1. The Picture of Dorian Gray: the structure of the novel

2. Freytag’s pyramid:

3. Chapters 1-3: exposition 4-7: rising movement: love affair with Sybil Vane – break-up – decision to go back to her and to ‘resist temptation,’ with the painting as ‘the visible emblem of conscience’ 8-10: crisis/reversal: 8: Dorian finds out Sybil is dead (= too late for Dorian to reform himself); 9: Basil’s ‘strange confession’ p 92-3 + decision to hide the painting, (end of chapter); 10: the painting (:‘the secret of his life’ )is taken to the old nursery + a book bound in yellow is sent by Lord Henry (p100- 101) (Or turning point = 12-13?: arrival and murder of Basil: a sin from which there is no turning back) 11-18: falling movement: 11: the impact of the yellow book (p 116 ‘Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book’) -> leap over a period of 18 years (beg. chapter 12: Dorian is 38); Dorian’s moral degradation: descent into murder (12-13), blackmail (14), drug addiction (15-16) and various unnamed sins; James Vane reappears (16-17-18) 19-20: dénouement

4. A symmetrical system of echoes: Chapters: 1 (painting) / 20 (painting) 2 (Dorian + Lord Henry) / 19 (D. + Lord H.) 3 (dinner at Lord H.’s Aunt Agatha’s) / 18 (house party with the Duchess of Monmouth and Lord Henry) Chapter 2 p 24-5: Faustian pact + Basil about to ‘rip up the canvas’, Dorian stops him :‘It would be murder’ / Dorian stabs the portrait- himself (20)

5. p16 (chap. 2) / p 168 (chap. 19): Dorian at the piano Beg. Chapter 8 / beg. chap. 14: Dorian having breakfast after sb who loved him has died because of him >> a symmetrical system of echoes on either side of the climactic chapters, and also a pattern of recurring words, verbal echoes: See John Paul Riquelme ‘Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Gothic’ in the Arden Critical ed. : burden, flame, shadow, languid (also: safe): p504: ‘Echo as well as Narcissus plays a continuing role in Wilde’s novel because of the style’s echoic character’

6. Other echoes: Echoes: not just within the novel, but also between the novel and Wilde’s other (previous or following) works: Lord Henry’s wit -> O. Wilde’s plays (post D.G.) // with his essays (pre D.G.): ex. ‘The Decay of Lying’, ref. to ‘Japanese effect’ (see Norton p 346) the short story ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ ( see note 7 your ed) Echoes of other works (+ myths as seen before: Echo = Sybil, Narcissus = Dorian; Dorian = Faust, Lord Henry = Mephistopheles): Walter Pater, The Renaissance (‘flame-like’), Marius the Epicurean: New Cyrenaicism -> Lord Henry’s New Hedonism. Frankel p 29 ‘the climax of a long dialogue between Wilde and Pater’ ‘The novel dramatizes Pater’s ideas, radicalizes them, and in doing so offers itself as a critique of Pater’s aestheticism. Some readers see the novel […] as a parody of his ideas.’ J.K. Huysmans, A Rebours: a inspiration for chapter 11, plus the ‘book bound in yellow’ (Le Secret de Raoul par Catulle Sarrazin in the 1890 ed.) Echoes of Wilde himself? ‘[The Picture of Dorian Gray] contains much of me in it. Basil Hallward is what I think I am : Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be, in other ages, perhaps’ (letter to Ralph Payne 1894)

7. Back to the novel as ‘a system of parallels and reversals’ (Riquelme) Central figure: the double, the Gothic doppelgänger archetype (see Moodle) Doubling: Dorian/picture, with a final reversal picture/Dorian + theme of the ‘double life’ led by the apparently respectable Dorian But also: // between the portrait and the book presented by Lord Henry (both works of art influencing Dorian), which is also a double of the book we are reading, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which as the title suggests is also a ‘picture,’ as well as a mirror in which we can see ourselves (according to the preface: ‘It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors’) (like the picture in the book, ‘the most magical of mirrors’)

8. One of the central themes: influence Parallel between Basil and Harry: both influence Dorian. Basil with the painting (see p 23-24 ‘A look of joy came into his eyes, as if he had recognized himself for the first time.’) Harry with his words and with the yellow book (see p 100-1: ‘It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed’ + p 102: ‘For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book. [..] And indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it.’)

