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This essay explores the central role of Lord Henry's philosophical seduction of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. By drawing parallels between the garden scene in Chapter Two and Plato's Symposium, the essay argues that Dorian's transformation is initiated through his introduction to both the erotic and the philosophical worlds. The essay also discusses Lord Henry's conflicting philosophical positions and Dorian's narcissistic character, ultimately suggesting that Dorian's encounter with Lord Henry leads him to a 'knowledge of good and evil' that makes him divine.
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by Harel W. Newman
A thesis submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Baltimore, Maryland July, 2017
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Abstract What are the aesthetic categories and epistemologies available within modernity? Does shifting one’s orientation away from the cultural centers of modernity change the answers? Does it change the question? Is it only proper to shift away from political centers towards their geographic margins, or could an analogous shift be made with respect to social position, namely, to the social margin of the queer? This thesis takes these questions and the broad framework of “marginal modernity,” particularly as formulated by Leonardo Lisi, to help answer the question, what difference does Oscar Wilde make? My hypothesis is that Oscar Wilde responds from his position as a queer subject straddling the uniquely discursively charged historical faults of the fin-de-siècle to the challenges of modernity by practicing a distinctly queer philosophical aesthetics. I argue that his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is structured according to these aesthetics within what I call, drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the “glass closet.” This structure navigates away from the binary options of autonomous aesthetics demanded by aestheticism and fragmentary aesthetics demanded by the avant-garde through a particular usage of intertextual allusion that structures the text as legible across multiple non-identical registers. Ultimately, it is only in relation to the reader and the particular knowledge they bring that the text solidifies as on one or another of its possible manifestations. In Dorian Gray , these registers are determined with reference, first, to the works of Plato, and then to the Bible. After describing in more detail the structure of the glass closet, I explore each reading in turn, before finally concluding with a brief meditation of Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol and suggesting that Wilde’s queer aesthetics at their limit gesture beyond art towards religious faith. Advisor: Dr. Leonardo Lisi
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. ( DG 239) I. Introduction I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art…I summed up all systems in a phrase,and all existence in an epigram. ( DP 1017) Oscar Wilde wrote in De Profundis , his great epistle from Reading Gaol, “I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age” (1017). In what sense is Wilde symbolic of his moment? What difference does Oscar Wilde make? In this thesis, I wish to answer these questions through a careful examination of Wilde’s literary practice and engagement with aestheticism as exemplified in his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.^1 I will argue that the aesthetic structure of the novel is distinctly queer, and that this aesthetic structure, in turn, stands upon a distinctly queer epistemology. Specifically, I will argue that the novel manifests aesthetically the epistemology of what I call, following the influence of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the “glass closet.” That Wilde’s aesthetics are queer and imply a queer philosophical position is a more heterodox proposition than it may at first appear. In proposing and describing Wilde’s queer philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic philosophy, I aim to bring together two dominant and consistently opposed figures of Wilde: Wilde the queer cultural hero and homosexual martyr, and Wilde the innovative, provocative, and yet emblematic figure of fin-
(^1) For the purposes of this essay, I am taking the text of The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray , ed. Nicholas Frankel, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012 as authoritative. This text is, based on Wilde’s typescripts and theemendations in his own hand, that were submitted for publication by Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890. I will not repeat Frankel’s arguments, which I take to be very strong, for the superiority of the text–for that, see his “TextualIntroduction,” 35-54. I prefer this text, primarily, for its not being the “expanded” version 1891. The additional material in that version is primarily depictions of heterosexual romance and drug use which obscure–though I do notthink by that means contradict–the textual strategies with which I am concerned. All references to Dorian Gray will be to the chapters and pagination of this edition.
