The Double Dorian Gray

Come See About Me: Enchantment of the Double in The Picture of Dorian Gray
Author(s): CHRISTOPHER CRAFT

Source: Representations, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Summer 2005), pp. 109-136
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2005.91.1.109 .
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CHRISTOPHER CRAFT
Come See About Me:

Enchantment of the Double in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
In the mirror I see myself where I am not, in an unreal space that opens up virtually
behind the surface; I am over there where I am not, a kind of shadow that gives me my
own visibility. . . . Due to the mirror, I discover myself absent at the place where I am,
since I see myself over there. From that gaze which settles over me, as it were, I come
back to myself and I begin once more to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute
myself there where I am.
—Michel Foucault, ‘‘Different Spaces’’1
This mirror is a sort of rectangle although they say mirrors are just water specified.
—Francesca Woodman, ‘‘Some Disordered Interior Geometries’’2
It had taught him to love his own beauty.

—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray3
W   D G stands before his portrait, therein to

consider both himself and his difference from himself, he requires a prosthesis. A
prosthesis so familiar it hardly seems like one. Dorian requires a mirror. In Wilde’s
routine scene of erotic speculation, Dorian characteristically finds himself gazing
into the monitory portrait ‘‘as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done
some dreadful thing’’; but then he winces, and ‘‘taking up from the table an oval glass
. . . that Lord Henry had given him, he glance[s] hurriedly into it. No red line
warped his lips. What did it mean?’’ (DG, 216; italics added). Two mirrors then,
since the portrait is overtly figured as such. Only with two reflections can Dorian’s
enjoyment counterpose images of his enduring beauty against those of his emerg-
ing ugliness. Only thus can Dorian perpetuate the fascination that comes to anchor
his body and disperse his character. Here and throughout The Picture of Dorian Gray,
Wilde explicitly duplicates the mirror function, as if to compound its estrange-
ments, or to alienate its alienations. Yet even in its singular form, the experience of
reflection is queer enough. A viewing subject replicated in a mirror may be said to
return to where he started, but not as she started. For she starts as a human being
 Focusing upon the alienation-effects generated by technologies of duplication (portrait, mir-
ror), this essay explores the enchantment of the double in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. / R    -
        91. Summer 2005 䉷 The Regents of the University of California.     0734–6018, elec-
tronic     1533–855X, pages 109–36. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or
reproduce article content to the University of California Press at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. 109

replete with such presence as persons may claim, yet returns to himself as an image-
being devoid of precisely this presence. An imago of ‘‘self,’’ a skin or film, effortlessly
escapes from the person whose incarnate being alone sponsors it, yet the departed
dear returns to its sponsor only as his own visible alienation, his being-over-there
coming back to himself here. The auto-difference thus revealed is immediately in-
stalled within the viewer as her perception of something other, something external,
that nonetheless delivers her up to herself: ‘‘a kind of shadow,’’ Foucault calls it,
‘‘that gives me my own visiblity’’ by positioning me ‘‘over there where I am not.’’
And so on and on, over and again. This return effect affords to the viewer the chi-
mera of a substantial unity, even as it promises a volume in perpetual disintegration.
Come see about me.
Any attempt to read the mirror function in Dorian Gray must begin where Wilde
does: with his appropriation of Ovid’s Narcissus. When Ovid pens his slick fable
about a haughty youth at once enchanted and devastated by a fatal self-image, he
effectively intervenes in an already entrenched history of thought regarding the
place of vision and reflection—of specular mimesis—in the constitution of individ-
ual identity, of sexual desire, even of truth itself.4 More specifically, Ovid confers
upon this tradition a late, fey antihero stranded somewhere between man and boy,
presence and absence, being and specter. Ovid’s Narcissus thus arrives at his mirror
scene already caught in and as a series of perplexing middles, or intermediate states;
he is at once neither/nor and either/both. No surprise, then, that he should find
himself captivated by another liminal being, this one a phantasm generated by an
automatic visual process in which the reflective capacity of still water conspires with
the human sensorium to beget a dazzling heterotopia, a mimetic world of virtual
presence in which image-beings are programmed to return the gaze of those who
solicit them, vis-à-vis and eye to eye. But like all ‘‘intuitive’’ programs this one must
be inculcated by repeated application, and Narcissus struggles with the learning
curve.
The first hurdle turns out to be the killer. Ovid insists that Narcissus originally
desires his own reflected image only to the degree that it is returned to him as,
precisely, not his own and, just as precisely, not an image. A hunk’s méconnaissance is
usually entire:
For as his own bright Image he survey’d,
He fell in love with the fantastick Shade;
And o’er the fair Resemblance hung unmov’d,
Nor knew, fond Youth! it was himself he lov’d.
The well-turn’d Neck and Shoulders he descries,
The spacious Forehead, and the sparkling Eyes;
The hands that Bacchus might not scorn to show,
And Hair that round Apollo’s Head might flow;
With all the Purple Youthfulness of Face,
110 R           

That gently blushes in the watry Glass,
By his own Flames consum’d the Lover lyes,
And gives himself the Wound by which he dies. (Metamorphoses, 98–101)
John Dryden’s translation underscores the misapprehension that founds Narcissan

desire: ‘‘Nor knew, fond Youth! it was himself he lov’d.’’ Neither self nor self-image
competently describes the fetching object that first captivates Ovid’s bright-eyed,
dim-bulbed ‘‘Lover’’ and then sets him aflame. Narcissus falls, that is, not for ‘‘him-
self ’’ but rather for a seeming-other over there, a shimmering dream-figure who
springs from a mimetic event that Narcissus does not yet recognize as such. This
is the figure of desire that Ovid anatomizes above—not yet a figure of self-
identification, though it will become so for Narcissus once it is altogether too late.
Certainly Ovid’s ‘‘fantastick Shade’’ begins as a ‘‘sparkling’’ excorporation of Nar-
cissus’s own ‘‘blush[ing]’’ person, his ‘‘fair Resemblance’’ as it is returned to him
by what Wilde will later call the ‘‘water’s silent silver.’’5 But Narcissus himself re-
ceives this ‘‘bright Image’’ as the ‘‘well-turn’d’’ incarnation of yet another being. In
this way chimera affords Narcissan desire a primordial object that will prove to be
intractable because immaterial: not an object once possessed and now lost, perhaps
to be recuperated some lucky day, but rather an inherently inaccessible object gen-
erated within reflexivity itself. Narcissus’s fundamental mistaking of visual infor-
mation determines a misbegotten longing that knows no antecedents, refuses all
substitutions, and divides Narcissus’s experience of being into a radically dissoci-
ated before and after. Prior to the moment of reflection, Narcissus enjoys a blithe
immunity to all desire and so strides his world like a runway model, imperturbable
in his frigid beauty and indifferent to the repeated appeals of ‘‘Maid’’ and ‘‘Youth’’
alike. The click of the camera’s shutter simply voices the plangency of someone
else’s desire—most famously, that of Echo. But subsequent to the moment of reflec-
tion, Narcissus yields his self-possession to chimera forever and never once again
stands upright, except as flower: ‘‘a rising stalk, with yellow blossoms.’’ Having lain
to gratify one thirst, Narcissus finds another heat firing his eye and compelling his
prostration. The rest is aftermath.
Yet the eye can desire only at a distance, however close, and across an insupera-
ble gap, however small. A still-uncomprehending Narcissus seeks to close this gap
by stretching his recumbent form across the great divide that separates him from
the image he still does not recognize as such:
To the cold Water oft he joins his Lips,
Oft catching at the beauteous Shade he dips
His arms, as often from himself he slips. (427–29)
This slip of lip and hand between boy and shade ultimately corrects Narcissus’s
visual error while failing to reform his longing. Haptic frustration is his teacher
Come See About Me: Enchantment of the Double in The Picture of Dorian Gray 111

here. Narcissus requires repeated tactile failure (‘‘oft . . . Oft . . . often’’) before his
mind will kindle an accurate recognition of the ‘‘beauteous Shade’’ that ‘‘his Arms
pursue’’ with such accomplished futility. Ovid’s insistence upon tactile repetition
measures the strength of Narcissus’s resistance to accurate identification of his own
image as such: as an image, and as his own. And why not? For the very first time
Narcissus has seen what he wants—just so—and so wants to continue seeing it in
just this way. The boy’s refusal to revise bespeaks the projective force of his urgent
desire for the ‘‘empty Being’’ whose fullness, amplitude, and density he has been
presuming all along. Ultimately the intelligence napping in Narcissus’s hand over-
whelms this resistance and clarifies his understanding, but only then to receive the
most dubious of rewards, since all that hand will ever reach or touch is what John
Keats calls ‘‘the feel of not to feel it.’’ Here that ‘‘feel’’ corresponds precisely to
the chill flat plane of mimetic reflection—‘‘water specified,’’ in Woodman’s fine
locution.6 However cruel this irony, it is but an extreme instance of the contradic-
tion inhering in all visual representation. Try to touch any visual image and all your
fingers will ever discover is the material substrate out of which the image has been
cut, compounded, or conjured: if sculpture, incised stone; if painting, dried pig-
ment on stretched canvas; if photography, paper chemically treated to remember
the passage of yesterday’s light.
This material irony finally informs Narcissus that he has come to adore ‘‘a
phantom that disappears just at the moment when motor activity tries to fix its
outline.’’7 Correctly received as erotic torment, this information spurs Narcissus
to lamentation. In giving voice to pain, Narcissus cries aloud, hears his own com-
plaint, and so comes to recognize the object of his desire as a figure or feint of
self, a dissociated image over there, one whose beauty draws him both to himself
and away:
Ah wretched me! I now begin too late
To find out all the long-perplex’d Deceit;
It is my self I love, my self I see;
The gay Delusion is a Part of me. (459–62)
Ovid carefully stages Narcissus’s passage from miscognition (‘‘gay Delusion’’) to

recognition (‘‘Part of me’’) as the mental effect of a disjunctive sensory itinerary.
Vision may proudly seize the objects of its attention at the speed of light, but touch
must reach through space with the slow hands of time. Thus two distinct modes of
sensory reception, themselves temporally out of joint, must be conceptually inte-
grated in order to ‘‘find out all the long-perplex’d Deceit.’’ Narcissus’s understand-
ing of the reflected image as ‘‘his own’’ depends absolutely upon this temporal syn-
copation of sensory experience. In counterpointing divergent temporalities, Ovid
both specifies the belatedness intrinsic to Narcissan desire (‘‘I now begin too late’’)
and anticipates the temporal convolutions that will inflect both Sigmund Freud’s
and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic articulations of narcissism two millennia later.
112 R           

