Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and the Anxiety of Queer Influence in The Picture of Dorian Gray

Abstract

This essay reopens the question of Walter Pater’s influence on 1870s Oxford in general and Oscar Wilde in particular, in order to mark it more specifically as queer influence and to suggest that this question of Pater’s queer influence on Oxford and the anxiety it gave rise to was the motivating idea and primary concern of Wilde’s The Picture of Doran Gray, which restages the Oxford moment of the 1870s in the 1880s to explore the questions “can you really influence someone’s sexual desire?” and “where does sexual desire come from?”. Simultaneously, though less consciously, Wilde works out his own anxiety of queer influence with respect to Pater, symbolically killing off the queer father in a ritual Christian sacrifice that we might take to be the founding murder of modern queer theory.