The Picture of Dorian Gray

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oscar Wilde
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
East End

‘The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.’ When Dorian Gray has his portrait painted, he is captivated by his own beauty. Tempted by his world-weary, decadent friend Lord Henry Wotton, he wishes to stay forever young, and pledges his very soul to keep his good looks. Set in fin-de-siécle London, the novel traces a path from the studio of painter Basil Hallward to the opium dens of the East End. As Dorian's slide into crime and cruelty progresses he stays magically youthful, while his beautiful portrait changes, revealing the hideous corruption of moral decay. Ever since its first publication in 1890 Wilde's only novel has remained the subject of critical controversy. Acclaimed by some as an instructive moral tale, it has been denounced by others for its implicit immorality. Combining elements of the supernatural, aestheticism, and the Gothic, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an unclassifiable and uniquely unsettling work of fiction.

Unfähigkeit

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jobst Welge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Provincial City ◽  
Non Linear ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
French Novel ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Early Novel

AbstractThe employee as a typical figure of modernity has been represented as a specific type of literary anti-hero since the nineteenth century. Italo Svevo’s early novel, Una vita (1982, A Life), is an example that is strongly related to the theme of the anti-hero in the French novel of disillusion, as well as to the fin-de-siécle concern with an incapacitated, dilettante protagonist, unable to act and live. In light of Svevo’s own misgivings about the profession of writing fiction, the novel reflects on the relation between literature and life, by way of an uprooted individual who finds himself ill at ease in the anonymous, competitive world of modernity. The subject of Svevo’s novel, the arrival of a provincial, petit-bourgeois intellectual to a semi-provincial city, may also be found in a somewhat later Brazilian novel, O amanuense Belmiro (The amanuensis Belmiro, 1937) by Cyro dos Anjos. Aside from parallels of plot, social, and geographical setting, which are grounded in the experience of modernity in different contexts, the two novels may be said to model a new kind of author-function, as well as a specific form of a non-linear, self-reflexive novel.

‘[C]allee me Oscar’: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Aestheticism, and Opium

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-87
Author(s):  
Ya-feng Wu
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
East End ◽  
House Beautiful ◽  
To Receive

Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), one of the flagship novels of Aestheticism, contains an intricate opium narrative that has yet to receive adequate critical attention. The novel consists of two nested units: the House Beautiful that subsumes a Gothic nursery where Dorian's portrait is placed, and London the Metropolis that harbours Blue Gate Fields in the East End. The former might be read as a miniature of the latter. This double mechanism hinges on a Chinese box in which opium is stored. The structure, which evolves from the classic opium narrative established by Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), enables Wilde to stage a critique on the connection between Aestheticism and the imperial trade of opium. Besides, Wilde's aesthete trio in the novel, Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian Gray, and Adrian Singleton, are cast as opium smokers in order to disrupt the imperialist mindset showcased in the cartoons appearing on trade cards and in magazines that satirise Wilde's promotion of Aestheticism. This essay contends that Wilde's opium narrative exposes the hypocrisy of Empire by demonstrating that the coloniser and the colonised are anamorphic reflections of each other.

scholarly journals Culture and corruption in The Picture of Dorian Gray

Em Tese ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Paulo Augusto de Melo Wagatsuma
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article analyses the supposed moral decadence in Oscar Wilde's novel<br />based on the aesthetic trends of his time as well as his writings on the same<br />topic and politics. It is argued that behind the horror tale of Dorian Gray's<br />life lies a veiled critique to fin-de-siècle Victorian society.

scholarly journals The Impact of Psycho-ideological Hero: A Žižekian Study of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Sara Safa ◽  
Jalal Sokhanvar
Keyword(s):  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Transitional Process ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
Art For Art's Sake ◽  
The Impact