But the most moving aspect of Narcissus’s new understanding is that it changes
nothing at all. So transfixed is his enchantment, so rapt his eye, that his desire re-
fuses adjustment, edification, or dismissal. This radical erotic commitment has in-
spired a long history of contempt, one that begins with Ovid himself, who con-
descends to Narcissus as the exemplar of a novitas furoris, or ‘‘new insanity’’: an
insanity that consists in the lover’s attachment not at all to ‘‘himself,’’ but rather to
the visual image that discloses the self to itself as the alienated object of its own
desire.8 This is a commitment that, like Dorian Gray’s, graduates fully unto death.
Clearly enough, the parables of Narcissus and Dorian Gray foreground the
erotic complications that ensue when the point of vision and desire are the same,
and both specify this point as a reflective surface that relays the object of desire as
a divided figure of self and same. Just as clearly, the specular eros explored by Ovid
and Wilde privileges the return of light consequent upon its collision with a material
surface, so much so that the first, last, and only object of this eros is the process of
image-captation and image-return. Within this recursive process, the light instanta-
neously returned by any reflective surface operates as a secret agent remanding its
captive image into the libidinal custody of a simultaneously captivated viewer. As
the image is caught by the mirror, so is the viewer caught by the returning image.
Between the two poles of this visual circuit, a tropological infinity exercises itself as
image-bearing light and light-born images turn and return, turn and turn about,
generating in the process a busy vertigo that leaves the lover as rapt as he is lost in
the ‘‘infinite space where doubles reverberate.’’9 It is into precisely this silent delir-
ium that Dorian Gray unwittingly steps when he first confronts the finished portrait
that Basil Hallward has just presented to him:
Dorian . . . passed listlessly in front of his picture, and turned towards it. When he saw it he
drew back, and his cheeks flushed for a moment with pleasure. A look of joy came into his
eyes, as if he had recognized himself for the first time. . . . The sense of his own beauty came
on him like a revelation. He had never felt it before. . . . he stood gazing at the shadow of
his own loveliness. He stood there motionless and in wonder. (DG, 190–91)
Somatically immobilized except at eye (‘‘he stood gazing’’) and heart (‘‘his cheeks
flushed’’), Dorian here actively solicits the silent ‘‘shadow of his own loveliness,’’
which in turn casts a ‘‘revelat[ory]’’ light back upon its own blond source, thereby
bringing Dorian home to himself ‘‘as if he had recognized himself for the first
time.’’ Like Ovid before him and Lacan after, Wilde insists that disclosive moments
of self-recognition entail a complex semiotic interchange between the one who ap-
prehends himself in an image and the visual image that has already apprehended
the ‘‘same’’ him over there. But unlike Ovid or Lacan, Wilde focuses extended at-
tention upon the visual technology that generates the flux (and reflux) of informa-
tion. It is, after all, the picture and not the character that gives the story its title,
just as it is the copy that confers upon ‘‘the original of the portrait’’ (DG, 194) his
first sense of being Dorian. Until this moment, Dorian’s ‘‘self ’’ is but a blank canvas

awaiting the artist’s touch. In the recognition scene just quoted, Wilde’s ‘‘as if ’’
quietly registers an equivocation proper to all specular identification, which can
mark out an origin (‘‘for the first time’’) only by remarking it as a mode or model
of repetition (‘‘recognized himself ’’). Further, Wilde’s notable, almost technical de-
ployment of ‘‘shadow’’ (an English usage specifying a human image within a mirror
and, later, a photograph) identifies ‘‘Dorian’’ as a mirror-buddy of Ovid’s ‘‘fantas-
tick Shade.’’ As that ‘‘most magical of mirrors’’(DG, 227), the portrait effectively
conjoins Wilde’s lazy gothic plot with the formal dynamics of self-regard. This, in
turn, enables Wilde to map the saturated, irreal space that intervenes between a
self-apprehending subject and the mimetic apparatus that returns this subject to
himself, but always in the guise of objectal or phantasmal other.
This is to insist upon what is occluded in and by the obvious. Ovid and Wilde
deploy the technology of the mirror—‘‘water specified’’—as the trope that best
conveys their respective thought regarding the erotics of self-identification, al-
though Wilde overtly complicates the trope, turns its visual screw, with the super-
addition of actual mirrors. The mirror-as-idea emphasizes the dynamics of reflec-
tion rather than the reflecting device itself. As physical object, the mirror certainly
locates the erotics of captation and return at a particular material site—that is, the
mirror I am looking into now. But as an optical technology generating abyssal
effects, the mirror’s visual performance negates its own site-specific materiality by
transplacing the objects it reflects into a purely virtual space evacuated of all sub-
stance, being, heft. However alluring it may be, the mirror’s dasein is nowhere; its
seductive depths are lies generated at a fluent surface; and its mimetic responsibility
is to put my being here over there where I never once have been and once again
will be. In thus derealizing the objects of its reflection even as it replicates them so
convincingly, the mirror operates as a seamless machine, swift and silent, for culling
the ghost out of the thing.
Yet a crucial difference distinguishes Wilde’s use of this technology from
Ovid’s: Ovid employs a ‘‘natural’’ speculum, Wilde an artificial and supernatural
one. Narcissus loses himself and finds his desire in a ‘‘watry Glass’’ that, like yours
and mine, reflects surfaces only, while Dorian’s portrait confers visibility upon an
internal corruption that otherwise escapes sensory apprehension. The full-length
portrait behaves, in Wilde’s conspicuous phrasing, as ‘‘a mirror that mirrors the
soul’’:
there would be a real pleasure in watching it. [Dorian] would be able to follow his mind
into its secret places. This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had
revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul. (DG, 227)
As part of the well-rehearsed Gothic technology bequeathed to Wilde by his fore-

bears, Dorian’s ‘‘magical’’ portrait reproduces the mirror-function by inverting its
mimetic performance.10 Instead of transposing surfaces laterally as everyday mir-
rors do, the portrait reverses the usual relation between surface and depth, core and
114 R           

facia. It turns Dorian inside out so his eyes may witness what, by definition, they
cannot see at all—the legible condition of his inner being: ‘‘It [the portrait] is the
face of my soul’’ (DG, 262). This labor of physiognomic extroversion situates Basil’s
painting in an antithetical relation to other crucial mirrors in the narrative. Indeed,
the odd duplication in Wilde’s insistent phrasing (‘‘a mirror that mirrors the soul’’)
suggests the way in which he has self-consciously split, even schematically bifur-
cated, the mirror-work that riddles Dorian Gray, a text never short on bright surfaces
or the desire to consult them.
Besides Basil’s painting of the youth who ‘‘has leaned over the still pool of some
Greek woodland’’ (DG, 180), the text’s most overt mirror is the literal one that Do-
rian prosthetically holds up to himself while he simultaneously engages the moni-
tory image reflected in the portrait. The painted image hurts, and calls for an actual
mirror’s shining redress:
The quivering, ardent sunlight showed [Dorian] the lines of cruelty round the mouth as
clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.
He winced, and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed in Cupids, that Lord Henry had
given him, he glanced hurriedly into it. No line warped his red lips. What did it mean? (DG,
216; italics added)
What it means, ardently and wincingly, is that Wilde has counterposed a conven-
tionally inverting mirror (‘‘framed in Cupids,’’ no less) and a supernaturally in-
verting one in order to introduce a spectral third into Dorian’s cognitive field. This
third, entrancing presence subsists in the palpable difference that distinguishes por-
trait from mirror, and vice versa. Yet this is a difference that cannot be seen in or
as itself. Purely relational, it can be apprehended only between reflections, where the
mind’s eye alone may behold its invisible lineaments. Early in the narrative, this
atopic third captivates Dorian’s attention and rivets his thought to the procession
of difference as if it were a place: the closet, to be sure, but one of a particular order:
the private viewing-booth in which a golden boy submits to visions of himself. As
Dorian’s career of obscure sinning unfolds, so does this difference advance. The
portrait grows uglier by degrees, the mirror more beautiful by contrast, and Dorian
more obsessional in his petition of both. During this process a terrible beauty is
first borne, then born again:
He himself . . . would . . . stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward
had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the
fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the
contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his
own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. (DG, 242)
Dorian’s characteristic ‘‘secret sin’’—the one, anyway, that readers get to watch him
perform in camera over and over again—consists precisely in this multifaceted self-
regard, itself a rarefied species of auto-fetishism in which Dorian simultaneously
performs the active and passive parts in his own scoptophilic script.11 Furthermore,

