The Utopian Aestheticism of Oscar Wilde?s The Picture of Dorian Gray
and Gertrude Stein?s Thre Lives
by
Linda Maureen Gordon
A disertation submited to the Graduate faculty of
Auburn University
in partial fulfilment of the
requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Auburn, Alabama
May 7, 2012
Keywords:  utopia, aesthetics, Wilde,
Stein, C?zanne, individualities
Approved by
Jonathan Bolton, Chair, Profesor of English
Jeremy Downes, Profesor of English
Christopher Keirstead, Asistant Profesor of English
Cathlen Giustino, Asociate Profesor of History
ii
Abstract
This study reads Oscar Wilde?s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891) and Gertrude
Stein?s Thre Lives (writen 1905, published 1909) through Paul C?zanne?s radical aesthetics of
surface, and is grounded in H. G. Wels? radical acount of utopianism as the ?interplay of
individualities.?  The utopianism of Wilde and Stein derives from their aestheticism.  Wilde?s
writing recapitulates the tension in aestheticism betwen totalistic and pluralistic impulses, and
Stein?s literary stres on surfaces extends C?zanne?s aesthetics that treats each surface as a
recalcitrant individuality.  This study explores the emergence of images of individualities whose
stres on surfaces resists reduction to any final asertion.  At the turn of the ninetenth century,
C?zanne?s pictorial art breaks down the Renaisance perspective?s distinction of figure and
ground, while Wels? utopianism aserts the interplay of individualities and implies a critique of
totalization.  The disruption of totalizing form moves thought from a model of reconciliation and
unity, in which the ?idea of one? is contested.  In their portrait metaphors and techniques, Wilde
and Stein aly themselves with Wels? figuration of utopia as an ever-inventive proces, thus
placing their narratives in the critical context of twentieth century novel theory of Mikhail
Bakhtin that critiques monologism, and occupies a position similar to the anti-totalizing ethics of
Derrida, Adorno, and Levinas that affirm difference, individuality, and Other.  The utopian
narratives of Wilde and Stein break from the monolithic explanations sought by other early
modernists, who sek to return to an old Eden rather than turn toward an ever-unfolding world.
iii
Acknowledgments
I thank and am grateful to Dr. Jonathan Bolton for his support of and faith in my
disertation ideas and their development, and to Dr. Jeremy Downes, Dr. Christopher Keirstead,
and Dr. Cathlen Giustino for their ready wilingnes to read and thoughtfully respond to my
disertation work.  My special appreciation to Christopher Newport University?s English
Department Chair Dr. Jean Fileti and Dean of Arts and Humanities Stephen Breese for a
generous grant award and former Provost Richard Summervile who supported my continuing
work.  I am especialy grateful to my three children, Teresa, Anthony, and Alan Teravainen, for
their continued, enthusiastic encouragement that has been a continuing source of inspiration.  On
the long course of my disertation writing, I have been especialy thankful for the steady
companionship of Phrog, my dog.  To more than anyone, I am grateful to Douglas Kirke Gordon,
my husband, whose love, encouragement, and support has helped me se this project to
completion.
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Table of Contents
Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ii
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ii
Chapter One: Art, Literature, and Utopia in Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Chapter Two: Wilde Stands Uneasy:  Individual and Aestheticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34
Aestheticism and the drive toward wholenes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Aestheticism and Wilde?s uneasy contemporary readers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41
Wilde?s uneasy stance:  utopian aestheticism and subversive individualism . . . . . . . . . .45
Artist-critic and a new work of art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Wilde utopian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Portraiture and Wildean aesthetic individualism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Chapter Three:  The Utopian Composition of Thre Lives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .87
The simple, ugly truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .92
Composition and utopian methods:  expanding C?zanne and Wiliam James . . . . . . . .101
James, C?zanne, and Stein in Portraiture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .120
Humors:  narrative fluidity of Thre Lives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .134
Chapter Four:  Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .140
Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
1
Chapter One:
Art, Literature, and Utopia in Context
Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fil it with new forms, and give it
progres, and variety and change.  Oscar Wilde The Critic as Artist 1058
I shal not speak for anybody.  I shal do my duty.  I shal establish that mile.  I shal choose wonder.  Be
blest.  Gertrude Stein ?Pink Melon Joy? Geography and Plays 374-375.
As Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Stein indicate, art and literature are the places of change,
places that reveal the human capacity to conceive of something beter.  In this context, art and
literature play a vital role in the development of the nature of our lives.  As Wilde argues,
aesthetics fil life ?with new forms.?  As Stein indicates, to choose is to ?Be blest?; art is the
place for world constructing, not for mere recollection of what exists.  The human capability to
conceive of the ?new? produces the utopian imagination that develops alternative perspectives to
help us rethink our existence.  In art the utopian imagination reaches toward an ideal:  ?I shal
choose wonder.? But to achieve an ideal, ?to establish that mile,? is not to be fulfiled
permanently.  Fulfilment is temporary, even momentary: to ?make life lovely and wonderful,?
as Wilde writes, is to ?give it progres, variety, and change.?  To stay in utopia represents the end
of utopia: utopia is a place to reach and recreate:  ?I shal not speak for anybody.?
2
?I agree that two times two makes four is a splendid thing; but if we?re going to lavish
praise, then two times two makes five is sometimes also a very charming litle thing,? the
underground man contends in Fyodor Dostoevsky?s Notes From Underground (1864) (1325).
Dostoevsky?s main target appears to be the utopian optimism of Nikolay Chernyshevsky?s novel
What is to Be Done? (1863), a social vision based on scientific positivism and enlightened self-
interest. The underground man?s comment broadens the perspective, however. The ?very
charming litle thing? of ?two times two makes five? reveals fault lines in the comprehensive
view provided by the image of the formula ?two times two makes four.?  Dostoevsky doesn?t
replace the ideal unity of two times two makes four but argues for another view, in dialogue with
the other.  Notes simultaneously contests represive totalities that pres individual experience
Underground and signals something other than the unified concepts of identity that, historicaly,
complement such constructions. In totalizing, harmonious images of unity betwen society and
individual, order and disorder, inteligence and sensuousnes, what is lost, Dostoevsky?s
underground man argues, ?preserves for us what?s most important and precious, that is our
personality and our individuality? (1322). Dostoevsky?s Notes, caled ?probably the most
important single source of the modern dystopia? (Morson 130), portrays the loss of individual
freedoms and human personality under controlling, synthesizing universal systems that atempt
to unite al humankind in a single form of expresion. Such systems exclude the unruly desires
and particularities of individuality, ?al of life?s itches and scratches? (Dostoevsky1321).
From his position, the underground man argues that ?al utopian schemes sem to him
devices to lure us into the yoke of slavery,? a stone thrown at the utopianism that could be
represented by London?s Crystal Palace, an optimistic symbol of a perfectly rational ?ant heap?
(1305).  Dostoevsky does not merely portray a ?sick man? railing against a rational world that
3
cannot admit difference and indeterminacy.  He exposes cracks in a utopian image of
harmonious, unified image.  For the underground man, the term utopia defines totalizing
systems: al represive totalities, social, political, or aesthetic that desire a single form of
expresion that dominates, underlies, or expreses such designs.  By the turn of the century, the
artistic innovations of early modernist writers and artists chalenged such totalizing cultural
foundations.  Exploration of such modernist decentering is extended in Karen Jacobs? study The
Eye?s Mind, in which she explores the changing relations betwen the traditionaly disembodied
subject and its subjected other in the context of modernism?s changing visual culture (4).  The
dominating, traditionaly disembodied subject?s relation with the other is a relation of
totalization, a suppresion of the individual experience of the Other.  Modern rejection of the
authority of the central image opened space for ?those Others who had been historicaly
conceived as cultural bodies or objects? and whose experiences, like Dostoevsky?s character, had
been confined ?underground.?  Exploring vision?s role in the ?unfolding narrative of modernity,?
Jacobs notes that ?Cartesian perspectivalism is characterized by a monocular, disembodied,
objective, and ahistorical vision. . . . [t]aking its bearings from art and philosophical history and,
specificaly, from chalenges to Renaisance notions of perspective and Cartesian ideas of
subjective rationality? (7). Turn of the century pictorial art chalenged perspectival objectivity
and a movement from foreground to background, and modernist literature atempted escape from
the detached, neutral observer that dominated linear narration, beginning, middle, and end.  The
refusal of depth, ?the freighting of things with meanings,?
 
and the consequent bringing to the
surface of things is, as Charles Taylor explains in Sources of the Self, ?to make the particular
thing come alive before us? and to ?retrieve genuine experience? (466-67).
4
The problem lies, however, in how meaning is made through the images at the surface of
things.  Ezra Pound?s emphasis on the ?hard-edged presentation of the thing, its clear
delineation? totalizes an ?Image? presented in ?an intelectual and emotional complex in an
instant of time.?  Pound?s aesthetic presentation of a clearly delineated, enclosed ?thing? directly
opposes Oscar Wilde?s earlier modern directive in Dorian Gray ?to destroy the thing? (172).
Early twentieth century modernist literature explores the changing relations betwen traditional
?represive totalities of meaning? (Taylor 478) and the individual experiences that such totalities
cannot alow. What ?defines the succes of modernism,? Richard Shiff contends, ?is its standard
of individual ?quality,? rather than some standard quality to which it aspires? (66).
This study explores the emergence of new images of individualities whose stres on
individual surface resist reduction to any final asertion, as represented in Oscar Wilde?s The
Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891) and Gertrude Stein?s Thre Lives (writen 1905, published
1909).  It does so primarily through an engagement with and in relation to two related cultural
innovations contemporary with the two texts, the radical utopianism of H. G. Wels? A Modern
Utopia (1905) and the late ninetenth century disruptive, new pictorial language of Paul
C?zanne?s pictorial art.  At the turn of the century, C?zanne breaks down Renaisance
perspectivism?s distinction of figure and ground.  Wels? utopianism as ?individualities? implies
a critique of totalization.  Oscar Wilde undermines unifying tendencies of traditional
aestheticism, and Gertrude Stein develops a literary version of C?zanne?s pictorial techniques
that disrupts narrative unity and yields an image/dialogue. Each moves thought from a model of
reconciliation and unity: single point perspective in visual art; stasis, totalization in utopian
thought; controlling image or ruling myth in narrative and literary criticism.  In other words,
5
these texts contest the idea of one.  If the idea of one is no longer useful to describe the way
things are or ought to be, then how artists, writers, and thinkers configured the parts matered.
Wels, C?zanne, Stein, and Wilde configure their works similarly but with differences, and their
schemes may be described in Wels? utopian terms as ?interplay of individualities.?  In their
model of interplay of individualities, meaning is created in interaction, betwen parts?different
points of view, different ideas, and different forms.  In a model of unity, things are more
confined or fixed; in a model of interplay of individualities, while there is uncertainty, there is
also opportunity for difference, movement, and growth.  The boundaries, therefore the
possibilities, change.  Because different kinds of interactions can take place, change occurs.
Something new can be produced.  Also, in a model of interplay of individualities, there is no
authority of one idea, but the model alows recognition of others, or other things, outside of the
usual privileged things.  This alows for a different kind of communication, a different way of
living.  In Wels? utopian terms, emancipation is not merely from habit, custom, the way things
have been done, but liberation of thought, or voices, from any suppresive or totalizing structure,
in a utopian scheme of individualities in interplay.  Historicaly, the perspective ?picture?
constructed acording to a single viewpoint has been correlative and complement of subjectivity
itself.  Likewise, the image of interplay reveals a change in how the individual self is created.
Self may be formed in relation to the proceses by which art is made.  In the model of interplay
of individualities, a self may be formed not only through the self?s own consciousnes of the
world, but the self is formed through interplay with others.  There is not a reconciliation or
alignment of self or of self and other, subject and object, subject viewer and outside world.  The
self does not live life for a totalizing ideal; through relationships with others self is developed.
6
The structure of Wilde?s and Stein?s narratives appears to resemble the literary tendency
to develop a pictorial analogy.  Rather than an ilustrated likenes, however, the narratives?
pictorial-literary structures develop in dialogue form that values difference and exchange.
Aesthetic efforts have traditionaly tended to balance and reconcile the confrontation of opposing
forces.  In the narratives of Wilde and Stein the structural interplay of pictorial art and literature
develops and engages opposing forces, thus creates new meaning.  The difference lies in the
referential function.  Rather than a paradoxical status as sign of reality and a thing in its own
right, their narratives portray an ?unreality? that paradoxicaly refers to a larger social project.
More than a juxtaposition of parts, their narratives develop a dialogue of parts; individualities
interplay.  Their other, unreal reality sets them outside conventional structures of identification;
the ?other? in dialogic exchange with what exists returns their referential function to social
existence.  Their narratives can be understood in relation to the notion of ?diversity of
differences? (Schoolman 3-4):  compositions that contest
cognitive strategies that render the unknown world known by representing it in
ways that identify only those elements each thing belonging to it shares with
everything else, while omiting those qualities which differentiate them.  Each
thing, unknowable in-itself and esentialy different from thought?s every
representation of it, and thus different from everything else represented in thought,
is represented in terms of its commonalities with other things, through which it
appears to be the same.
Wild?s and Stein?s narratives understood in relation to the notion of ?diversity of difference?
places the narratives in an ?outside? position that alows for the constitution of ?other? realities
for individual and cultural change.  In their capability to project other realities, the narratives
7
transgres a modernist form T. S. Eliot would cal the ?mythological method,? a method to
control and order, ?the imense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history?
(27).
Dorian Gray and Thre Lives develop and engage opposing forces that create new
meanings through pictorial art and literature in interplay. Rather than an ilustrated likenes of
the painting-literature analogy that Henry James advocates in ?The Art of Fiction? (1884), the
interplay of the pictorial-literary proceses of these narratives resists aesthetic efforts to balance
and reconcile the confrontation of opposing forces.  Wilde and Stein, instead, develop the
implications of C?zanne?s dynamic view of painting for their literary art.  Their narratives are not
a direct reflection of C?zanne?s techniques, but show how the dynamic and active nature of
C?zanne?s pictorial language of recalcitrant surfaces could give expresion in literature.  They
stres not the way narrative reflects social life, but rather the way literary versions of C?zanne?s
surface aesthetics can disrupt the authority of controlling idea and liberate the other, individual
elements of experience, alternative voices and points of view, that had been subsumed to
narrative styles of aesthetic ?wholenes.?
The narratives? turn from an aesthetic preference for unification toward difference and
exchange more closely resemble the free play of different value systems and individual
viewpoints of Mikhail Bakhtin?s dialogic form. The images emerging in these two narratives
have some affinity with the modernist poetics of juxtaposition, the term Charles Taylor, Roger
Shatuck, and others setle on to ?convey the idea of how the parts of a modern work of art are
put together? (Taylor 466).  Shatuck notes that the ?twentieth century has addresed itself to arts
of juxtaposition as opposed to earlier arts of transition? (qtd. in Taylor 466).  The images of
Wilde?s and Stein?s narratives relate to the term juxtaposition in the tensions betwen
8
individualities. Wilde and Stein would, however, oppose unifying efforts, such as Pound?s
Imagist demands of ?an intelectual and emotional complex,? that draw difference into one
?instant of time.?  The narratives? individualities engage opposing forces in interplay.  Dorian
Gray is, in part, a playing among the parts of Wilde?s critical ideas; for Wilde the continuing
interplay of personalities, in art and criticism, is vital.  Stein?s Thre Lives, writen under the
influence of C?zanne?s new idea of composition that ?each thing was as important as another
thing? places in question Pound?s Imagist rule ?to use absolutely no word that did not contribute
to the presentation? that reduces possibilities in literature, language, and life.
Wilde?s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Stein?s Thre Lives initialy fail criticaly
because they preserve the ?itches and scratches? of individualities.  But their succes ultimately
relies on a critical reception of the individualities of multiple value systems and individual points
of view these two narratives keep in play.  ?Art is Individualism,? Wilde argues in The Soul of
Man Under Socialism, ?and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.  Therein lies
its imense value.  For what it seks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny
of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine? (1091).  Wilde?s late ninetenth
century desire for aesthetic disruptions is more familiar to twentieth century readers, schooled in
Bakhtin?s and Roland Barthes?s pluralities of texts.  Bakhtin?s readings of Dostoevsky?s novels
as a new dialogic form that resisted unification promotes the idea that literary texts may be
multileveled.  Modern readers have been a more criticaly receptive audience for the ?itches and
scratches? of the narratives of Wilde and Stein. Placing literary stres on individualities, Stein
writes Thre Lives under the influence of C?zanne?s idea that ?in composition one thing was as
important as another? (?Transatlantic Interview? 15).  At the time of Wilde?s and Stein?s writing
of their narratives a literary narrative scheme of geting rid of the central image, dominant
9
symbol, or ruling myth to which everything else was subordinated was a radical concept.  These
narratives precede modernist experiments most often investigated.  It also sems important to
note that Stein?s Thre Lives is simultaneous in its construction with Wels? exploration of
utopian indeterminacy and interplay, but Wilde?s Dorian Gray precedes Wels? A Modern
Utopia by fiften years.
Along with Dostoevsky, late ninetenth century artists and writers contested totalizing
systems constructed acording to fixed points of view.  H. G. Wels? remark that ?Queen
Victoria was like a great paper-weight that for half a century sat upon men?s minds? sems off-
handed; it seriously addreses, however, what he perceives as the represive weight of ninetenth
century Victorianism.  By the twentieth century, artists and writers had taken a modernist turn, a
turn Charles Taylor has spoken of as a ?modernist retrieval of experience [that] involves a
profound breach in the received sense of identity and time, and a series of reorderings of a
strange and unfamiliar kind? (465).  Throughout the modernist period the abandonment of
traditional ordering, unifying images shifts the notion of a central figure: displaced from unified
image ?to the flow of experience, to new forms of unity, to language conceived in a variety of
way? (465).  The turn may be explored in the relation of the pictorial unity of figure and ground:
Traditionaly aesthetic unification depended on the central figure?s support by the rest of the
parts.  Its beauty was manifest in its totalizing form, harmonized because al parts contribute to
its completion or ?wholenes.?  A turn from the single, central ?stand out? figure suggests a turn
of atention to include undifferentiated ?ground? or ?surface.?  Geting rid of the distinction
betwen figure and ground focuses atention to the relation of ?parts? that had been subsumed by
a central image.
10
 In her writings and interviews, Stein indicates a direct relation with C?zanne?s art. In the
?Transatlantic Interview,? Stein explains her new, modern compositions: ?C?zanne conceived
the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing.  Each part is as
important as the whole, and that impresed me enormously? (15).  From C?zanne?s new idea of
pictorial composition, Stein develops three compositional principles that first appear in Thre
Lives.  As Stein explains in her esay ?Composition as Explanation,? her ?modern composition?
depends on ?using everything,? ?beginning again and again? and the ?continuous present.?  In
narrative, ?using everything? means no central image, no ruling myth.  This is a radical literary
equivalent of C?zanne geting rid of the distinction betwen figure and ground, a unifying
perspectival mechanism since the Renaisance, and of his recalcitrant surfaces that relate the
parts and resist reconciliation.
Wilde?s connection to C?zanne is les direct, but situated in a larger constelation of
ideas, changes in visual arts and aesthetics.  Wilde, like C?zanne, transforms what he takes from
Impresionists and old ?masters.? C?zanne took ?liberties with ordinary visual experience [that]
were surprising and often shocking.  Few major painters of the 19
th
 Century were so violently
atacked??madman? and ?anarchist? were among the epithets applied to him? (Murphy 8).
Wilde atributes to himself an ?anarchist? atitude, teling ?an interviewer in the spring of 1894 . .
. I think I am rather more than a Socialist.  I am something of an Anarchist? (qtd. Elmann, Artist
as Critic 290).  What may be Wilde?s self-advertising is not the final word; his critical writings
and his narrative Dorian Gray give their own evidence of Wilde?s wilingnes to throw over the
rules.  Certainly, Wilde, too, was atacked for the artistic ?liberties.? Perhaps tongue-in-cheek,
Wilde responds to editorial ?insinuations? about Dorian Gray?s gramar, writing ?To the Editor
of the ?St James?s Gazete,?? 26 June 1890, that ?correctnes should always be subordinated to
11
artistic effect . . . and any peculiarities of syntax that may occur in Dorian Gray are deliberately
intended, and are introduced to show the value of the artistic theory in question? (239).  Like
C?zanne, Wilde is serious about his role in the making of modern art: ?the mision of the
aesthetic movement is to lure people to contemplate, not to lead them to create, yet,? Wilde
writes, ?as the creative instinct is strong in the Celt . . . it is the Celt who leads in art? (Wilde,
Critic as Artist 1051).  Wilde and C?zanne connect most importantly in Wilde?s literary efforts
to decouple narrative from aestheticizing wholenes, his atempt to get rid of the distinction
betwen the figure Dorian and the perspectival ground on which Basil tried to ?fix? him.
The images of interplay portrayed in the early modernist texts of Dorian Gray and Thre
Lives indicate simultaneously an awarenes of acepted categories of thought and the
development of alternatives for ordering existence. Transgresive in nature, the narratives?
portraits of potential for individual and cultural change place them outside acepted, existing
form: outside the mainstream realism or naturalism, outside ?the circle of single, unitary
identity? and modes of narrative endorsing comprehensive, ordering views (Taylor 463).  Their
narratives produce an aesthetic awarenes of something else, an ?outside? described by author of
Reason and Horror Morton Schoolman as ?an identity that escapes representation (or
identification), that is unknown and remains unknown, which Adorno introduced as the
?nonidentical?? (166).  The narratives? particular stres on individuality resists traditional
aesthetic schemes that drive toward images of unity.  Their non-totalizing positions do not aim to
reconcile contradictions and create unity.  What they lose in unities they gain in conflict.  The
interplay of individualities alows difference and change.  This cannot take place when
contradictions are reconciled, producing shared ground and excluding individual experiences.
What these narratives alow is an exploration into what Dostoevsky caled ?al of life?s itches
12
and scratches,? non-totalizing approaches more fully explored in the non-totalizing positions of
later twentieth century thought of Bakhtin?s dialogue, Adorno?s non-identity, Derrida?s
difference, and Levinas? ?face? of the other.
The connection betwen visual and literary art in the narratives of Wilde and Stein is more
than just a comparison of techniques.  The communication develops betwen the two arts, and
within the two works.  Wilde and Whistler, Stein and C?zanne, visual art is part of their whole
experience.  Each influences the other.  Rather than a transposition of the visual onto the literary
art, it is a communication betwen the visual and the literary that alows their ?outside? literary
art to come into being.   A reference to ?Lesing? in The Critic as Artist suggests Wilde knew of
and rejected G. E. Lesing?s formulation of the separation of visual and verbal art and their
singular categorization by medium, space and time.
1
  Bringing the arts into interplay, Wilde and
Stein atempt to free literary time from linear spatialization, beginning, middle, and end; they
free spatial art from the imposition of literary themes, arrested in a moment of time.  Time for
Stein follows one of her composition principles, the ?continuous present.? She alows her images
no Poundian Imagist ?instant of time,? but makes language visual ?on the page.?  Time for Wilde
is oddly organized; it is suspended, expanded over eighten years, collapsed into a long chapter,
                                                  
1. Wilde refers to Lesing in the context of ethics-and aesthetics.  Wilde argues for
concrete manifestations of art and cleansing or catharsis ?as Goethe saw, esentialy aesthetic,
and is not moral, as Lesing fancied? (Critic as Artist 1018).  Rather than a rationalistic
interpretation of catharsis, Wilde, like Goethe, saw the aesthetic interpretation as at least equal
with the moral, transformative approach in which pasions are transformed by reason.  Se
Semerdjiev; se Grafton, Most, and Setis 519-520.  Jonathan Freedman, in Profesions of Taste,
acounts for ninetenth century aestheticism?s tendency toward ekphrasis, creating verbal
descriptions of visual works of art; although problematic this was a desire for unity, ?after
Lesing, as visual art?s defining characteristic: its ability to freeze action, its existence in a state
of perpetual?and silent?stasis? (19).  Thus ekphrastic verbal fictions ?achieve the kind of
synthesis aestheticism yearns for.? Se Freedman 19-24.
13
dips into contemporary London, and multiplies experiences by drawing on clasical Greece
(Elfenbein xvii-xx).
The chalenge to the model of unity, the single point model, had already begun with the
Impresionist painters.  The Impresionists were concerned with visual emphasis and the
?fleting moment.?  They painted an experience of color and light, often disolving the objects
we find at the surface of things.  The Impresionists, Richard Murphy writes, ?believed that there
were no esential and unchanging forms in nature?only pasing impresions of form, subject to
continual modification by changing atmospheric and light conditions? and used broken-color
technique to blur outlines, so ?forms semed to be partly disolved? (58).  The Impresionists
explored the way ?painting can shape our perception? (Taylor 468).  C?zanne, however,
?brought to expresion the meaningful forms and relationships which undergird our ordinary
perceptions, as they emerge and take shape from the materiality of things.?  Maurice Merleau-
Ponty understands C?zanne?s modulations of color as recapturing and converting ?into visible
objects what would, without him, remain waled up in the separate life of each consciousnes:
the vibrations of appearances which is the cradle of things? (17-18).  These writers and artists are
looking for a way that relationships, connection, and communication can take place.  It is a
search for new models of individualities that Wels sets out in A Modern Utopia.  It is a new
understanding how we are living.  Stein writes in ?Portraits and Repetition? (1930), repeating,
with a difference, what she had explained in ?Composition as Explanation? (1926), ?nothing
changes from generation to generation except the composition in which we live and the
composition in which we live makes the art which we se and hear? (?Portraits? 99).  In modern
utopian terms of time and movement, Wels writes, ?[n]owadays we do not resist and overcome
the great stream of things, but rather float upon it.  We build now not citadels, but ships of state?
14
(5).  In their literary works Wilde and Stein develop literary proceses working in the surface
aesthetics of C?zanne?s pictorial art.  The two systems play in literary art; not just visual or
literary, but interplay betwen them.  Rather than an appropriation of one for the other, it is
experiencing art in a different way.
In relating utopia and art, Douglas Davis separates visual art from literature.  Both art and
literature begin in the mind, he argues, but literature ends in ?abstraction?words typed on paper.
[Visual art] ends in a physical act, and in an object, in the face of intense resistance? (145).  But
in their artmaking, Wilde and Stein exced Davis? distinctions.  In structure, their literary
?portraiture? atempts to bring together the physical-visual form with innovative language
models.  These are active models, taken ?in-hand? by agents of change whose texts have shaped
practical activity and intelectual atention of artists and readers.  The startling quality of these
artistic configurations requires principles of observation and understanding and some degree of
tolerance.  Rather than a mimetic mirror that produces a static representation, the literary
portraiture of Dorian Gray and Thre Lives defines the existence of individuals as a mater of the
composition proces.
The narratives? exploration of the engagement of pictorial and literary art opens a space
for interplay of individualities.  In this lies their emancipatory potential. Their emancipation
anticipates Adorno?s contribution to emancipatory thought: ?to free thought of the obligation to
envision reconciliation . . . to free those who are divided within and from the world of the
identities imposed upon them by the images and ideals conceived to reconcile different forms of
life, different forms of being? (Schoolman 118).  The critical constitutive element of the cultural
imagination for alternative, beter ways of living is identified, in Western thought, as the utopian
imagination.  Reconciliation, the traditional utopian goal, was by the end of the ninetenth
15
century chalenged by the aesthetics of Wilde, Stein, C?zanne, Wels, and others.  Such
reconciliation had been achieved, as Wels argues in A Modern Utopia, ?by the suppresion of
individualities to some common patern, . . . by asimilation? (38).  Modern utopian thought
must, however, ?consider where the line of reconciliation comes? (37).  As Wels describes it,
?[t]he ideal community of man?s past was one with a common belief, with common customs and
common ceremonies, common manners and common formulae? (39).  Traditional utopian ideals
of reconciliation and commonality impose universal identities, by the impositions of ?images and
ideals conceived to reconcile different forms of life, different forms of being.?  For Wels the
universal is ?a universal becoming of individualities, . . . There is no abiding thing in what we
know? (21).  The Welsean ?modern? utopia of ?individualities,? schemes for betering their
interplay, chalenges the totalizing, reconciling structures of traditional utopias.  Interplay of
individualities introduces open-endednes, producing indeterminacy and non-identity that
subverts the power of authority, of narrative, of relations, of the subject.  In this utopian
framework, the works of Wilde and Stein, Wels and C?zanne critique what exists, dream of a
beter life, and rethink human existence.  Not reading Wilde?s Dorian Gray and Stein?s Thre
Lives through the framework of C?zanne?s recalcitrant surfaces and Wels? individualities, early,
initial responders labeled the narratives decadent, degenerate, and feeble-minded.  However,
these early responses indicate recognition of something beyond the usual unified concepts of
identity.  The transgresive nature of the narratives distinguishes them from acepted forms of
literary art; the ?outside? images portray potential for individual and cultural change.
The utopian genre?s ?esential value,? in which al utopian speculation lies, is the
hypothesis of the complete emancipation of a community of men from tradition, from habits,
16
from legal bonds, and that subtler servitude possesions entail (Wels 9).  In Western tradition,
the standard utopian structure is characterized by H. G. Wels as utopian thought ?before Darwin
quickened the thought of the world?:  ?al perfect and static States, a balance of happines won
for ever against the forces of unrest and disorder that inhere in things. . . . Change and
development were damed back by invincible dams for ever? (Wels 5).
The dynamic image/dialogue structures of Dorian Gray and Thre Lives differ from
traditional utopian static structures.  Reshaping language and form, the narratives develop
alternative possibilities in human experience.  Their emphasis on individualities as a beter way
of living finds support in H.G. Wel?s A Modern Utopia (1905).  Wels overtly constructs a
utopian socialist state, in contrast to the narratives? implicit utopian imagination, but his
emphasis on conflicting individualities as means to social regeneration provides a utopian
context for evaluating the narratives? interplay of individualities as utopian.  Wels? overtly
utopian argument links these narratives to the utopian imagination:
The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of personal life,
and al our Utopias no more than schemes for betering that interplay.  At least, that
is how life shapes itself more and more to modern perceptions.  Until you bring in
individualities, nothing comes into being. (10-11)
Wels? cal for a change in the way we imagine human life and experience paralels the
narratives? stres on individualities.  In A Modern Utopia, Wels reconstructs utopian thought
along the lines of modern perception.  In Cezanne and the End of Impresionism, Richard Shiff
argues, ?if anything defines the succes of modernism, it is its standard of individual ?quality,?
rather than some standard quality to which it aspires? (66).  The modernist artist, for Shiff,
?resists the fix of familiar stylistic constelation. . . . His wilful individualism often leads to the
17
use of techniques which, in their peculiar resistance to configuration, translation and
interpretation, risk a wanderer?s incomprehensibility.?  A modern utopian search for a beter way
of living concerns itself, then, with the problem of freedom rather than happines, it is dynamic
rather than static, imagination is its finest quality, individualities inform generalities: ?In a
modern Utopia there wil, indeed, be no perfection; in Utopia there must be friction, conflicts?
(Wels 262):
So long as we ignore difference, so long as we ignore individuality, and that I hold
has been the common sin of al Utopias hitherto, we can make absolute statements,
prescribe communisms or individualisms, and al sorts of hard theoretic
arrangement.  But in the world of reality, which . . . is nothing more or les than the
world of individuality, there are no absolute rights and wrongs, there are no
qualitative questions at al, but only quantitative adjustments.  Equaly strong in the
normal civilized man is the desire for freedom of movement. . . . (36-37)
Similar to the construction of critical thought in the narratives of Wilde and Stein, Wels? re-
construction of utopian thought as proces values a discourse of individuality of women and men
in their continual oscilation betwen social and individual concerns.
Ancient and modern, utopian discourse is shaped in dialogue form.  In dialogue form,
meaning emerges from the exchange of different views.  Modern dialogue differs, Wels
contends, from the ancient form.  Writing a ?Note to the Reader? in A Modern Utopia, Wels
explains his rejection of previous utopian methods, the ?development of the ancient dialogue?
the ?interplay betwen monologue and a commentator?; instead he aims at ?philosophical
discussion on the one hand and imaginative narrative on the other (xxxi).  He aimed at ?a sort of
shot-silk texture,? a narrative that is variegated, streaked through, and flecked throughout with
18
other colors, a narrative woven with various and different threads of thoughts (xxxi).  It is a
balance Wels tried to achieve ?throughout his life, in his novels as wel as his sociological
writings, and . . . never found that balance satisfactory, and increasingly failed to succed even in
part? (Kumar 191).  Wels? failure is his succes: ?the whole trend of modern thought is against
the permanence of any such enclosures,? Wels states (Wels 11).  The fundamental ideas of
Wels? ?modern Utopia imply everywhere and in everything, margins and elasticities, a certain
universal compensatory loosenes of play? (Wels 270).  In ?Discourse in the Novel,? Bakhtin
explains concrete discourse (utterance) as ?entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points
of view, alien value judgments and acents.  The word, directed toward its object, enters a
dialogicaly agitated and tension-filed environment of alien words, value judgments, and
acents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others,
intersects with yet a third group? (276).  Since Bakhtin?s readings of Dostoevsky?s novels as a
new dialogic model of the world, the novel has been considered multileveled, a dialogue of
individualities disruptively creating a productive interplay of parts that ?fertilises? society.
