Author: emarie

John Addington Symonds’s poem “The Valley of Vain Desires” uses natural imagery and metaphors to describe the process of descending into sin, a condition that is figured as a physical location, the “valley of vain desires.” When we look at Symonds’s poem through the lens of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, we see that there is a striking contrast between the way that descent into sin is described. While Dorian is corrupted by the influence of Lord Henry and by the ideas of the book that Lord Henry gives to him, Symonds’s poem depicts temptation and the act of sinning as a natural event. I want to suggest that the two different depictions of descent into sin in Dorian Gray versus “The Valley of Vain Desires” relate to the outcome of each text. In Dorian Gray, Dorian’s corruption by human influence manifests itself in a desire to collect material objects and in the harm that he does to others, and he is undone by his own desire to destroy his soul.  In Symonds’s poem, the speaker and the beautiful youth are drawn down into the valley by the lure of strange fruit and are held captive by its seductive poison, but are then spiritually resurrected. What I think the contrast between the depictions of descent into sin and the outcome of descent suggests is that while being seduced by natural forces, as in Symonds’s poem, is a redeemable offence, falling prey to corruption brought about by other humans and material objects, as in Dorian Gray, is not.

There are several striking parallels between The Picture of Dorian Gray and “The Valley of Vain Desires.” In both the poem and the novel, a beautiful youth is corrupted, and the two youths are both described as possessing classical beauty. In the first chapter of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry likens Dorian to two Greek gods in one sentence. Comparing Dorian to Basil, he says, “I really can’t see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus” (ch. 1). Symonds’s also likens the beautiful youth of the poem to a figure from Greek mythology. The speaker states,

I saw– yea, even now my cheeks are blenched

With thinking of the sorrow of that sight–

A youth Phoebean, whose fair brows, entrenched

With scars untimely, bore the branded blight

Of shame ‘neath withered bay-leaves: his long hair

Once crisped in curls that mocked the morning light

By calling the youth “Phoebean,” the speaker likens him to Phoebus, also known as Apollo, the god sun, light, and knowledge, among other things. The reference to the “withered bay-leaves” on the youth’s head solidify the comparison; in ancient Greece, bay leaves were seen as a symbol of glory and achievement. In both Symonds’s poem and Wilde’s novel, beautiful youths are described as possessing classical beauty.

Symonds’s description of the effects of the fruit is similar to the descriptions of Dorian’s use of opium in Wilde’s novel. The speaker of Symonds’s poem describes eating the “corpse-cold clusters” of the fruit as a kind of oblivion: once one eats the “Flesh-parching poison,” one experiences “pain that was pleasure,” a temporary oblivion. Similarly, when Dorian travels to the opium dens, he is driven by a “hideous hunger,” and the desire to “cure the soul by means of the senses” (ch. 16). Although the effects of both agents of corruption are similar, however, Symonds’s poem describes temptation as a natural force, while Dorian is driven to consume the opium by an idea that he received from human sources.

In Symonds’s poem, the speaker claims that his “feed were led,/ Down the slow spirals of those deadly stairs:/ And I too in my inmost spirit bred/ Desire of that fell fruit.” The speaker’s claim that he was “led” down into the valley by desire for the “fell fruit” indicates that the force of temptation is natural, not generated by humans. In Dorian Gray, by contrast, Dorian is corrupted the ideas in a book that Lord Henry lends him: “The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music… produced in the mind of the lad… a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and the creeping shadows” (ch. 10). Although Dorian also has no control over the effect of the book on his mind, the effect is generated by an object produced by humans, rather than the fruit of mysterious origins in Symonds’s poem.

The difference between the sources of corruption in Dorian Gray and “The Valley of Vain Desires” is the reason for the vastly different outcomes of the novel and poem. While Dorian’s belief in his ability to save his soul by awakening his senses eventually drives him to stab the painting of himself, thus killing himself, the speaker and the beautiful youth in Symons’s poem are absolved by a divine force. The final stanza of Symond’s poem suggests that corruption by natural forces is a forgivable transgression:

From the first fount of Thy felicity,

Through all the ocean where those myriad streams

Commingle, ‘twere an easy task to see

Concorde above the discord of our dreams.

The image of commingled streams suggests that the corrupting fruit springs from the same sources as the divine “felicity” that has intervened on behalf of the corrupted speaker and youth. The words concorde and discord form a syllabic and aural parallel, emphasizing that the two forces that the words represent (sin and virtue) exist in balance with one another. In the universe that the Symonds poem creates, benevolent divine forces stand by to intervene should one fall prey to corruption by natural forces. In Dorian Gray, however, the characters are at the mercy of the corrupting forces of the novel, as they have all been created by themselves.