each new sin, howsoever committed and with whomsoever enjoyed, ultimately
serves the same old solitary purpose, sending Dorian back to his closet so he may
consult portrait and mirror again. Whether ‘‘homo’’ or ‘‘hetero’’ in relation to its
presumed external objects (and the text authorizes both), Dorian’s eroticism re-
mains fundamentally self-motivated and self-directed. Having locked his attic door
behind himself, Dorian consults the portrait with ‘‘quicken[ing]’’ pulse and plea-
sure, mirror tight in hand. The sheer recursivity of this process—from sin to altered
image; from altered image to image-altering sin—only enhances the uncanny
power that holds Dorian in thrall to portrait and mirror alike, precisely because
they are so unlike. Observing his own incremental self-differentiation so excites
‘‘his sense of pleasure’’ ‘‘that he laugh[s] back at him[self ] from the polished glass,’’
ever ‘‘more enamoured of his own beauty,’’ even as he simultaneously grows ‘‘more
and more’’ entranced by the internal ‘‘corruption’’ that the portrait just as truly
returns to his solicitous eye. In the mirror Dorian rivals himself for beauty, in the
portrait for ugliness. The ‘‘sharpness of contrast’’ between these images sponsors
an autoerotic rivalry that needs and uses others only to prime a visual interchange
that Dorian has designed, precisely, to shut others out. The abyssal intensities gener-
ated throughout this process constitute Dorian’s central romantic and erotic experi-
ence. Compared to this, for instance, the vain charade he shares with Sybil (big
kiss, suicide, and all) amounts to a dust mote on a mirror’s surface: a nuisance first
to be brushed away, then forgotten entirely.12
But a still stronger case needs to be made regarding the work of mirrors in
Wilde’s text. For Dorian ‘‘himself ’’—the character, I mean, not the portrait—also
performs crucial reflexive work within the text’s larger visual economy. So shallow
is Dorian’s beauty, so shimmering and so flat, that it too operates like a mirror. His
visage returns to those who witness it not merely a superb image of present male
beauty, but also the living incarnation of an image about which they once used to
dream, in varying gradations of admiration and heat: ‘‘Indeed, there were many,
especially among the very young men, who saw, or fancied they saw, in Dorian Gray
the true realization of a type of which they had often dreamed in Eton or Oxford
days’’ (DG, 243). Of course Basil Hallward stands as the paradigm of the man who
sees in Dorian Gray the ‘‘true realization’’ of a form apprehended elsewhere and
now reflected here. Upon first sighting, Dorian already returns to the artist a type
of dream and a dream of type. Nothing less than its own predecessor, Dorian’s
beauty offers a late-Victorian instance of Platonic anamnesis, the recollection of eter-
nal beauty here among the delusive productions of time. ‘‘When our eyes met,’’
Basil tells Lord Henry,
I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating
that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art
itself. I did not want any external influence in my life. . . . I have always been my own master;
had at least always been so, till I met Dorian Gray. . . . [Some minutes later] I found myself
face to face with the young man [whose beauty] had so stirred me. . . . Our eyes met
116 R           

again. . . . I see things differently [since I met Dorian], I think differently. I can now re-
create life in a way that was hidden from me before. ‘‘A dream of form in the days of
thought,’’—Who is it who says that? I forget; but it is what Dorian Gray has been to me.
The merely visible presence of this lad . . . —ah! I wonder can you realize all that that
means? (DG, 177–180)
Clearly Dorian discharges his visual magic as effortlessly as the sun arrays its com-
mon gold. Just as clearly this radiance stuns Basil’s eye, threatens his artistic self-
possession, and haunts his memory with a ‘‘ ‘dream of form’ ’’ whose origin resists
disclosure. All of this transpires through Basil’s eye as an immediate effect of Dori-
an’s ‘‘merely visible presence’’: an extraordinary erotic perturbation, to say the
least, and one that Basil must struggle to convert into artistic production according
to the Platonic mandate in which elite Victorian males were routinely schooled.13
Nonetheless, it is the completion of the portrait that inaugurates Dorian Gray’s long
Platonic nightmare, which point-by-point cites and perverts the idealizing eroto-
cognitive itinerary established by Plato in the founding texts of Western metaphys-
ics: Phaedrus, Symposium, and Republic (especially Republic’s book 7). Wilde of course
knew Plato’s schedule of erotic sublimation by heart and could cite the apposite
texts, chapter and verse, when the rhetorical situation demanded. Nor can there be
any doubt that Wilde admired both the strength of thought and the beauty of lan-
guage with which Plato had formulated the imposing demands of that itinerary,
just as he clearly adored the idea of translating eros into art. But never without
qualification. For Wilde remained deeply suspicious of the deracinated sublimatory
motive driving thought and desire throughout the Platonic schedule: driving them
not so much on and on as up, up, and away. Away, especially, from the body as the
counting house of change and death.
As the most demanding model of sublimation imagined prior to the complica-
tions introduced by Freud, then elaborated by Lacan, the Platonic regime is much
harder to pull off than it is to put on. To wit: Start with your purblind passion for
the radiant beauty emanating from that golden boy; realize next that nothing gold
can stay and that your favorite can radiate so seductively only because he has al-
ready been irradiated by a lucent source as yet invisible to your enchanted eye; now
proceed toward this occluded source by transferring your ardor for golden youths
to airier, more abstract forms and in this way continue your strident climb upward
through ascending degrees of difficulty; as you climb remember to pause long
enough to recast that now abstracted beauty in perduring forms of art, thought, or
law; then resume your ascent, mounting higher still, until you bathe at last in the
cool radiance of pure Idea. This alone is true gold, the luminous origin toward
which the lesser lights have been conducting you all along. So perfect is this origi-
nary light that it utterly extinguishes any residual heat you may still feel for the
golden youth whose beauty, now transparently derivative, had prompted your aspi-
ration in the first place. ‘‘And once you have seen [‘this vision of the very soul of
beauty’], you will never be seduced again by the charm of gold, of dress, of comely

boys, or lads just ripening into manhood; you will care nothing for the beauties
that used to take your breath away and kindle such a longing in you.’’14
Plato thus recommends a hard road to persons inclined toward urgent erotic
engagement. Wilde, to be sure, was one so inclined, yet he disdained arduous activ-
ity on principle and in practice. When Wilde exercised he did so on couches, and
typically he hired coaches to get to these. Nonetheless, he adored the Platonic itiner-
ary for manifold reasons, not the least of which was the rhetorical and performative
advantage it offered. He would create art and stage life as a seriocomic replication
of Platonic paideia, at once displaying and disguising queer being through deft artic-
ulations of the Greek possibility. Clearly Wilde rehearsed the Platonic itinerary the
way an actor does her lines, thereby keeping Plato’s noble justification and his own
nubile language in close working conjunction, ever ready-to-hand for those charm-
ing London occasions when the inhibitions went down with the lights, and also
for the altogether more threatening ones when the late-Victorian horizon began to
darken and its fates to menace. Wilde’s justly famous ‘‘love that dare not speak its
name’’ speech, so expertly delivered during his first criminal trial, offered but a
late iteration of what by then had become a signature offering, or product: Oscar’s
Inimitably Canned Platonism and Paragon Detergent—not so far, after all, from
Pear’s Soap.15 But that 1895 performance, so desperately restaged at the Old Bailey,
had been long in preparation. Here is Wilde six years earlier, toying in an 1889
variant with what he facetiously claimed was Shakespeare’s true flame and guiding
light, that elusive phantasm ‘‘M[aste]r W. H.’’ (aka Willie Hughes), whom Wilde
identified as a mercurial boy-actor whose face ‘‘of beautiful aspect’’ had inspired
England’s greatest drama and ‘‘whose hair . . . of spun gold’’ did, in the Bard’s own
words, ‘‘give invention light’’:
Friendship, indeed, could have desired no better warrant for its permanence or its ardours
than the Platonic theory, or creed, as we might better call it, that the true world was the
world of ideas, and that these ideas took visible form and became incarnate in man, and
it is only when we realise the influence of neo-Platonism on the Renaissance that we can
understand the true meaning of the amatory phrases and words with which friends were
wont, at this time, to address each other. There was a kind of mystic transference of the
expressions of the physical world to a sphere that was spiritual, that was removed from gross
bodily appetite, and in which the soul was Lord. Love had, indeed, entered the olive garden
of the new Academe, but he wore the same flame-coloured raiment, and had the same words
of passion on his lips.16
Does flirting get any better than this? Here, and in like passages elsewhere, Wilde
unfurls Plato’s strenuous thought as a diaphanous viewing-screen upon which to
project beguiling images of what his late-Victorian phantasmagoria must also labor
to conceal: the solid bodies at play or in congress just below the stage, the lighting
apparatus that converts those bodies into disembodied images, and the strategically
placed mirrors that redirect those images toward the viewing-screen, where image-
hungry eyes may swallow them entire. This is Wildean hypermimesis at its casual
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best. All the queering technology has been secreted below the stage, the gay effect
projected above. Look: the ‘‘incarnate’’ ‘‘forms’’ and passionate ‘‘ardours’’ of ro-
mantic male friendship are here on open display, ‘‘fully warranted’’ and available
to your longing eye; yet no sooner do you try to touch them than they recede into
the prophylactic mist of a ‘‘mystic transference.’’ Listen: the ‘‘true meaning’’ of
whispered ‘‘amatory phrases’’ can almost be caught and deciphered now that Love
has ‘‘the same words of passion on his lips,’’ yet not quite, since those ‘‘same words’’
are neither sounded nor written here. However poised their equivocations or deli-
cate their modulations, these sentences are pleased to project a virtual image: Love
and Friendship lost in each other’s arms, purged somehow of ‘‘gross bodily appe-
tite’’ but cross-coupling still in ‘‘the olive garden of the new Academe,’’ where no
dames are admitted, much less known, and where the liquid ‘‘expressions’’ of the
physical world are magically sublimated, ‘‘removed’’ to ‘‘a sphere that [is] spiritual’’
only. Having explicitly submitted his prose to the sublimatory imperative, Wilde
also insinuates within it another erotic directive: visualize what you cannot see.17
With the July 1889 publication of ‘‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’’ in Blackwood’s
Magazine, Wilde introduced this technology of queer virtuality to a culture largely
unwilling to appreciate the gift. Unperturbed, he continued to issue serial revisions
until his conviction for ‘‘gross indecency’’ in May 1895. Verbal and visual repetition
constituted a key component of this technology, which operates on the insouciance
principle enunciated by Lord Henry: ‘‘Anything becomes a pleasure if only one
repeats it often enough.’’ The insistently reiterative quality of Wilde’s writing is less
a literary flaw than a discursive strategy; repetition was fundamental to the urgent
work of implanting transvalued deviations within the late-Victorian imaginary. An
implantation, Wilde had hoped, that Victorian culture at large would be unable to
blink or erase, but also one that its imperiled author could disavow should the long
arm of the law come knocking at his hotel door, as it did, arrest warrant in hand.
Wilde’s 1889 implantation offered a benign enough dalliance: an improbable liter-
ary theory grounded in Platonic idealism, itself costumed in Renaissance finery,
and earnestly delivered by a fictive narrator half-seduced by a forged portrait that
corroborates nothing more than the desire for Willie’s substantiation: let Willie be,
let Willie be here now. One year later Wilde would prove neither so delicate nor so
coy. With the July 1890 publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott’s
Monthly, Wilde intensified his queer implantation: first by bringing it home, insis-
tently, to contemporary London; then by demonizing its visual technology.
Recall that Wilde’s Narcissan fantasy opens just as Basil is about to complete
his ‘‘full-length portrait of [the same] young man’’ whose ‘‘extraordinary’’ beauty
and ‘‘mere personality’’ have been threatening, as Basil himself puts it, to ‘‘absorb
my whole nature, my whole life, my very art itself.’’ A formidable threat, which
Basil has met and averted through sublimatory painting. The portrait’s completion
awaits only a final sitting of model before artist; after that, nothing remains for Basil
to do but ‘‘work up the background’’ and sign ‘‘his own name, traced in long letters