de-siècle aestheticism. In insisting that these two visions of Wilde, rather than opposing one another, inform and determine one another, I hope to show further that Wilde’s queering of aestheticism represents a unique solution to modernity taken as a problem or a crisis, one which operates outside the established categories of modernism studies. It is, indeed, a queering of modernity itself. At stake in understanding Wilde’s position relative to his age, that is, is our understanding of the expanse of aesthetic and philosophical possibilities present to modernity, and how the queer stands in relation to those possibilities. This articulation places the thesis between two rival trends in Wilde studies. There is, on the one hand, a large body of work, building particularly upon the interventions of Eve Sedgwick, Linda Dowling, and Jonathan Dollimore in the early 1990s, which attempts to situate and problematize Wilde’s relationship to queer discourse. Readings like theirs, in turn deeply indebted to Michel Foucault’s work in The History of Sexuality , place Wilde against the backdrop of a late Victorian moment which represents the “sudden, radical condensation of sexual categories” along the “homo/heteroseuxal” binary ( Epistemology 9). These theorists have powerfully argued that it is, moreover, precisely the “Wilde catastrophe” as Dowling calls it (134)–that is, Wilde’s extraordinarily public trial and conviction on charges of sodomy under the Labouchere Amendment of 1885–which is the “moment of cultural discontinuity or rupture” at hand in Sedgwick’s analysis ( Epistemology 2). Taken as an established figure for a particularly discursively dense historical moment–“a largely empty, almost arbitrary name onto which law and journalism, medicine and theology, prejudice and ignorances would so ceaselessly project their theories and loathing and fears” (Dowling 153)–cultural historians and queer theorists have attempted to reclaim Wilde such that he may be “audible once again as a cultural hero rather than
its transgressive value.^3 Wilde is in this philosophical reassessment desexualized for the sake of intellectualizing, a questionable move at best. The binary opposition that here appears between Oscar Wilde the cultural hero of queer history and Oscar Wilde the de-sexualized aesthetic philosopher, heir to and critic of both Victorian criticism and German Idealism, is, I believe, both unnecessary and fundamentally harmful to a complete understanding of Wilde. I wish to propose, rather, a vision of Wilde in which the dilemma of philosopher and queer is resolved such that one can see how the one and the other determine each other against the backdrop of his uniquely discursively charged historic moment. To do so I will, first, describe the particular aesthetic structure of the “glass closet” I gestured to above as a queer refusal to opposed strategies of aesthetic organization, autonomy and fragmentation. Second, I will frame this strategy against modernity taken as a crisis or problem. Finally, I will outline the structure of the rest of the thesis.
A. The Epistemology and Aesthetics of the Glass Closet Silence itself–the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers–is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with and in relation to them within over-all strategies…There is not one but many silences. (Foucault 27) I understand Oscar Wilde’s aesthetics, in their queering of the standards and underlying epistemological assumptions presented by his moment, as navigating between two normative models. To fully unpack this situation would require a deeper historical analysis, which I will reserve for the next subsection. Briefly, however, the normative aesthetic models available to
(^3) For Brown’s brief and perplexing analysis of Wilde’s “incipient homosexuality,” see Brown 10-16. Most prominently, Brown flagrantly misappropriates Linda Dowling’s research inthat Wilde’s homosexuality was a performative imitation of a Platonic ideal of spiritual love (15). Hellenism and Homosexuality to insist
Wilde and to which I understand his aesthetics to represent a queer challenge, are the “aesthetics of autonomy” and the “aesthetics of fragmentation.” Both models arise as distinctly modernist strategies for organizing artworks, and are determined relative to one another. Within the aesthetics of autonomy, often associated with “modernism” generally but here associated more particularly with “aestheticism,” the artwork is taken as an organically organized, self-delimited whole. Leonardo Lisi helpfully directs his readers to the articulation of “ integritas ” in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as exemplary of these aesthetics(2): But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as self- bounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. (230) In opposition, the aesthetics of fragmentation posite the artwork as inorganic, composed of parts that do not come together to form a coherent whole. Underlying the former is a conception of truth and experience indebted to Kantian transcendental idealism and insistence upon an autonomous subject; underlying the latter is an important shift in the normative assumption of the nature of experience…from onethat views it as containing positive necessary relations between representations, to another that can allow only for negative and anarchic differentiation between terms. (Lisi
If Wilde’s queer aesthetics are to represent a challenge and alternative to these normative aesthetic models and their underlying epistemologies, they must escape the binary of positing either coherence or incoherence, of the artwork or of the subject and their world. That is, Wilde’s aesthetics must be shown somehow to determine a text which, while not organized
