Reflections on the Campus City Space and the Language of the Stage

I have to say that I did not expect to enjoy this story as much as I did—especially considering how much I loathed the main characters. By that I mean they were believably loath-able, not that they were poorly written characters (obviously). I had the privilege of running into Rosanna on campus today and we launched into a fairly interesting conversation about the novel; I figured I would reflect on our conversation as a kind of recognition of the University as a microcosm of the city space (I hope Rosanna doesn’t mind my reflection). We were both struck by how much we enjoyed the story while simultaneously detesting Dorian Gray, as well as Lord Henry and his equally detestable views on women, gender roles, and marriage. We were also equally intrigued by the homoerotic undertones throughout the story, not that they were subtle by any means. We discussed the ubiquitous flaneur throughout the story. Elizabeth Wilson states “At first sight, the flaneur appears as the ultimate ironic, detached observer, skimming across the surface of the city and tasting all its pleasures with curiosity and interest” (97). In Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian is utterly consumed by pleasure and the desire to experience pleasure through observation; He is entranced by his own beauty captured in Basil’s painting, he is infatuated with Sibyl Vane, but only when she is on stage performing for him and the audience, he becomes completely preoccupied with material vanity and outward representations of value, he consistently expresses a desire to escape or forget himself etc. We ended our happenstance conversation by admitting the novel made us both think about notions of performance, observation, Benjamin’s arcades, art and representation, the flaneur (it goes on) but that we had no idea how to articulate what we were thinking, so we would have to reconvene after more reflection and caffeine.

 Anyway, what I find to be interesting is the motif of the play and the language of the stage that is used throughout the novel. When Dorian recounts the story of his love for Sibyl to Lord Henry, he tell him “It was curious my not wanting to know her, wasn’t it?’” and Henry replies “’No; I don’t think so” (48). While Dorian seems perplexed by his own actions, Lord Henry seems to know something about the play, or art and performance in a larger sense that is beyond Dorian’s understanding; Dorian loves what the play and Sibyl represent but he does not know Sibyl. When Henry asks him “’When is she Sibyl Vane?” Dorian replies “’Never’” (49). The moment when Sibyl is in fact Sibyl, is the moment she leaves the space of representation and her performance fails to represent and reveal. Sibyl, overcome with her love for Dorian off the stage, refuses to merely represent or perform love on stage, reserving her performance of love for her real interactions with Dorian (I hesitate to use the word “real” at all but I can’t think of anything more appropriate at the moment). Dorian is furious and despises Sibyl for her outright refusal to represent love through art and performance. While there is a clear and heavy-handed commentary on Victorian notions of morality and Art, I am more curious about the particular art form of the play in this novel. After the confrontation with Sibyl, the text continually employs language of the “stage,” or the “scene.” Perhaps this is the only medium through which Dorian can experience pleasure or experience in general; his experiences outside the realm of representation break down into chaos and fail to reveal meaning, he constantly searches for the Romantic version of his experiences, he is often pleased with himself when he is able to calmly perform in social settings. In particular, he is surprised at his ability to interact socially after having recently committed a heinous murder. He seems to invest himself fully in the meaning of representation and it seems that in the end, he destroys the representation of himself, ultimately destroying the representation and the subject of representation in the same act. I don’t entirely like this explanation—it’s a bit too simplistic, but this is the track I’m on at the moment.