Dorian Gray essay Flashcards
Introduction
- Explores duality of the self: split between true and desired self
- 4 years after RLS Jeckyll and Hyde (1886)
- Pre-legalisation of homosexuality
- ‘the Anglo-Irishman with Nationalist sympathies; the Protestant with life-long Catholic leanings’ (Merlin Holland)
- Stevenson ‘not truly one, but truly two’ (acting)
- Conclusion: incompatibility of ‘man’s dual nature’: a paradox that cannot be maintained
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Duality of Dorian the man/ the performer
- Titular motif: ‘picture’
- idea of posing for a picture: perfomance
- unusual semantic choice (portrait: more specific to painting, Portrait of a Lady 81)
- picture: ‘a tableau in a play, ballet, etc.’ relates to performance more specifically, emphasises actor role - Acting and the set
- opening description like a play: ‘fantastic shadows’, ‘long tussore-silk curtains’, ‘the full length portrait of a young man’, Henry Wotton ‘lying’ on ‘the corner of a divan’, ‘BH ‘sitting’ ‘some little distance away’ from the painting
- metaphor of life as a play, or at least the pursuit of a better version of oneself (duality and role-playing)
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Dorian’s parentage
- ‘story’
- parentage described romantically as a ‘story’ (entertain)
- ‘modern romance’, ‘mad passion’, ‘treacherous crime’ borrowed from contemp melodrama or pop fiction (Wilkie)
- son of ‘beautiful woman’ and ‘loveless man’: tragic hero - ‘tragedy’ variations (28)
- foreboding use of tragedy latently reinforces his role as tragic hero
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‘Prince Charming’ and immortality
1. evidence of him playing hero role expressed through Sibyll’s nickname, ‘Prince Charming’
- plays up to the name, sending ‘flowers’ to Sibyll like a knight: timeless imagery of courtship
2. timelessness important: he desires to be hero through acting, but he also desires the quality of immortality
(duality of man and hero, but also through this the secondary desire to be man and immortal- the hero is a figure who never dies)
- Faustian pact selling his soul in the opening chapter
- following Sibyll’s death, ‘[Sibyll] was less real than [the characters she played] are’: was/are, immortality
- idea supported by: ‘sequence, or history, is destroyed by myth, which Wilde understood to be more enduring than history’ (Jerusha McCormack)
- Dorian becomes both man and myth through performance
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Critique of duality
- satire and caricature of Mrs Vane
- ‘she felt sure that the tableau was interesting’
- copied by Dorian, ‘wild gesture of despair’ - tragedy of this
- ‘looking up to the ceiling in search of an imaginary gallery’
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Duality and destruction
- duality of self presented as incompatible
- to have cathartic ending to ‘wonderful play’ he must die, as tragic hero
- the death of both Sibyll and Dorian shows that the split between one’s self and what one desires to be is impossible - stems from incarceration?
- 5 years after novel published Wilde incarcerated for two years for homosexual acts
Conclusion
- Overall, depiction of duality is prominent theme throughout text
- Indeed, Heather Henderson writes that ‘nothing characterises Victorian society so much as its quest for self definition’
- Wilde concludes by expressing the impossible paradox of man’s dual nature’ and highlighting the devastation that it creates
- This is, in part, perhaps due to his own life
- But also, Sheldon Liebman: ‘Dorian’s failure to integrate his opposing ‘selves’ is not a consequence of his own psychological inadequacy, but a condition of modern life’
- Perhaps his desire to become a performer is a physical embodiment of the aesthetic desire to ‘live life for art’s sake’
- Indeed, Wilde was a principal figure within the aestheticism movement that thrived in Europe during the 19th century
- Thus his dual nature stems in part from the tension between who he is, and who an aesthetic worldview encourages him to be: perfect, timeless, like a work of art, or a ‘picture’
