MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Science fiction, its stalwart fans so often assert, imagines the future in ways that are bound to conditions in the present. It follows from this assertion that a doubled temporality is a foundational aspect of much sci-fi as such. One of the most remarkable examples of what I will call diverging plot-worlds can be found in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a work which came into being at the precise midpoint between Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Wells’s The Time Machine. Wilde’s protagonist is not like other London residents in his day. Affluent, beautiful, impressionable, and yet innocent, Dorian falls under the influence of Lord Henry Wotton and embarks on a search for new sensations. No matter what he does—and much of what he then does is awful—or how much time passes, he remains faultlessly young during the novel. The sins of his expression and even the degeneration associated with time itself are inscribed not on him but on his portrait. Readers have long seen Wilde’s great conceit as an allegory of aesthetic, erotic, and personal independence, finding in it a great wish for emancipation in the face of social censure and repression. Rather than subvert such an anti-Victorian reading, I intend to trace out the sci-fi consequences of being in a world divided between the short-lived—like Basil Hallward, Lord Henry, and their circle—and Dorian, who, it must be allowed, has the potential to live eternally because he does not, and will not, age. In my reading, Dorian is less the emblem of a New Hedonism than a character that emerges when “science, doubt, and vitalistic philosophy met to produce the very first modern Science Fiction” (Jameson 329). As such, I approach him as an allegorical figure of utopian desire and of the many-lived possibilities that modernity would seem to promise us.