1 The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde wrote plays, short stories, essays, and one novel. Though his first play proved to be a disaster, he continued to write plays, and achieved success. His plays “Lady Windermere’s Fan”, “AWoman of No Importance”, “An Ideal Husband”, “The Importance of Being Earnest”, etc. have all the brilliance of the author’s wit, sarcastic treatment of the contemporary Victorian manners and prudery, and dry humor. Apparently his plays make a light playful reading.
The plays reveal the artificial lives that people belonging to the nobility and the higher class led. Each play has its scenes of the bright drawing rooms and the witty conversations that hide the real intentions of the characters. Someone enters their peaceful lives and brings the possibility of a revelation of a secret from the past, that may be some indiscretion done while young – love affair, some long lost child, etc. The crisis may involve an almost loss of position in the society if the secret is revealed, yet the resolution is glossed over as another normal incident in the lives of the characters. Upon being made public, besides providing solution to the original problem, usually a love affair, the secret helps in bringing the protagonists more closer. Eventually everything settles down to the advantage of the protagonists, and people resume their “normal” lives.
This is the basic structure that Wilde’s plays usually follow. Situations are funny, conversations between the protagonists are brilliant, entertaining, and epigrammatic. Another characteristic is the “goodness” of the central character. He is the wittiest as well as the most intelligent and resourceful person, who inspite of trying hard to be cynical and skeptical about everything in life – clothes, situations, relations, etc. is the one who helps in the crisis resolution.
In similar vein are the short stories, mostly fairy stories. However, the stories have more of poignancy than fun and laughter and humor of the plays. “The Happy Prince”, “The Selfish Giant”, “The Sphinx Without a Secret”, and even the “The Canterville Ghost” have a certain delicateness and sensitiveness of denouement. The sacrifice of the “Prince”, loneliness of the “Sphinx” as well as the “Giant” and, the unending torture of the “Ghost” have been brought out with compassion and finesse.
The one novel Wilde wrote, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, is in stark contrast to Oscar Wilde’s other writings. It is perceptibly darker and gloomier than his plays and short stories. The novel elucidates the life of Dorian Gray, the development of his character from a naive and gullible youth to the calculating, insincere and pretentious man. It traces the unraveling of a complex character, both the vital “Picture” as well as the living person. It is also as much the story of the artist. The novel can be read at another level also, as the study of sexuality and the power relations.
The novel unfolds the transformation of an unaffected young man of “extraordinary personal beauty”, Dorian Gray. Lord Henry sees the picture Basil Hallward is painting and gets curious to know the real person. When he meets Dorian he compliments him on his beauty, charm and beauty. He is an influential personality who captures the imagination of Dorian as much as the latter has fascinated him. He explicates on the advantages of possessing youth and beauty. One should return to the Hellenic ideal and revel in pleasures, for their negation is what makes the life miserable. “The only way to get rid of temptation is to get rid of it”, is what he tells Dorian. Repression and suppression of desires creates sin, and it is in “the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place”, as well as the “great events”. And since Dorian has the beauty and the youth he should enjoy life more fully, and seek to triumph, because youth and beauty are fleeting and once old age and wrinkles come he will have nothing to “triumph” over. These words of his act as a wake up call for Dorian. He suddenly becomes aware of the power of his beauty and youth. His wish for eternal youth is granted in the strangest of ways. Dorian’s painting that Basil has painted takes on the “soul” and Dorian becomes just the body. He doesn’t “feel” the emotions but lives the life of sensations making the most of the opportunity he had wished for and so amazingly granted to him. He remains youthful and handsome as ever, but the painting shows the signs of age as well as degradation and debauchery.
Sibyl is a young innocent girl who falls in love with the charming Dorian, who commits suicide after his bestial treatment of her when she fails to live up to his expectations in front of his friends. Therein starts the successive acts of savagery, licentiousness, and degradation. Apparently he is as charming and beautiful as he was years ago, but the painting, which he hides from everyone including Basil, shows the actual signs of his downfall. It becomes old, wrinkled, and bears every sign of Dorian’s profligacy.
