Art vs. Life
in The Picture of Dorian Gray
The distinction between art and life seems a simple, unquestionable one: art is imagined and created, and life is the actual process of living and experiencing. Life is real, and art, somehow, is not. Yet art possesses its own Realism, and life can also be perceived from an aesthetic point of view. The boundary between art and life seems to remain firmly in place despite this, but there are still questions. What qualifies as true art? What does ‘reality’ truly consist of, and just how can one discern what is real? If defining what is meant by the terms ‘art’ and ‘life’ is difficult in itself, determining the precise relationship between the two is even more so. From this simple binary opposition, where art is compared with life, several other relevant oppositions can be extrapolated, of which the separation between reality and illusion is merely one example. Further examples might be suggested, including those between appearance and substance, created and creator, surface and symbol, culture and nature, physicality and spirituality, body and soul, the representation and the thing represented.
While considering Victorian understandings purely through dualities such as these is admittedly a simplistic approach, it is nevertheless one which reveals several important details. As might be expected, Oscar Wilde’s own theories on the subject of art, though far from consistent and often confusing, are central to the understanding of Victorian perspectives through The Picture of Dorian Gray. In the preface to the book itself Wilde lists several observations about art and what he views as its purposes. “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim” (21), “All art is at once surface and symbol,” and “ It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors” (22). Each of these comments holds deeper implications when held up to the content within The Picture of Dorian Gray and also to other examples of Victorian fiction. Wilde further comments, “The nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth-century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.” (21). This last pair of observations is particularly relevant, especially considering the following comments from Wilde on how life and art are related.
Realism, Wilde seems to believe, is a futile aspiration in art. “Art never expresses anything but itself,” Wilde states in “The Decay of Lying” (48). In light of the obvious fact that art seems to express many things, Wilde’s new aesthetic doctrine seems contradictory. However, while an artist may use art for the expression of his feelings, opinions, or anything else, the truest form of art, in Wilde’s opinion, exists for no other purpose: it simply exists. Art cannot express anything but itself because fundamentally art is nothing more than the expression of the artist. In “Oscar Wild: the resurgence of lying,” Declan Kiberd summarizes, “The energy of life, said Wilde, is the desire for expression; and art invaluably presents the forms through which expression is attained” (285). Expression, here, connects art and life in a curious way; the two things seem to share a common purpose, but nevertheless exist on two different levels.
In another statement from “The Decay of Lying,” Wilde observes, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life” (48). What is meant generally by the word ‘life’ might be any number of things. One definition might be found in the words of Walter Pater, when he writes, in The Renaissance, about the “flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action” (249). Whatever is inferred by the term, real life is a more complex, far less controllable dimension than the one in which art is created and admired. Kiberd explains Wilde’s paradox by saying, “Nature imitates art in the sense that things ‘are’ because we see them: fogs appear everywhere once someone has started to paint them, for the eye always sees what it was trained to see” (285). The relationship between art and life is complex, reaching out to touch many different areas of thought.
Several late nineteenth-century theories concerning the representation and perception of truth, and the relationship between the physical world of appearances and the spiritual world of ‘higher truth’, are reflected within Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The relationship between art and life in The Picture of Dorian Gray is ambiguous, and therefore it becomes hard to distinguish Wilde’s representation of one from his representation of the other. The two concepts ultimately blend together, in many respects reflecting more general concerns about art, its relationship to life, and life’s relationship to it. Of the many forms of art described in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray—from the operas Lord Henry attends with Dorian to the tapestries and textiles in Dorian’s collection—the most central to the novel is the visual medium of painting, for it is Basil Hallward’s portrait of Dorian which is the ever-present element, the crucial piece of Wilde’s fantastic plot whereon hangs every important implication. It is through Dorian’s portrait that the complex relationship between art and life, and that of life with art, is explored most intensely. Is the painting or the living Dorian the truer individual? Which, the painting or the man, or neither, houses his true soul? And if the distinctions between Dorian as art and Dorian as real, between subject and object, creator and created, artificiality and actuality, are ultimately dissolved, what are the implications?
