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.

Dorian

Since i'll be rambling about Walkowitz tomorrow, ill save you all the trouble now and talk about Wilde.

I surprisingly really enjoyed the story. Here we have the prime example of a Flaneur, in all his glory. Dorian Gray is an incredibly annoying and amazing character. The beauty of him, this goes both ways, is that he is the men and women we see today. I love connecting everything we read to whats happening now, so bear with me.
Our society is Dorian Gray and that bothers me a lot. We live in a world where youth and beauty is cherished. We, and i use we very loosely, we praise the celebrities and mock the ones that fall from grace. Plastic surgery, botox, and all those lovely fix ups enables our world to be constantly surrounded by YOUTH NOW.
I'm a 23 year old who enjoys celebrity gossip from time to time. sue me. So when i see all these Dorian's running around it drives me crazy. There are celebrities in their 20s who get work done, and why? so they can look better which leads to feeling better and having a better life. Dorian would not have been "happy" if he had lost his looks, it was all he really had. And here have Kim Kardashian, Megan Fox, Lindsay Lohan, and many others who use Basil paintings, aka plastic surgery, to hide behind who they really are. And because of social media and the "news" (gossip shows and online bs)
girls in my city strive for that small nose and full lips. Half the people in my city have had elective work done, I have run out of toes and fingers to count on.

I just realized i massively detoured. Yeah i guess society will always be this way. The possibilities are endless with new ways to become forever young. Some celebrities have even fallen into looking like Dorian's Portrait because of it. (Mickey Rourke, Joan RIvers, Michael Jackson...)

Let's get back on some literary track...
Wilde has always been the type of author to point out the faults of the rich right off the bat. He really didn't care what came out of that beautifully ingenious mouth of his. He's rather amazing.

The novel was so different from what we have read so far and I am absolutely infatuated with it. But isn't that what got Sybil into trouble in the first place.
Oh yes, another story about a woman who cannot control her feelings. And before we forget, more homoerotic male relationships to dive into. Yes, Wilde knew what he was doing.

Let me also chime in on some Walkowitz before i go...
It's totally generic to call a city or country her right? Cause I found that amazing that the disheveled, blackened city was a woman. oh so lovely. i guess only the hardened countries are named after men. whatever, no time for gender fights right now. my brain is fried.

Chapter XI- The Labyrinth

At the end of “The Invisible Flaneur,” Elizabeth Wilson describes the heroic act by which the flaneur and flaneuse survive the “disorienting space” space of the city through an act of creating meaning.  Dorian Gray attempts this early in the story in his relationship with Sybil Vane, but their engagement to her proves fatal to both Sybil and to any heroism in Dorian; their relationship becomes fatal the moment he actually gets to know her.  Sybil, the person whom Dorian imagines he understands better than anyone else, is far from the person that Dorian imagined her to be.  In revealing her personhood, she becomes a stranger, destroying the meaning that Dorian built up around her.  This causes Dorian to lose faith in his ability to find meaning in the city.  Beginning from this point, the story of Dorian Gray is one of self-destruction.

With the loss of Sybil Vane, Dorian must find different ways to cope with the city.  He falls into the trappings of the flaneur that Wilson describes.  She says that in the labyrinth-like obscurity of the city, the flaneur’s life loses meaning:

Life ceases to form itself into epic or narrative, becoming instead a short story, dreamlike, insubstantial or ambiguous [ . . . ] Meaning is obscure; committed emotion cedes to irony and detachment; Georg Simmel’s ‘blasé attitude’ is born.  The fragmentary and incomplete nature of urban experience generates its melancholy—we experience a sense of nostalgia, of loss for lives we have never known, of experiences we can only guess at (Wilson 107-08).

Dorian’s detachment from life as narrative is strongly emphasized through the book the Henry Wotton sends to him after the death of Sybil vane.  The book itself is very much like the dreamlike existence of the flaneur.  The book is “a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own” (Wilde 106-07).  The focus on a Parisian obviously compares Dorian to the French flaneur, but more telling is the plotness nature of the novel.  Years pass in Chapter XI, which focuses on Dorian’s symbolic obsession with (descent into?) the book.  When we find him again in Chapter XII, Dorian is suddenly thirty-eight years old, but still looks as though he is in his early twenties.  His life has become one with Lord Henry’s book; time passes in the world, but no time passes for Dorian.  He is stuck in a single moment in time and the plot ceases to move forward.  The focus of Lord Henry’s book is also indicative of Wilson’s focus on nostalgia and experience.  Wilson’s flaneur is incapable of accessing the narratives of life; in the case of the Parisian in Wotton’s book, this leads to a life removed from his own life.  Such is Dorian’s fate; he seeks out new sensations and passions, but once he has “caught their colour and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, [he would] leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament” (112).  This sensational wandering leads him to indulge in Catholicism, the study of perfumes, the study of jewels, clothing, and more.  However, he has no real attachment to any of these things, and even the deeply spiritual is reduced to aesthetics.  Dorian becomes lost in the labyrinth of the city and, it seems, hardly bothers with finding his way out.