Although he resisted, refused traditional utopian structure because of his ?dislike of systems? and
his ?distrust of final answers,? Bakhtin?s vision of dialogue and the dynamics of language offers
a utopia of an anti-utopian thinker (Morson 94).  His preference for dialogue, like Wels?
?fertilising conflict,? produces productive exchange of individualities.  Wels? acount of utopia
as the interplay of individualities implies a critique of monologism and totalization consistent
with Bakhtin?s novel theory.
In Wels, critical ideals and imagination interplay, and the productive, ?fertilising
conflict? betwen the parts resists the subordination of individuality to any totalizing, static
concept.  This acounts for the experience of ?qualities to mingle and vary in every possible
19
way? (270).   It is not a clasification for Truth; Wels, skeptical of ?the objective reality of
clasification,
?
 acounts for difference by acounting for individualities, similar to Adorno?s
?nonidentity.? In the ?Appendix? to A Modern Utopia, Wels? ?Scepticism of the Instrument?
establishes his utopian ideas of individualities against thinking merely in clasifications:
whatever boundary you draw, straight away from that boundary begins the
corresponding negative clas. . . . You talk of pink things, you ignore, if you are a
trained logician, the more elusive shades of pink, and draw your line.  Beyond is
the not pink. . . . Not blue, not happy. . . I am persuaded that knowing is the relation
of a conscious being to something not itself, that the thing known is defined as a
system of parts and aspects and relationships, that knowledge is comprehension.
(386-87)
Wels? acount of utopia is recognition of  ?forces of unrest and disorder,? understood as the
productive ?fertilizing conflict of individualities? that evolve in interplay of unique individualities
(Wels 10, 33).  Wels? individual is the method of ?initiative,? a new means for expresing the
texture of its ?shaping body.?  In his utopia, ?Each man and woman, to the extent that his or her
individuality is marked, breaks the law of precedent, transgreses the general formula, and makes
a new experiment for the direction of the life force? (88).  In the book?s form, ?Wels is eminently
succesful in infusing life into abstractions,? Mark Hilegas writes in his ?Introduction? to A
Modern Utopia?s 1967 edition (ix).
Wels? acount of individualities? disruption of static utopianism, in different ways,
paralels the utopian philosophy of Ernst Bloch?s ?not-yet? principle of hope and Paul Ricoeur?s
20
acount of how the utopian frees imagination and fiction from ideological picturing.
2
  Significant
for this study, both Bloch and Ricoeur value art and literature as vehicles for the utopian
imagination, and each argues the esential role of the utopian function to change the reality of
human existence.  For Bloch, like Wels, images of ?anticipatory ilumination? refuse ideological
holds and iluminate possibilities for human being?s personal and social change; the ?anticipatory
iluminations? consist of artistic images and configurations of the ?not-yet? that are on the frontal
margins of reality:  beyond the ordinary modes of perception, expresing hope and indicating
what is necesary for human fulfilment.  Bloch?s iluminations brought to the surface reveal the
?not-yet,? just as C?zanne?s pictorial art brings to the surface forms that have been hidden by
perspective?s totalizing structure.  But Bloch?s modernist utopianism does not work at the
surface level; the ?anticipatory iluminations? are often disguised and displaced in artistic-
configurations. The critic?s task is to trace the expresions of hope hidden within the works of
art, the New, something mediated in what exists in motion (Principles of Hope 1. 4-5).
In historical-philosophic utopian thought, Ricoeur replaces Bloch?s utopia as revelation
with an acount of utopia as refiguration.  In refiguration, redescribed reality occurs in an ever-
unfolding proces and replaces the notion that the meaning and vision of utopia is given.
                                                  
2. In his ?Introductory Lecture,? in Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, Paul Ricoeur
proposes ?to move beyond the thematic contents of utopia to its functional structure.  I suggest
that we start from the kernel idea of the nowhere, implied by the word ?utopia? itself. . . . What
must be emphasized is the benefit of this special extraterritoriality.  From this ?no place? an
exterior glance is cast on our reality, which suddenly looks strange, nothing more being taken for
granted.  The field of the possible is now open beyond that of the actual; it is a field, therefore,
for alternative ways of living.  This development of the new, alternative perspectives defines
utopia?s most basic function.  May we not say then that imagination itself?through its utopian
function has a constitutive role in helping us rethink the nature of our social lives? . . . Utopia
introduces imaginative variations on the topics of society, power, government, family, religion.
The kind of neutralization that constitutes imagination as fiction is at work in utopia.  Thus I
propose that utopia, taken at this radical level, as the function of the nowhere in the constitution
of social or symbolic action, is the counter part of our first concept of ideology.  There is no
social integration without social subversion, we may say? (16-17).
21
Bloch?s utopian imagination differentiates itself from ideology, developing in contrast to reality
or waiting for the recovery of ciphers that wil reveal what is to come. Ricoeur places utopia as
complement to ideology.  Ricoeur?s dialectic of utopia and ideology produces ?new, alternatives
perspectives? that expose what exists and redescribes reality in an ever-unfolding proces. The
two sides of the cultural imagination imply each other, similar to Wels? disruptive interplay of
philosophical discussion and imaginative narrative.  Utopia functions, for Ricoeur, to redescribe
reality against ideology?s imaginative social function of the integration and the legitimation of
what is given: ?There is no social integration without social subversion? (17).  Without the
interplay and the ?friction,? Wels argued, ?we can make absolute statements? and ignore
difference and individuality.  Ricoeur?s acount of the disruptive interplay of utopia and ideology
thematicaly paralels Wels? ?fertilising conflict of individualities? that critique totalization.
These ?frictions? alow for difference and change, the center component of Wels? utopianism.
Similar in a proces of interplay rather than static state, Ricoeur?s and Wels? schemes beter
interplay by stresing individualities and disrupting totalization.
The interconnections betwen Wels and Ricoeur provide utopian understanding of
C?zanne?s treatment of each surface as a recalcitrant individuality contesting the ?totalizing?
effect of perspectivism. From the Renaisance to the late ninetenth century, pictorial art had
distinguished betwen figure and ground, a perspectival projection defined by Leon Batista
Alberti in the treatise De pictura (1435) as ?the intersection of a visual pyramid at a given
distance, with a fixed center and certain position of lights, represented by art with lines and
colors on a given surface? (qtd. in Wood 478).  C?zanne?s technique of painting from part to part
displaces the fixed center and positions, regulated by lines and graduated shading of color.  In
painting from part to part, C?zanne avoids ?the sense of a preconceived compositional
22
hierarchy,? and defines the parts by contrasts of color or contrasts of warm and cool hues.  In the
contrasts of warm and cool hues, C?zanne?s every part has its complement. The parts ?[d]efined
by juxtapositions [contrasts] of color, rather than by line or chiaroscuro,? resist the law of
?diferentiation?al parts of the composition must be rendered inteligibly distinct from one
another and ordered hierarchicaly acording to some principle,? of linear or aerial perspective
(Shiff 116, 83).  A description of C?zanne?s second portrait of art collector Victor Chocquet
ilustrates the artist?s transgresive surface aesthetics:
C?zanne?s aim in this strong, mosaic-like canvas was clearly to force al forms,
whatever their theoretical position in depth, to play a part in the surface patern.
Nothing, therefore, remains in a single plane.  By linking colors and forms of one
plane with those in another, C?zanne created almost the impresion of a single,
vertical plane at the picture surface.  Carpet, floor, wal, Chocquet himself?no
one is more prominent than the other. (Murphy 99)
By linking colors and forms of one plane with those in another, C?zanne consequently created an
interplay of parts that resists single point perspective.  The treatment of each surface as a
recalcitrant individuality alows one form to define an adjacent one: each color plays. The ?many
parts? are painted, Shiff writes, ?with equal atention and intensity, denying them any
differentiating hierarchy? (116).  C?zanne?s non-totalizing techniques do not unify his objects;
they are not merged into an underlying, unifying patern, nor are they subordinated to C?zanne?s
subjective ?gaze.?
The proces may be described as interplay of artist (subject) and the world (objective
view).  C?zanne said, ?the reading of the model and its realization are sometimes very slow in
coming? (qtd. Murphy 76).  The reading was an effort to ?get to the bottom of what you find in
23
front of you,? and the painting?s construction must be from components in the model?colors,
forms, and spatial relations.  One consequence of his approach is ?an inordinate amount of
looking,? in contrast to the centered Cartesian cogito that could ?grasp? the world as picture (75).
C?zanne?s treatment of each surface is analogous to how individual scenes and characters may
contest the tendency of narrative to yield, in Bakhtin?s words, a ?finalizing? monological
perspective or closure, and analogous to how difference in Derrida, the non-identitarian in
Adorno, the face in Levinas contest cognitive, conceptual, linguistic forms of totalization on
ethical grounds: affirming difference, recognizing individuality, doing justice to the Other.  In
C?zanne?s proces a similar non-totalizing, ?flow of experience? as a ?free proces? presents
itself; its end is unforesen and without the resolution asociated with spatial hierarchy.
The implications of difference, individuality, and othernes of C?zanne?s treatment of
surfaces to chalenge perspectivism open a space for understanding Stein?s literary version of
C?zanne?s technique and its narrative anticipation in Wilde.  The narrative composition of Thre
Lives is an exemplary sign of a creative and critical consciousnes, and example of the integrity
of equality toward the fulfilment of ?evennes of everyone having the vote? (Has 17).
Everyone having the vote does not necesarily mean al votes are cast equaly wisely; it means
each one carries equal importance, and difference of voice.  In her scheme of interplay, Stein?s
ideas find fuller explanation in the subtitle ?Each One As She May? to her story ?Melanctha.?
As each color plays in C?zanne, each voice, idea, and system of value plays for Stein.  In
?Composition as Explanation,? Stein argues aestheticaly that ?The only thing that is different
from one time to another is what is sen and what is sen depends upon how everybody is doing
everything? (21). Compositionaly for Stein, the ?different thing? sen is evennes of
individuality and the interplay betwen individuals rather than a comprehensive, linear view of
24
things.  In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein writes that the composition of Thre
Lives develops from her ?looking and looking? at a portrait by Paul C?zanne:  ?The C?zanne
portrait [of Madame C?zanne in the Red Arm Chair] had not semed natural, it had taken some
time to feel that it was natural? (34-35).  Stein contends that in her ?first book,? Thre Lives,
?there was a groping? to get to the ?bottom nature.?  As in C?zanne?s ?looking,? this is no longer
a subjective ?gaze? acording to a fixed or single point perspective.  In Perspectives as Symbolic
Form (1927), Erwin Panofsky explains that linear perspective was to have effectively achieved
reconciliation betwen the objecthood of the scene and the subjecthood of the beholder.  Stein,
reading C?zanne, is unable, however, to effectively negotiate her way and finds herself a
wanderer among the parts.
Wels? acount at the close of his modern utopia helps to explain such ?wanderings? in a
world where the comprehensive view not longer exists.  In his conclusion, Wels writes,
this Utopia began upon a philosophy of fragmentation, and ends, confusedly,
amidst a gross tumult of imediate realities, in dust and doubt, with, at the best,
one individual?s aspiration.  Utopias were once in good faith, projects for a fresh
creation of the world and of a most unworldly completenes, this so-caled Modern
Utopia is a mere story of personal adventures among Utopian philosophies. (372)
Wels? utopian scheme of individualities is one perspective on utopia, and Wels an individual
wandering among the individual parts.  Along with individual vision, Wels explains, comes
?glimpses of a comprehensive scheme . . .. But the two visions are not sen consistently together.
. . .Nevertheles, I cannot separate these two aspects of human life, each commenting on the
other.  In that incongruity betwen great and individual inheres the incompatibility I could not
resolve, and which, therefore, I have had to present in this conflicting form? (373).  Wels streses
25
the desire for individuality and an awarenes of the drive toward totalization that his scheme of
interplay maintains, ?each commenting on the other,? unresolved.
This has implications for C?zanne?s treatment of individual surfaces and helps read
Stein?s Thre Lives as a scheme for the interplay of individualities. The transposition of
C?zanne?s pictorial techniques and aesthetics into literature creates, for Stein, a ?realer? reality,
not ?in making the people real but in the esence or, as a painter would cal it, value? (Has 16).
Stein refers not to a higher order mirroring of the Real, a totalizing form or image.  Her insistence
on the esence of ?each one to have the same value? is distinctive of Stein?s image/dialogue, each
one as important as the other, and ilustrates Wels? concept of utopia as a scheme for betering
the interplay of productive, ?fertilising conflict betwen individualities,? anticipating Bakhtin?s
dialogism.  In betering the interplay of individualities, Thre Lives redescribes individual value,
thus refigures hierarchical systems.  In C?zanne?s pictorial art, this is surface.
The narrative design of Wilde?s Dorian Gray, like Wels?, presents ?conflicting form.?
Tensions betwen a desire to stres individualities akin to C?zanne?s surfaces and Wels? utopian,
on one hand, and a drive toward aestheticizing ?wholenes,? harmony, the subsuming of parts
into a whole, motivate the dark plot of Dorian Gray.  In his ?Preface? to The Picture of Dorian
Gray, Wilde writes, ?Al art is at once surface and symbol.  Those who go beneath the surface do
so at their peril.  Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.?  Wilde warns against the search
for the depth of firm foundation beneath the dream or ideal manifested at the totalizing surface.
Wilde?s aesthetic individualism in Dorian Gray reveals an individual wanderer?s search in a
world where the comprehensive view not longer exists.  Wels? dynamic utopianism and
C?zanne?s aesthetic of surfaces reject static notions of firm foundations.  Stein and Wilde?s
develop an aesthetic of surface; her ?composition? begins, however, with no center. In her literary
26
version of C?zanne?s surface, Stein develops the interplay of part to part in image/dialogue,
writing Thre Lives as a series of stories, the parts overlapping and contrasting.  Wilde?s story in
part develops its conflicting form in the engagement of Dorian Gray and his picture.  Subject of
Basil?s portrait, Dorian in the end remains object of Basil?s ideas, but has also become subject to
his own ideas as wel.  What can now be read as similar to Bakhtin?s acount of the dialogic
model that alows free voice to a variety of viewpoints, the interplay remains at the surface.  As
Wilde writes in The Critic as Artist, no one theory is final; his education does not train him for
living a totalizing existence.
Finaly, it is interesting to note that C?zanne?s surface technique and compositional idea
of ?each part is as important as another? is Stein?s Wildean starting place, as she takes up
Wilde?s cal for critics to ?rewrite history,? creating a new work of art.
In the proceses of his narrative, Wilde explores the relation betwen surface and symbol
and his utopian imagination appears to line up along the lines of Bloch?s progresive utopian
philosophy.  But there is tension toward a non-totalizing perspective in he development of the
artist critic.  This move is key to the movement from Wilde to Stein, as Wilde reaches toward
Ricoeur?s non-totalizing utopian scheme that ?shaters? and offers ?alternative ways of thinking?
in an ever-unfolding proces of creation and interpretation. On one level, Dorian appears the
figure/symbol but the ground is Gray, an imperfect, unstable medium.   Semingly tongue-in-
cheek, Wilde writes to critics, ?My story is an esay on decorative arts? (Elmann, Artist as
Critic 247).  In pictorial art, C?zanne?s problem is ?[h]ow to relate every part of the ilusion in
depth to a surface patern? (Shiff 291).  As with Wilde?s, C?zanne?s art binds 3- dimensional
ilusion to a decorative surface effect.?  Surface for Wilde is related to interpretation. In The
Critic as Artist, Wilde gave the critic the same freedom he had given the artist in his Soul of Man
27
Under Socialism.  In Dorian Gray, the dynamic interplay of personalities in art and criticism is
related to surface.  Wilde argues, in The Critic as Artist, that no theory is final.  Dorian Gray is a
hodgepodge of theories, other stories, and genres.  The interpretations take shape at the surface
of the second picture, Dorian?s, and in the literary work itself.  No one theory remains on a single
plane but weave, shot silk, within the whole.  The many parts are denied differentiation
hierarchy.  Wilde had already exposed the secret, the ?lie? of depth, in The Decay of Lying.  In
Dorian Gray, decorative surface is the proces of aesthetic individualism shaped by his theories
of creation and interpretation and the interplay betwen the individualities.
Wilde?s stres on the desire for individualities is countered by the drive toward and
dangers of aestheticizing wholenes. Richard Elmann argues that in his critical esays, Wilde
clarified the meaning of Dorian Gray and balanced ?two ideas from his dialogues which look
contradictory; one is that art is disengaged from life, the other that it is deeply incriminated with
it.  That art is sterile, and that art is infectious, are atitudes not beyond reconciliation.  Wilde
never formulated their union? (Oscar Wilde, 329).  Basil Halward, the artist, and Lord Henry,
the aesthete, influence or infect the life of Dorian, one with a picture, one with a book.  Basil, on
one hand, refuses to publicly present his portrait of Dorian, fearing he had put too much of
himself in it (Wilde 6).   Basil atempts, on the other hand, to subordinate Dorian and his picture
to his author-itarian control, akin to monologism as Bakhtin theorizes it in his Problems of
Dostoevsky?s Poetics (1929).  Lord Henry had initialy ?grasped? Dorian as a symbol of youth,
?the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found? (Dorian Gray 213).
Regardles of Dorian?s counter that he is ?not the same,? Lord Henry ?gazes? at Dorian as an
image of depth and categoricaly insists that ?Life has been [his] art.?
28
To limit or even so much as orient our concept of the utopia to Thomas More would be like reducing
electricity to the amber from which it took its name and in which it was first discovered.
Ernst Bloch The Principle of Hope 14
This study explores the utopianism of Wilde?s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Stein?s
Thre Lives aesthetics through a Welsean utopian perspective, contesting totalizing structures.
Looking at the two narratives against the utopian ?blueprint? definition of an ideal place, state or
situation of perfection projected in literary social utopias can reveal them more clearly as non-
totalizing forms.
Wilde and Stein tel stories of human debasement and defeat; they use literary forms that
sem more concerned with aesthetic originality than social criticism, and appear a condition of
literary decadence and degeneration.  Wilde?s Dorian Gray has been characterized as decadent
aestheticism, its social vision elitist and hedonistic.  Dorian is a handsome young man who,
siting for his portrait painted by his friend Basil Halward, is drawn into conversation with Lord
Henry Wotten.  Wotten outlines his philosophy of life, a ?New Hedonism? in which the aim of
life is uninhibited  ?self-development.?  Its highest values are beauty and youth.  Atracted to
these ideas, Dorian desires that his portrait might age and his appearance might remain youthful.
He would wilingly give his soul for the exchange. This plot sems anything but usual ?utopian?
structure.  The picture lacks a clear elevation of social harmony over individual needs.  As
Dorian Gray?s fascination with Lord Henry?s character and idea increases, his relation with the
artist, Basil, decreases.  Dorian demonstrates utter unconcern for his victims, and his behavior
increasingly wreaks havoc within his social community.  Dorian appears to confuse pasion for
art with true love.  His encounter with Sybil Vane leads to his biter disappointment, her suicide,
and a change in his portrait?a touch of cruelty around the mouth.  Lord Henry?s dismisal of
Sybil?s death as a ?fragment from some Jacobean tragedy? (255) setles Dorian?s misgivings
29
about his conduct.  From this point, Dorian takes morbid pleasure in the portrait?s hideous
changes, moves it upstairs to his former ply-room, and locks the door to conceal it from the gaze
of others.  Under the influence of Lord Henry and a secret book, Dorian leads a life of
disolution, experiencing intense sensual and aesthetic pleasure.  Despair and depravity replace
the freedom from sin and vice and social altruism asociated with utopianism.  Rumors of
Dorian?s behavior prompt Basil to confront him.  Seing the portrait horrifies Basil, who
recognizes it as his painting only by his signature.  Basil?s cal for repentance angers Dorian, and
he kils Basil.  With the help of the chemist Alan Campbel, Dorian disposes of the corpse, but he
cannot stop thinking of the portrait?s consequent bloodstained hand.  He obsesively tries to
drive the image from his mind with visits to parties and to London?s dockland opium dens.
Hoping for a new life, Dorian forebears seducing Hetie Merton, but the portrait reveals
hypocrisy rather than the hoped-for sign of moral improvement.  Dorian slashes the portrait with
the knife he had used to kil Basil, but his atempt to destroy the portrait destroys him.
Investigating a cry, the servants enter the room to find a beautiful portrait of their master and a
wrinkled and withered man, dead upon the floor with a knife in his heart.  They can recognize
him as Dorian Gray only by his signature rings.
The sketch of Dorian Gray confirms the disparity betwen this narrative and the
structural elements and thematic content of literary utopia, an ideal commonwealth beyond the
reaches of the known world.  Constructed as blueprints for reform, these geographical
commonwealths, whether located in paralel space or distant time, are located ?nowhere? and
exist outside everyday life. The controlling blueprints and theoretical position in depth contrast
with C?zanne?s and Stein?s worlds of canvas and compositions and recalcitrant individualities.
Differing from Wels? dynamic modern utopia of individualities, imperfection, and ?fertilising
30
conflicts, the static utopian community presented as an ideal form of human society, is nearly
always portrayed as free from sin and vice.  In contrast, Dorian Gray travels to the outer reaches
of social norms and explores the outer reaches of social norms and explores a realm of hedonistic
sensuous pleasures, more fiting with Wels? ?margins,? ?elasticities,? and ?loosenes of play.?
Rather than a constructed cultivated space of social and individual harmony, Dorian?s crafted
and disolute life paradoxicaly destroys the lives of others.  Rather than a production of utopian
order and stability, Dorian Gray contains a vision of chaotic materiality and sensuality.
Likewise, Stein?s Thre Lives does not conform to a blueprint utopia.  Like Wilde, she
appears to concentrate on the individual rather than construct an ideal community.  She develops
the histories of three working-clas women in a series of three stories and recounts their
individual lives.  She individualizes these portraits by titling each with its siter?s name:  ?The
Good Anna? ?The Gentle Lena,? and ?Melanctha:  Each One As She May.?  This listing reflects
the sequence in which Stein wrote the stories.  Although the last story writen told of Melanctha,
a young American black woman, in the published novel, Stein refused chronological sequence to
construct her own, arbitrary interrelationship of form.
Collectively, the rebelious, pasive, and street-wise sensuous characteristics of these
individual personalities contrast with the socialy cooperative inhabitants of utopia.  The good
Anna is tough-minded, motivated, and occasionaly rebelious.  She loves and idealizes those she
serves?Mis Mary Wadsmith, Dr. Shonjen, and Mis Mathilda.  Anna can be and needs to be
depended upon, and she moves from position to position when her authority is threatened?as
she does when Mis Mary Wadsmith?s niece, Jane, begins to give her orders; when Dr.
Shonjenmarriew marries and his new wife? was a proud, unpleasant woman? (57); when Mis
31
Mathilda leaves the country and Anna cannot be persuaded to follow.  Unwiling to be under
new masters, Anna stays on in Mis Mathilda?s house, supports herself by taking on boarders,
and dies ?after a hard operation? (82).
Anna?s asertivenes contrasts with gentle Lena?s ?pasivity? and Melanctha?s failed
search for relationships.  Lena?s silence on her own behalf prompts others to intrude and to
arrange her life:  ?it never came to Lena?s unexpectant and unsuffering german nature to do
something different from what was expected of her, just because she would like it that way
beter? (247).  Exercising control, her aunt, Mrs. Haydon, finds the docile Lena a ?good
husband.?  When Lena and Herman Kreder marry, they live with his parents, and she becomes
increasingly silent.  After the birth of her first child and increasingly so after the next two
children, Lena becomes ?lifeles.?  Giving birth to a fourth child, she dies, and ?nobody knew
just how it happened to her? (279).  Unlike Anna and Lena, Melanctha is without regular
employment, but like the other women, she is ?always ready to do things for others? (107).  Stein
draws Melanctha in relationship to three women?her ?pale yelow, swet-appearing mother,?
the incompetent and ?simple? Rose Johnson, and the fun-loving Jane Harden?and three
men?her ?black coarse,? virile father, the stable, middle-clas doctor Jeff Campbel who loves
Melanctha, and the gambler Jem Richards who does not love her.  Throughout the story
Melanctha develops no stable or satisfying relationship and, instead, was ?always losing what
she had in wanting al the things she saw? (89).  Melanctha, too, ends her life alone.  In a home
for consumptives, she ?stayed until she died? (236).
Stein?s series of stories about two domestic servants and a young black woman refuse a
totalizing unity expected of literary utopia.  Rather than placed out of existing time and space,
these are stories of everyday life in a les than ideal society.  Although in a series, the three
32
portraits are not thematicaly connected nor is the wealth of the community shared for the
common good.  Instead, al three women live and die alone.  Although their stories are
repetitious in themes of love, clas, and gender, they do not appear to offer a continuous story or
a unified social vision.
The comparison of the narratives to literary utopias appears to distinguish wide structural
and thematic differences.  In literary utopias, social wholenes structures form and thematic
topics of government, family, and religion follow the form, elevating social harmony over
individual needs.  Resisting the narrative drive to totalization, the narratives of Wilde and Stein
redescribe the harmonious vision and subvert the imposition of an integrated structure, such as
cohesive perspective in painting, to introduce an imperfect form constructed on individualities.
Their C?zannean surface aesthetics enable the narratives to resist ?perfection,? the
misunderstood condition of early utopia, and respect the imperfection of possibility.  Their
emancipation projects are utopian-in-proces?imperfection is incompletenes that implies
possibility for change.  As Wels emphaticaly argues, ?In a modern Utopia there wil, indeed, be
no perfection; in Utopia there must be also friction, conflicts . . . (262).  At work are the
recalcitrant individualities of C?zanne?s surface, in contrasts of colors and al parts at play.
Imaginative projects in the utopian mode are the ?search for ?othernes?? that produces
various imaginings. As Ricoeur argues, another reality can produce another kind of family,
another sexuality, another kind of government, and another kind of religion.  In the search for
?othernes,? the difference betwen literary utopia and the formal, aesthetic structures of these
narratives paradoxicaly ilustrate their similarities.  What is the relation of pluralizing and
valuing?  Bakhtin addreses a way we can judge what we imagine:
33
if ethics is real, and is located fundamentaly in particular situations, then real
work is always required.  That work of judging necesarily involves a risk, a
special atention to the particulars of the situation and a special involvement with
unique other people at a given moment of their lives. It is precisely in such a nexus
that morality, like love, lives. (Morson 26)
Dorian Gray sems to addres this centraly in the stres on the many and the particulars,
life and art.  In the framework of the utopian mode, utopia becomes an imaginative, experimental
project in search of the ?Other.?  The theme of ?othernes,? the concept of ?another? alows for
numerous variations in individual and social existence.  As experimental works, the narratives
provide an ?outside? glance at subject representation, and they develop perspective not yet
functioning in existence.  ?No one is ahead of his time,? Stein writes (?Composition as
Explanation? 22).  Of Wilde, biographer Elmann writes:  ?the novel was published on 20 June
1890, as pp. 3-100 of the July isue of Lippincotts?s Monthly Magazine.  After this date,
Victorian literature had a different look? (Oscar Wilde 314).
34
Chapter Two:
Wilde Stands Uneasy:  Individual and Aestheticism
To ?correct some errors? of critics reviewing The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Oscar
Wilde tels readers of the 30 June 1890 Daily Chronicle that far from emphasizing any moral, he
had experienced difficulty, ?from an aesthetic point of view,? in ?keeping the extremely obvious
moral subordinate to the artistic and dramatic effect.?   The problem was in his conceiving of
?the idea of a young man seling his soul in exchange for eternal youth? an idea that is old in the
history of literature, but to which I have given new form.? In the history of literature, the young
man?s exchange has been a one-time bargain for eternal ?truth? rather than ?youth,? finalized in
the subsuming of sensuous experience to moral/rational form.  Rather than closure of eternal
truth, Wilde?s new ?youth? form is of an ever-unfolding exchange, a continuous ?seling.?
?Youth, times which are on the point of changing, creative expresion? are, as utopian
philosopher and writer of Principles of Hope Ernst Bloch argues, ?cals for things to be different,
to be beter, to be more beautiful? (116-17). Wilde develops his disruptive, disintegrating
aesthetics in his theoretical works and expands them in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.
For Wilde, as for Bakhtin?s twentieth century investigations of the novel as a dialogic genre, the
novel is a dynamic form that embraces traditional contraries, explores the potential of their
conflict, and projects a critical, utopian scheme, as H.G. Wels would say, ?for betering the
interplay of individualities.?
35
Oscar Wilde believed in individualism and ?Art as the most intense mode of
Individualism.? He argued that ?to become a work of art is the object of living? (qtd. in Elmann,
Oscar Wilde 310).  Artistic endeavor, a model for creative, continuous, constructive living,
provides a means toward artistic freedom and expresion of personality.  Rather than a
philosophy of selfishnes, the primary aim of Wilde?s aesthetic development, as ilustrated in his
own artistic endeavors, is self-development.  His art?especialy his style?embodies his unique
temperament and it forges new, alternative perspectives that resist manipulative authority.  In
Wilde?s own words, his aesthetic ?individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force? (Wilde,
Soul 1091).  Wilde?s aesthetic individualism is utopian, at the intersection of ideology and
utopia, similar to Paul Riceour?s utopianism that confronts ideology where it exceds its
integrative value, ?unmasks? authority, and creates a ?fiction? of the way things might be.
At the intersection of these distinctions?art and life, sense and soul?Oscar Wilde
places his critical aesthetic theories and his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891).  In
pictorial-literary structure that anticipates Paul C?zanne?s aesthetic of surfaces and Bakhtin?s
dialogic, ideas and voices come into productive conflict with other ideas and voices; Wilde
brings the authoritative into question.  His aesthetic individualism reveals how the aesthetic
tradition has become torn betwen a desire to stres individualities and the drive toward
aestheticizing ?wholenes,? a harmony of parts.  These tensions motivate the novel?s dark plot,
and my study explores the disruptive relation betwen individual and aestheticism in the
aesthetic individualism of Dorian Gray.
36
Aestheticism and the drive toward wholenes
Aestheticism, a complex movement, had experienced various transformations;
fundamentaly, the aesthetic had been positioned as an autonomous realm ?elsewhere,? a separate
world or category of judgment, yet paradoxicaly this concept of a distinct sphere of being was
valued as socialy redemptive.  Unruly, sensate aesthetic impresions required for perfection a
unity betwen the images, and antithetical reason became the ordering principle of connection.
The term enforced the distinction ?betwen the material and the imaterial: betwen things and
thoughts, sensations and ideas? (Eagleton 13).
As a complex movement of artistic reform, Aestheticism began by emphasizing the power
of art and beauty to regenerate social life and ended by insisting on the independence of art from
life and the alienation of the artist from society. By the end of the ninetenth century ?aesthetic?
was asociated with an art for art?s sake vision, indicating failure of the long-hoped-for harmony
of art and life.
The aesthetic movement?s end of the ninetenth-century emphasis on art for the sake of
art disturbed Victorians already feeling the ground shifting beneath their beliefs and asumptions
of cultural synthesis and sensing an increasing disengaged, mechanistic mode of life.  For many
Victorians art for art?s sake was a ?mixture of straightforward rebelion against Victorianism,
new theorizing, and extravagant posing?al meting in unstable fusion in the symbolic rise and
fal of Oscar Wilde? (Gilmour 237).  Wilde was influenced by the contradictory artistic theories
of Ruskin and Pater, one who stirred his conscience and the other who stirred his senses.  Ruskin,
on one hand, portrays an aesthetic utopian image of social harmony; on the other hand, Pater
advocates an aesthetic impresionism, a subjective view that disrupts such harmonizing totalities.
Within these traditional contraries of aesthetics, Wilde placed his aestheticism. Jonathan
37
Freedman treats British Aestheticism in its contradictory nature and defines its contradictions as
expresing a desire for synthesis while ?articulating a severe skepticism over the value of any
such potential unifying force or vision.  The result is a complicated vision, which seks to
explore the experience of fragmentation, loss, and disintegration without necesarily giving up
the possibility of reuniting these shards? (8).  Uneasy betwen the tensions of individuality and
interpenetrating realities, Wilde?s aestheticism, however, moves the tradition?s utopianism
toward an engagement of the individualities that, like C?zanne?s surfaces and H. G. Wels?
utopia, resists a harmonious reunion of the parts.
