Review Of Ed Cohen's The Picture Of Dorian Gray

Ed Cohen’s article begins with a summary of Oscar Wilde’s trial and how it captured the “imagination” of the public. Cohen articulates how the British “middle aged” and “middle class” men judged Wilde not only in court but in the press too. The court and press saw themselves as needing to protect British vales and their children from the realms of homosexuality, thus Cohen explains that “Wilde provided the perfect opportunity to define publicly the authorised and legal limits” within which a man could “naturally enjoy the pleasures of his body with another man”. Cohen explains through Oscar Wilde’s dandyish behaviour how Wilde lived a life “straddling the lines” of class relations due to his aristocratic upbringing, but in his sexual encounters, he was working class. Through brining Wilde’s background and personal life into focus, Cohen article argues that Wilde was detached from the prevailing bourgeois culture in Britain and constantly challenging its ideals. Cohen includes many contemporary reviews of Oscar Wilde’s novel ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ to aid his argument. For example, Regina Gagnier who described Wilde’s novel as “unclean” and “obtrusively cheap scholarship”, Cohen observes, that contemporary critics received the novel in this way due to Dorian Gray being the antithesis of the male class gentleman.

Cohen examines in his article how Dorian Gray narrates the development of male identity, transgressing from the Victorian notion of the ‘man’ to the more feminine dandy, which inevitably, the contemporary audience took issue with, since homosexuality was a crime. In his article Cohen argues that the text is not overly homosexual it is merely the way Oscar Wilde lived his life that opened our eyes to its hidden meanings, despite his use of “straight”