of bright vermilion,’’ varnish to follow (DG, 189, 261). Wilde thus opens his fable
with an insistent narrative conjunction. Storytelling in The Picture of Dorian Gray
begins only as the work of visual representation nears its end, with the result that
the origin of Dorian’s narrative lies nowhere but in the termination of the process
that brings forth Basil’s crowning work. So emphatic a collation of narrative’s be-
ginning with painting’s ending is not inadvertent. Very few fictions of any length
commence with the casual but calculating genius that distinguishes the opening of
The Picture of Dorian Gray. For with a single narrative determination—this folding
together of origin and terminus—Wilde first establishes the crux of his thought
regarding the interdependence of language and vision and then launches the fatal,
if never fully tragic, movement of his protagonist’s infamous life story.18 Of course
that movement is written out, episodically unfolded, as this parable’s gyne / homo /
suicidal plot. But that movement can assume the ugly shape it does only because
Wilde has deftly installed its motive, or generative principle, well before Dorian’s
narrative finds its elegant legs and starts to prance. Wilde overtly inscribes this mo-
tive, itself a compound of homophilia and -phobia, during the final sitting in which
Basil completes his masterpiece. The painted image thereafter provides the visible
site wherein this inscription can be seen and read, a little too impulsively by the
Dumb Blond who will continue to model the painting’s beauty. Curiouser and curi-
ouser, though, since the painting as such exists only literally—that is, as letters.
Unlike Lady Windemere’s busy fan, say, or Desdemona’s bewitched handkerchief
—both of which materialize as props during performance—Dorian’s portrait never
materializes at all. As pure figure, the portrait ‘‘itself ’’ exists only as a knowledge-
effect generated by Wilde’s writing: a virtual object ever open to visualization but
never once to vision.
As such, the picture of Dorian Gray steps forth as the most urgently withdrawn
visual object in the British literary canon. Yet there is more to its less. Having con-
structed the portrait as a literal presence marking an objectal absence, Wilde then
puts it to work as a ferocious Platonic sublimate. For not only is the portrait the
material precipitate of Basil’s troubled desire for Dorian, and hence the bearer of
‘‘the secret of [Basil’s] own soul’’ (DG, 176); it is also the stunning product of his
difficult renunciation. Having submitted himself to the Platonic regime of ‘‘spiri-
tual procreancy,’’ Basil effectively translates his sexually charged desire for Dorian
into disciplined artistic production. His painting thus represents exactly the kind
of artifact that consecrates a transient embodiment of Beauty’s otherwise suprasen-
sual Being, even as it also frees the artist from the prospect of becoming Beauty’s
beast. Exactly the kind of artifact, in other words, that Diotima recommends to
Socrates as the latter struggles first to understand, then to overcome, the hot disor-
der he feels when beautiful youth is near:
those whose procreancy is of the body turn to woman as the object of their love, and raise
a family, in the blessed hope that by doing so they will keep their memory green, through
time and through eternity. But those whose procreancy is of the spirit rather than of the
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flesh—and they are not unknown, Socrates—conceive and bear the things of the spirit.
And what are they? you ask. Wisdom and all her sister virtues; it is the office of every poet
to beget them, and of every artist whom we may call creative.19
Basil has endured a tough gestation, ‘‘of the spirit rather than of the flesh,’’ yet he
brings forth in splendor: ‘‘ ‘This is going to be my masterpiece. It is my masterpiece
as it stands’ ’’ (DG, 187). Lord Henry concurs, but with a perverse, postmodern twist
that privileges the replica over its ‘‘original’’: ‘‘It is the real Dorian Gray—that is
all’’ (DG, 176). And Dorian himself later rewards Basil’s achievement, behind his
back, by digging a ‘‘knife into the great vein that is behind the ear, crushing the
man’s head down on the table, and stabbing again and again’’ (DG, 263). If murder-
ing Basil marks the culmination of Dorian’s notorious but otherwise indistinct ca-
reer of sin, it also constitutes the text’s most intense somatic engagement between
two men. The transposition here of murderous and erotic penetration, as obvious
as it is disturbing, poses the inescapable question. Why does so productive an act of
erotic sublimation, itself a tribute to ideal beauty, ultimately generate so grotesque a
counter-response, especially from beauty’s representative?
Wilde crafts his answer to this question in chapters 1 and 2 of Dorian Gray, the
offhand genius of which will only be adumbrated here. Suffice it to say that these
two chapters comprise a mini-Bildungsroman in which Wilde explicitly constructs
Dorian’s erotic ‘‘character’’ before his reader’s eyes. Readers get to watch a pretty boy
become a beautiful image, then watch again while the same boy identifies with that
mimetic image, assimilating it as the template according to which he will thereafter
fashion himself so extravagantly, and with such ugly results. ‘‘It had taught him to
love his own beauty’’ (DG, 217). In effect, Dorian props his emergent identity upon
an erotic identification with Basil’s just-completed painting; he does so first in re-
sponse to Lord Henry’s tease-and-taunt that the portrait is ‘‘the real Dorian Gray’’:
‘‘Is it the real Dorian?’’ cried the original of the portrait, running across to [Basil]. ‘‘Am
I really like that?’’
‘‘Yes; you are just like that.’’
‘‘How wonderful, Basil!’’ (DG, 194)
Oscillating uncertainly between similarity (‘‘like that’’) and identity (‘‘the real Do-
rian’’), the ‘‘original of the portrait’’ is seduced into specular identification with an
erotically charged image of himself; the portrait supplies the very prototype of the
being Dorian will work to become, ‘‘a kind of prefiguring type of himself ’’ (DG,
242). And soon he prays impiously for a substitution of identities: ‘‘If it was I who
were to be always young, and the picture that were to grow old! For this—for this—
I would give everything!’’ (DG, 191). In translating the erotics of specular identifi-
cation into Faustean pact, Dorian becomes the eponymous character whose narra-
tive Wilde goes on to tell; that is, Dorian ‘‘himself ’’ comes to embody the picture
of Dorian Gray. This Dorian constitutes not only the narrative’s definitive sexual
object (everybody wants him), but also its definitively perverse sexual subject: the

one who extends his desire toward external objects only so he may then watch it coil
back upon the image he loves to watch watching him. For Dorian, object-cathexes
themselves sponsor the multiple mirror relations that constitute Dorian’s only last-
ing passion.
In chapter two Wilde radically complicates this cross-identification of person
and picture by insisting that the completed portrait represents more than a homo-
erotic sublimate derived from Dorian’s heart-stopping beauty and Basil’s stopless
desire. While narrating Dorian’s final sitting before Basil, Wilde carefully traces a
complicated audiovisual interchange among (not between) men and then maps its
effects upon the painting as it is completed.20 During this interchange Dorian liter-
ally incorporates the desires of both Basil and Lord Henry for the unspoiled youth
whom Dorian himself is about to dismiss with an impious prayer. Yet these desires
are deeply problematic, not simply because Wilde marks them as same-sex desires,
but rather because they have already been marked, or rather marred, by particular
historical and textual inflections: Basil’s by an idealizing Platonism that disdains
the call of the flesh and calls instead for its sublimation into art, thought, and prayer;
Lord Henry’s by a counterposed ‘‘new hedonism’’ (DG, 189) that repudiates this
Platonic disdain and promises instead a renascent being-in-the-flesh, one that re-
fuses all limitation as it seeks ‘‘to give form to every feeling, expression to every
thought, reality to every dream’’ (DG, 185). Together these two extremes, each the
other’s palpable obverse, define the homosexual possibility in Dorian Gray as an
inescapable double bind: excessive restraint on the one hand, unrestrained license
on the other. Once Dorian’s person is inserted into this double bind, the vertices of
the fatal triangle are in place.
The audiovisual homosex circulating within this triangular exchange bypasses
women entirely; its three vertices are already occupied by men.21 Heterosex sim-
ply has no time or place during the two-chapter Bildungsroman in which Wilde
composes Dorian’s-becoming-Dorian as Dorian’s-coming-to-desire-Dorian’s-own-
desirability. For brevity’s sake, the erotic circulation that the portrait comes to mate-
rialize may be delineated in a single lumbering sentence as follows: While Dorian
stands before Basil to be painted in their final session together, Lord Henry whispers
bittersweet Paterian nothings, ‘‘those subtle poisonous theories’’ (DG, 217), into the
boy’s ripening ear; as Dorian assimilates Lord Henry’s bewildering influence,22 he
alters in both body and pose—his eyes brighten and his mouth opens slightly, while
Basil, ‘‘deep in his work,’’ grows dimly ‘‘conscious only that a look had come into
the lad’s face that he had never seen before’’ (DG, 185); so moved is Basil by Dorian’s
somatic alteration, that he captures the perfect moment with his last daubs of paint:
‘‘You were perfectly still. And I have caught the effect I wanted,—the half-parted
lips, and the bright look in the eyes. I don’t know what Harry has been saying to
you, but he has certainly made you have the most wonderful expression’’ (DG, 187).
Basil’s curious phrasing here (‘‘has . . . made you have’’) underscores the psycho-
somatic power of Lord Henry’s speech, its ‘‘wonderful’’ influence, all the more en-
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hanced by its own inclusion of a patent warning against itself: ‘‘There is no such
thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral’’ (DG, 185). Lord
Henry’s flux of language suffuses Dorian’s ear only to transform his mind and vis-
age, where Basil’s eye catches the crucial effect and passes it on to his painter’s hand.
At the moment of its completion, then, the portrait steps forth as the material for-
malization, the visual precipitate, of the complex erotic interfluence, the circulation
of audiovisual flows, that I have just described much too schematically. And it is this
formalization—nothing other, nothing else—that startles Dorian into queer recog-
nition when first he first beholds the finished portrait and, like Narcissus, falls for
a ravishing version of himself: ‘‘It is my self I love, my self I see; / The gay Delusion
is a Part of me.’’ In strong contrast to Ovid, however, The Picture of Dorian Gray insists
that such recognition transpires, ever and only, in the cognitive space generated
by the intersection of language and visual representation, especially as these are
conveyed by those who hold and behold us most passionately.
Of course the question regarding which Dorian Gray constitutes the original
of the other perplexes Wilde’s text well beyond its quasi-suicidal conclusion, which
returns character and portrait to proper relation. Indeed, Wilde’s querying of the
audiovisual erotics of identification never closes out or finishes up, but simply ends
with Dorian’s life, as does the story itself:
When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master
as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the
floor was a dead man in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled
and loathsome of visage. (DG, 281)
Upon penetration (of the portrait by the knife; of the knifer by the portrait) the
magical transposition of Dorians is terminally reversed, but never adequately ex-
plained. Nor need Wilde venture any explanation, since he had adopted the super-
natural device at the beginning of his story precisely to foreclose this need. The
gothic enables almost anything while explaining absolutely nothing; its machina-
tions are there to suspend or bypass ‘‘normal relations,’’ including those of causality.
Similarly, the question of Dorian’s posthumous identity does not find resolution
with a successful identification of the body of ‘‘their master as they had last seen
him,’’ since ‘‘the dead man in evening dress’’ is ‘‘wrinkled and loathsome’’ beyond
recognition. Instead The Picture of Dorian Gray closes upon a somatic enigma that
in turn generates a scene of bewildered interpretation among those who believe
they had known the man once so wondrous in ‘‘his exquisite youth and beauty.’’
But of course they had not known him at all, and so cannot recognize him now.
Hence the sign that decides this scene is not Dorian’s brute presence as ‘‘withered’’
corpse, his being-there-dead waiting to be deciphered. Here, as in Ovid’s fable, the
last sign offered to understanding is a metonymy from which identity can only be
inferred: in Narcissus’s case, the golden-throated flower that still bears his name;
in Dorian’s, a final shining artifact: ‘‘It was not till they had examined the ring that

