Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the (Un)Death of the Author

Abstract

Oscar Wilde wrote his last book twenty-four years after his death. The book, entitled Oscar Wilde from Purgatory: Psychic Messages, was edited by Hester Travers Smith, the medium who received the messages while in a trance and inscribed them through the process known as "automatic writing." The book's publication occasioned a lively exchange of letters in the spiritualist journal Occult Review, in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his opponent, C. W. Soal, debated the connection between the identity of the writer and the textual persona of the author. Doyle considered the messages to be genuine on the basis of his stylistic analysis of the text: "It is difficult to note these close analogies of style and to doubt that an Oscar Wilde brain is at the back of it" (305). Soal, on the other hand, pointed out that such analogies are easily counterfeited and suggested that the author of the text was the medium herself, even though she may not have been aware of her forgery.

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