Though stories abound as to his moral corruption, it becomes hard for the people to believe them because of his bewitching and charismatic face. However, except Lord Henry, those who become his friends leave him and avoid any further contact out of a mixture of fear and disgust. Dorian murders his friend Basil when in his horror and guilt at creating such a painting he urges the former to change. This crime acts as a catalyst in bringing Dorian to commit suicide. In a wrath, he stabs the painting for showing him who he really is. His body is found out next morning, old, wrinkled and bearing the signs of his sins, while the painting resumes its original form, that of a young, beautiful and charming young man.
2 History of Sexuality
Michel Foucault writes about knowledge, power and sexuality. Power comes not from above but from “below”, and from everywhere. The repression of talk about sex led to an increase of discourse about it, and perhaps initiation of “sexual heterogeneties”. It may be that the attention on sexuality in the 19th century was a means to ensure the proliferation of species, and increase labour capacity, i.e. to serve capitalistic interests. It also led to the legitimation of certain relationships – heterosexuality and marriage and to the exclusion and marginalization of others – homosexuality, infidelity, and suppression of sexuality in minors, mad people, as also criminals.
"He shows that what we think of as ”repression” of sexuality actually constituted sexuality as a core feature of our identities, and produced a proliferation of discourse on the subject."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
Important in this division is the form of power exercised. It operates not through the repression of sex, but through the production of discourse about sexuality. Knowledge is not object and cannot be separated from power. It is another way for classification, power brings marginalization, control and maintenance of “order”. A “normative” pattern of sexuality was established that the “deviant” behaviours could be eradicated from society. Power also contains the seeds of resistance in it. This is how Foucault elucidates the idea of power and inherent resistance in it,
"the desire of one’s own body... once power produces this effect, there inevitably emerge the responding claims and affirmations, those of one’s own body against power, of health against the economic system, of pleasure against the moral norms of sexuality, marriage, decency. Suddenly, what had made power strong becomes used to attack it. Power, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed to a counter-attack in that same body."
http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/bodypower.htm
"power is a technique or action which individuals can engage in. Power is not possessed; it is exercised. And where there is power, there is always also resistance."
http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-fou1.htm
Power in sexuality plays through four mechanisms, control over children’s sex, attribution of hysteria to women’s sex, exclusion of deviant behaviour and preference to heterosexual relations. Foucault argues for the kind of power the discourse on sexuality produces “on body and on sex”. This power acts through the multiplication of sexualities, that sex is there in the body and attracts “its varieties by means of spirals in which power and pleasure reinforced one other...pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another.” The discourses give rise to multiplicities of sexuality rather than repression and restrictions. And this is what happened in the nineteenth-century bourgeois society. Instead of repression of sexuality, it let to more talk and wider spread of power.
3 Foucault and Wilde
Foucault writes about knowledge being power. And that power is exercised, and that it comes from everywhere. Youth is juxtaposed with power in this novel by Wilde. Dorian Gray has the youth and the beauty. Lord Henry arouses his narcissistic desires with his talk of the charms of youth and the influence he can exert over people, and exhortations about “a new Hedonism”.
"The sense of his own beauty came to him like a revelation. He had never felt it before.
I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it."
However, youth being fleeting, he would soon part with his good looks and would become a wrinkled old man. When Dorian’s wish for eternal youth is miraculously answered, he commences on his mission of triumphing over the world. He is flamboyant and rules everybody’s mind. With his charm and charisma accompanied by his fascinating personality, he always attracts people to himself. Basil is drawn to his innocence and symmetry. Lord Henry is captivated by his beauty and unaffectedness of the picture even before he has met him, and the meeting affects him more.
