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CLASSICS REVISITED

Wilde and the Devil’s pact

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written or badly written.

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray

When Oscar Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray, it was trashed as scandalous and not to be put out in public. From a distance of a century, though, it is hardly scandalous, at a time when anything goes — a young man ma kes a pact with the Devil and suffers unremittingly until he finally kills himself.

But it isn’t the story line that really matters: a pact between a young man and the Devil (the Devil has many manifestations, from drink to sexual deviance, and much else besides) is a common enough theme in literature. Here there is no implication that Lord Henry (Lord Harry, a common nickname for Satan) gets hold of Dorian’s soul and leads him down the primrose path to death and damnation; it is Dorian himself who is responsible for all that happens because of his licentious ways.

What was scandalous at the time was Wilde’s scathing critique of English hypocrisy and bourgeois values at the end of the 19th century combined with his descriptions of homosexual and bisexual affections that were carried out within the social structures of marriage and conventional property relations. (Later Victorian biographies, especially by Lytton Strachey, revealed how accurate were Wilde’s descriptions of Victorian private lives and their inner tensions and contradictions.) So, this is not a conventional novel where there is a standard resolution of plots. It is a novel of ideas: that the real purpose of money is to purchase ever more erotic sensual pleasures but which are hidden away in the closet till they finally burst out into the open with fateful consequences.

What is appealing is Wilde’s catalogue of sensual pleasures and the lengths to which the young Dorian would go to fulfil them. Dorian has money with which he thinks he can buy eternal youth; he buys perfumes and jewels that would make him look attractive; he takes to smoking pot and seduces others to take to it also so that he can have the company to enjoy his pleasures.

Class, it is said, is not what you earn (or inherit in this case) but what you spend your money on. Going by this standard, Dorian was nothing but a city slicker who had nothing to do and the whole day to do it in. Dorian’s real problem is that he can’t come to terms with himself, to look at himself from a distance and see what’s going wrong. He stands as a mute spectator to his failings and those of others around himself. Instead he leans on his mentor, Lord Henry, to help him out or at least to make him a role model.

Lord Henry, the Satan, is in complete control of himself but he couldn’t be bothered about Dorian. He sees what is happening in the social whirl but has no sympathy for those who have been seduced by the sweet life. He is cold and indifferent towards his family as he is towards Dorian. For him, it is all, “I, Me, Myself”.

What gives him the greatest intellectual pleasure is to spin out epigrams about Victorian hypocrisy, some which can be tiresome, but others have a hard kernel of truth, even after 100 years and more. Many have become quotable quotes with the literati who don’t know where they come from.

He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us. As it was we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it, a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.

The whole book is full of philosophical musings and epigrams, a great many of which have stood the test of time. What remains after more than a hundred years is not a novel of sensuous surfaces that beguile and give a prurient pleasure but a novel full of disturbing ideas. And what is a novel except a philosophy expressed in images?

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