9. But also: Dorian influences Basil’s art. + Dorian initially imitates Harry, then he goes further, does things H. would love to do, p 171 ‘I wish I could change places with you, Dorian’. // between Dorian and Sybil: both ‘attractive young people to whom unpleasant, destructive revelations are made’ (chapter 3: Dorian becomes aware of the fleeting nature of his beauty; chapter 7: Sybil discovers the fleeting nature of love) >> Dorian is to Sybil what Henry was to him Dorian: eventually in the same relation to Basil when he shows him the picture before killing him Dorian: eventually in the same relationship to himself? (final confrontation with the picture revealing the futility of his attempt at redemption)

10. John Paul Riquelme ‘Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic gothic’ p 503: Central to the novel’s structure is the doubling not only of person and painting that Pater mentions but also of picture and book, both the book within the narrative that Lord Henry gives Dorian, and the book we read that is also a Picture. The doublings include Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton as fraternal collaborators in the production of the painting and as doubles of different kinds for Dorian himself. Hallward and Wotton split up the dual role that Leonardo da Vinci fills as the quintessential artist-scientist. As a detatched experimenter with human lives, Wotton is an avatar of Victor Frankenstein, who produces an ugly, destructive double of himself. There is, as well, the parallel between Dorian Gray and Sybil Vane, as attractive young people to whom unpleasant, destructive revelations are made. Complicating that parallel is the fact that Dorian stands in relation to Sybil as Lord Henry does to him as the revealer of something harsh and damaging. Dorian also stands eventually in the same relation to Basil, whom he destroys, as he has already destroyed Sybil. At the end, he stands in that same destructive relation to himself. Although Dorian prevents Basil from ripping up the painting with a knife near the end of chapter 2, he ultimately stabs the painter, who says he has revealed himself in the painting, and he pursues Hallward’s intention from chapter 2 by trying to stab the painting in the book’s final chapter and thereby stabbing its subject. This is ekphrasis with a vengeance and the revenge of the ekphrastic object, which strikes out at the artist and viewer, who wish also to strike it.The roles in reversal become indistinguishable. So many doublings and shifts of position undermine the possibility of reading the book as realistic, that is, as containing primarily intelligible patterns and answers rather than enigmas that cannot be readily resolved. There is no ultimately controlling perspective based on a geometry of narrative relations that allows us to find a stable, resolving point of vantage. In this narrative garden of forking paths, there appears to be a virus that replicates itself in double, antithetical forms within a maze that leads us not to an exit but to an impasse.

11. Other ‘doublings’ Sybil / Alan Campbell / Basil (D’s victims) Sybil / her mother: inverted mirror images: Sybil lives her roles on the stage as if they were real, her mother lives her life as if it were a cheap melodrama (p 70 ‘[…] before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night, and Portia the other.’; p 51 ‘Mrs Vane glanced at her, and with one of those false theatrical gestures that so often become a mode of second nature to a stage- player, clasped her in her arms.’) Sybil / Hettie Merton Dorian / Adrian Singleton Similar names: Dorian, Alan, Adrian

12.  concl.: as suggested by John Paul Riquelme: not a ‘realistic’ text, but a deliberately artificial, antirealistic one. + ‘Doublings and shifts of position’: making it impossible to come up with a reassuringly stable interpretation of the novel.  Multiplicity of possible readings of the book

13. A glorification of vice? (see many of Wilde’s early critics) A morality tale? Faustian pact (p 23-4 + p 150, ‘the devil’s bargain!’); struggle between good and evil influences, Basil vs Lord Henry? (but note that both equally fail to understand Dorian, and the ‘good’ character is punished more harshly than the ‘evil’ one) A human tragedy? See Sheldon W. Liebman in ‘Character Design in The Picture of Dorian Gray’: ‘Dorian Gray is torn between two mutually exclusive interpretations of human experience: one, optimistic, religious, and emotional; the other pessimistic, cynical, and intellectual.’ His life: a failed attempt at trying to reconcile two contradictary human impulses, instinct and conscience, self-development and morality. An indictment of aestheticism? (see Richard Ellmann, but note the contradiction with the Preface, an aesthetic manifesto which discourages the reader from seeking any moral in the story, and also the fact that Lord Henry is the only character who is spared at the end)

14. According to Wilde himself: a condemnation of both excess and renunciation: letter to the Daily Chronicle, 1890: “What I want to say is that, so far from wishing to emphasize any moral in my story, the real trouble I experienced in writing the story was that of keeping the extremely obvious moral subordinate to the artistic and dramatic effect. When I first conceived the idea of a young man selling his soul in exchange for eternal youth […] I felt that, from an aesthetic point of view, it would be difficult to keep the moral in its proper secondary place, and even now I do not feel quite sure that I have been able to do so. I think the moral too apparent. When the book is published in a volume I hope to correct this defect. […] The real moral of the story is that all excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its punishment, and this moral is so far artistically and deliberately suppressed that it does not enunciate its law as a general principle, but realizes itself purely in the lives of individuals, and so becomes simply a dramatic element in a work of art, and not the subject of the work of art itself.”

