Desiring Networks in Dorian Gray

As a novel deeply concerned with attributes – with appearances, associations, material possessions, and influence – The Picture of Dorian Gray invites an understanding of its characters, and particularly its protagonist, as actor-networks. Dorian sees himself as “a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion,” influenced and corrupted by art and literature, by his friends, and by the actions and even the personalities of his ancestors (Wilde 137). If corruption is one of the “action[s]…to be redistributed” (Latour 2) through the actor-networks in the novel, desire is another: Dorian is an object of desire for both Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward, however differently these two characters express it. For me, one of the many interesting questions prompted by thinking of characters (and Dorian Gray in particular) as actor-networks is, what does it do to view an object of desire as an actor-network? How is the desire directed at an ostensibly self-contained object redistributed - or not - to the other entities networked with that object?

One answer that The Picture of Dorian Gray proposes to this question is that actor-networks redistribute the desire directed at one node of the network to other nodes. For Lord Henry, for example, desire for Dorian becomes a desire for knowledge about Dorian’s family history (conceivably, Dorian’s “network of production”). Henry demands of his uncle: “I want you to tell me about [Dorian's] mother. What was she like? Whom did she marry? […] I am very much interested in Mr Gray at present” (Wilde 34). Henry’s uncle obligingly relates a tragic history of forbidden marriage, contracted murder, and death in childbirth, and Henry responds to this story with something strangely like desire: “So that was the story of Dorian Gray’s parentage…it stirred him by its suggestion of a strange, almost modern romance” (37, my emphasis).

The novel also suggests that desire for an object includes a desire to integrate that object into one’s own network of ideas and associations (one’s own “network of production). Lord Henry becomes obsessed with the idea of “influencing” Dorian, imagining that “the most satisfying joy” left to the present (Victorian) age is “to project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment” (37) – an act not overtly sexual, but still strangely intimate, embodied, and penetrative. All the moments in which Henry introduces Dorian to the people, locations, and actions that form nodes in his (Henry’s) own network are too numerous to review here; a memorable example is “the yellow book,” which once exerted its “poisonous” influence on Henry, and which Henry then presents to Dorian (121). Indeed, Henry seems so obsessed with the thought of merging his and Dorian’s networks that he retroactively incorporates attributes of Dorian’s actor-network, such as Dorian’s fiancé Sibyl Vane, into his own: “It was through certain words of his [Henry’s]…that Dorian  Gray’s soul has turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her” (57). For Henry, desire seems to focus not solely on an entity but on an entire actor-network.

But The Picture of Dorian Gray offers a third possible relationship between desire and networks, and that is a refusal, like Basil Hallward’s, to understand an object of desire as an actor-network. Basil’s desire for Dorian hinges on an image of Dorian as a monolithic totality, remarkably unfragmented and unconnected. To Basil, Dorian is a “mere personality” with the potential to “absorb my [Basil’s] whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself” (10). Significantly, Basil is introduced to Dorian Gray by a woman who “quite forget[s] what [Dorian] does” and is “afraid he – doesn’t do anything” (11); Dorian’s lack of attributes is what leads “one [to feel] he had kept himself unspotted from the world” – to which Lord Henry adds, “No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him” (19). Just as Henry is obsessed by the thought of influencing Dorian, Basil is obsessed with keeping Dorian uninfluenced; he becomes “angry” when Henry begins to mention the social circles in which Dorian circulates, and ends by begging Henry: “Don’t spoil him. Don’t try to influence him” (16). Later, as their friendship breaks under the strain of Henry’s influence, Basil confesses to Dorian: “I wanted to have you all to myself” (110). Predicated as it is on a fantasy of Dorian as an isolated and self-contained object, rather than an actor-network, Basil’s desire for Dorian is doomed to failure.

Based on this text alone, I can't propose any over-arching pattern or broad insight that might arise from recognizing objects of desire as actor-networks. I think such a recognition does emphasize the idea that objects of desire are fragmented, not self-contained, and it suggests that desire is necessarily redistributed – though how much and in what ways remains ambiguous – to other entities in the actor-network. I’d love to hear other thoughts on this. In what ways is it useful or productive to think of desire as existing not between subjects and objects, but between actor-networks?