#thinking about Belphoebe lately

[narrativewatch-blog]

The Beautiful Boy as Destroyer

by Camille Paglia

Oscar Wilde, a master of mass media, projected himself internationally as the ultimateaesthete. He synthesizes a half century of French and English Decadent Late Romanticism and joins itto the great tradition of English comedy. Wilde criticism is cautious and oddly solemn. One reason isthat a male academic specializing in Wilde still risks being judged both queer and frivolous. Thuscritics drift toward apologia, tediously extolling Wilde’s humanity or morality, things utterlynonexistent in his best work. The time is past when it was necessary to defend a homosexual genius.As an advocate of aestheticism and Decadence, I feel no need to disguise Wilde’s cruelty andimmoralism.Wilde is an Apollonian conceptualizer in the line we have followed from Egypt and Greece throughBotticelli and Spenser to Blake, Gautier, and Rossetti. In him we see that brilliant fusion of theaggressive western eye with aristocratic hierarchism, created by the Old Kingdom Pharaohs. Wildewas not a liberal, as his modern admirers think. He was a cold Late Romantic elitist, in theBaudelairean manner. Arrogantly turning life into public theater, Wilde became drama’s ancient ritualscapegoat. Apollonianism is objectification, a radical pagan materialism. Wilde uncannily,compulsively literalized or materialized his own ideas, bringing about his spectacular tragic fall.Wilde’s two supreme works, a novel and a play, are energized by the western dynamic ofcompetitive sexual personae. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–91) is the fullest study of theDecadent erotic principle: the transformation of person into objet d’art. Wilde shows the strangesymbiosis between a beautiful boy and a painting, that is, between a charismatic androgyne and hisportrait. I noted that the artist’s hierarchic submission to a glamourous personality ischaracteristically western, as illustrated by Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura, Shelley andEmilia Viviani. In Wilde, as in Baudelaire and Rossetti, the relation is a Decadent ritual ofsadomasochistic enslavement. The artist Basil Hallward is “dominated” by Dorian Gray. But Dorianhimself is to be dominated by his own entrancing mirror-image, the art work recording Basil’simaginative submission.Dorian Gray opens with a perceptual pyramid, like the public unveiling of Cellini’s Perseus. Basiland Lord Henry Wotton sit looking up at “the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinarypersonal beauty.”1 This triangulated scene dramatizes the new nineteenth-century authority of art,with its coterie audience. Romanticism freed art from society and Christianity; photography freed itfrom realism. By the late nineteenth century, the art work was more separate and elevated than it hadever been. The picture of Dorian Gray stands alone in its hierarchic command. It is imperious as aByzantine icon but divorced from any collective value system. Wilde’s painting, beginning in aposition of spiritual preeminence, actually increases in power as the novel goes on. We see the artwork steadily escaping into independent mastery. What Gautier undertakes as an amusing fantasy inThe Mummy’s Foot, with its rude, refractory object-life, becomes Wilde’s nightmare vision of matteravenging itself on imagination. Basil’s painting, like Balzac’s boudoir a masterpiece of civilizedartifice, will generate the most savage barbarities. The artist himself will be butchered at its feet, hisbody dismembered and dissolved in acid.Wilde systematically charts the painting’s ritual sequestration. Basil refuses to exhibit it. Dorianaccepts it as a gift but, as it starts to change, conceals it behind a screen, then a drapery, and finally ina locked attic room. The painting becomes holier and holier as it becomes more and more daemonic.The novel proceeds by a daemonization of the Apollonian, my principle of Decadent art. The paintingis the precious monstrance of a cult of the beautiful boy, modelled on pagan prototypes. Wildecompares Dorian to Adonis, Narcissus, Paris, Antinous. With his “crisp gold hair” and Greek name,Wilde’s hero represents the Aryan absolutism of the Dorian invaders, whose blondeness I found inSpenser’s Amazons. He belongs to the Billy Budd category of ephebic androgyne, retaining theadolescent bloom into adulthood. Dorian is half-feminine, with “finely-curved scarlet lips” and a“delicate bloom and loveliness.” He has a “rose-red youth” and “rose-white boyhood,” like a fairy-talemaiden. Lord Henry tells him, “You really must not allow yourself to become sunburnt. It would beunbecoming”—as if Dorian were Scarlett O’Hara forgetting her parasol. Images of flowers supportDorian’s identification with Adonis. Lord Henry experiments with a male vampirism, transplanting his temperament into Dorian, who ispossessed by him in both the sexual and daemonic sense. Basil is increasingly dismayed by Dorian’sadoption of Henry’s cynicism, style, and sophisticated epigrams. The Apollonian androgyne has novoice of its own; therefore, once its impermeability is breached, it begins to speak with the voice ofanother. Dorian, like the Delphic oracle, is under the mediumship of a hidden god. In his review of thebook, Pater calls the portrait Dorian’s “Döppelgänger.”16 I see a second doppelgänger pattern inHenry’s relation with his protégé: Dorian becomes Lord Henry, the beautiful boy turned Decadentaesthete. The transformation is complete when Wilde attaches the word “languidly” to Dorian,Henry’s emblematic epithet from his first appearance.17 An act of homosexual generation hasoccurred, a hermaphroditic cloning of sexual personae. Teaching again as an erotic transaction: we seethe candlelit courtship, the sexual initiation and insemination, and the Decadent fruition. DominantLord Henry spawns the remade Dorian from his cold ivory brow.Dorian himself dominates Basil, by the artist’s own admission. Basil recalls the origin of hissubordination, at a crowded London soirée. It resembles the moment of cathexis when Balzac’sSarrasine falls under the spell of the singing castrato.I suddenly became conscious that someone was looking at me. I turned halfway round, and sawDorian Gray for the first time. When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curioussensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose merepersonality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, mywhole soul, my very art itself.Homosexuals, now as then, recognize each other by a mysterious hard meeting of the eyes, a trope ofwestern aggression. The source of this passage is in Plato’s Phaedrus. Basil’s paleness and terror arethe “shudder,” “awe,” and “fever and perspiration” afflicting the philosopher who encounters a humanembodiment of “true beauty”: “Beholding it, he reverences it as he would a god.”18 HomoeroticPlatonism is overt in Basil’s later confession:Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence overme. I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnationof that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshippedyou.... I hardly understood it myself. I only knew that I had seen perfection face to face.19Ordinary sexual desire is not the issue. Greek idealism is a glorification of the eye, not a glut of thesenses. Apollo lives by day, Dionysus by night. Basil seeks not to sleep with Dorian but to paint hispicture. The portrait is not sublimation but conceptual perfection. Painting, an iconic Apollonianmode, preserves Dorian’s hierarchic command and the aesthetic distance symbolizing the LateRomantic’s