Decrypting the Desires
of Dorian Gray: From Imaginaries of the Ego Ideal towards a Deleuzian
Emancipation of Desires
Madeeha
Ahmad,
Post Graduation,
Aligarh Muslim University,
Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India.
Abstract:
This paper is a re-reading of the seminal
text of desires, “The Picture of
Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde, which was traditionally read and influenced
undoubtedly by the biographical literary approach popular at the time of
reading texts. Its reception has been mediated through the lens of
homosexuality and concerns as to its morality. Ironically, in continuing
similar philosophical problems, the Lacanian school has furthered the same
reading by locating the Ego Ideal in the portrait. This paper proceeds by
showing how this reading again turns the influence of Lord Henry into a
corrupting force that leads to the destruction of Dorian.
In contrast to the above readings, the paper proceeds by
using Deleuzian strategies that aim to reveal that the portrait of Dorian
itself is the problem because it represents the wholeness that society imposes.
Lord Henry’s influence emancipates Dorian's desires and forms the seeds of the
potential resistance to the impositions of society. As such, it is a
productive, not merely a reproductive force.
This re-reading of Dorian Gray is more revealing since
the author himself reveals that he has put much of himself into Lord Henry's
character. The reading allows for a radical emancipatory take instead of the
morbid moralising that most interpretations of the novel force.
Keywords: Lacan, Deleuze, Desires, Knowledge, Dorian, Body Without
Organs, Ego Ideal
Since the publication
(1980) of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” in the Lippincott’s Monthly magazine,
it has been a subject of acute scrutiny. The text was branded as immoral for
its indecency and was conceived as an attack on Victorian virtues and morality.
Written by an Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde, it was a novel that had an overt
portrayal of aestheticism, hedonism and promiscuous homosexuality, a taboo idea
for twentieth-century Britain. The story, first published in a short version,
was blatantly toned down, cutting down huge chunks of the text that had the
portrayal of the same. “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is the story of a
man, Dorian, who, confronted by the perfect painting of himself, realises the
fleeting nature of his beauty and youth and then ends up bargaining his soul
with the painting to avoid imminent ageing. This realisation is mediated by
Lord Henry Wotton, a hedonistic aristocrat who aims to free Dorian from
society's clutches by influencing him with his hedonistic philosophy.
The generalised reading of
the text is limited to the realm of homosexuality, which is quite reductive of
the grandiose of the text. The story is an exploration of desires, knowledge
and identity despite having the undercurrents of homosexuality. Dorian’s love
for the portrait raises questions regarding his conception of love. It is
further complicated by his interactions with Lord Henry and other characters,
which require a deep analysis of the nature of desires to build a coherent narrative
in this regard.
One must trace the
historical tradition of transferring knowledge to understand the dynamics of
Dorian’s relationship with Lord Henry. Education in British institutions
initially consisted of Classics, Greek and Latin texts till the late nineteenth
century. People taught and learned the content, form, and culture of antiquity,
and consequently, their education system was adopted as it was by the
Britishers. Pederasty was a socially sanctioned connection between an older man
(erastes) and a younger boy (eromenos), usually in his teens. These ties were
of paramount importance when it came to socialisation and knowledge
transmission. They were ethical, intellectual and personal relationships viewed
as cultural and educational institutions. However, this complex bond has often
been reduced to being merely a sexual interaction. This system of Greek
pederasty is reflected in the Oxfordian and Etonian structure of education,
which consists of the seniors initiating the juniors into the culture and the
tradition of that place.
Concerning this context,
the initial discussion between Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton can be read
as the conversation between two prefects looking at Dorian Gray as a child who
needs to be eased into their system.
