Suggesting a Surface: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Suspicious Reading

Abstract

This essay reads The Picture of Dorian Gray, a novel about art and heuristics, as though what is at stake in its representations are, in fact, art and heuristics, especially with respect to the posture a reader adopts toward a text. Suspicious readings and the rhetoric of surfaces have dominated the literary conversation about Dorian Gray, all while a suspicious reading of a cathected surface catalyzes the plot of Dorian Gray. Using this framework and contrasting the way the novel has been read with the way Dorian reads his portrait, we find that Dorian Gray anticipates critiques of deep-reading and suspicious heuristics, assembling a narrative that has its characters detecting for hidden meaning to secure a posture of readerly mastery, and in so doing, staging the disempowering (and interpretively flawed) results of symptomatic readings.