Oscar Wilde's Aesthetic Gothic: Walter Pater, Dark Enlightenment, and The Picture Of Dorian Gray
Main Thesis
Wilde uses several echoes within The Picture of Dorian Gray. This central argument is supported by several examples of Dorian Gray acting as double to not only several characters within the novel but within mythology as well. Wilde merges the Gothic and the aesthetic in the book. “The merger is possible, and inevitable, because of the tendency of Gothic writing to present a fantastic world of indulgence and boundary-crossing and the tendency of the aesthetic, in Pater, to press beyond conventional boundaries and to recognize terror with beauty” (610).
Echoes and Parallels
The occurrence of doublings between different characters …show more content…
-Dorian becomes a Perseus and look at himself-as-Medusa
Doubling as a symptom of darkness follows Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde», anticipates Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Joseph Conrad’s the Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer
Echoes in Language
- “literally echoes: ‘blossoms […] branches […] bear […] beauty […] birds’ and ‘flame-like […] fantastic […] flight flitted’” (619).
-Repetition of language and words: the words ‘burden’, ‘flame’ and ‘shadow’ are frequently used and they often occur where something significant is happening or being described. In the passage where Dorian Gray and Basil Hallward are going up the stairs to Dorian’s schoolroom where he will murder Basil. In the stairs, “the lamp cast fantastic shadows” (Wilde 154). Later on, Dorian visits some opium dens to try to forget what he has done and become. He sees mainly dark windows, “but now and then fantastic shadows were silhouetted against some lamp-lit blind” (Wilde 185). Riquelme writes that “[t]he phrase ‘fantastic shadows’ […] returns in a way that punctuates at times the stages in Dorian’s destructive attempt to hide and to experience who he is” (Riquelme
Main Thesis
Wilde uses several echoes within The Picture of Dorian Gray. This central argument is supported by several examples of Dorian Gray acting as double to not only several characters within the novel but within mythology as well. Wilde merges the Gothic and the aesthetic in the book. “The merger is possible, and inevitable, because of the tendency of Gothic writing to present a fantastic world of indulgence and boundary-crossing and the tendency of the aesthetic, in Pater, to press beyond conventional boundaries and to recognize terror with beauty” (610).
Echoes and Parallels
The occurrence of doublings between different characters …show more content…
-Dorian becomes a Perseus and look at himself-as-Medusa
Doubling as a symptom of darkness follows Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde», anticipates Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Joseph Conrad’s the Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer
Echoes in Language
- “literally echoes: ‘blossoms […] branches […] bear […] beauty […] birds’ and ‘flame-like […] fantastic […] flight flitted’” (619).
-Repetition of language and words: the words ‘burden’, ‘flame’ and ‘shadow’ are frequently used and they often occur where something significant is happening or being described. In the passage where Dorian Gray and Basil Hallward are going up the stairs to Dorian’s schoolroom where he will murder Basil. In the stairs, “the lamp cast fantastic shadows” (Wilde 154). Later on, Dorian visits some opium dens to try to forget what he has done and become. He sees mainly dark windows, “but now and then fantastic shadows were silhouetted against some lamp-lit blind” (Wilde 185). Riquelme writes that “[t]he phrase ‘fantastic shadows’ […] returns in a way that punctuates at times the stages in Dorian’s destructive attempt to hide and to experience who he is” (Riquelme