Encoding Queer Erasure in Oscar Wilde’s "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

Abstract

Literary and textual scholars have long speculated about Wilde’s intentions for revising the homoerotic content of his famous novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). More recently, electronic editing tools enable scholars to explore textual composition histories within a digital space. This project uses the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard, an electronic editing tool that allows researchers to ‘mark up’, or tag, textual elements. Using the TEI, I mark up the first chapter of Wilde’s manuscript of Dorian Gray, which introduces the story’s three main characters, Basil Hallward, Lord Henry Wotten, and Dorian Gray. Drawing from debates in Textual Scholarship and Queer Historiography, I question how electronic editing with the TEI might register the ways that Wilde suppressed the homoeroticism between these three characters during his revision process. My work here pushes against what I identify as TEI’s main constraint, which is its limitation for handling data that is discrete, rather than smooth or ambiguous data, like the homoeroticism of this text. I conclude by proposing a TEI customization that marks Wilde’s revisions according to the four homoerotic themes of ‘intimacy’, ‘beauty’, ‘passion’ and ‘fatality’. As an experiment in ‘queer encoding’, this customization shows how strict data structures like the TEI might engage the fluidity and complexity of queerness in text.