This paper critically examines psycho-ideological significance of Dorian Gray, on Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Although Wilde’s novel has mostly been read as an aesthetic work of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’, the present research intends to criticize Wilde’s only novel using Žižek’s theories on subjectivity, ideology, and trauma. The brainchild of an indisputable giant literary tradition, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a tactfully designed puzzle that called the Victorian establishment into question. The thick texture of the novel, I argue, lends itself to Žižekian ideological and psychoanalytical theories wherein one can obtain a novel perspective on the issue of subjectivity. The Slovenian philosopher, Slovaj Žižek (b.1949) argues that the subject is divided and always in a transitional process until his death; Dorian is an epitome of such a subjectivity always already in transition.

scholarly journals Art, the Artist and Ethics in Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Zrinka Frleta
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
Art For Art's Sake ◽  
Art And Ethics

This paper examines ideological and philosophical premises of aestheticism, presented in Wilde's critical essays (The Critic as Artist and The Decay of Lying), and epigrams in the preface to the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which both offer a philosophical context to the novel. Aestheticism emphasized that art can not be subordinated to moral, social, religious and didactic goals, because its ultimate goal is art itself, l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake). „Art never expresses anything but itself.“ „All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.“ „Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.“ „Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.“ (Wilde, 1891). The relations between art and reality (concealment of reality) and art and ethics (an ethical function of art) have been explored through the interaction of the characters of Basil Hallward and Sibyl Vane with Dorian Gray. The paper also examines the role of the artist, his morality in the process of creating and experiencing the work, and the influence of the work of art on the artist himself/herself.

scholarly journals “Un estado de la conciencia contemporánea”: género y moral en La sirena negra de Emilia Pardo Bazán

Neophilologus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susana Bardavío Estevan
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
Gender Performance ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Emilia Pardo Bazan ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Emilia Pardo Bazán ◽  
Decadent Aesthetics

AbstractDespite Emilia Pardo Bazán’s prominent feminism, La sirena negra has been strangely overlooked by gender studies. When the novel was published in 1908, Gómez de Baquero judged it “non feminist” due to its superficial heroines and the centrality of its complex masculine characters. Academic studies of La sirena negra have not refuted this idea, since they have elided gender approaches to focus on its decadent aesthetics. This article argues, on the contrary, that the novel’s androcentrism can be read as a Pardo Bazan’s strategy to appropriate the patriarchal discourse and hold it responsible for national degeneration. Emilia Pardo Bazán was harshly affected by the fin-de-siècle crisis. In her opinion, Spanish decay came from a lack of solid morality. Thus, Catholic principles should be restored because they would provide the autoregulation mechanisms to regenerate and reassemble the country. Literature should show the new reality, and the French roman psychologique provided her with an appropriate model. La sirena negra sets out the problem of the moral anomie through its protagonist, Gaspar de Montenegro. The analysis of his sexuality and gender performance reveals the danger of this amoral behavior for the degeneration of society, attributed ultimately to the patriarchal order and the androcentric discourse.

scholarly journals Dracula – Hybridity and Metafiction

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Anca Andriescu Garcia
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Clear Definition ◽  
Narrative Technique ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Place Of Origin ◽  
History And Myth ◽  
Good And Evil

AbstractDue to his supernatural nature, but also to his place of origin, Bram Stoker’s well-known character, Dracula, is the embodiment of Otherness. He is an image of an alterity that refuses a clear definition and a strict geographical or ontological placement and thus becomes terrifying. This refusal has determined critics from across the spectrum to place the novel in various categories from a psychoanalytical novel to a Gothic one, from a class novel to a postcolonial one, yet the discussion is far from being over. My article aims to examine this multitude of interpretations and investigate their possible convergence. It will also explore the ambivalence or even plurivalence of the character who is situated between the limit of life and death, myth and reality, historical character and demon, stereotype and fear of Otherness and attraction to the intriguing stranger, colonized and colonizer, sensationalism and palpable fin-de-siècle desperation, victim and victimizer, host and parasite, etc. In addition, it will investigate the mythical perspective that results from the confrontation between good and evil, which can be interpreted not only in the postcolonial terms mentioned above, but also in terms of the metatextual narrative technique, which converts into a meditation on how history and myth interact. Finally, it will demonstrate that, instead of being a representation of history, Bram Stoker’s novel represents a masterpiece of intergeneric hybridity that combines, among others, elements of history, myth, folktale and historical novel.1

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