Today avatars and simulated selves carry out complex lives online, and we commonly regard such activities as peculiar to the computer age. But are they? In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, writer after writer developed the theme of the Double Life or the Secret Self. Think of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Man With the Twisted Lip” (in which the upper-class Neville St. Clair regularly disguises himself as a crippled beggar to earn money to support his stylish wife and establishment). The famous Victorian sex diary “My Secret Life” and the Jack the Ripper murders testify, in their differing ways, to a similar division between public respectability and private obsession.
“He’s a regular Jekyll and Hyde” remains a description of anyone with two radically different sides to his personality. But Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” may be even more troubling than Stevenson’s masterpiece. Everyone knows its central premise: The beautiful Dorian Gray remains, as we now say, forever young, while his hidden portrait ages and grows increasingly horrifying, a vivid representation of the elegant sensualist’s every sin and evil act. In pages redolent of fin-de-siecle languor and sparkling with bons mots, Wilde’s only novel raises several seriously troubling questions: If one could live a life of absolute freedom, would the result be happiness or a nightmare? How much of our complex selves do we deny or sacrifice to conventional morality? What, most simply, is this book really about?
The Picture of Dorian Gray, An Annotated, Uncensored Edition. By Oscar Wilde; edited by Nicholas Frankel. (Belknap/Harvard Univ. 295 pp. $35)
To Nicholas Frankel, editor of “The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition,” the novel is a lightly coded text about homoeroticism, what Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s lover, famously dubbed “the love that dare not speak its name.” The centrality of the sexual is, Frankel maintains, much clearer in the original typescript, which forms the basis for this edition. Scholars have long been aware that Wilde — responding to reviews that warned of the story’s “uncleanness” — toned down the sexual elements in the 1890 Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine version and added some new plot elements for the 1891 book publication, notably the sentimental chapter in which the actress Sybil Vane gushes to her mother about her handsome but unknown admirer and the scenes late in the novel set in the opium dens and murderous streets of London’s East End.
But, as Frankel emphasizes, the Lippincott editors had already slightly bowdlerized Wilde’s original story, deleting words such as “mistress” and excising whole sentences and paragraphs, making the book 500 words shorter and less overtly offensive to contemporary morality. This Harvard edition of the untouched typescript is thus a necessary acquisition for any serious student of Wilde’s work.
Yet the label “uncensored” is somewhat deceiving, leading a naive reader to think he or she is being given the whole and complete novel, rather than a preliminary (though perhaps artistically superior) version of it. Wilde simply added too much to the 1891 book edition for any other text to replace it as standard, even if some of the later material about crime and poverty seems out of place. Besides, one really does want as much of the witty, Mephistophelean Lord Henry Wotton as possible.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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