Lord Henry is able to exert influence on Dorian because he has knowledge that the young man lacks when they first meet. He has the “power” to mould his mind, and he takes pleasure in stirring his soul. He exercises the power that he has by virtue of his having knowledge. He has the desire to control Dorian, and to this end he directs his fascinating voice and all of his thoughts.
"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul...Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing...Yes; he would try to be to Dorian Gray what, without knowing it, the lad was to the painter who had fashioned the wonderful portrait. He would seek to dominate him – had already, indeed, half done so. He would make that beautiful spirit his own. There was something fascinating in this son of Love and Death."
He himself acknowledges the fact that he has the capability to influence to Dorian
"I represent to you all the sins that you have never had the courage to commit."
Dorian Gray with his “chiseled” features and beauty has the power to dominate gathering he is in. He dominates Basil because of his physical appearance. Lord Henry opens a completely new world to him.
"You filled me with a wild desire to know everything about life...I had a passion for sensations.
He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations."
According to Foucault, sex lies in the body, and power and pleasure instead of remaining oppositions form spirals that reinforce each other through reinforcement. Dorian Gray seeks sensuous pleasure. He has come to love beauty first in himself through the painting which has “taught him to love his own beauty”. Now he seeks beauty, experience and pleasures outside. He has an obsessive and insatiable curiosity to seek every kind of experience. Pain as well as pleasure is there in every act, pleasure of experiencing an hitherto unknown experience, pain of being base and corrupt.
"Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins – he was to have all these things. The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame...Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous."
He doesn’t live on in one experience, rather flits from one to another. In his own words,
"But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or for mistaking, for a house in which to live in, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in
which there are no stars and the moon is in travail."
Another juxtaposition in the novel is that of youth with sexuality. Youth has vitality and vivacity to allure, and to keep the interest from flagging. Dorian has attained “eternal” youth by a quirk of fate. He uses that youth, and the amazing fact that he can hide his real face from the world, to gain all kinds of experiences. He becomes debauch. And the expression of this sexuality is an exercise of Foucauldian power. No one can resist his harm, they fight against even their own better senses to associate with him. However, they lose reputation, relations, friends, position in society, as well as self respect. Yet he still has the power to make them fear even his name. And this dominance as well power and far is due to his sensuousness.
Dorian has the ability to attract beauty, makes friends with women and men, but he has also the uncanny ability not to feel the emotions himself, the picture does that and bears the permanent marks of his cruel, evil, and criminal acts. This makes him callous and calculating, not caring for anyone except his own pleasures. He yearns for never ending youth that he may continue with his pleasures and conquests. The portrait is the representation of all what he would have lost if he had become old as “normal” people do.
"It held the secret of his life, and told his story. It had taught him to love his own beauty...The picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience...life, and his own infinite curiosity about life. .. What did it matter what
happened to the coloured image on the canvas? He would be safe. That was everything."
He does not conform, sexually or physically. Foucault argues that the repression of discourse about sexuality instead of silencing brings about a multiplicities of discourse. The nineteenth century is perceived to be prudish that put a muzzle on speaking about sex and sexuality. However, as seen through Wilde’s novel it is not so. Sexuality, sexual experiences and verbalization are there, of alternate sexualities as well, though not openly. Dorian indulges in all kinds of sexual relations, not necessarily in heterosexual, or even the more desirable marriage. He keeps experimenting as a result of his irrepressible curiosity. This is acceptable to some people like Lord Henry, who rather encourages him on in his endeavour to learn more as well as live more.
It is this tendency of deviation that is irksome to the people. People whisper about him, stories make round about his fallen ways and his ruthlessness, but he has the indescribable charm and a charming and disarming smile that makes it impossible for anyone to believe that he could do any wrong. When he feels guilt and remorse, besides being haunted by the murder he has committed, Dorian thinks of confessing his crimes. He has this weak moment when he wants to give up his way of life of being “different”, being pointed out as something of a phenomenon, being a “sinner” as society judges it. He thinks about confession as a way of embracing the “norms” of the society, and normalization. This is what Foucault describes when he talks about the four mechanisms through which power works through sexuality, conforming to the societal norm – preference for “procreative heterosexual” relationship, and the exclusion of deviant behaviour.