            The effect of this eleventh chapter is profound.  It is a chapter that draws us into Wotton’s book and, living up to the reputation of the book, it is a chapter in which nothing happens.  The experience of reading chapter XI is incredibly blasé.  I found myself as bored with life as Dorian Gray himself.  In fact, even though Dorian becomes far from heroic in his surrender to the labyrinth, Wilde’s writing in this chapter makes me feel a certain degree of sympathy for Dorian.  After inching my way through seventeen pages that stretch across what seems like a decade, I can say with certainty that Dorian’s fate is far worse than Sybil’s.  Leave it to Wilde to make an artwork of even the blasé experience.

Walkowitz and Wilde

I definitely enjoyed reading Walkowitz this week, especially after finishing The Picture of Dorian Gray. The introductory quote from Henry James about how the city has “gathered together so many of the darkest sides of life” and has become a “strangely mingled monster” resonates so much with Dorian Gray. Following him into the opium house on the “wrong” side of town, surrounded by drunks and prostitutes, we can see just how dark Dorian’s life has become. The final scene, where we’re left with an unrecognizable figure, emphasizes just how monstrous living the city life can be. Walkowitz later says of James’ representations of city life, which I think we can also see in Wilde: “activities of manufacture, trade, and exchange were overshadowed by rituals of consumption and display” (17). In the world of Dorian Gray, we see no production, no producers. We have Basil the artist, Victor the attendant, Sybil the performer, but even these characters are placed in the world of the wealthy. We are not made to see value in their individual work as much as to see their purpose in helping the wealthy (i.e. Dorian and Henry) go about their days. As for Dorian, Henry, and the many others in their world, we see that their world revolves around “consumption and display.” They buy art, go to the opera, dine out, etc. It was hard to gloss over the many moments in the novel where we’re given almost a catalog of luxurious items such as jewelry, clothing, furniture, etc. These many instances where commodities are catalogued on the page highlight the author’s choice to emphasize consumption over labor.

            Another connection I made between Walkowitz and Wilde was with the representation of women. Walkowitz, building off of Stallybrass and White, points out the paradox of the prostitute’s role in the urban setting. The prostitute, while being outcast in the “social periphery,” also constitutes a central place in the city. In the novel, the woman in the opium house represents that female figure on the outside of society. I can’t remember if it’s the same woman that soon after tells Sybil’s brother that that was indeed Dorian Gray/ Prince Charming. Either way, if we didn’t already think a lady hanging out in an opium house was part of that “darker side” of life, she soon tells us of her fall from grace (or from the center, from higher society), which Dorian Gray caused. One thing that I found interesting, though, was that other women in the novel, whom we wouldn’t expect to lack virtue and propriety, actually do. For example, Henry’s female cousin is very flirtatious with Dorian, even with her husband present. An idea I’m working out still is trying to reconcile the depictions of women in Dorian Gray with something Walkowitz says early on in his essay. He says that women “lacked autonomy” and were “bearers of meaning rather than makers of meaning” (21). In the homosocial world Wilde has created, we definitely see some issues with the portrayal of women.

            If I can end with one final comment on Walkowtiz, I’d like to end with the following: “They [late-Victorian novelists] expressed this unease [over their ability to read the city] by constructing a mental map of London marked by fragmentation, complexity, and introspection, all of which imperiled the flaneur’s ability to experience the city as a totalizing whole” (39). I think we can see this sort of unease in Dorian Gray, and maybe that can help us understand his inability to see the big picture or the error in his ways. 