they recognized who it was’’ (DG, 281). But ‘‘who it was’’ is now both past tense
and past knowing: an unrecognizable body fatally ‘‘struck by the wound of the dou-
ble.’’23 This truly is how Wilde’s story comes out, not to mention why it won’t go
away.
II
To everything which man allows to become visible, one is able to demand:

What does he wish to hide?
—Friedrich Nietzsche
‘‘The dead linger sometimes,’’ Dorian intones not long after he has
launched first Basil, later himself, into that wide and lingering population (DG,
270). Yet Wilde’s corpus does more than simply linger. The Picture of Dorian Gray
keeps reappearing like a revenant in pseudonymous disguise; most notably and in-
fluentially in psychoanalytic guise, with much of Wilde’s subtle genius bled away,
trepanned into theory, pinned and formulated there. Taking his cue from Havelock
Ellis (1898), Paul Näcke (1899), and Otto Rank (1911), Freud decisively reanimates
Dorian’s corpse in his 1914 essay ‘‘On Narcissism,’’ the distressed incoherence of
which Freud implicitly acknowledges in his defensive subtitle—‘‘An Introduction,’’
merely. Freud’s conceptual struggle in this essay lies with the difficulty of deter-
mining the psychic origins of the ego, the organ or agency without which narcissism
would seem to have no logical or theoretical basis. When and how, then, does the
ego begin? If the ego is not given ‘‘naturally’’ but is instead constructed through
psychic processes, what psychic agency precedes the ego and performs the work
required to generate the ego in turn? Can there be narcissism without, or before,
the advent of the ego? If not, what erotic capacity or propensity opens the path
to narcissism proper? And finally: Is narcissism always integrally itself, a unitary
phenomenon, or are there versions or subdivisions within the category proper?
Freud begins his essay by vexing this last question. On the one hand, he affirms
that clinical observation has clearly established the existence of a pathological nar-
cissism in which a person ‘‘treats his own body in the same way in which the body
of a sexual object is ordinarily treated—who looks at it, . . . strokes it, and fondles
it till he obtains complete gratification through these activities. Developed to this
degree, narcissism constitutes a perversion that has absorbed the whole of the sub-
ject’s sexual life.’’24 On quite the other hand, however, Freud also asserts the follow-
ing: ‘‘It seem[s] probable that an allocation of the libido such as deserve[s] to be
described as narcissism might be present far more extensively, and that it might
claim a place in the regular course of human sexual development’’ (SE, 14:73). This
‘‘other’’ narcissism, which Freud alternately calls ‘‘primary’’ and ‘‘normal,’’ ‘‘would
be not a perversion but rather the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct
of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living
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creature’’ (SE, 14:73–74). Freud thus tentatively splits narcissism into ‘‘normal’’
and ‘‘perverse’’ variants, the latter of which may be verified clinically while the
former can only be inferred theoretically. Narcissism, in short, must be split in two
because the viability of the organism demands that a certain ‘‘allocation of the
libido’’ be reserved exclusively for the ‘‘egoism of the instinct of self-preservation.’’
Here, as so often in Freud’s thought, it is the visiblility of the obtrusive ‘‘perversion’’
that confers legibility upon an embedded and otherwise inapprehensible norm.
Still, Freud’s timorous grammar (‘‘would’’/‘‘might’’) suggests the instability of this
provisional distinction between modes or types of narcissism.
As the ‘‘libidinal complement’’ to the ‘‘instinct of self-preservation,’’ primary
narcissism is putatively normal in both origin and function. ‘‘In the beginning,’’ as
it were, primary narcissism enables the emergent ego to cathect itself into well-
being and survivability; without this narcissistic complement, the nascent ego
would not survive the perils of its own generation. Only later, at an advanced stage
in the ego’s organization, will that originary narcissism be subject to complex redis-
tributions as the individual proceeds down a prescribed but tortuous path toward
external object-cathexes and presumptive heteronormativity. Not only must objects
external to the ego be cathected for the first time, but the objects so chosen should be
‘‘normal’’ ones. To effect this formidable achievement, the maturing ego must first
relinquish some portion of its ‘‘original narcissistic libido,’’ then recast it as object-
libido. This displacement of libido amounts to nothing less than a developmental
imperative. In the case of secondary or ‘‘perverse’’ narcissism, the ego effectively
repudiates this obligation and retains its libidinal investment in itself. Freud identi-
fies this species of narcissism as ‘‘secondary’’ because it derives, both temporally
and logically, from the primary form and therefore shares the latter’s primordial,
irrecoverable origin. Freud in turn classifies secondary narcissism as a ‘‘perversion’’
because the ego’s ‘‘original libidinal cathexis’’ ‘‘fundamentally persists’’ to the detri-
ment of the developing ego, which unconsciously refuses to yield the libido neces-
sary to establish and fund external object-cathexes (SE, 14:74). In other words,
‘‘perverse’’ narcissism manifests an aggravated case of arrested development within
a restricted libidinal economy; like Narcissus transfixed at the pool, it refuses to let
go and move on.
Freud’s account of a bifurcated narcissism remains haunted by its occluded ori-
gin. Since both forms of narcissism presuppose at least a proto-ego, Freud begins
his archaeological speculations with the advent of that psychical agency: ‘‘We are
bound to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual
from the start; the ego has to be developed. The autoerotic instincts, however, are
there from the very first; so there must be something added to autoerotism—a new
psychical action—in order to bring about narcissism’’(SE, 14:76–77). The origin
of both the ego and its ‘‘libidinal complement,’’ primary narcissism, would thus
seem to lie in the dark backward and abysm of ‘‘the auto-erotic instincts,’’ which,
Freud assures us, ‘‘are there from the very first.’’ Problematically, however, this very