Questioning the relationship between art and life involves questioning what is true and what isn’t. Oscar Wilde characterized art as a form of untruth when he said “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art” (48). In this view, art is not meant to be realistic, and should not attempt to be. Art, however realistic, can never be as real as life’s experiences are, and can therefore never be considered as true or as immediate. In contrast to Wilde’s equation of Art with lying, Michael Tanner writes in his introduction to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, “Art, at its greatest, tells the truth and makes it possible to bear it” (xxix). How can it be that both Truth and Lies can be seen within the world of Art? Wilde’s comment, recorded by Merlin Holland, that “A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true” (3), provides an explanation, of sorts. It seems that instead of symbolizing any profound, insightful truths, and instead of masking the ills of the world in preference of a beautiful and simple conception of life, art exists completely outside of all normal valuations of ‘true’ and ‘untrue,’ as well as those of ‘morality’ and ‘immorality,’ which concepts Wilde also mentions in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray.
It might be said that beauty, and truth, and many other qualities also, are thoroughly subjective—in the eye of the beholder, as they say. Flint speaks about the Victorian attitude toward the accurate portrayal and observation of life, saying, “This challenge to the adequacy of representation, to the sufficiency of the visible, was expressed in a range of ways by the Victorian…” (25). The Picture of Dorian Gray touches on the subject of truth, honesty, and perception in the comments of Lord Henry Wotton. He says, “Being natural is simply a pose” (26-27), and many other things to the effect that life is a string of imitations, and nothing whatsoever is truly genuine. Later in the novel, these ideas are emphasized when Dorian must paste over the fact that he has done murder by acting as if nothing has happened. “Perhaps,” writes Wilde, “one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part” (210). In these comments, what is at first glance ‘natural’ is revealed to be nothing but ‘a pose,’ a superficial layer of untruths and dishonesty. Any remaining demarcation between true reality and surface appearances is destroyed. Danson writes, “In Wildes’ terms, only the unique individual, or (to use his keyword) the ‘personality’, who is a creator and not a product, is fully human. You have to be artificial to be really yourself.”
If what is ‘human’ and real is only, at bottom, artificial, how much faith in that ‘reality’ is one expected to maintain? Flint states, “The Victorians were fascinated with the act of seeing, with the question of the reliability—or otherwise—of the human eye, and with the problems of interpreting what they saw” (1). In art as well as in life, questioning the validity of first appearances raises difficult questions about the nature of accepted reality. Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, observes the differences between what is true and what is merely appearance when he speaks of “The contrast between this authentic, natural truth and the lie of culture masquerading as the sole reality…”, and that “…art, with its metaphysical consolation, points to the eternal life of that core and the constant destruction of phenomena ...” (41). The perspective shown here, one in which culture is a lie and art somehow reveals the authenticity behind it, echoes what Flint writes about the revelation of truth, “…to reveal is not always to put on display that which is pleasant, but revelation is informed by a desire to lay bare the truth, whatever the cost to one’s peace of mind” (21).
Whether the truth is out there to be revealed or is impossibly buried under the lie of culture and society, is beside the point. The answers to these complex challenges to the nature of art and reality are less important than the questions themselves and the context in which they evolved. Flint comments on the Victorian exploration of perspective itself, saying:
“For [the Victorians], problematizing vision … involved acknowledging the individualism involved in perception, both the individualism of consciously evoked social knowledge and experience, and of factors of memory and association which belong to the increasingly investigated world of the unconscious…Visuality was crucial to Victorian debates about the place of the individual in the world.” (311)
Individual perspectives make up the general attitude of any given age, but the reverse seems also to be true: that the general attitude prevalent in society will determine a person’s individual perspective. Pater speaks of “…the impression[s] of the individual in his own isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world” (249), and this brings to mind Dorian’s lonely predicament. Dorian must keep his portrait, his soul, his ‘solitary prisoner,’ bearing all the weight of his sins, locked in an empty, unvisited room. It is his prisoner and his freedom—his life made into art, allowing him to act as he wishes. Flint summarizes Foucault’s influential idea that “…to make something visible is to gain not only just understanding of it, but control over it,” and goes on to explain that this moved the Victorians “towards exposure, towards bringing things to the surface, towards making things available to the eye and hence ready for interpretation” (7-8). That Dorian’s soul has become visible through the painting, and that even that visible form of conscience does him no good in his vague attempts to live righteously, are both ways in which The Picture of Dorian Gray turns Foucault’s notion on its head. By having his soul presented to him visually, Dorian gains nothing but instead comes to lose everything.