In early British aestheticism, John Ruskin, along with Wiliam Morris and the Pre-
Raphaelites, found beauty in its various forms, particularly in the art of the medieval period.
Ruskin?s portrait of the medieval world of Gothic artists as ?a harmonious totality in which art
and life had become interpenetrating realities? taught that beauty could change society (Dowling
33).  Like a recovered Eden, the medieval period offered a time period, for these artists and
writers, of harmonious totality.  Wilde?s artist Basil Halward in Dorian Gray expreses this
longed for return, lamenting ?[t]he harmony of soul and body?how much that is!  We in our
madnes have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, and ideality that is
void? (8).  Such harmonious utopian images convey the idea that the experience of art, especialy
visual art, could open up possibilities of a genuine experience of human freedom, a Schilerian
kind of ?freedom? of individual autonomy.  Art created a bridge betwen conflicting tendencies,
such as reason and senses, order and chaos, and provided a counter image to the mechanized,
alienating character of modern industrial society.
The painters, writers, and thinkers that comprised the early artistic movement saw their
work in art and aesthetics as a reaction and an alternative to the social and cultural impact of
38
modern scientific rationalism and the impact of ?disengaged instrumental mode of life? that
empties life of meaning and spiritual significance (Taylor 499).  The early movement?s emphasis
on aesthetic education, cultivation of aesthetic sensibility, was meant to counteract the
dehumanizing effects of modern scientific rationalism.  The ninetenth century?s ?social and
psychological effect of the Industrial Revolution, which enslaved milions of workers in gloomy
?sweating? industries and created cities of ?dreadful night,?? provides an image of the
mechanized character of modern society (Beckson xii).  Although Ruskin?s aesthetic utopian
vision of transcendence failed to fuse art and life into an organic harmonious community of free
individuals, his model of art?s role in society stirred Wilde?s conscience.
Aestheticism?s early utopian social project ended, insisting on the independence of art
from life, thus the alienation of the artist from society.  In contrast to Ruskin?s model of
transcendence, Walter Pater?s Studies in the History of the Renaisance (1873) stirred Wilde?s
senses.  It was his ?golden book?; as Wilde told Yeats, ?it is the very flower of decadence: the
last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was writen? (qtd. Beckson 41).   Pater?s
?golden book? did sound the last trumpet of Aestheticism as an organic and spiritual art
movement for social reform.  Readers could stil find a lingering vision of the grand utopian
project in The Renaisance that affirms that ?al periods, types, schools of taste, are in
themselves equal,? in continuity with the Victorian language of tolerance and sympathy (Harrold
1393).  In the ?Postscript? of his Appreciations, Pater turns, however, from the earlier aesthetic
democracy to the more elite ?true aesthetic critic? who with other ?creative minds of al
generations?the artist and those who have treated life in the spirit of art??builds ?that House
Beautiful? (1460).
39
Pater?s aestheticism is salvation for the elite and the individual rather than the mases.
For the individual, Pater?s ?Conclusion? reveals a modern awarenes of and response to the
world of flux and ?perpetual motion of modern existence,? the rejection of systems of thought
that ?requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience,? and a consciousnes that ?habit
is relative to a stereotyped world?: only the experience of sensation, ?any stirring of the senses,?
in a world of flux wil ?set the spirit free for a moment.?  Pater?s formula for succes in life
maintains ?ecstasy? of the senses. Grounded in a philosophy that values the uniquenes of an
individual?s experience and subjective impresions, Pater contends, ?art comes to you proposing
frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pas, and simply for
those moments? sake? (Harrold 1411).  Art becomes a ?refuge,? Pater writes in his esay ?Style,?
?a sort of cloistral refuge, from a certain vulgarity in the actual world? (Harrold 1429).  Al
ultimate values are aesthetic, in Pater?s aestheticism, a means toward an aesthetic good.  Thus the
purpose in life shifts from social harmony to an ?end of life? in rich experience realized in an
individual life of aesthetic enjoyment.
In valorizing the pursuit of individual sense experience, Pater revises the transcendent
critique of Ruskin and Morris and refutes Mathew Arnold?s critical directive ?to se the object
as in itself it realy is.?  In the ?Preface? to The Renaisance, he claims that ?in aesthetic
criticism the first step towards seing one?s object as it realy is, is to know one?s own
impresion as it realy is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly? (Harrold 1392-93).  Pater?s
impresionist, subjective criticism chalenges Aestheticism?s drive to wholenes, much like the
Impresionist visual artists who ?made thematic . . . the power of art to transfigure ordinary
reality,? ?bringing to light the merely tacit paterns and connections on which we usualy lean
unnoticing as we construe our normal world? (Taylor 468).  To know one?s impresion as it
40
realy is, Pater is not concerned with the ?thing in itself? but knowledge of the impresionist?s
appearance of things.  Also concerned with appearance, ninetenth century Impresionist
painters created sensations of light and color, a technique that ?shaters the ilusory coalescence
of signifier and signified object that characterizes both normalized perception and conventional
techniques of representing objects in painting? (Walker 8).  Like the Impresionist painters?
visual art, Pater?s literary works retard ?easy recognition of familiar objects and [refuse] to
disolve into ilusory depth,? making litle contact betwen the subject and the object.  For Pater,
the gathered ?moments? are a refuge from and a response to the progres of rationality and a
correction to its ?degradation of the senses? (Harrold 71).  His impresionist perspective deals a
blow to Aestheticism?s universalizing efforts, but like the post-impresionist paintings of
C?zanne, it wil take the disruptive, individual aesthetics of Oscar Wilde to re-open up self and
art to the other from which it is isolated in Pater?s critical impresionistic art.
From a utopian perspective, Pater can be read through Ernst Bloch?s revisionist utopian
philosophy.  Like Bloch, Pater?s ?moments? in art and literature produce what Bloch cals
?anticipatory iluminations? and critics, in acts of recovery, discover these ?truth? images of
utopia that Bloch cals ?fortunes of hope.?  The utopian imagination in art reveals, for Bloch, the
?dream of a beter life? embodied in aesthetic images. In the ?Conclusion? of The Renaisance,?
Pater?s crafts an image of his aesthetic critic who enters worldly flux to experience, unceasingly,
a chain of perfect and transitory ?moments? of desire.  In gathering his ?moments,? Pater
performs Bloch?s utopian task of ?recovery,? discovering the exquisite moments in art and the
flux of everyday life.
Pater?s recovery of the already existing ?moments? of experience has a totalizing
purpose, as ?end of life? contemplation.  These discovered ?moments? suggest Bloch?s ?not-yet?
41
principle of hope that indicates a future anticipation for human fulfilment. Unlike Pater or
Bloch, Wilde cals for critics ?to se the object as in itself it realy is not,? indicating not a
recovery of existing moments but his shift to a disruptive, disintegrating aestheticism.  In ?The
Preface? to Dorian Gray, Wilde writes that ?[t]he critic is he who can translate into another
manner or a new material his impresion of beautiful things.?  Wilde?s critic as artist subverts the
power of narrative authority.  Contesting possibilities of aesthetic totalization, Wilde critiques
aesthetic idealism?s drive toward the possibility of closure, and like C?zanne and Stein develops
an aesthetic that works to end the notion of an end.
Aestheticism and Wilde?s uneasy contemporary readers
Wilde?s influential biographer, Richard Elmann, understood The Picture of Dorian Gray
as Wilde writing ?the tragedy of aestheticism? (315).  Readers raged against the decadent and
anti-Establishment author Wilde and his character Dorian.  Following its first publication in
Lippinscott?s Monthly Magazine, June 20, 1890, and until the mid 1950s, The Picture of Dorian
Gray was read paralel to Wilde?s chronological existence, his personal and social behavior and,
in the context of literary history, his categorical place as a writer concerned exclusively with
literature, as opposed to literature with larger concerns with politics and culture.
 
  Wilde
problematizes the expectations of moral identification betwen author and work, life and mind.
For late ninetenth century readers, texts should be integrated, unified structures. Embroiled in
the late-Victorian controversy over the relation betwen art and morality, readers felt Wilde?s
story lacked the conventional ninetenth-century paterned form that confirms the picture of a
42
cohesive society in a knowable structure.
1
  Ninetenth-century readers, comfortable with
constructions that maintained moral integrity and moved characters from innocence to suffering
and renewal in a hero patern modified for readers in need of moral direction, valued novels
concerned with social isues.  For these readers, the novel?s biographical asociation of Oscar
Wilde and Dorian Gray created for many a degenerate ?hero.?  An anonymous commentary in
the July 5, 1890, Scots Observer atacked Wilde; ?it is a false art . . .. It is false to human
nature?for its hero is a devil; it is false to morality?for it is not made sufficiently clear that the
writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanlines, health, and sanity?
(Hart-Davis 265).  Wilde, however, disturbs and disrupts the relations betwen terms.  Dorian
Gray problematizes individual identity by placing the author/artist/character in a precarious, les
dominant position.  Like the man, Wilde?s new novelistic form of dialogue frustrated
expectations in its refusal of an aesthetic utopian image of reconciliation.
Criticized from a lack-of-morals standpoint, Wilde?s subject mater and style chalenged
conventional topics and ignited an uproar of righteous indignation and acusations of
degeneracy.  A June 24, 1890 St James Gazete commentary contends that had Gautier been
given Wilde?s material he ?could have made it romantic, entrancing, beautiful.  Mr. Stevenson
could have made it convincing, humorous, pathetic . . ..  It has been reserved for Mr. Oscar
Wilde to make it dull and nasty.?  In closing the reviewer aserts that such books are ?revelations
                                                  
1. ?Cultural trends in the final decades of the century were thus moving in two
simultaneously antithetical directions:  declining Victorianism (the synthesis of moral, religious,
artistic, political, and social thought that had produced the wealthiest and most powerful empire
on earth) and rising Modernism (with its chalenges by writers and artists to the cultural
foundations of Philistine society, which habitualy condemned daring innovations in the arts as
?imoral? or ?degenerate?)? (Beckson xiv-xv).  Arthur Symons? ?The Decadent Movement in
Literature? (1893) and Hugh E. M. Stutfield?s ?Tommyrotics? (1895) offer differing views on
the end of the ninetenth century literary debates.
43
only of the singularly unpleasant minds from which they emerge.?
2 
  The story?s ?secret?
meanings so astonished readers that later, at Wilde?s 1895 trial for homosexuality, public
prosecutor Edward Carson read several pasages from Dorian Gray as evidence of Wilde?s own
?perverted moral views.?  These comments expres anxieties over the fin-de-si?cle
aestheticism?s separation of art and morality, ?an indication that the earlier cultural synthesis of
Victorianism was unraveling . . . common beliefs and asumptions concerning social
relationships, the nature of reality, and the nature of art were subjected to atack? by novels such
at Wilde?s Dorian Gray (Beckson xvi).
Yet Wilde never has it al one way; he does not merely critique common aesthetic beliefs
but also offers a new aestheticism.  In his 31 July 1890 leter to the Scot Observer, Wilde applies
his aesthetic principle of the artist critic, saying that ?[i]t wil be to each man what he is himself.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art realy mirrors?; he notes that a ?Mr[.] Charles Whibley . . .
discovers in [Dorian Gray] ?lots of morality.?  It is quite true,? Wilde continues, ?that he goes on
to say that he detects no art in it.  But I do not think that it is fair to expect a critic to be able to
se a work of art from every point of view? (Elmann, Artist as Critic 249).  At once, Wilde
chalenges the single point perspective of narrative structure and critical perspective: he breaks
up unquestioned narrative unity and disrupts critical pretensions of seing the whole of the work
in a glance, claims of objective closure, and promotes the ideas that art and life may be
multileveled, resistant to unification. Forms of opposition and differences of evaluation suggest,
in Bakhtinean terms, dialogue.  Acording to Wilde, ?[d]iversity of opinion about a work of art
shows,? he writes in the ?Preface? of his novel, ?that the work is new, complex, and vital.?
Since its publication, Dorian Gray has generated responses that ilustrate diversity and
                                                  
2. Samuel Henry Jeyes, ?A Study in Puppydom.?  St James Gazete June 24, 1890. 4.
44
contradiction of belief systems.  If the novel?s ?dark plot? portrays the fal of a great utopian
aesthetic movement it also portrays something else, ?outside? its identification with arts for art?s
sake vision.
Wilde?s contemporary critics tended to separate the categories of ?literarines? from
social, ethical, and cultural concerns, a distinction that Wilde?s art works to reduce.
Contemporary readers who found his novel a ?false art? and of ?ethical import? indicate an
individual perspective that Wilde refuses to totalize in the novel?s structure.  Wilde?s novel
produces a perspective similar to Adorno?s non-identity, an identity that is always open,
individual, and always different from every thought of it.  Like C?zanne?s recalcitrant surfaces,
Dorian Gray resists totalization and reconciliation.  Like Adorno?s dream of emancipation, the
novel liberates thought not from division, but emancipates thought, ?[t]o free thought of the
obligation to envision reconciliation? (Schoolman 118).  In its paradoxical and dialogical form,
Wilde?s novel generates the ?fertilising conflict? of H. G. Wels? utopianism of individualities
that Wilde had hoped it would produce.
The novel can be read as participating in the critical debates on art and life:  Wilde
believed the public swalowed ?their clasics whole, and never tasted them,? and this uncritical
aceptance ?does a great deal of harm? (Soul 1091).  Against clamor of ?Caliban seing . . ..  not
seing his own face in a glas,? Wilde presented a new form that disturbed aesthetic expectation
(?The Preface?, Dorian Gray).  He knew that ?[a]ny atempt to extend the subject-mater of art
[was] extremely distasteful to the public; and yet,? he argued, ?the vitality and progres of art
depend in a large measure on the continual extension of subject mater? (Soul 1091).  In a similar
way, Morton Schoolman considers the ?logic of equivalency that knows the world not as it is, in
itself, but in terms of identities that reason projects on it . . . ilusory identities? (117). Counter to
45
public aceptance of ?what has been,? Wilde ?selects his own subject, and treats it as he
chooses.?  The public disliked Dorian Gray, Wilde argued, because it is ?new,? and ?they are
afraid of it.? Victorians educated in John Ruskin?s vision of art?s purpose to reveal beauty
expected art to conform to ?man?s moral nature? and provide moral guidance (Beckson 260).
In contrast, Wilde?s picture of Dorian provided a moraly ?vague? atmosphere.  In some
ways the moral vaguenes of Wilde?s picture resembles the Impresionists? ?suppresion of an
object?s precise outlines to enable the imagination to perceive ultimate realities? (Beckson 260).
Impresionist paintings made some of the ?suppresed tacit ?look? of things visible? and began
the exploration of the power of painting to re-shape our perception of things (Taylor 468). But
the Impresionists? focus on color and light often disolved form, and Wilde valued the
expresion of form as wel as color.  From this perspective, Wilde?s utopian aesthetic vision
tends to paralel C?zanne?s post-impresionist paintings that ?brought to expresion the
meaningful forms and relationships which undergird our ordinary perception? and produced
egalitarian fields of color and form in surface interplay.
Wilde?s uneasy stance: utopian aestheticism and subversive individualism
In The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1890), Wilde staged his overt aesthetic utopian
vision.  His aesthetic in Soul develops his new aesthetic doctrines laid out in The Decay of Lying
(1889): In The Decay of Lying, Wilde presents his ?general principle that Life imitates Art far
more than Art imitates Life? and ?Art never expreses anything but itself,? saying, ?[t]his is the
principle of my new aesthetics (985, 987).  Rather than a subordination of Life to Art or Art to
Life, Life and Art are brought into a dialogic interplay betwen the parts. Wilde tels readers of
30 June 1890 Daily Chronicle that the ?moral of the story? of Dorian Gray is that ?al exces, as
46
wel as al renunciation, brings its punishment? (Elmann, Artist as Critic 246).  This general
principle, he writes, ?becomes simply a dramatic element in a work of art and not the object of
the work of art itself?: ?it does not enunciate its law as a general principle.?  The interplay of art
and life, life and art, resists an objective metaphysics, knowledge of the thing in itself and truth
from a particular, single point of view.  The interplay of life and art resists both ?al exces as
wel as al renunciation.?  Instead it produces an open-ended responsivenes.
As Wilde notes, ?paradoxes are always dangerous things,? and by seting his ?general
principle? in an ever-unfolding disruption of interplay of ?art and life,? Wilde establishes an
unstable ground for interpreting art. At the conclusion of The Decay of Lying, Wilde argues that
this general principle has ?never been put forward before, but it is extremely fruitful, and throws
an entirely new light upon the history of Art? (992).  Wilde chalenges the history of art as a
drive to comprehensive wholenes to achieve a single point perspective; instead Wilde imagines
art?s interplay as open-ended and responsive, a continuous play betwen the parts.  Wilde hopes
to emancipate art and life from a ?world of the identities imposed on them by images and ideals
conceived to reconcile different forms of life, different forms of being? (Schoolman 118). Wilde
expects his paradoxical theory to produce a ?fertilising conflict? that wil act as a starting point
for a new aesthetic theory and new works of art.  Rereading ?Art? in the context of his theory
wil, Wilde believes, release the transformative power of art because art wil expres itself, rather
than be expected to symbolize an age, mediate betwen traditional contraries, or be concerned
only with aesthetic qualities.  Wilde does write that ?[a]rt finds her own perfection within, and
not outside of, herself,? . . . and ?develops purely on her own lines? (982, 987).  In the context of
his ?general principle,? ?the principle? that ?art wil expres itself? would not oblige art to be
confined to any one theory, including its own qualities.  By placing art and life on the same
47
C?zannean picture plane, Wilde suggests art and life are ongoing proceses of a surface aesthetic,
and the activities of each wil become part of the other. In a kind of Derridean view, for Wilde
neither art nor life has a fixed, completely autonomous esence.  The conflict betwen, then, wil
defer any final meaning.
Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.  Therein lies its imense value.
Oscar Wilde The Soul of Man Under Socialism 1091
Following his new aesthetic doctrines in The Decay of Lying, it should be no surprise that
in Wilde?s utopian Soul ?Art? becomes ?a disturbing and disintegrating force,? equated with
?Individualism.?  The aesthetic individualism of Wilde?s The Soul of Man Under Socialism was
problematic for many Victorians, however.  Wilde?s socialism privileges the artist and ?presents
an anarchist vision of the artist fulfiling his ?Individualism? in a utopian society, one not
exercising ?that monstrous and ignorant thing that is caled Public Opinion? (Beckson 17).
Making individualism ?the supreme achievement of socialism,? Wilde places stres on the
increasing conflict betwen culture and individualism.  By the 1880s in Britain, Carl Beckson
writes, ?the doctrine of anarchism . . . was asociated with such individualism, and its proponents
were widely regarded by the conservative pres as threats to the social order? (18).  Wilde?s
socialism leads to individualism and threatens conservative work to preserve the current order;
Wilde?s socialism is a ?socialism of pleasure? (Lesjak 195).  A utopian aesthetic acompanies
Wilde?s socialist ethic, and Mathew Beaumont correctly notes that ?socialism serves for
[Wilde], in the future, as the material foundation of a redemptive aestheticism? (6).
Many factors make it difficult to understand Wilde?s art and his aesthetic theories.  The
public?s disfavor of Wilde?s private life and his literary inclination to paradox have caused
readers to overlook his serious aesthetic chalenge.  To dismis the seriousnes of Wilde?s
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aesthetics is, however, to mis his belief in art?s vital connection with life.  ?To become a work
of art? is a means toward individual freedom and self-realization.  His paradoxical approach
chalenges the notion that such unity might ever be achieved; nonetheles, art plays a vital role in
improving the everyday conditions of individual life.  ?Art as the most intense mode of
Individualism? counters a society that tends to make human beings mechanistic and conformist:
?Self-denial is,? Wilde contends, ?simply a method by which man arrests his progres, and self-
sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old worship of pain which is so
terrible a factor in the history of the world, and which even now makes its victims day by day,
and has its altars in the land.  Virtues!  Who knows what virtues are?  Not you.  Not I.  Not
anyone? (Critic as Artist 1024).  Individualism eliminates self-denial and self-sacrifice as empty
ideals that arrest self-development.  Wilde argues that the possibility of true freedom and self-
realization resides with the individual.  Individualism transforms the crush of social represion in
the wholenes of experience, for Wilde an ever-unfolding proces that may never find complete
wholenes.
In Wilde?s formula, art and individualism as ?disturbing and disintegrating force? are a
kind of action, an individualized self-direction.  Wilde?s aesthetic individualism as ?disturbing
and disintegrating force? contests the notion of individualism as discrete and unified and
chalenges any ?end of life? or totalizing theory.  Freedom for Dorian Gray depends on his
?wish? for individualized direction rather than Ruskin?s utopian vision of freedom that depended
on the cultivation of aesthetic sensibilities toward a harmonious totality.  Art is a kind of action.
For Wilde freedom is a self-creation that recognizes that the individual, as Pater noted, is a
?perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.?  But Wilde?s aesthetic self, unlike Pater?s, is
49
not isolated.  Wilde grounded art and life in unresolved tension, working toward a C?zannean
cross-current weaving of meaning with other parts and refusing any final identification.
Pater?s aestheticism can be understood in R.V. Johnson?s approach to aestheticism as
?view of life,? as ?contemplative aestheticism?the idea of treating experience, ?in the spirit of
art? as material for aesthetic enjoyment? (12).  In this view of life as aesthetic individualism,
?[w]hat emerges in art as the self-contained and self-sufficient artwork manifests itself in life in
the figure of the solipsistic aesthete or dandy who creates himself in a similarly conceived form
of artistic expresion and chooses an equaly unique and independent existence? (Comfort 3).
Looking at Pater?s idea of the Renaisance sheds light on Pater?s aesthetics and aesthetic
individualism as ?contemplative aestheticism.?  Pater approaches the Renaisance as an idea
rather than an historical period, one that can be found in al periods, studied ?for its general spirit
and character, for the ethical qualities of which it is a consummate type? (Harrold 1395).  In this
sense, the historical period becomes a discrete, ahistorical idea, separate from the world of flux,
one of Bloch?s anticipated but ?not-yet? principles of hope.  In relation to aestheticism?s view of
art, as self-contained and self-sufficient, Pater?s idea of the Renaisance manifests in life as a
figure of ?equaly unique and independent existence.?  Pater places the aesthetic at the forefront
of life, an alternative to the flux of life that isolates the individual from other aspects of human
experience.
Pater?s isolated self that resists communication with others outside ?the thick wal of
personality? is problematic for art and life.  In isolating life as art, the individual remains, like the
work of art, separate from life, and experience is ?ringed round for each one of us by that thick
wal of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us . . ..
Every one of those impresions is the impresion of the individual in his isolation each mind
50
keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world? (Harrold 1409).  Pater?s finenes of
criticism iluminates possibilities for a human being?s personal change, a life of sensation that
counters the ?deadening? flux of the everyday world.  He succeded in finding sources that could
restore depth and richnes to the meaning of life, but his scheme failed to recover the connection
of self and society or Other.  British aestheticism?s ?fascination with the other? as one of the
movement?s major dualities functions, on one hand, by denying the existence ?of any
phenomenon beyond the confines or the self and, on the other, ?lamenting the absence of a
significant Other whom, it hopes, might somehow be able to complete or reunify the fragmented,
isolated self? (Freedman 35-36).  Pater and later Wilde suggest that ?the self formed through its
experience of others is esentialy unstable?so unstable, in fact, that it yearns to overcome its
boundaries at the price of embracing its own extinction? (Freedman 37).  For Pater the encounter
with the Other is a proces of identification, ?the wish to replace the other, to mimic or mirror
enough aspects of another?s character that one might absorb him? (39).  In Marius, Freedman
argues, Pater steps away from such absorption, retreating into the isolated self, because ?death is
the only possible outcome of acts of identification? (41).
In the dialogical structure of his ?picture,? Wilde confirms Pater?s belief that death is the
outcome of identification with not only the Other, but also in a theory of life as art that
substitutes art for life.  Wilde responds to Pater?s fear in the figure of the dandy, Lord Henry,
rather than the usual suspect, Dorian.  The world may think of Wilde as Lord Henry Wotton:
ornamental man-about-town, lover of luxurious living, spouting wity aphorisms from his highly-
decorated Corinthian capital.  But in the end, Lord Henry is an isolated self, a ?mere spectator of
life?:  he separates himself from life, thinks art a ?malady,? and love an ?ilusion.?  Lord Henry
identifies life as art and aims to influence Dorian to follow this totalizing image.  Image of the
51
dandy, Wotton absorbs art as Other in a proces of identification, ?the wish to replace the other,
to mimic or mirror enough aspects of another?s character that one might absorb [it].?
Consequently, he remains a static ideal.  In a 26 June 1890, leter to the St James?s Gazete,
Wilde explains that ?Lord Henry Wotton seks to be merely the spectator of life.  He finds that
those who reject the batle are more deeply wounded than those who take part in it? (Elmann,
Artist as Critic 240).  Lord Henry?s choice was Pater?s aesthetic choice: an aesthetic of
contemplation, unengaged and isolated.
Like Lord Henry, Dorian appears a ?picture? of ideality that appeals to the integrative
imagination of naturalistic portraiture.  At the surface, Dorian?s distinctive beauty sems ideal
and static.  But Wilde?s aesthetic emphasis suggests reading Dorian through Wilde?s aesthetic
point of view.  One definition of ?Dorian? is an order of architecture.  The Doric order, in
common use by the seventh B.C., is characterized by its solid, masive appearance and simplicity
of form; its fluted column has no base, and its two part capital of circular pad and square slab
transition betwen the column and the entablature (Walton 294).  Like the Doric order, the
character Dorian portrays an opposition of characteristics:  he portrays, on one hand, a state of
innocence, clarity, and simplicity; on the other, an object of opposition, opposing circular and
square two-part capital, Dorian suggests complexity of surface ideality.  The Doric lack of
?base,? like Dorian?s lack of family, denies a finite organizing system and suggests a move
toward twentieth century non-foundational ?outsidednes.?  Like C?zanne?s paintings without a
fundamental single-point perspective, Dorian?s lack of controlling theory ilustrates a recalcitrant
surface that holds the potential for interplay and change.  Part of Wilde?s ilustration of the re-
constructive proces, the novel Dorian Gray resists easy conclusion, thus always holds potential
for further readings.  The novel?s dialogic structure requires an exchange of different views and
52
its meaning rises from a dialogue of interpretations betwen and among individual critics.  In this
way, Wilde develops a Welsean utopian scheme to ?beter the interplay?: a scheme to recover
the connection betwen the self and others, alowing individual to counter aestheticism drive to
wholenes and to grow and change as art does.  Wilde?s novel reaches toward Wels? utopianism
of individualities that produces life in interplay; as Wels defines it, the ?fertilising conflict of
individualities? is ?how life shapes itself more and more to modern perceptions? (10-11).
Unlike Lord Henry and Pater, Wilde acknowledges that one must enter life in order to be
fully human, and art must encompas reality.  ?Basil Halward is what I think I am:  Lord Henry
what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be?in other ages, perhaps,? Wilde writes
(Hart-Davis 352).  The figures of the novel?s ?picture? are closely related to Wilde: the artist, the
dandy, and the Wilde?s new perspective of art and art as life.  For Wilde, the individual self is
multileveled, a construction of self and others. Life as art, for Wilde, would be a proces of self-
construction, art and life in interplay.  The individualities of Wilde?s novel portray this interplay
of parts.  Like Basil, Wilde is an artist, a creator of forms and images.  But Wilde realizes the
artist has limitations in the artistic development of individual subjectivity: ?there is a limit even
to the number of untried backgrounds, and it is possible that further development of the habit of
introspection may prove fatal to that creative faculty to which it seks to supply fresh material?
(Critic as Artist 1055).  A move beyond Impresionistic contemplation, Wilde hopes for an
intelectual, critical spirit that wil extend the future of the creative faculty.  He, like Dorian,
?wishes? to progres beyond known aesthetic boundaries: in the future he hopes that both he and
his art perform the role of critic and criticism to develop new, alternative aesthetic perspectives.
Dorian is what Wilde ?would like to be?in other ages, perhaps.?  Wilde writes, in Critic as
Artist that art is not the symbol of an age, but the ages are symbols for art.  Wilde believes he
53
writes the Age of Dorian; he hoped Dorian would in other ages ?extend the future of the creative
faculty.?  For Wilde, it was important to develop new atitudes and new points of view that
looked beyond Mathew Arnold?s proper aim of criticism: ?to se the object as in itself it realy
is.?  Arnold?s aesthetic idea was old, for Wilde a traditional view of art?s moral purpose that
could be disinterestedly found in the object, if you were told what to look for.  As wel, Wilde
sought to se beyond Pater?s critical step away from Arnold:  ?the first step towards seing one?s
object as it realy is, is to know one?s impresion as it realy is, to discriminate it, to realise it
distinctly.?  Wilde aserts that the aim of criticism is ?to se the object as in itself it realy is not.?
Neither identified with the ?best? cultural ideas, nor the subjective critic, the critic becomes an
artist.  Conflating the artist and critic, Wilde places them in the interplay of personalities.
Artist critic and a new work of art.
In the tension of the artist critic, Wilde develops a non-totalizing perspective art and life
as art.  Placing the artist and critic face-to-face, Wilde?s aesthetics anticipate H. G. Wels? 1905
utopian scheme for ?betering the interplay of individualities.?  As Wels explains his scheme,
?[u]ntil you bring in individualities, nothing comes into being, and a Universe ceases when you
shiver the mirror of the least of individual minds? (11).  Facing one with the other, the artist
critic shaters totalizing aestheticism?s drive to comprehensive wholenes of art with an aesthetic
individuality?s receptivity to difference.  ?The critic,? Wilde writes, ?has to educate the public;
the artist has to educate the critic? (Hart-Davis 269).  In interplay of individualities, rather than a
linked chain of moments, Wilde suggests that through criticism the aesthetic critic wil be an
interpreter.  But he is not one simply repeating
54
in another form a mesage that has been put into his lips to say. . . . it is only by
intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality and
work of others, and the more strongly this personality enters into the interpretation
the more real the interpretation becomes, the more satisfying, the more convincing,
and the more true.  (Critic as Artist 1033)
By intensifying his own personality, the critic can beter understand others.  If Wilde exhibits
any universalizing tendencies, it would be a universal individualism, each one developing and
conveying its own individual interpretation; not confined by general precepts, however,
individualities interplay to develop ideas and views betwen themselves.  A C?zannean aesthetic
surface of interplay, Wilde?s artist critic non-totalizing proces copes without an underlying or
overarching universal judgment, individualities of interpretations interplay, ensuring the
individuality and collectivity of society.  Like C?zanne?s works, Wilde understands art and life
as art as open and unfinished, an aesthetic model that anticipates Bakhtin?s idea of
unfinalizability:  an idea which ?rejects models of any cultural proces that investigate that
proces in terms of laws or systems while treating actual events as mere instantiations of
preexisting laws? (Morson 39).
Wilde does not follow Pater?s procedure but its effects.  More than Pater, Wilde gives
atention to the interplay of personalities in art and criticism.  Pater?s ?isolated self may expand
itself by increasing the number of fine, rich, and rare impresions it has of the world; but these
impresions are predominantly visual ones, entering through the eyes and shaping subjects into
litle scopophiles? (Freedman 42).  Wilde, too, seks sensations in the flux of experience and
embraces the ?transitorines of desire,? but Wilde?s individual and aesthetic individuality is open
to the pleasures of al the senses.  Moreover for Wilde aesthetic experience develops in a critic
55
artist proces, a new kind of individuality in interplay of individualities. For Wilde, the critical
relation is dynamic, interplay betwen the perceptual and the conceptual: the aesthetic
experience informs the subject; the subject in turn creates an object of his or her own.  Wilde?s
proces more than Pater?s emphasizes the ?force of temperament? and beyond Pater, Wilde
acknowledges the relationship betwen the sensual and the intelectual, the individual aesthetic
experience and the realities of common life.  Wilde not only makes the work of art as source
important, but Wilde?s aesthetic theory copes with the consequences of aesthetic effects.  Unlike
Arnold?s critical aesthetic activity that informs general society by the critic?s single point
perspective, for Wilde critical activity is a proces of interplay betwen artist and critic that
produces a work of art of his or her own; this individual aesthetic experience informs rather than
directs general perceptions and society.  Wilde?s emphasis on the individual aesthetic experience
and the interplay of artist critic approaches Gertrude Stein?s observation of C?zanne?s visual art,
as ?each part as important as the whole,? and the proces ?beginning again and again.?