“Then he looked at Lord
Henry. ‘Dorian Gray is my dearest friend,’ he said. ‘He has a simple and a
beautiful nature. Your aunt was quite right in what she said of him. Don’t
spoil him. Don’t try to influence him. Your influence would be bad. The world
is wide, and has many marvellous people in it. Don’t take away from me the one
person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses: my life as an artist
depends on him. Mind, Harry, I trust you.’ ” (Wilde 21)
Lord Henry, in particular,
is trying to acclimatise Dorian to embrace a philosophy that breaks out of
society's conventional mode of life. Dorian, in turn, is interested because of
the kind of space Henry provides him with to ponder and philosophise. When it
comes to their relationship, though it may have a sexual undercurrent, it is not
entirely foregrounded in that objective. Instead, it is actually about the gain
of power and knowledge.
There is a system of
learning in place that relies on mentorship out of pure love. One becomes the
best version of oneself by learning from the best, and love is the key to
earning that knowledge (this earning of love comes in various structures of
service, which may or may not include sexual acts of service.) In Platonic
terms, true love is training a young person into what is truth without any lustful
intent whatsoever. So, the true love lies in the exchange of knowledge. In the
context in which the novel is written, homosexuality is highlighted as an
incidental structural problem of these learning circuits, which function on the
principles of Greek grooming. Schoolboy sexuality is not a sexuality that is
based on sexual preference. The underlying principle is power gain. In this
sense, Dorian is after Lord Henry's power and knowledge.
“There was something horrible in them all. He
saw them at night, and they troubled his imagination in the day. The
Renaissance knew of strange manners of poisoning – poisoning by a helmet and a
lighted torch, by an embroidered glove and a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander
and by an amber chain. Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.” (Wilde 169)
The interesting thing that draws our
attention in this quote is the ‘book.’ This solidifies the understanding of how
knowledge is the cause of all the problems. Further investigation of the
uncensored novel reveals it might have been French.
The malady of the meek
subjects lies in their compliance with the system. This compliance eliminates
the very possibility of dreaming and thinking about and beyond their imprisoned
minds. Lord Henry is radically opposed to this approach.
“I believe that if one man were to live out
his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling,
expression to every thought, reality to every dream – I believe that the world
would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of
mediævalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal” (Wilde 25-26)
All the problems arise when the dreams are
realised in reality because that is the moment which marks the transition of a
subject from being a pervert to a psychotic. Lord Henry is clearly against the
usual way of thinking of being a subversive subject moving on the dictates and
wants of the system. His hedonism is foregrounded on the principle of breaking
free from the system and thinking beyond the apparent. He says-
“The ugly and the stupid have the best of it
in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know
nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live
as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent and without disquiet. They
neither bring ruin upon others nor ever receive from alien hands. Your rank and
wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are – my art, whatever it may be worth;
Dorian Gray’s good looks – we shall all suffer for what gods have given us,
suffer terribly.” (Wilde 10)
It is the way of thought Henry is lending to
Dorian, and that is precisely the problem for the society as it threatens its
power structures. He is creating the intellectual space for Dorian, which is a
significant threat to the retention of power by these structures. This way of
thought demands freedom of the intellect, which the mediaeval Christian Europe
did not allow.
“But he never fell into the error of
arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or
system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but
suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which
there are no stars and the moon is in travail.” (Wilde 153)
The following sections of the novel heavily
signal intellectual gain as the propelling force for such an interaction.
“That curiosity about life which Lord Henry
had stirred in him, as they sat together in the garden of their friend, seemed
to increase with gratification. The more he knew, the more he desired to know.
He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them. (Wilde 149)
“Indeed, there were many, especially among
the very young men, who saw, or fancied that they saw, in Dorian Gray the true
realization of a type of which they had often dreamed in Eton or Oxford days, a
type that was to combine something of the real culture of the scholar with all
the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen of the world. To them
he seemed to be of the company of those whom Dante describes as having sought
to ‘make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty’. Like Gautier, he was one
for whom ‘the visible world existed’” (Wilde 149)
Having established a
historicity of the contested desires, in the following sections, I will analyse
the desires through Lacanian and Deleuzian perspectives in order to find if the
desires are a repressive or productive force.
In Lacan’s psychoanalytic
theory, the mirror stage marks a crucial
point in developing a child’s ego. During this stage, the child recognises his
reflection in the mirror as the “Ideal I”, the perfect complete image of
himself. This image dramatically contrasts how he feels inside, a fractured and
fragmented version of himself.
