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UNDER THE SIGN OF WILDE 75
turning it into an empty frame, a vacuous sign. Thus it becomes available as a
site for depositing the model’s “true” identity, displaced through a neutralization
that emerges along with and because of the appropriation of the sign. As Dorian
commits crime after crime, his interiority is reflected by the mutating monster on
the canvas, but his body surfaces, because they now signify only Basil’s desire
purified under the ideal of art, remain unchanging and immortal. So how did
Wilde solve the problem of the pesky, paradoxical presence of the model’s
identity? He simply draped a sheet over it and hid it in the attic.
Situating desire in art, and art on the surfaces of the posed body, was a
peculiarly Delsartean maneuver. In the Delsarte philosophy, the pose was
considered the highest form of art and, more importantly, art was the expression
of desire; therefore, the pose could be interpreted as its highest and noblest
representation. Interpreting Dorian Gray through the lens of Delsarte not only
yields an alternative reading, but provides the logic to explicate the emergence of
the portrait model as the represention par excellence of the desired Other:
because for Wilde, as for Delsarte, art was the field produced by the intersection
of desire and vision. When Wilde asserted that “the basis of life—the energy of
life…is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various
forms through which this expression can be attained” (1889a: 311), he was
rehearsing the Delsartean identification of art as the site in which to inscribe
desire (and in which it could be fulfilled). According to Delsarte, only art had
practical, beneficial, and, more importantly for Wilde, purificatory results for the
expression of desire. Delsarte taught that it was art alone that could fix desire,
giving it permanence, thus potentially stabilizing an identity organized around its
expression by consolidating the various objects of desire under a single ideal
(Stebbins 1902:27). Accordingly, the Delsartean sign could transcend the
physical so that, regardless of its stigmatized grossness, the sexual act could be
aligned with the ideal, freeing Wilde from self-definitional dependence on the
physical presence of the sexual partner.
In Dorian Gray, it is the appropriation of the sign to the surfaces of the
model’s body that stabilizes desire, and which is represented as Dorian’s arrest
of the aging process. Because it is Basil’s desire, not Dorian’s, that is fixed on
the surfaces, Dorian’s body has become the site of a double identification with
both gaze and image, and Dorian’s impetus to action is motivated only by Basil’s
desire. In that case, Dorian’s murder of Basil Hallward marks the final success of
the appropriation of the sign, a success that frees Basil from dependence upon
the Other by literally enacting the collapse of subject and object through a joyous
self-immolation, eliminating the need for a shared subject position.
By composing or reading on an exterior surface, Delsarte believed that the
artist could animate and transform objects so as to mark them with his own
character, to leave behind an imperishable trace of his being on a foreign body:
“It is…by the subjective virtues of this ineffable power that he fixes fugitive
things, gives permanence to what is momentary and actuality to that which is no
[t]. …Thus he lives on “(qtd in Stebbins 1902:27). Because Basil’s desire was