Dorian’s urge to confess, though short lived, and though it unknowingly becomes the cause of his suicide, is a manifestation of the chains that society binds people with. He has lived life on his own terms, has indulged in every kind of sexual relationship, yet when he feels hounded by his own crimes he tries to run towards conformity. He is a sort of social outcast who has no friends except Basil Hallward and Lord Henry, former he has already murdered in a fit of rage. Lord Henry is more of a mentor. Everyone else is either too afraid of him (former friends and partners in sin) or worship him (newer acquaintances). How aptly Lord Henry had said in the beginning that
"great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also"
The development of Dorian Gray’s character, from the simple, carefree youngman, through being the one who can still feel remorse, guilt and sympathy when he is reminded that he behaved cruelly with the girl he was madly in love with, to the remorseless man who has no qualms in murdering his best friend, and one who blackmails another to remove every trace of his handiwork, and ultimately kills himself by “mistake” makes for an interesting study of sexuality, and power relations. Youth, sexuality and power are equated in Foucauldian terms, and all are embodied in the protagonist. Dorian Gray has youth which he uses to gain power and use that power to dominate in every gathering and relationship he is in. Sexuality is in the body. It cannot be separated from the person – Dorian Gray. Power is simply not repressive,
but creative as well because it increases discourse and desire as a result of trying to repress discourse on sexuality.
4 References
1. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Class handout.
2. Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, Wordsworth Editions Limited(1997)
3. Sim, Stuart and Borin Van Loon, Appignanesi, Richard ed. “Introducing Critical Theory”. Totem Books, USA, 2001. pp 91-99.
4. Gutting, Gary, ”Michel Foucault”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2003/entries/foucault/
5. http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-fou1.htm
6. http://web.utk.edu/~misty/AndersonFouc.html
7. http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/bodypower.htm
Oscar Wilde wrote plays, short stories, essays, and one novel. Though his first play proved to be a disaster, he continued to write plays, and achieved success. His plays “Lady Windermere’s Fan”, “AWoman of No Importance”, “An Ideal Husband”, “The Importance of Being Earnest”, etc. have all the brilliance of the author’s wit, sarcastic treatment of the contemporary Victorian manners and prudery, and dry humor. Apparently his plays make a light playful reading.
The plays reveal the artificial lives that people belonging to the nobility and the higher class led. Each play has its scenes of the bright drawing rooms and the witty conversations that hide the real intentions of the characters. Someone enters their peaceful lives and brings the possibility of a revelation of a secret from the past, that may be some indiscretion done while young – love affair, some long lost child, etc. The crisis may involve an almost loss of position in the society if the secret is revealed, yet the resolution is glossed over as another normal incident in the lives of the characters. Upon being made public, besides providing solution to the original problem, usually a love affair, the secret helps in bringing the protagonists more closer. Eventually everything settles down to the advantage of the protagonists, and people resume their “normal” lives.
This is the basic structure that Wilde’s plays usually follow. Situations are funny, conversations between the protagonists are brilliant, entertaining, and epigrammatic. Another characteristic is the “goodness” of the central character. He is the wittiest as well as the most intelligent and resourceful person, who inspite of trying hard to be cynical and skeptical about everything in life – clothes, situations, relations, etc. is the one who helps in the crisis resolution.
In similar vein are the short stories, mostly fairy stories. However, the stories have more of poignancy than fun and laughter and humor of the plays. “The Happy Prince”, “The Selfish Giant”, “The Sphinx Without a Secret”, and even the “The Canterville Ghost” have a certain delicateness and sensitiveness of denouement. The sacrifice of the “Prince”, loneliness of the “Sphinx” as well as the “Giant” and, the unending torture of the “Ghost” have been brought out with compassion and finesse.
