THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY - CONTEXT
Oscar
Wilde was born on October 16,
1854, in Dublin, Ireland. He was
educated at Trinity College in Dublin and at Magdalen College,
Oxford, and settled in London, where he married Constance Lloyd
in 1884. In the literary world
of Victorian London, Wilde fell in with an artistic crowd that
included W. B. Yeats, the great Irish poet, and Lillie Langtry,
mistress to the Prince of Wales. A great conversationalist and a
famous wit, Wilde began by publishing mediocre poetry but soon
achieved widespread fame for his comic plays. The first,
Vera; or, The Nihilists,
was published in 1880. Wilde
followed this work with Lady
Windermere’s Fan (1892),
A Woman of No Importance
(1893),
An Ideal Husband (1895),
and his most famous play, The
Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
Although these plays relied upon relatively simple and familiar
plots, they rose well above convention with their brilliant
dialogue and biting satire.
Wilde published his only novel,
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
before he reached the height of his fame. The first edition
appeared in the summer of 1890
in Lippincott’s Monthly
Magazine. It was criticized as scandalous and immoral.
Disappointed with its reception, Wilde revised the novel in
1891, adding a preface and six
new chapters. The Preface (as Wilde calls it) anticipates some
of the criti-cism that might be leveled at the novel and
answers critics who charge The
Picture of Dorian Gray with being an immoral tale. It
also succinctly sets forth the tenets of Wilde’s philosophy of
art. Devoted to a school of thought and a mode of sensibility
known as aestheticism, Wilde believed that art possesses an
intrinsic value—that it is beautiful and therefore has worth,
and thus needs serve no other purpose, be it moral or
political. This attitude was revolutionary in Victorian
England, where popular belief held that art was not only a
function of morality but also a means of enforcing it. In the
Preface, Wilde also cautioned readers against finding meanings
“beneath the surface” of art. Part gothic novel, part comedy
of manners, part treatise on the relationship between art and
morality, The Picture of
Dorian Gray continues to present its readers with a
puzzle to sort out. There is as likely to be as much
disagreement over its meaning now as there was among its
Victorian audience, but, as Wilde notes near the end of the
Preface, “Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that
the work is new, complex, and vital.”
In 1891, the
same year that the second edition of The
Picture of Dorian Gray was published, Wilde began a homosexual
relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, an aspiring but rather untalented poet.
The affair caused a good deal of scandal, and Douglas’s father, the marquess
of Queensberry, eventually criticized it publicly. When Wilde sued the
marquess for libel, he himself was convicted under English sodomy laws for
acts of “gross indecency.” In 1895, Wilde was
sentenced to two years of hard labor, during which time he wrote a long,
heartbreaking letter to Lord Alfred titled De
Profundis (Latin for “Out of the Depths”). After his release, Wilde
left England and divided his time between France and Italy, living in poverty.
He never published under his own name again, but, in
1898, he did publish under a pseudonym
The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a lengthy poem about a prisoner’s feelings
toward another prisoner about to be executed. Wilde died in Paris on November
30, 1900, having converted to Roman
Catholicism on his deathbed.
