"Fin de Siècle, Fin du Globe": A confession, a question, and one possible answer

"Fin de siecle," murmured Lord Henry. "Fin du globe," answered his hostess. (Wilde 171)

I have to confess that it took Oliver Parker’s Dorian Gray (2009) to show me that something was strange about historical time in The Picture of Dorian Gray. This prompted a realization about the novel that I have never been quite sure what to do with; this post is an attempt to make it productive.

The relationship between The Picture of Dorian Gray and its historical context may seem, at first, perfectly straightforward. As Robert Mighall writes in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, “[the novel] is…a compendium of the beliefs of its period, and an exercise in literary decadence, conspicuous in its exotic and esoterica, and defining the Zetigeist of the so-called fin de siècle” (xxviii). From the “tussore-silk curtains” and disparaging comments about “the Grosvenor” and “the Academy” in the first pages to the “Java parrot” and  praise of “illusion” in the penultimate chapter, the language, anxieties, and material culture in Wilde’s novel seem consistently fin de siecle (5-6; 204). This temporal stasis is bizarre, however, because the events of the novel cover at least twenty years!1  Almost as much as Dorian himself, culture and society in novel seem trapped in the early 1890s, unchanging since the “particular day in June” with which the novel opens, even as decades pass on the calendar (28).

Despite having read the novel several times, I didn’t catch on to its strange temporality until I watched Oliver Parker’s 2009 film adaptation, Dorian Gray. Parker’s screenplay reinforces, by contrast, the strange stasis of the novel by dramatizing the societal and technological changes that Dorian would “actually” have encountered. Over the course of the film, the women’s costumes shift from lace and corsets to shirtwaists, narrow skirts, and sailor collars; automobiles appear in London’s increasingly sanitized streets; and Lord Henry’s daughter (an original character) agitates for women’s suffrage. My own interpretive epiphany, however, came two-thirds of the way through the movie, when a young boy asks Dorian if he has served “in the War” - to which Dorian responds, as any man born around 1870 would, “I was too old.” Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s quintessentially fin-de-siecle character, had just brushed against World War One, the conventional end-of-the-road marker for the Belle Epoque. He wasn’t just moving through time, he was moving across periods. I hadn’t looked critically at time in The Picture of Dorian Gray until the film raised the issue of WWI and with it, the issue of periodization. More precisely: without first being made aware of the narrative’s potential to cross time periods, I hadn’t been able to observe the non-passage of time in the novel.

Judging from a quickly-Google-searched handful of movie reviews, I’m not the only viewer to find WWI significant as a marker of the film's shift in period. This suggests a question: what does my not-entirely-idiosyncratic viewing experience suggest about the ways periodization influences our reading of texts, not only as artifacts "of" a particular period (as in Mighall's description of The Picture of Dorian Gray), but as narratives that themselves depict the passage of time?

Turning to Kates’ discussion in “Against Period,” I suggest that my viewing experience shows that concepts of period remain strong even when a text avoids the fallacy of  “contemporaneity,” or “an immediate simultaneity among all the historical concepts occupying the same swath of time,” one of the “two conceptual schemata” on which Althusser claims periodization depends (Kates 137). Parker’s film actually avoids this fallacy, staggering the emergence of different fashions, scientific inventions (automobiles) and political views (women’s suffrage); however, these emerging concepts did not signal the passage of time as strongly as the one event -- World War One -- conventionally used as a marker to separate time periods. Periodization not only creates a certain view of history in which it is acceptable to treat all the concepts of a given time period as simultaneous; it also generates a kind of reading in which, even where contemporaneity is shown to be a fallacy, the changes that occur over the course of a period do not appear as significant as those that occur across periods. This suggests a critique of period that is more explicitly political than Athusser’s (as depicted in Kates’s article): the issue is not merely that “the period” creates an inaccurate view of history, but that it leads to privileging certain kinds of events – in this example, a war – as more significant or more worthy of attention than others precisely because they mark the boundary between periods. 

What are other ways in which "the period" affects not only what we read, but how we read it?

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1. Dorian is just “over twenty” in the first chapter (13); in chapter twelve, Dorian murders Basil Hallward “on the eve of [Dorian’s] thirty-eighth birthday” (141); by chapter nineteen, Dorian is irritated to find that people are “still discussing poor Basil’s disappearance” (202). I should note quickly that I’m not in any way “blaming” The Picture of Dorian Gray for its odd relationship to the passage of time; Wilde could not, of course, have predicted the events that would occur in the decades after he published his novel.