1144 Wilde, Oscar
play, though they will surely try. Gwendolen eventu-
ally will find that reality must circumscribe her fan-
cies, but she will continue the effort. Lady Bracknell
is whiplashed by fiscal realities and fate by the end
of the play, yet even fate allows her some reprieve.
The ends, in Wilde’s world, are all chimeras. But
these ends are ideals, attitudes, and approaches to
a life that refuses a clean definition. Each charac-
ter represents a different approach to the world in
which he or she resides. None have a solution, but
each achieves a certain success with their attempt to
understand and navigate the situations of their lives.
Wilde appears to define success as the process, the
attempt to try to the best of one’s wit and skill. For
the author, of course, success is being Ernest.
Aaron Drucker
wiLDE, oSCar The Picture of Dorian
Gray (1890, 1891)
Oscar Wilde’s only novel first appeared as a serial
in Lippincott’s magazine in 1890, and was published
in book form with several additional chapters the
following year. It was immediately attacked by many
critical reviewers as immoral, charges to which
Wilde responded by saying he found, if anything,
that the story suffered artistically because it con-
tained too obvious a moral lesson.
Moral questions are certainly raised by Wilde’s
tale: Dorian Gray, influenced by a new friend, Lord
Henry Wotton, becomes convinced that retaining
the appearance of youth is the most important goal
in life. Seeing himself beautifully depicted in his
portrait, he exclaims that he would give his soul
to remain young while the picture aged. His desire
is fulfilled, and he indulges himself in the coming
years by seeking out new experiences, driven by
curiosity rather than by concern for the morality of
his actions. His portrait displays the corruption of
his soul; at least Dorian interprets what he sees in
this way. He believes the picture is the voice of his
conscience.
At the conclusion of the novel, Dorian has
become obsessed with what his portrait shows him,
and he attempts to destroy it, with tragic results.
Wilde’s conclusion is ambiguous, for art remains
inviolate and undisturbed, and throughout the story
art is shown to be amoral in character. No useful
moral lesson is suggested, for, as Wilde himself
stated in his preface to the 1891 novel, “All art is
quite useless.”
Paul FoxIdentIty in The Picture of Dorian Gray
A definition of identity is stated explicitly in Wilde’s
novel by Dorian Gray when he considers how
“[h]e used to wonder at the shallow psychology
of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing
simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence.
To him, man was a being with myriad lives and
myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature
that bore within itself strange legacies of thought
and passion.” The suggestion in this quotation is
that human identity is composed of those influences
and experiences undergone by the individual; but
more important, and underlining the significance
of time’s passage for Wilde and Dorian in the text,
the history of humankind is made manifest in every
individual from moment to moment in ever-varying
ways. Identity in The Picture of Dorian Gray is, as a
consequence, neither static nor stable, and Dorian’s
portrait is evidence of this essentially dynamic con-
ception of the self. The picture portrays a reality in
flux, an interminable succession of selves essential
to the constitution of identity within each passing
moment of time.
Dorian attempts to alter his portrait, and thus
his identity, by experimentally indulging in various
experiences. These attempts are not always success-
ful, and often the alterations are not those which
Dorian expected. To produce one’s own identity ulti-
mately seems to be beyond an individual’s control.
This is suggested in the novel not only by Dorian’s
failure to control his portrait’s changing appearance
but also in the tragedy of his erstwhile fiancée, the
actress Sybil Vane. When Lord Henry Wotton asks
Dorian to dine with him, Dorian replies that he can-
not as that night Sibyl will be Imogen and the fol-
lowing night she will be Juliet. It is significant that
Sybil will not play these roles; rather she will be the
characters themselves. Her personal identity, if such
a thing has ever existed for her, exists completely
within the roles she adopts: her identity is a suc-
cession of selves. When Lord Henry teases Dorian