Via Andrew Sullivan, an article devoted to Michèle Mendelssohn's recent book on Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and plagiarism. Mendelssohn's basic point that Wilde committed serial plagiarism will not come as news to any vaguely-alert Victorianist; the more interesting part of her argument derives from her contention that Wilde and James were "obsessed with each other." Her account of The Picture of Dorian Gray suggests that she sees it less as a critical rewriting of Walter Pater and more of an engagement with James: "'The critic persuades him to go off and have what I think is a gay life with him. The critic's name is Lord Henry and a lot of the things he says are very similar to what Henry James is saying in his literary criticism. Later, Dorian is almost murdered by a character called James, so there's this Henry/James thing going on.'" I've got some quibbles with this assertion: Lord Henry isn't "a critic," and while there's definitely some homoerotic intellectual seduction at work here--as one might guess from all those photographs Lord Henry later keeps around his house--I wouldn't quite read it as an invitation to a "gay life." (There's no sign that Dorian responds to either Lord Henry's or Basil Hallward's passion for him, and he's actually fairly bemused when the latter confesses his initial fascination; the scene with Alan Campbell is the only time the novel explicitly suggests that Dorian might have taken time out from his usual habit of bedding every woman in sight.) One of the most interesting things about The Picture of Dorian Gray, though, is just how ironic it is about the entire concept of "originality." Lord Henry ventriloquizes Walter Pater/Henry James on the need for absolute originality; Dorian, who is as unoriginal as they come, spends the entire novel justifying himself by ventriloquizing Lord Henry ventriloquizing Walter Pater/Henry James. And when Dorian does cautiously attempt to assert his "difference," by raising the possibility of confession and thus speaking as himself, Lord Henry doesn't believe that Dorian could possibly be a murderer.
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