The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Ø Literary influences
o Greek mythology and philosophy
§ platonic ideal of love (pedagogic benefits of free adult male / free male adolescent)
§ myths: Narcissus
o intertexts from The Middle Ages
§ psychomachia
§ Faust
o Gothicism (decadent gothic)
§ decadent: perverted innocence; degeneration; corruption
§ Gothic elements: the city; the portrait; Dorian himself; homosexual undertones
§ doppelgänger motif (internal or external; duality of nature)
o Fin de siècle
· uncertainty, anxiety; decline
· dandyism (dandy: flamboyant youth who places importance on physical looks, refined language and leisure (imitating aristocratic style)
· hedonism (philosophy advocating pleasure as the ultimate value in life); decadence; carpe diem;
‘The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to’
'Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. . . . A new Hedonism-- that is what our century wants'
· nietzscheanism (post-Darwinian universe); artificiality; distrust of religion
'"Love?"
"An illusion."
"Religion?"
"The fashionable substitute for belief."'
· the Yellow Book (but remember Wilde's opinion about 'good'/'bad' books from the Preface)
'Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.'
o aestheticism
· the study of beautiful things; artistic and literary tendency regarding beauty as the ultimate end in itself; art is self-sufficient, doesn't serve any purpose; against the values of bourgeois (morality: homoeroticism)
· art vs the artist; art vs reality (the Preface)
· l'art pour l'art ("art for art's sake")
‘An artist should create beautiful things but should put nothing of his own life into them’
'The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim'
'All art is quite useless.'
· life as art (Dorian as a concept, not a character)
‘Life has been your Art. Your days are your sonnets’
'And, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.'
§ Sybil Vane as an idea
'The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.'
o Wildean epigrams
'Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly'
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