function of those techniques in an aesthetic whole” (Lisi 3), we will find that the epistemological structures implied by the aesthetic structure align closely with those identified by Sedgwick as the “glass closet” or “open secret.” Two tasks of immediately at hand. First, to articulate, with Sedgwick, what the structure of the glass closet might be. Second, to outline how an aesthetics grounded upon such an epistemology would function as transcending the aesthetics of autonomy/aestheticism without positing their dialectical negation in the aesthetics of fragmentation/the avant-gardes. In Epistemology of the Closet , Sedgwick draws our attention to Michel Foucault’s articulation of the discursive power of silence as grounding her own project: in the vicinity of the closet, even what counts as a speech act is problematized on a perfectly routine basis. As Foucault says: “there is no binary division between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things.…There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.” (3; emphasis original) She goes on to describe the closet as a “performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence” ( ibid .) While Sedgwick does not proceed to articulate precisely the epistemological structure of this silent performance–it is an irony of Epistemology that it broadly outlines yet never articulates an actual epistemology–she points to a sense in which the gay male or queer subject relates to their world through a series unresolved and unresolvable–or only contingently resolvable–truth valuations. The post-Victorian sexual regime under which we live, and which takes hold in the generation of Oscar Wilde, is marked by a “pointed cognitive refusal of sexuality between women, between men” (73; emphasis original). In the interface between queer subject and world, the content of that subject’s identity is not made invisible, but rather made visible as invisible. It is admitted, even declared, only through its refusal to declare. The glass
closet is the fullest manifestation of this epistemological structure, in which the truth of the subject is acknowledged precisely through the silence which accrues around them. This structure will be articulated as an irresolvable liminality between a singular, autonomous subject and a multiple, fragmentary subject constituted through speech acts of silence arising from a social injunction to such silence. The subject is resolvable in this position as neither, but is rather held in a suspension between them. It is, finally, a determinate indetermination, made determinate through reference to an external other who, through their act of silent naming both brings the subject’s indeterminacy forward and determines it as such. To unpack what I mean by this, I will articulate here how such a structure arises for the queer subject over three distinct moments. To begin, the queer subject is taken as autonomous. In the first moment, however, that autonomy is destabilized, and the fragmentary, bifurcated subject of the closet is determined. From the social injunction to silence surrounding homosexuality, a division between the public self and the private self of the queer subject emerges. This is the liminality of the closet, between hidden and exposed version of the same subject. In the second moment, this distinction becomes reflected within the queer subject, as they become incoherent to themselves. Within the epistemology subtending the aesthetics of autonomy–which is negated for the bifurcated subject of the closet–the Hölderlinian statement “I am I,” “expresses the most certain form of identity that we possess” (Lisi 37). Like a Cartesian clear and distinct perception, the truth of Hölderlin’s “I am I” is both irresistible and certain. For the queer subject, to the contrary, “I am I” is an incoherent statement. The meaning of the sentence is entirely uncertain, as the reference point “I” becomes indeterminately diffuse. The closeted subject cannot state “I am I” without clarifying: Which “I” is which “I”? Am “I” my public or private self? Is there, perhaps, even a
Whether by the actual presence of another subject or by the mere fact of sociality, the queer subject is always undergoing the dialectical motion from the second moment of internally reflective fragmentation to the third moment of determinate indetermination before the other. The ambiguity of silent naming determines this ambiguous position of the queer subject, irresolvable either to the organic coherence of the autonomous subject or the incoherence of the fragmentary subject. Essential to this epistemological structure is the dependence of the subject on the other for particular determination. There are, to be precise, three possible positions relative to the closeted subject. In the first instance, the queer subject is confronted by an other that is entirely ignorant. They have none of the prior knowledge or understanding to recognize that the queer subjected is closeted, and takes the public self of the queer subject as it is given. Relative to this other, the queer subject appears to be autonomous, even if relative to themself the queer subject is fragmented by the closet door. In the second instance, the queer subject is confronted by a partially cognizant other. This other is aware enough to recognize an incoherence in the superficial, public self of the closeted subject, but brings to bear insufficient knowledge. They cannot perceive the structure of the closet internal to the queer subject, and therefore cannot secure the relative coherence of that subject of themself. Relative to this other, the queer subject appears merely fragmentary. In the third instance, the queer subject is confronted by a fully cognizant other. This other is able fully to fully perceive the homoerotic subtext of the silences which surround the queer subject, and name that subject as queer. Relative to this other, the closeted subject does not have an internal, organic coherence. Rather, they appear to occupy a glass closet: on their own terms indeterminate, yet in relation to the knowing other coherent in that indeterminacy.