The one novel Wilde wrote, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, is in stark contrast to Oscar Wilde’s other writings. It is perceptibly darker and gloomier than his plays and short stories. The novel elucidates the life of Dorian Gray, the development of his character from a naive and gullible youth to the calculating, insincere and pretentious man. It traces the unraveling of a complex character, both the vital “Picture” as well as the living person. It is also as much the story of the artist. The novel can be read at another level also, as the study of sexuality and the power relations.
The novel unfolds the transformation of an unaffected young man of “extraordinary personal beauty”, Dorian Gray. Lord Henry sees the picture Basil Hallward is painting and gets curious to know the real person. When he meets Dorian he compliments him on his beauty, charm and beauty. He is an influential personality who captures the imagination of Dorian as much as the latter has fascinated him. He explicates on the advantages of possessing youth and beauty. One should return to the Hellenic ideal and revel in pleasures, for their negation is what makes the life miserable. “The only way to get rid of temptation is to get rid of it”, is what he tells Dorian. Repression and suppression of desires creates sin, and it is in “the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place”, as well as the “great events”. And since Dorian has the beauty and the youth he should enjoy life more fully, and seek to triumph, because youth and beauty are fleeting and once old age and wrinkles come he will have nothing to “triumph” over. These words of his act as a wake up call for Dorian. He suddenly becomes aware of the power of his beauty and youth. His wish for eternal youth is granted in the strangest of ways. Dorian’s painting that Basil has painted takes on the “soul” and Dorian becomes just the body. He doesn’t “feel” the emotions but lives the life of sensations making the most of the opportunity he had wished for and so amazingly granted to him. He remains youthful and handsome as ever, but the painting shows the signs of age as well as degradation and debauchery.
Sibyl is a young innocent girl who falls in love with the charming Dorian, who commits suicide after his bestial treatment of her when she fails to live up to his expectations in front of his friends. Therein starts the successive acts of savagery, licentiousness, and degradation. Apparently he is as charming and beautiful as he was years ago, but the painting, which he hides from everyone including Basil, shows the actual signs of his downfall. It becomes old, wrinkled, and bears every sign of Dorian’s profligacy.
Though stories abound as to his moral corruption, it becomes hard for the people to believe them because of his bewitching and charismatic face. However, except Lord Henry, those who become his friends leave him and avoid any further contact out of a mixture of fear and disgust. Dorian murders his friend Basil when in his horror and guilt at creating such a painting he urges the former to change. This crime acts as a catalyst in bringing Dorian to commit suicide. In a wrath, he stabs the painting for showing him who he really is. His body is found out next morning, old, wrinkled and bearing the signs of his sins, while the painting resumes its original form, that of a young, beautiful and charming young man.
2 History of Sexuality
Michel Foucault writes about knowledge, power and sexuality. Power comes not from above but from “below”, and from everywhere. The repression of talk about sex led to an increase of discourse about it, and perhaps initiation of “sexual heterogeneties”. It may be that the attention on sexuality in the 19th century was a means to ensure the proliferation of species, and increase labour capacity, i.e. to serve capitalistic interests. It also led to the legitimation of certain relationships – heterosexuality and marriage and to the exclusion and marginalization of others – homosexuality, infidelity, and suppression of sexuality in minors, mad people, as also criminals.
"He shows that what we think of as ”repression” of sexuality actually constituted sexuality as a core feature of our identities, and produced a proliferation of discourse on the subject."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
Important in this division is the form of power exercised. It operates not through the repression of sex, but through the production of discourse about sexuality. Knowledge is not object and cannot be separated from power. It is another way for classification, power brings marginalization, control and maintenance of “order”. A “normative” pattern of sexuality was established that the “deviant” behaviours could be eradicated from society. Power also contains the seeds of resistance in it. This is how Foucault elucidates the idea of power and inherent resistance in it,
"the desire of one’s own body... once power produces this effect, there inevitably emerge the responding claims and affirmations, those of one’s own body against power, of health against the economic system, of pleasure against the moral norms of sexuality, marriage, decency. Suddenly, what had made power strong becomes used to attack it. Power, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed to a counter-attack in that same body."
