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Allusion
Explanation and Analysis—Huysmans' Against Nature:
A turning point in The Picture of Dorian Gray occurs when Dorian Gray reads the "poisonous book" sent to him by Lord Henry. Although specific details on the book are vague, Wilde alludes to the notorious French novel Against Nature. Wilde remarks that it has been written in a “curious jewelled style” from the French “school of Symbolists”:
There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner […] The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music […] produced in the mind of the lad […] a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows.
Joris-Karl Huysmans published À Rebours or Against Nature just a few years prior to Wilde's writing of Dorian Gray and was met with immediate public outcry. The novel tells the story of a neurotic aristocrat who attempts to surround himself with an increasingly indulgent world of art and luxury in an effort to escape reality. Some feared that reading Against Nature would contribute to the moral deterioration of the reader, even as critics heralded the book as a major achievement of aestheticism.
It seems fitting that Wilde would reference this book, given that his own story depicts a very similar fall from grace in Dorian Gray’s descent into hedonism. To the extent that Dorian’s ultimate corruption occurs in the aftermath of his reading Against Nature, Wilde’s story may be read as a creative and exaggerated—even satirical—imagining of a world in which the contemporary criticisms of Against Nature were accurate. Wilde’s observations in his preface that there is “no such thing as a moral or immoral book,” but rather simply “well written” or “badly written” books, supports the notion that Dorian’s submission to Huysmans’ ideology is intentionally overblown.
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