The relationship between commodification and personal value in The Essay - 1

The relationship between commodification and personal value in The Moonstone and The Picture of Dorian Gray - Essay Example The early history of detective fiction is saturated with narcotic drugs. Wilkie Collins was a laudanum addict, and opium circulates through The Moonstone. However, not only there. The constellated concerns of opium, subjectivity, empire, and the Gothic recur frequently in texts throughout the nineteenth century, from Wilkie Collins and Dickens to Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray. Just as early detective fiction is deeply, perhaps constitutively, steeped in drugs, it is also associated with empire, and this connection is constitutive. In this fiction, crime is the dark side of conquest and imperial rule returning to pollute the metropolitan homeland. Exactly these fears and uncertainties about the human self and its coherence in the 1890s are reflected in Oscar Wilde’s treatment of the double theme in The Picture of Dorian Gray, though from a markedly different perspective. Wilde uses the tale of a beautiful young man who is granted his wish to remain young while his alter ego, a portrait, ages, to explore ideas about art and life. The novella derives from Wilde’s interest and commitment to the Aestheticism of Walter Pater and Decadence of Baudelaire and Huysman. The innocence of Gray is framed alongside the morality of the tormented artist, Basil Hallward, who paints the portrait and is clearly in love with its subject, and the irresistibly cynical dandy, Lord Henry Wooton, who teaches Gray that the only proper object in life is the pursuit of beauty. As Gray succumbs to the temptations supplied by Wooton, he is led into a life of decadence, an immorality the signs of which mark his portrait but not his person. On this downward slope of decadence Dorian is able to continue his life of revelry without revealing his murderous deed, but is now driven by another force, his hunger for opium. His name bears significance again here, especially when a woman in the opium den identifies him as "Prince