The Affective, Embodied, and Cognitive Dimensions of Literary Scandals: Performative Disgust and the Case of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

ABSTRACT

Traditional scandal theory focuses on the role of affect in scandalization phases but has overlooked the bodily and cognitive dimensions that initiate and sustain scandalization. This article offers a rhetorical and narratological analysis that proposes a new conceptual tool for literary scandal theory. It introduces the phenomenon of performative disgust which refers to the verbal expression of physical, emotional, and cognitive revulsion to moral transgressions in literature. In the 1890 reception of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” two distinct response waves emerged: an initial wave of embodied and affective disgust, followed by cognitively articulated emotional repulsion. The article conducts a discourse analysis of contemporaneous newspaper articles, interpreted through a new historicist as well as a cognitive and embodied narratological lens. It illustrates how performative disgust serves as a strategy that seeks to counter moral provocations in literature. Rather than producing empirical data, this study develops and applies a theoretical framework to inform literary scandal theory by highlighting that the expression of bodily, affective, and cognitive responses is integral to collective processes that shape communication about moral values for (late nineteenth-century) readers.