“The mirror stage is a
drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation
– and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial
identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented
body-image to a form of its totality”
(Lacan 3)
There is eventually a
realisation of the gap between the image and the feeling of the self, which is
also emphasised as the difference between the conceived self of the lived
reality and the idealised self of society. The subject develops a neurosis in this
regard, where the Lacanian desire manifests in the potential womb of the lack.
It is this neurotic lack that the individuals keep on trying to fill with
objects of desire to feel complete and whole again. Lacan introduces the term
“Phallus” for the symbolic representation of the object that will fill the
lack, with desire ultimately leading to filling that void and the person, on
the fulfilment of desire, feeling complete again.
This desire does not
originate from the demands of the Symbolic Order- the realm of societal laws
but is a desire that has a personal dimension. The desire of the other (petit
a) is the personal desire of the subject when it relates to the lack of that
individual.
“In order to come into
being as desiring subjects we are forced to acknowledge the impossibility of
the total fulfilment of our jouissance. Castration designates that fundamental
loss for which the phallus is the signifier.” (Homer 99)
When the individual
realises the unattainable nature of the lack, he enters the Symbolic Order,
which is governed by the law, language and the system. This realm is governed
and regulated by the Other. The Other places the prohibitions as a part of the
regulatory processes that maintain the system in status quo.
In The Picture of Dorian
Gray, Lord Henry Wotton becomes the source of the object petit a,
regulating Dorian's desires and wants. His encounter with Lord Henry introduces
him to completely new ideas and philosophies that challenge the life he has
lived so far.
“Dorian Gray listened,
open-eyed and wondering. The spray of lilac fell from his hand upon the gravel.
A furry bee came and buzzed round it for a moment. Then it began to scramble
all over the oval stellated globe of the tiny blossoms. He watched it with that
strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high
import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we
cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden
siege to the brain and calls on us to yield.” (Wilde 31)
When Dorian looks at the
portrait for the first time in Basil’s studio, he sees the perfect version of
himself. Here, this perfection must be defined in Lacanian terms clearly as the
decisive moment when his Ideal Ego- or that image where he thinks of as being
himself in his most complete and total form, is the same as the Ego Ideal, or
that image which he imagines society or the imaginary Other, imagines him to be
the most complete as. From this moment of perfect equilibrium, any movement in
any direction disbalances the equilibrium of desire that is so very ephemeral
and fleeting. Dorian’s moment of viewing the portrait is a moment of deep
blushful pleasure –
“Dorian made no answer, but
passed listlessly in front of his picture and turned towards it. When he saw it
he drew back, and his cheeks flushed for a moment with pleasure. A look of joy
came into his eyes, as if he had recognized himself for the first time. He
stood there motionless and in wonder, dimly conscious that Hallward was speaking
to him, but not catching the meaning of his words. The sense of his own beauty
came on him like a revelation. He had never felt it before.” (Wilde 33)
– and his realisation of
the portrait's ephemerality automatically produces a chain of desires that
cause him to move to rage and despair.
“Then had [sic] come Lord
Henry Wotton with his strange panegyric on youth, his terrible warning of its
brevity. That had stirred him at the time, and now, as he stood gazing at the
shadow of his own loveliness, the full reality of the description ashed across
him. Yes, there would be a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his
eyes dim and colourless, the grace of his figure broken and deformed. The
scarlet would pass away from his lips, and the gold steal from his hair. The
life that was to make his soul would mar his body. He would become dreadful,
hideous, and uncouth. As he thought of it, a sharp pang of pain struck through
him like a knife, and made each delicate bre of his nature quiver. His eyes deepened
into amethyst, and across them came a mist of tears. He felt as if a hand of
ice had been laid upon his heart.” (Wilde 33)
The teachings of Henry
become the means of filling in this lack, which is created due to his realising
the fleeting nature of his moment of perfection, and almost like a fallen Adam,
he must now seek to find the knowledge that is forbidden by society but is that
which might just provide a means out of the certain impossibility of his desire
to remain as he is. He emerges as a neurotic
subject, desperate to find someone who masters the knowledge that he lacks. In
this manner, the authoritative gaze of Lord Henry becomes the gaze of the other
that moulds Dorian’s perception of his desires. Dorian aligns his desires with
Lord Henry's to compensate for his certain lack. This leads to the formation of
his Ideal Ego under Lord Henry's tutelage. Dorian’s neurotic lack manifests in
his perverted pursuit of Lord Henry’s desires. Realising that he can never
truly fulfil his own desires, he replaces his desires with those of Lord Henry.
