Unruly Minds in The Little Stranger and The Picture of Dorian Gray

While discussing the potential of biopolitics to generate a different understanding of gender in the Victorian novel, a genre long dominated by analyses focused on discipline, Armstrong argues that “the novel set about producing…a sense of self embedded in a body that housed asocial instincts and abnormal impulses” (530).  Both of our post-Victorian novels rework this model of a disciplinary self by showing how these “abnormal” desires might arise, not from the body, but from a socially conditioned “mind” or “consciousness.” This reworking of discipline in turn creates subjects that seem to escape both disciplinary and biopolitical forms of control.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian’s “asocial” and “abnormal” behaviors do not seem prompted by embodied “instincts,” but rather by the corrupting influences of art, literature, and his acquaintances. In following Lord Henry’s injunction to “give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream” (21), Dorian must first rely on Henry, and art-objects such as “the yellow book” (119) to instruct him in various modes of dangerous, indulgent, and sinful behavior. Dorian’s crimes are enacted through his body, but they first arise in his socially conditioned consciousness: as Lord Henry insists, “It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place” (21). Dorian’s subjectivity is dangerously undisciplined and out-of-control precisely because the “self” is not invested in curbing the problematic desires of the body, but in creating and pursuing desires of its own.

Dorian’s lack of discipline should, according to Armstrong’s argument, place him among the populations governed by biopolitics. Yet, the unembodied-ness of his desires also makes them impossible to reduce to discourse or statistics. Part of this can be attributed to the interference of Dorian’s supernatural portrait: while Bertha’s deviance is inscribed on her body – in her improperly feminine appearance, her mental disorder, her racial heritage – Dorian’s deviance never achieves the physical expression that would allow for easy categorization of his body and the “self” that it houses. But even if the consequences Dorian’s behavior were made manifest, it seems that many of Dorian’s actions would not find a place in discourse: from the novel’s first publication, reviewers and critics have insisted on describing Dorian’s crimes as “unspeakable” (Lippencott’s review, 217). Within the narrative itself, Basil despairs of being able to comprehend the nature of Dorian’s actions in words: “Before I could [describe you], I should have to see your soul” (146).

While physical desire does have a role in The Little Stranger in Faraday’s courting of Caroline, the novel presents it as a side effect of the relationship rather than its driving force. This bodily desire is not what gets Faraday into trouble. Instead, it is the desires of the mind that impel Faraday to displace the Ayreses from their home. We see his desire for the Hall between the lines throughout the novel. In what he afterward calls a “fit of discontentment,” he spends the night after his first adult visit to the Hall envisioning its inhabitants, its “cool fragrant spaces, the light it held like wine in a glass…” (41, 40). His longing never truly becomes expressed through his body and, in fact, is never fully accepted by his conscious mind. This double displacement of desire occurs through the poltergeist, a “shadow-self” that is “motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away” (389). Like Dorian, one could argue that Faraday’s unembodied desires help him escape from not only discipline but also the grasp of the biopolitical. However, there is also the sense that, because Faraday ends up alone, unlike the happy couple of Jane Eyre, and haunting Hundreds Hall, he has become “the living dead” of population (Armstrong 544). The novel, if not the state, could be said to have deemed him not fit to reproduce.

wc: 643