‘Withered, Wrinkled, and Loathsome of Visage’: Reading the Ethics of the Soul and the Late-Victorian Gothic in The Picture of Dorian Gray

Abstract

As a literary phenomenon, the Victorian gothic manifests itself in fin-de-siøcle literature both as a subversive supernatural force and as a mechanism for social critique. Envisioning the world as a dark and spiritually turbulent tableau, the fictions of the late-Victorian gothic often depict the city of London as a corrupt urban landscape characterized by a brooding populace and by its horror-filled streets of terror. In The Three Impostors (1895), for instance, Arthur Machen offers a desolate, hyper-eroticized portrait of London and its invasion by a chemically altered degenerate race of pagan beings. In one of the more chilling portrayals of London’s citizenry, Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1896) narrates the Devils progress through the city’s ethically bankrupt environs as he searches for someone — indeed, anyone — with the moral strength to resist his temptations. He does not succeed. At the conclusion of The Sorrows of Satan, the Devil ascends the steps of Parliament, walking arm-in-arm with its acquiescent ministers. The characters in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) encounter a similarly troubled London cityscape. In the novel, a desperate and lonely Robert Holt wanders the city in search of lodging only to confront the supernatural insect, metaphor for London’s spiritual vacancy in the form of a giant beetle.