 

In the final scene of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian determines to destroy the portrait of himself in an effort to also destroy “all that that meant” (212). For Dorian, to kill his portrait “would kill the past, and when that was dead he would be free. It would kill this monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace” (212). Dorian’s resolution to destroy his portrait is a futile effort to alleviate his anxieties about the past, the power of conscious, and ultimately, about the existence of a higher universal design. Dorian’s stabbing of the painting constitutes his final attempt to achieve the pleasurable existence that Lord Henry seduced him with, which Walter Pater describes in the conclusion of The Renaissance as “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself’ (152). However, Dorian is unsuccessful, and Wilde leaves us with a final image of Dorian’s physical body visibly marked with the accumulation of his sins, “withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage” (213). Dorian’s failed attempt to “maintain [the] ecstasy” of the present moment represents the triumph of conscience and morality over the aesthetic possibilities of art.

At the heart of Dorian Gray is the reversal of the physical forms of art and conscience that occurs when Dorian wishes for his portrait to age so that he might remain eternally young. From the moment that the painting first changes to reflect the state of Dorian’s soul, it is evident that the painting has taken on the role of conscience, while Dorian’s now-eternal beauty enables him to realize the purpose of art: “to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake” (153). Initially, the physical separation of Dorian’s conscience, or the painting, allows him to pursue “experience itself,” a life of the senses, quite successfully. However, his portrait, or conscience, continues to haunt him, and his perception of the portrait at the end of the novel indicates that he believes that its destruction will allow him to pursue a sensual life unhindered. In order to continue to embrace the beauty of the present moment, Dorian believes that he must “kill the past,” and kill the “monstrous soul-life” that sends him “hideous warnings” with each transgression that he commits (212). For Dorian, this piece of art has come to represent the anxiety-producing concepts of the past, conscience, and a higher universal design. The portrait now performs the exact opposite function of art; instead of offering the “highest quality” to each moment, “simply for those moments’ sake,” the portrait now simultaneously pulls Dorian backwards towards the past and forwards into an afterlife in which he will surely be punished by his sins.

Dorian’s effort to eradicate the perversion of art that his portrait has become and to reap the benefits of his own existence as a piece of art results in his demise. After Dorian stabs the painting, the initial reversal between the painting and himself occurs once more: the portrait becomes art, and Dorian is marked with the physical evidence of his conscience. This final transformation emphasizes the futility of truly living for the sake of the current moment, and of seeking only experience in itself. As Dorian’s fate indicates, to live such a life would require a separation of the body and soul, and such a separation is not truly possible.

 

“Ah, that wonderful Madam Mina! She has a man’s brain– a brain that a man should have were he much gifted– and woman’s heart. The good God fashioned her for a purpose, believe me, when He made that so good combination” (Stoker 250).

Dr. Van Helsing’s praises Mina’s “man brain” after Dr. Seward informs him about Mina’s role in preparing the individual diaries. Although Van Helsing’s praise registers acknowledgement and appreciation for Mina’s role in compiling information about Dracula, it also betrays anxiety about her intellectual capacities. Considering Van Helsing’s praise of Mina’s “man brain” in the context of the debate surrounding the “Woman Question” in the Victorian era illuminates Van Helsing’s underlying anxiety about female intelligence. Van Helsing attempts to alleviate this anxiety by masculinizing Mina’s intelligence and by emphasizing her feminine characteristics.

The much-debated “Woman Question” was concerned with trying to determine women’s proper place in society, and in the Victorian era, women were considered to be the “weaker sex” in almost every context, including the literary and medical establishments (1061). Although the number of women writers increased drastically during the Victorian era, and women writers were acknowledged for their achievements, women’s writing was also considered to be a type of “brain-work” that “unfitted women for motherhood” (1061). Although Van Helsing is complimenting Mina’s skill in compiling factual information in the quotation above, both Mina’s skill at typing and organizing the information in the diaries and the profession of women’s writing can be considered as a display of female intellect that provoked anxiety about the effect of “brain-work” on women.

