Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), that ‘tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents, […] heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction’ (Mason 1971, 65), is a sustained admixture of popular Gothic fiction, caustic social satire and melodrama, combined with Wilde's distinctive verbal wit and a certain aesthetic portentousness. In it the threat and frisson of the Gothic uncanny (the supernatural presence of the ageing portrait; Dorian's own seemingly perpetual juvenescence) and the Gothic arc of the narrative are used by Wilde to interrogate the super-sophisticated surfaces of life in London, the imperial metropolis, at the century's end. Wilde's deployment of familiar Gothic motifs in Dorian Gray should not surprise us, as I shall explain; though the comic and stylistic uses to which he puts these motifs and conventions are distinctive. What is perhaps more surprising, and itself revealing, is that the novel emerges partly from Wilde's previous comic and knowing engagement with the Gothic in his 1887 short stories, The Canterville Ghost and Lord Arthur Savile's Crime: an aesthetic manoeuvre in which his comic strategies slide from the campy to the camp Gothic, recalibrating the genre's balance of laughter and terror.

Prefacing Camp

Susan Sontag's 1964 ‘Notes on Camp’ and its companion piece ‘On Style’ (published a year later) remain among the best and most fertile brief introductions to Wilde's work, as well as to the dandyism which is performed so elegantly by Lord Henry Wotton in Dorian Gray. For Sontag, Camp is a precise mode of aestheticism, one which sees the world ‘not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization’ (Sontag 1983, 106).