The Picture Of Dorian Gray And Bel Ami : A French Connection

In The Book of Five Rings of 1645, legendary Kenjutsu master Miyamotto Masashi wrote ‘Be detached from desire your whole life long…do not seek pleasure for its own sake or let yourself be guided by the feelings of lust or love’. Neither the infamously vain Dorian Gray nor the socially ambitious self-styled Baron, Georges du Roy de Cantel, heeded this sagacious advice. The causative agent acting upon these iconic literary anti-heroes was a decidedly French muse of an altogether different character. In place of Japanese martial strategy as a credo for how to live, we see our nefarious, egocentric protagonists exemplify the quintessential minatory axioms of satirical literary naturalism, aestheticism and decadence. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) and Bel Ami (1885) by Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) are inextricably linked by dint of a fundamental nexus: French nineteenth century literature and its philosophical and literary influence upon both Maupassant and Wilde.

Both novels are for me almost faultless masterpieces, able to entertain and disturb in equal measure. However, each shimmers ever brighter when seen through the prism of reflective interdependence. Profoundly inspired by Maupassant’s work, it is the audacious belief of this reader that Wilde took Bel Ami as his starting point and transmuted it to become his magnum opus. Bel Ami may be seen as the literary garden into which Wilde imaginatively planted his gothic flowers of aestheticism, decadence and paradoxical epigram, exploiting Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1604), as his colourful, but poisoned garden’s organising agency. As with any literary work, intertextuality is of course inextricably embedded either consciously or unconsciously. However, the ‘French connection’ between these two literary gems is, for me, not only detectable, but demonstrably elemental.

Before exploring the literary connectivity posited to directly exist between both novels, it’s worth looking at how their authors tellingly reflect each other. Both ostensibly genteel writers led promiscuous, scandalous and ultimately short lives, each afflicted by syphilis and insatiable, injudicious hedonistic desires. Both adored bohemian Paris in the late nineteenth century. According to H. Montgomery Hyde in his biography Oscar Wilde (1976), Wilde, dismayed at the reception in London of his play Salome, (1893) wanted ‘to settle in France where I shall take letters of naturalisation’. Both participated in and observed a society in tumult as fin de siècle thinking prised the recalcitrant Victorian fingers of moral rectitude and didactic realism off public values and writer’s pens.

Both societal chroniclers employed satire as a barbed literary device, each exploring similar authorial themes, such as akrasia, hedonism, hypocrisy and moral corruption during the same epoch and with a heavy nod to antecedent and contemporaneous French literary masters. Indeed, Wilde procured the works of leading French authors including Maupassant and Emile Zola (1840-1902), from a French book shop in Covent Garden called, ‘Librarie Françoise’. A salacious detail again revealed by Hyde, being that the establishment was also a clandestine purveyor of French pornography, including the dissemination of a homoerotic novel called Teleny, co-authored by Wilde himself!

Both Maupassant and Wilde sought to break free of Victorian puritanism. Maupassant turned to naturalism, as described in my previous piece addressing his canon of short stories. Aestheticism as a movement promoted the culturally antithetical value of artistic, sexual and political experimentation, with an emphasis upon artistic form rather than morality. Charles Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909), himself heavily influenced by French writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Theophile Gautier, rejected the omnipresent convention of poetry having only a didactic purpose. Sexual perversion, cruelty and violence were admirable artistic topics, authors free to offer the reader moral ambiguity and psychological uncertainty. Literature began to wriggle free of its antiquarian bonds.

Walter Pater (1839-94), the celebrated critic and writer, and himself influenced by the French literary canon, wrote Studies in the History of the Renaissance in 1873 and it became the putative manifesto of Aestheticism. Artistic individualism and the authorial exploration of hidden, mysterious motives and desires were advocated. Pater asserted that an individual could only know the world via intense sensory experience, not the objective reality and eternal truths of Victorian convention. This presented writers like Wilde with the encouragement to cast off the yoke of didactic moralism and reject the Christian doctrine per se. I am not sure Wilde needed too much encouragement!

Although poetry was the central vehicle through which aestheticism communicated, in the works of Swinburne, Alice Meynell and Amy Levy, prose forms began to sprout forth. Essayists such as Pater, Arthur Symons, Vernon Lee and Oscar Wilde produced ‘purple prose’. Ornate and elaborate in style, these works were fecund in rich metaphors and densely allusive. For Aesthetics, art did not imitate life; the converse was true. Wilde presented himself to the world and his readers as a living work of art and infamously said ‘I have put my genius into my life and my talent into my work’. He’d later regret this flamboyant boast and perhaps ponder the wisdom of such an expression from behind bars.

George du Maurier (1834-96) caricatured Wilde and Whistler (1834-1903) in the satirical magazine, Punch as the ridiculously fey fictitious poet Jellaby Postlethwaite in an attempt to discredit aestheticism. However, another French wave washed simultaneously over literature on both sides of the Channel. In 1890, ‘decadence’ became a term used to signify the outpourings of numerous French authors including Baudelaire. Meaning a process of falling away or decline, this work was typified by intense refinement, ennui as opposed to hard work and moral earnestness and a characterising interest in perversity, paradox and transgressive modes of sexuality. Arthur Symons described decadence as ‘a new, beautiful and interesting disease’ in his 1893 work The Decadent Movement in Literature.