contemplative submission to the eroticized object. Subordination to the person as objetd’art explains the androgyny of all aesthetes. Such subordination is intolerable, we saw, toSwinburne’s masculine Sappho, whose admiration of Anactoria’s beauty escalates into sadism.Basil and Dorian’s first meeting also invokes one of the primary Romantic principles, vampirism.In the middle of a party, Basil senses someone looking at him. Dorian’s gaze is palpable, like the oneGautier’s Queen Nyssia tries to wash from her body. It has an eerie extrasensory effect on Basil,because it is an expression of sudden hierarchic assertion, casually exercised by an agent stillunconscious of his powers. When their eyes meet, Basil feels Dorian is “so fascinating” as to “absorb”him. At this moment of visual fixation, Dorian, like a vampire, dominates the plane of eye-contact.Basil, mesmerized, actually grows “pale,” like the vampire’s bled victim. But Wilde gives thedaemonic an Apollonian setting. Basil somehow grasps Dorian’s “personality” without a word beingspoken. He only sees Dorian; he does not hear him. There is an unpleasant intensification of ambientsound in the room. Enlightened consciousness flows into the visual. Basil’s revelation occurs in atemenos of muteness, into which noise can pierce only by becoming more grating. We witness one ofEnglish literature’s great Apollonian epiphanies. The Apollonian is a mode of silence: Dorian’spersonality, like Belphoebe’s at her glittering entrance into The Faerie Queene, is conveyed byentirely physical, visual means. This is a representational law of pagan sexual personae.Wilde calls Basil’s painting a “portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty.” Personal:what other kind of human beauty could there be? This homoerotic locution means Dorian has beautyof personality, but not personality as normally understood. At his first trial, Wilde sparred with hiscross-examiner, who read aloud from Basil’s confession to Dorian:Edward Carson: Do you mean to say that that passage describes the natural feeling of one mantowards another?Wilde: It would be the influence produced by a beautiful personality.Carson: A beautiful person?Wilde: I said “a beautiful personality.” You can describe it as you like. Dorian Gray’s was a mostremarkable personality.20Carson’s formulation, “a beautiful person,” has a moral inflection that Wilde is quick to correct. Hisown phrase, “a beautiful personality,” is morally indifferent. For Wilde, personality is a fact, a given.It is not character, shaped by education or ethics. Personality for him is immanent, belonging to apreordained rank in the great chain of being of authority and glamour. It is a visual construct. I spokeof the externality and theatricality of the Greco-Roman persona, a public projection, metaphoricallyvisual. Wilde, the most self-dramatizing of English writers, makes this metaphor literal. JoiningGreek idealism to Late Romantic connoisseurship, he imagines personality as a radiant icon ofApollonian materiality, the godlike summation of the visible world.Personality is central to Wilde’s literary theory, where it is the measure of both artist and critic. Hesays: “It is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality andwork of others. ... As art springs from personality, so it is only to personality that it can berevealed.”21 The idea comes from Pater. But there is a great difference between Pater’s“temperament” and Wilde’s “personality”: the first is misty and receptive, the second hard anddominant. The Importance of Being Earnest is a spectacle of this hardness of Wildean personality.Dorian Gray makes personality hierarchic in the Greek way, but it also promotes a Romantic view ofthe mystery of sex and power. Only Coleridge’s Christabel surpasses Dorian Gray as an analysis ofthe occult operations of fascination.No word appears more often in Dorian Gray than “fascinating.” It refers to a person, an experience,a drug, a book (A Rebours, by which Dorian is “poisoned”). The fascination theme belongs to thenovel’s romance of hierarchy. An unanswered question of history is how one individual can controlmasses of people. Freud speaks of the “fascination” of very beautiful, narcissistic women: narcissismhas “a great attraction” for others because of that “self-sufficiency and inaccessibility” shared bychildren and cats.22 Narcissistic politicians induce the investment of mass emotion by a process offascination.I compared the charisma of Lord Byron and Elvis Presley to that of the opportunistic first Duke ofBuckingham. Max Weber sees charisma as “an extraordinary, supernatural, divine power” that mustbe manifested by a warlord in heroic deeds or by a prophet in miracles.23 I question this definitioninsofar as it makes charisma dependent upon acts or external effects. Early Christianity first uses theGreek word charisma (“gift, favor, grace”) for the gift of healing or speaking in tongues. But I viewcharisma as completely pre-Christian. Athena gives charisma to Achilles when she sheds “a goldenmist around his head” and makes his body emit “a blaze of light.” She gives charisma to Odysseus onPhaeacia: he becomes “taller and sturdier”; his hair thickens like “the hyacinth in bloom”; he is“radiant with comeliness and grace.”24 Xenophon says the beauty of a victorious athlete, like “thesudden glow of a light at night,” “compelled everyone to look at him”: “Beauty is in its essencesomething regal.”25 Charisma in classical antiquity meant exactly what it does in the pagan massmedia: glamour, a Scottish word signifying, as Kenneth Burke points out, a magic “haze in the air”around persons or things.26 Charisma is the numinous aura around a narcissistic personality. It flowsoutward from a simplicity or unity of being and a composure and controlled vitality. There is graciousaccommodation, yet commanding impersonality. Charisma is the radiance produced by the interactionof male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine forceand severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowingwith presexual self-love.Wilde gives Dorian Gray pure charisma. Dorian is a natural hierarch who dominates by his“fascinating” beauty, drawing both sexes toward him and paralyzing the moral will. The narcissism ofthis beautiful boy has disastrous consequences: suicide, murder, vice. Dorian excites a mesmericfollowership among his well-born companions, but one directed toward no public aim, not eventyranny. Basil demands:Why is your friendship so fatal to young men? ... You have filled them with a madness forpleasure. They have gone down into the depths. You led them there. Yes: you led them there,and yet you can smile, as you are smiling now.... They say that you corrupt everyone with whomyou become intimate, and that it is quite sufficient for you to enter a house, for shame of somekind to follow after.Seduction literally means “leading astray.” Paterian influence has become entrancement andcompulsion. Dorian daemonizes his followers, deconstructing the social order. He is a Late Romanticrather than Renaissance androgyne, bound by the public good. As a homosexual Alcibiades, Dorianfrustrates dynastic continuity. He is ostracized by the elder archons, who formally demonstrate theirdispleasure by leaving the room of a club whenever Dorian enters it. He creates a seditiousheterocosm within society, a colony of pagan idolatry. Wilde says of one of Dorian’s ill-fatedadmirers, “To him, as to many others, Dorian Gray was the type of everything that is wonderful andfascinating in life.”27 Extreme male beauty, like a siren song, lures toward destruction.Dorian