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

Abstract

Literary scholars generally agree that the aesthetic qualities of Oscar Wilde’s influential text, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) classify it as a modernist work. At the same time, textual scholars have long speculated over the role of aesthetics in Wilde’s revision process in an apparent effort to reduce or obscure the homoerotic themes in the manuscript. Electronic editing standards such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) enable scholars to trace in detail the development of homoerotic themes within a digital space. Using the TEI standard, my project transcribes and encodes the first chapter of this manuscript, which introduces the story’s three main characters, Basil Hallward, Lord Henry Wooten, and Dorian Gray. In analyzing Wilde’s suppression of the homoerotic elements, I draw from debates in Textual Scholarship and Queer Historiography to explore how electronic editing might restore or "rescue" queer subjects and themes. I end with proposing a method for electronic editing that marks Wilde's alterations and deletions in TEI formal language in a way that probes the potential of TEI's “queerability.” My method examines how TEI might work as a tool of containment that suggests elusiveness through constraint. My work here manifests the intricate handling of homoerotic elements within a distinctly queer ethos.