...contrasting settings portray a gulf between social classes in Victorian society.’ How far and in what ways do you agree with this view of The Picture of Dorian Gray? The novel’s contrasting settings do portray a gulf between social classes in Victorian society but also represents the dualism in The Picture Of Dorian Gray. Wilde specifically chooses to pick two opposite settings, the East End and the West End, and ignores the middle class areas of London. This is due to the suggestion that Wilde wanted to convey class indifference explicitly and clearly in the novel, but also the double aspects of Dorian and his life. Dorian comes from the West End of London, living in a very wealthy and prestigious “Grosvenor Square”, the wealth in the glamorous side of London is explicitly different to the “foul” East End, with its “grisly prostitutes, drunken brawls, and opium dens”. These two contrasting settings are very interesting as Dorian, a wealthy man likes to spend his time in the “darkest” London. Not only is Wilde portraying the gulf between these two social classes, he is representing Dorian; the glamorous West End acts as a mask for Dorian, whereas the “evil” East End is a true representation of the real Dorian Gray and his true nature. However the rest of high Victorian society would not tolerate such visits Dorian went on and Dorian would fact social ostrication, however as long as immorality was hidden it was fine. Rita Felski suggests that this portrays the “crass vulgarity of...
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...‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ the reader is shown two sides to the character of Dorian. Whilst a strong dislike from the reader emerges as a result of the decisions he chooses to make, one can also sympathise with the character due to him being perceived as weak and easily influenced. One could argue that Oscar Wilde presents Dorian Gray as a selfish and self-centred character. This is shown through his constant disregard of other people’s feelings and his ignorant nature to put his needs first. Dorian’s interaction with Sibyl Vane supports this as Sibyl purposely refuses to act her role in Romeo and Juliet well to show “infinite joy” toward Dorian. He, however, finds this to be extremely humiliating despite claiming moments before that he was in love with her. This is a prime example of how Dorian puts his self before the one he supposedly loves. Sibyl claims that by finally committing herself to Dorian, she has no desire to pretend to be anybody else and so therefore she cannot perform her role. She claims that Dorian has “freed my soul from prison” and cannot “mimic” another person’s persona. Instead of seeing this as a gesture of love, Dorian feels betrayed and states that Sibyl is nothing without her art. He believes that he will now suffer because of this which portrays the characters selfish and egotistical nature for Sibyl is actually the one who is left without a career and without love. However, one could argue that at times Dorian’s love for Sibyl is genuine and he...
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...The Picture of Dorian Gray: Plot Analysis The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is a fiction novel that tells about a man who goes through many trials and tribulations that test his sanity. The novel takes place in the late 19th century which is considered to be the Victorian era. The Victorian era was an era of great judgement and it really depended on your social class whether or not you would get treated with high regards. The contrast between middle-class society and the sins of the wealthy corrupted upper class played a huge role in the novel. Dorian Gray was considered to be of the higher class, therefore, he struggled with the madness that came with it. Dorian Gray was beautiful. So beautiful that Wilde made a point to explain to the reader how beautiful and good-looking he was. “Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair” (Wilde 11). Not only was Dorian Gray well respected, but he was quite the man to look at and everyone admired him. However, Dorian Gray had some of his own demons to battle with his quest to stay forever young. Having this impossible and selfish wish comes him transforming from a gorgeous innocent pure soul, to a full developed maniac. To continue, like many other novels, there’s other characters that have a great impact towards the main character. Lord Henry is the definition of a bad influence that impacted Dorian Gray. Dorian Gray does not have any parents because...
