‘A Malady Of Dreaming’

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‘A Malady Of Dreaming’Paul SheehanPublished online: 19 Aug 2006.

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‘A MALADY OF DREAMING’

Aesthetics and Criminality In The Picture

of Dorian Gray

Paul Sheehan

Oscar Wilde’s afterlife could be described as a case of ‘accelerated approbation’: by an

overwhelming critical consensus, his work seems more and more contemporary with each

passing year. Only three decades ago, Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling felt it necessary to

defend Wilde against charges of ‘showy mediocrity’ by gently directing him away from

Baudelaire and Flaubert and towards Blake. Now, however, he is the standard-bearer for

Queer Theory; a critical combatant in the field of Anglo-Irish relations; and, not least, a

poststructuralist avant la lettre. Terry Eagleton, for example, in the Foreword to his play

Saint Oscar, describes Wilde’s way with self-referential language, with the fictional nature of

truth and the illusory character of the human subject, and concludes that ‘Oscar Wilde

looms up for us more and more as the Irish Roland Barthes.’1 In similar fashion, Jonathan

Dollimore says of ‘Wilde’s transgressive aesthetic’ that ‘insincerity, inauthenticity, and

unnaturalness become the liberating attributes of decentred identity and desire, and

inversion becomes central to Wilde’s expression of this aesthetic’;2 ‘inversion’, here, is

clearly both sexual and textual, evoking same-sex male desire as well as playful

epigrammatic paradox.

But if, amidst this formidable lexicon of decentring and illusion, it is possible to talk of

a ‘core’ or ‘essence’ of the Wildean aesthetic, then it consists in what I will call the ‘theatrical

self’. This self is brought into being, is given the breath of life, through one precept in

particular: the fundamentally undecidable nature of performance. To support this claim I

suggest that, even though the theatre is no longer the mass-entertainment medium it was

in Wilde’s lifetime, there is one vital theatrical tenet that still abides in the culture, even in

our age of technological reason—and that is the confusion, uncertainty, ambiguity and

ultimate unknowability of the performing person. Where does performance end and ‘real

life’, or bare existence, begin? And what are the tools needed to make such a distinction? It

is not so much the problem that Yeats refers to, of separating the ‘dancer’ from the ‘dance’,

as of separating the dancer from the self, the performer from the person. The theatrical self,

then, is predicated on the view that performers do not need a stage; that audiences can be

composed of even the most unaware and oblivious bystanders; and that role-playing

infiltrates every corner of our daily lives. If Dollimore’s reading of Wilde is correct, that ‘life is

at best an energy which can only find expression through the forms which art offers it’,3

then it would seem that theatrical form is the primary mode, the one best suited to

mobilising this life energy in aesthetically accomplished ways.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is in some sense a commentary on this elusive quality of the

theatrical. It is an oblique, yet sustained, meditation on the nature of the theatrical self,

and on its primary condition of possibility: the notion that art and life are not separate,

Irish Studies Review, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2005ISSN 0967-0882 print 1469-9303 online/05/030333-340

q 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd DOI: 10.1080/09670880500171942

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discontinuous domains, but conjoined spheres across which limitless commutations are

possible. Or as Lord Henry Wotton says, in the novel: ‘I love acting. It is so much more real

than life.’4 Art and life meet, cross over, swap roles and play out indeterminate dramas, in a

dizzying vertigo of interactions and exchanges. The Picture of Dorian Gray addresses, by

implication, some of the epistemological difficulties that arise from this observation, and

the collateral outcomes—the most significant of which is to convey the clandestine bond

between aesthetics and criminality.

One of the more noteworthy aspects of Wilde’s novel is that it is a highly theatricalised

fiction. The world of the theatre provides the central axis for the novel, and it serves as the

ideal imaginary space for the focusing of Dorian’s desire. But beyond the histrionic

behaviour and dramatic performances that shape the narrative, there is the work’s intrinsic

design, its arch, theatrical assemblage. As Mario Praz points out, Wilde’s prose style is

essentially ‘decorative’, and this entails a kind of theatricalisation of the novel form: ‘Wilde’s

point-of-view, in fact, is always scenic; he sees things in stage-perspective; he is all the time

arranging his characters, his landscapes, his events, and making them pose.’5 This

compulsion for the theatrical is identified by Susan Sontag in her essay ‘Notes on “Camp”’.

