Verdeurs: Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray, and the Colors of Decadence

Abstract

When Basil Hallward discovers the distorted portrait of Dorian Gray in chapter 13 of Wilde's eponymous novel, he first ascribes the changes to “some wretched mineral poison” in his paints. Although the passage corresponds to the climax of the story, it has rarely been discussed from a chromatic perspective. And yet, color mattered to Wilde as well as to many of his decadent friends. Drawing on the canonical text of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which it revisits from a color perspective, this article explores the literary inscription of new, shifting chromatic materialities in order to shed light on what Théophile Gautier, in his seminal 1868 essay on Baudelaire, defined as the decadent “palette”: “veined with the greenness (verdeurs) of decomposition.”