2. State of research and contexts
2.2 Research on Wilde and Dorian Gray
In their discussion of the life and works of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Jo-sephine Guy and Ian Small emphasize that the popularity of his only novel is due to its being “simultaneously both ‘high’ and ‘low’ art:”113 Dorian Gray borrows elements from the popular literary genres of the time and presents the witty epigrams that should later become synony-mous with Wilde’s celebrated society comedies, and at the same time discusses complex ideas of the relationship between art and life. Hardly any other late-nineteenth-century novel has attracted so much scholarly attention.114
However, there is one further reason that contributes to the popularity of The Picture of Dorian Gray: its being “steeped in the person-al but painful yillery-yperson-allery of Wilde himself,” as John Osborne wrote in the introduction to his dramatization of the novel, which was later filmed for the BBC.115 Still in Wilde’s lifetime, the novel achieved extra-ordinary prominence when used as a piece of evidence against the writer at court. Having sued his lover’s father, Lord Queensbury, for libel,116 Wilde was cross-examined by Queensbury’s defendant Edward Carson, who, by reading out passages from Dorian Gray and comparing the pro-tagonists’ words with Wilde’s, tried to equate Wilde’s art (and the moral corruption he found displayed in it) with his life. While Wilde was not the only Victorian writer whose literature was contrasted with his per-
113 Josephine Guy and Ian Small, Studying Oscar Wilde: History, Criticism, and Myth (Greensboro: ELT Press, 2006) 169.
114 Cf. Guy and Small 2006: 165. Cf. Ian Small, Oscar Wilde Revalued. An Essay on New Materials & Methods of Research (Greensboro: ELT Press, 1993) and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde: Recent Research, A Supplement to ‘Oscar Wilde Revalued’ (Greensboro: ELT Press, 2000).
115 John Osborne, The Picture of Dorian Gray. A Moral Entertainment (London: Faber and Faber, 1973) 11. This version of Dorian Gray will shortly be assessed in ch.
3.2.7.1.
116 Wilde received the Marquess of Queensbury’s card accusing the writer of “posing Somdomite [sic]” on 28 February 1895 at the Albermale Club. It was the last in a series of offences by the Marquess, who disapproved of Wilde’s intimate relation-ship to his son Lord Alfred Douglas; cf. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Pen-guin, 1987) 412; for Wilde’s trials see the extensively annotated Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (London: Fourth Estate, 2003).
sonal life by adversaries,117 no other artist was forced to justify his works of fiction at court in such a way. The aesthete Wilde, who had partly fic-tionalized his own life, finally had to concede that the novel may be read so as to “convey the impression that the sin of Dorian Gray was sod-omy.”118 The novelist Peter Ackroyd is sure that “never has a novel so marked out its author.”119 Ian Small sums up: “the first mythologizing and fictionalizing of Wilde’s life was by Wilde himself.”120 With the
‘help’ of Dorian Gray, the cult around his own persona Wilde had con-structed as part of his aesthetic programme was finally exploited by his persecutors. In his monograph Acting Wilde (2009), Kerry Powell dis-cusses the trial as a “vital linkage of sex, texts, and performance.”121 Con-victed at a time when the political climate towards homosexuals was most hostile122 and Old Bailey trials frequently served “as theatrical events to both evoke and reinforce public opinion,”123 Wilde was treated less as an individual than as a type: referring back to Foucault’s seminal assessment that “the nineteenth-century homosexual […] was now a species”,124 chroniclers of gay history have emphasized the role of Wilde’s trials, claiming that they “made ‘homosexuality’ both as an onto-
117 Guy and Small point out that “[i]t was not unusual for Victorian reviewers to connect literary works and the lives of their authors.” With works like Life of Charlotte Brontë (Elizabeth Gaskell, 1857), Life of Charles Dickens (John Foster, 1872-4) and George Eliot’s Life (John Cross, 1885), the literary biography was at the height of its popu-larity; likewise, “hostile reviews of works of literature often took the form of thinly veiled attacks on the personal lives of their authors.” (Guy and Small 2006: 33) 118 Holland 2003: 78f.
119 Peter Ackroyd, “Introduction to the First Penguin Classics Edition,” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Robert Mighall (London: Penguin, 2000) 226.