effects these multiple cathexes by pagan magic. In the London netherworld, he is called“Prince Charming,” a cliché we are meant to hear in its oldest occult sense. Hierarch as sorcerer,Dorian has a “strange and dangerous charm.” He enchants not by words but by visible charisma. Mr.Hubbard, the “celebrated frame-maker,” comes instantly at his bidding: “As a rule, he never left hisshop. He waited for people to come to him. But he always made an exception in favour of DorianGray. There was something about Dorian that charmed everybody. It was a pleasure even to see him.”The young shop assistant reacts similarly: “[He] glanced back at Dorian with a look of shy wonder inhis rough, uncomely face. He had never seen anyone so marvellous.” Like the star of film or popularmusic, Dorian draws heterosexuals into bisexual responses. Depressed, he wanders into CoventGarden: “A white-smocked carter offered him some cherries. He thanked him, and wondered why herefused to accept any money for them, and began to eat them listlessly.”28 The man makes a mutepagan offering to Dorian’s remarkable beauty, stirred by an emotion he could not explain.Dorian is attractive, in the original meaning of the word. He aligns the imagination of otherstoward himself by inborn magnetic power. Wilde told a fable to Richard Le Gallienne, ostensiblyabout the problem of free will, in which a magnet infiltrates the consciousness of a group of talkativesteel filings, who are mysteriously swept toward it. Wilde often speaks of the “attraction” ofpersonality. For example: “Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curiousattractiveness of others.” He means that the good are ruled by abstract systems, ethical and social,while the not-good are ruled by personality alone, their “intensification of personality,” as he puts itelsewhere, generating a seductive glamour.29 This is clear in the original script of The Importance ofBeing Earnest:Miss Prism. I highly disapprove of Mr. Ernest Worthing. He is a thoroughly bad young man.Cecily. I fear he must be. It is the only explanation I can find of his strange attractiveness.30Elsewhere Wilde remarks: “All charming people are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.”31They are spoiled because their altar is heaped with spoils, the gifts of the multitude. Divine charismaseparates the hierarch from communality by a zone of privilege. Lord Henry says of Dorian: “I neverinterfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expressionthat personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.” The narcissistic personality, like the psychotic,lives by its own laws. As Basil murmurs uneasily, “Dorian’s whims are laws to everybody, excepthimself.”32The Picture of Dorian Gray departs from its Greek sources in this perilous pattern of LateRomantic fascination. Submission to the beautiful personality leads to degradation and death. InPlato’s and Shelley’s hierarchic relationships, there is no sadomasochistic pleasure in suffering. Onthe contrary, the imagination is exalted, perfecting and purifying itself in Apollonian contemplation.Remember the speed with which Shelley dumped Emilia Viviani when she no longer served hisartistic purposes. In Decadent Late Romanticism, however, eroticism is terminally obsessive. Basil,admitting to Dorian, “I worshipped you too much,” is slain before his masterpiece, the symbol of hisDecadent enslavement.33Dorian Gray is also Late Romantic in having a male rather than femalefascinator. Since the beautiful boy is anti-chthonian and since aestheticism is predicated on a swervefrom nature, the female impinges only weakly on the emotional world of Wilde’s novel. No goddessloves this Adonis. Sibyl Vane is a sentimental, ill-drawn caricature. My principle of psychoiconicism:feminine Sibyl and her mother, like Christabel’s Sir Leoline, lose their fictive energy to the dominantandrogyne. Wilde’s writing, like Pater’s, has but one cruel chthonian woman, Salomé. Dorian Gray isgoverned by triumvir. The three male leads tolerate the feminine only as a component of their ownhermaphroditism.One frequently encounters the misperception that Dorian Gray was modelled on Wilde’s lover, theboyishly handsome Lord Alfred Douglas. But Wilde did not meet Douglas until after The Picture ofDorian Gray was published. Dorian was conceived a priori. He is the beautiful boy of antiquity givencomplex modern form. Wilde writes to Douglas of “the soul of the artist who found his ideal in you,of the lover of beauty to whom you appeared as being flawless and perfect.”34 Therefore Wilde’s firstencounter with Douglas after the release of Dorian Gray was a Platonic fulfillment, exactly likeShelley’s with Emilia Viviani, stunning incarnation of the Hermaphrodite of his just-completed Witchof Atlas. But Shelley wrote a greater poem afterward, Epipsychidion, for there were no sexualrelations between himself and his self-foretold hermaphrodite deity. Wilde, forgetting the abstinenceof Socrates with Alcibiades, made the fatal error of copulating with his representational ideal. Byron’scrazed Manfred leaps into the same demeaning literalization. In Dorian Gray, Wilde correctlyportrays the beautiful boy as a destroyer. Douglas drew Wilde into Late Romantic infatuation andfascination, disordering his mature judgment and ending his career at the height of his fame andartistic power. Wilde later wrote to him, “The basis of character is will-power, and my will-powerbecame absolutely subject to yours.”35 Douglas childishly goaded Wilde to file an ill-advised lawsuitfor libel against his father, the Marquess of Queensberry, first of a rapid series of events leading toWilde’s conviction and imprisonment for homosexuality, from which he never recovered. He diedprematurely three years later, at forty-six. Wilde was already guilty of a sensual materialization ofPaterian doctrine in Lord Henry’s swerve from contemplative to active. His affair with Douglas wasthe gravest of his materializations, for which he was forced to undergo in painful, public reality thatapocalypse prophesied for half a century by Late Romantic catastrophe theory. Wilde’s fall in 1895ended aestheticism and Decadence.The beautiful boy is never deeply moved by the disasters he brings on his admirers, since he isscarcely aware of anything outside himself. His ruthlessness is an Apollonian apatheia, Stoicemotionlessness. In a long, bitter letter to Douglas from prison, later expurgated and synopsized as DeProfundis, Wilde dismisses as preposterous the charge that he was a bad influence on animpressionable youth. He asks: “What was there, as a mere matter of fact, in you that I couldinfluence? Your brain? It was undeveloped. Your imagination? It was dead. Your heart? It was not yetborn.”36 Why, it might be asked, was Wilde ever drawn to so contemptible a man? The true aesthete isalways a lover of narcissistic beauty. Wilde’s list of Douglas’ defects is neither strident nor rhetorical.It is absolutely consistent with the long western history of the beautiful boy, who is a thing, an objetd’art. Wilde, seething in prison, has simply switched perspective on the same unchanging fact.After Basil’s confession of adoration, Dorian Gray drifts into thought, wondering “if he himselfwould ever be so dominated by the personality of a friend”: “Would there ever be someone who wouldfill him with a strange idolatry?” As the oblivious beautiful boy, he can fall in love with no one—except himself. What fills him with “a strange idolatry” is his own mirror-image. Dorian falls intoerotic subordination to Basil’s painting. Seeing it finished, he declares, “I am in love with