ABSTRACT
In Chapter 5, I offered a minimalist thesis about evil people: to be evil is to suffer from virulent viciousness. Iago is plausibly regarded as being virulently vicious as is Claggart in virtue of the fact that Iago is unapologetically cruel and misanthropic while Claggart is icily envious and malicious, among other serious character flaws. One of the advantages of the thesis that I defend is that it can avoid the dubious assumption that “evil has been that way since time immemorial,” one of the dubious assumptions that composes the “Myth of Pure Evil.” On this assumption, evil people have always been like that, at least since childhood and
perhaps since birth, and their evil character is not the product of trauma or poor socialization or environment.1 Reflection on Dorian suggests that this need not be the case. Dorian does not start out as evil; indeed, he is arguably morally redeemable in some ways. But he becomes more and more cruel as the story progresses – extremely so by end of The Picture of Dorian Gray – and he becomes more and more wholehearted about the condition of his character. Famously, of course, the image in Dorian’s portrait becomes more and more horribly deformed such that by the novel’s end the complete corruption of Dorian’s soul is literally visible. What should also be evident is that Dorian’s portrait reflects his virulent viciousness. Dorian’s fall serves as a warning to the rest of us: extreme vice can get its roots in a character that is initially flawed in only minor and ordinary ways. But Dorian Gray is also illustrative for present purposes insofar as
Dorian’s progression – or, perhaps, devaluation – into an evil character is evidence of my favored thesis about evil people. There is probably no way of reading Wilde’s novel that purges the obviously supernatural elements from it; this is a work of gothic fiction, after all. Happily, as I have suggested, we can understand Dorian’s evil character without recourse to anything supernatural. The Picture of Dorian Gray takes place in a fairly distant possible world, but Dorian’s character and his crimes are surely conceivable in our own. To explain, I will have to amend my thesis that evil personhood consists in virulent viciousness and focus on a particular and especially nasty strain of vice. I then consider Dorian’s descent into Hell.