 In Dorian Gray, Sibyl Vane as actor critic initialy plays Wilde?s artist critic.  He gives to
Sibyl, actor-artist-critic, the highest role.  Interpreting art she acts out, using each work as a
starting point for her own work of art: she interprets the works of art from her own perspective,
and enacts them in a way that communicates the works in new ways.   In doing so, Sibyl?s art
develops a scheme of betering the aesthetic interplay, ?how life shapes itself more and more to
modern perceptions? (Wels 11).  As an actor able to interpret and communicate art in new ways,
Sibyl appeals to Dorian?s imagination and sense of aesthetic non-identity, having identities that
cannot be known, because identity, like art, is always different from the ways it can be
represented by thought.  Dorian tels Basil and Lord Henry that [s]he wil represent something to
you that you have never known? (65).  As ?a born artist,? Sibyl takes Dorian beyond ?London . .
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. in the ninetenth century. . . . in a forest that no man had ever sen? (62).  Utopian in
imagination, Wilde?s aesthetic perspective is outside the ideals and images of ninetenth century
aesthetics.  Art has the potential to develop new perspectives because, for Wilde, art is the
realization of change.  As a sibyl, Sibyl Vane ought to communicate alternatives, acting as
?vane? to show a way to ?beter the interplay.?  In her love for Dorian, however, Sibyl re-collects
empty ideality.  Her art falters and then identifies with, what Dorian cals ??shalow and stupid,?
common ?realistic? representations that bring death to her and her art.
Wilde?s visual artist Basil also gives up artistic endeavors toward artistic, self-
development.  Like Sibyl, Basil becomes dominated by Dorian?s personality; Basil then re-
produces what he had already achieved, and thus he fails to realize that art is part of the living
proces.  If balance is achieved, harmony is only temporary.  Basil tels Dorian, ?I worshipped
you.  I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke.  I wanted to have you al to myself? (89).
Basil wants to isolate art and Dorian and bows to aestheticism?s drive to wholenes.  Basil fears
he has put too much of himself in the portrait of Dorian, and his failure to present his ?new
manner? of art arrests, simultaneously, the development of Basil?s and art?s individuality. Basil
closes off the creative proces.
In theory and artistic form, Wilde explores the notion that identity is shaped.  A product
of Wilde?s utopian imagination, the art of his novel and its character Dorian Gray function to
portray identity as a constituting proces rather than one already constituted.  In the novel, Wilde
portrays the figures Basil, Henry, and Dorian as created in interplay of influences, in interplay
betwen the self and others; however, only the art of Dorian remains open and responsive to the
Other.  An intense personality, free from oppresive limitations, Dorian is Wilde?s symbol ?of
what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive.?  A
57
symbol of what we might be, Dorian represents ?a prospective identity.?  Ricoeur argues that
?[t]he ruling symbols of our identity derive not only from our present and our past but also from
our expectations for the future.  It is part of our identity that is open to surprises, to new
encounters. . . . a prospective identity.  The identity is in suspense.  Thus, the utopian element is
ultimately a component of identity.  What we cal ourselves is also what we expect and yet what
we are not? (311).  Wilde describes this surface aesthetic of identity in his ?Preface? to Dorian
Gray writing,
Al art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
Wilde?s art as surface aesthetic, like C?zanne?s recalcitrant surfaces, resists the totalizing
identities imposed on him by images conceived to suppres art?s individuality and difference.
The prospective identity is defined by its capacity for change.  In its constitutive role, the utopian
imagination refuses confining systems and, in an ever-unfolding disruptive force, anticipates
growth in thought and in life.  Basil Halward had realized his ideal absolutely.  And as Wilde
expreses utopia, ?when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and
becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself? (Critic as Artist 1031).
Dorian?s starting point is his own ideal beauty.  As prospective identity, he ?has as many
meanings as man has moods? (1030).  He takes suggestion from the artist?s work, and by a fresh
medium of expresion realizes an imaginative beauty that ?makes al interpretations true and no
interpretation final? (1031).  For Dorian?s role, Wilde provides an atmosphere within which
readers can realize new perspectives for ?the vitality and progres of art.?  He tels readers in his
leters, ?it was necesary, . . . for the dramatic development of this story to surround Dorian Gray
58
with an atmosphere of moral corruption.  Otherwise the story would have had no meaning and the
plot no isue? (Hart-Davis 266).  Wilde corrupts the principle of conformity, custom, and
conduct.  To create new atitudes and new points of view, Wilde breaks with elaborate social
codes in order ?[t]o keep this atmosphere vague and indeterminate and wonderful.?  Wilde?s
Dorian Gray approaches C?zanne?s painting of recalcitrant surfaces that contest totalizing
perspective, unbound from ?setled custom of thought, or stereotyped mode of looking at things?
(Soul 1091).
Overturning traditional constructions, Wilde opens a space for Dorian to asert the
?disintegrating force? of individualism and upsets reader expectation.  Rather than being moraly
corrupt, Dorian Gray corrupts systematic morality.  Wilde overturns the notions of right and
wrong that confine thought and self-development.  In Critic as Artist, Wilde replaces ?Sin? as
moral principle with ?Sin? as aesthetic potential.   In Wilde?s theory Sin becomes the perception
of possibilities.  Aestheticaly, Sin saves Dorian Gray from ?monotony of type.?  As Lord Henry
remarks, ?The costume of the ninetenth century is detestable.  It is so somber, so depresing.  Sin
is the only real colour-element left in modern life? (28).  Wilde characterizes Dorian Gray with
the utopian yearning to ?know more? and to ?be more.?  Dorian Gray is restles and discontent;
his subsequent wanderings indicate a need for utopia.  At the anthropological level, Dorian?s
behavior is caled ?versatility? that stems from individual choice and is considered free and
unpredictable.  Dorian exhibits independence and individual initiative, the capacity for creative
behavior that requires taking risks.  Although it causes conflicts betwen individuals and their
community, the individual initiative ensures future survival for the self and society.  Likewise,
artistic individualism ensures aesthetic survival.
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Wilde joined his predecesors in the utopian task to set individuals free from conventional
and oppresing structures of everyday life.  In a different way than his predecesors, Wilde?s
aesthetic individualism created space for a more creative culture that returns art to life.   ?We
have got rid of what was bad,? Wilde writes in Critic as Artist (1890). ?We have now to make
what is beautiful? (1050).  If emphasis is placed on is, the concrete here and now, Wilde is
working in aspects of human existence, rather than transcendent ideals.  At end of the ninetenth
century, art was reconciled with life and art was separated from life: either way, life and art
remain hierarchical, traditional contraries.  On one hand, art?s purity is at stake and must remain
detached from life.  If, on the other hand, the two contraries are reconciled then one must be
subsumed under the other, or both parts must equaly lose power.  In Ruskin?s aesthetic utopia, art
and life become interpenetrating realities and the world a harmonious totality.  The critics of
Wilde?s Dorian Gray were wiling to subsume al art under a moral category.  For Wilde,
however, art is a kind of force.  In his critical works he develops the theoretical considerations of
the relationship betwen art and humans.  In The Picture of Dorian Gray he promotes his new
aestheticism, a view of art and a view of life. Neither is safe from external influences.  Wilde?s
critical studies and his fiction anticipate the changes undergone by the concept of literary value
that means ?today it is no longer possible to define ?literarines? separately from cultural,
historical, or social concerns? (Smal 155).  Recent studies point out that aspects of human
existence, such as politics, sexuality, and gender, are present in al conceptual schemes.
3
Important here, these aspects are present regardles of the claims of universality and neutrality to
mask such aspects.
                                                  
3. Ian Smal?s ?Literary Histories,? in his Oscar Wilde Revalued, explores the revaluing
of Oscar Wilde?s literary works in the context of the ?series of far-reaching changes? that the
concept of literary value has undergone in the twentieth century.
60
Wilde utopian
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a product of Wilde?s utopian imagination, and the painting
of Dorian Gray portrays familiar but empty ideals, and produces a ?fiction? of new perspectives
from which we can re-think the nature of existence.  Both external object of art and imediate
experience of proces, Wilde?s ?portrait? can be viewed as one of Bloch?s utopian ?tracings,?
certified by the Blochean moments of ?astonishment? that constitute the perception of the future
concealed in what exists.  For a condition of living, Wilde produces new ideals that for Wilde as
for Bloch, carry the dream of a beter life, but are not yet.  Bloch argues that an ideal contains
something desirable and worth striving for (Bloch, Utopian Function 105).  Thus ideals are what
we strive for in the content of our lives.  For Bloch the ideas of the imagination ?carry on the
existing facts toward their future potentiality of their othernes, of their beter condition in an
anticipatory way.?  Bloch?s utopianism moves critical thought forward, toward what is not-yet in
existence.
Wilde, however, stands uneasy betwen Bloch?s utopian progres of finding the not-yet in
the existing and Ricoeur?s continuously disruptive dialectic: Wilde?s utopia anticipates Adorno?s
affirmation of individuality in his concept of ?non-identity,? which refers ?to nature, being, or
the world and al it contains as having identities that cannot be known, because identity is always
different from the ways it can be represented by thought? (Schoolman 123).  In language that
considers Wilde?s aesthetic imagination in utopian terms, Elmann concludes: ?We inherit his
struggle to achieve supreme fictions in art, to asociate art with social change, to bring together
individual and social impulse, to save what is ecentric and singular from being sanitized and
standardized, to replace a morality of severity by one of sympathy? (Oscar Wilde 589).
Is this Utopia?
61
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one
country at which Humanity is always landing.  And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seing a beter
country, sets sail.  Progres is the realization of Utopias.
Oscar Wilde The Soul of Man Under Socialism 1089
The Soul of Man Under Socialism criticaly reconfigures utopia, progres, and individualism, a
reconfiguration Wilde wil expand in Dorian Gray.  Wilde?s statement ?Progres is the realization
of Utopias? defines utopia in its capacity for change, and it asociates utopia with anticipation and
hope for what is not-yet in existence.  Wilde?s metaphoric map suggests that any representation,
or picture, of the world needs to include possibilities of what is possible for existence.  As part of
our imagination, utopia is always present, but in fact it is temporary or not-yet.  Wilde?s utopian
imagination perceives a continuous reconstruction of the living experience that tends forward;
each construction derives from interplay, a ?fertilising conflict of individualities? (Wels 10).  The
utopian expresion of hope lies in what sems like Wilde?s progresive sequence of continuous
reconstruction toward ?a beter country.?  As in Bloch, Wilde?s utopia presents itself as ideas of
the imagination that ?carry on existing facts toward their future potentiality of their othernes, of
their beter condition in an anticipatory way? (Bloch, Utopian Function 105).  Wilde like Bloch
believes that art and literature can act as maps of the world; maps constructed with utopian
imagination can direct humanity to a ?beter country.?  Art, for Wilde as for Bloch, is the main
vehicle to those ideals.
Utopian scholars and students of Wilde alike cite, almost as convention, Wilde?s
statement on Utopia and Progres. Even Ernst Bloch cites it without critique in his Principles of
Hope.  Yet Wilde?s conceptual reconfiguration of progres opens utopia and individualism to an
ongoing, disruptive proces.  Progres can be defined as ?[a] narrative of change which looked
forward and upward to ultimate fulfilment? (Woodal 5).  Wiliam Morris, like Wilde,
62
complained that ?practical? socialists ?read the present into the future,? a form of progres that
imagined ?people?s ways of life and habits of thought wil be prety much as they are now?
(Morris 336-37).  H. G. Wels also critiques the concept of progres and makes a similar claim in
A Modern Utopia footnote, arguing that ?[t]he social speculations of the Greeks . . . had just the
same primary defect as the economic speculations of the eightenth century?they began with
the asumptions that the general conditions of the prevalent state of affairs were permanent?
(265).  Mathew Beaumont, author of ?Reinterpreting Oscar Wilde?s Concept of Utopia: The
Soul of Man Under Socialism,? reinterprets Wilde?s concept of utopia and its asociation with
the concept of progres; he argues that students of utopia often use the statement out of context
or partialy.  In other words, they ?misrepresent? it.  Although Wiliam Morris and Wilde
disagreed on the agent of change?Morris advocated work and Wilde believed in pleasurable
leisure?they ?sought to read the future into the present? rather than the present into the future
(Beaumont 16).
The question that frames Wilde?s statement, ?Is this Utopia?,? is not rhetorical but
critical.  Like Morris, Wilde believed that machines could free people for beter use of their time.
Like Morris, he objected to the mas of machine-made articles that reduced not only the object?s
beauty but also human creativity: ?The evil that machinery is doing is not merely in the
consequences of its work, but in the fact that it makes men themselves machines also.  Whereas
we wish them to be artists, that is to say men? (qtd. in Elmann, Oscar Wilde 194).  Wilde sought
a socialist alternative that disrupted existing conditions.  Several things occur: Humanity, the
Individual, lands at Utopia, ?looks out, and, seing a beter country, sets sail.?  Wilde?s
Individual as ?always landing? establishes Individual?s development, in art and life, as an
ongoing proces.  Wilde?s proces does not indicate a finalized, completed fulfilment, or end
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goal.  Rather, Wilde disrupts the possibility for the traditional static utopian existence.  The
statement ?Progres is the realization of Utopias? is just that, a stated definition of progres in
relation to utopia.  But it does not define the proces Wilde has just described.  Instead, Wilde?s
individual ongoing proces of constructive self-development rejects traditional individualism?s
status as a unified, coherent self.  Wilde?s utopian Individual engages with the world.
Wilde has ?defamiliarized? utopia and individualism, envisioning utopia as a Welsean
?scheme for betering the interplay? and producing ?[t]he fertilising conflict of individualities?
(Wels 10).  Similarly, reconfiguring utopian movement in his 1905 A Modern Utopia, Wels
writes that in traditional utopian schemes ?[c]hange and development were damed back by
invincible dams for ever.  But the Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape not
as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage . . .. Nowadays we do not resist and overcome the
great stream of things, but rather float upon it.  We build now not citadels, but ships of state? (5).
In his utopianism as the interplay of individualities, Wels works against a progres that puts the
present in the future, a permanent order of things that hopefully advances. As Beaumont
correctly notes, Wilde?s esay ?sems to cover the spectrum of ideological positions adopted in
turn-of-the-century utopian discourse, from the revolutionary to the evolutionist, the idealist to
the materialist, the practical to the escapist? (17).  Thus, Wilde?s Soul is a play among the parts, a
dialogue of utopian ideas, just Mark R. Hilegas writes in his ?Introduction? of Wels? modern
utopia; it is ?one which sums up and clarifies the utopias of the past.  The text and the footnotes
(they are Wels?) demonstrate his mastery of every phase of the utopian tradition from Plato and
More and Bacon to Belamy, Hertzka, and Morris. . . . they wil be found to be transformed into
something new? (Wels x).  Like A Modern Utopia, The Soul of Man is contradictory in nature, a
dialogue of conflicting utopian voices and ideas.
64
Portraiture and Wildean Aesthetic Individualism
It is certain that the subject mater at the disposal of creation is always diminishing, while the subject mater
of criticism increases daily.  There are always new atitudes for the mind, and new points of view. . . . There was
never a time when Criticism was more needed than it is now.  It is only by its means that Humanity can become
conscious of the point at which it has arrived.  Oscar Wilde The Critic as Artist  1055
In Wilde?s aesthetics the creative proces must progres beyond the artistic creation of
new forms.  Artists and critics play vital roles in the ?world-making? proces.  For Wilde, the
Individual is the artist.  ?The future is what artists are,? Wilde writes in Soul of Man (1100).
?Humanity,? the Individual, with ?new atitudes for the mind, and new points of view [for the
senses]? becomes ?conscious of the point at which it has arrived.?  Here Wilde argues against the
notion of individual esence.  There is no discoverable esential, unchanging esence or
individual identity.  Rather Wilde portrays in Soul an image of recalcitrant individualism of self-
creation, in a proces of engagement of self and other.
As a constructive proces, the artistic endeavor is a means toward self-realization and a
model for the development of individual life.  Art, says Wilde, is the ?real mode of
Individualism? because it disturbs ?monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and
the reduction of man to the level of machine? (Soul 1090-91).  Wilde?s critical esays develop
recurring themes: the role of art and the role of artistic criticism in developing individuality,
intensifying personality, and renewing culture.  The novel?s use of Dorian Gray?s portrait to
register moral decline develops in an artistic form, portraiture, which lends itself to
experimentation.  Paradoxicaly, as Dorian?s portrait registers the failure of aestheticism?s
traditional view of life and view of art, it also registers the vital role of how art is made and its
connection to how self is made.
65
Why is portraiture particularly suited?  In portraiture Wilde could experiment with the
notion of individualism, ideals, and artistic endeavors and demonstrate a proces of change and
renewal.  The ?Preface? of Portraiture: Facing the Subject states ?Portraiture occupies a central
position in the history of western art.  It has been the most popular genre of painting and lies at
the heart of the naturalist projects.  It has been crucial to the formation and articulation of
?individualism?? (xii).  In a description that could describe some of C?zanne?s portraits, Joanna
Woodal, editor and author of Portraiture?s ?Introduction: Facing the Subject,? writes that
?[t]oday, the fixed, imovable features of a portrayed face can sem like a mask, frustrating the
desire for union with the imaged self? (9).  The moment of carnival ?unmasking? is lost: this
phrase describes the yearning to ?cal things by their real names,? seking ?union of language
(representation) with the things to which it refers.?  The quest for the ?good? portrait that
guarantes the identity of external experience and inner subjectivity no longer satisfies the need
for ?presence.?  As C?zanne?s pictorial art frustrates ?seing through the window? and contests
the perspective of identity so, too, does Wilde?s double portraiture of Dorian Gray frustrate the
?desire for union.?
Wilde?s novel and C?zanne?s paintings contest what Woodal describes as naturalistic
and dualistic in terms of portraiture.  She defines ?naturalistic portraiture? as ?a physiognomic
likenes which is sen to refer to the identity of the living or once-living person depicted? (1).  In
terms of portrayal principles, ?[p]hysiognomic interpretations was predicated upon a
?symptomatic? relation betwen external appearance and an invisible, internal self? (7).  The
portrayed face and the exploration of the naturalistic quest for identity of ?external appearance
and an invisible, internal self? are primary and problematic concerns for Wilde?s ?picture? of
Dorian Gray.  In naturalistic portraiture, the desire is to overcome separation and to presume
66
?identification betwen individualized physiognomy and a distinctive, interiorized identity.?
This is an aesthetic cognitive task: to mediate ?betwen the generalities of reason and the
particulars of sense,? . . .. a ?unity-in-variety? (Eagleton 15).  In the desire to overcome division,
portraiture speaks to an early utopian task: to overcome separation.  In this quest, although in
different ways, Wilde follows his predecesors in recovering the connection of the divided self
and the self from society.  In Dorian Gray, other characters, seing Dorian as he was in his
portrait, se Dorian as convention dictated, and asume a union of exterior and internal reality. In
portraiture terms, this is a belief that the naturalistic portrait guarantes such identification.
Ninetenth-century portraiture stands uneasy, however, betwen the naturalistic portraits of
?great men? who represent authority of science, technology, intelect, and those of the
Impresionists, who interrogate such presumptions of unity.
Within a dualist paradigm, conflict betwen subjectivity and objectivity are, as Woodal
notes, fundamental to the interpretation of portraiture.  Dualism frustrates the concepts of
identity that naturalist portraiture seks to create; Cartesian dualism locates personal identity ?in
a concept of mind or thinking person.  As pure, divine intelect, the mind was quite separate from
machine-like, material body? (10).  Other ideas of identity would define it ?in terms of the soul,
virtue, genius, character, personality, subjectivity.?  In The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Wat
explains individualism in relation to the rise of the novel and explains the turn to individuality in
term of Rene Descartes? modern asumption ?whereby the pursuit of truth is conceived of as a
wholly individual mater? (13).  In portraiture, Woodal contends that ?[a] sense of the diference
betwen an inner, abstract subjectivity and an objectivised, material body has been discerned in
portrait practice from the sevententh century? (10).  Wat and Woodal both credit Descartes for
the formulation of dualism in its oppositional sense. The problem, for portraiture, lies in ?how
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the portrayed body can re-present someone?s identity,? if body and identity are opposed.  This
distinction of identity and material body applies to the individual and the individual in society.
The term ?individualism,? Wat notes, is a recent term, dating from the mid-ninetenth century,
and is defined as a way of living:  ?It posits a whole society mainly governed by the idea of
every individual?s intrinsic independence both from other individuals and from that multifarious
alegiance to past modes of thought and action denoted by the word ?tradition??a force that is
always social, not individual? (60).  In society the coherent, unified, esential individual can be
viewed as a promise and a threat.
These are tensions of individualism and aestheticism, evident in ninetenth century
portraiture: the conflict betwen individual stylistic freedom and aestheticism?s drive to
wholenes:  ?sensation is characterized by a complex individuation which defeats the general
concept. . . . marked by an irreducible particularity of concrete determinatenes which threatens
to put it beyond the bounds of abstract thought? (Eagleton16). The character Dorian Gray?s
intense individuality, free from oppresive limitations, is Wilde?s symbol ?of what we pray for,
or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive.?  This fear sems evident in
late eightenth century German aesthetic idealism?s envisioned ?bold new model of social life?:
?a universal order of free, equal, autonomous human subjects, obeying no laws but those which
they gave to themselves. . . . What is at stake here,? Terry Eagleton argues, ?is nothing les than
the production of an entirely new kind of human subject?one which, like the work of art itself,
discovers the law in the depths of its own free identity, rather than in some oppresive external
power.  The liberated subject is the one who has appropriated the law as the very principle of its
own autonomy? (19).  Dorian Gray?s division of body and soul, his portrait a ?picture of his
soul? or ?idea of identity,? sems to portray the problems of dualist portraiture:  body and
68
identity opposed, just as beholders of Dorian Gray asume a naturalistic union of external
appearance and interior self.
In Wilde?s modern novel, Basil laments the lost ?harmony? of body and soul, but he does
not sek to return to that lost edenic picture of life in his final portrait of Dorian Gray. ?The
harmony of soul and body?how much that is!  We in our madnes have separated the two, and
have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void,? Basil says (14).  But he imagines
a ?fresh school?:  ?a fresh school, a school that is to have in it al the pasion of the romantic
spirit, al the perfection that is Greek? (14).  Basil?s aestheticism, Donald Lawler writes, is ?an
ideal combination of the teaching of John Ruskin (?al the pasion of the romantic spirit?) and
Walter Pater (?al the perfection of the spirit that is Greek?) (Lawler 14).  What Basil strives for
is an kind of inter-weaving unity, an interplay of reason and sensation: the perfection of
underlying form of Dorian beauty asociated with the Greek clasical spirit, bringing order out of
chaos and the pasion of imediate appearance asociated with the romantic spirit, creative and
imaginative, proceding by feeling.  This is for Wilde, both sense and soul. In previous portraits
of Dorian, Basil had painted his art of Dorian as it ?should be, unconscious, ideal, and remote,?
in ?the costume of dead ages? (90).  But for the portrait of Dorian Gray, Basil tels Dorian, ?I
determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you as you actualy are, . . . in your own dres and in
your own time. . . . directly presented to me without mist or veil.?  Dorian painted in modern
?dres? is similar to Wels? utopian vision of ?how life shapes itself more and more to modern
perceptions,? in the ?fertilising conflict of individualities? (11, 10).  Presented without the veil of
impositions of identities and ideal that wil suppres Dorian identity, Basil?s portrait of Dorian
approaches C?zanne?s resistance to the totalizing veil of single point perspectivism of visual art
since the Renaisance.  The ?rebirth? of portraiture was a definitive feature of the Renaisance;
69
initialy a naturalistic project, by the sixtenth-century, portraits reconciled atention to
physiognomic particularities of the subject with more generalized visual devices, techniques
understood to atribute universal ideal qualities to the figure.  The Picture of Dorian Gray
shaters such universal, totalizing form in its emphasis on the individuality and aesthetic
difference of Dorian Gray.  In Welsean utopian terms, the novel continuously disrupts any final
theory of Dorian Gray or of individual identity; the ?interplay of the individualities? produces a
new utopian ideal of ?fertilising conflict.?
To become a work of art is the object of living.  Oscar Wilde, Elmann, Oscar Wilde 310
Wilde believed that ninetenth-century art was deficient in ordering the increasing
complexity of human experience.  He argued that its concerns were re-productive, continuing the
integration of empty ideals and preserving what existed.  Ideology and utopia, Ricoeur contends,
are concerned with the use of power; ideology integrates and preserves what is.   In the aesthetic
proces a hierarchy of form and content controls and repeats language that arrests the
development of thought and behavior.  In Dorian Gray, Wilde disrupts the integrative power of
old ideas.  Living life ?to become a work of art? requires continuous self-consciousnes.
Cultivated, this individualism disrupts arrested development to imagine something else.  This
disruptive power is the utopian part of the imagination; it releases the aesthetic proces that
develops new, individual forms.
Wilde works outside the power of integrative construction to fashion new forms that
interplay with existent ideas.  He tels readers, ?the idea of a young man seling his soul in
exchange for eternal life [is] an idea that is old in the history of literature, but to which I have
given new form? (Hart-Davis 263).  Although portraiture today is conceived primarily as a
representation of ?personality,? portraiture and individualism have viewed the concept of identity
70
as a true self, coherent, imutable, permanent, and independent (Woodal 10, 14).  Wilde
chalenges this ?idea that is old,? replacing the notion of a unified, permanent self with an
individualism of on-going self-construction. In Dorian Gray the artist Basil Halward self-
consciously realizes new form in his portrait.  Basil says, Dorian?s ?personality has suggested to
me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style.  I se things differently, I think
of them differently.  I can create life in a way that was hidden from me before? (14).  In his
individual, aesthetic determinations, Basil risks a step outside conventions that carries the
potential to cause community disfavor and disruption.  The ?wonderful creation? derives from
Basil?s subjective vision of Dorian?s identity, without the veil of ?empty ideality.?  Basil?s
perception is new, and even the world-sophisticated Lord Henry does not understand Basil?s
?leap? forward.  ?Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the
siter,? Basil argues.  The siter, or referent, does not dominate the field of vision: ?The siter is
merely the acident, the occasion.  It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the
painter who, on the coloured canvas reveals himself? (10).
As the artist, Basil has disregarded socialy determined forms and reordered life from his
personal, impresionistic perspective.  Perfection lies not in the harmony of parts to whole but, as
Wilde says, in the perfect use of imperfect medium.  In Dorian Gray, art as life holds center
place: ?In the center of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a
young man of extraordinary personal beauty? (7).  In its upright and full-length position, the
portrait of Dorian suggests the dignity of human beings. As Woodal notes, ?emulation of
exemplars? in the fiftenth and sixtenth centuries alowed a union of ??idealising? format with
?realistic? likenes? and the full-length format with images of secular rulers and sovereigns was
part of this proces of emulation (2).  Dorian, a young man whose beauty is beyond the ordinary
71
and common representation, deserves to be portrayed, Basil sems to suggest, independent of
traditional social portraiture.
Yet Basil is voice for Wilde?s aesthetic theory that art is the ?real mode of
Individualism,? that artistic individualism is truth.  In his representation of Dorian, Basil has
?shown in it the secret of [his] own soul? (10).  A revelation of Basil?s unique temperament and
particular style, the portrait is a creative projection grounded in the true, subjective values of his
experience.  Wilde writes, ?[a] work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.  Its
beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is.  It has nothing to do with the fact that
other people want what they want? (Soul 1090).  In this step, Wilde?s disruptive new aesthetic
theory simultaneously releases portraiture from efforts toward identity of external appearance
and internal self and from artistic endeavors of social, moral, political, and economic arrest. In
art that portrays life, the interplay of individualities in art becomes primary.  Basil refuses
aestheticism?s drive to wholenes, a harmony of body and soul, and creates interplay of Basil?s
?soul? and Dorian?s ?body.? ?Dorian Gray is to me simply a motive in art,? Basil says to Lord
Henry.  ?You might se nothing in him.  I se everything in him.  He is never more present in my
work than when no image of him is there.  He is suggestion, as I have said, of a new manner.  I
find in him the curves of certain lines, in the lovelines and subtleties of certain colours.  That is
al? (14-15).  Later Dorian?s portrait portrays his personality, a new art; this interplay of
personalities, artist critic, creates a tension of non-totalizing perspective. Basil?s portrait of
Dorian ilustrates Wilde?s aesthetic charge for the intensification of individualism.  The portrait?s
representation, outside the preservation of integrating forms, has disrupted existent notions.
Even Dorian, the supposed central subject of the portrait, initialy fails to know himself;  ?is that
the real Dorian?? he asks.  ?Yes; you are just like that. . . . At least you are like it in appearance,?
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Basil responds (28).  Basil understands his new manner as surface aesthetics.  Dorian?s initial
inability to ?grasp? his image as self suggests that reality has shifted, and Basil has painted
beyond naturalistic portraitures identification betwen external appearance and inner identity.
What Basil?s portrait sems to chalenge is the asumption that for knowledge to be real it must
be a system that explains everything.  For Basil, the portrait is the ?real Dorian? in appearance.
At the end of Chapter II, Basil and Lord Henry verbaly scuffle over the ?real? Dorian; as Dorian
departs with Lord Henry and Basil stays with Dorian?s portrait, each is certain they have the
?real? Dorian. Basil imagines a new, alternative possibility for art and for Dorian, and the
multiple perspectives Dorian?s portrait produces anticipates Adorno?s concept of non-identity,
?as having identities that cannot be known, because identity is always different from the ways it
can be represented by thought? (Schoolman 123).
Basil?s alternative perspective on Dorian plays a constitutive, utopian role, and his
portrait creates a space from which Dorian wil re-think the nature of his existence.  In life as in
art, Wilde would argue, individualism changes the representation of the subject.  When Basil
paints Dorian in new form, he paints the ?secrets of his soul.? His individual perspective re-
shapes the representation of Dorian.  Shaping old ideas into new form, the artist Basil finds in
Dorian a beauty not yet revealed.  In Bloch?s terms, when Basil paints the not-yet, he makes
others conscious of what does not exist.  Revealed, the not-yet in existence becomes an
alternative perspective full of possibility.  For Dorian it awakens an awarenes of his potential.
For Lord Henry, Dorian might be a new ?visible symbol? that the century wants (23).  But Wilde
does not follow Bloch toward the dream of fulfilment.  Rather, Wilde?s novel reveals multiple,
recalcitrant C?zannean perspectives that Dorian Gray, since its publication, has produced in
multiple theoretical perspectives.
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The experimental potential of portraiture form is perfect for Wilde?s disruptive
imagination.  In a portrait whose subject visibly ages, Wilde disrupts the visual constituent, the
recognizability of appearance.  In consequence, the artist?s determinations create uncertainty for
the siter; he cannot identify himself.  For Wilde, placing the individual outside ordinary,
unifying self-conceptions offers freedom for self-development.  Rather than type, Wilde believed
?man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multi-form creature?
(111).  And as Elmann notes in Oscar Wilde, ?Wilde prided himself on leading a life not double
but multiple? (283).  In his capacity for multiplicity, Dorian intensifies the individualism that
projects him beyond existent forms.  He frees himself from conventional spatio-temporal limits
of existing reality.  Time for Dorian, for example, is oddly organized; it is suspended, expanded
over eighten years, collapsed into a long chapter, it dips into contemporary London, and
multiples experiences by drawing on clasical Greece (Elfenbein xvii-xx).  The disruptive
individualities of Wilde?s stylistic ?picture? chalenge the drive to aesthetic wholenes in art, the
single point perspective, whether visual art or literature.  In Soul, Wilde reconstructs progresive
time, and makes individual movement an ever-unfolding proces, without a plan of progres.
Basil?s creation of new form, Dorian?s portrait, becomes an expresion of possibilities beyond
traditional conventions.
As an artful characterization of an individual?s life, any portrait represents acumulated
and existing influences, as wel as anticipated and hoped for developments of individual identity.
As Wilde wrote to Max Beerbohm, ?[t]he name one gives to one?s work, poem or picture?and
al works of art are either poems or pictures, and the best both at once?is the last survival of the
Greek Chorus.  It is the only part of one?s work in which the artist speaks directly in his person?
(Hart-Davis 576).  The title, The Picture of Dorian Gray provides understanding for Wilde?s new
74
form.  Bringing pictorial art and literature together, Wilde lets the two artistic activities become
part of the text and replaces the notion of re-presention as ?a unifying, revelatory encounter
betwen subject and object? with ?an ongoing proces? that Woodal defines as a Derridean view
of identity, ?enacted through language, betwen subjects? (13).  Elmann argues ?[t]hat literature
and painting could not exchange their roles was the idea which Dorian Gray would alter; in the
end each art would revert to its norm, but literature would show itself capable of doing what
painting could not do, exist temporaly rather than eternaly? (Oscar Wilde 312).  In this way,
Wilde disrupts aesthetic efforts to totalize the ?picture? and ?plot? and places two forms in
interplay that emphasizes the value of both rather than dominance of one.
