Dorian Gray Post
My current preoccupation with Oscar Wilde seems a bit over the top when I recognize my relatively recent exposure to the great writer. It was just over a year ago in my E 314 L class that we read The Importance of Being Earnest, thus inspiriting my subsequent obsession with Wilde and all of his texts. A fifty-cent purchase from Half-Priced Books the following fall (Oscar Wilde’s Book of Wit, featuring his most quotable witticisms) displays a cartoon version of the author on the cover in his signature pose. Slightly tilting the left, his hands are placed huffily on his hips while a slightly ridiculous grin stretches across his face. I hesitate at referring to this stance as his signature pose; as I remember it, this has been my pose. Nearly every photograph of my freshman year of college gives supporting evidence.
In the opening paragraph of Chapter 11 in The Picture of Dorian Gray, the narrator describes Gray’s affinity for a certain Parisian novel, a book in which he finds a literary ancestor: ‘And , indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it.’ I am completely fascinated by this idea (especially this particular quote) of our non-genealogical ancestors. I’ll admit that I (semi) jokingly refer to myself as Oscar Wilde incarnate, but there exists a certain amount of truth behind those jokes. Throughout my reading of the novel, I recognized so many pleasures and experiences that were strangely familiar. The total fascination with excess, the visually engaging (and often highly theatrical) ways in which characters never seem to calmly sit down but always ‘fling [themselves] into couches,’ the unbridled interest in the intersection between life and art. The idea that these vectors which have so deeply permeated gay culture and eventually penetrated my own life have an origin, a beginning point, that they have not always been elements of homosexual identity is so mindboggling to me. I feel almost as though I’ve taken certain things about gay culture for granted. While I’ve been familiar with the infamous Wilde trials for years now, and aware of the difference of homosexual identity as opposed to homosexual practice since entering college, I don’t think I had ever realized the extent to which Wilde’s entire life was actually a turning point in revealing sexuality as a possible identity vector.
Just as the Parisian novel has functioned for Dorian, Wilde’s novel has operated for me (though I certainly hope my relationship to the novel produces less dire outcomes).
posted by PatrickMcKelvey @ 2:25 PM
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