Os homens que não amavam as mulheres: o processo de transmissão textual de O Retrato de Dorian Gray e sua configuração homotextual

Abstract

The Victorian Era, the second-longest reign of an English monarch, is regarded as the UK's most prosperous period. The progressive phase of the English nation, which restored its colonialist system and the prestige of the bourgeois class, was also marked by the rigidity of policies regarding the moral and ethical values of society. One of the figures crossed by such moralism was the writer Oscar Wilde, whose work, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was used as evidence in the lawsuit file through the eleventh section of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which configured male homosexuality as a sodomite activity and therefore, not only sinful, but criminal. The Picture of Dorian Gray can be found, today, in four capacities: in the manuscript, in the typescript, and the versions published in 1890 and 1891. Due to the changes in the textual transmission, a discourse took place concerning the basis of such changes. For Donald L. Lawler (1969), the alterations can be seen as literary revisions that were not only purposeful but necessary. However, for Nicholas Frankel (2013), the progression of the texts would demonstrate an admonishing control, influenced by the criticism of the time. In the present work, I highlight the textual transmission of The Picture of Dorian Gray, focusing on how the understanding of gender and sexuality at the time, as well as historical events, affected the process of production, circulation and reception of the text, and contributed to the author's imprisonment. Furthermore, using the manuscript, the typescript, and the versions disseminated in 1890 and 1891, I investigated the supposed censorship applied throughout its dissemination. Therefore, I mobilized the methodological apparatus of philological studies, creating a collation of the testimonies/redactional phase of the text, selecting the first chapter to elaborate a philological reading. Taking into account the importance of the physical particularities of each capacity, and its socio-historical implications, the materiality was considered as well. Through a philological exercise, assimilated here as Textual Scholarship, we studied the types of movements carried out in the first chapter of each capacity, characterizing them as an act silencing, and not censorship, given that, regardless of its alterations, the text preserves its homotextuality, according to Jacob Stockinger (1978).