http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/bodypower.htm
"power is a technique or action which individuals can engage in. Power is not possessed; it is exercised. And where there is power, there is always also resistance."
http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-fou1.htm
Power in sexuality plays through four mechanisms, control over children’s sex, attribution of hysteria to women’s sex, exclusion of deviant behaviour and preference to heterosexual relations. Foucault argues for the kind of power the discourse on sexuality produces “on body and on sex”. This power acts through the multiplication of sexualities, that sex is there in the body and attracts “its varieties by means of spirals in which power and pleasure reinforced one other...pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another.” The discourses give rise to multiplicities of sexuality rather than repression and restrictions. And this is what happened in the nineteenth-century bourgeois society. Instead of repression of sexuality, it let to more talk and wider spread of power.
3 Foucault and Wilde
Foucault writes about knowledge being power. And that power is exercised, and that it comes from everywhere. Youth is juxtaposed with power in this novel by Wilde. Dorian Gray has the youth and the beauty. Lord Henry arouses his narcissistic desires with his talk of the charms of youth and the influence he can exert over people, and exhortations about “a new Hedonism”.
"The sense of his own beauty came to him like a revelation. He had never felt it before.
I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it."
However, youth being fleeting, he would soon part with his good looks and would become a wrinkled old man. When Dorian’s wish for eternal youth is miraculously answered, he commences on his mission of triumphing over the world. He is flamboyant and rules everybody’s mind. With his charm and charisma accompanied by his fascinating personality, he always attracts people to himself. Basil is drawn to his innocence and symmetry. Lord Henry is captivated by his beauty and unaffectedness of the picture even before he has met him, and the meeting affects him more.
Lord Henry is able to exert influence on Dorian because he has knowledge that the young man lacks when they first meet. He has the “power” to mould his mind, and he takes pleasure in stirring his soul. He exercises the power that he has by virtue of his having knowledge. He has the desire to control Dorian, and to this end he directs his fascinating voice and all of his thoughts.
"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul...Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing...Yes; he would try to be to Dorian Gray what, without knowing it, the lad was to the painter who had fashioned the wonderful portrait. He would seek to dominate him – had already, indeed, half done so. He would make that beautiful spirit his own. There was something fascinating in this son of Love and Death."
He himself acknowledges the fact that he has the capability to influence to Dorian
"I represent to you all the sins that you have never had the courage to commit."
Dorian Gray with his “chiseled” features and beauty has the power to dominate gathering he is in. He dominates Basil because of his physical appearance. Lord Henry opens a completely new world to him.
"You filled me with a wild desire to know everything about life...I had a passion for sensations.
He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations."
According to Foucault, sex lies in the body, and power and pleasure instead of remaining oppositions form spirals that reinforce each other through reinforcement. Dorian Gray seeks sensuous pleasure. He has come to love beauty first in himself through the painting which has “taught him to love his own beauty”. Now he seeks beauty, experience and pleasures outside. He has an obsessive and insatiable curiosity to seek every kind of experience. Pain as well as pleasure is there in every act, pleasure of experiencing an hitherto unknown experience, pain of being base and corrupt.
"Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins – he was to have all these things. The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame...Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous."
He doesn’t live on in one experience, rather flits from one to another. In his own words,
"But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or for mistaking, for a house in which to live in, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in
which there are no stars and the moon is in travail."
Another juxtaposition in the novel is that of youth with sexuality. Youth has vitality and vivacity to allure, and to keep the interest from flagging. Dorian has attained “eternal” youth by a quirk of fate. He uses that youth, and the amazing fact that he can hide his real face from the world, to gain all kinds of experiences. He becomes debauch. And the expression of this sexuality is an exercise of Foucauldian power. No one can resist his harm, they fight against even their own better senses to associate with him. However, they lose reputation, relations, friends, position in society, as well as self respect. Yet he still has the power to make them fear even his name. And this dominance as well power and far is due to his sensuousness.