120 Small 1993: 12.
121 Kerry Powell, Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde (Cambridge:
CUP, 2009) 149.
122 The Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889 centred around a male brothel and its Aristo-cratic clientèle, among them Lord Alfred Somerset and Prince Albert Victor, who was second in the line to the throne; for a summary see Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side. Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York and London:
Routledge, 1993) 121.
123 Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977) 12.
124 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge (Histoire de la sexualité. Vol. 1: La volonté de savoir, 1976), trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998) 43.
logical state and as a chosen lifestyle available to ordinary middle-class imaginations for the first time.”125 According to Alan Sinfield, for example, Wilde’s public persona has shaped images and prejudices of the homosexual in modern British culture: “The Wilde Trials helped to produce a major shift in the perceptions of the scope of single sex passion. At that point, the entire, vaguely disconcerting nexus of effem-inacy, leisure, idleness, immortality, luxury, insouciance, decadence, and aestheticism, was transformed into a brilliantly precise meaning.”126 However, to a degree nowhere to be seen before, Wilde himself had commodified his own public persona, he had “learned that […] one’s very being could be transformed into a marketable good.”127 This insight is inscribed by Wilde into his eponymous hero too, as the discussion of Dorian Gray in front of the movie camera (ch. 3.2.) will show.
However, this set-up poses a special threat to literary criticism of the novel: The bizarre bond between the author’s own story, partly fic-tionalised by Wilde himself, and Dorian Gray’s fictitious story that partly became ‘reality’ for Wilde, is so close, and so well known, that one can hardly refer to Dorian Gray without referring to his author. Accordingly, the reception of Wilde’s works, and of Dorian Gray specifically, saw three stages: already in his life time, triggered by his trials, Wilde’s works would have been juxtaposed to his lifestyle and thus met wide-spread critical refusal in England.128 A second phase set in with Wilde’s death. In biographically infused texts, friends and former companions like Robert Ross and Max Beerbohm worked hard to rehabilitate Wilde.
While these texts triggered and – at least partly – satisfied the voyeuristic needs of readers, the assessment of Wilde’s literary works still was exclu-
125 Spencer 1992: 206.
126 Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 3.
127 John Freedman, “Introduction: On Oscar Wilde,” Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays (Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996) 1-9: 4 qtd. in Diana Tappen-Scheuermann, Literarischer Narzissmus: Spiegelverhältnisse zwischen Autor, Text und Leser (Marburg: Tectum, 2012) 109.
128 In contrast to this, Wilde’s works continued to be read with growing fascination on the continent, where Wilde was perceived by many as “European by sympathy”, as Stefano Evangelista called him in the introduction to his recent anthology on the European reception of Wilde. (“Oscar Wilde: European by Sympathy,” The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, ed. Stefano Evangelista (London: Continuum, 2010) 1-19)
sively contextualized before the background of his biography.129 It was not before the early 1960s that what Small calls “serious study of Wilde”130 set in.
Still the definite biography is Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde (1987), whose famous claim that “Wilde is one of us”131 is symptomatic of the idolizing attempts of the times to appropriate Wilde, the former outcast.
In 1993, the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco was the host of the first international conference “entirely devoted to Oscar,” as organizer Constantin George Sandulescu proudly announced in his opening state-ment for Rediscovering Oscar Wilde.132 In the 1990s, research on Wilde’s works remained overshadowed by “the Wilde myth,”133 which did not change much around the turn of the century, when anthologies com-memorated the centenary of Wilde’s death and playwrights dramatized his dramatic life.134 Many scholars writing about Wilde today believe that he must be considered a proto-postmodern writer. For example, in their introduction to the 2002 anthology The Importance of Reinventing Oscar, Uwe Böker, Richard Corballis & Julie Hibbard claim that “Wilde remains […] a chameleon, forever defying authentic, transhistorical def-
129 Cf. Stefan Lange, Ästhetische Lebensalternativen im Werk Oscar Wildes (Trier: WVT, 2003) 15f qtd. in Tappen-Scheuermann 2012: 102f.
130 Small 1993: 174 qtd. in Tappen-Scheuermann 2012: 102.
131 Ellmann 1987: xvii.
132 Constantin George Sandulescu, “The Supreme Quartet,” Rediscovering Oscar Wilde, ed. Constantin George Sandulescu (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994) xv-xvi: xv.
