Ruddick explains that, while the moral about vanity ‘dramatize the disastrous consequences of the preference of the beautiful at the expense of the good’, the other moral about homosexuality ‘explores the destructive effects of the clandestine or closeted life’ ( Ruddick, 2003: 126, 128). In particular, Nicolas Ruddick argues that Wilde aestheticizes Dorian in order to emphasize a moral about the dangers of vanity at the expense of another, more covert moral about the liberalization of homosexuality. The textual scholarship on this revision process generally agrees that Wilde neutralizes this homoeroticism by transforming Dorian from an erotic object into an aesthetic object.
It is excised during Oscar Wilde’s revision process, along with other suggestions of homoeroticism between the three main characters of the story. This striking line, among many others that carry homoerotic innuendos, never appears in print. Basil admits, ‘Where there is merely love, they would see something evil, where there is spectacular passion, they would suggest something vile’ (Wilde, 1889–90: 21). In the first scene of the novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), the painter Basil Hallward confesses to his friend Lord Henry Wotton why he cannot exhibit the portrait of the eponymous hero. 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. I conclude by proposing a TEI customization that marks Wilde’s revisions according to the four homoerotic themes of ‘intimacy’, ‘beauty’, ‘passion’ and ‘fatality’. 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. 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. 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. This project uses the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard, an electronic editing tool that allows researchers to ‘mark up’, or tag, textual elements.
More recently, electronic editing tools enable scholars to explore textual composition histories within a digital space. 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).
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