Zola and Wilde

In Zola’s The Experimental Novel he discusses the characters in a novel as being observed as if they were an experiment. When Zola writes, “The novelist starts out in search of truth,” he is seeking to create something real or something naturalistic. He states, “The novelist is equally an observer and an experimentalist. The observer in him gives the facts as he observed them,” or in other words the novelist writes down what he observes the characters doing, where they live, where they came from, and or anything else the novelist can observe. Zola then writes about the experimental part of the novel, “Then the experimentalist appears and introduces an experiment, that is to say, sets his characters going in a certain story so as to show that the succession of facts will be such as the requirements of the determinism of the phenomena under examination call for.”

In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray I would argue that this experiment that Zola writes about starts for Dorian’s character in chapter two. The experiment would be the obvious: what would happen to a man who had no consequences for his actions. I see the experiment start to form when Lord Henry gives his seductive speech. He says, “We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. . . . Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.”

The whole idea that not doing something impulsive will eventually poison your mind is very convincing coming from Lord Henry. He discusses this sort of impulse that if you deny that ignored impulse will eat away at your brain. Eventually Dorian is to act on his impulses and to derive pleasure from the bad things he causes to happen; the same impulse that would poison his own brain if ignored will poison the people around him when he acts upon it.

When Zola writes, “The social circulus is identical with the vital circulus; in society, as in human beings, a solidarity exists which unites the different members and the different organisms in such a way that if one organ becomes rotten many others are tainted and a very complicated disease results. Hence, in our novels when we experiment on a dangerous wound which poisons society, we proceed in the same way as the experimentalist doctor; we try to find the simple initial cause in order to reach the complex causes of which the action is a result.”

What Zola says is in a way discussing an experiment like that of Dorian Gray. The bad events in the text like Basil and Sybil’s deaths were just like the rotting fruit Zola discusses in his text. The evil Dorian turned into spread onto the other characters like sick rotting fruit. I would argue that Oscar Wilde’s story is a solid representation of the experimental novel. Dorian’s ability to survive without consequences was the experiment and the outcomes weren’t so good.