133 Small 1993: 3.
134 At that time, a number of playwrights made Wilde himself a literary figure, often focussing on the circumstances of his downfall: Thomas Kilroy (The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde, 1997; My Scandalous Life, 2004), David Hare (The Judas Kiss, 1998) and Moises Kaufman (Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, 1998). Brian Gilbert’s biopic Wilde (1996), introduced the legal case Wilde to a broader audience by concentrating on Wilde’s trials and his time in prison. As the topic of ‘fictional biographies’, Wilde in the last two decades once again stood at the centre of a literary trend. As a postmodern phenomenon, these plays engage in subtle irony: “the very postmodernism that proclaimed the death of the author and the demise of character delights in resurrecting historical authors as characters.” (The Author as Character:
Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature, eds. Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1999) 11) The term ‘fictional bio-graphy’ was coined by Ina Schabert in her study In Quest of the Other Person: Fiction as Biography (Tübingen: Francke, 1990).
inition, forever donning new masks, forever being reinvented.”135 This transformative potential is just another characteristic that Wilde shares with Gray, as ch. 3.3 will show.
In recent years, two volumes have concentrated on the effect Wilde and his works have had on others: Oscar Wilde in Modern Culture (2009, ed. John Bristow) and The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (2010, ed.
Stefano Evangelista). While Bristow sets out to “reveal how and why”
Wilde influenced “successive generations of writers, critics, composers, dancers, filmmakers, and performers”136 of the last 110-odd years, his volume is very eclectic and often remains limited to mere case-studies of instances in which Wilde’s liberal-mindedness has inspired others.
Evangelista’s volume is better structured, and more precise in its focus.
It features extensive reception and performance timelines and discusses the reception of Wilde in the literary cultures and markets of twelve dif-ferent European countries as varied as France and Croatia, Denmark and Russia. Both Bristow and Evangelista emphasize that Wilde was well received on the Continent long before he was rehabilitated in England.
With many translations of his works appearing early in the twentieth century, Wilde soon reached the status of a ‘popular classic’; Evangelista modestly recaps that Wilde’s European reception is “by and large a tale of popularity and success.”137
Still in 2012, Diana Tappen-Scheuermann has to concede that bio-graphical readings of Wilde have always been dominant and still are very popular: “Oscar Wildes Texte sind überwiegend vor dem Hintergrund der historischen Person Oscar Wilde lesbar.”138 In 2004, for example, Frederick S. Roden edited a volume of the Palgrave Advances series
135 Uwe Böker, Richard Corballis and Julie Hibbard, “Wilde on the Fringe of Bohemia,”
The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde During the Last 100 Years, eds.
Uwe Böker, Richard Corballis and Julie Hibbard (Amsterdam and New York: Rodo-pi, 2002) 7-12: 9.
136 John Bristow, “Preface,” Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend, ed.
John Bristow (Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 2009) ix-xxix: ix.
137 Stefano Evangelista, “Introduction: Oscar Wilde: European by Sympathy,” Evangelis-ta 2010: 1-19: 19.
138 Tappen-Scheuermann, Literarischer Narzissmus: Spiegelverhältnisse zwischen Autor, Text und Leser (Marburg: Tectum, 2012) 133.
