“‘We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.’
‘Even when one has been wounded by it, Harry?’ asked the duchess after a pause.
‘Especially when one has been wounded by it,’ answered Lord Henry.”
The characters from The Picture of Dorian Gray in the scene quoted above are talking about romantic experience, but their dialogue is ambiguous enough that it set me thinking about experience in general. How would their endorsement of experience – any experience, and at any cost – apply to the characters in the other novels we’ve read, particularly The Island of Doctor Moreau and Dracula? The characters of the other novels are entirely focused on trying to end or escape their awful experiences, not savor them or milk them for future memories, and they have certainly been wounded by what has happened to them. Much of what renders their experiences so horrible is that they themselves are ordinary people, totally unprepared and unwilling to be thrust into the grotesque worlds of their stories. That is how the horror genre works: it emphasizes its outlandish events by setting against them people you could meet any day. The type of character has become an essential element of the genre.
The characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray, on the other hand, pride themselves on not being ordinary; at being superior to the vast masses of common, boring, good people. Thus they are able to enthuse about the value of experience without needing to qualify that it must be good or worthwhile. Is it possible to imagine them in the worlds of Dracula or Doctor Moreau, or would that genre fall apart if the characters placed in them are scarcely less appalling than the horrors that befall them? I think it would. I think that the ordinary people who populate horror stories are vital to the structure of the genre, since it achieves its effect by allowing the reader to inhabit the minds and fears of the characters – a difficult job if the characters are as bizarre and artificial as those in Dorian Gray.
What about the reverse – if the ordinary men and women of Dracula were placed in the setting of Dorian Gray? There the story’s structure would fall apart as well, because someone like Mina Harker could not work within its artificiality – either she would be treated as a laughingstock by someone like Lord Henry, or she would simply leave Wilde’s world of exquisite drawing rooms. Both in Dorian Gray and in Dracula and Doctor Moreau, genre is dependent on character, and each genre has evolved its own kind of staple character to carry the novel’s story and atmosphere. The ordinary person who stumbles into something awful is undeniably well known in horror, and a quick look at Oscar Wilde’s other works – or at mannered comedy in general – bears out the similarity, and artificiality, of the typical characters. I suspect Oscar Wilde would hate to be told that he had anything in common with Dracula, but the otherwise different genres share reliance on a particular type of character.
The idea of ordinary vs. extraordinary people reminds me of the character- vs. plot-based novel. You could argue that Dracula is mainly plot-driven; the characters are stereotyped and relatively uninteresting, and bizarre events propel the plot rather than the character’s actions. But Dorian Gray has very little plot; it’s a case study, an investigation into a character and its influences. Lord Henry is so artificial that he’s interesting; Dorian Gray’s misdeeds and disintegration are the subject of the novel. Maybe the characters in Dracula are so ordinary because if they were extraordinary, the story would be based on them rather than on the plot and events; similarly, if the characters in Dorian Gray were simply ordinary, the novel would never appear as it is.