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But I can't travel without Balzac and Gautier, and they take up so much room.
Oscar Wilde, in a letter from Augusta, Georgia
In "The Decay of Lying," Oscar Wilde makes his most sustained attack on the usefulness of realism for the contemporary artist.1 Proclaiming that "[a]s a method, realism is a failure," Wilde ultimately attempts to show that "[IJife imitates Art far more often than Art imitates Life" (303, 307). Wilde's famous equation might seem to be his final word on the subject. However, he was to wrestle with the problem of realism, especially in the dialectical interaction between Realism and Romanticism, throughout his career as a critic and an artist. Although one could make an argument for reading The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) as a realist novel - at least as we usually think of the realist novel as coming from Flaubert, the great Russian novelists, Eliot, and Dickens - a better approach might be to argue that in order to discuss Wilde's only novel one must come to terms with the ways that it fhnctions within the confines of a realism that combines with, e.g., melodrama. In order to write a novel - especially one that would make money - Wilde had to work within me subgeneric confines of some specific variation on the theme of realism.2 As experimental as Dorian Gray may seem, it is yet very much a product of the novel tradition with which one is familiar. Which specific branch of that tradition - and how Wilde positions his novel both within and outside of it - is what I would like to discuss here.
Wilde's views on realism can perhaps best be described as contradictory. Although he takes realism to task in "The Decay of Lying" and seems to move toward a version of formalism in "The Critic as Artist," in his earlier writings he was often in favor of deploying realism for certain artistic and social ends. Wilde's mentor Walter Pater referred to Attic Greece as "an age clearly of faithful observation, of what we call realism. ... Its workmen are close students ... of me living form as such . . ." (Greek Stuthes 301). With Pater, Wilde developed the idea that England's culture should...