it.” Theautoeroticism is blatant: he later kisses the “painted lips,” like Narcissus “almost enamoured of it.” Asthe painting degenerates, “He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty.”37 The picture ofDorian Gray is the fetish of a Romantic cult of self-love.Magic pictures are a traditional romance motif. In Poe’s The Oval Portrait, an artist’s paint drainsthe vitality of his bride, who dies the instant her portrait is completed. But never is there the fanaticalintensity of connection Dorian has with his portrait. High Romantic harmony of man and nature hasbecome Late Romantic enslavement of man by art work. The picture of Dorian Gray resembles SnowWhite’s magic mirror, which the witch-queen, like Dorian, constantly consults. Dorian in fact calls thepainting “the most magical of mirrors.” But Snow White’s mirror has a personality quite distinct fromthat of its owner, to whom it makes bold and unpleasing remarks. There is a “horrible sympathy”between Dorian and his portrait, “atom calling to atom in secret love of strange affinity.”38 Man andpainting are bound by Dorian’s self-divinizing autoeroticism. The phrase “secret love” is from Blake’s“Sick Rose,” whose hermaphrodite convolutions Dorian enacts: he stands with a mirror before hispainting in the locked room, looking from one face to the other in solitary self-absorption. The threesequestered Dorians recall the triple females of Blake’s Crystal Cabinet, complacently self-propagating. The tableau also recalls the dialogue of Byron’s effeminate Sardanapalus with his mirror.Elsewhere, Wilde says, “To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.”39 In his secretpagan cult, Dorian is god, priest, and devotee, worshipping at his own graven image.The iconicism of the art work is far more developed in Wilde than in Poe. The picture of DorianGray is an idol, heavy with mana. Relieved at its departure from his studio, Basil remembers “theintolerable fascination of its presence.” The painting is a sinister vampire-object, invading theconsciousness of its human servants. Basil’s premonition that Dorian’s personality will vampirically“absorb” him is redramatized in Dorian’s relation to his portrait. The picture absorbs Dorian’s mentalenergy to the point of obsession. He cannot stop thinking about it. It interferes even in his pleasures: athis country house, “he would suddenly leave his guests and rush back to town to see that the door hadnot been tampered with, and that the picture was still there.”40 The portrait literally captivates Dorian,controlling him by a magnetism mimicking his glamourous magnetism over others. Like a jealousparent or lover, it summons him back from the outside world to its airless cell. And Dorian is nevertranquil except when there. Between him and his portrait is a ghostly umbilical link, like theincestuous bond between Romantic twins.Late in the novel, Dorian complains, “My own personality has become a burden to me.” He has sointensified his personality in the Wildean manner that he has animated his mirror-image. Now hisdouble, drunk with power, tries to usurp the identity of its human original. The painting feeds onDorian, until in desperation he murders Basil, a propitiatory blood-sacrifice before an objet de culte,from whose bondage he fights to be free. But the painting will be satisfied with no other victim butDorian. The finale is one of the uncanniest moments in literature. Killing Dorian, the paintingachieves its ultimate vampirism, triumphantly regaining “all the wonder of [its] exquisite youth andbeauty.”41 The painting finds the elixir of eternal youth by shedding Dorian’s blood.A peculiar mystical act occurs. Dorian stabs the painting but is found with a knife in his heart. Onerecalls Balzac’s Sarrasine, who attacks a living art work only to be slain himself; or Balzac’smarquise, who succeeds in her knife assault upon the sequestered precious object because she is afemale androgyne of chthonian force. Or Poe’s William Wilson, who traps his antagonist in a smallroom and skewers him, only to find he has murdered his “mirror” likeness and therefore his moralself. How does Dorian’s knife end up in his own heart? We do not ordinarily ask naturalistic questionsof magical fictions. Dorian’s death is simultaneous with the blow he strikes. But if we were to expandthat point of time into a cinematic sequence—and Wilde’s novel encourages the deformation of timeby imagination—I think we would see the portrait standing like a cruel, laughing god, plucking theknife from its body like an arrow caught in midflight, and hurling it back into the heart of its impiousassailant. The Picture of Dorian Gray ends in a spectacle of perverse animism.Many admirers have felt Dorian Gray’s punitive finale uncharacteristic of Wilde and an evasion ofthe decadence of the whole. In a letter to the editor defending the book against scandalized reviewers,Wilde says, “Dorian Gray, having led a life of mere sensation and pleasure, tries to kill conscience,and at that moment kills himself.” His qualification that this moral is “an artistic error” exempts usfrom taking him seriously on the question of conscience. But if he believed what he said, the man whowrote that letter did not understand what he had written in Dorian Gray. No great work of Romanticimagination has anything to do with conscience. Dorian Gray is a web of Romantic fascination, aforce field of Apollonian and daemonic charisma, heir to Christabel in its dark vision of sex andpower. We need no moral axioms to interpret it. Dorian commits certain forbidden acts and ispunished for them. But he operates under ritual rather than ethical proscriptions. The Bible, forexample, begins the human story by granting access to all trees of Eden but one. The mystery ofdivine law appears throughout the world in arbitrary rituals of prohibition or avoidance. By hishubristic defiance of time, Dorian wanders into an infrahuman realm where he is at the mercy ofpitiless daemonic agents. He is devoted to his portrait: I use the word as in classical Latin, where“devotus” means bewitched, enchanted, cursed, consecrated, dedicated to divine service, and markedfor slaughter. Dorian Gray is about not morality but taboo. The ending shows not the victory ofconscience but the destruction of person by art work. Dorian says: “There is something fatal about aportrait. It has a life of its own.”42 The painting, like all hierarchs, makes its own laws andsubordinates reality to its will. Pater speaks of “the fatality which seems to haunt any signal beauty,whether moral or physical, as if it were in itself something illicit and isolating.”43Dorian Gray isabout the amorality of beauty and the fascism of the western objet d’art. It is about the magic of art inthe magic of person.Dorian Gray is like the ritual scapegoat of Aztec festival. Frazer says a young man, chosen for “hispersonal beauty,” served as the double of the god Tezcatlipoca. For a year, the youth was “apparelledin gorgeous attire” and “trained to comport himself like a gentleman of the first quality, to speakcorrectly and elegantly, to play the flute, to smoke cigars and to snuff at flowers with a dandified air.”When he walked through the city, people flocked to see and honor him. At the end of his time, “thisbejewelled exquisite” was butchered on the temple steps, his breast sliced open and his heart tornout.44 Dorian Gray, in “the wanton luxury and gorgeous splendour of his mode of life,” is also adandy, a connoisseur, a man of leisure smoking Lord Henry’s cigarettes, a charismatic beautyattracting attention and veneration in the streets.45 Like the Aztec