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"Culture and corruption," murmured Dorian, "I have known something of both."
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I hold that no work of art can be tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or not it be consistent with itself is the question.
-Thomas Wainewright, quoted by Wilde in "Pen, Pencil, and Poison"
Recent genre theory reminds us of just how often our disagreements about the meaning or interpretation of a text are actually debates about how the text should be read, or, more precisely, what kind of text it should be read as. If we are persuaded that a text is indeed an urban eclogue, a Bildungsroman, a Horatian ode, a parody of pastoral, or an example of postmodern female Gothic, we are more likely also to be persuaded of the critic's interpretation of that text's meaning. Thus a critic who interprets Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a modern secular morality play is not so much claiming to have found the meaning of the text as he or she is trying to persuade us to read the text as a particular kind of play. What a text means is inseparable from how it is read, and since we must always read a text as something, genre often asserts itself as a set of instructions, implicit or explicit, on how to read a text. The debate over the genre, and thereby the meaning, of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray exemplifies this protocol of reading.
Dorian Gray1 has always provoked contradictory interpretations, but underlying the disagreements about the work's meaning there has persisted a more fundamental debate about what kind of novel it should be read as. This debate is discernible in the early reviews, though somewhat obscured by the hysteria over the novel's alleged immorality. Reading the novel as an English imitation of a decadent French text, for example, the reviewer for the Daily Chronicle denounced it as "a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents, a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction" (NCE 342-43). The St. James Gazette repeated this attack: "The writer airs his cheap research among the garbage of the French Decadentslike...