victorian London, several thousand copies of the book sold, making it a hit. This can be viewed as a testament to Michel Foucault’s hypothesis of Perverse Implantation.
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