By turning himself into the object of the desires of Lord Henry, Dorian
descends into perversion, leading to his finding satisfaction and completeness
in enjoying the desires that Lord Henry craves. However, as Lacan explains, the
lack becomes the sole object of desire, and the individual or the subject
continues to chase what they believe will provide the unattainable phantasmic
wholeness.
“Man's desire finds its meaning in the desire
of the other, not so much because the other holds the key to the object
desired, as because the first object of desire is to be recognised by the
other” (Lacan 43)
The Other, representing the
society, constantly prohibits full access to the subject’s jouissance. In the
Lacanian sense, following Henry’s new hedonistic philosophy (quote), which is
not merely about sensualism but rather about the pursuit of knowledge, Dorian
moves away from the Ego Ideal that society sees in him at the moment of the
painting of the portrait. His understanding of desires is incomplete and
misplaced. Each time Dorian moves towards his desires, he moves away from the
desires of the Other, making his perversion-driven sense of pleasure
unrealistic. The mere attainment of the objects of desire as dictated by the
Other cannot lead to jouissance.
“For these treasures, and
everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of
forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that
seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne.” (Wilde 162)
Dorian’s chase for
jouissance is ultimately governed by the prohibitions of the Other. Society
prevents him from achieving satisfaction, reinforcing the cycle of desire and
lack. The more Dorian indulges and learns, including from the unnamed French
book, the further he slips into a state of being the other of society,
symbolised by the deterioration of the portrait, his Ego Ideal.
“and stand, with a mirror,
in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at
the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that
laughed back at him from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the contrast
used to quicken his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his
own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. He
would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible
delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around
the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the
signs of sin or the signs of age. He would place his white hands beside the
coarse bloated hands of the picture, and smile. He mocked the misshapen body
and the failing limbs” (Wilde 148)
Indeed, Dorian has already
been forced into being schizophrenic. He is now deriving pleasure from his
inability to be the object of desire of the Other. This is clearly placed in
his complete alienation from the Symbolic Order- he can no longer bear to have
to deal with the symbolic representation of the painting and its slow descent
into cacophony. He can no longer bear to deal with the symbolic authority that
the painting represents and cannot bear the strictures of society. His act of
tearing the portrait must be seen as a descent into the psychotic- both a
realisation of the real and a descent into schizophrenia. This schizophrenic
emancipation in the novel is bound to end with the desire of Dorian to reunite
his ego ideal and his ideal ego, which he attempts through the destruction of
the painting, which leads also to the destruction of his self and the final
coming into being, almost in a Hideggerian sense, through death, into the
misshapen, warped corpse that is discovered at the end of the novel to be the
remains of Dorian’s struggles with his desires.
“If desire is the metonymy
of the want-to-be, the ego is the metonymy of desire. ” (Lacan 208)
Interestingly, the portrait
gradually becomes the portrait not only of Dorian but also of Lord Henry
Wotton. Lord Henry is the manifestation of the other looking at the Ego Ideal.
He is the corporeal reality of the other who does not exist but is not the
Other who proscribes, prohibits and inscribes into Dorian the impossibility of
filling his lack. On the other hand, Lord Henry is the other constantly pushing
his fleeting small desires onto Dorian, which he cannot fulfil himself, and
they are usually desires which are not the desires of the Other.