The camp sensibility, writes Sontag, is ‘wholly aesthetic’, and it is conditioned by what she

terms the ‘theatricalization of experience’6—the switch-point where art and life meet,

where life can be lived in aesthetic terms. Straddling the two domains is the dandy. A

perpetual performer on the social stage, he closes the gap between art and life. We need

only recall Wilde’s celebrated remark to Andre Gide, about putting his talent into his work

and his genius into his life—a separation that he describes as ‘the great drama of my life’.7

There are numerous crossings-over between art and life in the novel, but two in

particular stand out, and follow reverse paths. The first is the episode with Sibyl Vane, the

East End actress whom Dorian woos, wins, and then abandons, when her off-stage persona

ceases to stir his imagination; or, to put it another way, the relationship breaks down when

Sibyl trades her artificial, theatrical self for a sincere, real-life one. ‘A little sincerity is a

dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.’8 Wilde’s maxim is borne out when

Sibyl, inconsolably distressed by Dorian’s departure, kills herself. Although Dorian initially

feels responsible for this, and suffers remorse, his reaction is tempered by the thought that

she has passed over into the sphere of art. This is part of the ‘tutelage’ he receives from Lord

Henry Wotton, in the guise of his aestheticising rationale:

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they

hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning,

their entire lack of style. They affect us as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of

sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that

possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real,

the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect.9 (Emphasis added)

This implies that ‘vulgarity’ and ‘beauty’ are not just parts of an aesthetic vocabulary but

can be applied to the most significant human concerns, to matters of life and death. Lord

Henry’s verdict on Sibyl’s demise underwrites this conviction: ‘There is something to me

quite beautiful about her death.’10 Soon after this episode, Dorian develops his own

aesthetic protocols, his own ways of negotiating the art-life gap that Sibyl’s death—and her

‘sincere’ demeanour—momentarily opened up.

The second example shows Dorian coming into his own as an aesthete-dandy. The

direct agent is the yellow-bound book that Lord Henry gives to him. If Sibyl’s death signifies

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the translation of life into art, the yellow book indicates the reverse: it presents a number of

sinful acts that Dorian is impelled to imitate, to make real. ‘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.’ In short: ‘It was a

poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to

trouble the brain.’11

A troubled brain leads to an altered consciousness. For the nineteenth-century

aesthete or decadent, the desire to escape the demands of a physical, naturalistic reality is

achieved most effectively through liminal states of consciousness—reverie, fantasy,

hallucination, mystical vision or trance-like states of mind, all exemplifying the

transformative power of artificial sensation. They provide access points to a self-contained

world of the imagination, a nocturnal escape route from the constraints of Victorian

conformity. In his elucidation of ‘Aesthetic Poetry’, for example, Walter Pater writes:

‘Reverie, illusion, delirium: they are the three stages of a fatal descent both in the religion

and the loves of the Middle Age. . . . The strangest creations of sleep seem here, by some

appalling licence, to cross the limit of the dawn. The English poet too has learned the

secret.’12

Dreaming is of particular importance, especially in its relation to aesthesis, the term

Pater revived in the 1860s when he wrote about the ‘Aesthetic movement’. As the Greek

word for ‘perception’, aesthesis helps to explain the aestheticist fixation on the ‘impression’;

Richard Ellmann even maintains that the latter was the word ‘with which Pater sought to

unlock everything’.13 But aestheticist theory is not focused exclusively on perception or the

receiving of impressions, but on what immediately follows, which is sensation. Since David

Hume, philosophers have made much of the distinction between impressions received by

the brain through the optic nerve, that is, visual perception, and images received directly by

the brain via the imagination. Oneiric experience, dream experience, is imagistic rather than

perceptual in character. Dreaming is a type of imagining, a projection of mental images

onto the screen of the mind, clearly distinct from the reception of sensory percepts.