Because ?name? readily identifies the central reference, portraits cal the function of
names into question.  The name ?Dorian Gray? provides a key to the utopian theory of art Wilde
sets out in his novel.  A shaping constituent, Dorian Gray is appended to the portrait.  But as with
the visual constituent, the bodily image, Wilde chooses to subordinate the siter?s ?identity? to
aesthetic proces.  Combined as first and last name, Dorian Gray appeals to a unified identity;
separated the two names Dorian and Gray, suggest the artist?s ideal, placing character in a
nowhere, re-constitutive position.  The name Dorian is of Greek origin, a dialect of the Dorics;
also as a rustic English dialect, Dorian is contrasted with Standard English; as a native of Doris,
Dorian is a member of one of the four main peoples of the ancient Greeks; Dorian is of Doris, its
people, its language or culture.  Wilde selects a name of multiplicity; Dorian as dialect indicates,
simultaneously, a dialogue betwen the parts and a deviation from the standard.  The noun gray
signifies achromatic color.  Denoting a ?color? achieved by blending black that absorbs light
rays, and white that reflects al the rays that produce color, gray is an imperfect absorption of al
?perfect? rays.  Reflection and absorption interplay, not arrested but communicating.
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Aestheticaly, Dorian resists definition.  The name Dorian is a multiplicity of viewpoints, always
a part of a whole that resists completion and deviates from the standard.  Gray cals up a visual
image of the absence of prismatic color, and as an achromatic color, gray refracts light rays that,
bent or broken, frees form and spirit from its diffracted order.  Combined, the names ?Dorian?
and ?Gray? hold the potential to develop alternative perspectives.  As a work of art, ?Dorian
Gray? becomes ?the perfect use of an imperfect medium? (?The Preface? Dorian Gray).
Wilde?s paradoxical name has further possibilities.  A modifier of identity, ?Dorian
Gray? acts as a foil to what is and as a symbol of ideal possibilities.  As adjective, ?Dorian?
defines a clasic order of Greek architecture, characterized by its simplicity of form.  ?Gray,? as
an adjectival, Indo-European base, means ?to shine?, ?to se.?  The ninetenth-century
Impresionists often limited the range of chiaroscuro values in a manner of painting
characterized by grise, ?the general evennes of value, neither black nor white but gray al over.
Graynes evoked a uniform (and often intense) ilumination? (Shiff 201). Working with Pisarro
in 1870s and 1880s, C?zanne developed a manner of ?mixing several briliant colors together
whenever he wished to make a neutral brown or grayish tone? to avoid conventional chiaroscuro,
the ilusion of depth (207).  Diffracted and re-arranged, the traditional order is thus disrupted in
order ?to [re-] se,? free from the ?laws? of nature.  In the novel, Wilde like C?zanne uses
?Gray? to eliminate the ilusion of depth, or central idea and to alow individuality to play at the
surface.  In re-formulating portraiture?s esential constituent of naming, Wilde re-emphasizes
that a human being posseses ?myriad lives and myriad sensations, [he is] a complex multi-form
creature.? Typing individuals arrests the development of potential.
As with portraiture?s visual constituent, Wilde also undermines traditional portraiture at
the conceptual level.  If looking for continuity and unity in the art of Dorian Gray, there wil be
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disappointment. The novel ever-unfolds and frustrates critical certainty. Dialogue, a favored
form for Wilde, is the making of truth and reaches toward Bakhtin?s dialogic novel and language
form, as an unfolding exchange of views that resists aesthetics? drive to create harmony and
wholenes.  Dialogue is the form that ?the creative critics of the world have always employed,?
Wilde says in his Critic as Artist; it ?can never lose for the thinker its atraction as a mode of
expresion? (1046).  Shaping the construction of the novel in dialogue form, Wilde hopes critical
readers wil continue to converse with the novel and explore its meanings.  In the pictorial-
literary dialogue structure Dorian Gray, Wilde chalenges esentialist ideas of art and its
individuality, creating a dialogue of portraiture?Basil?s portrait of Dorian Gray and Dorian?s
portrait of his ?soul? are, for example, two conflicting voices.
Readers of Dorian Gray know Wilde offers no easy optimism in its surface plot realities.
Rather than a narrative as ilustration of a utopian hermeneutic, it appears to be the story of sin
and degradation that revolted its critics.  Indeed, the picture of Dorian degenerates from innocent
beginning to catastrophic ending.  Beginning in anticipation of innocence and beauty, the story
opens in the artist?s, Basil Halward, studio and references Edenic images.  But low and
reverberating, ?like the bourdon note of a distant organ,? the roar of daily London denies the
idyllic seting and negates the ?rich odour of roses? and ?light summer wind? that stirred the
trees of the garden? (7).  The portrait ?of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty,?
initialy upright and at the room?s center, a symbol of harmonious totality, is by degrees
corrupted and decentered.
Disrupting progres and single point perspective, each episode negates the proceding one
and appears to lower the level of expectation and raise the level of corruption throughout,
creating an interplay of tensions.  Wilde?s plot, structured as a series of episodes, first reveals
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Dorian at age twenty in the first ten chapters and at age thirty-eight in chapter twelve through
twenty with one intervening chapter that speeds through Dorian?s developing aesthetic
experiences. His treatment of Sibyl Vane adds ?a touch of cruelty in the mouth? and initiates a
change in the portrait that ?was horribly apparent? (73).  And each ?unveiling? reveals a growing
uglines in the portrait that negates the horror of the preceding episode.  To the thinning hair and
sodden eyes of his degeneracy, Dorian?s murder of Basil transforms the canvas:  ?wet and
glistening, on one of the hands as though the canvas had sweated blood?? (134).  The ?scarlet
dew? brightens with age and blood stains the painted feet and wrinkled hands; the eyes have a
?look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite? (168).  In C?zannean
multi-perspective of picture, the reader/beholder never ses the portrait in its wholenes.  Only in
its parts and their interplay of relations across the canvas does meaning occur, creating
possibility for multiplicity of critical interpretations.
From a moral point of view, the portrait appears the degradation of Dorian?s ?esentialist?
soul, and the destruction of  ?good? portraiture?s identification betwen external appearance and
internal identity, the overcoming of the divisions of self.  That, however, is what Wilde gets rid
of: the relation of self and other as identification and, instead, leads toward a perspective of
individualities that interplay.  What he portrays are the aspects of human existence that are
closed off by atention only to beauty that conceals by claims of universality and neutrality.
Wilde plots at the aesthetic level rather than convention moral level, and the ethics his aesthetics
propose are those of ever-unfolding exchanges betwen self and others.  His portrait opens
toward an aesthetic theory that opens art to questions of human existence.  One thing, ?it had
done for him.  It had made him conscious . . .? of his cruelty (76).
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Wilde frustrates the idea important for portraiture as re-presention: ?Some kind of eternal
or persistent dimension to identity is necesary if the viewer is to be satisfied that the absent
person depicted is present, at least in a ?good? or ?authentic? likenes? (Woodal 11).  In Dorian
Gray, other people and art influence the identities of Basil, Lord Henry, and Dorian.  When Basil
ses his portrait of Dorian, which had become a starting point for Dorian?s own work, Basil can
identify it only by his signature in the corner of the portrait: his influence remains but it does not
unify the work?s idea.  Likewise, only signature rings can identify Dorian Gray, at his death,
refuting the notion that Dorian is, as individual or as art, a completely unified, autonomous
individual.  Art and individual identities are saturated with other influences.  Wilde resists the
notion of single point identity of a work of art or an individual.  Writing to the Daily Chronicle,
30 June 1890, Wilde explains that ?to get rid of the conscience that had dogged his steps from
year to year that he destroys the picture; and thus in his atempt to kil conscience Dorian Gray
kils himself? (Elmann, Artist as Critic 246). Geting rid of the notion of moral conscience,
Wilde simultaneously gets rid of the notion of unified identity and artistic single point
perspective.  In the final moments of the disintegration of this ?metanarrative,? Wilde, at the
conclusion, has two ?gentlemen? query authority, the policeman, as to ?Whose house is that,
constable?? At the policeman?s response, ?Mr. Dorian Gray?s,? house, the two looked at each
other, walked away, and ?sneered? (Dorian Gray 219). The master narrative of art and critical
activity has been broken; art and life are no longer harmoniously atuned, and Arnold?s critical
ideal that society can be informed and directed by a critic?s atunement to art no longer holds.  In
terms of aesthetics, Wilde hopes that interpretation of The Picture of Dorian Gray is
unfinalizable, a move that anticipates the surface aesthetics of C?zanne and Stein. Wilde?s
development of art and individual as engagement and surface obliterates the internal ?law? of
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conscience or the ?moral? read in aesthetic appearance and suggests an ethics and aesthetics that
Bakhtin cals unfinalizability, that views people always making themselves in ever-unfolding
exchanges betwen self and others, artist and critic.  In this surface aesthetic, no mater how
many categories are applied to art, something is always left over, a non-identity in Adorno?s
terms.
At his novel?s conclusion, Wilde has broken with the present order of doing things and
performs the utopian task of freeing individuals from ?monotony of type, slavery of custom,
tyranny of habit? (Wilde, Soul 1091).  Dorian has stabbed the picture; the valet, Francis, together
with a footman and a coachman, ?crept upstairs,? knocked, caled out, tried to force the door, and
receiving no response from ?their master,? climbed on the roof, and dropped on to the balcony.
Wilde writes that ?[t]he windows yielded easily: their bolts were old? (Dorian Gray 165).   In
Dorian Gray, Wilde has broken the ?bolts? of traditional perspective?s/aestheticism?s ?window?
of ?master? narrative, single point perspective.  The ?splendid portrait? survives its artist and
siter and, lying on the floor was the ?withered, wrinkled, loathsome of visage? Dorian Gray.  In
an interplay betwen his critical ideas and his imaginative novel, Wilde breaks down the barrier
betwen creation and interpretation, the division betwen artist and critic, art and society,
liberating each one from the restrictions of the other by the interplay betwen them.  In doing so,
Wilde also refutes notions, proposed until the mid-ninetenth century, within the dualist
paradigm that ?the portrayed body remained an adequate symbol for an identity conceived in this
coherent, self-contained way, because notions of identity . . . were, like the imaged body,
characteristicaly consistent, unified and autonomous? (Woodal 11).  In ?The Preface? of his
novel, Wilde states that ?Al art is at once surface and symbol./Those who go beneath the surface
do so at their peril./Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.?  Simultaneously, surface and
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symbol exist in Dorian Gray; surface does not symbolize a coherence and unity of art or the
portrayed body?s identity.
In the novel, Basil finds in Dorian the motivation toward a new manner of art; he
understands his portrait as a creation of interpenetrating realities of body and soul, art and life.
Rather than the unified appearance and identity of naturalistic portraiture, Basil?s
interpenetrating reality is of Basil?s artistic personality/soul and Dorian?s appearance, artist and
siter, brought together in the portrait.  Basil tels Lord Henry he has sen in Dorian?s personality
a suggestion for ?an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style? (8).  Dorian, like
a work of art, had influenced, informed Basil, and he was able to ?se things differently . . . think
of them differently.  I can now recreate life,? Basil said, ?in a way that was hidden from me
before.?  Inner form as Basil?s soul, Basil says, ?[t]here is too much of myself in the thing.?
Furthermore, Dorian?s own picture, informed by Basil and Lord Henry, shows ?the secret of his
own soul,? an interplay of self and other rather than an identification that Pater had feared as
death (4).  When Dorian ?murders? Basil, he kils deadly identification, the equation of symbol
and its referent ?thing.?  Dorian tels the chemist, Alan Campbel, ?to destroy the thing that is
upstairs?to destroy it so that not a vestige of it wil be left? (123).  Basil had imposed his own
identity on Dorian, giving the look of a stable, isolated, solid body.  Before giving the picture to
Dorian, Basil had fixed or ?masked? the individuality of his art with varnish and frame,
esentialy fixing or imposing an ideal image and claiming a disinterested stance.  Basil?s atempt
to mask ?his soul? kils the creativity of art.  In murdering Basil, Dorian murders the notion of art
as a single thing; in fact, he describes Basil as ?[t]he thing,? a ?dead thing. . . . like a dreadful
wax image,? no longer as source and origin of the painting, the death of the author-itarian center
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controlling the work of art (123-124). Dorian, in constructing his ?wish? to remain always
young, separates the ?body and soul? that Basil had tried to harmonize.  For Wilde art is both
surface and symbol, and dead Basil no long remains a direct referent.  Regardles of his desire to
kil Basil?s influence entirely, Dorian?s own picture of his soul retains Basil?s ?signature? as
trace, as are the influences of Lord Henry and his book, now part of, but not completely
dominating ideas.  True to his oppositional Doric characteristics, Dorian remains without a
?base? theory:  He ?never fel into the error of arresting his intelectual development by any
formal aceptance of creed or system? (100, 103).  As C?zanne developed his unruly pictures in
relatednes without controlling perspectivism, Wilde?s dialogic scheme of interplaying
individualities develops without the control of a master narrative.  Wilde breaks the locks,
disrupts closed, linear narrative and alows for an art and aesthetic individualism of self/critic
construction, with limited freedom but in relation with others.
In Dorian Gray, Wilde anticipates Wels? utopian interplay of individualities to create the
novel?s dialogue structure.  These individualities are present in the constructions of body and
soul, pictorial and literary art, physical and abstract, surface and symbol, material and
imaterial, and impresionism and symbolism.  The traditional contraries play across and
through Wilde?s often referred to tension of ?sense and soul.? In his proces of portraying his
new aesthetic individualism, Wilde develops Dorian?s portrait as a proces of shaping and re-
shaping of aesthetic individuality, grounded in a proces of uncertainty and excesive sensations.
In Soul, Wilde had overthrown time as progres, and Dorian moves out not in linear fashion, but
as if in a labyrinth of ?streets like the black web of some sprawling spider? (136).  In dialogue
form of interplay and multiplicity that he had developed for art and life in The Decay of Lying,
Wilde sets the contraries ?sense and soul?:  ?To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the
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senses by means of the soul! . . . Certainly with hideous iteration the biten lips of Dorian Gray
shaped and reshaped those subtle words that dealt with soul and sense? (Dorian Gray 135, 136).
The shaping and reshaping reveal what claims of totalizing beauty had masked: ?Uglines that
had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very
reason.  Uglines was the one reality? (136).  As C?zanne and later Stein, Wilde finds a ?realer
reality.?  His disruptive aesthetic theory opens up aspects of human existence, once masked by
universal claims, aspects before excluded from aesthetic ?purity.?  Dorian?s ?picture of his soul?
is multileveled, shaped and reshaped by engagement with life, a ?shot silk? portrait that
anticipates H. G. Wels? later utopian scheme.  The anarchic, unruly, disruptive multiplicity of
Wilde?s individual art subverts the atempts of Basil, Lord Henry, Sibyl and others, to instil
?Dorian? aesthetic order.  In the portrait, for example, one of the first influences we se beyond
Basil?s is the influence of Sibyl?s death, as ?a touch of cruelty in the mouth? (66).  Through the
course of Wilde?s novel, the texture is similar to C?zanne?s recalcitrant surfaces and Wels? later
modern utopian ?shot silk texture betwen philosophical discussion on the one hand and
imaginative narrative on the other?:  ?the story of the adventure of his soul among [aesthetic]
inquiries? (Wels xxxii, 2).  The punishment and reward of the critic artist is tracing the cross-
currents of meanings that Wilde?s tensions produce in his story.
For Wilde, individualism as a mode of life must be a ?disruptive and disintegrating force.?
Like art, it holds multiple perspectives.  In Dorian as art, the novel ilustrates the multiple
perspectives of critical evaluations and demonstrates the destructive relation betwen individual
and aestheticism.  Lord Henry understands Dorian as the ?symbol? for the age; others se him as
?Prince Charming?; stil others found that his ?mere presence semed to recal . . . the memory of
the innocence that they had tarnished? (Dorian Gray 93), each seking an identity betwen
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Dorian?s exterior beauty and an ?unspotted? soul.  For the artist critic, each is important.  At the
novel?s end, James Vane finds his sister Sibyl?s ?Prince Charming? and nearly alows his
understanding of Dorian?s individuality to be subsumed to the universal ideality of Dorian?s face.
James Vane seks Dorian?s death but is stopped, momentarily, by Dorian?s use of his
unchanging, beautiful visage.  Others in the novel have, too, felt the tension at the surface of
Dorian face.  Unlike the others, however, when told of Dorian?s past, James awakens to the
tension of inner and outer existence.  Aesthetic Dorian, complex and multileveled, chalenges
aesthetic theory that drives toward aesthetic universality and neutrality of art and individual, and
anticipates twentieth century aesthetic theories that open up new perspectives on the
heterogeneity of subjects. In Wilde?s novel, James Vane is kiled; however, Vane experiences
both reward and punishment of understanding. As ?vane? for Wilde?s new ?Dorian? aesthetics,
James could say, like Wilde?s character Gilbert, that his punishment and reward ?is that he ses
the dawn before the rest of the world? (Critic as Artist 1058).
The tension of ?sense and soul? in Wilde?s novel connects with the recalcitrant surfaces of
C?zanne?s pictorial art, as wel as the interpretative uncertainty of C?zanne?s critics? evaluations.
Wilde develops this possible connection in The Critic as Artist, writing of the ?Archaicistes, as
they cal themselves? who sek ?the imaginative beauty of design and the lovelines of fair
colour?: those who ?try to se something worth seing, and to se it not merely with actual and
physical vision, but with that nobler vision of the soul? (1051).  These painters work under
?decorative conditions,? and move beyond ?the limitations of absolute modernity of form which
have proved the ruin of so many of the Impresionists.?  In pictorial art, C?zanne applied the
color work of the Impresionists, but also brought form back to painting.  In Sources of the Self,
Charles Taylor argues that C?zanne ?brought to expresion the meaningful forms and
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relationships which undergird our ordinary perceptions, as they emerge and take shape from the
materiality of things.  To do this he had to forge a new language, abandoning linear and aerial
perspective and making the spatial dispositions arise from the modulations of colour? (468).
From the perspective of Taylor?s description of C?zanne?s art, we can view Wilde?s ?new
aesthetic? language as an approach to C?zanne?s surfaces in his rejection of aestheticism?s drive
toward wholenes of conventional, imposed form.  Developing Dorian Gray in dialogue form,
Wilde exposes aspects of human existence that have been excluded by claims of universality,
thus alows the individualities of different ideas and voices to compete in the space.  Both Wilde
and C?zanne work toward, what Taylor cals, a ?retrieval of experience? and away from a
contemplative perceiving of mere color.  C?zanne strives but fails to realize fully his
?sensations,? and Wilde argues for the ?cultivation of temperament? but also fails to achieve
self-realization in the novel.  Both C?zanne and Wilde develop a surface aesthetic, an art that is
?decorative? and developed at the surface of things: in Wilde?s terms one cannot find this ideal
of art
in mere atmospheric effect, but sek rather for the imaginative beauty of design and
the lovelines of fair colour, and rejecting the tedious realism of those who merely
paint what they se, try to se something worth seing, and to se it not merely with
actual and physical vision, but with that nobler vision of the soul which is as far
wider in spiritual scope as it is far more splendid in artistic purpose. (Critic as
Artist 1051)
Wilde?s critical works and his novel Dorian Gray point to interpretive uncertainty that
C?zanne?s surfaces generate.  In 1896, Andr? Melerio described C?zanne?s painting in
impresionist and symbolist terms, as presenting ?nature acording to a vision particular to
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himself, where the juxtaposition of colors [and] a certain arrangement of lines make his very
direct painting like a synthesis of colors and forms? (qtd. in Shiff 10).  In describing C?zanne?s
impresionistic ?particularity? and juxtaposition of colors? with a symbolist ?arrangement of
lines? and ?synthesis of color and forms,? Melerio?s interpretation paralels Wilde?s description
of the artists, like Basil and Dorian, who se with their ?souls?: ?colour, unspoiled by meaning, .
. . [and] the delicate proportions of lines and mases? (Critic as Artist 1051).  Reading C?zanne?s
impresionism, Richard Shiff writes that ?symbolist?s utopian desire to unite al humanity within
a single form of expresion? believed the ?permanent reference was the human spirit itself, not
something outside it? (48-49).  The Impresionist sought a ?means of expresion that would
convey his own spontaneity, originality, and sincerity? that linked his art to ?a unique
temperament? (46).  Reading the documents of ninetenth century visual artists and their
theories, Shiff points out that for the Impresionists, ?the impresion was neither subject nor
object, but both the source of their identities and the product of their interaction? (26).  In the
critical judgment of C?zanne, Shiff points out that for some, C?zanne was an impresionist, for
others a symbolist: Shiff, considering C?zanne?s whole body of work, argues ?his life?s work, as
the product of impresionist ?sensation.? Yet, during the 1890s, it clearly served as a model for
the younger symbolists? (10).  Such uncertainty and indeterminacy can be read in Dorian Gray.
Basil and Dorian se with the ?particularity? of their identity, and Dorian is greatly influence by
the ?poisonous book,? most often asociated with Joris Karl Huysmans?A rebours (1884) that
was among ?the precedents for the critical position that the symbolists adopted during the late
1880s and the 1890s? (Shiff 46).  The book Lord Henry had given Dorian is full of the ?technical
expresions? and ?elaborate paraphrases that characterizes the work of some of the finest artist of
the French school of Symbolistes (92). The novel both surface and symbol, or in this case
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impresionist and symbolist, creates a texture of non-identity that, like C?zanne?s surface
aesthetic, requires an ever-unfolding exploration; each interpretation is partial, the identity of the
work exceds every identification of it.  The interplay of these tensions influences Wilde?s
?picture of Dorian.?  And what this study points out is that the tension of the individualities of
his text and the multiple individual interpretations they generate disrupt aestheticism?s drive to
wholenes. Wilde?s Dorian Gray no longer fits within an identification of aestheticism as it is
usualy described.
Wilde?s own aesthetic-ethical blend is a picture of Welsean ?fertilising conflict.? His
picture models a non-totalizing aesthetic utopian image of disturbing aesthetic individuality
engaged in continuously creative development of self and of self and other.  Read in the pictorial
framework of C?zannean surfaces, Wilde?s disturbing proces of contradiction and interplay
contests the dominating force of single point perspective.  The aesthetic individualism of Wilde?s
The Picture of Dorian Gray shapes an aesthetic model that is, in Wilde?s own words, ?neither al
exces nor al renunciation,? but a tension of interplay of art and life at the surface. Wilde
?showed the aesthetic world not isolated from experience, but infused with it.  This was the new
Helenism of which he liked to speak? (Elmann, Oscar Wilde 361).
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Chapter Three:
The Utopian Composition of Thre Lives
Gertrude Stein fronts her Thre Lives with Jules Laforgue?s statement, ?Donc je suis un
malheureux et ce n?est ni ma faute ni cele de la vie,? introducing the utopian composition of her
?first book.?  Stein?s utopian composition resists, however, the ?happy? foundation of
metaphysical truth: the promise of utopian happines, the reconciliation of subject and object,
individual and world.  Rather Stein?s utopian thought paralels H. G. Wels? 1905 utopian
scheme for ?betering the interplay betwen individualities? (10).   The ?unhappines? of
Laforgue?s statement emphasizes the unstable relation betwen self and world; unhappines is
neither the responsibility of self nor life.  In Cezanne and the End of Impresionism Richard
Shiff explains Laforgue?s 1883 aesthetic position that ?in the new impresionist painting ?object
and subject [that is, either nature and artist, or art work and viewer] are . . . irretrievably in
motion, inapprehensible and unapprehending.  In the flashes of identity betwen subject and
object lies the nature of genius? (28).  Shiff concludes then that [i]n this way Laforgue presented
the union of subject and object as an aim or ideal of art.?  This conclusion, however, does not
acount for the malheureux, non-foundational stance of Laforgue?s statement that Stein presents
to set the tone and structure of her Thre Lives.  If ?identity betwen subject and object? is only
?flashes,? this contests the notion of ?union?; instead the unstable relation, ?in motion,? prevents
full apprehension and arrest.
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On this fault line Stein places Thre Lives.  This unhappy lack of union is not the faute, or
responsibility, of the artwork or viewer.  Like C?zanne, Stein creates a different kind of unity
betwen the parts; it is not a ?happy? reconciliation of parts, but the malheureux interplay of
individualities in a Welsean ?fertilising conflict,? and a C?zannean ?each part is as important as
the whole.?
In the first book there was a groping for a continuous present and for using everything by beginning again
and again and again. Gertrude Stein ?Composition as Explanation? 26
?In the first book there was a groping . . . there was an inevitable beginning again and
again and again,? and Gertrude Stein reaches out for a ?continuous present? and for ?using
everything,? for what is, but not yet conscious in literature and life.  Using the three parts of her
composition theory??using everything,? ?beginning again and again,? and ?continuous
present??Stein achieves in Thre Lives the ?need for evennes,? a kind of C?zannean unity,
overcoming the notion of a ?central idea? or ruling myth, the single point perspective of narrative
structure.  Stein?s projective image is dialogic in structure and utopian in its impulse, the need to
know along with ?an [utopian] impulse to explore unknown environments, with al the atendant
risk and tension? (Quarta 160).  In its dynamic, recurring beginnings, Thre Lives explores
aesthetic environments that value each part in a present that moves continuously, at the surface.
In the ?beginning of beginning again,? the utopian imagination of Thre Lives takes form and
content beyond a ?picture? of what existed in literature.  Utopian in her need to know a beter
way, Stein gropes for a realism whose ?insistence? is a movement of proces that realizes human
individual existence, ?as they are living.?  In her narrative Stein blends her observations of Paul
C?zanne?s pictorial art and the teachings Wiliam James.  Although with a difference, Stein
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returns to the isues central to Oscar Wilde, resistance to totalizing aesthetic unity and emphasis
on individualities.
This study explores Stein?s technique of image/dialogue and its implications for the
aesthetics and ethics of human individual existence.  In Thre Lives, Stein?s image/dialogue
extends in literature C?zanne?s pictorial surface aesthetic that emphasizes ?the idea of each part
of a composition being as important as the whole? (Has 17).  Stein?s literary stres upon
surfaces along C?zanne?s lines chalenges literary images designed to reflect the unity and
integrity of the self and world, as C?zanne?s treatment of surfaces chalenged perspectivism?s
pretense to grasp the world as ?whole.?  Rather than concentrate and unify an underlying idea in
a single pictorial image, Stein?s insistence on the esence of ?each one to have the same value?
re-describes individual value.  Her scheme of image/dialogue breaks up aestheticizing unity,
prevents subordination of one voice to another, and provides, as Stein puts it, an ?evennes of
everybody having a vote? that implies an independence and integrity of each part that
paradoxicaly develops a surface unity, betwen and among the parts in a cross-current patern.
For Stein, ?[e]ach word, each sound, each textual moment has a vote, and each part of the world
voiced by (not only represented by) the writing has a vote as wel? (Chesman 202).  Thus Stein
refigures hierarchical systems of aesthetic construction that, consequently, refigure hierarchical
systems of clas, family, gender relations, and sexual orientation and imagine an aesthetic-ethics
of unfolding exchange betwen self and others.  Stein?s literary stres of C?zannean surfaces
explores literary possibilities and reveals a utopian imagination in its ability to expose the habits
of convention while developing ways to rethink our existence. In Thre Lives, Stein re-captures
the value of the human individual in a Welsean proces of utopian interplay of individualities.
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But why talk of Gertrude Stein in relation to the concept of utopia?  Increasing numbers of
studies agree that Stein?s work changed literary language thus changing the way we imagine
ourselves.  Moreover, Stein would not consider her own work utopian as the term has been
traditionaly defined?a dream of an idealy harmonious and static state of affairs.  Stein?s
utopianism is, however, as Morson and Emerson say of Bakhtin, ?the utopia of an anti-utopian
thinker? (Morson 94).  Akin to Bakhtin?s ?dislike of systems,? ?distrust of final answers,? and
preference for the ?mesy facts of everyday life,? Stein places her work within the consciousnes
of thought that considers dynamic change valuable for continuing human intelectual and
emotional growth.  Her theory of composition is a critical approach to the tradition of Bakhtin?s
dialogic thought that permits the ?fertilising conflict? of different value systems, thus refusing to
unify the various points of view.
In 1984, Sheri Benstock commented that ?[t]he history of Stein criticism has stayed
squarely within the dialectical mode of western culture (male/female, speech/writing,
sense/nonsense), avoiding?not seing (precisely because the field of vision was limited to
dialectical opposites)?the ways in which Stein?s writing put into question that dialectic,
refusing the dialectical, representational, mimetic conceptions. . . . Stein?s narratives broke the
one bond that joined al Modernists?a belief in the mastery of experience, the recreation of
reality, through mastery of the Word.  Stein had sen what no other Modernist saw:  that
meaning always slides away from the word no mater how tightly the author tries to control the
directions that meaning might take. . . . To rediscover Stein is to problematize the critical
methods we employ in that discovery; indeed without problematizing these critical methods,
Stein may never have been rediscovered? (23-24).  In The Public Is Invited To Dance (1989),
Harriet Scott Chesman atempts to step outside the dialectic criticism that, acording to
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Benstock, is usualy used to approach Stein.  Chesman reads Stein?s writing as a ?configuration
of voices engaged in dialogue? that offers ?a central paradigm? for Stein?s project:
a poetics of dialogue, where dialogue presents an alternative to the possibility of
patriarchal authoritarianisms implicit in monologue, reliant upon the privileging of
one voice, one narrator, or one significance.  The equality Stein creates among the
different parts of her compositions replaces this model of hierarchy and constitutes
the basis for her dialogic form, in which difference may enter without being
relegated to a secondary position or subsumed under an authoritarian identity. (2-3)
In a 1946 interview, Stein comments on the composition of Thre Lives: ?Up to that time
composition had consisted of a central idea, to which everything else was an acompaniment and
separate but was not an end in itself, and C?zanne conceived the idea that in composition one
thing was as important as another? (?A Transatlantic Interview 1946? 15).  Akin to Bakhtin?s
twentieth century dialogism, Stein rejects the controlling ?central idea? of the monologic, author-
itative voice; her narrative composition breaks up such drive toward unity of al parts as
acompaniment and, instead, ?using everything? she alows ?each part to be as important as the
whole.?  Stein?s literary stres on surface along C?zanne?s lines yields the image/dialogue
characteristic of Stein?s narrative, Thre Lives.  The narrative?s composition portrays a Welsean
kind of utopian stres on individualities that, in dialogue form, produces a utopian scheme to
beter their interplay.  The compositional scheme of ?using everything,? ?beginning again and
again and again,? toward a ?continuous present? that Stein sets out in her ?Composition as
Explanation? paralels Wels? cal for utopia as schemes for beter the interplay of individualities.
Her utopian composition proposes an ever-unfolding development of art and of individual self, an
unfolding exchange of views with others.  Characterization for Stein is no longer representational,
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but lives developing ?as they are living.?  Refusing the strict hierarchy of single point perspective,
her compositions develop a Steinean ?knowing? as ?talking and listening,? truth conceived as an
unfolding exchange of views.  Atempting to read Stein beyond a dialectical mode, Chesman
argues, ?[t]he utopian dimension of Stein?s project lies in her creation of a literary language that
invites our imaginative sense-making effort as readers even as it succesfully resists our desire
either to master the language?s meaning or to proclaim the language unreadable? (15).  Reading
Thre Lives through Stein?s acknowledged C?zannean framework opens the text more fully to the
utopian tensions of ?fertilising conflict,? of interplay of the parts.  Stein?s pictorial-literary
structure develops in dialogue form that develops and engages opposing forces.  These opposing,
interplaying forces or ?fertilising conflicts? create alternative perspectives that reveal changes for
intelectual and emotional growth and atempt ?this evennes of everybody having a vote? (?A
Transatlantic Interview 1946? 17).  Her atempt to get ?evennes? participates in what H. G.
Wels cals ?modern perceptions?: the ?fertilizing conflict of individualities . . . the ultimate
meaning of the personal life, and al our Utopias no more than schemes for betering that
interplay? (Wels 11).  Like Stein, Wels is concerned with the changing interplay of individual
and world.  Although different in form and method, his 1905 A Modern Utopia argues that
?[u]ntil you bring in individualities, nothing comes into being? (11).  Stein and Wels consider the
individual esential to transform society, and the individual?s role must be re-imagined to portray
this image.