Van Helsing both disguises and attempts to alleviate his unease at Mina’s intellect by masculinizing her intelligence. By stating that Mina has the brain of a particularly gifted man, Van Helsing implies that Mina’s intellect is inherently masculine. This particular way of describing Mina’s intelligence also suggests that she herself is not intelligent, but is merely borrowing the trait of masculine intellect. Van Helsing’s qualification that Mina has “a brain that a man should have were he much gifted” also suggests that Mina is appropriating a man’s rightful intelligence. By describing Mina’s intelligence as a masculine feature, Van Helsing implies that Mina’s intellect is unnatural and does not rightly belong to her. His technique of separating Mina from her intelligence allows Van Helsing to both suggest that intelligence in a woman is unnatural and to alleviate that anxiety by separating the woman from her brain.

Van Helsing further alleviates his anxiety about Mina’s intelligence by emphasizing her feminine characteristics, which allows him to categorize her within the confines of a Victorian understanding of femininity. According to Victorian standards, “The ideal Victorian woman was supposed to be domestic and pure, selflessly motivated by the desire to serve others rather than fulfill her own needs” (1061). Van Helsing’s remark that Mina possesses a “woman’s heart” is meant to stand in for all of the attributes of the Victorian ideal of femininity. While Mina “man’s brain” is not fully her own because it is inherently masculine, her “woman’s heart” truly belongs to her as it is an aspect of femininity. By referencing Mina’s “woman’s heart,” Van Helsing reassures himself that Mina is indeed truly feminine. His comment that the “good God fashioned her for a purpose” further establishes that Mina is, in fact, an ideal Victorian woman. The statement implies that Mina exists not as a woman in her own right, but for some higher, perhaps patriarchal, design, and also allows Van Helsing to consider Mina’s intelligence not as an unnatural attribute but part of some divine plan.

Reading Van Helsing’s praise of Mina’s efforts to compile the information about Dracula in the context of the Victorian debate about the “Woman Question” reveals an underlying anxiety about female intelligence. Van Helsing’s description of Mina’s intelligence as a “man brain” suggests both that he views her intellectual abilities as at odds with her gender and that he wishes to separate her intelligence from her gender by masculinizing it. In order to retain Mina within the bounds of femininity, Van Helsing takes the additional measures of emphasizing Mina’s femininity by drawing attention to her “woman’s heart” and by suggesting that Mina’s oddly masculine intelligence is perhaps not unnatural, but part of some divine plan. The variety of measures that Van Helsing employs to normalize Mina’s intelligence is indicative of the widespread anxiety about women’s intelligence and place in society that pervaded British society at the end of the 19th century.

In the context of Ledger and Luckhurst’s discussion of the 1870 Education Act and the issue of “massification,” Conan Doyle’s “The Red-headed League” displays anxieties about education and intelligence through the implicit hierarchy of intelligence visible in the characters’ interactions with one another. As Ledger and Luckhurst state, “The audience for… popular literature was perhaps the first generation to benefit from the 1870 Education Act” (xv). Anxieties about the “lowering” effect that this new expansion of the reading public had on the types of literature being produced were intimately connected to the issue of “massification,” which Ledger and Luckhurst link to the increasing population of the “London poor” (xv). Although Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories could be considered to be included in the newly developing genre of popular literature, they display an anxiety about the consequences of knowledge coming into the minds of the masses. By establishing a hierarchy of intelligence in stories including “The Red-headed League,” Conan Doyle presents a ordered vision of which classes of society should be knowledgeable, reserving true intelligence for the most privileged members of society. Naturally, Holmes resides at the highest level of the intelligence hierarchy, as Watson’s frequent testaments to his intelligence demonstrate, and it is Holmes’s judgement in “The Red-headed League” that deems Clay worthy of inclusion at the upper level: “He is, in my judgement, the fourth smartest man in London, and for daring I am not sure that he has not a claim to be third” (31). Holmes’s statement explicitly reveals the presence of the hierarchy of intelligence that Doyle creates in this story through the numerical rank that he awards Clay, which implies that Holmes holds the full list in his mind. The authority of his “judgement” is sufficient to secure Clay’s place at the top of the hierarchy, and Holmes’s wealth and privileged social position, implied through his ample leisure time, correspond with John Clay’s credentials: “His grandfather was a royal duke, and he himself has been to Eton and Oxford” (33). Through the credentials that he awards Holmes and Clay, Doyle implies that true intelligence is only accessible to the elite. He therefore moves true intelligence out of the hands of many of his readers, who, as the “masses” reading popular literature, will never reach the level of intelligence that Holmes and Clay represent– it is unattainable. Watson is also elevated above the level of the reader. Although he is consistently stymied by the inner workings of Holmes’s mind, he acts as an authority figure by allowing the readers access to Holmes’s mind, and his relationship with Holmes allows him to experience firsthand the power of Holmes’s mind: “I trust that I am not more dense than my neighbours, but I was always oppressed with a sense of my own stupidity in my dealings with Sherlock Holmes” (32). Here, Holmes confirms the implication that Holmes possesses an intelligence that even he, a physician knowledgeable in his own right, cannot hope to possess. However, his ability to relate the events of Holmes’s cases makes him more knowledgeable than the reader– again, privilege allows access to intelligence, even indirectly. By thinking about “The Red-headed League” through the lens of Ledger and Luckhurst’s discussion of the effects of the 1870 Education Act, it becomes evident that Conan Doyle was expressing his own anxieties about “massification” and the rise of popular literature at the end of the 19th century. By creating a hierarchy of intelligence in his Sherlock Holmes stories, in which Watson, the character that the reader is supposed to identify with, cannot fathom the intelligence of Sherlock, Doyle renders true intelligence inaccessible to all but the most privileged.