Visualising something in the mind’s eye is very different from having a sensory impression

of it, that is, of actually seeing that thing. The two experiences therefore correspond to

different psychological states that ensue, one imagistic the other sensory.14 But I want to

suggest that shifting aesthesis from perception or impression-gathering to sensation in

effect short-circuits that distinction.

The oneiric or dream state is not, strictly speaking, a form of aesthesis, but it is

nevertheless an effective means of obtaining exotic sensation, and it is in this sense that The

Picture of Dorian Gray could be characterised as a ‘dream-novel’. Actual dreams figure in it

quite prominently, but even more marked is the sense of lethal purpose that often

underlies oneiric surrender. For on the other side of reverie, and its sanctioning of

unrestricted imagination, is the horror and helplessness, the inescapable downward pull,

and disintegration of form, that characterises dream-experience. Martin Greenberg, in his

study of The Terror of Art, describes this in relation to Kafka: ‘With him, literature gropes its

way to the very bottom of the mind, seeking the unconscious self in its very condition of

hiddenness, in all its turbidity and strickenness.’15

The dream aspects in Wilde’s tale are secreted through the yellow-bound book. As

the narrator explains, ‘Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to

him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.’16 The result is that

the ‘mere cadence of the sentences . . . produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from

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chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of

the falling day and creeping shadows’.17 The imagery is exact, anticipating Dorian’s fall into

shadows and the subsequent attenuation of the daytime world, its gradual eclipse by

nocturnes of uneasiness and agitation. The ‘turbidity’ of the dream-state also assimilates

the book’s theatrical architecture. As Guido Almansi and Claude Beguin note in their Theatre

of Sleep anthology: ‘In fact all dreams are subjects in search of an author; and there is a

profound affinity between dream and show, between La mise-en-scene du reve . . . and a

theatrical production.’18 Dreams are in some sense ‘staged’, then, just as Wilde orchestrates

the elements of his novel in terms of maximising their dramatic effect. His narrator gives the

book’s nocturnal ambience a psychological underpinning. He hints at a particularly acute,

even hallucinatory, form of insomnia:

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of

those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights

of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms

more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques,

and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially

the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie.19

Thus, even though art’s unreal, imaginary, ‘dream-like’ realm, on the one hand, and the

dreams precipitated by sleep, on the other, are brought into congruity by decadent writing,

oneirism can have pathological consequences—it can bring forth terrifying, misshapen

nightmares rather than strange and beautiful dreams. Theophile Gautier, Wilde’s distant

literary ancestor, expresses this in a suitably baroque phrase: ‘Contrary to the classical style,

[decadence] admits of the introduction of shadows, in which move the larvae of

superstition, the haggard phantasms of insomnia, the terrors of night, the monstrous

dreams that impotence alone stays in their realization.’20

I will move now to the main concerns of my argument, which turn on the fact that the

‘influence’ of the yellow-bound book, and its maladies of dreaming, lead inexorably to an

irruption of criminality. As the narrator says, ‘Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could

realise his conception of the beautiful.’21 Aesthetics—the beautiful—is thus enmeshed in

violent crime. This is implicit in the very definition of artistic decadence, which reveals the

secret affinity of culture and corruption. ‘There are only two ways by which man can reach

[civilisation]’, Lord Henry tells Dorian. ‘One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.’

As Dorian unhesitatingly admits to him, ‘I have known something of both. It seems terrible

to me now that they should ever be found together.’22

The deep-seated connection between aesthetics and criminality can be discerned in

the ideology of aestheticism. For art and criminality are each, in their different ways, anti-

normative. Since society exerts countless constraints on the individual, artists, like criminals,

come up against the laws that normalise and regulate their behaviour, and are tempted to

transgress them. To find freedom, then, artists must look to the criminal classes for

direction. Ellmann avers that for Wilde, as for Jean Genet, art is an inherently dissident

practice.23 He writes: ‘The image of subversion leads Wilde to see the artist and the critic

within the artist as in some sense criminal. He disrupts, he destroys as he creates. In

pursuing ever ampler and as yet unaccepted versions of the world, the artist is also

breaking bonds.’24 The critic as artist as criminal therefore unites aesthetics with anti-social

attitudes. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is Lord Henry who embodies the spirit of this