15. Nicholas Frankel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, an annotated, uncensored edition, general introduction : Ellman is right that Dorian Gray is a tragedy but certainly wrong in asserting that the novel is a condemnation of aestheticism. Wilde never ceased to be an aesthete in his writings and pronouncements. His only novel, written in decorative prose that works upon the senses, and full of acknowledgements to its aesthetic precursors, is the fiction of an aesthete, whatever else it is. From an artistic point of view, Wilde felt that emphasizing the moral cost of pursuing pleasure to its logical conclusion was the novel’s central weakness […]. And according to the artistic tenets that Wilde had articulated for a considerable time by 1890 – and that he was to reiterate in the 1891 Preface – Dorian’s (and our own) willingness to be judged by the portrait, to see it as the document of his inner corruption, is to misunderstand that ‘the sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct.’ Dorian has, in truth, misconstrued the nature of the portrait from the start, gazing at it as if it were a mirror of his true being or soul. Had he understood the portrait from a more purely ‘Wildean’ perspective, seeing it (like any artwork) not as a truth-telling entity so much as a purely imaginative one, he would never have come to be so haunted or possessed by it, allowing it to dominate his existence at the expense of what makes him human. ‘Art never expresses anything but itself’ and is best understood for its absolute indifference to life, Wilde maintains in ‘The Decay of Lying.’

16. By confusing the relations between life and art – to the degree that he becomes the work of art and feels he can act with impunity as a result – Dorian has allowed not merely his humanity to become diminished and shrunken but his ‘aestheticism’ as well. He has morphed, in effect, from an aesthete into a mere decadent. The destruction of art, as of civilized culture more broadly, Wilde writes, begins not when ‘Life becomes fascinated with [art’s] new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle’ as a result, but when ‘Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art into the wilderness.’ Dorian is no more an examplar of Wildean aestheticism than Camus’s Mersault is a model of existantialism. Aestheticism, at least initially, promises to fulfill Dorian’s human potential, not to thwart it. A life dedicated to sensation and art needs to be lived fully and openly, Wilde suggests; but we should not forget that art ‘is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way.’ The minute life mistakes its object or tries to be sensation or art, to act wholly according to it or to separate itself from those broader elements that define humanity as such, a kind of corruption sets in and both life and art become inescapably spoiled in consequence.

17. Art and life in The Picture of Dorian Gray: crossing boundaries Frankel: DG = about what happens when you project your life onto art instead of acknowledging art as separate Basil: puts too much of himself in the painting Sybil: art as a substitute for life Sybil’s mother: life as bad art Henry: a disengaged spectator of life, as if life were a work of art Dorian (+Henry), p80ff: life as a play: ‘How extroardinarily dramatic life is!’; ‘And yet I admit that this thing that has happened does not affect me as it should. It seems to me simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded.’

18. // between Dorian and Sybil: Dorian/Narcissus: identification with portrait, fascination for an image => death Identification with painting (chapter 2 p 23), then inversion art/life as the painting is made to ‘bear the burden’ (p85), then inversion : itself inverted as the work of art regains its original beauty. The Faustian pact = A monstrous kind of contamination of art by life, which leads to the destruction of the hero. Sybil/ Echo: identification with Shakespeare’s heroines, inability to find her own voice => death Sybil’s art as an actress: based on a similar process of identification When real life (love) takes over, her art, her talent, vanishes, because to her it was only a substitute for life (read p70). When she commits suicide, art regains its supremacy (at least in Dorian’s and Henry’s eyes) as ‘She pass[es] again into the sphere of art’ (p88) = process of contamination and destruction similar to Dorian’s case.

19.  Both characters fail to understand art and use it wisely, to give art its rightful place as an autonomous object. The mistake both Sybil and Dorian make: valuing art purely as a reflexion of themselves, as if it were a mirror, rather than as an end in itself, an independent entity whose only purpose is beauty.

20. Similar ‘original sins’ committed by Basil: painting a realistic modern portrait of Dorian rather than sticking with the Greek themes (realism) + seeing the portrait as a mirror of himself (romanticism). Final scene: a return to order, with art and life finding their rightful places again? = unclear. Restoration of the real or triumph of art? A double process: the characters project themselves onto art and spoil it, art invades life and destroys it. Careful! We shouldn’t commit a similar sin against art and overinterpret the novel: see the preface ‘Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.’