The Picture of Dorian Gray: A Portrait of the ‘Wild Reader’

Abstract

Paul Jay claims that we need to pay renewed attention to the aesthetic to address and incorporate everyday experience into our academic discussions. Clearly, at stake here is the opportunity to reconceptualise the symbiotic relationship between literature and ordinary readers. In this essay, I propose a concept that I call ‘wild reading’ through which to understand sensuous, and potentially violent, acts of reading texts, as represented in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The novel repeatedly portrays reading as an act of wild, sensual submission to seductive ‘texts’, as if one were succumbing to the charms of an irresistible lover. I am going to focus on, and analyse, particular scenes in the novel, by means of which I will conceptualise and discuss the notion of ‘wild reading’ as performed by Wilde's characters. Ultimately, I suggest ‘wild reading’ as a useful aesthetic category for our own everyday experience of reading and as a vehicle through which we might understand actual readers’ desire-driven acts of imagination triggered by a seductive text.