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composite creature. As Joseph Bristow remarks, ‘the more we see of Wotton, the clearer it

becomes that his desires are closely attached to crime’.25 Hard evidence for it, however, is

always hinted at, alluded to, placed just beyond the reach of the narration. The nearest Lord

Henry gets to an admission of complicity is when he says: ‘Crime belongs exclusively to the

lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to

them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.’26 Crime, in

other words, is like reverie and dreaming: yet another form of aesthesis, another stimulant

for the senses.

A potential objection to this hypothesis might be that the dandy is not traditionally

seen as a criminal figure. Domna C. Stanton, for example, argues that to the extent that the

figure is involved with vice, it is always vicarious. ‘Rather than actually engage in criminality,

the dandy prefers to stay within the precincts of the law, exploit it to his advantage, and at

the same time, stand secretly above it.’27 It is Wilde, then, who effectively ‘criminalises’ the

dandy. He asserts, in ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’, that ‘there is no essential incongruity between

crime and culture’,28 and sets out to demonstrate the compatibility. The essay, which dates

from 1889, is an apologia for Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the painter and art critic who

had a shadow-career as a forger and a ‘subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in

this or any age’.29 Wainewright achieved renewed notoriety five years ago, thanks to

Andrew Motion’s fictional biography Wainewright the Poisoner. Wilde’s initial interest in the

man is that he was a dandy, hence actively engaged in crossing that borderland between

life and art: ‘[H]e recognised that Life itself is an art, and has its modes of style no less than

the arts that seek to express it’.30

Wilde’s argument is essentially an exercise in bathos, as it plays on the considerable

distance between aesthetics and murder. So in the same breath as Wainewright’s

susceptibility ‘to the spiritual influences of Wordsworth’s poetry’ is expounded, we are told

about his guardian and uncle George Edward Griffiths, ‘whom he subsequently poisoned’.31

Though initially a talented artist, Wainewright later ‘sought to find expression by pen or

poison’,32 and it is the relationship between the two spheres that fascinates Wilde. He

writes: ‘His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave a strong

personality to his style, a quality that his early work lacked. . . . One can fancy an intense

personality being created out of sin.’33 This is, of course, a thumbnail sketch of Dorian Gray,

the drafting of which began the same year as ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ was published.

Wilde’s claim, then, is that some artists are naturally inclined towards criminality, just

as some criminals are impelled to creative expression. What is really at stake, however, is

what he means by the word ‘crime’. In ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ he sees crime in its

most prosaic form:

For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is

the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so

absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view. They are not marvellous

Macbeths and terrible Vautrins. They are merely what ordinary respectable, commonplace

people would be if they had not got enough to eat.34

The sociology of crime is not Wilde’s concern. The ‘criminals’ he has in mind, such as

Wainewright, are outlaw figures who inhabit the same space as artists, who require

‘sensation’ in order to carry out their misdeeds. Thus, it is crime as a form of aesthesis that

captivates Wilde, rather than crime as a social problem. He marks the difference with great

delicacy in another one of his celebrated maxims: ‘The criminal classes are so close to us


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that even the policeman can see them. They are so far away from us that only the poet can

understand them.’35 Crime, as a social reality, is so evident that it disappears into the folds

of everyday life, becomes a nondescript part of the scenery. But at the same time, criminal

activity connotes a departure from the everyday, and to understand the real nature of this

break, and its role in the cultural imaginary, requires an artist’s insight and sensitivity.