The simple, ugly situation
Picaso said, ?You se, the situation is very simple.  Anybody that creates a new thing has to make it ugly.
The effort of creation is so great, that trying to get away from the other things, the contemporary insistence, is so
great that the effort to break it gives the appearance of uglines.  Your followers can make it prety, so generaly
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followers are acepted before the master.  The master has the stain of uglines.  The followers who make it prety are
acepted.  The people then go back to the original.  They se the beauty and bring it back to the original.  
Gertrude Stein in ?Transatlantic Interview 1946? 32-33
Writen in 1905, Thre Lives is a view of the twentieth century that Stein?s contemporaries
did not yet se.  Her ?newnes and difference? break with the past and create, for readers, an
?appearance of uglines.?  Reading Thre Lives, Stein?s friend and writer Hutchins Hapgood
complimented ?Melanctha? but criticized the repetitions and the ?painstaking but often clumsy
phraseology?; he warned her that the stories would met future difficulty with both publishers
and readers ?because to get their real quality, patience and culture are demanded of the reader?
(Sprigge 66).  Then titled Thre Histories, the book was refused by New York publisher Pits
Duffield because it ?was too unconventional, for one thing, and if I may say so, too literary?
(67).  Deciding to have it printed herself, Stein concluded arrangements with the Grafton Pres.
In The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Stein recounts the visit by a Grafton Pres
representative, sent by the director, to discover if Stein was limited in her ?knowledge of
english,? or if she ?might not have had much experience in writing? (68).  To this, Stein replied
that ?you might as wel tel him . . . that everything that is writen in the manuscript is writen
with the intention of its being so writen and al he has to do is to print it and I wil take the
responsibility.?
Early biographer of Gertrude Stein, Donald Sutherland contends that Thre Lives as wel
as The Making of Americans (writen 1906-1911) were vilified on the grounds that they were
?cold or dead or clumsy or inhuman? (20).  These impresions kept al but a smal fraction of the
reading public from her works.  Sutherland notes that ?[t]he demand of the educated American
public were for precisely the things the work was meant to destroy, biographical or historical
emotion, vaguenes of feeling and slurred ideas, al esential to the average educated American
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literary taste.?  Early critical responses to the novel varied.  After its publication, Stein sent
copies of Thre Lives to H. G. Wels, George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, and Arnold
Bennet for review.  Although no one came forward to sponsor Stein?s innovation, Wels wrote a
note to Stein saying that he ?had at first been repeled by the extraordinary style . . . had finaly
read the book with ?deepening pleasure and admiration, and would look for . . . future works
?very curiously and eagerly?? (Brinnin 119-120).  When Edmund Wilson ?encounters? Stein?s
early work, he, too, found its newnes and difference difficult.  In style, Wilson argues, Stein?s
work ?appears to owe nothing to that of any other novelist, she sems to have caught the very
rhythms and acents of the minds of her heroines: . . . Behind the limpid and slightly
monotonous simplicity of Gertrude Stein?s sentences, one becomes aware of her masterly grasp
of the organisms, contradictory and indisoluble, which human personalities are? (237-38).
Wilson?s influential evaluation of Stein?s writings represents the early, positive sense of her
work.  He acknowledges that Thre Lives moves toward a new verbal structure that creates a
representation of the substantial realities the individual experiences in modern society.  Although
at the time of its publication it atracted litle atention, Wilson notes that ?loaned from hand to
hand, it acquired a certain reputation.?
Although early responses to Stein?s Thre Lives reveal an uncertain readership, later
critics have been more receptive to the complexities her narrative presents.  Mention of Stein?s
name and works seldom appeared in early discussions of Modernism, but later critics place her at
the movement?s beginning before World War I and understand her work as being solidly at the
center of modernist?s ?revolution of the word.?
1
  In ?Gertrude Stein and the Modernist Canon,?
                                                  
1. Among others, Jayne Walker charts Stein?s modernist project ?from its beginnings in
Thre Lives . . . ? (xvii), and Liesl Olson notes Stein as ?one of modernism?s earliest
experimenters . . . (328-29).  Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, in ?The Name and
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Marianne DeKoven observes that in contrast to the mainstream modernist canon, Thre Lives
?sems not to have the proper weightines, although,? DeKoven continues, ?in fact, it is a
mordant, emotionaly loaded, complex text, stylisticaly highly wrought, masquerading as
simple, whimsical, even slight.  Moreover, . . . [i]ts politics of race and clas are extremely
troubling? (?Gertrude Stein? 15).  Often Stein?s Thre Lives is considered an important
beginning for her continued work, yet critics often fail to examine its complexity.  Some argue
that because ?most critics have not known how to deal with Stein . . . they have focused on the
more ?comprehensible? pieces?Thre Live? (Neuman and Nadel xvii).  Thre Lives can be
considered ?comprehensible? if examined at a surface story-level where it appears three stories
of three women.  Like Stein, other early twentieth-century writers focused their atention on the
lower clases rather than the rich.  The two stories, ?The Good Anna? and ?The Gentle Lena,? of
two German servant women might, for example, reveal the difficulties of the great numbers of
imigrants entering the United States at this time.  Thus Stein?s topic appears timely; after al,
she argues her work lies within the composition of her time.  In the 1933 Preface of Thre Lives,
Carl Van Vechten notes ?Melanctha? is ?perhaps the first American story in which the Negro is
regarded as a human being and not as an object for condescending compasion or derision? (x).
Even from a social and racial perspective, Stein displays what utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch
would cal ?the highest sensitivity to the crucial moments of change in time and its material
proces? (The Principle of Hope 126).  Van Vechten, Eugene O?Neil, and Sherwood Anderson
read Thre Lives ?with admiration,? Edmund Wilson writes, and he notes ?that al three of these
                                                                                                                                                                   
Nature of Modernism,? asociate Stein with the ?logic and modes of Modernism? and with ?the
revolution of the word,? continued by ?the later Joyce? (34).  Not only do they designate Stein?s
modernist contributions as revolutionary and innovative, they note her own placement within the
?powerful movement? of ?Modernism . . . our inevitable art,? as Stein put it, ?the only
?composition? appropriate to the new composition in which we live, the new depositions of space
and time? (23).
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writers were to occupy themselves later with negro life, in regard to which Mis Stein had given
an example of an atitude not complicated by race-consciousnes? (238-239).
Stil only a few critics and artists examine Stein?s aesthetic, imaginative capabilities as
utopian.  However, her innovative language and her critical atention to multiple, marginal areas
of our existence have provided scholars a festival of material on which to try out their own
theories.  Some twentieth century critics have read Thre Lives as new in its verbal structure that
creates the substantial realities of the individual experiences in modern society.  Recent studies
have indicated the ?future? value of Stein?s work for our time, suggesting that critical twentieth-
century feminist, linguistic, and poststructuralist theory, criticism, and practice ?have helped us
imeasurably in understanding Stein? (Neuman and Nadel, ?Introduction? xix).  Editing
Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature, Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel recognize that
twentieth-century theory provides a conceptual framework to discuss Stein?s work.  Critics have
realized that ?the theory was not as new as it sounded, that ?Stein did that!?  What
poststructuralist theory did was let us begin to name what has semed most problematic in
Gertrude Stein?s writing? (xx).  In understanding Stein, the contemporary newnes of her work
and its continuing relevance to the future, readers have developed ?new, alternative
perspectives.?  Expresed in utopian terms, her work has helped readers rethink the nature of
human existence and their position in society in new, beter ways.  Studies not using the utopian
perspective from which to examine Stein?s work, understand it in ways that relate to utopian
thought.  In ?At a Tangent: Other Modernisms? in Modernism: A Literary Guide (1995), Peter
Nicholls argues that Gertrude Stein discovers
a form of writing that reveals continuities betwen self and world. . . . Even in her
early work [Thre Lives], Stein?s focus of atention travels consistently away from
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meaning to the texture of writing.  Language begins to asume a new opacity,
blocking any easy pasage betwen words and Eliot?s ?world of objects?.  Stein, we
might say, invents another version of modernism by circumventing the image
altogether and by exploring precisely that self-sufficiency of language which had
semed decadent to the ?Men of 1914?. (202)
Writing Gertrude Stein (1976), Michael J. Hoffman argues that in Thre Lives, ?Stein for the first
time took a genuine step away from narrative and linguistic conventions? (21).  In Gertrude Stein
and the Literature of the Modern Consciousnes (1970), Norman Winstein counters critical
contentions that Stein?s radical experiments into the nature of language cause ?artistic
suicide?(45).  Instead, he concludes that ?[t]he narrative of Gertrude Stein captures the changes of
the real world; it reads awkwardly, since reality changes awkwardly? (107).  In A Diferent
Language:  Gertrude Stein?s Experimental Writing (1983), Marianne DeKoven sums up her
analysis of Thre Lives, noting that Stein?s ?impulse to alter conventional language in the service
of realizing the esence of her subject leads her to abandon coherent thematic treatment of that
subject in preference for the possibility of reinventing the structure of thought itself? (45).  From
the work of Stein, DeKoven argues, ?[n]ew meaning and fresh synthetic combinations can be
extracted from thinking,? requiring readers and other writers to alter their perspectives on the
individual in society.
Stein was aware that she saw the composition of her time, thus narrative composition, in a
structure of which her contemporaries were not yet conscious.  For the most part, her
contemporaries were not her contemporaries.  Yet she claims, ?[n]o one is ahead of his time, it is
only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also
are creating their own time refuse to acept. . . . Those who are creating the modern composition
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authenticaly are naturaly only of importance when they are dead. . . .The creator of the new
composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a clasic? (emphasis mine, ?Composition as
Explanation? 22).  Like C?zanne?s surface aesthetics that resists perspective order, Stein?s ?new
composition? placed her ?out? side the ?law? of conventional narrative and outside the
conventions even, as she notes, of the most acepted ?modernist? art.  ?You se,? she explains,
?it is the people who generaly smel of the museums who are acepted, and it is the new who are
not acepted.  You have got to acept a complete difference.  It is hard to acept that, it is much
easier to have one hand in the past.  That is why James Joyce was acepted and I was not.  He
leaned toward the past, in my work the newnes and difference is fundamental? (?Transatlantic
Interview? 29).  While this may appear mere self-advertisement on Stein?s part, Sheri Benstock,
too, understands Stein as a ?failed? Modernist and argues that Stein ?always stood resolutely
outside the mystery of language, just as she stood outside the gate of Modernism? (13).
Acknowledging the impossibility of defining Modernism so as to include al its various
Modernist experiments, Benstock notes:
The one sacred belief common to them al semed to be the indestructibility of the
bond betwen the word and its meanings, betwen the symbol and substance,
betwen signifier and signified.  Multiple linguistic experiments?juxtapositions of
unlike words, typographical experimentation, translations of language into the
dreamworld of night or the language of the mad?only reinforced the linguistic
claims on meaning. (13)
Stein, on the other hand, ?never believed in the indestructible relation betwen the word and its
meaning, and she was able to demonstrate in multiple ways the uncontrollable divergences of
form and content, style and substance, signifier and signified? (14).  Although by 1992, Marianne
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DeKoven places only Stein?s Thre Lives as a work of modernist fiction and, like the work of
Joyce, Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson, devoted to ?inventing new fictional means to represent
the proceses of consciousnes. Even Thre Lives, however, is so American, so much an eruption
of modernism from within Jamesian pragmatism and American naturalism, that it occupies a
different space within modernist fiction than that asociated with the other three? (?Why James
Joyce Was Acepted and I Was Not? 26).
In the ?After the War?1919-1932? chapter of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,
Stein writes, ?Kate Buss brought lots of people to the house.  She brought Djuna Barnes and
Mina Loy and they had wanted to bring James Joyce but they didn?t? (200).  John Malcolm
Brinnin places Stein meting Joyce at a party to celebrate Jo Davidson?s completion of his statue
of Walt Whitman (230).  Stein ?was touchy about the coupling of her name with that of the Irish
master mainly because, by suggesting affinities of outlook and method that did not exist, such
mention did diservice to both writers,? Brinnin writes.  Later Stein said, ?Joyce and I are at
opposite poles, . . . but our work comes to the same thing, the creation of something new? (290).
Writing in 1960, Brinnin argues the central chalenge for modern writers was ?to find some
substitute for the myth-structures that had made possible the epics of the past? (298).  Some like
Joyce would borrow ?piecemeal the mythological unity of some period of the past and use it to
contain and carry the chaos of the present. . . . Others would base their work upon an idea, a
method, or . . . findings of scientists and the meditations of philosophers? (299-300). Brinnin
writes that while ?Joyce is bound by references; . . . Because she offers no references by which
bearings can be taken, Gertrude Stein cannot be ?solved,? she can only be acepted? (304).
Sherwood Anderson, in his introduction to Stein?s Geography and Plays, wrote that ?[f]or me
the work of Gertrude Stein consists in a rebuilding, an entire new recasting of life, in the city of
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words? (8).  Although there remains a question of Stein?s influence on Virginia Woolf, in leters
and diaries Woolf reveals herself ?weighted down by innumerable manuscripts? including ?the
whole of Gertrude Stein,? and found Stein ?rather formidable? (qtd. in Hussey 263).
Stein?s compositions are outside writing and painting that is occupied with making ?it as it
is [already] made? (?Composition as Explanation? 22).  Her composition is a ?modern
composition,? and like Wels? modern utopian composition, it means ?outside . . . boundary
lines.?  Wels writes that the ?whole trend of modern thought is against the permanence of any
such enclosures?; both Wels and Stein endeavor to repudiate ideas that imply ?that the whole
intelectual basis of mankind is established, that rules of logic, the systems of counting and
measurement, the general categories and schemes of resemblance and difference, are established
for the human mind for ever? (Wels 11, 19-20).  Stein understood that ?[i]n the history of the
refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling? (?Composition as
Explanation? 23).  For some, as with Stein?s early critics, the ?startling? is disconcerting.  But in
Bloch?s utopian philosophy, startling provides evidence of art?s utopian creativity and the
possibilities for social and individual identity, revealed by works of art that strive for the startling
and unpredictable, new portrait of human existence.  And Stein?s ?first book,? Thre Lives, not
only reveals the ?startling and unpredictable? but it also, in its narrative change, develops new
modes of knowing the individual and the individual?s position in a changing world.
Stein argues that each generation changes, must change, and the creative artist is the one
who portrays the real tendency of reality:  ?any creative artist is . . . contemporary.  Only he is
sensitive to what is contemporary long before the average human being is.  He puts down what is
contemporary, and it is exactly that.  Sooner or later people realize it? (?A Transatlantic
Interview? 33).  Although Stein?s continuous, disruptive ?modern composition? has moved
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beyond Bloch?s disruptive, but goal oriented utopianism, Bloch?s ?not-yet? helps frames Stein?s
idea as a utopian concept that reveals ?real realism . . . because it grasps the tendency of reality?
(The Utopian Function of Art and Literature 106).  Stein?s grasp of ?the tendency of reality? is
evident in her concept of composition, and in general, the esential component of ?insistence,? a
proces that reveal her utopian imagination.
Composition and utopian methods: expanding C?zanne and Wiliam James
Everything I have done has been influenced by Flaubert and C?zanne and this gave me a new feeling about
composition.  Up to that time composition had consisted of a central idea, to which everything else was an
acompaniment and separate but was not an end in itself, and C?zanne conceived the idea that in composition one
thing was as important as another.  Each part is as important as the whole, and that impresed me enormously, and it
impresed me so much that I began to write Three Lives under this influence and this idea of composition and I was
more interested in composition at that moment, this background of word-system, which had come to me from this
reading that I had done. . . . It was the first time in any language that anyone had used that idea of composition in
literature. . . . the realism of the composition which was the important thing, the realism of the composition of my
thoughts. Gertrude Stein ?Transatlantic Interview 1946? 15-16
The three aesthetic compositional components Stein developed in her ?Composition as
Explanation? lecture give shape to an image/dialogue form that simultaneously breaks up
integrative, totalizing narrative structure; promotes the idea that texts may be multi-leveled,
dynamic, and non-authoritarian; and resists closure on movement and change.  Stein?s innovative
component ?using everything? in a proces of ?beginning again? liberates alternative voices,
words, and ideas of human individuals excluded from single point perspective narrative.
Anticipating Bakhtin?s idea of dialogue, Stein?s multiplicity of voices disrupts authority, even of
the author herself.  ?Beginning again and again and again? and ?continuous present? are ?both
things,? Stein explains: this movement establishes her method as a dynamic proces, active in
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nature, a context in which the multiple points of view and individual expresions resist
unquestioning unification. As such, it is a constructed, relational proces that provides for inquiry
and change, as wel as relations betwen the individual parts.  Trying to cope without a central
idea, Stein is ?groping? toward a modern composition that portrays the composition of her time
and individuals as they are ?existing? in it.  Stein?s dialogic structure relies on succesive,
individual perspectives in a ?fertilising conflict? betwen the parts.  Although influenced by
C?zanne?s surface aesthetic and James? ?stream of thought,? Stein?s uses her own medium, the
resource of language, and ?continuous present? is her ?background of word-system? that she
says, ?had come to me from this reading that I had done? (?A Transatlantic Interview? 15).
In Thre Lives she portrays her aesthetic composition and explains her ?new way? in her
theoretical esays ?Composition as Explanation? and ?Portraits and Repetition.?  In reading
Stein?s narrative as a product of the utopian function of the imagination, her development of
composition is central. In her title, ?Composition as Explanation,? Stein acounts for
?composition? as a changing proces, and her use of ?as? suggests that her compositional
elements wil explain her composition.  This shifts composition from reliance on a ?central idea?
as explanation, toward the idea of composition as a composing, arranging proces.  Stein
understands composition as an on-going proces:  composition is the act of composing and the
proces of composition governs her work.  For Stein, ?[t]here was a groping for using everything
and there was a groping for a continuous present and there was an inevitable beginning of
beginning again and again and again? (?Composition as Explanation? 26).  She explains her
composition proces as a ?groping? rather than a grasping.  Because she uses everything in ?a
continuous present,? beginning again, Stein?s composition disrupts any underlying idea directed
toward a single image.  Stein compositional proces can be iluminated by Paul Ricoeur?s later
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twentieth century explanation of his utopian theory of fiction as an ever-unfolding disruptive
proces, a proces in which, he notes, the utopian imagination functions in a constitutive and
constituting role rather than one that presents the complete, constituted.  In the ?[b]eginning again
and again and again,? Stein writes, ?explaining composition and time is a natural thing?
(?Composition as Explanation? 23).  Thus the ever-unfolding structure of Thre Lives permits
interplay of alternative voices and value systems.
Influenced by the ideas of Wiliam James and Paul C?zanne, Stein gains a ?new feeling of
composition? that combines James? psychological explorations into the workings of the human
mind and C?zanne pictorial investigations of the equal integrity of al things.  In A Primer for the
Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, Robert Has argues that Stein wrote Thre Lives under
the influence of psychologist and philosopher Wiliam James, Stein?s ?most stimulating teacher
while she was at Radcliffe? (43).  Has claims that James? ideas stimulated Stein?s literary
struggle to understand the ?basic nature? of human individuals in a continuous movement of
proces.  In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Stein writes that ?in looking and
looking at this picture Gertrude Stein wrote Thre Lives. . . . she had this C?zanne and she looked
at it and under its stimulus she wrote Thre Lives. . . . The C?zanne portrait had not semed
natural, it had taken her some time to feel that it was natural? (34-35).  Stein found in C?zanne?s
Madame C?zanne in a Red Armchair a pictorial model of James?s ideas of experience that,
combined, led her toward her ?modern composition.?
In different ways, C?zanne and James both struggled with the problem of continuity
grounded in experienced relations, against totalizing and finalizing form.  Stein undertakes a
similar struggle, developing the problem of continuity of individual experience in the literary
portraiture of Thre Lives.  The problem, as C?zanne articulated it, was ?to relate every part of the
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ilusion in depth to a surface patern? (Shiff 291).  Stein?s literary stres on surfaces follows
C?zanne?s pictorial geting rid of distinctions: C?zanne reduces perspectivism?s distinction
betwen figure and ground to articulate a new pictorial composition; James denies dualism?s
distinction betwen body and mind or, for James, consciousnes and content, and replaces the
distinction with a pluralistic ?pure experience? (Taylor and Wozniak, par. 11-16).  In his ?A
World of Pure Experience,? James contends that knowledge in transitu joins with the notion of
?pure experience?: the ?field of the present is always experience in its ?pure state,? plain
unqualified actuality, a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought? (208).  In her
?first book,? Stein blends C?zanne?s recalcitrant surface aesthetic of shifting perspectives and
James? ?stream of thought,? an acount of experience as a stream of consciousnes rather than a
succesion or series of propositions, to produce her sense of narrative as a proces of ?continuous
present.?  Like C?zanne?s ?surfaces,? James? ?stream,? and Wels? ?great stream of things,? Stein
develops her composition in a continuity grounded in relations, or ?interplay? betwen the parts,
that denies any single perspective or single formulation of ruling myth or theory.  Stein had
studied James and read C?zanne; it is through her own medium, however, the resource of
language, that she develops ?this background of word-system? (?A Transatlantic Interview? 15).
?No longer subordinated to the organization of ideas, Stein?s ?back-ground of word-system?
comes to the fore as the predominant element of the composition,? Jayne L. Walker writes in her
study of Stein and C?zanne (13).  Stein does bring the ?background of word-system? to the
surface, and in her ?continuous present? images are constructed and relations betwen images
developed.  Walker continues, noting that ?Stein?s foregrounded ?word-system? creates a new
mode of realism that inheres in the material paterning of the composition, not merely re-
presenting the objects of completed conception but modeling the proceses of perception and
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cognition.  As she defines it here, it is a ?realism of the composition,? that is the formal
embodiment of the ?composition of [her] thoughts.?  Stein does ground her new ?realism of the
composition? in the proceses of perception, but Stein uses ?everything? and follows C?zanne in
reducing the distinction betwen figure and ground, in avoiding hierarchical composition. Stein
avoids hierarchical composition, in one instance, by refiguring the beginning, middle, and end of
her composition of Thre Lives, disrupting the chronological sequence in which she had writen
the three stories.  Originaly sequenced as ?The Good Anna,? ?The Gentle Lena,? and
?Melanctha,? Stein constructs her own, arbitrary interplay of form.  In C?zanne pictorial art this is
an ?absence of ilusionistic depth? that results from ?a number of ?highlighted? areas [that] appear
in like manner in the foreground, middleground and background; and this effect is enhanced by
the repetitious patern of brushstroke, which does not distinguish ?near? from ?far?? (Shiff 209).
Moreover, Stein reduces the distinction betwen figure and ground at the portrait level.  In
pictorial art, figure and ground constitute the totality of what is perceivable. Traditionaly, figure
is what appears structured, what perception is focused upon; whereas ground appears as
background, as unstructured.  In Thre Lives Stein brings ground or her ?background of word
system? to the fore; the study of ground or medium becomes as important as the rhetorical figure
or idea.  To achieve an ?absence of ilusionistic depth,? Stein deviates from the ordinary or
expected patern or category of words.  In ?The Gentle Lena? we se this flatening of the ilusion
of depth in Stein?s description of Lena, who ?had the flat chest, straight back and forward faling
shoulders . . .. flat, soft featured face?(240-41).  Language as generic ground, traditionaly of
generic transparency and semingly seamles construction, is what Stein brings to readers?
atention.  Shifting atention to ground, Stein explores its differences and ilustrates the relations
of elements across the categorical distinctions.  For example, Stein writes that ?Lena was patient,
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gentle, swet and german. . . . had been brought from Germany? and had ?german patience,? a
?german voice? (240).  Lena is categorized as from Germany and speaks the German language,
but Stein describes her nature, patience, and voice as ?german.?  Lena is germane to Stein?s
compositional structure: in one general definition ?german? as a sprout, bud, or germ, the form
from which new organisms or organizations and structures develop.  Not easily categorized, ?The
Gentle Lena? narrative produces a dynamic arrangement of parts that are related to al other
elements of the composition.
As an experience of ever-unfolding continuousnes, Stein?s development of a surface
aesthetic of narrative ?continuous present? participates not only with C?zanne?s and James?
struggle to develop new languages of composition in pictorial art and psychology and philosophy,
but also H. G. Wels? utopianism of the interplay of individualities.  Key to a connection of Stein
and C?zanne is Oscar Wilde?s construction of an ever-unfolding interplay of the artist critic that
anticipates aesthetic experience as an ongoing continuum. C?zanne and Stein open up Wilde?s
non-totalizing perspective of the artist critic to relationality among al parts of the composition.
The non-totalizing perspectives of these artists anticipate Bakhtin?s dialogism that rejects
dialectic closure and values conversation betwen individuals and their ideas, Adorno?s concept
of non-identity that privileges individuality, and Derrida?s diference that defers meaning and
affirms difference, countering a unifying encounter betwen subject and object: al doing justice
to the voice of the Other.
Stein?s ?continuous present? replaces composition time as linear progres; as she ses it,
?continuous present? is the composition of her time and the time of her composition.  Explaining
her aesthetic composition Stein continues that
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beginning again, and again is another thing. . . . This brings us again to
composition this the using everything.  The using everything brings us to
composition and to this composition.  A continuous present and using everything
and beginning again.  In [Thre Lives and The Making of Americans] there was
elaboration of the complexities of using everything and of a continuous present
and of beginning again and again and again. (?Composition as Explanation 26)
Al of Stein?s disruptive, uncertain ?groping? unsetles models of progresive drive toward perfect
unity.  Instead, the groping qualities of her compositional proces are the basic nature of her
compositions, with al the ?atendant risk and tension,? utopian philosopher Cosimo Quarta
argues, of the utopian impulse to ?search for new possibilities of sustenance . . . ? (160).
 Beginning again and again, for Stein, is an ever-unfolding proces, unfinished and
continuous.  John J. McDermott, writing the ?Introduction? to The Writings of Wiliam James,
explains that James?s principle of the ?experience of continuity? is ?not imposed from without
but is rather found as an ongoing and intrinsic activity of the flow of experience. . . .
inteligibility without a principle of total meaning, and the experience of continuity without the
knowledge of finality? (xlvii).  For James, the ?procesive quality? of human beings is of
?continuous transitions? of ?next with next in concrete experience?; for Stein, the procesive
quality is a ?beginning again and again.?  Stein?s proces can also be understood in her
connection to C?zanne?s ?unnatural? shifting perspectives, as wel as Wels? utopian interplay of
individualities.  As C?zanne holds his pictorial art at the surface, Stein keeps these shifting
perspectives ?on the page,? using them to sek out form and capture the proces of her ?word
system,? creating a utopian tension of individualities as they appear in worldly reality and
narrative composition itself.
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?Beginning again and again and again,? Stein establishes her method, the constructed,
relational proces that provides for inquiry and change, as wel as relations betwen the
individual parts.  Stein is ?groping? toward a modern composition that portrays the composition
of her time and individuals as they are ?existing? in it.  As a method of proces, Stein?s
?beginning again? compliments her notion of ?insistence.?
In ?Portraits and Repetition,? Stein argues her work is not repetition or repeating;
that is the same thing, but once started expresing this thing, expresing any thing
there can be no repetition because the esence of that expresion is insistence, and
if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not
possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis. . .
. That is what makes life that the insistence is different. (100)
Stein?s ?insistence? can never be ?repetition,? descriptions of things being given, ?because
insistence is always alive and if it is alive it is never saying anything in the same way because
emphasis can never be the same? (?Portraits and Repetition? 102).  A dialogic structure,
?insistence? relies on succesive, individual perspectives in a ?fertilising conflict? betwen parts.
Stein?s insistence is a kind of Derridean difference; it differs from any previous expresion
because the emphasis changes and defers any final meaning.  What sems repetition in Stein?s
work, she defines as ?insistence that in its emphasis can never be repeating.? Here, Stein ?rejects
the mimetic art of remembering . . . knowledge that is converted into an artifact of itself.
Remembering? Marianne DeKoven writes, ?invokes what Stein considers the ninetenth-century
English linear mode of succesivity; she cals it elsewhere "beginning middle and ending," and
considers herself to have replaced it with the twentieth-century American mode of simultaneity,
a thing not acreted through time but composed instantaneously of its various, interchangeable,
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equaly important parts? (?How James Joyce was Acepted? 24).  Stein insists that ?[n]o mater
how often what happened had happened any time any one told anything there was no repetition.
This is what Wiliam James cals the Wil to Live.  If not nobody would live? (?Portraits? 101).
In a ?continuous present,? ?the shifting repetition of insistence is inevitable because you
rediscover and reinvent in each moment what you know. If you knew you'd already known it you
wouldn't have to say it again? (DeKoven 25).
Stein?s ?esence of that expresion is insistence? can be understood in relation to Wiliam
James? and C?zanne?s influence.  Predicated on the existence of difference, Stein?s ?insistence?
endangers the notion of esentialism, or a Bakhtinean monologism.  Coupled with ?insistence?
Stein?s use of ?esence? must differ from esentialism?s fixed or unchanging concept of
?esence.?  James replaces esence with ?proces? and uses ?esence? in relation to his idea of
?interest? and ?selectivity.?  In Principles, James aserts that ?there is no property
ABSOLUTELY esential to any one thing? and that ?[t]he esence of a thing is that one of its
properties which is so important for my interests that in comparison with it I may neglect the
rest? (II. 333, 335).  The transposition of C?zanne?s pictorial techniques and aesthetics into
literature creates, for Stein, a ?realer? reality, not ?in making the people real but in the esence
or, as a painter would cal it, value.  One cannot live without the other? (?A Transatlantic
Interview? 16).  Stein emphasizes C?zanne?s new compositional idea that conveys ?the idea of
each part of a composition being as important as the whole? (17).  Stein makes the value of each
part, each individual, each different value systems as important as the whole, and rather than
repetition of the same thing, her composition is a utopian constitutive and constituting proces
that begins ?again and again and again,? so that each part is as important as the whole.  It is the
?beginning of knowing what there was that made there be no repetition? (?Portraits? 101).  As
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Stein notes in ?Composition as Explanation,? beginning again ?is a natural thing even when
there is a series? (23).  The three portraits Stein draws of Anna, Lena, and Melanctha are a
?beginning again? to portray each individual, each life and value system, as wel as the
continuing portrayal of the constitutive, changing proces of her compositions.  In her
compositional component of ?beginning again,? Stein applies the verb of continuous movement,
a movement that explains her narrative Thre Lives as an expresion of Wels? utopian
?fertilising conflict? of the interplay of individualities.  In her ?Melanctha,? Stein applies the
proces of insistence, developing an interplay in relations betwen Jeff and Melanctha:  ?I
certainly never can know anything about you real, Melanctha, . . . ? Jeff says (Thre Lives 141).
?But I certainly do admire and trust you a whole lot now, Melanctha.  I certainly do, for I
certainly never did think I was hurting you at al, Melanctha, . . . ?.  To which Melanctha
responds, ?I know, I know, . . . I know you are a good man Jeff.  I always know that, no mater
how much you can hurt me.?  Each insistence of ?I know? or ?I certainly? carries the thought
forward and each insistence is different.  Stein argues, ?[t]hat is what makes life that the
insistence is different.?  The insistence is an emphasis on a particular property, a selective
proces that develops and then begins again, building the picture in a continuous movement.
Bloch argues that ?the utopian function is the only transcending one that has remained,? a
transcending function ?without transcendence? (Utopian Function 107).
Stein?s utopian method of ?using everything? ?brings us again to composition,? a
utopianism of individualities of the arrangement of the parts.  Stein?s ?using everything? opens
the field of experience in literature to every sensation and every body as they are ?existing,? and
places value on the individual and the individual?s relation with others.  This composition
element is similar to C?zanne?s multiple perspectives and ?each part? at the surface that ?reach
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no more resolution than the whole, nor do they sem certain to atain individualy any integral
form.  These figural elements sem to exist only in their interconnections, and the composition
appears to expand by addition of details, minor details, adjacent to those already defined? (Shiff
116).  The elements of Stein?s aesthetic composition develop the image/dialogue structure of
Thre Lives and her understanding of C?zanne?s idea of composition, as the idea that ?each part
is as important as the whole.?  C?zanne?s pictorial and Stein?s literary art develop their ?non-
hierarchical? compositional structure ?in terms of the linking of one articulated part to another?
(Shiff 215).  In Thre Lives, Stein portrays three working clas women, servants and imigrants,
German American and African American, developing their lives as they are living.  Having
disrupted narrative drive toward hierarchical, progresive structure by re-arranging the original
chronological sequence, Anna, Lena, and Melanctha, in which she wrote the narratives, each
portrait liberates individual voice and point of view.