Harry's Science Project

In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Harry perceives Dorian as his creation. Basil’s creation is a work of art; however, Harry’s creation is evident through the influence he possesses over Dorian. He states, “There was something enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it” (33). On page 51, Harry contemplates, “…through certain words of his, musical words said with musical utterance, that Dorian Gray’s soul had turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her. To a large extent the lad was his own creation.”  Harry believes that “Talking to [Dorian} was like playing upon an exquisite violin.” (33). Dorian is not as close to Basil as he is to Harry because he feels that Basil is too invested in his art to appreciate humanity over art, or the abstract. Dorian is too ingenuous to understand that Harry seems him as a science project rather than as a friend.

            Dorian is vulnerable because he is young, rather than immature. He does understand that he lacks information to be successful in life, which is why he behaves like an apostle towards Harry. He worships Harry in similar ways to how he worships Sibyl Vane.

Harry’s desire to learn about human nature drives him to use Dorian as subject in an experiment.  He approaches Dorian’s relationship with Sibyl as an opportunity to learn more about human nature’s connection to love. He is not elated because Dorian has found a significant person in his life. Harry is excited because he will have the opportunity to witness the nature of Dorian and Sibyl’s love. He is observing them without their knowledge.

This reminds of me of Foucault’s notion that “power is not negotiable.” Harry’s experience gives him the ability to have influence over Dorian, which is a strong form of power. We see that Basil has the power to immortalize Dorian’s beauty through his art. In fact, Dorian is jealous of the painting because it always been younger than him. According to Harry, whom he worships, youth is the purest form of beauty. Thus, Harry and Dorian take part in a ceaseless exchange. To be observed, Dorian must not be aware that Harry constantly observes him.

Harry’s art lies in his ability to influence Dorian. Dorian is enthralled by Harry, but he does not possess the intellectual competence to understand the complexity of Harry’s art, which is the ability to possess a heavy influence over others that resembles a sort of hypnotism, to an extent. Dorian has the cultural competence to find meaning in Basil’s art, but that bores him. It is human nature to become bored with what one knows. In similar fashion, it is human nature to be curious about the unknown. Dorian sees Harry’s mystery, and that sparks a curiosity to attempt learning from him. This attracts Dorian to Harry. I suppose Dorian is searching for Harry’s art, but fails to see himself as the work of art because he is used to being worshipped over his good looks, rather than measured by his intellect.

Making Connections

In Wilde’s letter to the editor reprinted on page xxiii of the introduction, he suggests that Basil, Dorian, and Lord Henry are incomplete because they fail to strike a balance between indulgence and restraint. At least that’s what our text’s editor gleans from the author’s words. Taking this reading a step further, you might say that the novel allegorizes these impulses, with Basil representing indulgence, Lord Henry restraint, and Dorian the tension between the two extremes. It’s easy for us to forget that Dorian wrestles with this conflict because his efforts are so overshadowed by his losing record and the ugliness of his acts.

You could also apply a similar reading to Bleak House. In this case, Jarndyce, Woodcourt, and Esther also lack a balance between indulgence and restraint. (Although critics have characterized the binary in terms of desire and selflessness, I believe they derive from the same basic impulse.) Jarndyce gives care and protection to his wards, but he will not indulge himself by accepting gratitude. Woodcourt is heroic and generous in deed, but after seven years of marriage he infantilizes Esther and treats her like a domestic. Esther, on the other hand, begins as self-effacing, and like Jarndyce she runs from compliments—not literally like he does but by reflecting the compliment back onto the sender. But Esther at least tries to evolve; it’s just that her efforts are blunted by the men in her life. When she accepts Jarndyce’s proposal, she puts her arms around him and gives him a kiss, but he just stands there like a stone wall. Although she seems to concede defeat at the end, who knows what lies beyond that curious hyphen. 

The point I want to make is that it’s important for givers to accept gratitude for their acts. The process isn’t complete until the receivers express their thankful feelings and the givers accept them. Giving and receiving—whether in the form of material objects or love—is an organic process. It’s essential to the development of a civilized society—in contrast to the decaying world that Dickens portrays—but each link in the evolutionary chain must be fully formed before it can grow. The same logic applies to indulgence and restraint. Henry tells Dorian—in order to egg him on—that “the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it” (19). But this only leads to a life of indulgence, as Dorian shows. Temptation is part of the life force. It should not be replaced by restraint but informed by it. This also holds true for the relationship between life and art, the parallel theme of the novel. Their connection is a symbiotic one. Each cannot prosper without the other. It’s not an either-or question of whether life imitates art or art imitates life; they nurture each other. 

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.