first ‘‘auto-erotism’’ lacks a unified or organized object (since ‘‘the ego cannot exist
. . . from the start’’). By implication, then, ‘‘the auto-erotic instincts’’ must remain
ductile and polymorphous (without specific object, without specific aim) until the
emergent ego presents itself as the first erotic object. That is to say, the ‘‘new psychi-
cal action’’ that must be ‘‘added to auto-erotism . . . in order to bring about narcis-
sism’’ turns out to be nothing other than the advent of the ego itself. Yet a difficulty
remains. Logically and ontologically, a certain indeterminate something designated
by the prefix ‘‘auto’’ must precede the ego so the ego may proceed from it. Yet this
suppositional referent cannot be present as a specific or identifiable entity, since ‘‘a
unity comparable to the ego cannot exist . . . from the start.’’ Perhaps that imputed
something consists in nothing more than a pure potential for subsequent psychic
consolidation. In any case, it presents itself only to the degree that it is adverbially
embedded within an indefinite set of erotic pulsions whose primacy (‘‘there from
the very first’’) remains indistinguishable from its indeterminacy. But if this is so,
where is the ‘‘there’’ of the ‘‘auto-erotic instincts’’? The answer, it would seem, is
nothing other or more than the distinctness or boundedness of the somatic ‘‘indi-
vidual,’’ a physically delimited envelope that has as yet no psychic equivalent (‘‘the
ego has to be developed’’) and which is already traversed by transindividual drives
that parody this merely somatic integrity. So at the fantasmatic origin of both the
ego and its ‘‘normal’’ ‘‘libidinal complement,’’ primary narcissism, we find neither
clear presence nor secure foundation. We find instead the psychoanalytic version
of what Wilde had already figured, even more fantastically, when Dorian comes to
identity-recognition at age twenty while standing ecstatically before a painting of
which he ‘‘himself ’’ had so recently been ‘‘the original,’’ just as he is also about to
become its counterfeit or conceit.
Lacan had the wit to revive and revise these complications by returning the
méconnaissance of ego-formation to the optical dimension, not to mention the audac-
ity of supplanting both Narcissus and Dorian with his decisive allegory of a male
infant jubilating before his own reflected image. Rudely put, the Lacan of ‘‘The
Mirror Stage’’ holds that individual ‘‘identity’’ is indeed apprehensible but only
via the apprehending subject’s identification with a portentous specular image: the
mirror proffers not just an image of ‘‘himself ’’ over there, but also a visual propa-
deutic for the fabrication of le moi. Famously, Lacan calls this aboriginal experience
méconnaissance, and it necessarily incorporates some tricks of the eye, tricks that dis-
sociate the I from its origin at the very moment of its visual delivery, the split itself
being a kind of postnatal birth trauma from which, like the first one, none of us ever
quite recovers. Lacan’s allegory specifies identity-formation as an ‘‘orthopaedic’’
psycho/optical process that compensates for ‘‘a real specific prematurity of birth in
man.’’25 Born, as it were, in pieces, Lacan’s infans embodies an amalgam of drives,
needs, and capacities that still await physical and psychic organization; hence, ‘‘spe-
cific prematurity.’’ Lacan then represents psychic organization as a species of
mirror-effect. For it is the coherence of the reflected image that confers upon the
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infant the possibility of an I, which here props itself upon a specular identification
with a very complicated other first presented by the mirror. This composite other
is composed of no fewer than three elements: first, the person or device supporting
the baby before the mirror (call that support Mother, though Lacan fails to do so);
second, the mirror as enabling or productive technology; and third, the mimetic
image that the mirror instantly returns to the child’s motivated gaze.26 ‘‘Still sunk
in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence,’’ Lacan’s infant celebrates all the
more to find itself exhibited in a picture-show that ‘‘symbolizes the mental perma-
nence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination’’ (‘‘MS,’’ 2).
This ‘‘prefiguration’’ of the I through the visual assimilation of the body’s reflection
entails many as yet unrealized implications for this vexed subject, including ‘‘cer-
tain functions of libidinal normalization. But the important point is that this form
situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direc-
tion, which will always remain irreducible to the individual alone’’ (‘‘MS,’’ 2). La-
can thus discloses the ego not as a facile optical illusion, a mere phantom of the
visible, but rather as the complex ‘‘fictional’’ character that is precipitated when a
person, here indicatively male, incorporates another’s projected image in order to
constitute an I originally dissociated from itself.27
Let us consider this mirror scene more closely. Flick on the light and look at
the baby (B1) looking at the ‘‘same’’ baby in the mirror (B2); look as well at the
prosthetic mother (M1) holding, supporting, propping B1 so that B2 (now the image
of perfect erection) may serve as a visual model for the psychical integration of B1,
who first sees in this reflection the specular differentiation of B2 and M2 (mom in
the mirror) and then begins to incorporate this image of this me-not-mom as the
allocentric template for the autoconstitution of ‘‘himself.’’ Let us call this himself
‘‘B1’’—that is, B1 in scare quotes, the quotation marks serving to remember the
scarification performed upon B1 by Lacan working the mom working the baby
working the mirror. Thus ‘‘B1’’ comes into being, or accedes to such identity as
Lacan’s reflections are willing to confer, only by superposing a highly tendentious
visual image upon a highly friable psychic space. A morass is finding its mapping.
If ‘‘B1’’ ’s jubilation at this show of shows is easy to comprehend and enjoy, then
this comprehension must be immediately tempered by the recognition that ‘‘B1’’ ’s
specular genesis presupposes the subjective incorporation of several mistakes of the
eye—or, let us say, several scotomas. (Definition: scotoma refers to an experience of
partial or temporary blindness that derives in part from the anatomy of the eyeball
and is therefore constitutive of vision per se; more specifically, it derives from that
portion of the retinal surface at which the optic nerve enters the globe of the eye
from the rear. On the one hand, this opthalmic site is necessarily blind because
denuded of rods and cones; it is therefore utterly incapable of receiving the visual
information that the rest of the ‘‘optical’’ eye nonetheless continues to pass on to
it. On the other hand, this same site is absolutely crucial to the transmission and
comprehension of what is received elsewhere on the retinal surface, since it is only

here, at the blind spot, that the optical information gathered by the eye is converted
into the neural code that the brain alone can translate into the picture-show of
visual consciousness. Eye and brain must work hand-in-hand to ‘‘fill in’’ vision’s
heart of darkness by composing a virtual image garnered from the saccadic move-
ments of the eyeball itself. Thus, for our purposes here, scotoma will represent the
blindness that vision needs in order to see at all; without this blindness there would
be nothing but nothing to see. Like the blindspots that enable vision itself, those
buried in Lacan’s visual allegory are anything but epiphenomenal or inconsequen-
tial; they establish the foundation, dubious as it is, for the heads-up advent of the
Lacanian moi).
First scotoma: to lose sight of the utterly invisible fact that the only route to self-
recognition offered by Lacan is the one that traverses the path of the tain: the path,
that is, of the symmetrical inversion of information that advenes upon the mirror’s
blockage and redirection of light. This action is performed by the mirror’s tain, the
reflective metallic backing (from the French etain or ‘‘tin’’) that confers reflectivity
upon otherwise transparent glass. Like the retinal blindspot, the tain itself is witheld
from sight, but it alone enables the ‘‘mirror’s exhibition or reproduction of objects
in the form of images’’—enables it by controlling and directing the deviation of
light.28 This generative deviation is at once reflexive (in the sense of automatic),
instantaneous (you can’t beat your image to the mirror), and rigidly organized (the
angle of incidence always equals the angle of reflection). The mirror itself is a silent
machine efficiently manufactured to produce, over and over again, exactly this calcu-
lated deviance, to which, as we all know, great uses can be put; I underscore ‘‘ma-
chine’’ here in order to foreground the mirror as a visual technology designed to
perform a specific kind of representational work, that is, the manipulation of light
for the exhibition of persuasive mimetic images. So proficient is this technical exhi-
bition that it sponsors a fantasy of faultless mimesis: ‘‘Am I really like that?’’ as
Dorian puts it while gazing at that ‘‘most magical of mirrors.’’ Yet exactly this mi-
metic proficiency promotes a double alienation. For not only does the mirror instate
an ambiguous oscillation between the ‘‘original’’ and its double, that reflected simu-
lacrum ‘‘over there’’; it also generates a secondary complication in which the mi-
metic image immediately returns to its ‘‘original’’ as a visual supplement, thereby
triggering the ‘‘new psychical action’’ required by an ‘‘ego [that still] has to be
developed.’’
It is the technological intervention of the mirror that creates this crucial, this crux-making
repetition. The mirror-as-machine actually generates or invents the difference (the
image B2) that will in turn precipitate the ego in B1, who must import one manufac-
tured difference (B2) in order to manufacture still another (‘‘B1’’). Lacan’s little self-
made man operates a very subtle technology here. This is to affirm what Lacan’s
language (in ‘‘The Mirror Stage,’’ at least) would seem to deny: that the precipita-
tion of the I in a ‘‘primordial form’’ does not occur ‘‘before it is objectified in the
dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the
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universal, its function as subject’’ (‘‘MS,’’ 2). Here, precisely, is where Wilde ex-
ceeds and corrects Lacan, insisting (in chapter two of Dorian Gray) that identity-
construction never escapes the imbrication of vision and language. The very pres-
ence of the mirror indicates that both the dialectic of identification with the other
and the advent of language have already penetrated the visual primal scene from
which Lacan would dismiss them. They are incorporated within the technology
itself, as voluble as it is silent. Put otherwise: only insofar as B1 is worked upon by
the mirror-as-machine can ‘‘B1’’ precipitate himself as that other-in-himself that Joel
Fineman calls the ‘‘ ‘alibi’ (alius abi, or ‘elsewhere’) of subjectivity.’’29 In Wilde’s fa-
ble, that alibi assumes the form of a portrait-as-mirror: ‘‘It is the real Dorian Gray
—that is all.’’ Wilde thus insists that the subject generated within and through this
reflexive process arrives double-crossed as nothing less than its own rhetorical fig-
ure, say chiasmus: first a specular crossing of person into image, then a reverse
crossing of image back into person, not to mention the physical crossing of light
rays that inverts the image in relation to its object-source. Still, there is a compensa-
tion within this double-cross. In sponsoring a fantasy of seamless mimesis (‘‘Am I
really like that?’’ / ‘‘Yes, . . . just like that.’’), the mirror inducts the subject into a
theoretically open-ended series of motivated visual repetitions. Like Dorian inter-
posing himself between mirror and portrait, ‘‘B1’’ will hereafter enjoy a future of
fervent, even bewildered looking. Just as the initial alienation of person into image
produced an external repetition (B2) that in turn enabled an internal one (‘‘B1’’), so
conversely will every subsequent look at the mirror repeat and extend the unending
labor of psychogenesis and subjectivity.
Second scotoma: to fail to see (and Lacan sponsors this failure) that the image
projected by the mirror represents a fantasy of ego-bildung as pure male frontality.
Lacan does not overtly emphasize the boy’s genitality here. But then he need not,
since the penis has already been phallically sublated, first, into a spinal erection
facilitated by the capable hands of the mother and, second, into the boy’s soon-to-
be obsessional gaze, for the development of which M1 is also serving as a crack
personal trainer. Yet there is a fundamental erasure or ‘‘castration’’ in Lacan’s visual
allegory. The backsides of both person and machine have been ablated here. In the
case of the mirror this backside is comprised, as I have already indicated, by the
tain itself, opaque and metallic, which blocks the movement of light so as to project
a picture-show back toward an image-happy eye. As two-dimensional as any paint-
ing or photograph, and altogether more fleeting, this image nonetheless conveys a
compelling illusion of depth—a highly tendentious reality-effect—even as it ob-
scures the tain; or rather, because the tain has been obscured by the very construction
of the mirror. The tain is thus both ‘‘in’’ the mirror and ‘‘of ’’ it—no tain, no reflec-
tion—but it is banished from the reflected image so profoundly that the tain com-
prises, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s figure, the ‘‘optical unconsciousness’’ of this
image-throwing machine.30 This structural repression of the tain finds its subjective
counterpart in the imagistic ablation of the back and buttocks and all of the associ-