scapegoat, he is privileged butdoomed, destined for execution at the feet of an idol, his heart pierced by a knife. The painting is hisdivine double, the god who allows him to live like a prince but, thirsting for blood, demands hissacrifice.Another anthropological parallel: the picture of Dorian Gray is like Meleager’s brand in that aman’s life term resides in an enchanted object. I examined Swinburne’s play on this subject. InWilde’s version, there is no longer a nature-identified female custodian of the precious relic, since thenovel’s women are few and puny. The ancient Meleager legend belongs to a complex of primitivebeliefs about the soul. Frazer says the savage thinks of life as “a concrete material thing of a definitebulk, capable of being seen and handled, kept in a box or jar, and liable to be bruised, fractured, orsmashed in pieces.” This entity can be removed from a man’s body yet “still continue to animate himby virtue of a sort of sympathy or action at a distance.” If it is destroyed, he dies. Totemistic culturesbelieve in “the possibility of permanently depositing the soul in some external object—animal, plant,or what not—, ... just as people deposit their money with a banker rather than carry it on theirpersons.”46 In Dorian Gray, Romanticism’s tidal dynamic of regression makes art revert toprimitivism. Aestheticism concretizes the invisible world, allowing Dorian to deposit his soul in anexternal object, which affects him, in Frazer’s words, by “sympathy or action at a distance.” WhenDorian tries to destroy it, he dies. In Dorian Gray, a malevolent totem lures a sophisticate into an actof savagery, Basil’s grisly murder. The novel supports my definition of decadence as sophisticationwithout humaneness or humanism.Wilde’s assumptions are normally Apollonian. In The Critic as Artist he says: “Form is everything.It is the secret of life.... Start with the worship of form, and there is no secret in art that will not berevealed to you.”47 Praising Pre-Raphaelite painting, he condemns Impressionism as “mud andblur.”48 He follows Blake in preferring the clarity of the Apollonian incised edge. Even in Monet’sstudies of flickering light, western painting is Apollonian in its stasis, fixity, and sharp outer borders.What is odd about the picture of Dorian Gray is that it is in Dionysian metamorphosis. The changingpainting insults beauty and form: Dorian calls it “the misshapen shadow,” “the hideous painted thing,”“this monstrous soul-life.” Nature and art war for supremacy in it. Painting is invaded by a daemonicform-altering power, because Wilde has tried to make nature surrender her authority. He opens TheDecay of Lying: “The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us isNature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinishedcondition.”49 Wilde has gotten this from Baudelaire via Huysmans. But in assigning a superior valueto art, Baudelaire never disguises nature’s violent power. And Huysmans’ dreaming hero is terrifiedby primeval nature’s choking abundance. In Wilde, however, nature lacks archetypal force. His fewnature descriptions are pretty and minor. In Dorian Gray, nature, denied entry, seeps into the portrait-double and corrodes it from inside out: “It was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horrorhad come. Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating thething away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful.”50 Internality, liquidity,chthonian murk. Apollonian painting is dissolving and putrefying in Dionysian fluidity.The locked attic room, Dorian’s bower of art, recalls the tower where the incestuous doubles meetin Byron and the turret where the maiden poses for her artist-husband in Poe. The room is also amausoleum, for it is the dusty playroom of Dorian’s boyhood, preserved like Miss Havisham’s bridalhall in Dickens. Hence Dorian’s portrait is like the ka or double of the deceased in Egyptian tombs,heaped with toys and furniture. The horrified discoverers breaking into the chamber are likearchaeologists finding the king’s mummy thrown on the floor by grave robbers. Becoming a corpse,Dorian reaches his ultimate objectification. As the novel opens, the painting is still incomplete. Basilfinishes it as Dorian begins to change, contaminated by Lord Henry. After Sibyl’s maltreatment, thepainting never stops changing until the end. Dorian has assumed Basil’s role as his own portraitist,working on the painting by telekinesis. The painting finally achieves permanent form only with thedeath of its model, whose beauty it reclaims for itself. Hence Dorian Gray is like Woolf’s To theLighthouse, which I suspect it influenced, in the way that a painting and a novel are coterminous,developing in tandem, with the last brush strokes applied to the canvas in the last paragraphs.As a self-portraitist, Dorian is a Neronian life-artist, making perverse autobiography out of thesufferings of others. The first maxim of Wilde’s preface to Dorian Gray, imitating Gautier’spolemical preface, is, “The artist is the creator of beautiful things.” But Dorian, who makes life into awork of art, is a creator of ugly things: his hideous self-portrait and then Basil’s corpse, a “thing” witha “grotesque misshapen shadow,” a “humped back, and long fantastic arms.” In artistic style, Dorian isprophetically Expressionist. The brutality of Basil’s murder is in deliberate contrast to Dorian’sexquisite connoisseurship. It is as if Dorian is overcome by a paroxysm of daemonic force, eruptinginto the Apollonian world of perfect form. We saw a similar effect in Euripides’ Medea, whereprincess and king sink beneath a tarry wave of fire. The morning after the murder, Dorian mustreconstruct his Apollonian persona by Paterian rituals of discrimination. He dresses “with even morethan his usual care, giving a good deal of attention to the choice of his necktie and scarf-pin, andchanging his rings more than once.” Selecting Gautier’s Enamels and Cameos, he admires the bindingof “citron-green leather, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted pomegranates.”51 Returned fromhis descent to Hades, the barbaric chthonian realm, Dorian restores himself to normality by focusingon the Apollonian separateness of objects in the aesthete’s visible world, numbering them bycognitive palpation.Wilde constantly talks about “Art,” but his actual commentary on the visual arts is sparse and inert.I think that, as a primarily verbal intelligence, he had little feeling for painting. Whistler made sometart remarks about Wilde’s trespass into his territory. Wilde’s stage directions to An Ideal Husbandare full of allusions to art, comparing the characters to paintings by Van Dyck, Watteau, Lawrence.There is a chatty superficiality or name-dropping: “Watteau would have loved to paint them.”52Paintings are being seen vaguely and generically. But Wilde’s only novel is a supreme artifact ofaestheticism, taking a painting for theme. The most potent art work in all literature belongs to the ageof photography, which allowed painting to shift toward the strange and irrational. It is to Wilde’scredit that he sensed and exploited this. The objet d’art resumes its archaic religious function. Wilde,without real knowledge of the visual arts, creates a great book about a painting because of his dualityof vision: he is Apollonian in his worship of form but Romantic in his instinct for the daemonic.Together, these principles produce the despotic art work of Dorian Gray. Nature and art, in their ritualcombat in the painting, duel to a draw and separate, leaving the marred beautiful boy as their LateRomantic victim.

