Week 1: The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (4)

Where to start, where to start... Oscar Wilde certainly does a lot with the narrative of Dorian Gray, commenting on topics spanning from the paramount frivolities of the post-Victorian British upper class to how not only complacently but willingly one can be in facilitating the corruption of one’s own soul. The presence of society’s moral decay present in The Picture of Dorian Gray is something still saturating consumed literature, something that has always saturated literature, and something that will always saturate literature, unless this modern plague turns out to be the thing to finally make each man a hermit and completely collapse global infrastructure back to pre-recorded history, which. We are not there quite yet, so. Let’s talk instead about the one who plants the seed of temptation’s rot in Dorian and nurtures it in hedonistic aestheticism- Lord Henry Wotton.

Now, Henry isn’t the root of all evil. He’s certainly a bad influence and a gateway of temptations, but influence can be rejected, temptation ignored. Dorian chooses to listen to Henry over Basil in their first meeting at the artist’s home, just as Basil chooses to advise sense and and Henry chooses to beguile the senses. That all being said, Henry is to me the most interesting character present within the novel, simply by way of his motivations: he’s bored. He is beyond bored. Henry is so unfulfilled and starved for engagement that I felt vicariously savaged when reading from his perspective. Henry is a late century British Lord during one of the wealthiest periods of British history, which means he has too much time, too great a fortune, and too many reductive thoughts. He is a symptom of his environment, the restrictive, dull conventions and the luxurious, debauched consequences. To me, he comes across as horribly depressed, and it manifests as a toxic manipulation of others as an enjoyable coping method, dragging them down to his level of depravity or deeper. He keeps his interests shallow and fickle so as to not feel suffocated by his own stagnation, and thus preaches the sanctity of fleeting ephemera in almost every scene we find him. 

By Henry’s own words, this type of behavior is afforded only by those of the ‘idle classes’ of Britain, those who have no need to work or challenge themselves for anything at all ever, really, and are thusly about as ennobled as caged lions. Where Henry takes this personally is to be a contrarian of modern sense in a last-bid effort of eking out some sense of doing something productive, but in doing so goes out of his way to disparage ways of helping himself, literally scoffing at philanthropic efforts and a suggestion to write a compilation of his theories. He doesn’t want to do anything to help himself. So stagnant is he, that in chapter four of the book, Henry literally claims that ‘experience has no ethical value’ and that ‘[experience] was merely the name men gave to their mistakes’ before decisively stating that our pasts are our future and once we have sinned once, we will gleefully do so again. He knows what he’s saying too, since in chapter six he tells Basil that ‘[no] life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.’ 

At some point in time in the evolution of Henry Wotton, he made the same conscious choice as Dorian Gray to corrupt his soul, and then just like Dorian as well, made barely the effort to recognize their own culpability, let alone save themselves from their vices. Henry inflicts upon Dorian his own apathy, which carries Dorian until he can’t help but to care, where he then dies. And Henry and Dorian aren’t the only ones partaking in such illicit behavior- many of their peerage willingly find their way into it as well, which suggests a greater, inherent corruption of the framework of their society.

Thematically, Henry is supposed to be the temptation, the fruit of knowledge and the serpent that offers it concurrently, but I say he’s worse than that, because at least the Devil was impassioned by jealousy and hatred of man: Henry is just bored and apathetic to the consequences wrought from his hypocrisy. The Devil cared - Henry does not. Some men want to watch the world burn, and some men just want to light the fire that burns other men. And at the root of it all, Henry is just another cog in the machine unwittingly brought to light in the mirrored window of Dorian’s soul.