Previously, individual voice had been subordinated to a controlling idea.  ?Up to that time
composition had consisted of a central idea,? Stein says, ?to which everything else was an
acompaniment and separate but was not an end in itself . . . ? (?Transatlantic Interview? 15).
The three lives are linked in a series of portraits across the surface of her narrative composition;
each working clas woman?s life is developed individualy and is as important as the whole of
the Thre Lives composition.  In doing so, Stein like C?zanne establishes correspondences to
unify the image, and without conventional modeling ?displays a harmonious surface in which the
colors of foreground and background from a continuous patern of interrelated hues? (208).
Stein unifies her patern, not idea, in a ?continuous present? at the surface; ?using everything? in
a continuous patern of interrelated ?hues,? Stein does justice to the Other in a social context.
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Her ?beginning again and again? interplay of individualities resists narrative unity of any single
interpretative theory or finalized existence.
Stein wished to find a new way to portray the human individual, not describe, report,
repeat, or resemble what has been.  From her perspective, ?the realism of the people who did
realism before was a realism of trying to make people real? (?A Transatlantic Interview? 16).
Stein acknowledges that Flaubert and Henry James had had a ?slight inkling? of the new
composition she achieves; however, acording to Stein, ?[t]hey al fel down on it, because the
supremacy of one interest overcame them.?  Granted, Stein?s precursor Henry James used
writen art of portraiture strategicaly for the construction of The Portrait of a Lady (1881).  But
she argued, James? ?composition had consisted of a central idea? rather than what she ?tried to
convey the idea of each part of a composition being as important as the whole? (15). Stein?s
Thre Lives as image/dialogue is non-authoritarian form whose free play of various points of
view and value systems, expresed in the various characters, contests an integrative ?image.?
In her 1926 lecture ?Composition as Explanation,? Stein establishes her ?modern
composition? as ?[c]omposition is not there, it is going to be there?; the modern composition of
her ?book,? she argues, is the composition of living, ?the thing sen by every one living in the
living that they are doing, . . . ? (24).  In this composition of living, Stein says,
there was a constant recurring and beginning there was a marked direction in the
direction of being in the present although naturaly I had been acustomed to past
present and future, and why, because the composition forming around me was a
prolonged present.  A composition of a prolonged present is a natural composition
in the world as it has been these thirty years it was more and more a prolonged
present . . . it was natural. (24-25)
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The anticipatory proces that develops the composition of Stein?s Thre Lives works to
compose each part that is as important whole.  Speaking of the composition of her novel, Stein
said she had ?tried to convey the idea of each part of a composition being as important as the
whole? (?A Transatlantic Interview? 15).  In the proces of composition, Stein recognized the
individual thing in itself that relies on continuous proces to develop.  In ?Portraits and
Repetition,? Stein explains that with insistence, without repetition, composition of portraiture
was ?a movement lively enough to be a thing in itself moving. . . . In other words the making of
a portrait of any one is as they are existing and as they are existing has nothing to do with
remembering any one or anything? (102, 105).  The word ?existing? is esential for Stein?s
continuous proces of composition.  She argues that ?existing as a human being . . . is never
repetition? because each time the emphasis is different.  Neither for Stein nor for Ricoeur is
individual esence a constituted thing.  Rather both would agree that individual identity emerges
over time, revealed through time and through proces.  As Stein says, existing has nothing to do
with remembering because ?remembering is repetition? (?Portraits and Repetition? 106).  In the
movement of ?proces and existing,? the ideas of the utopian interplay contrast with those of
recollection.
In ?looking and looking? at C?zanne?s portrait of Madame C?zanne in a Red Armchair
(c.1877) Stein wrote Thre Lives.  In painting, C?zanne?s ?looking? was a ?reading of the
model,? an effort to ??get to the bottom of what you find in front of you? as C?zanne put it to a
young artist friend, [that] was followed by the ?realization??the formation of a painting out of
whatever materials the reading had presented? (qtd. in Murphy 76).  Stein, too, atempts to ?get
to the bottom? of each person. And her reading, like C?zanne?s, is a deconstructive proces that
dismantles conventional seing to find, as Stein writes, a ?realer? reality.  The equality of al the
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parts of C?zanne?s painting relates the parts in a continuous ?modeling the proceses of
perception? across C?zanne?s canvas and the pages of Thre Lives.  In geting rid of the
distinction betwen figure and ground, C?zanne makes the viewer ?aware of the picture surface
itself as wel as the motif it is ?realizing? (Murphy 78).  Walker describes C?zanne?s method to
combine these ?contradictory sensory signs? as manifesting a ?tension betwen material surface
and ilusory depth? (9).  This places great stres on the art of portraiture, the focus of which is
traditionaly on the figure.  C?zanne?s surface aesthetic forces ?al forms, whatever their
theoretical position in depth, to play a part in the surface patern.  Nothing, therefore, remains in
a single plane. . . . Serious artists . . . found it impossible after C?zanne, to se the face without
seing the wal?and with it, carpets, draperies, posted plants and the whole seting of shapes and
colors in which the subject was placed? (99).  For Stein?s writing like C?zanne?s painting, the
emphasis lies on the creating of each part in a continuous present, and by beginning again and
again.  Stein, looking at life differently in each continuous moment, composes the various,
interplaying parts.  Thus Stein?s composition, like C?zanne?s, resists the linear mode of
beginning middle and end.  Stein?s narrative composition ilustrates C?zanne?s interplay of
recalcitrant surfaces, their meting and overlapping, from which meaning arises.  In doing so, she
composes the pictorial-literary structure of Thre Lives in relation to C?zanne?s significant
pictorial developments.
Unable to ?grasp? C?zanne?s picture in a single look, Stein develops her literary
?background of word-system? in a proces of ?looking and looking? that semed unnatural for
her early readers.  C?zanne?s painterly concerns culminate the aestheticism so important to Oscar
Wilde.  Although in a different way, Wilde had approached C?zanne?s surfaces and expresed
C?zanne?s own problem of ?[h]ow to relate every part of the ilusion in depth to a surface
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patern? (Shiff 291).  For Wilde, art was both ?symbol and surface,? and within C?zanne?s
pictorial framework, readers find in Wilde?s artist critic perspective a C?zannean conflict in the
awarenes of the picture surface itself as wel as the motif it is realizing.  Stein argues that her
literary forerunners, Flaubert and Henry James, had ?a litle of the feeling about this thing,? but
she had ?made it stay on the page quite composed? (?A Transatlantic Interview? 15-16).  ?The
C?zanne thing I put into words came in the Thre Lives,? Stein writes.  She contends it is ?the
first time in any language? that anyone had ?tried to convey the idea of each part of a
composition being as important as the whole. . . . I was not interested in making the people real
but in the esence or, as a painter would cal it, value.?  Like C?zanne?s pictorial art, Stein?s
pictorial-literary structure in Thre Lives reduces the distinction betwen central figure and
surrounding ground.
Unlike her forerunners, Stein literary work does not fal down to one central idea, but
following C?zanne?s ?complex shifting of planes, [and] the rich play of surface patern,? Stein?s
triptych portraiture portrays the complex, unique individual, in a complex, unique form that uses
the resources of her own medium, language (Wechsler 685).  Like C?zanne?s Madame C?zanne
in a Red Armchair, Stein?s Thre Lives ?records the act of looking as part of the finished image,?
leaving the evidence of the ?shifting perspective? on the page.  In 1905, artist critics R. P.
Rivi?re and J. F. Schnerb noted that C?zanne ?worked from part to part on his canvases,
alowing one form to define the adjacent one, as if the end of this free proces could not be
foresen? (Shiff 116).  His paintings
whether ?finished? or not with respect to covering the entire canvas, frequently do
sem incomplete, as if more parts could easily be added.  The artist?s images often
reach the edges of the canvas indecisively, or lack a central focus. . . . having
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painted many parts . . . with equal atention and intensity, denying them any
differentiating hierarchy.
Stein?s literary surfaces paralel C?zanne?s interplay of parts in an atempt to cope without the
perspectivism of a ruling myth or a central idea.  In Thre Lives Stein anticipates a Bakhtinean
proces in her image/dialogue and presents a utopian surface aesthetic of Wels? utopianism of
individualities that contests, in interplay, any totalizing efforts.
In Thre Lives, the story ?Melanctha? appears the most developed chalenge to totalizing
narrative, perhaps the most utopian story of an anti-utopian thinker.  Her image/dialogue
structure holds the depth of individual development at the surface of the page and develops in a
?continuous present? with interplay of various points of view.  Key to Melanctha?s minute
changes is her ?wandering?:  ?It was now something realer that Melanctha wanted, something
that would move her very deeply, something that would fil her fully with the wisdom that was
planted now within her, and that she wanted badly, should realy wholly fil her? (108). Her
?wandering? suggests a loosening of linear perspectivism that resists traditional narrative
beginning, middle, and end.  In fact, ?Melanctha wandered on the edge of wisdom. . . . wandered
very widely.  She was always alone now when she wandered.?  Like Wilde?s Dorian, Melanctha
lacks a foundational system and ?had now no home nor any regular employment? (109).  At the
surface of things, ?[s]he had youth and had learned wisdom, and she was graceful and pale
yelow and very pleasant, and always ready to do things for people, and she was mysterious in
her ways and that only made belief in her more fervent.?  Melanctha, perhaps ?melancholy,?
suggests the ?unhappines? of Laforgue?s statement that emphasizes the unstable relation
betwen self and world.  Figure and ground interplay.  In this one sentence Stein portrays
Melanctha from multiple perspectives.  We se her surface appearance, her actions, and others?
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perspectives of her.  In terms of portraiture, the external vision of Melanctha does not identify
with her internal yearnings.
The uncertainty of Melanctha?s position and the unstable development of her individuality
streses Stein?s emphasis on literary surface and her resistance to deep structural cohesion.  In
the creation of Melanctha and ?Melanctha? from moment to moment and part to part, Stein
resists narrative finalization: ?Melanctha al her life did not know how to tel a story wholly.  She
always, and yet not with intention, managed to leave out big pieces which make a story very
different, for when it came to what had happened and what she said and what it was that she had
realy done, Melanctha never could remember right? (100).  Later in the story, Melanctha
acuses Jeff Campbel of ?fits of remembering.  It?s always me that certainly has had to suffer,?
Melanctha recals, ?while you go home to remember? (181).  Melanctha, on the other hand, is
?excitement.?  And Melanctha?s excitement disturbs Jeff?s hope for ?regular? living.  Jeff never
believes in ?doing things to just get excited?: I realy certainly don?t ever like to get excited, and
that kind of loving hard does sem always to mean just geting al the time excited? (122).
Melanctha?s ?excited? living counters Jeff?s hope for ?regular? living, the very ?regular? thing
Stein?s disruptive composition atempts to contests.  Remembering for Stein?s narrative is similar
to pictorial recollection of reproducible and universal knowledge for C?zanne.
Stein?s composition ?Melanctha? produces an unstable interplay of various points of view.
Melanctha?s individuality develops from a ?fertilising conflict? of her mother?s and her father?s
characteristics: Mis? Herbert ?had been a swet appearing and dignified and pleasant, pale
yelow, colored woman. . . had always been a litle wandering and mysterious and uncertain in
her ways. . . . but the real power in Melanctha?s nature came through her robust and unpleasant
and very unendurable black father? (90).  Her parents provide Melanctha no certain foundation
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from which to live; her mother ?uncertain,? her father ??unendurable? and Melanctha ?was a
most disturbing child to manage? (91).  Stein cals ?Melanctha? the ?quintesential? story of the
series; it gives evidence to her extension of C?zanne?s recalcitrant surfaces.  Using everything,
Stein?s narrative interplay betwen Melanctha and Jane Harden, Melanctha and Jefferson
Campbel, Melanctha and Rose Johnson, Melantha and Jem Richards, develops each part in
interplay, but play begins again and again. Each part is as important for Melanctha?s continuing
development.
Melanctha develops ?wisdom? or knowing as she engages each relationship, but Stein?s
dialogic form offers neither fulfilment for Melanctha nor finalization of the narrative.  After al,
Melanctha ?was always losing what she had in wanting al the things she saw.  Melanctha was
always being left when she was not leaving others? (89).  Jane Harding ?had a good deal of
education? and she taught Melanctha ?how to go the ways that lead to wisdom? (103).  Jeff?s
time with Melanctha was an ?uncertain time? (136).  He always loved now to be with Melanctha
and yet he always hated to go to her. . . . he had loved al his life always to be thinking . . . and he
had never before had any of this funny kind of feeling.?  The interplay betwen Jeff and
Melanctha was a ?struggle . . . as their minds and hearts always were to have different ways of
working? (153).  In Jem Richards, ?Melanctha found everything she had ever needed to content
her? and ?Jem was al the world now to her? (218).  But Stein?s story resists such finalizing
contentment and soon for Melanctha, ?Jem Richards was now al past for her? (224).  Rose
Johnson appears across the canvas of Stein?s story; Rose had ?the sense of proper conduct. . . .
Her white training had only made for habits, not for nature? (88, 86).  And Rose was always
?teling the complex and les sure Melanctha what was the right way for her to do? (88).  When
Stein writes that Melanctha ?had not been raised like Rose by white folks but then she had been
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half made with real white blood,? she points out the narrative difference of the imposition of a
central idea and the complexity of relating al parts to the narrative surface (86).  Stein creates an
interplay betwen Rose?s ?simple, promiscuous, unmorality? with Melanctha?s ?graceful, pale
yelow? inteligent atractivenes, reteling the story with difference across the length of the
story.  In the uncertainty, tension and continuous development of al parts of the story, Stein
avoids faling down to ?one idea.?  Each contributes and interplays with al other parts.  In its
dialogic nature Stein?s ?Melanctha? alows each part voice and promotes the idea that literary
works may be multileveled, resisting unification.
Critics most often focus their critical views on Thre Lives? central story ?Melanctha? as
the best representation of Stein?s new composition.
2
  But Stein admired C?zanne?s new
composition of the ?integrity? of ?each part? and the ?evennes? of the ?vote.?  To overlook the
other two stories, ?The Good Anna? and ?The Gentle Lena,? denies the rich significance of her
utopian dialogic vision.  Like C?zanne?s Madame C?zanne siting in a red chair, ?Melanctha? not
only occupies most of Stein?s narrative and much of the critical work on Stein?s Thre Lives but
also gives ?an impresion of centrality?; however, in Stein?s narrative, as in C?zanne?s picture,
?everything shifts and belows, staking out a highly complex picture space.  The chair swels out
beyond proportion to the right side of the picture.  Her body compensates, shifting to the left,
while [Madame C?zanne?s] skirt manages to occupy center right? (Wechsler 685).   In Stein?s
narrative, readers find C?zanne?s halmark, these shifting perspectives: seking out form and
capturing the proces in the image created.  In the period he painted Madame C?zanne in a Red
Armchair, C?zanne ?created a dynamic balance betwen things as they appear in depth, their
                                                  
2. Alexander; Blackmer; Brinnin 120-121; Hoffman 32-38; Nicholls 202-210; Walker
19-41.  These few references represent critical work from 1960 to 2008, ilustrating the
continuing interest in Stein?s Thre Lives and the usual focus on the narrative ?Melanctha.?
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worldly reality, and the equaly compeling reality of the canvas itself.  The pictorial drama is in
the tension betwen depth and surface.?  C?zanne?s surface designs create Welsean interplay of
?fertilising conflicts? betwen the painting?s concrete signifiers and the perception of empirical
data, as Stein?s portrait of three lives portrays in literary tension betwen the individualities of
language and the ?realism of [her] thoughts? at the surface.  Or as Stein says, she keeps it on the
page.  Having composed ?The Good Anna? and ?The Gentle Lena? as the first and second
stories of the triptych, Stein, however, decenters the narrative structure, by giving ?Melanctha?
center position.   Stein?s re-arrangement of her composition not only disrupts the linear flow of
the narrative structure.  Decentered, ?The Good Anna? and ?The Gentle Lena? create an
opposing tension that also contests the potential dominance that ?Melanctha? might gain from its
center space.   Re-arranging the progresive flow of the narratives? construction, Stein develops a
dialogue among the parts; ?everything shifts and bilows.?  Here al parts wil play; here my look
at Stein?s narratives wil focus on the two stories that flank Stein?s ?quintesential? story,
?Melanctha.?
James, C?zanne, and Stein in Portraiture
Stein like C?zanne was not interested in representational characterization of human
individuals.  When Gertrude and Leo purchase C?zanne?s portrait, Gertrude Stein reports that
?Vollard said of course ordinarily a portrait of a woman always is more expensive than a portrait
of a man but . . . I suppose with C?zanne it does not make any difference? (The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas 33).  C?zanne?s portraiture does not participate in a dialectical mode of
seing/reading that requires a perfect match betwen the parts; the image is arbitrary and revises
the relation betwen image and determining substance, thus resisting any unifying perspectivism.
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Looking at C?zanne?s portraiture, Stein atempts to ?realize??forming her narrative as C?zanne
forms his painting out of material the reading presents?the esence or ?bottom nature? of the
subject, and its form in a matrix of relationships.  Because the experimental portraiture form
alows for aesthetic exploration, Stein?s Thre Lives can realize the individual in an imediacy
of experience and a proces of development.  Stein develops the unique human being in a
proces of perception that in Thre Lives is depicted as individualities and, in its whole
arrangement, an individuality of parts.  The three stories, ?The Good Anna,? ?Melanctha,? and
?The Gentle Lena,? portray three women.  In Thre Lives, as a whole arrangement, individual
parts interplay in an ever-unfolding disruption that refuses the notion of unified, self-sufficient
individualism that Wilde had chalenged.  Stein, like C?zanne, distorts the portraiture form, but
even at it most experimental, the portraits? fundamental visual and conceptual elements of
recognition endure.
At the visual level, Anna, Melanctha, and Lena are not, however, recognizable persons.
Because of the ?fictionalization? of Stein portraits, Wendy Steiner, author of Exact
Resemblances, rejects Thre Lives as portraiture, arguing it is a novel or novela; its subjects are
fictionalized (their names changed), and its operations are imaginary, though ?realistic? (64).
Steiner does acknowledge Stein?s ?elaborate theories of portraiture? and agrees the portraiture
genre as experimental form alows Stein to make startling ?implementation of abstract
requirements.?  Steiner correctly notes that Thre Lives differs from Stein?s later portraiture of
?real? people, but Stein would disagree that her Thre Lives is a novel or novela.  In fact Stein?s
narrative is difficult to categorize.  Composition to convey a central idea was, for Stein, a
soothing remembering:  ?this element of remembering . . . makes novels so soothing?
(?Portraits? 108).  Acording to Stein, twentieth-century writers, including herself, have not
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produced any novels:  ?As long as the novel has existed, the characters were dominant. . . . You
cannot say that there is a novel of the Twentieth Century.  I mean a more or les creative writer
has never writen anything that could in any reasonable sense of the word be caled a novel.  I
have created a lot of characters, but that is another story? (?A Transatlantic Interview? 21-22).
Acording to Stein, ?[t]he individual that made the Ninetenth Century live practicaly does not
live in the Twentieth Century, where the individual does not stick out enough for the people
reading about him. . . it is the title and the form of the book that you remember rather than the
characters in the book.?  Whether writers of the twentieth century ?novel? agree with Stein is
another mater.  Even before writing Thre Lives, Stein said that she began to know ?what there
was that made there be no repetition? (?Portraits? 101).  For Stein, repetition, is remembering:
?anything one is remembering is repetition, but existing as a human being, that is being listening
and hearing is never repetition. . . . Being existing that is listening and talking is action? (107-
08).   This is movement; listening and talking are part of doing the same thing; for Stein, ?this
thing? is what she means ?by life?:  ?If this existence is this thing is actualy existing there can
be no repetition.  There is only repetition when there are descriptions being given of these things
not when the things themselves are actualy existing and this is therefore how my portrait writing
began.?
In art, life represented as proces is anticipatory, and becomes a cognitive act that directs
our thinking toward what is possible: what different practices might be used to reshape our lives.
Life presented as proces paralels Wels? utopian scheme of interplay of individualities that
develop in ?fertilising conflict.?  As experimental literary portraiture, Stein?s Thre Lives evokes
not ?recognizable? people but the experience of individuals and art, in the proces of shaping and
reshaping, like Stein?s own composition, as a compositional proces.
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Stein ilustrates her scheme of image/dialogue in the two stories of Anna and Lena as a
set of difference of experiences.  Both Anna and Lena are servants and German, thus both
generaly have a similar experience, and similar to James? idea of experience as a play of parts:
he maintains that in
a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of asociates, plays
the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of ?consciousnes?; while in a different
context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an
objective ?content.?  In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another
group as a thing.  And, since it can figure in both groups simultaneously we have
every right to speak of it as subjective and objective both at once. (James 172)
James reinterprets ?dualism? as ?an affair of relations? that fals outside the single experience,
and ?can always be particularized and defined.?  In Stein?s composition of parts, we se the
consciousnes of the characters Lena and Anna are neither merged nor subordinated.  They play,
rather, the part of ?knower, of a state of mind, of ?consciousnes?, and in a different context, ?the
part of a thing known.?  As in Wels? utopianism of individualities, the world is sen as
pluralistic and variegated, ?shot silk? in its nature, whether the parts are connected; they are
related.  As Meyer Schapiro said of C?zanne?s artistic vision: he
loosened the perspective system of traditional art and gave to the space of the
image the aspect of a world created free-hand and put together piecemeal from
succesive perceptions, rather than offered complete to the eye in one coordinating
glance as in the ready-made geometrical perspective of Renaisance art. (emphasis
added 10)
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In ?The Good Anna,? Stein explores the ?good? state of ?consciousnes? in compositional
structure.  The ?good? Anna struggles to ?know? the world she lives in an effort to create a
traditional aesthetic utopian image, based on ?the right way to do things.?  Although Anna and
the Lena are given servant roles, dominated positions in life, Anna strives to make the world
conform to her subjective moral stance.  She has high ideals, and in the world in which she lives,
Anna works to subsume the multiplicity of bad under the control of singular good.  Stein first
details Anna?s ?high ideals? in the realm of ?canine chastity and discipline? (12).  Al the dogs
were ?under strict orders never to be bad one with the other,? but some of the dogs have
?[p]eriods of evil thinking? and although Anna scolded them, the bad, ?wicked-minded dogs?
had to be secluded from each other when Anna left the house (13).  Anna?s high ideals of
ninetenth-century conventional ethics Stein reduces to reproductive doggerel.
Stein expands Anna?s world of wicked dogs to include wicked men and recalcitrant
under-servants in a wicked world that Anna must control with her voice.  Although at times,
Anna?s voice was ?a pleasant one, when she told the histories of bad Peter and of Baby and of
litle Rags.  Her voice was a high and piercing one when she caled to the teamsters and to the
other wicked men . . .. and her queer piercing german english first made them afraid and then
ashamed? (13-14).   Based on an ?old world sense of what was the right ways for a girl to do,?
Anna leaned on old ideas to shape her world and the world of those she served.  Anna?s
wilingnes to serve relies on finding people who can be ?made?: ?Anna?s superiors must be
always these large helples women, or be men, for none others could give themselves to be made
so comfortable and free? (25).     And Anna always ?made herself always fulfil her own ideal of
how a girl should look . . .. Anna knew so wel the kind of uglines appropriate to each rank in
life? (40).  Working under the ilusion of hierarchy of taste and rightnes, a hierarchy where even
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uglines is ranked, Anna?s aestheticism is a theory of life that identifies with beauty and moral
goodnes.
But in Stein?s composition, even presenting a ?subjective? perspective of experience,
such identification cannot be final.  Stein?s three stories al develop in a field of tension that
undermines the stability of that position.  The ?fertilising conflict? is evident first in Anna?s
tension of ?temper and humor? and, again, in a ?strange coquetry of anger and of fear, the
stiffnes, the bridling, the suggestive movement underneath the rigidnes of forced control, al
the queer ways the pasions have to show themselves al one?  (28-29).  The idealized harmony
of conventional morality, on which the ?good? Anna relies to shape her world, fails her:  ?The
good Anna could not understand the careles and bad ways of al the world and always she grew
biter with it al.  No, not one of them had any sense of what was the right way for them to do?
(73).  Anna?s only ?romance,? her ?idealised affection,? Mrs. Lehntman was at first sight
?magnetic, efficient and good. . . . generous and very amiable,? but the image shifts and she
becomes ?bland, impersonal and pleasant? (30, 42).  Good Anna had a ?firm character,? a ?sharp
firm edge,? similar to the hard lines Wels describes as ?hard theoretic arrangements? that have
been the ?common sin of al Utopias hitherto? (262).   Mrs. Lehntman, however, ?never could be
led? and chalenges the hard lines of Anna?s determination ?for the right? (Thre Lives 42-43).
Although Anna ?made her words come sharp and with a jerk,? Mrs. Lehntman in her ?pleasant
wel diffused atention,? countered: ?feelings spread her breath, and made her words come slow,
but more pleasant and more easy even than before,? breaking down the boundaries of Anna?s
hard lines.  In compositional terms, Mrs. Lehntman diffuses the power of Anna?s central,
controlling idea: ?Mrs. Lehntman needed Anna just as much as Anna needed Mrs. Lehntman, but
Mrs. Lehntman was more ready to risk Anna?s loss, and so the good Anna grew always weaker
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in her power to control? (54).  In her composition, Stein is ready to risk loss of the central idea.
Her resistance to the drive toward narrative wholenes is similar to the disruption in the
hierarchy of Anna?s power that disrupts the control Anna?s ?good? moral power had, to control
those around her and to control the freedom of the composition.
Like C?zanne?s vibration of recalcitrant parts, the interplay of the personalities denies
Anna?s drive for ?good? wholenes.  As the portrait?s central controlling subject, Anna?s position
is weakened; if considered as traditional aesthetics? effort to reconcile sensation and moral
signification, the ?ideal? decomposes.  Stein contends, ?it is very lonely living with it lost? (55).
Yet Stein deconstructs the subjective position as controlling ?knower? and emphasizes
individuality that is receptive to difference.  The subjective position as controlling ?knower?
creates ?violence in thinking [that] resides in this universalistic orientation intrinsic to knowing,
whereby reason obliterates what differences there are in nature and the world by identifying them
only acording to what form they posses in common? (Schoolman 31).  In the de-composition
of Anna as the subjective knower of this experience, not only the moral dominant position is
weakened by Mrs. Lehntman?s diffusion of the hard single perspective lines.  In the relation
betwen these two characters, Anna and Mrs. Lehntman, Stein puts in question the determinacy
of meaning and the notion of central, unified identity. Anna?s and Mrs. Lehntman?s differences
play at the surface of Stein?s narrative.  In connection to C?zanne?s portrait of Madame C?zanne,
Stein?s portrait of Good Anna contradicts literary portraitures formula of a unified self.  The
centralizing moral concept ?Good? that Stein uses to describe Anna?s efforts, fails to achieve a
harmonious, total utopian image of an autonomous individual in a community of like-minded
individuals.  Although Anna gives the impresion of a centralized subjective perspective of the
experience that Anna and Lena share, the portrait of Anna, like C?zanne?s of Madame C?zanne,
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leaves evidence of shifting perspectives.  In C?zanne?s Madame C?zanne in a Red Armchair, on
the right side, ?thought in motion creates a kind of showed displacement . . . on the left,
everything is more incisive? (Wechsler 685).  ?The Good Anna? is ?shifting planes and rich
surface texture,? displacement and hard lines in a tension of depth and surface.
It would be easy to define the pure experience of ?The Gentle Lena? as a monist portrait.
As individual and/or aesthetic theory, Lena sems to represent an early traditional view on
?purenes? that concerns the supposed neutrality of the individual subject.  Its atention, as
aesthetic theory or individual, is concentrated on the object itself, and its pure atention is
incompatible with other concerns, such as sexuality, clas position, or power.  In its ?purity,?
maters of singular quality can be isolated from other aspects of human existence, and Stein?s
claim that Lena is pure brown suggests her neutrality and isolation as a character, and the teasing
of the other girls ?only made a gentle stir within her? (Thre Lives 240).  Lena?s formation is,
however, without conventional, ideal form; she ?had the flat chest, straight back and forward
faling shoulder of the patient and enduring working woman, though . . . work had not yet made
these lines too clear.?  With Lena, the ?rarer feeling? showed ?in al the even quiet of her body
movements, but in al it was the strongest in the patient, old-word ignorance, and earth made
purenes of her brown, flat, soft featured face? (241).  The ?purenes? of Lena?s ?brown?
appears separate from and nearly un-penetrated and ?litle troubled? by influence outside her
pure atention to a singular existence.  In her ?purity? Lena appears isolated from the contraries
and conflicts of life:  Lena is in life but not a participant, for most of the story.  Instead she sems
to asume a ?disinterested? stance, never learning to know, in the Steinean sense of ?talking and
listening.?   And Stein?s use of ?staid,? as fixed, setled, or standing stil, to describe Lena
suggests resistance to change.  Influenced by C?zanne and Wiliam James, Stein?s ?Lena? could
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portray the dangers of such an esentialist perspective of a fixed, unchanging nature.  But within
a C?zanne-James framework, ?The Gentle Lena? provides more than cautionary tale of
monological interests.
In a utopian shift of an anti-utopian, Stein corrupts aesthetic ?purity.?  In her second
writen, third place-positioned story, Stein overcomes traditional hierarchies, for example, of the
rational and sensuous, and she places ?The Gentle Lena? in a ?continuous present.?  Lena floats
upon the ?great stream of things,? as Wels says of our utopian shift from a static, permanent
state of things that we sek to ?resist and overcome? (5).  Instead Wels argues that ?we have to
plan ?a flexible common compromise, in which a perpetualy novel succesion of individualities
may converge?? (6).   In this stream of life Lena is not isolated from traditional contraries, but
now moves within a realm of difference.  Sounding much like Wiliam James, Wels says, ?[i]n
space and time the pervading Wil to Live sustains for evermore a perpetuity of aggresions? (7).
Regardles of responses and interpretations of Lena, she cannot be identified or finalized.
Simultaneously Stein reveals, in ?The Gentle Lena,? the painful loss of a central guiding point
and examines Wiliam James? notion of ?pure experience? that she keeps at the surface, in a
C?zannean ?reading? to ?get to the bottom of what you find in front of you.?  As James writes in
?Does ?Consciousnes? Exist?? ?[m]ater we know, and thought we know, and conscious content
we know, but neutral and simple ?pure experience? is something we know not at al. . . . If you
ask what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same: ?It is made of
that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatnes, brownnes, heavines or what not?
(179).
In ?Lena,? Stein gets to the ?bottom? of Lena?s nature of ?pure experience,? developing
James? pursuit of concretenes and imediacy that would lead to ?pure experience,?
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undifferentiated into thought or thing (Krueger, par.10).  In ?The Varieties of Pure Experience:
Wiliam James and Kitaro Nishida on Consciousnes and Embodiment,? Joel W. Krueger
explains that for James
the phenomenal content of embodied experience as experienced outstrips our
capacity to conceptualy or linguisticaly articulate it.  In other words, James
insists that many of our basic experiences harbor non-conceptual content.  That is,
many of our experiences have a rich phenomenal content that is too fine-grained
and sensuously detailed to lend itself to an exhaustive conceptual analysis.  For
example, we can have visual experiences of colors and shapes of things for which
we lack the relevant concepts (a previously unfamiliar shade of magenta or a
chiliagon).  And this ability holds for other sensory modalities as wel.  For our
ability to describe or report a wide-range of tastes and smels lags far behind our
capacity to actualy have an experience of a nearly infinite spectrum of tastes and
smels.  In other words, the deliverances of our senses continualy run ahead of
both our descriptive vocabularies as wel as our conceptual abilities. (par. 7)
Pure experience, a harmonious integration of self in nature, is a condition James preferred rather
than the dichotomy of self and nature, mind and body.  This includes the ?inarticulate (or again,
non conceptual) dimensions of our lived experience that continuously defy purely logical or
conceptual analysis? (par. 10).  James? ?pure experience? paralels Adorno?s ?non-identity? that
he uses to ?refer to nature, being, or the world and al it contains as having identities that cannot
be known, because identity is always different from the ways it can be represented by thought?
(Schoolman 123).  In ?The Gentle Lena,? Stein explores the ?pure experience? of the character
Lena that defies any finalizing ?identity? because her experience can never be fully ?known.?
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Lena portrays Stein?s aesthetic composition?s desire for an ever-unfolding interplay that contests
aestheticism?s drive toward wholenes of art or individual ?unity.?