[marcythewerewolf]

Haline: Aarne-Thompson 870

A new project I’ve been working on is the Rare Fairytales. (I’m a sucker for mythical archetypes but the ones in the lovely CJ art are just a little too standard for my inner medievalist.) They’ll be labeled by either Aarne-Thompson number, or ballad categorization, so see if you can guess the story before you look it up! 

Once there was a princess, condemned to a terrible fate….

There are eyes everywhere, and every eye is on her.

The worst eyes are Not-Sebastian’s, dark and cold. She wants to fly at him, strike him, try to throttle him. But that didn’t work last time, so she restrains herself and flees back to her room with the books from the library.

Preparations are going more quickly now. Her imprisonment will be a gilded cage. The librarians allowed her to take five whole books, each a masterpiece of fine calligraphy and scribework.

There is a knock on her door, and then her mother’s voice. “Ah-Lien? May we come in?”

“Yes,” she replies, because she is a princess and it is wrong to refuse your queen (and presumably king). Besides, she doesn’t resent them, truly. They did the best with the situation she gave them.

The law would have allowed them to put her to death. Attempted murder of a relative is not a light matter. Her house arrest, in a perfectly nice border tower with plenty of food and apparently one whole servant, is a kindness.

Her mother and father enter. There is a maid with them, head covered in a dowdy cap, hands pale against a grey apron.

“Aline,” her father says, his voice soft with worry, “I am sorry.”

“It was not your fault,” she protests. “Just promise me you won’t be alone with him.”

Her mother’s lips thin. “Aline, he’s your cousin.”

It’s a fell magic he’s cast on the palace, this demon who wears her cousins skin. Even her sensible family cannot see the truth.

“Besides,” he father says, coming to sit with her on her bed, “We brought someone her to see you. This maidservant has volunteered to help you through your exile.”