“You cannot imagine the strange colourless delight of these intellectual desires. The thing before you is no longer an animal, a fellow creature, but a problem” (56).

Dr. Moreau’s use of the phrase “strange colourless delight” to describe the “intellectual desires” that compel him to conduct  his vivisection experiments reveals the underlying unease that he feels about his experiments in vivisection. By his own description, Moreau himself does not fully understand the nature of his own desires, and his ambivalence towards them creates a cycle in which he conducts his experiments in order to get at the “problem” not only of the animal on his vivisection table, but also within himself.

Moreau suggests that he finds his own delight in his experiments both alien and ambiguous with his use of the phrase “strange colourless delight.” Color typically functions as an identifying characteristic, whether it connotes pigmentation or emotion, and its absence makes both objects and concepts difficult to define. So, while Moreau’s delight is colourless, and therefore ambiguous, the word strange implies that his delight is also alien, or other. The simultaneously strange and ambiguous nature of the delight that Moreau derives from his intellectual desires reveals that Moreau himself has difficulty locating or naming what it is within himself that spurs him to conduct his experiments.

The unknowable nature of Moreau’s “strange colourless delight” echoes the “restless curiosity in research” that Arthur Symons notes as being a defining characteristic of decadence (105). Moreau’s frustration about the ambiguity of his delight could be read as its own sort of “restless curiosity.” In the context of this interpretation, Moreau’s “intellectual desires” are focused both on the “problem” of his animal experiments as well as on the “problem” of the unknowability of his delight.

The phrase “intellectual desires” also suggests Moreau’s cloaked anxiety, created in this case by the contradictory nature of the combination of intellect with desire. Desire pairs oddly with the adjective intellectual, as desire and intellect are not words typically associated with one another. The word intellectual is affiliated with reason, while the word desire correlates with lack of control, or perhaps instinct. The phrase as a whole suggests that Moreau’s “intellectual desires,” which push him to ever greater extremes of experimentation, meld reason with bestial instinct, an anomalous mixture that causes anxiety for Dr. Moreau.

If Moreau’s statement does in fact reveal that he, perhaps unconsciously, feels anxiety about how his “intellectual desires” affect him, then his later, more explicit statement about the purpose of his experiments is in fact an articulation of the cycle of anxiety, experimentation, and further anxiety that characterized Moreau’s work on the island. Moreau states, “Each time I dip a living creature in the bath of burning pain, I say: this time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own” (59). In light of the underlying anxiety evident in Moreau’s description of his “strange colourless delight,” I believe that his desire to “burn out all the animal” and “make a rational creature of my own” is in fact an attempt to reconcile the contradictory nature of his own “intellectual desires,” the combination of desire for reason and animal instinct that drive him to conduct his experiments in the first place.

Moreau’s own anxiety about the delight that his partially bestial “intellectual desires” inspire in him connects to the larger anxieties and ambivalences that characterized the late 19th century. If Moreau’s experiments are in fact part of a cycle in which he tries to locate the “problem” within himself in the bodies of his “fellow creature[s],” then it is possible that Arthur Symons’s definition of decadence as “an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity” is a list of the symptoms inspired by the simultaneous anxiety and ambivalence experienced at the close of the 19th century (105). Decadence, then, and the delight suggested by its name, is its own cycle of anxiety, experimentation through “self-consciousness, restless curiosity… over-subtilizing refinement,” and a resulting “a spiritual and moral perversity,” which creates further anxiety necessitating investigation.