ated darkness, anal or otherwise, that is always waiting behind us, not least because
we have left it there. Within this absolutely frontal ontology, then, the image I am
calling B2 (baby in the mirror) authorizes a fantasy of personhood relieved of all
back-door (if not rear-window) functions, a personhood therefore massively re-
pressed and discordant with his ‘‘own’’ body. Given Lacan’s psycho-technical map-
ping of his morass, in other words, B1 must keep his rear well behind him—no more
ass—if he is to be reborn as the jubilant masculine replicant ‘‘B1’’ ‘‘over there,’’ in
the fantasy space his mother first presents to him.
Third scotoma: ‘‘B1’’ ’s visual reception of B2 as distinct and separate from M2
implicitly erases the physical support that M1 so helpfully provides for B1, who re-
mains hopelessly ‘‘sunk in motor incapacity.’’ Even as this child jubilates before the
image B2, he is being held up (from behind) by M1, his vertical competence entirely
a function of the maternal supplementation that his enthusiasm over B2 is encourag-
ing him to forget. (Theoretical corollary: the Law of the Father, however hard-fisted
its impositions, is always most subtly conveyed by the Loving Hands of the Mother).
Without this visible but unvisualized prosthetic assistance from M1, little B1 would
simply crash to the floor, if not exactly falling to pieces, then nonetheless prostrate
and abject, maybe even squalling. Unable, in any event, to appreciate the spectacle
in which he, like Dorian, plays chief luminary to his own star-struck audience. So
within this extremely touching relationship, M1 functions as a kind of human pros-
thesis, very much in the scene but not at all present in ‘‘B1’’ ’s incorporation of his
‘‘own’’ reflection. Virtually unthought by Lacan, this work of prosthetic centering
alone enables the mirror scene to unfold before B1’s utterly bewitched eyes. And as
Kaja Silverman has insisted, the maternal prosthetics here are not simply manual
but audiovisual as well. Silverman astutely insists that the mother’s supplementary
look ‘‘superimposes the structuring reflection upon the child, and so makes possible
the child’s identification with what it can never ‘be.’ ’’31 In rejecting Lacan’s dis-
avowal of ‘‘social determination,’’ Silverman’s revision implies that the ‘‘primordial
form’’ of the I is indeed ‘‘objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other’’
(‘‘MS,’’ 2): a dialectic that here presupposes ‘‘B1’’ ’s constitutive severance from the
mother who is nonetheless supporting his body while also sponsoring his optical
fantasy of self-sufficiency. Nor can this effect of superimposition be restricted to the
visual order alone, since no doubt the coordination of the two looks, mother’s and
child’s, requires in turn the intercession of language, effectively an induction into
the order that Lacan would later call the Symbolic. Such a scene does not unfold
in silence. Close ears have heard M1 paraphrasing Basil: ‘‘Look, that’s you over
there . . . you are just like that’’ (DG, 153); and closer ones still have heard Lord
Henry concur while whispering into the boy’s bewildered ear: ‘‘It is the real Dorian
Gray—that is all.’’
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III
‘‘Is there three of ’em, then?’’

—Charles Dickens, Bleak House
The shadow of Dorian Gray falls upon persons as well as texts, and reve-
nant Dorians have walked the earth. In the first decades of the century following
Dorian’s death, for instance, one of his aspiring avatars could be found night-
clubbing in New York City, sometimes resplendently attired in ‘‘satin corsets [and]
low-cut evening gowns . . . donned on gala nights to display his gleaming shoulders
and dimpled, plump, white arms. Thus arrayed, [‘Dorian’] bantered, he would be-
witch even me, now so impassive, until I should throw myself, in tears of happiness,
into his loving embrace.’’32 On other, less formal evenings ‘‘Dorian’’ could be heard
cultivating his vocal talents in the seclusion of an off-Broadway piano-bar, where a
select audience would thrill less to the ‘‘limpid, treble purity’’ of his singing voice
than to his always breathtaking ‘‘lips, coral red, [and] parted incessantly to reveal
the glistening pearliness of his teeth.’’ A member of that audience recalls the scene:
‘‘One evening [‘a young surgeon, having read my copy of Psychopathia Sexualis’] convoyed
me to several of the cafés where inverts are accustomed to foregather. These trysting places
were much alike: a long hall, with sparse orchestra at one end, marble-topped tables lining
the walls, leaving the floor free for dancing. Round the tables sat boys and youths, Adonises
both by art and nature, ready for a drink or a chat with the chance Samaritan, and shyly
importunate for the pleasures for which, upstairs, were rooms to let. One of the boys, sup-
ported by the orchestra, sang the ‘Jewel Song’ out of Faust. His voice had the limpid, treble
purity of a clarinet, and his face the beauty of an angel. The song concluded, we invited
him to our table, where he sat sipping neat brandy, as he mockingly encountered my book-
begotten queries. The boy-prostitutes gracing these halls, he apprised us, bore fanciful
names, some of well-known actresses, others of heroes in fiction, his own being Dorian Gray.
Rivals, he complained, had assumed the same appellation, but he was the original Dorian; the
others were jealous impostors.’’ (italics added)
Excerpted from the 1915 edition of Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, this passage
derives from the autobiographical case history of one ‘‘H. C., American, aged 28,
of independent means, unmarried, the elder of two children.’’ H. C. is here re-
counting but one episode in the much longer narrative of what he calls ‘‘my devel-
oping inversion.’’ The vicissitudes of that development, which include lots of heady
reading, need not detain us here. But an urgent photographic sequence deserves
parting attention:
‘‘I purchased, too, photographs of Oscar Wilde, scrutinizing them under the unctuous aus-
pices of that same emasculate and blandiloquent mentor. If my interest in Oscar Wilde arose
from any other emotion than the rather morbid curiosity then almost universal, I was not
conscious of it.
Erotic dreams, precluded hitherto by coition, came now to beset me. The persons of
these dreams were (and still are) invariably women, with this one remembered exception:

I dreamed that Oscar Wilde, one of my photographs of him incarnate, approached me with
a buffoon languishment and perpetuated fellatio upon me, an act verbally expounded shortly
before by my oracle. For a month or more, recalling this dream disgusted me.’’ (italics
original)
Just as the shadow detained within a photograph may wake to incarnate life within
the precincts of a ‘‘real’’ dream, so too do ‘‘real people’’ step forth as copyists de-
voted to enjoying the ‘‘mimic life’’ they have found imaged in mirrors, photo-
graphs, even naughty books (DG, 245). For this reason alone, the passages adduced
here demand brief critical attention, if only in lieu of full reading and positive clo-
sure. Both passages record genuinely performative and fully embodied readings of
Wilde’s decisive fiction, readings far more responsive to the text’s queer élan than
virtually all of the academic criticism to date. For ‘‘being Dorian Gray’’ here points
neither to individual nor sexual ‘‘identity’’ in any positivist sense, but rather to an
overpopulated impersonation of Wilde’s already performative character, right
down to the parted coral lips. No doubt Wilde, who had himself conceived the
‘‘book-begotten’’ masterpiece from which these passages derive their very self-
conscious life, would have thrilled with wry delight to discover in the ‘‘new world’’
a rivalry of ‘‘assumed’’ identities among ‘‘jealous impostors,’’ each an Adonis in his
own right and each vying less for the deep pockets of that ‘‘chance Samaritan’’ than
for the local honor of being crowned outright as ‘‘the original Dorian.’’ Apparently
too many young men had peered longingly into the uncanny looking glass we call
The Picture of Dorian Gray. Despite ‘‘Dorian’s’’ indignation at ‘‘the other’’ Dorians,
the ‘‘original’’ here can aspire only to be acknowledged as the privileged copy or
authentic substitute. First among the latecomers, he alone would deserve to inherit
the aura of the nonexistent but now deceased ‘‘original of the portrait.’’ But even
so compromised a firstness had already been confounded by the ‘‘real’’ Dorian’s
obsessional practice of specular eros, itself on loan from Ovid. At the busy seat of
identity, then, Wilde discloses image-theft, mimetic proliferation, and the enchant-
ment of the double. As usual, Wilde had been expert in his calculation of literary
effects: ‘‘It is the real Dorian Gray—that is all.’’
No t e s
1. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Different Spaces,’’ in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James
D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al., vol. 2 of Essential Works of Michel Foucault (New
York, 1998), 179. The notion of ‘‘heterotopia’’ or ‘‘other-world’’ that I use in this paper
derives from Foucault’s essay. Distinguishing heterotopia from the more familiar utopia,
an idealized nowhere, Foucault writes: ‘‘There are also, and probably in every culture,
in every civilization, real places, actual places, places that are designed into the very
institution of society, which are sorts of actually realized utopias in which the real em-
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placements, all the other real emplacements that can be found within the culture are,
at the same time, represented, contested, and reversed, sorts of places that are outside
all places, although they are actually localizable. Because they are utterly different from
all the emplacements that they reflect or refer to, I shall call these places ‘heterotopias,’
as opposed to utopias’’ (178).
2. Francesca Woodman, ‘‘Some Disordered Interior Geometries,’’ in Francesca Woodman
(New York, 1988), 89.
3. Throughout this essay, my text of reference is the serial version of The Picture of Dorian
Gray published by Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in July 1890; this sleek and efficient
fable remains superior to the bloated ‘‘novel’’ Wilde published the next year, replete
with talky padding and cautionary revisions. Conveniently, both texts have been re-
printed in Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Donald L. Lawler (New York,
1988), hereafter cited parenthetically as DG within the body of my text.
4. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al. (1732; reprint, New
York, 1976), 98–101; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
5. Wilde’s cheerful reliance upon the Narcissus myth is well advertised in Dorian Gray. Two
sentences should suffice to establish the case: ‘‘Basil, he is a Narcissus’’ (DG, 174); and
‘‘He has leaned over the still pool of some Greek woodland, and seen in the water’s
silent silver the wonder of his beauty’’ (DG, 180). There is of course nothing original
or remarkable in Wilde’s appropriation of Ovid’s fable; echoes of Narcissus are easy
enough to find in Victorian writing, and Wilde often resorted to the fable in text and
conversation alike. See especially the brief parable Wilde published under the title ‘‘The
Disciple’’ in Poems in Prose (1893). Wilde’s success in The Picture of Dorian Gray derives,
at least in part, from the ease with which he cross-pollinates Ovid’s classic tale with the
late-Victorian gothic subgenre of magic portrait narratives (see note 12). For a useful
but very different interpretation of Wilde’s deployment of ‘‘narcissism,’’ see Gregory
W. Bredbeck, ‘‘Narcissus in the Wilde: Textual Cathexis and the Historical Origins
of Queer Camp,’’ in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (London, 1994),
51–73.
6. Cf. Michel Foucault, ‘‘So Cruel a Knowledge,’’ in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology,
61: ‘‘Thus, at the meeting’s surface, on the smooth plane of the mirror, the limit-gesture
par excellence takes form in a momentary pause of delight: laying bare, it masks what
it reveals.’’
7. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer
(New York, 1991), 86–87.
8. Cf. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1987), 103–22.
9. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Language to Infinity,’’ in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 93.
10. Wilde’s intellectual indebtedness extended to ‘‘popular literature’’ as well; see Kerry
Powell, ‘‘Tom, Dick, and Dorian Gray: Magic-Picture Mania in Late Victorian Fic-
tion,’’ Philological Quarterly 62, no. 2 (1983): 147–70.
11. In the two decades prior to Sigmund Freud’s 1914 essay ‘‘Narcissism: An Introduction,’’
the three sexological terms auto-fetichism, auto-erotism, and narcissism swirled together in
a terminological purple haze. Havelock Ellis cites auto-fetichism as the first coinage: ‘‘In
France, Féré, about the same time [1897], gave the name of auto-fetichism to the case
of a girl who was in the habit of kissing her own hand and at the same time experiencing
sexual excitement. All such cases, even if scarcely representing true or complete Narcis-
sism, suggest its presence. We are approaching the point at which the conception [nar-
cissism] began to take more precise shape.’’ One year later, in 1898, Ellis himself intro-
duced his own neologism in ‘‘Auto-Erotism, a Psychological Study’’: ‘‘To complete this