The bowed head raises, and under the dull kerchief Aline sees familiar glimmering eyes, a face full of upturned swoops and sharp planes. Suddenly, all thought of the demon in the palace is gone. Her parents can manage, surely. After all, they have managed to bring her an angel.

Helen, her Helen, looks so different out of her woodland garb that she’s almost unrecognizable. Almost, but not quite.

“We’ll leave you two alone to get acquainted.” Jia says, reminding Aline that there are ears everywhere and eyes always watching.

Helen, fair as a winter’s dawn, curtseys. She does not quite have the hang of it, fey creature that she is.

“Princess,” the laughter in her voice is barely disguised.

Aline thinks that seven years may not be so torturous after all.

In the tower they are alone.

It is horrible and yet freeing. Aline was raised in a great court, surrounded by attendants and petitioners. Privacy is a luxury she is unused to and loneliness takes some adjustment.

Helen is her solace and her comfort. Helen’s is the only voice she hears.

“I would have come for you no matter what,” Helen whispers one night, a few weeks after they are locked away. “If your parents turned me away I would have fought my way to your window. I would have scaled the walls. I would have turned myself into a mouse and slipped through cracks in the masonry, I would have become a wisp of smoke and come down the chimney.”

“Does that mean you could get us out?” Aline half-jokes, and Helen considers it with some seriousness.

“No. I would have needed my mother’s help for all of those things, and she is not here. We’ll have to wait.”

“Seven years is a long time.”

Helen shrugs. “To a mortal, perhaps.”

There is a garden on the high rooftop. They are just far enough above the ground that it would be foolish to jump, but close enough that the climbing ivy vines still stretch to their window. Helen sings to them every night, trying to coax them to grow strong enough to bear the weight of a fully grown woman.

“I’ve never been much good at anything but warding magic,” she admits sheepishly as the ivy withers that first winter. “Useless to us now, isn’t it?”

“If we ever want to barricade ourselves in this fortress, you’ll be our first line of defense,” Aline jokes, and slings her arm through hers.

As the days grow cold and long, they huddle in the basement, where natural springs heat the foundations. Aline kisses Helen’s face, memorizes every freckle, and breathes hot air into her perfect mouth. Helen’s hands are always cold, but somehow she doesn’t mind when they burrow under her clothes.

The system is perfectly set up for complete isolation. Supplies come every three months- two in the cold half of the year. Aside from that they are alone. This is where her kingdom sends inconvenient heirs to die.

“They mean me to go mad,” Aline mutters. “Well, they think I’m already mad, but they want me to go madder. Then he’ll have won, the monster.”

“Stay sane, darling,” Helen whispers, mouth close to her ear, “Stay with me. Inherit, banish him to the furthest corners of the earth.”

It would have been so much better if she didn’t try to strangle the monster wearing her cousin’s face, but it’s useless to refight old battles when the new one is not yet won.

Two years pass. They learn their books by heart, and then make up their own. Helen tells every story of Faerie she can remember (they are a culture of songs) and then more, stories where beautiful princesses and daughters of the forest triumph over evil and save the day. They sleep for weeks, tangled in each others arms, until Aline is almost certain their dreams are one. 

It sounds mad, but then again she is dating an elf-child.

It takes them a month to realize the supplies are late, and then another month to decide that help truly isn’t coming. By then it is late autumn and the last of their garden is running out. They have some late beans, dry bread, salted meat, and little else.

“What did you say,” Aline whispers, “About becoming a mouse?”

It’s not magic that gets them out in the end, it’s a bedsheet and hope. They clamber down, one after the other, on fine linen that threatens to rip at any minute.

Helen carries their supplies in a makeshift satchel on her back. In her hand is a dull dinner knife. Aline makes sure to grab the books. Such things are valuable. The librarian back home will want them back.

They walk home on back roads only elfkind know. It’s quiet. Aline sees her first new trees in two and a half years.

“We should see your city when we exit the woods here,” Helen tells her, after hours of adoring silence. But as they leave the treeline, the only thing on the horizon is ruin.

Her home is gone, her father and mother’s hall razed. The librarian monk is slaughtered in his library, the ashes of precious books all around him.

The monster, Aline thinks, and then, I should have torn his throat out when I had a chance.

“My mother is strange,” Helen warns as they come closer to the land of her people. “She does not necessarily approve of you either.”

Aline does not answer.

“I think we’ll have to go about this in a clever way,” Helen continues. “They all respect guile. There is an artistry to being a trickster-”

“It doesn’t matter,” Aline hisses, and pulls away. “My family is dead.”

Helen kneels and clasps her hands. “My love, I know. You are grieving. Let me take the weight off your shoulders. Let me be your family, let me wrap you in safety.”

Again, Aline pulls away. “No. Go back to your woods and your magic. Without you, I would have fought for my parents. I would have gone back eventually. I could have faced that demon and at the very least I could have died with them.”

“Darling, my light, my shining star,” Helen’s lovely face is torn with sorrow, fragile as gold leaf, able to be broken with a touch.

“Go home,” Aline insists, the third time, because three is enough to compel anyone of faerie blood. “You took two years and my parents from me, isn’t that enough?”

Sobbing, Helen leaves.

It isn’t until that night, as Aline sits on the empty plain in front of her burnt out home, alone for the first time in years, that she realizes what a mistake she’s made. By then she can’t find Helen anywhere.

It takes her three months to track down the entrance to Fairyland. But she is canny and unafraid, no longer a princess but an adventurer with only one goal in mind.

The fair folk do not often admit mortals into their court, but Aline begs and pleads and shows off all the wonderful things she learned how to cook for Helen during their imprisonment (faerie palates being quite delicate and hard to cater to) and she’s eventually given a job as a mid-ranking chef in the court of the Faerie Queene.