Dorian has the ability to attract beauty, makes friends with women and men, but he has also the uncanny ability not to feel the emotions himself, the picture does that and bears the permanent marks of his cruel, evil, and criminal acts. This makes him callous and calculating, not caring for anyone except his own pleasures. He yearns for never ending youth that he may continue with his pleasures and conquests. The portrait is the representation of all what he would have lost if he had become old as “normal” people do.
"It held the secret of his life, and told his story. It had taught him to love his own beauty...The picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience...life, and his own infinite curiosity about life. .. What did it matter what
happened to the coloured image on the canvas? He would be safe. That was everything."
He does not conform, sexually or physically. Foucault argues that the repression of discourse about sexuality instead of silencing brings about a multiplicities of discourse. The nineteenth century is perceived to be prudish that put a muzzle on speaking about sex and sexuality. However, as seen through Wilde’s novel it is not so. Sexuality, sexual experiences and verbalization are there, of alternate sexualities as well, though not openly. Dorian indulges in all kinds of sexual relations, not necessarily in heterosexual, or even the more desirable marriage. He keeps experimenting as a result of his irrepressible curiosity. This is acceptable to some people like Lord Henry, who rather encourages him on in his endeavour to learn more as well as live more.
It is this tendency of deviation that is irksome to the people. People whisper about him, stories make round about his fallen ways and his ruthlessness, but he has the indescribable charm and a charming and disarming smile that makes it impossible for anyone to believe that he could do any wrong. When he feels guilt and remorse, besides being haunted by the murder he has committed, Dorian thinks of confessing his crimes. He has this weak moment when he wants to give up his way of life of being “different”, being pointed out as something of a phenomenon, being a “sinner” as society judges it. He thinks about confession as a way of embracing the “norms” of the society, and normalization. This is what Foucault describes when he talks about the four mechanisms through which power works through sexuality, conforming to the societal norm – preference for “procreative heterosexual” relationship, and the exclusion of deviant behaviour.
Dorian’s urge to confess, though short lived, and though it unknowingly becomes the cause of his suicide, is a manifestation of the chains that society binds people with. He has lived life on his own terms, has indulged in every kind of sexual relationship, yet when he feels hounded by his own crimes he tries to run towards conformity. He is a sort of social outcast who has no friends except Basil Hallward and Lord Henry, former he has already murdered in a fit of rage. Lord Henry is more of a mentor. Everyone else is either too afraid of him (former friends and partners in sin) or worship him (newer acquaintances). How aptly Lord Henry had said in the beginning that
"great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also"
The development of Dorian Gray’s character, from the simple, carefree youngman, through being the one who can still feel remorse, guilt and sympathy when he is reminded that he behaved cruelly with the girl he was madly in love with, to the remorseless man who has no qualms in murdering his best friend, and one who blackmails another to remove every trace of his handiwork, and ultimately kills himself by “mistake” makes for an interesting study of sexuality, and power relations. Youth, sexuality and power are equated in Foucauldian terms, and all are embodied in the protagonist. Dorian Gray has youth which he uses to gain power and use that power to dominate in every gathering and relationship he is in. Sexuality is in the body. It cannot be separated from the person – Dorian Gray. Power is simply not repressive,
but creative as well because it increases discourse and desire as a result of trying to repress discourse on sexuality.
4 References
1. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Class handout.
2. Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, Wordsworth Editions Limited(1997)
3. Sim, Stuart and Borin Van Loon, Appignanesi, Richard ed. “Introducing Critical Theory”. Totem Books, USA, 2001. pp 91-99.
4. Gutting, Gary, ”Michel Foucault”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2003/entries/foucault/
5. http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-fou1.htm
6. http://web.utk.edu/~misty/AndersonFouc.html
7. http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/bodypower.htm