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...Nav Kaushal Mr. Martin July 10, 2012 Character Analysis of Dorian Gray Dorian Gray was a handsome, innocent, lovely and wealthy young man, who has seen the world as a beautiful place. Later, he turns into an evil little creature who breaks people's heart, always seeking for pleasure, becomes vain, and only care about his looks. However, Dorian had couple strengths as in he was the most attractive and charming fellow in his town, also he was never afraid to speak his mind, "If Lord Henry Wotton goes I shall go too" (Wilde, 19) it shows that if Dorian wanted something to happen, he will mention it to you in person. Dorian's weaknesses were, he was really easy to influence; Lord Henry played a huge part influencing Dorian in many wrong ways, "Then he rose from the table, lit a cigarette..." Henry influenced the most innocent human being to smoke like him. Also he was impressionable, naive, and lustful. Dorian made plenty of choices, mostly the horrible ones. He made a choice to forget Sibyl Vane for rest of his life because she did not perform on stage at a level he was expecting from her, even when she begged him for a second chance "I will work so hard, and try to improve" (85) that choice ended up killing Sibyl Vane. He made a choice to make best friends with Lord Henry, which made him realize who he actually is as a person, but in a suffering way he would not want to find out. Lord Henry taught Dorian about the outside world, which he was totally unaware of. Also, Lord Henry...
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...Preface-SUMMARY The artist creates beautiful things. Art aims to reveal art and conceal the artist. The critic translates impressions from the art into another medium. Criticism is a form of autobiography. People who look at something beautiful and find an ugly meaning are "corrupt without being charming." Cultivated people look at beautiful things and find beautiful meanings. The elect are those who see only beauty in beautiful things. Books can’t be moral or immoral; they are only well or badly written. People of the nineteenth century who dislike realism are like Caliban who is enraged at seeing his own face in the mirror. People of the nineteenth century who dislike romanticism are like Caliban enraged at not seeing himself in the mirror. The subject matter of art is the moral life of people, but moral art is art that is well formed. Artists don’t try to prove anything. Artists don’t have ethical sympathies, which in an artist "is an unpardonable mannerism of style." The subject matter of art can include things that are morbid, because "the artist can express everything." The artist’s instruments are thought and language. Vice and virtue are the materials of art. In terms of form, music is the epitome of all the arts. In terms of feeling, acting is the epitome of the arts. Art is both surface and symbol. People who try to go beneath the surface and those who try to read the symbols "do so at their own peril." Art imitates not life, but the spectator. When there is a...
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... The Power and Destruction of Vain Pursuits in the Picture of Dorian Gray “In fact, despite his power of rationalization and the continuing influence of Henry. Dorian is increasingly disturbed by doubts about his moral freedom and stung by the pangs of the conscience that will not die” (Liebman 10). Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is centered upon the effects of liberty of the soul and degradation that results from it. If one chooses to always act on inner desires and passions, ignoring ethical values, one’s life will be destroyed by vain pursuits. Dorian Gray a wealthy young man has been challenged to “embark upon a hedonistic life, after having feared it for so long, developing every intellectual, aesthetic and sensual appetite to the utmost. Despite the look of his innocent beauty...”(Magill Book Reviews 1) Dorian becomes very vain with the pursuit to simply fulfill his desperate desires without looking into the ethical importance of his actions and thus becomes hopeless and defenceless to his own desires. When one becomes aware of the fear to venture in life, one will pursue to fulfill every incomplete/unfulfilled passion without limits. This in turn leads to an amoral representation of one’s life. For once in his life, Dorian Gray was inspired. He was woken up to a world of freedom. Lord Henry Wotton opened his eyes to a world of hedonism saying “You, Mr. Gray... with your rose-red youth... and ... boyhood ... you have had passions...
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...This philosophy brought on by Wilde and Lord Henry often leads to the conclusion that Dorian Gray is a declaration of Wilde’s, promoting the adoption of purely aesthetic lives without qualification. Dorian’s relationship with the actress Sibyl Vane illustrates the marked change in Dorian’s personality. Dorian pursues Sibyl from the moment he laid eyes on her, he intends on acquiring her before he ever attempts to even truly know her and who she is. Dorian’s love for Sibyl is incredibly superficial, as shown by Dorian’s own description of his infatuation with Sibyl: “I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art” (Wilde 101). Dorian is not attracted to Sibyl’s personality, but rather her acting talent and inviting performances. When Sibyl leaves the stage and quits acting, she no longer serves a purpose in Dorian’s aesthetic life, leaving Dorian to abandon her abruptly. The...
