Works that have stood the tests of time, such as canonical texts like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, have proven themselves influential over and over again in every field of the arts. They have impacted and altered the course of history and set the bar for other great works of fiction and have even inspired other worlds entirely; moreover, Stevenson’s and Wilde’s work have had a conscious and subconscious effect upon such successful work as Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, and even Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s Batman which has a story that spans over decades.
The dualities that appear in Stevenson’s and Wilde’s work pay tribute to mans’ opposing, and even conflicting, nature that rage inside them. On one hand you have the desire to be an outstanding moral citizen, while on the other you have the desire to give in to your more primal inclinations. In Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian, who heard his friend’s hedonistic world view, decides that beauty is the only aspect of life pursuing and wishes that his self-portrait would age instead of himself. After breaking the heart of his first love, he discovers that his wish has been granted. His portrait begins to age instead of him and also changes and alters itself based on the moral choices Dorian makes. When he leaves his first love, Dorian notices that there appears a sneer of cruelty on his portrait that wasn’t there before. He begins to watch his portrait grow darker and more malicious as he makes conscious immoral decisions as he experiments with the darker sides of hedonism.
Almost directly mirroring Wilde’s sense of duality, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho plays with the same archetypes. The main character, Patrick Bateman, is a handsome, well-educated, and intelligent man who works on Wall