Dorian’s misplaced
jouissance is central to the novel’s tragedy. There is an endless cycle of
dissatisfaction in place. The subject desires what it lacks and believes that
filling that void would lead us to obtain its jouissance. However, that
jouissance is prohibited by the Other, which creates a permanent lack and
reinforces our desire to obtain the ever-elusive jouissance. As the subject
chases its Ego Ideal, it is constantly reminded of its inability to emulate it
fully. Therefore, the inception of dissatisfaction becomes the precursor of
desires and leads to its further structuring. Desires, which fill the lack
under the prohibitive gaze of the big other, must be taught. It does not
signify the failure of desire but what keeps it alive. In this reading, Lord
Henry is the destructive and corrupting influence on Dorian.
Desire in the Deleuzian framework is taken as
a productive flow, unlike being seen as a repressive force in the Lacanian
framework.
“The rule of continually
producing production, of grafting producing onto the product, is a
characteristic of desiring-machines or primary production: the production of
production.” (Deleuze and Guattari 7)
The portrait of Dorian is a desiring machine.
It produces desires in the people who view it and is itself a product of the
desiring machine conglomerate that is encapsulated by the symbolic figure of
the artist Basil Hallward. In the intermeshes of desiring machines that open
the novel and come together to form, inform and impress the portrait as
represented by the figures of Basil and Lord Henry, amongst others who find
fleeting mention, including Lady Agatha, Lady Henry, Sybil Vane, the figure of
Dorian himself is curiously aloof. He is a being possessing no desires of his
own- at least those that connect him as a desiring machine to the others- he
remains, at best, a machine of desire for everyone he seems to be in touch
with. Whether it is as a mere figurine or as a piano partner, not only is a
complete machine of desire to be subverted for their own production, he is also
a body which is whole.
Until the moment that he
encounters Lord Henry, Dorian has not yet been anything but a complete machine
for the benefit of other desiring machines. What marks his encounter with Lord
Henry is that, for the first time, he becomes a desiring machine in his
presence- a machine at work that produces and consumes value.
“For the real truth of the
matter—the glaring, sober truth that resides in delirium—is that there is no
such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is
immediately consumption and a recording process (enregistrement*), without any
sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determine
production, though they do so within the production process itself. Hence
everything is production: production of productions, of actions and of
passions; productions of recording processes, of distributions and of
co-ordinates that serve as points of reference; productions of consumptions, of
sensual pleasures, of anxieties, and of pain. Everything is production, since
the recording processes are immediately consumed, immediately consummated, and
these consumptions directly reproduced.” (Deleuze and Guattari 4)
Dorian's first desire is for some pages of
music, which is also marked out as a point of learning.
“As they entered they saw Dorian Gray. He was
seated at the piano, with his back to them, turning over the pages of a volume
of Schumann’s ‘Forest Scenes’. ‘You must lend me these, Basil,’ he cried. ‘I
want to learn them. They are perfectly charming.’” (Wilde 22)
The second desire he expresses is for the presence
of Lord Henry. The desire for the presence is in a desire for knowledge as to
his opinions on the business of philanthropy.
“ ‘Oh, please don’t, Lord Henry. I see that
Basil is in one of his sulky moods; and I can’t bear him when he sulks. Besides,
I want you to tell me why I should not go in for philanthropy.’ ” (Wilde 23)
From here on, he is not a
site of value production, as an accompanying piano artist or a model, but
instead becomes the consumer of value as provided by Lord Henry. As such, he suddenly
becomes a desiring machine and is confronted by his desires- emancipating
immediately his other latent desires, which now find space in the textual
realm, almost in every trivial interaction- whether it be his desire for youth
as is evinced from his interactions with the portrait machine,
“‘How sad it is!’ murmured Dorian Gray, with
his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. ‘How sad it is! I shall grow old,
and horrible, and dreadful. It will never be older than this particular day of
June…. If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young,
and the picture that was to grow old! For that – for that – I would give
everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would
give my soul for that!’” (Wilde 34)
or his desire to accompany Lord Henry to the
theatre-
“‘I should like to come to the theatre with
you, Lord Henry,’ said the lad.” (Wilde 37)
The portrait as it was painted represents the
Body with Organs in Deleuzian terms. As it is complete, it is a shutting off of
desires. It is a whole object that must now be possessed, destroyed and
corrupted as it proceeds in its chain of interactions with other machines which
produce and consume it to produce interpretations and meanings that create
their desiring machines.
