The Anxiety of Influence: Fascination with the Self and the Other
Oscar Wilde was no vampire even though he undoubtedly became an object and agent of fascination. Some critics, however, claim that he served as the model for Dracula,1 a figure that came into print two years after Wilde's trial and epitomises the same Victorian anxieties over homosexuality that were fuelled by the life and works of the controversial writer. The suggested metamorphosis of Wilde's sexually 'corrupted' character, which produced highly seductive and provocative works such as The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) a novel accused of promoting homoerotic desires, into both Stoker's monstrous protagonist and the entrapped Jonathan Harker who is taken by a 'wild[e] desire',2 points to an act of artistic vampirism.3 Insofar as they feed on events, themes and objects that have already received increased public attention, absorbing their energy to bind readers, Stoker, Wilde and several other writers might indeed be accused of artistic vampirism. Dorian Gray seems particularly tainted by this 'disease' The novel was criticised for its pot pourri of ideas taken from other authors, including Stevenson, Poe, Balzac, Goethe, Radcliffe and Hawthorne. While some critics lamented that 'there is so little that is original in it',4 others curiously praised 'the book's very lack of originality' as 'the secret of its power'.5 According to Wilde's aesthetics, it was possible to be derivative and original at the same time in that an artist could appropriate the ideas of others to create wholly original impressions and, as he claims in his preface, 'beautiful things'.6