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...Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian Gray wishes for eternal youth in exchange for his soul. Even though Dorian always looks the same, his portrait changes with every bad act he commits. Even though Dorian tries to avoid thinking about this, it is always on his mind. The portrait is like his conscience, trying to advise him not to commit all of these evil acts. In the end, the portrait would also lead to Dorian’s death. The stage in the book I chose to draw the portrait was after Dorian killed Basil. By this point, Dorian had already done some pretty terrible crimes, like causing Sibyl Vane’s suicide and smoking opium. These bad deeds affected the portrait by making Dorian’s portrait uglier. For example, after Sibyl Vane committed suicide, the portrait now had a touch of cruelty in the mouth. The more he smoked opium, the more wrinkles he got on his forehead and near his mouth. However, killing Basil was by far the worst crime Dorian had committed. When looking at the portrait after killing Basil, Dorian noticed blood dripping off the hand that killed Basil. Dorian became really disturbed at the sight of it and even considered it for a moment worse than seeing Basil lying on the floor. By this point in the story, Dorian hated looking at the portrait and he was trying to avoid it as much as possible. However, this change in the portrait would contribute to his death. As you can see, there is a big difference between the real Dorian and the portrait Dorian. The real Dorian is young...
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...Dorian Gray character analysis Dorian Gray is so many opposites at once that we can’t really understand them all. He’s good, he’s bad; he’s beautiful, he’s hideous; he’s perfect, he’s terribly flawed. Most importantly, he is literary two things at one – he’s himself, a living, a breathing human being, and he’s also the portrait, a visible reflection of the state of his soul. Dorian Gray within the novel At the opening of the novel, Dorian Gray exists as something of an ideal: he is the archetype of male youth and beauty. As such, he captures the imagination of Basil Hallward, a painter, and Lord Henry Wotton, a nobleman who imagines fashioning Dorian into a pleasure-seeker. Dorian is exceptionally vain and becomes convinced, in the course of a brief conversation with Lord Henry, that his most salient characteristics—his youth and physical attractiveness—are ever growing. The thought of waking one day without these attributes sends Dorian into a tailspin: he curses his fate and pledges his soul if only he could live without bearing the physical burdens of aging and sinning. He longs to be as youthful and lovely as the masterpiece that Basil has painted of him, and he wishes that the portrait could age in his stead. His vulnerability and insecurity in these moments make him excellent clay for Lord Henry’s willing hands. Dorian soon leaves Basil’s studio for Lord Henry’s parlor, where he adopts the tenets of “the new Hedonism” and resolves to live his life as a pleasure-seeker...
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...The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde This eBook was designed and published by Planet PDF. For more free eBooks visit our Web site at http://www.planetpdf.com/. To hear about our latest releases subscribe to the Planet PDF Newsletter. The Picture of Dorian Gray Chapter I The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pinkflowering thorn. From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as usual, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-colored blossoms of the laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters who, in an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the black-crocketed spires of the early June hollyhocks, seemed to make the stillness 2 of 250 The Picture of Dorian Gray more oppressive...
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...read The Picture of Dorian Gray, what struck me most, and what inspired me to write my essay, was the irony that Dorian exhibited in his life. In pursuing aestheticism—a philosophy based in the simplistic beauty of things—the pursuer may, in the end and without notice, emerge uglier than ever before. Dorian, the once wide-eyed innocent, buckles and caves in to depravity while practicing an aesthetic lifestyle, despite the beauty that such a life idea claims. I began to wonder what Oscar Wilde intended to convey with his portrayal of the Aesthetic Movement incarnate and its often harsh consequences, especially given the well-documented involvement of Wilde in promoting aestheticism in his contemporary society. The juxtaposition of Wilde’s support for the Aesthetic Movement with Dorian’s corruption at the hands of it provided a great jumping-off point and a lingering question with which to begin an essay. What exactly is Wilde’s view of aestheticism when one bears in mind the story of Dorian Gray? In writing my essay, I realized Wilde’s outlook is not as straightforward as it may first appear. Throughout the writing process, a difficult task I faced was to encapsulate the aesthetic position when the philosophy often meant different things to different people. In researching the movement, I found that the moral philosophies of various proponents of aestheticism often varied and, thus, it became difficult to nail down the aesthetic tenets and apply them to Dorian Gray. In retrospect,...