In France it was associated with the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé and the fiction of Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907), author of À Rebours (1884). Huysmans’s novel traces the moral descent of its protagonist Des Esseintes, an ailing aristocratic obsessively exploring a staggering cornucopia of sensory experiments. The notorious ‘poison book’ given to Dorian Gray by his malfeasant moral tempter Lord Henry Wooton, is widely believed to be a copy of À Rebours. A French book literally corrupts Wilde’s narcissistic protagonist. W.B. Yeats was not immune to the power of decadence, establishing ‘the Rhymer’s Club’ with Ernest Rhys in 1890 as a devoutly anti-naturalist cohort, developing Symbolism in its place. Wilde was familiar with and influenced by these ‘French’ inspired works, his artistic soul infused with their clarion call to aestheticism, symbolism and literary innovation.

Decadence’s most notorious exponent was the artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898). His distinctive erotic illustrations became the cover designs for The Yellow Book, a periodical published between 1894 and 1897. Rather like Lord Henry himself, though the periodical was shocking, it was more amusing than diabolically shocking. That said, Wilde permeates ‘The Picture’ with references to the colour yellow to signify the artistic imperatives of his own fiction. Only Wilde’s trial and fall from grace, with a shove from Max Nordau’s work Degeneration (1890), halted decadence in its artistic tracks.

So, the ‘French connection’ established as a seminal intellectual and artistic zeitgeist directly inspiring Wilde as both a man and a writer, let’s look at how Bel Ami may be seen to be reflected in ‘The Picture’. If you are still with me, my gauche hope is that I’ve catalysed a desire on your part to grab a copy of both Bel Ami and ‘The Picture’ and delight in finding the delicious connections for yourself. At worst, a diverting experiment in extrapolation and at best, scintillating fun, yielding insights into both books which only render their reader even more captivated. On the basis that you may need further convincing before taking up my enthusiastic suggestion, I will share a few of the more obvious ones.

Thematically, both novels explore an almost identical smorgasbord of ideas. These include personal and societal corruption, the dichotomy between appearance and reality, moral degeneration, power as exchanged between men and women, hedonism, mortality, injustice, deception and the force of life as an imitation of art. Welding Maupassant’s inveterate pessimism to Wilde’s capacity for invidious, but entertaining cynicism, a plethora of historically sacrosanct conventions are lampooned or ruthlessly undermined. These include fidelity, love, marriage, aristocratic morality, religious faith, personal integrity and sexual propriety. Fear not, Indolence, materialism and vice per se are not overlooked. Bel Ami’s polysemous strands form the thematic fabric with which ‘The Picture’ is woven into a metropolitan gothic tale which visits all these motifs as they orbit its central theme of self-actualisation and moral depravity.

Both novels employ an omniscient narrator describing events in the same epoch and a similar contextual setting. Both protagonists share the characteristics of each other, namely Adonis-like good looks, corruptible personalities, a nefarious appetite for sensory pleasure, a capacity for monstrous violence, a profound fear of death, the ability to employ charisma in pursuance of ambition and a self-conscious disregard for conventional morality. Both are ostensibly young men indulging their darkest desires in a society riddled with hypocrisy and moral decay.

Both have the authorial licence to achieve their every whim, deus ex machina regularly employed to keep them safe from misadventure. Both centre their plots upon one character’s ineluctable journey into decadence and moral degradation. Both characters achieve their iniquitous objectives by dint of their looks and willingness to, at best, obtrude upon those around them and, at worst, perfidiously destroy the flies they catch in their diaphanous, self-serving webs. Georges Duroy can be seen as Dorian Gray without the latter’s supernatural agency, philosophical complexity or aesthetic depth.

Both are only ever ephemerally satisfied, suffering more in the pursuit of pleasure than ever finding eudaimonia, or indeed release from the fetid addiction they share for vainglorious power. ‘I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure’ says Dorian. Georges echoes this by endlessly searching for the, ‘path he could scale the heights on which one finds respect, power and money’. Dorian is by far the more despicable of the two, the more murderous and fiendishly nihilistic save for his adoration of sensory delight, but they are kindred souls none the less.

Symbolically, both novels develop their dramatic power from portraits. Georges depicted as Christ himself and like the painting, literally worshipped, despite his shambolic disregard for morality. Dorian’s relationship with his own portrait is of course a desideratum of the plot’s success. Mirrors are also extensively employed to expound authorial perspectives on personal integrity, self-awareness, duplicity and alluring superficiality. George’s reaction to his own image dressed in black tie foreshadows Dorian’s first reaction to Basil Hallward’s portrait of him, ‘A look of joy came into his eyes as if he had recognised himself for the first time’.

So, two marvellous novels sharing a very ‘French connection’ and need I say that both remain as joyously unsettling and enjoyable as the day their masterful authors gave vent to their inner demons and French souls!