Aesthetically, a text structured in terms of the glass closet would stand similarly as determinate in its own indetermination as n/either fragmentary n/or autonomous. Such a text would, further, be open to manifesting three different apparent aesthetic structures according to three different readers, one fully ignorant, one partly cognizant, and one in full possession of the necessary prior knowledge to constitute the text as a glass closet. In the particular case of The Picture of Dorian Gray , I will argue that the novel is constituted structurally though a system of literary allusions–that is, performative silences–which place the reader in a determinative position with respect to the aesthetic significance of the text. Wilde’s use of intertextual allusions, I will argue, render the text legible according to multiple, distinct hermeneutic registers producing non-identical texts. These registers, in turn, unfold progressively in accordance with the degree of cognizance the reader brings to the text. Nonetheless, this unfolding is not predicated upon a demand at any point internal to the readings; one register does not demand its negation in the next. Rather, it is entirely dependent on the given reader and the content of the knowledge that reader brings to the text to determine which version of the text and which aesthetic structure solidifies. In the first place, this is manifest with relation to the queerness of the text: there will be readers for whom the text is coherent without any insinuation of homoerotic subtext, readers for whom the text is clearly queer, and readers in between for whom the text, while not cohering as queer, does not cohere with itself.^5 In the second place, for readers cognizant of the queer text, the garden scenes which open the text become legible as seduction. In turn, a set of those readers bringing with them the necessary external knowledge, the garden reads as an allusion to the
(^5) For a thorough account of the reception of The Picture of Dorian Gray as a “non-homosexual” text and argument for the possibility of reading the text productively without any reference whatsoever to Dorian Gray’shomosexuality, see Guy and Small, 31-39.
entirely unstated; they are available only to the reader for whom the references are intimately familiar. The allusions within Dorian Gray do not thrust themselves upon the reader, either as impediments or as a key to disentangling the text, but rather invite the attention of the reader who is aware of their significance while allow the reader who is not so aware to continue on their way unperturbed. As such, whereas the only possibility of accounting for sense in a text like The Waste Land is a careful elucidation of each and every allusion, with Dorian Gray it is up to the intervention of the reader, and dependent upon the degree of their particular epistemic privilege, whether some, all, or none of the allusions come into play. Guy and Small are correct that “the most fruitful way of unlocking the novel’s subversive secrets is…by patiently explaining Wilde’s allusions, and spelling out the values which they encode” (193), but they are only correct that this is the most fruitful approach. The fullest possible reading of the novel may be available only with respect to reader for whom the novel is a glass closet, but the novel does not itself demand such a reading. Oscar Wilde writes in the preface to Dorian Gray , “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril” (239). I believe this is what Wilde had in mind, that the novel is at once what it is on its surface, and what it is when one reads its allusion. To remain at the surface or to go below it, to ignore the symbols or to read them, is entirely up to the reader. Wilde will not absolve the reader of that final responsibility to determine the significance of the text which he has constituted as, in itself, indeterminate: “It is the spectator, and not life, that are really mirrors” ( ibid .). It is only in the encounter between the text and what the reader demands of it that the novel takes shape.
B. Modernity as an Aesthetic and Philosophical Problem Dandyism is the assertion of the absolute modernity of Beauty. (“Maxims” 1242) In understanding Oscar Wilde’s significance as a queer intervention in philosophical aesthetics–and aesthetic philosophy–at a particular moment in the history of modernity, three principal problematics are brought to bear: 1. “modernity” as such as a problem or crisis; 2. Oscar Wilde’s particular moment relative to the historical unfolding of that problem; 3. Oscar Wilde’s relationship as queer to that problem. I will attempt here to treat these three points as systematically as possible. That modernity may be conceived of as a “problem” or in “crisis” is hardly innovative. It belongs, rather, to the discourse of modernity itself. Robert Pippin very helpfully and thoroughly elucidates the contours of that crisis, both for philosophy as a discipline and the arts, in his Modernism as a Philosophical Problem. Therein, Pippin proposes that “modernity” aggregates philosophically and aesthetically around the positing of subjective autonomy, and the positing of that autonomy as a problem (3). That modernity is an issue of autonomy is itself, again, hardly innovative; to quote Lisi, “Whatever else there might be disagreement about with respect to modernism, a consensus exists that ‘autonomy’ is central to it” (Lisi 1). What Pippin does offer that is different is an understanding which, through a hermeneutic shift that centers the historical progression of the autonomy problem on its philosophical manifestations, takes modernism to be a wrestling with the disatisfaction of the grounds of autonomy. Modernism is not a particular solution to the positing of autonomy, it is itself the positing of autonomy as a problem. A problem, that is, both of the positive attempt to articulate a subject and artwork which is the grounds of its own justification, and the negative dissatisfaction which arises in the face of all such attempts.
