Oscar Wilde - The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

T HE UNCENSORED PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

T HE UNCENSORED PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

OSCAR WILDE

EDITED BY

NICHOLAS FRANKEL

THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND 2012

Previously unpublished and copyright-protected material from the typescript of The Picture of Dorian Gray copyright 1962, 2000, 2011 by The Estate of Oscar Wilde

Additional content copyright 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Cover art: John Singer Sargent, Man Wearing Laurels, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Digital image 2009 Museum Associates / LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY.

Cover design: Annamarie McMahon Why

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wilde, Oscar, 18541900.

[Portrait of Dorian Gray]

The uncensored picture of Dorian Gray / Oscar Wilde ; edited by Nicholas Frankel.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-674-06631-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Appearance (Philosophy)Fiction. 2. Conduct of lifeFiction. I. Frankel, Nicholas, 1962 II. Title.

PR5819.A2F73 2012

823.8dc23 2012010044

For Susan

CONTENTS

Oscar Wildes typescript of his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, remained unpublished until 2011, when it appeared under the title The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition as part of Harvard University Presss annotated series of classic literary works. Like The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, this paperback edition is based on the typescript submitted by Wilde to Lippincotts Monthly Magazine in 1890, whereupon an alarmed J. M. Stoddart, the magazines editor, quickly determined the novel, at least in its present form, would offend the sensibilities of his readership. Especially troubling to Wildes editor were instances of graphic sexualespecially, homosexualcontent he found in the typescript. In consultation with his publishing associates, Stoddart struck words, phrases, and whole sentences from Wildes typescript. The introductory essays that follow explain the commercial, social, and legal imperatives that motivated changes to both Wildes typescript and the subsequent and expanded book edition of 1891, published by Ward, Lock, and Company. This edition restores all of the material excised by Stoddart and his colleagues.

Literary scholars often speak of publication as a process of collaboration between publishers and authors; however, the reality is often far different. The relations between Victorian journal editors and their authors presumed a sharp imbalance of power, especially where first-time novelists were involved. Thomas Hardy complained in 1890 that the patrons of literatureno longer Peers with a tasteacting under the censorship of prudery, rigorously exclude from the pages they regulate subjects that have been made... the bases of the finest imaginative compositions since literature rose to the dignity of an art. In the case of Wildes novel, the evidence that Stoddart censored it is plain from the sexual and political nature of his deletions, such as his removal of Basil Hallwards confession: There was love [for Dorian] in every line [of the portrait], and in every touch there was passion.

Further evidence can be found in Stoddarts panicked reaction upon receipt of Wildes typescript. Rest assured that it will not go into the Magazine unless it is proper that it shall, he told his employer, Craige Lippincott. In its present condition there are a number of things which an innocent woman would make an exception to. But I will go beyond this and make it acceptable to the most fastidious taste. Before committing himself to publication, Stoddart assigned Wildes typescript to no fewer than five publishing professionals for commentone of whom he later charged with picking out any objectionable passages. Wilde did not see these changes to his novel until after it appeared in print.

American literary critic Elaine Showalter has characterized the milieu in which Wilde lived and wrote as one of sexual anarchy. Stoddarts edits must be seen within the wider context of the sexual paranoia and legal threat apparent in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The circumstances under which Dorian Gray was published are a far cry from those faced by the majority of English-language authors either before or since. The 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act outlawing gross indecency between men, the establishment of the National Vigilance Association in 1885 (it successfully brought about a jail sentence for Henry Vizetelly, translator of Emile Zolas works, in 1889), and the Cleveland Street Scandal of 18891890 all served to bring about a heightened atmosphere of paranoia and intolerance, particularly where upper-class and well-educated English homosexuals were concerned. Indeed, Wilde was the chief victim of this climate of repressionas was plain from the jubilation that greeted his imprisonment for gross indecency in 1895. Whether he acknowledged it or not, Stoddarts hand was directed by the courts.

Literature is an inherently social product, but it isnt always commensurate with its public face or accepted manifestations, and the processes of publication arent always as seamlessly collaborative as literary scholars sometimes imagine. Are the sanitized texts of Osip Mandelstam presented by Soviet editors to be accepted on the grounds that they are collaborative products? Reclaiming works of literature from the censorship they were subject to, often for the duration of their authors lifetimes, is not a Romantic endeavor, but rather an effort to reveal the social antagonisms and broader political forces shaping their accepted social face.

The remains of Oscar Wilde lie in Pre Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. His sleek, modern tomb, designed by the British sculptor Jacob Epstein and commissioned by Wildes lover and executor, Robert Ross, is one of the most frequently visited and recognizable graves in a cemetery notable for the many famous writers, artists, and musicians buried there (Balzac, Chopin, Proust, Gertrude Stein, Jim Morrison). The surface of Epsteins massive monolith is covered with hundreds of lipstick kisses, some ancient and faded, others new and vibrant. (The madness of kissing is what Wilde said Lord Alfred Douglass red-roseleaf lips were made for.) Some observers decry the presence of these marks on Wildes tomb as a form of defacement or vandalism, rightly pointing out that the lipsticks high fat content does real and lasting damage to the monolith. But to the many men and women, gay and straight, who journey each year to the site, the kisses are a tribute to the famous playwright, novelist, and witsentenced in 1895 to two years in prison, with hard labor, after being convicted of gross indecencywhom they see as a martyr to Victorian sexual morality.

Five years before his death, Wilde went, almost overnight, from being one of Britains most colorful and celebrated figures to its most notorious sexual criminal. When he died from cerebral meningitis, in a seedy Parisian hotel room on November 30, 1900, at the age of forty-six, he had been living in exile in France for over three years, broken in spirit and body, bankrupt, and ostracized from respectable British society. In 1895, at the time of his arrest, he had been Britains leading playwright and wit, feted in Londons West End and intellectual circles, as well as in the country homes and London townhouses of Englands ruling class (much of it unaware that Wilde originated from Ireland, since, to use Wildes own words, my Irish accent was one of the many things I forgot at Oxford). Even before his fame as a playwright and novelist, he had been the principal spokesman for the cult of Aestheticism, or art for arts sake, which had swept much of England and America in the wake of Wildes stunning arrival on the cultural scene in 1881. His death in 1900, little more than three years after his release from Englands Reading prison (the Reading Gaol of his celebrated poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol), coincided with the end of a decade (the Yellow Nineties, the age of Dorian) more closely associated with him than with anyone else, as much for his large personality and life as for his considerable accomplishments as a writer and thinker.