The work is hard, but gratifying. She is surrounded by people, both of the normal, person kind, and of other inclinations entirely. There are spirits of air and fire, shapeshifters, lovely gentry, and lowly brownies. It’s overwhelming to hear voices other than Helen’s and to know that someone might tap her on the shoulder when she’s already in the middle of a conversation but she adjusts. Besides, others in the Queen’s company have far stranger habits than a bit of jumpiness.

It takes time to hear word of Helen. A young half-faerie girl, even the daughter of a fairly high ranking lady, is not often the subject of gossip when there are gods and monsters to talk about.

When she does hear word it is heartbreaking.

“They say Nerissa’s daughter is to marry,” a woodland nymph stage whispers, as she stands too close to the great hearth. The flowers in her tail start to blacken and sizzle. Aline absentmindedly instructs someone to start preparing the fire protocol. “Some princess from far away.”

Aline slices root vegetables with the fury of a vengeful god.

“Who?”

“No one knows. She comes from far away, and they say no one even knows her face. You know the Wild Fae. Belphoebe, they call her. She is a huntress of great skill.”

The turnips go into the pot and Aline begins to come up with a plan so reckless it can only be defined as self-destructive.

The Lords and Ladies take engagements seriously. But if Helen is to be believed, they also have a soft spot for tricksters in their hearts.

“I am the Lady Belphoebe, come to your court of pomp and plenty,” Aline growls from behind her mask. The alliteration is a good touch. The fair folk loved alliteration. “Come to fetch my bride.”

Much to her surprise, she is let in.

It is two weeks before the wedding is set to take place, but Aline blusters her way through with excuses about the flow of time in the wilds of Fairyland, and that seems to satisfy the courtiers.

“We can speed up preparations,” one says, “I’ll speak to Lady Nerissa at once. In the meantime, Your Swiftness, may I take you to your room?”

It’s a well appointed space, far better than a cook’s room. It does not remind Aline of her room at home, which was full of soft brocade and heavy embroidered tapestries. This is more airy, more bright, the colors more saturated.

Everything screams with life in this land, even things that should not be living. Sometimes it seems even the walls move.

She waits for hours, not daring to change a thing about her disguise.

Eventually a servant comes to take her to Lady Nerissa, Helen’s mysterious mother who Aline has only heard stories of. She is a sorceress of great power, apparently, and she mourns a love lost long ago.

The receiving room looks like the inside of a clam shell, pearlescent and rounded. In a driftwood chair sits a fair woman who can only be Nerissa. On pillows next to her are three young people, one a boy who looks so much like Helen that Aline nearly stops in her tracks, the other two a faerie boy and human girl.

“Belphoebe,” Nerissa sighs, “At last, someone to fix my daughter’s broken heart. She is much in need of love, and you are known for your devotion. Come, the wedding is set up in the great hall.”

“Already?” Aline blurts. Her mind is still recovering from the comment about Helen’s broken heart (how dare she hurt such a wonderful person so).

Nerissa looks puzzled. “But of course.”

There is nothing to do but follow her through the winding halls. Suddenly Aline’s heavy velvet cloak feels cheap. She has not brought engagement gifts or tokens of faith. She is not a princess anymore, what can she possibly give Helen?

When they reach the great hall all is quiet. Unfortunately it is the hush of many people being reverentially still. The place is packed.

At the very end of the long room stands Helen, resplendent in gold and ivory. She’s biting her lip nervously. The gnawing only increases when she sees Aline.

Oh, my love, I’m sorry, Aline thinks, but Nerissa’s hand is on the small of her back, guiding her forward.

The ceremony is quick. They both stumble over the words as they exchange rings wrought of gold.

There is a feast afterwards. They don’t look at each other.

Then they are pushed together into their new room and told to get to know one another and Aline’s nerve breaks. She knows this part of the castle, has delivered meals here once or twice. She knows how to escape.

“I’m- I’m sorry,” she says. “I just wanted to see you again. I didn’t mean for it to end up like this.”

Helen’s eyes widen. “What do you mean? Who-”

Aline makes a run for the servants door.

In the twisting back hallways, she escapes. She sheds her cape and mask and hunting boots, the accoutrements of a fine lady. She makes for the kitchens, but can’t bring herself to face anyone quite yet. Instead she finds a little alcove- one of many in this mazelike place- and sobs.

The ring is heavy and gold on her finger. Part of her wants to take it off and throw it at the wall but the other part can’t help but remember the warmth of Helen’s hands as she slid it on.

There are footsteps nearby.

“My love?” comes Helen’s voice, and then she’s bearing down on Aline and Aline can’t help but fling herself into her arms. “You came back for me,” Helen whispers. “You wanted me back?”

“Always.”

For a while they rock back and forth in each other’s arms.

“How are we going to deal with your real fiance?”

“We’ll figure it out. Then we’ll kill whatever monster hurt your parents and win your kingdom back and live happily ever after.”

Aline hums. “You make a good argument. How did you even find me? It’s a labyrinth back here.”

The known weight of Helen’s chin settles on her shoulder. “I saw a glow,” she says as if that explains it. The Land Under Hill truly is strange.

“I don’t want to go back to the tower, but I want you back.” Aline mumbles, feeling compelled to speak.

Helen pulls away but doesn’t let go of her hands. “Let’s go back to our room. It’s not the tower, but it’ll do.”

Once there was a princess, condemned to a terrible fate, rescued by a princess of the elves. In her pride and anger she rejected this help, but quickly regretted her swift judgement. She devised a plan to win the elven princess back. In time they lived happily ever after.

(“You know, mother, you could have just told them about one another,” Mark commented, turning a letter opener in his hands. “The fake engagement was a bit excessive. And I think it traumatized Helen a little.”

Nerissa smiled, “It’s much more romantic this way, dear one. Besides, Belphoebe owed me a favor and I wanted to cash in before the next century.”)

#heline #haline #helen blackthorn #aline penhallow #the shadowhunters chronicles #Nerissa #m writes #fanfiction #maid maleen is gay and shannon hale was too cowardly to go all the way