Dorian Gray Falls From Grace:

Dorian Gray

Falls from Grace: Dorian Gray, the Victorian Dr. Faustus

In Christopher Marlowe's play "Dr. Faustus," the title character sells his soul to the devil out of a quest for knowledge. The title character begins the play a frustrated man despite his success in learning, because learning does not give him omnipotent power or eternal life: "we must die an everlasting death./What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera,/What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu!" (I.1). Oscar Wilde's Dorian Grey begins the Picture of Dorian Grey, in contrast to Dr. Faustus, innocent and contented with his lot, until a devilish, tempting Mephistopheles-like character, Lord Henry, causes him to contemplate his own mortality and the death of his youth: "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June'" (Chapter 2). Despite his beauty Dorian realizes he cannot transcend decay and death, just as despite his learning Faustus cannot transcend his mortality.

At first, Dorian's consciousness and awareness of the inevitable fate of every human being is untouched and pure, and he has no sense of his external beauty, only a sense of a joy of living: "All the candor of youth was there, as well as all youth's passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world" (Chapter 2) but Basil's creation of art in Dorian's image makes Dorian aware of the sitter's own beauty, and thus Dorian comes to regret the inevitability of beauty's passing -- and his own impending death. Knowledge in the form of academic learning causes Faustus' fall from grace, much like knowledge in the form of art and aesthetics causes Dorian's fall from grace. This why: "There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray'" says Lord Henry (Chapter 2).

In both Marlowe's and Wilde's tales of men overreaching the natural order, evil is primarily construed as transcending the natural, specifically of desiring eternal life, rather than bowing to the natural processes of change that are inherent in nature. God's law is synonymous with nature, and both Faustus and Dorian Gray go against nature and embrace artifice and art. Faustus desires to become a magician so he can become invisible and conjure spirits to do his bidding. Dorian Gray desires to be eternally youthful and innocent-looking and to remain looking young, even while he ages and treats others with cruelty. This desire for stasis and resisting change is seen in Dorian's treatment of the young actress Sybil Vane, whom he rejects after she loses her talent when she falls in love with a real man, and can no longer pretend that actors are 'real': "You are more to me than all art can ever be. What have I to do with the puppets of a play?'" she says, but Dorian only wants to marry Sybil if she is a great actress, just as she was when he first saw her (Chapter 7).

For Dorian, literally and metaphorically unchanging art is more real than the changes of real life. He prefers the original Sybil on stage rather than the real Sybil, and his painting becomes more real and true to his soul than his own face. The painter's creator Basil seems to intuitively recognize this as he says; "I shall stay with the real Dorian," after Dorian has his first meeting with Lord Henry (Chapter 2). Basil recognizes that Dorian has changed for the worse under Lord Henry's influence, but mistakes the unchanging painting, his creation, for the real and changing man. Marlowe's Faustus like Dorian takes the easier, immediate payment of worldly pleasure, success, youth on earth and power rather than the more difficult, but more 'real' payoff of eternal life in heaven when he deals with the devil and sells his soul. Faustus also famously falls in love with an image -- the face of Helen of Troy, for whom he finally rejects the possibility of repentance. "Her lips suck forth my soul," he says, literally and metaphorically, when the false image kisses him (IV). Faustus thinks if he does not age on earth and kisses an ageless woman that he will never die, but this proves to be a lie, told by the devil.

Helen is beautiful, but she is also a representation of the type of Classical learning esteemed by Faustus, and the honor he hoped to gain through learning -- honor that gave him neither satisfaction and led him to temptation. This love of classicism is echoed in Lord Henry's cry which Dorian wishes to embrace: "I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream -- I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal -- to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be'"(Chapter 2).

The seductiveness of both protagonists' ambitions for the reader, however, has provoked contradictory interpretations in the responses of critics and its more general audience. On one hand, both works seem to argue that obeying God's natural order and law regarding knowledge and morality is best. In short, do not seek to become a magician or seek to be young forever. But although Dorian Gray may read like an argument against art and artifice on one hand, it itself is a work of art. Furthermore, although "Dr. Faustus" argues against magic, the actors on the stage need to make use of 'magic' to portray the morality tale of the fall of the scholar from Wittenberg. This confuses the question of what is good or bad in both plays, especially since the 'good' characters like the old man who counsels Faustus to repent, or Basil and Sybil in Wilde's work, are the weakest characters. The moral authority of Basil and Sybil in Wilde's work is further undercut by the fact that both characters are in essence failed artists and failed people as a result. Basil refuses to display his portrait, and instead gives it to Dorian, because he cannot bear his intimate feelings being expressed to the world and he is murdered by his creation. Sybil loses her talent upon coming in contact with Dorian and commits suicide.

According to critic Nils Clausson of Papers on Language and Literature, Wilde's the Picture of Dorian Gray "has always provoked contradictory interpretations, but underlying the disagreements about the work's meaning there has persisted a more fundamental debate about what kind of novel it should be read as," as either a parable or as "an English imitation" the French Decadent novels that celebrate immorality (Clausson 2003, p.1) Those who read it as the latter saw it as "a poisonous book" while "Christian publications" at the time of Gray's publication "interpreted it as an ethical parable or moral fable," and praised it as 'a work of high moral import'...[this shows how] the judgment of early reviewers depended...on the genre in which they placed the novel" (Clausson 2003, p.1).

Clausson also comments on the book's similarity to Marlowe's play: "its structure as workman-like as Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, to which it bears an obvious family resemblance (Clausson 2003, p.1). Calling Marlowe's play workman-like seems to undercut the equally fragmented and ambiguous moral tone of "Dr. Faustus." But saying that the novel merges the genres of "self-development" and "Gothic degeneration" seems apt (Clausson 2003, p.2). Ultimately Dorian's journey is not of self-discovery, but self-annihilation of his earlier, purer self into a state of moral turpitude like Dr. Faustus, but as both Dorian and Marlowe are the only complex characters that undergo any change or develop in any manner, they are the only compelling individuals with whom a viewer or reader could find some sort of site of self-identification. They are the only characters, in essence, who undergo a journey, however misguided that journey may ultimately be, and even though it leads to hell.

Clausson, however, sees the novel as a failure of the self-development plot, because he reads it as ultimately condemning the positive self-awakening of Dorian's apparent desire. "the opening chapters of Dorian Gray focus on the innocent Dorian's awakening, under the twin influences of Basil's homoerotic painting and Lord Henry's subversive philosophy, into 'the true pleasure and joy of living'" (Clausson 2003, p.3). But even from the beginning, this self-awakening is narcissistic, and based upon Dorian's gaze upon himself, and his too-permeable infiltration by the philosophy and influence of another man, Lord Henry, rather than Henry's recognition within Dorian of anything pre-existing and 'real.'