Joseph Bristow describes the life of Dorian Gray as being “Violently split between perfect beauty and sordid ugliness…” (214). It is Dorian’s physical self that is beautiful and unchanging, and his soul, in the form of the portrait, which grows ugly. This physical/spiritual duality is easily established, especially given Dorian’s own words to Basil Hallward, when he says, “I shall show you my soul. You shall see the thing that you fancy only God can see” (186), but does the distinction hold fast throughout the novel? After all, Dorian’s true inner self is not shut away in a painting but out in the world, glutting itself on experience. And after all, Dorian’s portrait reveals nothing more than an outward appearance—the grotesque surface of what Dorian’s own body would have become—and only hints at the blackness of Dorian’s invisible soul.
Equating the character of Dorian Gray with the representation and deeper meaning of art is the natural interpretation of Wilde’s novel. According to Flint, “Identity, rather than being regarded as something innate, pre-inscribed on the body, was increasingly recognized as something which could be deliberately constructed for others to read” (217). In Dorian’s case this is especially true. Lord Henry says to him “At present you are a perfect type…Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets” (255-256). Dorian, in effect, becomes nothing beyond his appearance. Although the reader may look in on his thoughts, and read about his emotions, these too become nothing more than superficial. Wilde writes of Dorian that “…to him Life was the first, the greatest, of the arts…” (160).
That life itself is a form of art echoes several times throughout The Picture of Dorian Gray, and yet Wilde seems hesitant to break down the barrier completely. He writes, “… now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art; was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, Life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting” (83). Life is presented as very much akin to artistic expression, but Wilde cannot deny that there is a difference between them which cannot be ignored. One of the most striking moments in the novel occurs when Dorian looks past the artifice of beauty and sensation. Wilde writes:
“Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of Art, the dreamy shadows of Song.” (222)
The ‘intense actuality of impression’ Wilde speaks of is one way of describing what it is that makes life more ‘real’ than art.
Nevertheless, Life’s reality does not keep it completely from being viewed in an aesthetic manner. Peter Ackroyd writes in the introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray, “In the conversations of Lord Henry Wotton and the behavior of Dorian Gray there is clearly a sense in which Wilde is continuing to celebrate the triumphs of a truly individual life and to suggest that in the perfection of personality, self-expression can be turned into an art” (14). This suggestion is expressed thoroughly in the character of Dorian Gray. He makes life his greatest art, creating and re-creating himself with every new sensation and experience. Similarly, Kiberd suggests, “Thus real life is not the one we lead so much as the one which we create in our imaginations” (284).
Art is tightly tied to a realization of life’s experiences, yet art’s self-sufficiency is argued to be one of its most significant characteristics. Clearly, although Wilde claims that artistic representation is and should be completely separate from outside concerns, art simply cannot stand alone, no matter how much one subscribes to the idea of ‘art for art’s sake.’ Life for art’s sake, however, and living in order to collect as many experiences as possible, be they ‘good,’ ‘moral,’ or otherwise, is a somewhat less controversial and at any rate a more acceptable idea. Wilde certainly believed in it.
WORKS CITED
Bristow, Joseph. “’A complex multiform creature’: Wilde’s sexual identities”, in Peter Raby, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1997, 195-218
Calloway, Stephen. “Wilde and the Dandyism of the Senses”, in Peter Raby, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. 1997, 34-53
Danson, Lawrence. “Wilde as critic and theorist”, in Peter Raby, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. 1997, 80-95
Flint, Kate. The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. 2000
McCormack, Jerusha. “Wilde’s fiction(s)”, in Peter Raby, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. 1997, 96-117
Nietzsche, Freidrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Shawn Whiteside translation. Michael Tanner, ed. England : Penguin Books. 1993
Raby, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. 1997
Wilde, Oscar. ‘The Decay of Lying,” The Nineteenth Century. January 1889
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London : Penguin Books. 1985
