Picture of Dorian Grey/The happy Prince/ Nightingale and the Rose/The fisherman and his Soul
Oscar Wilde’s works, including his most influential novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey, in which a beautiful young boy working as a sitter to a renowned painter, Basil, on an certain occasion catches the eye of Lord Henry, whom with his decadent and cynical view brought out the evil in Dorian Grey’s heart. The painter Basil painted a portrait of Dorian Grey, which the painter himself treasured very much because of both his admiration for Grey and the effort he had put into his masterpiece. Lord Henry’s praises toward Dorian Grey’s beauty made Grey’s mind twisted and inclined toward an more dissolute and evil lifestyle to the extent that he will do nothing but to hold tight to the both the bodily beauty he possess and the mental satisfaction it brought to him. In Grey’s ardent but blind pursuit of beauty, he cruelly rejected the love of a young actress and indirectly kills her. The aftermath of his heartless treatment to the actress quickly followed suit and he can do nothing but commit more murders to keep his seemingly good public appearance.
The portrait of Grey in The Picture of Dorian Grey played less of a role to aid the flow of the story than to be a magical and mystic symbol that imbues the story with a humanistic moral. The ever-present portrait witnessed Grey inevitably developed from an easily impressed and inquisitive young boy to an unethical and sinful man who was obsessive about renewing and retaining his physical beauty. As more sins and dark affairs transpired in the hands of Grey, the portrait grew more and more gruesome while Dorian Grey himself remained the same even through a period of twenty years. Nevertheless, at the end, consciousness of his own dreadful deeds struck him, with remorse an deaths on his hand, he finds no way out but to pay them back with his own life, at the same time, the portrait went back to normal at the final moment.
This book preoccupies with the pursuit of beauty, mostly physical and psychological but almost never spiritual. The spiritual values lies in Lord Henry, which in whom the author Oscar Wilde let himself be reflected in, Lord Henry is the one that turns out many of the book’s worldly-wise but cynical remarks lashing out against late-Victorian English society, to name a few:
Nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing;
Lord Henry had a marriage that is only a pretense, both the spouses go their separate ways and live separate live, in his eyes:
Men marry because they are tired, wome , because they are curious : both are disappointed;
His view on human nature belongs to a liar’s :
Man is least himself when he talk in his own person, give him an mask, and he will tell you all about the truth.
As is Oscar Wilde’s own aphorism:
Acting is more real.
These views may appear innovative and intriguingly enigmatic at the time of the book’s publication, but also deeply unsettling at the same time. We have to ask, were these cynical views on life truly witty and worth looking into? The non-fictitious life of the author of the book, who held these opinions, will answer our unsettled questions.
Wilde, lead a new age of aesthetic that stress beauty with his Victorian era romanticism of elaborate chandeliers, white-horsed carriages and unleashed imaginations. His inclination towards using convoluted mysteries and allegorical tales to express his views probably stemmed from his Irish descent. Celtic Irish, with its wind blown reeds, melodious folk songs are most well-known for its mysticism, mostly originated from the people of Keats that formerly resided on the island. One of Wilde’s contemporaries, W. H. Yeats, also an Irish, expressed his love for Irish folklores and preserved them by itinerarily talking to villagers and recording them. Wilde is also deeply affected by Irish culture, especially the knotty, intricate and wildly imaginative fairy-tale like nature of Irish descent that most of his novels, stage-plays and especially his fairy tales derived from. His novel, Picture of Dorian Grey, as well as his most famous fairy-tale, The Happy Prince, The Nightingale and the Rose, The Fishman and his Soul all employed symbols of mysticism. For instance, the strange portrait of Grey which bears the ugliness of Grey’s soul, the statue of the happy Prince who is rarely happy, the nightinggale’s adoration for love itself and the separation of soul and body of the fisher man, and the soul ‘s return with the goal of seducing the fisherman with all of the world’s desires are all emblems of romanticism. Romanticism, in other words, is the dogged pursuit of worldly beauty. Wilde, as all of his above characters were, if not more so, determined in chasing after the world’s store of beauty and goods. In doing so, he placed beauty onto a pedestal and turning it into a God. After he too separated with his wife, he began an affair that Victorian England, shaped by ‘beers, bibles and seven virtues’ as he summed in one of his journals, dare not speak its name. Wilde chased after the beautified romanticism of his own imagination with his homosexual lover Alfred Douglas, but finds even the love that he flung out everything else for can be ambiguous to him in the end, when he was sent into prison for his affair, he described Alfred Douglas as sometimes charming, but sometimes thoughtless and delights in giving him pain.
