The Picture of Dorian Gray
Literary Gothic in Special Collections
Brontë family manuscripts in Special Collections
Oscar Wilde in Special Collections
Twentieth century gothic: Dennis Wheatley & Sophie Hannah
Rachel Mace introduces The Picture of Dorian Gray:
In 1891 Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) published his first and only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray to scathing reviews.
Throughout the novel the protagonist Dorian struggles with his sexuality at a time when The Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885) had made homosexuality illegal. Four years after the publication of his novel, on 25th May 1895, Wilde was imprisoned for two years with ‘hard labour’ for ‘gross indecency’, after the father of his lover Lord Alfred Douglas threatened to expose the writer’s own homosexuality.
The Picture of Dorian Gray was actually presented to the jury as incriminating evidence during the trial as it was thought to be semi-autobiographical, and therefore immoral, despite Wilde declaring that he had tried to play down this aspect of the novel for his readers.
The novel appeared during the fin de siècle when the Gothic style was again being revived, both architecturally and in the literary world.
Where previous authors of Gothic novels from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century had relied on exotic locations and medieval buildings to incite fear in their readers, Wilde brought the Gothic into the ‘naughty nineties’ by depicting an urban city setting filled with the opium dens and gentlemen’s clubs that many of his readers would have been familiar with.
As a keen follower of the Aesthetic movement that championed ‘art for art’s sake’, it is no surprise that Wilde chose a painting as the central motif in his novel that would haunt the text and torment his protagonist. The painting becomes a monstrous doppelgänger (double) of Dorian, and its gradual decay can be read as an example of degeneration or deteriorating morals, traits often associated with homosexuality and promiscuity during the late-Victorian period.
