Dorian Unbound: Transnational Decadence and the Wilde Archive by Sean O'toole (review)

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• Dorian Unbound: Transnational Decadence and the Wilde Archive by Sean O'toole
• Kristin Mahoney

O'TOOLE, SEAN. Dorian Unbound: Transnational Decadence and the Wilde Archive. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. 170 pp. $94.95 hardcover; $34.95 paperback; $34.95 e-book.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1891) is a novel that can feel at once too legible and strangely obscure. Critics have wrestled with what to do with the novel's conclusion, which seems to transform a Decadent novel into an overly pat cautionary tale, supplanting all the sinister hedonism that preceded with simplistic moralism, leading readers to struggle as to how to bring the text into accord with the movement from which it emerged. The novel's treatment of desire, which famously underwent numerous revisions, manifests in wildly different ways within different chapters, and critics have struggled as well with how to render coherent this unruly thematic within the text. Sean O'Toole's Dorian Unbound: Transnational Decadence and the Wilde Archive provides a way out of some of these challenges, not by simplifying or reducing the novel, but by foregrounding the fragments of which it is composed, the fact that it is a collage arranged from a network of transnational influences. In illuminating what the novel is made from, he also demonstrates the function of these borrowings and adaptations, the manner in which its fragmentation and bricolage disguised the text's queer project, allowing Wilde to avoid the censoring of its representation of same-sex desire and "circumvent dominant ideology" (38).

O'Toole argues that our tendency to see The Picture of Dorian Gray as an outgrowth of Victorian Aestheticism and French Decadence has obscured the broader array of international influences from which Wilde was drawing in his composition of his only novel. In his preface, O'Toole connects this move to place Dorian Gray within a broader transnational and transhistorical framework to recent efforts to "undiscipline" Victorian studies as well as to what has been referred to as "new Decadence studies," which locates Decadence across a wider range of geographic locations, time periods, and media. However, while recent work on the Decadent Movement's global reach by, for example, Stefano Evangelista, Matthew Potolsky, Regenia Gagnier, and Robert Stilling has focused upon Decadence's cosmopolitan networks at the fin de siècle as well as its transnational afterlives in the twentieth century, O'Toole takes a somewhat different tack by disinterring Wilde's international source materials, turning our eyes back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to Irish Gothic, European historical romance, and nineteenth-century American short fiction. This is not a Decadence shading into modernism but a Decadence made from past materials. What is most interesting in all of this is the carefulness with which O'Toole approaches Wilde's allusiveness, stressing that the "glancing affinities" he reveals should be understood in concert with one another, that no single potential source or influence is a "lynchpin to understanding the genesis or meaning of Dorian Gray," and that Wilde creatively [End Page 337] retooled and reused these components, turning them to his own ends (xii, 92). This results in readings that are arranged thoughtfully and carefully alongside Dorian Gray rather than pressed into direct correlation with the novel.

In two of the book's most compelling chapters, O'Toole demonstrates how attentiveness to Wilde's borrowings and allusions illuminates the structure and conclusion of Dorian Gray. The first chapter focuses on the "queer form" of the text, arguing that "sexuality inheres in the novel's formal components" (17). O'Toole asserts that the novel's perceived messiness, its blend of genres and extreme tonal shifts, emerges from the historical conditions surrounding its composition. Rather than indicating the novel's aesthetic failure, this disorderliness and discordance speak to Wilde's deftness in navigating the realities of Victorian censorship. O'Toole provides us with a model of the text's sly project in miniature through analysis of its heady opening scene, which nearly drowns the reader in queer-coded sensuality (the scent of roses and lilacs, tremulous laburnum branches, and cigarette smoke) before a sudden interruption from a foreign aesthetic presence (in this case the...