Much of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray focuses around the dichotomy of physical appearance and the soul, through the use of deformation and as represented by the titular portrait. Painter Basil Hallward expresses the nature of deformation insisting of public scandals that they “must interest you, Dorian. Every gentleman is interested in his good name. You don’t want people to talk of you as something vile and degraded…Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed” (126). Wilde chooses the word degraded at several significant moments throughout the novel, consistently drawing a parallel by which the committing of sin and physical appearances deform congruently, if not causally. Dorian the man is based on Ovid's Echo and Narcissus and the deformation and degradation of his portrait represent in the novel Dorian Gray's reflexivity. This is where Dorian differs from Narcissus, for as the latter "is reflective...he is not reflexive that is, he is conscious of himself as an other, but he is not conscious of being self-conscious of himself as an other, and hence not able to detach himself from, understand, survive, or even laugh at this initial experience of alienation," Dorian is forced constantly to confront his otherness, his alienation, and his detachment--and yet Dorian still fails to survive (Babcock 2).
Earlier in the narrative—as the reader enters Lord Henry Wotton’s consciousness—the man of pleasure meditates upon his work of art in Dorian the man, drawing an analogy between his and proper art insofar as “now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, Life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or paintings” (Wilde 52). Lord Henry continues to expand upon an understanding of the life-art correspondence in terms of the existence of “animalism in the soul, and the body [having] its moments of spirituality. The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade…Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the body really in the soul” (53). The conflation of body and the soul, however, becomes a complicated reality as each character maintains a high degree of difficulty determining if the body primarily affects the soul or if the opposite is true. As Dorian himself contemplates the relationship and the nature of deformation in the aftermath of his ill treatment toward Sybil:
He shuddered, and felt afraid, and, going back to the couch, lay there, gazing at the picture in sickened horror…There were opiates for remorse, drugs that could dull the moral sense to sleep. But here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin. Here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls. (81)
It becomes, here, by no means clear whether sinful action causes the degradation of appearance, but that certainly seems to be the order of events. This scene represents the fruition of Basil’s intimation to Lord Henry Wotton, “I hope the girl is good, Harry. I don’t want to see Dorian tied to some vile creature, who might degrade his nature and ruin his intellect” (63). But rather than Sybil’s appearance and nature deforming Dorian’s soul, it is Dorian influencing his own demise. The portrait’s grotesquification allowed for Dorian to lament his sinful behavior but also to experience an invisibility of his own physical deformation.
By this invisibility, this ability to forego responsibility, Dorian’s soul slipped even further into evil. Dorian does attempts to reason his deformation to a “natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves” (108). He notices how “the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic” (108). Then of his own deforming situation, he comes to a expressing a declaration:
There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear, and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape, Nature, in her wonderful irony, driving out the anchorite to feed with the wild animals of the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field of his companions. (108)
Wilde’s project attempts to create of his society a new and unique theory of degradation, wherein fearful selfishness causes both physical and spiritual degradation that needs to be on display for society in order to control its monstrosity. Or, in Basil’s words to Lord Henry and Dorian prior to Sybil’s stunted theatrical performance as Juliet, “’One has to pay [for selfishness] in other ways but money…Oh! I should fancy in remorse, in suffering, in…well, in the consciousness of degradation’” (67). The idea of consciousness as a mode through which degradation appears denies the prevailing sociological mindset, which insists that Dorian’s beauty represents his good nature. And although Dorian’s degradation lived invisibly behind his beautiful physical features, “upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation of his life, and in front of it had draped the purple-and-gold pall as a curtain” (117).
In similar ways as the novel debates the body-soul dichotomy, so too does the story discuss science and magic as a lens through which to study human nature. After the first notice of the portrait’s distortion, Dorian “remembered afterwards, and always with no small wonder, he found himself at first gazing at the portrait with a feeling of almost scientific interest” (80). Then later in the chapter, Dorian believes “there would be a real pleasure in watching it. He would be able to follow his mind into its secret places. This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul” (89). The narrative broadens its utility of the language of science with distance to the action and dialogue within the story. Wilde’s narrator invokes the scientific community, relating the “moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses” (158). As he corresponds the effects of fear on the degradation of body and soul, he also proposes—through Lord Henry—that “Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate” (173). The function of Dorian Gray’s scientific language, the emphasis on the city setting, and the model of social evolution, predicts tropes and themes that will become more dominant in the Modernist and Naturalist fiction of the twentieth-century.
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