It's Like Looking in the Mirror of Society: How the Picture of Dorian Gray Is the Reflection

Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is just the sort of book that made Victorian England shiver. This decadent masterpiece is anything but a vehicle for the propagation of middle-class morality. We have in Wilde the ultimate aesthete, a disciple of Walter Pater, a dandy who in his personal life seems to have lived out Pater's quiet injunction to "burn with that hard, gemlike flame" in experiencing art and, no doubt, other things. How could Wilde's book, given its affinities with the age's decadent manifestoes--Stèphane Mallarmé's symbolist poetry, Huysmans' À Rebours (Against Nature), Aubrey Beardsley's drawings, The Yellow Book, and so on--serve as a cultural critique every bit as scathing, and perhaps more acute, than those of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold? I suggest that Wilde accomplishes this task by making his characters enact the philosophy with which he himself was nearly synonymous and, in the same gesture, connecting this very philosophy with the logic of capitalistic exploitation that underlay the aristocratic façade of Dorian's England. By Wilde's time, the aristocracy could do little more than serve the capital-owning class as a kind of enhanced mirror image of its own behavior. The worst tendencies of Wilde's wealthy characters are none other than the selfishness, isolation, exploitation, and brutality that made the most perspicuous Victorians condemn capital. In Wilde's aristocracy, we see rich, idle, and decadent characters reveal from their lounge chair and clubroom perspective the worst flaws in the system upon which they are parasitic. They are the dressed-up doubles, the insignificant others, of Britain's industrial class. Grown refined and idle, Wilde's aristocrats are free to expose, both in their words and deeds, the "sins" of those indulged with mammonism. Let's try to draw out the element of cultural criticism, then, in The Picture of Dorian Gray. If we wanted to pursue a moralistic, depressingly middle-class reading, we might think