Page 3427 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 19 September 1990
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Mr Stefaniak: That was very subtle, Michael, actually.
MR MOORE: Well, I am not used to that, of course, as you know. It reads:
Was the face on the canvas viler than before? It seemed to him it was unchanged; and yet his loathing of it was intensified. Gold hair, blue eyes, and rose-red lips - they all were there. It was simply the expression that had altered. That was horrible in its cruelty. Compared to what he saw in it ...
And so he goes on. We see the beginnings of a slow change away from ethical conduct.
Those things happen in small ways. It was interesting that one of the early things Oscar Wilde wrote about in Dorian Gray was getting involved in robes. That is a little ironic, considering the fact that Ted Mack referred to the ACT Government in respect of this particular thing. On page 155 Wilde writes:
He had a special passion, also, for ecclesiastical vestments, as indeed he had for everything connected with the service of the Church.
He goes on to describe a:
... cope ... of green velvet, embroidered with heart-shaped groups of acanthus-leaves from which spread long-stemmed white blossoms ...
Wilde goes on and on about robes and their importance to Dorian Gray, as part of Dorian Gray's slow seduction to what Wilde perceives as a lack of ethics.
Mr Humphries: You will need a point of order, Mr Speaker.
MR SPEAKER: Relevance, Mr Moore.
MR MOORE: I am talking about the slow seduction in terms of ethics. Of course, what would happen is that Dorian Gray would be very pleased with himself and, as he progressed further into his lack of ethics - I quote from page 156:
... he would sit in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other times, with that pride of individualism that is half the fascination of sin -
sin, of course, being a lack of ethics -
and smiling with secret pleasure at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own.
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