entitled Oscar Wilde Studies, assessing recent “research on an author of enduring interest.”139
In line with the biographically infused attention to Wilde, Dorian Gray has attracted much gay criticism. In The Celluloid Closet, his groundbreaking 1981 study on Homosexuality in the Movies, Vito Russo discusses early film-makers’ interest in adapting The Picture of Dorian Gray for the screen and compares it to Mikaël, the Danish writer Her-man Bang’s 1904 novel which was filmed by Carl Th. Dreyer in 1924.140 In recent years, The Picture of Dorian Gray has drawn the attention of a growing number of queer critics, for example Dirk Schulz, who com-pared the novel to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in his dissertation Set-ting the Record Queer.141 Calling him “Queer heritage,” Dianne F. Sadoff, in her 2009 study Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen, claimed that
“Wilde has one of the century’s most powerful afterlives,”142 explicitly including the film versions of his life and Dorian Gray:
Wilde is what we, looking back, imagine him; worshiping him as ‘messiah’ or
‘saint,’ identifying with him as model, or pitying him as martyr, we somehow, too, make him ours, make him modern. Indeed, Wilde’s trials for ‘gross in-decency’ precipitated a historically crucial scene of sympathy that demanded a spectatorial look, constituted homosexual sociality, and mobilized heterosexual rage, anxiety, and empathy. Oscar Wilde’s figure positions the homosexual in a modern culture, literary, and cinematic history.143
In recent years, The Picture of Dorian Gray has attracted much attention by academic publishers, too. In 2005, John Bristow edited the novel as volume three of the Oxford English Texts (OET) of Wilde’s complete works.144 Bristow’s variorium edition contains two versions: Wilde’s con-tribution to the Philadelphia-based Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in July
139 Frederick S. Roden, Oscar Wilde Studies (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2004) n. pag.
140 Cf. Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (1981), rev. ed. (New York et al: Harper & Row, 1987) 23f.
141 Dirk Schulz, Setting the Record Queer: Rethinking Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ and Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011).
142 Dianne F. Sadoff, Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen (Minneapolis: U of Min-nesota P, 2009) 197.
143 Ibid.: 200.
144 As of August 2014, seven out of eight volumes have appeared. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 3: The Picture of Dorian Gray, The 1890 and the 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow, gen. ed. Ian Small (Oxford: OUP, 2005).
1890 and the extended and ‘censored’ book version that appeared with Wilde’s British publisher Ward, Lock & Co in April 1891. Four years ago, in 2011, Nicholas Frankel edited The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Anno-tated, Uncensored Edition for Harvard UP. Frankel is the first to use the original typescript, with emendations in Wilde’s own hand, submitted for publication with Lippincott’s. In his ‘textual introduction,’ Frankel diligently tracks the changes Wilde’s magazine editor J.M. Stoddart made to this “more scandalous and daring” text, which was even too “ex-plicit in its sexual allusions and references” for Lippincott’s, although the magazine “had a well-deserved reputation for publishing stories in the so-called Erotic School of American fiction.” Frankel is sure that if barrister “Edward Carson had possessed Wilde’s typescript, he undoubt-edly would have made effective use of it in the courtroom.”145 However, Frankel’s book is deserving for another reason, too: it does not only com-prehensibly annotate Wilde’s ur-text but is lavishly illustrated with portraits of Wilde and his circle, maps of London, reproductions of book covers and caricatures and photographs of art works and objects men-tioned in the novel. Frankel’s is an edition that allows for the appreci-ation of the intertextual and – as will be shown in the course of the thesis – synaesthetic scope of Wilde’s novel.
2.2.1 Dorian Gray adaptations
In contrast to the other two novels under scrutiny here, Dorian Gray has never been discussed as the source of adaptations in a broader sense.
There are a few articles available on specific filmings and re-writes, but no study has systematically traced the ‘career’ of Dorian Gray in film.
This may be partly due to the loss of all early filmings of the novel (see ch. 1.3); another reason may be the above-described tendency to read Wilde’s literature, and this text specifically, biographically. In my thesis, I will only come back to the queer perspectives many critics have offered in recent years when discussing the subversive potential of Dorian’s and the other figures’ bodies – and what they are at odds with.
145 Wilde 1890/2011: 54, 40.
Overall, Dorian Gray has by far not been filmed – or used as a source for films – as often as the other two novels. While early European film makers’ fascination with Wilde’s protagonist led to five films in the 1910s alone, which are all lost now, Hollywood studios did not take an interest in Dorian Gray until the mid-1940s. No matter how well suited a literary figure would have been for negotiating film, for a literary adap-tation to be realized in Hollywood at that time, it had to be able to being easily shaped along the rules of the Hollywood Production Code. This was possible with the heteronormative dramatizations of Jekyll & Hyde and Dracula, but not with Dorian Gray, of which no such stage version existed at that time. While Dorian’s film career was thus not as resounding as the ones of Jekyll & Hyde and especially Dracula, the way the Dorian Gray filmings to be discussed here exhibit their protagonist as a paradigmatic film figure will be taken into account for the feasibility of Dorian’s proto-filmic design in film.