The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order by Margot Gayle Backus

Author:Margot Gayle Backus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2012-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

“Something That Would Breed Horrors and Yet Would Never Die”

The Picture of Dorian Gray

As Ed Cohen argues in his essay “Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation,” The Picture of Dorian Gray’s central, complex trope of a subject irreparably split into “the image of his body and his body itself” (81) is the product of cultural representation. During the painting of Dorian Gray’s portrait, the painter Basil Hallward and the aesthete Lord Henry Wotton reorient Dorian pictorially and verbally, “in relation both to his own identity and to his social context” (80). The finished portrait, a composite emblem of the two older men’s desire (since as Basil paints, Lord Henry’s monologue elicits on Dorian’s face the striking “look . . . never seen before” [Wilde 158] that sparks the painting into life), shows Dorian to himself in a new and exciting erotic context. Dorian’s sudden, acute awareness of his body as the object of male sexual desire causes him to “internalize an identity that excites his body only to make it vulnerable to the passage of time” (Cohen 80). Prompted by the sudden, radical sexual awakening that the painting elicits, Dorian makes his spontaneous fatal wish, that he might exchange his soul in order that “it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old” (168). Dorian’s speech act linguistically enacts a separation of his body from his soul, so that, as Cohen argues, “the ‘I’ of the speaking character is projected against the visual image of the ‘I,’” and “his body is evacuated and thereby removed from the flow of time” (81).

Cohen elucidates some of the most striking implications of Wilde’s representational and narrative strategies by exploring The Picture of Dorian Gray as an exemplary site at which to initiate a broader exploration of the representational strategies used by some Victorian men as a means to articulate alternative masculine sexual practices and identities. These practices and identities, Cohen reminds us, were at risk at a historical moment when “the discursive production of. . . the ‘true’ bourgeois male” was consolidating itself through the discursive production (and exemplary persecution) of “the homosexual” as its defining antithesis (69). The novel’s representation of a radical and irreparable breach between bodily desire and representation, however, has implications and intertextual connections that extend in directions other than those Cohen explores. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for instance, briefly gestures in these alternate directions in her characterization of the schism between person and persona that typified Wilde’s own mode of existence, which she associates with representational complexities connected to Wilde’s national as well as sexual subject position. According to Sedgwick’s analysis:

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