“The Trees Seemed to Sweep Past Him in Spectral Procession”: Nature’s (Un)sympathy in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

Abstract

Employing an ecological-awareness framework, this article investigates The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) by expanding on a panoply of descriptive scenes, actions, mental attitudes, and allegorical allusions that inform the text. Attention is paid to how Dorian Gray falls prey to a self-deception that, in his greedy struggle for existence and sensory gratification, causes him to ignore his entanglement with an underlying order of things and a networked system of interdependence. By considering himself unique and capable of halting the transformative process of growth, Wilde’s anti-hero goes “against nature” in a broader sense than that envisioned by Joris-Karl Huysmans in his landmark 1884 novel À rebours. The article shows how, as Dorian deludes himself into thinking he can reduce both human and non-human habitats to pliable commodities, a natural world infused with animistic and prophetic forces tends to respond to his deviant behaviour in kind.