Dorian Grey, as Wilde described, at first, seemed naively charming, but after Lord’ Henry’s world-wise and vain teachings, he worshipped his own beauty, became a slave to vainglory and just as Wilde was thrown into prison after his homosexual act, Grey also after many of his grotesque actions, made a journey to the
opium filled den under the moon that hung low in the sky
which symbolizes both’s journey in pursuit of beauty that ended in gloom and darkness. What’s more? Even this is not the end, as Grey and Wilde went on their journeys, even they themselves realized they are embarking toward something that world regarded as horrible. Sin intrudes as suddenly as a snake snatches its prey. As Wild described in the novel,
There are moments, psychologists tell us, the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature that every fiber of a body, every cell in the cell, seems instinct with impulses.
Both Grey and Wilde are inescapable of sin, therefore they are sent plunging deeper and deeper into the mire of sinning. When sin is too much, the consciousness call back with so loud a voice that no one can ignore.
Oscar Wilde tries to reconcile his actions through emphasizing on the harmony of soul and body. Grey tried to ease his conscious by killing his conscious when he saw his portrait grew uglier each time he had done an ugly deed. Wilde’s attempts at separation of man’s individualism and the consequences of man’s actions threw him arm in arm with a philosopher of existentialism - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche who died of mental disorder. But is self-compromise between body and soul enough? No, it never does, the story of Grey and Wilde answered it for us. The more man ignores it, the more the voice of consciousness overwhelms other feeble attempts at extinguishing it. The young and beautiful Grey was somewhat similar to the twenty-seven-years old Wilde with his clean-face and straight gesture shown by a picture taken with him in it shown on the Internet. However, Towards the end of the book, after twenty years, Grey’s outward appearance remain unchanged, with his portrait bearing all his ugliness but his restlessness, the agony of his soul sent himself into a frenzy, his obsessiveness of his beauty made beauty stand on a pedestal and made itself God, he no longer was a free man, but a slave to it. I presume, at that time, when a man is possessed by Satan or became Satan himself, the frowns on his forehead, the down droop of his lips will no longer bespeak of beauty and vibrancy even though his face remained young. Oscar Wilde also had a picture taken after he came out of prison and he no longer look like the same man, sin and vices weathered his face, slanting his eyes, separating his bone and flesh, making his face almost unrecognizable. A familiar scene can be seen in the bible, as prophet Ezekiel is lead by God’s spirit to a valley full of dry bones, full of lost hopes.
Not surprisingly, Grey eventually plunged a knife into the portrait that bears the sins that etched itself onto his souls, killing himself off simultaneously. Wilde is forced to throw his career as a renowned playwright and celebrity at its pinnacle into the wind and traveled abroad to French and Spain in anonymity. We as readers, even when the book did not provide us an answer, wanted to know if there is a way out of the knotted situations of Grey in the story and Wilde with the abandonment of society is on the left, the denouncement of one’s own consciousness is on the right. When beauty is stripped of its charm, it no longer is a sanctuary, but a curse. Judgments pronounced from the prophet Isaiah after the Israelites chased after the glittering idols of Babylon is as heart-wrenching as Grey’s story:
“Go down, sit in the dust, Virgin Daughter Babylon; sit on the ground without a throne, queen city of the Babylonians. No more will you be called tender or delicate. Take millstones and grind flour; take off your veil. Lift up your skirts, bare your legs, and wade through the streams. Your nakedness will be exposed and your shame uncovered. (Isaiah 47:1-3 NIV)
After prophet Ezekiel was lead to the valley of dry bones, the Lord asked him,
“Son of man, can these bones live?” then the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. (Ezekiel 37:1-5 NIV).
It is both a surprise and paradox that the way out of Grey and Wilde’s situations resided precisely in the puritanic beliefs that Grey and Wilde derided and resisted vehemently. The society denounces them, the consciousness forsakes them, but there was also a way that lead to truth and life, who is also the way, the truth and the life. Jesus was nailed to the cross for the sins of men, to free people from the bondage of sins and with it the accusation of consciousness. Saint Augustine also once was plagued with the love of sensuality and pride, but he turns his soul to God, and finds his rest there. He concluded his view on people such as Grey and Wilde and stretch out a helping hand in his Confession:
These were Homer’s fictions, transferring things human to the gods; would he brought down things divine to us! Yet more truly had he said ’’these are indeed his fiction; but attributing a divine nature to wicked men, that crimes might be no longer crimes, and who so commits them might seem to imitate not abandoned men, but the celestial gods.
No wonder apostle Paul said in his letter to Christians of Judean:
How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God! (Hebrews 9:14 NIV)
The trend in beauty loving, at the sacrifice of moral integrity, which is emerging in Wilde’s time, is more and more prevalent in 21th century. Now, as England and other parts of the world puts down their bibles and resisted the doctrines, loves and light of God, even what Wilde did is been considered as a hereditary and intrinsic inclination, sin is no more than a man-made word. The way out seemed more out of reach, but however narrow, it is still the only way. May we what is true beauty and what we truly should pursue, As Saint Augustine had said:
Lower goods, such as outward beauty and pride, for they are beautiful and comely, but compared with those higher and beatific goods, are abject and low.