summary of the main phenomena of auto-erotism, I may briefly mention that tendency
which is sometimes found, more especially in women, for the sexual emotions to be
absorbed, and often entirely lost, in self-admiration. This Narcissus-like tendency, of
which the normal germ in women is symbolized by the mirror, is found in minor degree
in some feminine-minded men, but seems to be very rarely found in men apart from
sexual attraction to other persons, to which attraction it is, of course, normally subser-
vient.’’ A year later still, in a review notice of Ellis’s article, Paul Näcke ventured the
German term Narcismus as a ready translation of Ellis’s ‘‘Narcissus-like tendency.’’
‘‘Thus,’’ writes Ellis, ‘‘I seem responsible for the first generalized description of this
psychological attitude, and for the invocation of Narcissus: the ‘ism’ was appended by
Näcke.’’ Of course Wilde’s ‘‘invocation of Narcissus’’ to describe ‘‘a kind of prefiguring
type’’ precedes all of this by seven years at least (DG, 242). See Havelock Ellis, ‘‘The
Conception of Narcissism,’’ in Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Philadelphia, 1915),
3:347–75.
12. In the terms of Ovid’s fable, Sybil plays Echo to Dorian’s Narcissus. Not only does she
die of unrequited love, as does Echo in the fable, but her primary attractiveness to Do-
rian resides in the beauty with which she embodies Shakespeare’s characters and echoes
his language: ‘‘Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my
ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth’’ (DG,
208). The other Echo figure in the text, altogether more enthralling, is Lord Henry,
who repeats the language of Walter Pater to devastating effect. Hence Dorian’s empha-
sis upon the voice of each: ‘‘You know how a voice can stir one. Your voice and the
voice of Sybil Vane are two things I shall never forget’’ (DG, 199).
13. The best account we have of the relation between Plato’s writing and Victorian peda-
gogy is Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1994); see especially the chapters entitled ‘‘The Socratic Eros’’ and ‘‘The Higher Sod-
omy.’’ The Platonic doctrine of ‘‘spiritual procreancy,’’ as Dowling terms it, was most
powerfully advanced by Benjamin Jowett, the famed ‘‘Master of Balliol’’: ‘‘He [Plato]
is fresh and blooming, and is always begetting new ideas in the minds of men’’ ( Jowett
quoted in Dowling, Hellenism, 74).
14. Plato, Symposium, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Huntington Cairns and Edith
Hamilton, trans. Michael Joyce et al. (Princeton, N.J., 1961), 563.
15. In Wilde’s superb short story ‘‘The Canterville Ghost: A Hylo-Idealistic Romance,’’ a
character named Washington Otis uses ‘‘ ‘Pinkerton’s Champion Stain Remover and
Paragon Detergent’ ’’ to ‘‘clean up’’ a particularly recalcitrant blood stain. Oscar Wilde,
The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York, 1989), 196.
16. Wilde, Complete Works, 1175.
17. Cf. Tupac Shakur, ‘‘Can’t C Me,’’ on All Eyez on Me, compact disc (Los Angeles, 1996),
disc 2, track 1.
18. Cf. Lady Bracknell’s incomparable line from The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘‘I did not
know until this moment that there were any persons or families whose origin was a
terminus.’’
19. Plato, Symposium, 560.
20. Dorian’s final sitting in two senses: (1) the portrait is finished, hence no further sitting
is necessary; and (2) Dorian will never again model for Basil’s art. In an ugly counter-
point, Basil will have his final sitting before the portrait when, seated at a table and
appalled by what he sees, Dorian drives a blade behind his ear.
21. In establishing this purely homoerotic triangle, Wilde proleptically dismantles Freud’s
oedipal triangle. The psychogenic work of the oedipal triangle within Freud’s schema
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is to secure heteronormativity within the subject and throughout the socius. At the heart
of Freudian subjectivation lies his notion of anaclitic desire, according to which the
infant’s sexual instincts first lean against (Greek, anaclisis, to lean) or are propped upon
‘‘the vital functions in the service of self-preservation.’’ That is, the infant’s burgeoning
sexual desire, originally polymorphic and undetermined as to object, hitches an easy
ride upon the waves of oral satisfaction that flow from the body of the mother. Hereafter,
according to the logic of anaclitic desire, all subsequent ‘‘normal’’ object-choice in
males will seek to replicate this primal satisfaction, however delusively, by locating sex-
ual objects that are ‘‘just like the girl that married dear old dad.’’ In the case of mistaken
(i.e., homosexual) object-choices, however, the trajectory of anaclitic desire has been
disturbed or deflected into narcissistic desire, according to which the developing male
child identifies with the mother and subsequently takes himself or others like himself as
the objects of his sexual desire. Wilde’s triangular model efficiently dismantles Freud’s
account by altogether dismissing the female from the generative triangle. In effect, Do-
rian’s narcissistic desire props itself or leans upon the imaged model of Basil’s and Lord
Henry’s desire for him. Wilde thus presents a model of male homosexual desire that
dissolves Freud’s distinction between anaclitic and narcissistic types of desire.
22. Throughout Dorian Gray Wilde puns repeatedly upon his own surname, sometimes in
flagrant doublets (e.g., ‘‘secret, wild joys and wilder sins’’ [DG, 226]; ‘‘wild words of
sorrow, and wilder words of pain’’ [DG, 220]), but never more effectively than when he
embeds it as a transitive verb in Dorian’s complaint against Lord Henry’s verbal seduc-
tion: ‘‘ ‘Stop!’ murmured Dorian Gray, ‘stop! You be[wilde]r me. . . . I don’t know what
to say. . . . Don’t speak. Let me think, or let me try not to think’ ’’ (DG, 186). The best
firsthand account we have of such ‘‘bewildering’’ derives from André Gide’s journal
entry of 1 January 1892: ‘‘Wilde, I believe, did me nothing but harm. In his company
I had lost the habit of thinking. I had more varied emotions, but had forgotten how to
bring order into them. Above all, I could no longer follow the clumsy deductions of
others. A few thoughts from time to time, but my clumsiness in handling them made
me give them up. I return now, with difficulty but also great delight, to my history of
philosophy.’’ André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York,
1947), 1:18. Thus did Wilde bewilder young Gide. Throughout this essay I use bewilder
and its variants in this specifically Wildean sense.
23. Foucault, ‘‘Language to Infinity,’’ 99.
24. Sigmund Freud, ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction,’’ in The Standard Edition of the Com-
plete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London,
1953–1974), 14:73. All further references to Freud in The Standard Edition are abbrevi-
ated as SE and given in parentheses within the body of the text.
25. Jacques Lacan, ‘‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed
in Psychoanalytic Experience,’’ in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York,
1977), 4; hereafter this essay will be cited as ‘‘MS’’ in parentheses within the body of
the text.
26. Lacan acknowledges but underplays the complex function of the prop or support within
the scene of self-reflection: ‘‘Unable as yet to walk, or even stand up, and held tightly
as he is by some support human or artificial (what, in France, we call a ‘trotte-bébé’), he
nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support
and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his
gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image’’ (‘‘MS,’’ 1–2). Lacan here, very
much like the infant he is describing, works to forget the ‘‘human or artificial’’ prop
that nonetheless enables the entire event, largely because he wants to construct this

scene as occurring ‘‘before its [the ego’s] social determination.’’ As Kaja Silverman has
suggestively noted, readers tend to restore the maternal prop that Lacan has elided:
‘‘When we attempt to understand the mirror stage we so often imagine the mother
present, not merely holding the child up to its reflection, but facilitating the imaginary alignment
of the child with the reflection. In such an elaboration of this specular drama, the mother’s
look stands in for what no look can actually approximate: the gaze’’ (italics added); Kaja
Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York, 1996), 18.
27. I take Lacan’s deployment of the mirror to be in part a subtle revision and complication
of an idea presented in a footnote to The Ego and the Id: ‘‘The ego is ultimately derived
from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It
may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body’’ (Freud, SE,
19:26–27 n. 1).
28. Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 16.
29. Joel Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release
of Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 185.
30. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Little History of Photography,’’ in Selected Writings: Volume Two,
1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al., trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge,
Mass., 1999), 511–12.
31. Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, 18.
32. Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion, vol. 2 of Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Philadelphia,
1915), 175–99.
136 R           


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Come See About Me: Enchantment of the Double in The Picture of Dorian Gray

Author(s): CHRISTOPHER CRAFT

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Come See About Me:

It had taught him to love his own beauty.

W   D G stands before his portrait, therein to

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John Dryden’s translation underscores the misapprehension that founds Narcissan

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Ovid carefully stages Narcissus’s passage from miscognition (‘‘gay Delusion’’) to

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As part of the well-rehearsed Gothic technology bequeathed to Wilde by his fore-

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To everything which man allows to become visible, one is able to demand:

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‘‘Is there three of ’em, then?’’

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