...Classroom" Wilde is one of those rare authors perhaps equally famous for his life as for his works. When Wilde was a student at Oxford he enthralled his colleagues by decorating his room with blue vases full of lilies (the known symbol of the Pre-Raphealite Brotherhood), and is reported to have caused a stir by showing up to gallery openings in a coat made to resemble a cello. The son of a woman who had reinvented herself by claiming her maiden name, Elgee, was a corruption of the surname of the great Italian poet Dante Aligheri, Wilde inherited his mother's sense of flare and daring. With his ubiquitous green carnation, flamboyantly feminized dress and clever epigrammatic sayings, Wilde cultivated the dandyish persona of "the aesthete in the marketplace" (Sloan 9) when he was through at Oxford, soon winning tame on both sides of the Atlantic for his easy wit and effulgent flamboyance. Wilde was highly adept at networking and self-promotion, essentially managing to turn himself into a walking advertisement for his plays, prose, poetry, and aesthetic philosophies. When the artistic freedom and experimentation of the "New Hedonism" surfaced in the 1880s and 90s, Wilde became the "presiding spirit of this emerging new culture" (Sloan 19).

The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in July 1890. It met, for the most part, with criticisms of immorality. "It is not made sufficiently clear," complained the Scots Observer, "that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health, and sanity" (Critical Heritage 75). The Daily Chronicle took a similar tone, alleging that "Mr. Wilde's book has no real use if it be not to inculcate the 'moral' that when you feel yourself becoming too angelic you cannot do better than rush out and make a beast of yourself" (Critical Heritage 72). These allegations were entirely unexpected by Wilde, who thought that he had written an obsequiously moral book. "I cannot understand how they can treat Dorian Gray as immoral," Wilde wrote to Arthur Conan Doyle in April 1891: "my difficulty was to keep the inherent moral subordinate to the artistic and dramatic effect" (Letters 478). Wilde made several public attempts to address his critics on this point. In a rebuttal letter to the Daily Chronicle dated 30 June 1890, he wrote that "what I want to say, 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" (Letters 435). A letter to the St. James' Gazette (26 June 1890) again asserts the self-evidence of a moral in Dorian Gray:

They will find that [Dorian Gray] is a story with a moral, and the moral is this; All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment ... Yes; there is a terrible moral in Dorian Gray--a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but which will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book. (Letters 430-1)

These letters demonstrate Wilde's initial strategy for the public defense of Dorian Gray: to address his critics and detractors head-on by contending that indeed there is a moral. Wilde's publication of the famous "Preface" in the Fortnightly Review (March 1891) marked an abrupt change of strategy. Rather than arguing that Dorian Gray does have a moral, Wilde was now alleging that "there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book" (3). What the "Preface" does, in effect, is to articulate Wilde's version of the "art for art's sake" credo, distancing the work itself from the standards of what Dorian, parroting Lord Henry, calls "middle class virtue" (106).

Wilde's main purpose in the "Preface" (which was included in the 1891 book edition of Dorian Gray) was the obfuscation of what he considered to be an excessively apparent moral conclusion. When Wilde wrote to the St. James' Gazette on 26 June 1890, he began a long series of evasive maneuvres that would continue until his eventual imprisonment. Aside from being ambiguous, Wilde's suggestion in the St. James' Gazette letter that the "moral" of Dorian Gray--"all excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment"--is a massive understatement of the novel's essentially orthodox morality. Dorian Gray is tar more overtly Christian than Wilde's generically ethical statement seems to indicate. It conveys an orthodox rendering of the objective world, and reinforces this orthodoxy by maintaining the hierarchy of the Christian cosmological schema in its end. It can be inferred from the great efforts Wilde took to cultivate an outlandish persona that the last thing he wanted to appear was orthodox. Wilde's changes for the 1891 version of Dorian Gray, as well as much of his subsequent public commentary on the novel, are designed to obscure the fact that he had written a book with an ostensibly Christian moral. Wilde seems to have truly believed his own dictum about the apparentness of the moral being the novel's "only flaw," and its Christian sensibility must have been that much more shaming for the "presiding spirit of [the] emerging new culture" of the "New Hedonism."

Given Wilde's blatant public pronouncements that Dorian Gray had an overt moral, the claim of the preface that "there is no such thing as an immoral book" cannot be taken at face value. It should be evident by this point that "moral" is a problematic term when talking about Dorian Gray. Wilde's use of "moral" in the preface seems to imply the classical signification of the word as a broad collection of teachings or philosophies (OED). This points to morality as a comprehensive (and presumably internally coherent) system, precisely the kind of metanarrative that Jean-Francois Lyotard avowed his postmodern incredulity for. Wilde was unable to think of himself as entirely outside the assumptions of his age, but the "Preface" does allow for the looser senses of "moral" as the "teaching or practical lesson of a fiction or fable" (OED) and as a vehicle for "import, meaning, and signification" (OED). In the distance between these senses of "moral," Wilde is both anticipating some important notions of postmodern narrative theory and creating a novel whose somewhat scripted trajectory towards the "teaching or practical lesson" manages to lead to a plurality of viable access points. My "window into Wilde," as it were, is what I'll call the "subtle/evil" interplay.

One of Wilde's less obtrusive edits for the 1891 version occurs in a description of the book that Dorian receives from Lord Henry. In the 1890 version the book is said to contain "metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as evil in colour" [emphasis mine] (Planet .PDF 155). For the 1891 version, Wilde deleted the word evil...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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