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...Writer “Dorian Gray the Escape Artist” is the culmination of my work in my WR100 seminar, Fantasy at the Fin-de-Siècle. The final assignment was to create a research paper based on an interesting problem or paradox I had found in Oscar Wilde’s book, The Picture of Dorian Gray. For me, one of the book’s most fascinating elements was Dorian’s immature behavior; though he grows older, he never seems to “grow up.” At first, I investigated how my idea related to aestheticism and what Dorian’s immaturity showed about aestheticism; however, I could not find a solid way to prove my thesis. My greatest problem was being unsure of how writing a paper based on a research problem in The Picture of Dorian Gray constituted a researchable argument and not just a literary analysis. Hoping to gain a different perspective on the assignment, I met with fellow classmates to talk out my problem. It turned out that they were having the same issue with their essays, and through discussing my paper with them, I realized that my topic was too narrow to be easily supported by sources; the idea of Dorian growing older without growing up was interesting but could not easily be supported with sources outside the novel itself. With this in mind, I modified my thesis, claiming that though Dorian Gray demonstrates aesthetic behavior in The Picture of Dorian Gray, his fascination with artistic things serves less to pursue aestheticism and more to evade his dark past. In this manner, I argued, Dorian could...
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...1. W. Shakespeare « Hamlet» (Renaissance) Character List Hamlet - The Prince of Denmark, the title character, and the protagonist. About thirty years old at the start of the play, Hamlet is the son of Queen Gertrude and the late King Hamlet, and the nephew of the present king, Claudius. Hamlet is melancholy, bitter, and cynical, full of hatred for his uncle’s scheming and disgust for his mother’s sexuality. A reflective and thoughtful young man who has studied at the University of Wittenberg, Hamlet is often indecisive and hesitant, but at other times prone to rash and impulsive acts. Hamlet is extremely philosophical and contemplative. He is particularly drawn to difficult questions or questions that cannot be answered with any certainty. Faced with evidence that his uncle murdered his father, evidence that any other character in a play would believe, Hamlet becomes obsessed with proving his uncle’s guilt before trying to act. Claudius - The King of Denmark, Hamlet’s uncle, and the play’s antagonist. The villain of the play, Claudius is a calculating, ambitious politician, driven by his sexual appetites and his lust for power, but he occasionally shows signs of guilt and human feeling—his love for Gertrude, for instance, seems sincere. Gertrude - The Queen of Denmark, Hamlet’s mother, recently married to Claudius. Gertrude loves Hamlet deeply, but she is a shallow, weak woman who seeks affection and status more urgently than moral rectitude or truth. Polonius - The...
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...Essays Essays Part II. 2, 2.] Part II. 2, 2.] Essays The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: Essays Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson Editor: Edna H. L. Turpin Release Date: September 4, 2005 [EBook #16643] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS *** 1 Essays Produced by Curtis A. Weyant , Sankar Viswanathan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net ESSAYS BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON Merrill's English Texts SELECTED AND EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES, BY EDNA H.L. TURPIN, AUTHOR OF "STORIES FROM AMERICAN HISTORY," "CLASSIC FABLES," "FAMOUS PAINTERS," ETC. NEW YORK CHARLES E. MERRILL CO. 1907 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION LIFE OF EMERSON CRITICAL OPINIONS CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF PRINCIPAL WORKS THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR COMPENSATION SELF RELIANCE FRIENDSHIP HEROISM MANNERS GIFTS NATURE SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET PRUDENCE CIRCLES NOTES PUBLISHERS' NOTE Merrill's English Texts 2 Essays 3 This series of books will include in complete editions those masterpieces of English Literature that are best adapted for the use of schools and colleges. The editors of the several volumes will...
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