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74 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
disappointment in failure to complete the Delsartean operation through
appropriation of that sign. Yet, in choosing the model/poser as signifier of his
own homoerotic desire, the establishment of the subject-object relationship
between the artist and an exterior surface had at least allowed the completion of
the first half of the Delsarte semiotic by constructing the portrait-as-sign.
In what became a completion of the Delsartean operation, Wilde took the
portrait-as-sign which was constructed in “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” and (by
substituting Dorian for W.H. as boy-surface, and Basil Hallward for the narrator
as desiring subject) replicated it in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). In Dorian
Gray, the painter Basil Hallward inscribes his desire onto the posed body of the
young and beautiful Dorian by painting his portrait, thus activating the sign by
using an external gestural display to signify the artist’s displaced interiority. Ed
Cohen has also identified this sign construction:
Within the narrative structure, Dorian is an image—a space for the
constitution of male desire. From the time he enters the novel as the
subject of Basil’s portrait… Dorian Gray provides the surface on which the
characters project their self-representations. His is the body on which
Basil’s…desires are inscribed.
(806)
The artist’s inscription, as it did in “The Model Millionaire” and “Mr. W.H.,”
displaces and eliminates the model’s “true” identity by neutralizing Dorian’s
body surfaces in order to render him as the object of desire. The discrepancy
between the artist’s inscription and the model’s personal identity, that earlier had
provided the means for constructing the portrait as a homoerotic sign, had also
produced a paradox that prevented that sign from being appropriated. In “The
Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” Wilde had trapped himself in the hall of mirrors it
created: in order to establish the portrait as homoerotic sign he needed the
model’s identity, but the model’s identity negated the sign through an
antidialogic turn. In Dorian Gray, he found a way to resolve the paradox through
a remarkably simple and creative maneuver that allowed the portrait-as-sign to
be appropriated to the surfaces of the model’s body.
Dorian, who fears the loss of his beauty and desirability in the process of
aging, prays for and receives a magical transference: his portrait is literally
appropriated to the surfaces of his body. By appropriating the portrait-as-sign,
Dorian’s body reflects only the painted image, thus he will no longer age. This is
not because the painting frames a moment in time, but because Basil Hallward’s
desire—as the signified—has also been relocated to the surfaces of Dorian’s
body as a necessary affect of the appropriation of the sign. With his body surfaces
now signifying only Basil’s interiority, Dorian’s own “essence” (personal
identity) is put under erasure and transferred. Because Wilde conceptualized the
model’s bodily inscription as pastiche, the appropriation of the portrait-as-sign to
the model’s body transforms the material canvas by stripping it of meaning,