“The full body without
organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable.”
(Deleuze and Guattari 8)
Coming back to the
portrait, the decisiveness of that decisive moment when the portrait is
completed comes not from the fact that it is the representation of the Ideal
Ego but from the fact that it is the complete Body With Organs. It is not a
desiring body, and that which is not a desiring body automatically becomes an
object of desire-(here of Henry). Henry is the corporeal reality of all the
desiring machines coming together, and it is precisely because of this that he
can make Dorian realise the necessity of liberating the desires of his organs,
independent of the wholeness of the totality imposed by the Ego Ideal- a dead
totality of the status quo. It is not merely in the liberation of his organic
desires in their fragmented body that emancipation can happen, obviously, but
the beginnings of an existence not tied down to the imposed wholeness of the
state that may allow the germination of the emancipatory project that is not
merely material and definitely not merely bodily. Had Dorian remained the whole
object, he would have been just what the system wanted- an instrument to be
regulated by the system.
It is in the denial of the
absolute subjective qualification of a subject that he becomes a desiring
machine existing beyond the totality of the body. The more the portrait gets
marred, the more the organs gain independence from the body. The breaking of
the wholeness of the body results in the subject becoming schizophrenic-
i.e., a schizophrenic assemblage of the
organs as a network of desiring machines which are constantly connecting with
other desiring machines, producing and consuming new desires. The subject then
has no unified identity but is taken over by the precedence of the links it
forms with other desiring-machines as a response to whichever machine dominates
the flow of desires. As a summation of parts, this machine becomes free from
society's clutches, and it cannot be pinned down as a whole.
Dorian has to become a Body
Without Organs by dissolving the focus on the wholeness of his body imagery and
letting the organs function independently without the overarching structure of
society binding him. So, Lord Henry is not the Other as the society but is the
little other- the foil forcing Dorian to confront the fact that he is not a
complete thing or a thing in himself. Instead, he is a conglomeration of
various desiring machines. Henry is making him realise his liberation in the
realisation of his fragmented desires and that to experience that freedom, he
has to let go of being Big Brother’s object of desire. To make the transition
from a perverted individual to a schizophrenic, one has to understand that
there is a conflict between our desires and what is being told to us. Once a
pervert deterritorialises into a schizophrenic, he realises the immateriality
of reality. He realises the stark absence of all the foundations on which he
had constructed his identity. By the end of the novel, Dorian becomes
schizophrenic, leading to his complete emancipation rather than the neurotic
imaginary that he was bound in as a cohesive whole body. Therefore, Lord Henry
is an influence for the better.
The Body Without Organs is
the only potential state where the desiring organs can become a precursor to
realising itself through a complex and rhizomatic interaction with other
desiring machines. All desiring machines go on to fulfil their desires and
culminate into a Body Without Organs, wherein all the organs function
cohesively of one another but independently of the Other. Body Without Organs
is not an end nor a moment of enlightenment. Instead of taking the Body Without
Organs as the hallmark of where we want to go, Wilde suggests that it is a
moment that is very fleeting and very capable of being turned around. Hence,
the Body Without Organs is not an end in itself. It keeps on lapsing on the
organality- that is the natural state of mind because the business of thinking
of ourselves as a whole has a certain deathness to it.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles, and
Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1972. New
York, Penguin Books, 2009.
Homer, Sean. Jacques
Lacan. New York Routledge, 2005.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits:
A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Routledge, 28 Oct. 2020.
Wilde, Oscar. The
Picture of Dorian Gray. New Delhi, Fingerprint Classics, 2021.