Krueger?s analysis provides characteristics of ?pure experience? that help ilustrate Lena?s
pure experience.  He includes descriptions of ?pure experience? as prior to interpretive structures
(subject-object bifurcation and conceptual discrimination); as seing the world but not
thematizing it, nor organizing it; as bearing mute witnes to the world in al its ?blooming,
buzzing confusion? (par. 11).  Pure experience is the ?underlying experiential unity behind
language and reflective, conceptual thought.  Stein portrays Lena as ?always sort of dreamy and
not there.  She worked hard and went very regularly at it, but good work never semed to bring
her near? (Thre Lives 245).  In ?Lena,? Stein?s exploration of ?pure experience? is an
exploration of James? stream of consciousnes that bears mute witnes to the world?s ?blooming,
buzzing confusion?:  Lena ?was so stil and docile?; she ?had no power to be strong. . . . Lena
who was patient, swet and quiet, had not self-control, nor any active courage? (245, 247).  Like
the river of her name, Lena takes no action that would determine her existence, nor did she
determine a course of action for others, not having ?any sense of how she should make people
stand round for her, and that was,? for other characters in the story, ?the trouble with her? (260).
In other words, Lena?s position retains its independence and integrity; she does not thematize or
organize the world, but does witnes the world in its ?blooming, buzzing confusion.?
Within James? scheme of ?pure experience,? aspects of human experience, such as power,
sexuality, gender relations, exist.  Throughout the story, Lena?s aunt, Mrs. Haydon, determines
her present and her future, without ever finalizing the ?rarer strain there was in Lena.?  Lena, at
various points in the story, is penetrated by human existence.  First, Lena went into ?service? and
later the marriage ?match was made? (253).  At the end Lena dies in childbirth; the baby ?was
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like its mother lifeles,? and her husband Herman now lived ?regular and peaceful,? everything
regulated and controlled, ?alone now with his three good, gentle children (279).   The character
Lena remains unmerged with the other characters or the author?s, Stein?s, viewpoints.  Most
importantly, Stein makes us aware of the influence and violence of such constructive elements as
power, sexuality, and gender relations, elements that a claim of neutrality masks.  Like C?zanne
Stein atempts to get rid of compositional harmony, described in pictorial terms as
?differentiation?: ?al parts of the composition must be rendered inteligibly distinct from one
another and ordered hierarchicaly acording to some principle? (Shiff 83).  Maurice Denis, one
of C?zanne?s most acute early critics, observes that ?even in the background areas, C?zanne?s
canvases reveal the scintilating patern of contrasting colors: ?The entire canvas is a tapestry
where each color plays separately and yet mingles its sonority in the ensemble.  The
characteristic aspect of C?zanne?s painting derives from this juxtaposition, from this mosaic of
separate tones gently merging one into the other? (qtd. in Shiff 1123).  In the story, regardles of
dominating efforts to order Lena acording to various principles, Lena plays separately yet is
lightly grounded in others; her difference disrupts and creates an unease.
Lena?s action is her voice.  At the story?s beginning,
Lena?s german voice when she knocked and caled the family in the morning was
as awakening, as soothing, and as appealing, as a delicate soft breeze in mid day,
summer.  She stood in the halway every morning a long time in her unexpectant
and unsuffering german patience caling to the young ones to get up.  She would
cal and wait a long time and then cal again, always even, gentle, patient. (Thre
Lives 239)
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Lena?s caling voice creates dialogic interplay betwen her and the ?young ones? and in
dialogue?s anticipation of response creates an ?evennes? that, in the relation among the parts,
resists any conceptual thought. Harriet Scott Chesman points to Lena?s quiet, caresing voice as
a ?utopian moment.?  The only critic to directly link Stein?s Thre Lives and utopian thought,
Chesman claims that Stein?s writing ?displays a certain utopian element, especialy in its
atempt to reimagine gender and to subvert violent hierarchies? (4).  From Chesman?s
perspective Stein?s work emphasizes ?language as the utopian place? that creates a ?utopian
linguistic realm? where language ?invites readers to sense-making efforts but resists the need to
control it? (61, 202).  Chesman?s intuitions of the utopian indeterminacy and uncertainty of
Stein?s narrative indicate her move beyond a dialectical mode of reading Stein. Chesman points
to the utopian moment
Ocurring in an urban locus amoenus, a moment to be relished in its constancy
(?always . . . always?). . . . outside of linear and narrated story, her voice becomes
a figure for Stein?s impulse . . . toward a writing in which the authority of
traditional narration would be shared by other voices, or even replaced by these
voices entirely.  Lena?s actual words do not need to be recounted, since the
sensual dimension of language has in such moments more value than the
representational. (36)
Stein?s Lena, for Chesman, is ?doomed? in her ?inarticulatenes.?  Language ?baffles? Lena.
Because she is inarticulate, Chesman argues, the story does not move Lena and her utopia of
voice far enough away from the ?real? world, or the world of realistic fiction to alow such gentle
?caling? to be sustained.?  In the absence of C?zanne?s framework of recalcitrant surfaces that
resist perspectivism?s totalizing drive, Chesman?s uncertain intuitions remain uncertain, and
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returns Stein?s narrative to a totalizing conception of utopia, outside of the stream of existence.
Urban or rural, locus amoenus is a ?pleasant place,? an idealized place of safe, Edenic comfort,
beyond the necesary utopian scheme of interplay?s ?fertilising conflict.? C?zanne?s recalcitrant
surfaces, like the tension of Lena?s caling, disrupts any single perspective place.  Reading
?Lena? in a C?zanne?s framework, Stein would agree that narration can be shared by other
voices, but would disagree with replacing voices.  For C?zanne and Stein, each voice is
important and plays in a relation with the others at the surface, as the individual part is ?existing?
rather than how it has been made in the past.  Stein, like C?zanne, is ?using everything,?
?beginning again and again,? in a ?continuous present,? that this pasage ilustrates.  Using
everything implies that Lena?s ?actual words? do need to be recounted.  Lena?s voice is as
important as Anna?s or Melanctha?s, for each part/voice/word is as important as the whole, thus
?such moments? are not ?more valuable than the representational? because, as with C?zanne
pictorial art, with Stein?s narrative perceptual and conceptual interplay at the surface level.
Lena?s caling and waiting suggests the later Bakhtinean ?utterance,? that anticipates a response;
there is nothing static about Lena?s voice; in fact, it ?was an awakening.? Moreover, Stein like
C?zanne creates compositions to get rid of any central figure that requires al other parts to
contribute to some principle of wholenes; Stein?s C?zannean framework reduces the distinction
betwen figure and ground, and al parts have ?equal atention and intensity, denying them any
differentiating hierarchy? (Shiff 116).
Without Stein?s connection to C?zanne?s pictorial techniques, Chesman?s utopian
intuitions tend toward a traditional utopian framework that drives toward a harmonious, unified
structure, the kind of hierarchical structure she ses Stein moving away from.  The surface
patern of Stein?s narrative is dynamic, an ever-involving relation betwen al parts.  It invites no
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separate ?realm? or single sense-making effort.  Counter to Chesman?s idea, Lena is not
?doomed? in her ?inarticulatenes.? Her ?pure experience? of the world resists articulation of
conceptual thought, and placement in a totalizing utopian realm.  Utopia of voice appears to
function as ?field of the possible? for the reimagination of language, but Chesman?s reference to
?a certain utopian element? sems uncertain.  What Stein?s C?zannean framework suggests is
that there is no ?certain utopian element.?  Al parts play in Welsean ?fertilising conflict.?  And
C?zanne?s frame alows Stein, and readers, to consider the value of Lena?s caling as a shaping
rather than an integrating role.
In ?The Good Anna? and ?The Gentle Lena,? Stein acknowledges differences betwen
the two women and differences in compositional structure.  In ?Melanctha? Stein expands her
observations to include distinctions beyond the polar, dichotomous perspectives of subjective
and objective experience.  In this portrait, Stein travels outside those limiting polar boundaries
and enters experiences that enlarge our understanding of the complex, and increasingly culturaly
and ethnicaly diverse world.  In writing the stories of Thre Lives, Stein composed the portrait
of Melanctha last, then placed it at the intersection betwen sets of experience she developed as
?The Good Anna? and ?The Gentle Lena.?
Humors:  narrative fluidity of Thre Lives
Stein?s insistence on the esence of ?each one to have the same value? is distinctive of
her image/ dialogue structure.  It ilustrates Wel?s concept of utopia as schemes for beter the
interplay of productive, ?fertilising conflict betwen individualities,? and is similar to a dialogic
proces that Bakhtin later theorizes: the characters are objects of the author?s word, and they are
also subjects of their own significant words, as wel.  The stories or characters are not
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subordinated to the author?s idea.  In betering the interplay of individualities, Thre Lives
redescribes individual value, thus refiguring hierarchical systems.  In C?zanne?s pictorial art, this
is surface.  The implications of thinking of surface individuality in Stein can be ilustrated by her
use of colors that suggest the ancient system of temperament: humors.  I find no documentation
that suggests she incorporated ?humors? into Thre Lives, but Stein?s medical and scientific
background suggests it as a possibility.  Read in C?zanne?s framework Stein?s narratives disrupt
humors? traditional ideal system of unity and balance and place it within a non-hierarchical
composition.
?Humors?, a theory of temperament, is based on a color scheme, and the concept
provides a means for her forms shaped by color at the individual level and surface arrangement.
In ancient and medieval thought, humors are ideal in balance; a right balance would be esential
for maintaining health.  In balance, humors are harmonious, a good mixture; unbalanced and
aggravated, humors are out of sorts, a bad mixture (?The Four Humors?).
Acording to the ?humors? theory of temperament, the human body contains four fluid
substances, caled humors, or ?fluids,? that determine a human individual?s health and character.
The humors differ from each other as warm or cold and moist or dry (?humor?).  Each humor is
asociated with the four basic elements and made up the universe in ancient thought: Blood/red,
asociated with the element fire, was warm and moist; clear phlegm, asociated with the element
water, was cool and moist; black/melancholic, asociated with the earth, was cool, dry; and
yelow/choler, asociated with air, was warm, dry.  Because imbalances of the four fluid
substances were thought to cause ilneses and personality defects, the ideal, integrated system is
one of unity or balance of al elements.
136
Stein?s literary stres on individual surfaces, however, breaks down rather than reconciles
the system.  Following her modern compositional principle, ?using everything,? Stein gives al
parts play and maintains a ?fertilising conflict?/?shot silk? weaving of individualities.  Her
literary version of C?zanne?s surface develops the interplay of al the parts, overlapping and
contrasting, paralel to C?zanne?s ?even distribution, or a tension, of warm and cool colors in
nearly every area of his painting? (Shiff 122).  The parts are developed in Stein?s three stories.
The individual parts, various points of view maintain individual expresion and the ?colors?
contrast and complement each other across the book.  Stein?s insistence on ?Good? Anna?s pale
yelow skin is asociated with choler or yelow bile; she?s quick-tempered and often irritable:
?you se that Anna let an arduous and troubled life? (Thre Lives 13).  She scolded, grumbled,
and complained: Anna?s ?worn, pale yelow face? was often in ?queer discord with the
brightnes? of her summer clothes (40).  The pale yelow of Anna?s skin and the blue of her eyes
reappear, in different ways, in ?Melanctha.?  Melanctha and her mother are both ?pale yelow,?
but Melanctha?s ?feeling was realy closer to her black coarse father? (90).  At the beginning and
ending of the story, Stein depicts Melanctha as melancholy, considered the black bile asociated
with being ?blue,? gloomy, or depresed.  In fact ?[s]ometimes the thought of how al her world
was mad filed the complex, desiring Melanctha with despair.  She wondered, often, how she
could go on living when she was so blue? (87).  But Melanctha?s yelow bile indicates an excited
and emboldened pasion that places Melanctha in a ?shot silk? relation with others.  Stein
describes ?Gentle? Lena as ?a brown and pleasant creature, brown as blond races often have
them brown, brown, not with the yelow or the red or the chocolate brown of sun burned
countries, but brown with the clear color laid flat on the light toned skin beneath, the plain, spare
brown? (240).  Usualy the color brown combines yelow, red, and black.  Lena?s phlegmatic
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brownnes could paralel C?zanne?s early impresionist ?brown?; in his paletes of the 1870s and
early 1880s, he mixed ?several briliant colors together whenever he wished to make a neutral
brown? (Shiff 207).  But Stein?s insistence on Lena?s ?brown with the clear color? connects her
with the clear phlegmatic humor.
Aestheticaly Stein moves from the choleric, tension-filed story of Anna to create ?color
laid flat? in ?The Gentle Lena.?  Lena, as part of James? ?pure experience,? is characteristicaly
sluggish and dull, and calm apathy asociates her with the phlegmatic humor:  her ?gentle,
patient, and unsuffering swetnes? turns, by the end, to ?careles . . . dull, and lifeles? (278).
In a tension of calm and composed with sluggish and dull, the ?flat? surface complexity of Lena
refuses resolution asociated with spatial hierarchy.  The fourth humor element of the individual
body was asociated with the color red and blood.  Here the artist, Stein, is the fourth humor and
asociated with the lifeblood of the narrative.  In ?Melanctha? the character Rose creates an
interplay with the color red and the authority of authorship, in her atempts to shape Melanctha
and in her eventual leaving Melanctha to develop own identity.  Giving language greater free
play, Stein?s portraits tend toward arbitrary alignment of ?humor? and its ?meaning.?
Anticipating Bakhtin?s novelistic dialogue, Stein?s characters are objects of the author?s word,
and they are also subjects of their own significant words, as wel.  Neither the stories nor the
characters are subordinated to the author?s ideas or the ?humor? system, but ?colors? play across
the pages.  In a ?continuous present,? a fluidity of movement fails to form the ideal, integrated
system of humors.  Instead of unity or balance of al elements, Stein?s composition begins again
and again in a ?tension? of contrasting colors: the ?cool? blue of ?Melanctha,? flanked by and in
interplay with the contrasting ?warm? yelow and brown of ?Anna? and ?Lena.?  As C?zanne?s
?color compositions,? Stein binds the ?lives? to the surface by ?modulating?; different colors
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changing from warm-to-cool-to-warm, every color/life is developed individualy but is related to
al other colors/lives throughout.  Stein atempts to abolish linear perspective entirely, as
C?zanne does, relying ?on sharp warm-to-cold contrasts and overlapping forms to suggest depth?
(Murphy 81).  She keeps her composition ?on the page.?
Similar to C?zanne?s pictorial art, Stein?s narrative lacks ?realization?:  Anna and Lena
just die at the story?s end, and Melanctha is to stay in ?a home for poor consumptives . . . until
she died? (236).  Stein?s narrative engaged in dialogue with C?zanne?s portrait remains open-
ended, in Bakhtinean dialogic terms; their language is creative and the self ?unfinalizable?
(Morson 40).   They have provided models of interplay that have broken up the unquestioning
unities of literary and pictorial integrated structures.  ?In a world of hasty judgments and carping
criticism,? H. G. Wels writes, ?it cannot be repeated too often that the fundamental ideas of a
modern Utopia imply everywhere and in everything, margins and elasticities, a certain universal
compensatory loosenes of play? (270).
In Thre Lives, Stein makes the spatial structure a relationship of colors that is important
to capture alive in portraiture.  Stein distorts the literal appearance, proclaiming her right to re-
create what sems ?natural,? and expres the ?bottom nature? of her individual characters.  At
the surface level, Stein combines the red, yelow, black, and brown body humors to depict
human individuals.  Like C?zanne?s paintings, the stories develop part to part, within the stories
and betwen them; meaning is only available by moving among the parts.  There is no
comprehensive view to be grasped. Following her modern compositional principle, ?using
everything,? Stein gives al parts play and maintains a ?fertilizing conflict? of the individualities.
Stein?s aesthetic of surface, like C?zanne?s, gets rid of a hierarchical concept of human relations
and, similar to Wels? and Ricoeur?s utopianism, her image/dialogue unfolds in interplay.  ?One
139
thing as important as another? finds connection to the utopianism of Wels' and Ricoeur?s
acounts of individualities? disruption of static utopianism or ideological picturing.  At the close
of A Modern Utopia, Wels defines his utopianism of individualities in contrast to traditional
utopian thought, writing that ?[u]topias were once in good faith, projects for a fresh creation of
the world and of a most unworldly completenes; this so-caled Modern Utopia is a mere story of
personal adventures among Utopian philosophies? (A Modern Utopia 372). Stein?s new form of
composition replaces what was previously sen as linear and closed with a scheme of part to
part, a scheme of interplay that contests the notion of ?completenes,? similar to C?zanne?s
surface aesthetics chalenge to a single perspective structure and Wels? utopian individualities
that contest the drive toward totalization.
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Chapter Four:
Conclusion
Historicaly it has happened that the most dynamic societies and epochs have been those that expresed the
greatest need for projection, and therefore the greatest need for utopia.
Cosimo Quarta, ?Homo Utopicus: On the Ned for Utopia? 163
As a proces of transcendence, the utopian story is a historical phenomenon; utopian form
and content vary acording to the situation from which they arise and transcend.  In Utopian and
Critical Thinking, Martin G. Platel argues that utopian thought ?asumes different forms in an
era when man thinks that he himself must take charge of his future than in a period in which the
traditions of the past strongly continue to control man?s view of life? (27).  Wels? modern utopia
responds to the failed ninetenth utopian plans, stimulated by the French Revolution, that had
emphasized the idea that history could be changed and had promised a new beginning.  Progres
was no longer a mater of course, obeying ironclad laws of nature.  Ninetenth century utopias
often had two common qualities; they were socialist and progresive.  Wels argues against
notions that imply ?that the whole intelectual basis of mankind is established, that the rules of
logic, the systems of counting and measurement, the general categories and schemes of
resemblance and difference, are established for the human mind for ever . . .? (19-20).  Modern
perception, for Wels, values the ?unique,? and the ?insistence on individuality, and the
individual difference as the significance of life. . . . Nothing is precise and certain (except the
mind of the pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude?
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(20).  Looking at Wels? utopian individualities as contesting totalization, it is easy to se the
ethical and political consequences of an aesthetic rigor inspired by C?zanne?s surfaces.  As
Wels? individualities, C?zanne?s recalcitrant surfaces reject a precise perfection laid out by
totalizing structures.  The drive toward wholenes, ?schemes of resemblance and difference,? is
what C?zanne?s techniques derail.
Wels? utopianism of individualities shifts utopian thinking from systematic blueprint
construction of utopian space to more open and more exploratory projects focused on values.  In
the shift, two things happened.  First habitual values are thrown in disarray; second, we enter a
new utopian space.  The utopian experiment expands creatively.  In the relation betwen
C?zanne?s surfaces and Wilde?s and Stein?s aesthetics, there opens the way for aspirations that
explore the fulfilment of individual needs.  The stres on individual surfaces in the narratives
liberates voices and points of view that had previously been subordinated to a controlling idea.
?Up to that time composition had consisted of a central idea,? Stein says, ?to which everything
else was an acompaniment and separate but was not an end in itself . . . (?Transatlantic
Interview? 15).  The imaginative projects of Wilde?s and Stein?s narratives, the emphasis on
?aesthetic individualism? and ?using everything? in a ?composition of parts? that are as
important as the whole, reflect their aspirations to transform values and asumptions.
At the turn of the century, Wilde?s Dorian Gray and Stein?s Thre Lives contribute to the
resurgence of utopian thought and expectation for change.  Fin de siecle was a host of voices
?fascinated with the ?gothic? science of degeneration,? and ?a host of other voices that contested
visions of collapse with dreams of regeneration? (Ledger xxii).  A critical shift reflects itself in
the ?blueprint? form of literary utopias.  In Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, Krishan
Kumar argues that it may be ?only a slight overstatement to say that Belamy?s Looking
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Backward created the anti-utopia.  Certainly it started that chain of chalenge and response that
largely makes up the history of utopia and anti-utopia from the 1880s to the 1950s? (128).
Belamy offers a scientificaly ordered, rational, and urban solution to the alienating conditions
of the industrial society.  The art of Wilde, Stein, and C?zanne, and surely Wels? utopianism
participate with the host of voices that cal for a beter way of living, not a return to totalizing,
rational structures.  A model of interplay of individualities relies on ?fertilising conflicts? for
change and initiative.  In contrast, Belamy offers a scheme of fixed lines and positions.  Another
voice is Wiliam Morris? and his pastoral utopia, News from Nowhere that counters Belamy?s
machine-oriented future that celebrates the machine?s ability to aid in the control and structure of
a ?just? society.  A more atractive vision of socialism, Morris? News emphasizes the value of
aesthetic creativity in individual lives, and counters Belamy?s privileging of machine efficiency
over individual initiative.
Alongside Morris? utopia, Kumar sets Wilde?s The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)
that portrays ?socialism as an aesthetic utopia and so won converts among those repeled by the
increasingly mechanical representations of socialism? (66).  Wilde wrote this esay simultaneous
with his writing of Dorian Gray.  What Wilde advocates in his political esay he creates in his
narrative?s fiction. In both Wilde rejects mechanical, theoretical, governmental authoritative
control:  State and individual are separate but interplay; the State manages al things useful,
leaving the individual to develop to its full potential.  Socialism is the environment necesary for
the ?full development of Life to its highest mode of perfection? that is ?Individualism? (Soul
1080).  Wilde?s application of the ?full development of Life to its highest mode of perfection?
has identity with the German humanist ideal, asociated with Wilhelm Humboldt and Frederick
Schiler, as wel as Schiler?s ?aesthetic education? as it influenced Marx, Arnold, and Pater.
143
The ideal that the educated personality realized the highest ethical potential in man was defense
against the ?reduction of man to the level of a machine.?  In Humboldt?s educationalist model,
the individual learns ancient culture to live for the humanist ideal.  In a dialectical proces,
individuality mets universality that results in an ideal totality.
Traditional aestheticism began as a utopian project to link art and life, as a means to
overcome alienation, fragmentation of society. In the movement of aesthetic utopianism, Wilde?s
insistence of the power of art and literature as a means to change the reality of human existence
links him with Schiler, Arnold, and Pater.  Humboldt, Schiler, and Wilde sought to limit
external authority and valued arts potential for change. Wilde had, however, created a tension
toward a non-totalizing perspective in the development of the artist-critic, in The Critic as Artist.
In Wilde?s version, the objective, universality of art, as wel as the harmonious outcome, is under
question.  In Soul of Man, Wilde sets a tension betwen aesthetic and individualism, writing,
?Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.  Therein lies its
imense value.  For what it seks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of
habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine? (1091). Wilde has given the critic the
freedom he had given the artist, to ?extend the subject mater of art . . . the vitality and progres
of art depend in a large measure on the continual extension of subject mater? (Soul 1091).  The
individual aesthetic is a ?disintegrating force.?  The aesthetic individualism creates a destructive
relation betwen aestheticism and individual in Dorian Gray.  In the narrative, Wilde extends his
critical ideas; in Dorian Gray the universality of art is permeated with othernes?art, culture,
people, language.  In response to Arnold?s demand ?to se the object as it itself it realy is? and
Pater?s shift of ?the center of atention from the rock of the object to the winds of the perceiver?s
sensations? (Elmann, Artist as Critic xi), Wilde aserts that it is ?to se the object as it realy is
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not.?  Wilde atempts to get rid of the central image. The conflict betwen aesthetic and
individual relates to C?zanne?s surfaces and the ?fertilising conflicts? of pictorial parts.  Stil
Wilde stands uneasy betwen aestheticism and the individualities of C?zanne, Wels, and Stein.
The ?environment? of Socialism that is ?Individualism? anticipates the C?zannean surface on
which the ?disturbing and disintegrating? individual parts wil reject the totalizing grasp of
perspectivism.  Wilde writes of the ?surface? environment of Socialism, ?[e]ach member of the
society wil share in the general prosperity and happines of the society? (Soul 1080).
C?zanne?s surfaces bridge the narratives of Wilde and Stein. In his esays and his critical
fiction, Dorian Gray, Wilde reaches toward a surface of interplay.  Stein?s literary version of
C?zanne?s techniques configures new relations of the parts.  Her narrative, like the art of
C?zanne, is not a figure of balance and harmony, but explores the elements in their individuality
and uniquenes.
Like Wilde, Stein defines the dynamic quality of human nature; in Thre Lives
individualities resist external, mechanical control.  An early influence on Stein, Wiliam James
rejects the notion of a perfect society, not because humans cannot create one, but because its
perfection would violate the restles, relative aspirations of their beings: ?Everyone must at some
time have wondered at the strange paradox of our moral nature,? James writes, ?that, though the
pursuit of outward good is the breath of its nostrils, the atainment of outward good would sem
to be its suffocation and death.  Why does the painting of any paradise or utopia, in heaven or
earth, awaken such yawnings for nirvana and escape? (167). The pluralism of Wilde?s aesthetic
differs with James? in the tension betwen Wilde?s artist critic non-totalizing perspective and the
temporalized dynamic of James? continuity.  James? sensations are ?continuous.?  James argues
that ?Consciousnes . . . is of a teming multiplicity of objects and relations . . .. A permanently
145
existing ?idea? or Vorstelung? which makes its appearance before the footlights of consciousnes
at periodical intervals, is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades? (21, 30).  James? stres
on sensations and particulars anticipates the valorization of surfaces in C?zanne and Stein.  In
?The Stream of Thought,? James contends that from the sensations we receive from each thing,
?The Mind selects again.  It chooses certain of the sensations to represent the thing most truly,
and considers the rest as its appearance, modified by the conditions of the moment? (71).  Stein,
like Wilde, values conflict of individualities to stimulate life.  Stein?s relation to C?zanne?s
technique alows a productive, conflicting dialogue across categorical distinctions that links to
Wilde?s disruptive aesthetic individualism.  Against tedious satisfaction along utilitarian
socialistic lines, the narratives of Wilde and Stein play out the tensions of individualities that are
paradoxicaly signs of imperfection and movements of dynamic exchange necesary for
development and change.  The contrast evident betwen Belamy?s Looking Backward and
Morris?s News from Nowhere literary utopias, thus, signals a shift in critical thinking that
emphasizes the value of individual productive, imaginative activity in bringing about social
transformation.  Register of a shift in critical thinking is not confined, however, to overtly
utopian works; the utopian imagination functioning in art and literature can register a critical
shift in thought.
This critical shift expreses the need for atention to the imaginative tension produced by
individuality, in a society inclined toward integrative conformity.  C?zanne pictorial art exhibits
the tension of the individual and society and offers a correction to the earlier aesthetic tradition.
He painted from part to part, giving atention to the individualities at the surface that disrupted
the perspectival drive to integration.  His technique of painting part to part returned ?solidity? of
form lost as the Impresionists disolved form in order to paint the impresion of the pasing
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moment. But C?zanne?s forms remain in interplay of the parts rather than faling to unification.
At stake is the conventional, the traditional, the idea of a ?natural? order of centralization and
organic cohesion.  When Morris shifts his utopian emphasis toward individual needs, he adds a
new dimension to literary utopia that has primarily stresed social concerns.  But it is Wels who
writes the ?modern? utopia.  He takes the genre from the ?total? static state to a ?kinetic . . .
hopeful stage? (A Modern Utopia 5).  The dynamic utopia moves, continualy oscilating,
betwen the private individual life and public social concerns, and even this is without resolve.
The modern utopia, Wels writes, differs from ?those finite compact setlements of the older
school of dreamers[.]  It is not to be a unanimous world any more; it is to have al and more of
the mental contrariety we find in the world of the real; it is no longer to be perfectly explicable . .
. ? (123).  Modernized, utopia becomes tentative and subjective; at best, Wels tels the reader, it
is ?one individual?s aspiration? (372).  Wels? individualism is the ?wilful individualism? that
Shiff suggests ?leads to the use of techniques which, in their peculiar resistance to configuration,
translation, and interpretation, risk a wanderer?s incomprehensibility? (66).  The ?standing out?
of each of C?zanne?s surfaces is a similar wilful individualism that resists, in its recalcitrant
individuality, a totality.  For Wels, utopian thought must consider the actual lives of men and
women in society.  But like C?zanne?s recalcitrant individuality of surface, these men and
women cannot be explained in the whole, only the part and the engagement betwen them.  And
while the goal of an equitable society remains, the individual and the individual?s role in the
transformation of society needs to be re-portrayed in forms constructed by the modern utopian
imagination.  This perspective of utopia offers a broad enough frame to encompas the utopian
imagination of Dorian Gray and Thre Lives.
147
Research reveals litle scholarship on the narratives? relation to the concept of utopia.
The criticism that considers Thre Lives and Dorian Gray through utopian lens points to the
difficulty in defining utopian imagination in aesthetic constructions.  Harriet Scott Chesman
appears to be the only critic to directly link Gertrude Stein?s Thre Lives and utopian thought.  In
The Public is Invited To Dance she claims that Stein?s writing ?displays a certain utopian
element, especialy in its atempt to reimagine gender and to subvert violent hierarchies? (4).
From Chesman?s perspective Stein?s work emphasizes ?language as the utopian place? that
creates a ?utopian linguistic realm? where language ?invites the readers to sense-making efforts
but resists the need to control it (61, 202).  Here Chesman sems to intuit the necesary
?fertilising conflict? of utopian imagination.  But she argues, the story ?does move Lena and her
utopia of voice far enough away from the world, or the world of realistic fiction to alow such
gentle ?caling? to be sustained? (36).  Without Stein?s connections to C?zanne?s pictorial
techniques, Chesman?s utopian intuitions develop in a traditional utopian framework the drives
toward a harmonizing, unified structure.  The surface patern of Stein?s narrative invites no
separate ?realm? but interplay of recalcitrant surfaces.
Jody Price?s A Map with Utopia: Oscar Wilde?s Theory for Social Transformation
directly relates the concept of utopia to Wilde?s Dorian Gray.  Utopia, for Price, appears to
function as an unalienated realm outside present reality, and she argues that Wilde?s aesthetics
provide a map of the world that includes utopia:  ?Wilde?s focus on the transformative qualities
of art presents an aesthetic intent on idealizing a world free of oppresivenes of Victorian
capitalism? (7).  In resistance to the cultural suppresion, Price writes, Dorian Gray ?becomes
Wilde?s clear articulation of the importance of the unified human being? (100).  This fits with
Schiler?s humanist ideal and Mathew Arnold.  But Dorian Gray read in the framework of
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C?zanne questions the possibility of such a unified subjectivity.  The utopian quality of this
narrative is, for Price, anticipated freedom from alienation and oppresion, but this emancipation
sems to offer another scheme of reconciled unification.  Wilde?s connection to C?zanne?s
surface aesthetics alows a space to explore Wilde?s anticipation of Welsean utopian interplay of
individualities in the making of art and the forming of a self.  He brings this idea to Dorian Gray
from his critical esay, The Critic as Artist.  In this esay, Wilde explores the necesary interplay
of creation and interpretation in a non-totalizing perspective that alows art and self to grow and
change.
In explicitly relating Wilde?s transformative aesthetics to utopian thought, Price?s
investigation implicitly addreses, as Chesman does, the larger yet litle explored asociation
betwen utopia and art as the expresion of change for individual and social existence.
C?zanne?s surfaces in their connections to Wels? utopianism help show how the dynamic and
active nature of pictorial techniques of surface give aesthetic expresion in Stein?s and Wilde?s
narratives.  Each disrupts the authority of controlling idea; each of these texts liberates
alternative voices, ideas, points of view.  The liberation and interplay, not alienation, of
individual voices suggest change, based on a model of other, and other than one of totality.  In
the changing expresion of utopian imagination that varies over time, the construction of the
individual and the question of a ?beter way of being? becomes a central isue.  Tom Moylan
argues in Demand the Impossible (1986) that utopian writing
was saved by its own destruction and transformation into the ?critical utopia?:
?Critical? in the Enlightenment sense of critique?that is expresions of
oppositional thought, unveiling, debunking, of the genre itself and the historical
149
situation. . . . A central concern in the critical utopia is the awarenes of the
limitations of the utopian tradition. . . . (10)
C?zanne?s surfaces made similar modification of the aesthetic pictorial tradition.  Aware of the
limitations of single point perspective, as wel as the Impresionists? singular focus on light and
color, to acount for the diversity of difference of the world he painted, C?zanne rejects aesthetic
singularity for a surface aesthetics of individualities that brings al parts into play.  In his part-to-
part technique, C?zanne preserves the dream of unity in interplay of parts that, paradoxicaly,
valorizes difference in their ?fertilising conflicts.?
In this context, the productive imagination of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Thre Lives
function as utopian imagination.  In their productions, they encourage other writers and artists to
discover the multiplicity of experience.  They encourage readers to reach beyond what is given, to
activate their human capacity to envision possibilities not yet developed: to use their utopian
imagination.  The projective movement of their narratives ilustrates the utopian impulse, the need
to know: ?a search for new possibilities of sustenance . . . an impulse to explore unknown
environments, with al the atendant risk and tension? (Quarta 160).
150
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