Actor, aesthete, dandy, dreamer, criminal—these are the different roles that inhabit,

somewhat uneasily, that paragon of artifice that is the theatrical self. Their unlikely

cohabitation is made not just plausible but inevitable with the final act of Wilde’s life-

drama. I will conclude now with the arresting, yet oddly plausible, thought that Regenia

Gagnier expresses in Idylls of the Marketplace, her study of Wilde’s readership and the

politics of publishing:

British Aestheticism as a movement ended in 1897, when Wilde left prison for Paris. Then

the struggle between art and life was over, for middle-class life was left behind and Wilde

was as free as his art. As one of life’s criminals and outcasts, he found the proper audience

for non-bourgeois, non-mass art—an audience of peers.36

It is criminality, finally, that unites this multi-part being, part-performer, part-impressionist,

part-imagist, as it is bodied forth by the theatrical self. Wilde’s afterlife, then, could be said

to begin in the writer’s post-prison twilight years, and in the kind of ultimate freedom that

criminality conferred on his transgressive aesthetic.

NOTES

1. Eagleton, Saint Oscar, 370.

2. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 14.

3. Ibid. , 11.

4. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 67.

5. Praz, The Romantic Agony, 378.

6. Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 286.

7. Gide, ‘In Memoriam’, 145.

8. Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, 1144.

9. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 80–81.

10. Ibid., 82.

11. Ibid., 97, 96.

12. Pater, ‘Aesthetic Poetry’, 79.

13. Ellmann, ‘Introduction’, xiii.

14. McGinn, Mindsight, 7–41.

15. Greenberg, The Terror of Art, 9.


17. Ibid., 16.

18. Almansi and Beguin, Theatre of Sleep, 305–6.


20. Gautier, ‘Charles Baudelaire’, 40–41.


22. Ibid., 150.

23. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 330.

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24. Ellmann, A Long the Riverrun, 7.

25. Bristow, Effeminate England, 37.


27. Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art, 76.

28. Wilde, ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’, 1106.

29. Ibid., 1093.

30. Ibid., 1095.

31. Ibid., 1093.

32. Ibid., 1094.

33. Ibid., 1106.

34. Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, 1182.

35. ‘A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-educated’, 1243.

36. Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, 11.

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ALMANSI, GUIDO and CLAUDE BEGUIN. Theatre of Sleep: An Anthology of Literary Dreams. London:

Picador, 1986.

BRISTOW, JOSEPH. Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885. Buckingham: Open University

Press, 1995.

DOLLIMORE, JONATHAN. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1991.

EAGLETON, TERRY. Saint Oscar. In The Eagleton Reader, edited by Stephen Regan. Oxford: Blackwell,

1998.

ELLMANN, RICHARD. “Introduction: The Critic as Artist as Wilde.” In Wilde, The Artist as Critic, edited

by Richard Ellmann. London: W. H. Allen, 1970.

———. A Long the Riverrun. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.

———. Oscar Wilde. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

GAGNIER, REGENIA. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Aldershot: Scolar,

1978.

GAUTIER, THEOPHILE. “Charles Baudelaire.” In Works of Gautier, vol. XII, translated and edited by F. C.

Sumichrast. Boston and New York: Brainard, 1907.

GIDE, ANDRE. “In Memoriam: Oscar Wilde.” Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality. New

York: Meridian, 1995.

GREENBERG, MARTIN. The Terror of Art: Kafka and Modern Literature. London: Deutsch, 1971.

MCGINN, COLIN. Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard

University Press, 2004.

PATER, WALTER. “Aesthetic Poetry.” In Selected Works, edited by Richard Aldington. London:

Heinemann, 1948.

PRAZ, MARIO. The Romantic Agony. Translated by Angus Davidson. London and Glasgow: Fontana,

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SONTAG, SUSAN. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Octagon, 1978.

STANTON, DOMNA C. The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnete Homme and the Dandy in

Seventeenth- and Nineteenth-century French Literature. New York: Columbia University

Press, 1980.

WILDE, OSCAR. “The Critic as Artist.” Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994.


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———. “A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-educated.” Complete Works of Oscar Wilde.

Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994.

———. “Pen, Pencil and Poison.” Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994.

———. “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Glasgow: HarperCollins,

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———. “The Soul of Man under Socialism.” Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Glasgow:

HarperCollins, 1994.

Paul Sheehan, Department of English, Division of Humanities, Macquarie University,

Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia.

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Documents

‘A Malady Of Dreaming’