aestheticism in Bürger’s account is the avant-garde, which opposes formally the principle of the fragment to that of organic autonomous unity (69), and which opposes functionally–in order to reject the autonomy of art from life absolutely–the distinct institution of art as such (49). This move constitutes a “break in the development of art” and an “historical discontinuity” which radically shifts the grounds of all theoretical analysis of aesthetics (88). The transition from aestheticism to to the avant-garde is therefore, following Bürger, the single most important moment in aesthetic history between the Renaissance and the present. This moment at the end of the nineteenth century when a fulcrum appears between the fulfillment of autonomy in aestheticism and its utter rejection in the avant-garde, is precisely the moment into which Oscar Wilde enters. Julia Prewitt Brown strikes a similar note when she attempts to disassociate Wilde’s aestheticism from that of Walter Pater and the Pre-Raphaelites (xvii-xviii). As she articulates it, “Wilde was never an absolute aesthete” (60-61; emphasis original). Rather, he was always “conscious of the limitations of l’art pour l’art ” (61). Indeed, the main thrust of her reading is to argue that Wilde’s most substantial contribution to philosophical aesthetics is the development of an “ethical aesthetic” (51), that is to say, of an aestheticism in which a productive dialectic of “Life” and “Art” recognizing their paradoxical mutual exclusion and mutual dependence is maintained. This would be an aestheticism that attempts to move beyond the unsustainable absolute autonomy of the “Aestheticism” defined by Peter Bürger without yet resolving into the fragmentation of the avant-garde , as he defines it. Without adopting Brown’s analysis per se , we may adopt this conclusion, that Wilde’s project from its beginning is not, as many continue to believe, mere aestheticism. Wilde’s work engages, rather, in a radical reappraisal of the project
of aestheticism and attempts to define a new position beyond its horizon without yet abandoning its promise of a way out of the crisis of meaning in modernity. While not framing the issue quite as I have, Brown does recognize the historical significance of this project and Wilde’s historical moment. Comparing Wilde to Nietzsche, Brown elaborates: Wilde stood at a point in history on which all the contradictory influences of the nineteenth century were brought to bear, and he was as conscious of representing this position as his contemporary on the continent was, to whom he was compared by bothGide and Thomas Mann. In fact, Wilde and Nietzsche inherited the same situation in philosophy: what earlier in the century Engels had called the ‘despair of reason,’ its confessed inability to solve contradictions with which it is ultimately faced. (57-58) There is, in other words, in this moment shared by Nietzsche and Wilde, the coming to maturity of the problem of modernity as the problem of aestheticism. To quote Wilde himself, “Dandyism is assertion of the absolute modernity of Beauty” (“Maxims” 1242). Without necessarily conceding to Bürger that aestheticism represents the terminus of the history of aesthetics, it is possible to agree with him that aestheticism is a climaxing of a particular socio-political and philosophico-aesthetic trend towards the assertion of the absolute autonomy of art and the subject. It is an “historical rupture” within the history of aesthetics, one I do not believe merely coincidentally simultaneous with “moment of cultural discontinuity or rupture” Sedgwick associates with the emergences of queer identities and contemporary post-Victorian sexual discourse ( Epistemology 2). That is, we can understand Wilde, insofar as pushes the boundaries of aestheticism towards the point of transcending them–without resorting thereby to the dialectical negation of aestheticism that would in following generations arrive with the avant- gardes–as precariously straddling a philosophico-hisotircal fault line. How might Oscar Wilde’s difference in how he straddles this fault line–relative, say, to a Nietzsche–be understood? This is question here at stake; it is one thing to describe the
