Privileged Gaze?

City Soul of Contrasts

          Oscar Wilde sure seems to be one who holds this "privileged gaze" upon humanity. We’ve been discussing the city in the 19^th century this quarter, and after studying Mayhew’s version of the London Labour’s decrepit poor, now we have a new type of 19^th century Londoner; the flaneur. Yet, this character, with its rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the solitary prostitute, is not just the connoisseur of the street; this flaneur is a nocturnal wanderer in pursuit of entertainment.  Judith Walkowitz’ City of Dreadful Delight’s opening chapter “Urban Spectatorship” explains that it is “the flaneur’s propensity for fantasy” and a “bourgeois male pleasure” whom has a “privileged gaze” and whose exploration and discovery of one’s city can help him obtain the advantage of what Griselda Pollock defines as truly “being at home in the city” (16).  Walkowitz describes the progress of this new urban traveler from the traditional urban spectatorship of the “sympathetic resident” who can take up night walking, (noticeably a male pursuit immortalized in urban accounts since Elizabethan times).

             So, now we learn that the poor hovels of London in the East End become a place of entertainment for the bored aristocracy, how enchanting. The “streets of London became a playground for the upper classes” where the street's sights and characters are" passing shows.” Is this like visiting the animals in a zoo? This is where the connection between Wilde’s classic The Portrait of Dorian Gray and the city landscape really began to connect for me. Dorian goes down to the dumpy London theater to “watch” a second rate actress perform, and Sybil Vane becomes the character in one of his many passing shows.

            Except, Walkowitz begins using terms such as moral and biological degeneration in the latter part of her chapter to define the poor. People of poverty (or the characters in the streets who create the stage shows), who were able to change the bourgeois’ boring reality into an evening bit of fantasy, are now the purveyors of immoral attitudes that ultimately change the biological nature of humanity. Really? Well, yes. Walkowitz declares London to be a place  “where values and perception seem in constant flux” and Wilde shows us that when Dorian enters into these East End opium dens, (where he ultimately learns his horrid immoral behavior as he quite frequently begins sauntering into these decrepit hovels), we watch how one can easily transfer from an “illegible” city at night back into an “ordered and knowable” city before dawn. This fluctuating between reality and fantasy become a construct only a knife can put order to.

              Yet, my argument would differ. I believe that I can prove that the beauty of Dorian (aka. the West End) is a façade. Just like when Walkowitz explains that “the public landscape of the privileged urban flaneur of the period had become an unstable construct threatened internally by contradictions and tensions and constantly challenged from without by social forces that pressed these dominant representations to be reworked, shorn up, reconstructed (17)” I would suggest that Wilde created a satire to explain the obscene vanity of the bourgeois; as long as they kept up “appearances” they did not have to follow any moral code, and these nocturnal wanderings were part of this unstable construct of ethics of the hypocritical rich; a group of West Enders who ridicule the poor as dirty, but enjoy the entertainment provided to them.

            And another way I will prove this (as I believe I am passionate enough about this idea to write my second paper on it) is by taking all the descriptions that Wilde uses to describe the portrait as it changes, and the immoral actions of Dorian and compare the diction to the descriptions that historians use to define the East End. Once Dorian’s soul is defined to be a symbol of the East End, I will then show how the hypocrisy of the bourgeois façade makes Wilde’s novel a satire of his own West End social class.