The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Psychopathy Checklist and the Dark Triad

Abstract

Building on Stevenson’s tropes of Gothic decadence in Jekyll & Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s serialized novel The Picture of Dorian Gray similarly explores the sinister duality of what seem to be otherwise upstanding gentlemen rejecting the veneer of Victorian civility as nothing more than a charade—a social mask. There is little question that Wilde was influenced by and drew heavily on Stevenson’s work, Wilde being an admitted admirer of the Jekyll & Hyde narrative as well as its underlying principal characters. The nature, however, of Wilde’s prose and the characters developed in Dorian Gray proved to be more sardonic, even darkly satirical, and unlike Jekyll & Hyde, Wilde’s novel was initially received rather poorly by critics. As well, both the novel and Wilde were publicly condemned as obscene despite significant redactions and attempts to sanitize the story having been made by the editorial staff at Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine where it first appeared in 1890 before being released in a revised book form in 1891.