Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Lust for Our True Character The struggle to seem perfect on the outside is ever so present in today’s society. The desire to project an unrealistic version of ourselves, striving to mask our insecurities with layers of falsehood. The Victorian era is known for its beautiful women, art and architecture. Beneath the surface, it is all false portrayals full of pretend actions and untruthful ideas in order to uphold their aestheticism. Victorian authors used the idea of “destructive doppelgangers”, showing parallels in the contemporary culture of the falsity.
Specifically, Jerome Griswold has underlined that the unique emphasis of “death”, resulting from his challenges to the traditional artistic views, distinguished Wilde 's fairy tales from the traditional ones. The purpose of this thesis is to make a systematic and thorough exploration of the motif of “death” in Oscar Wilde 's fairy tales: to elaborate how “death” is used by Wilde in his tales as a weapon against the Victorian morality that was instilled in most traditional fairy tales, to illustrate how such utilitarian moral lesson corrodes artistic beauty and how Wilde breaks the conventions of the classical fairy tale tradition. To present a systematic exploration, this paper will be
Wuthering Heights comprises all the elements of a Gothic novel. However its characters are not as simple as the average Gothic protagonists. This particular novel deals with an amount of Gothic qualities, like dark settings and extreme landscapes, moonlights and candles, melancholy figures and imprisonment, torture and cruelty, supernatural element, madness, necrophilia as well as a communication between the living and the dead. Jibesh Bhattachayya states out clearly: “That Emily Bronte must have read some of these fictions of the Gothic type is evident from her creation of the mysterious Gondal world in her literary world in her literary attempts. Her passion for the esoteric and the sensational did not seem to have left when she wrote Wuthering Heights.
Is it possible, however, that we would not be aware if the soul ever left the carcass? Could the soul leave us without any warning? What would happen then? Oscar Wilde, due to his quite insouciant character, was intrigued by the idea of disturbing the balance between these elements, wanting to see what exactly would happen if, let us say, one’s soul and one’s heart were to be separated. This is the theme that also serves at the core of Oscar Wilde’s most significant and most renowned work of prose, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, one of Oscar Wilde’s masterpieces, portrays one of the most important values and principles for him: aestheticism. As a criticism to the life lived during the Victorian era in England, Wilde exposed a world of beauty a freedom in contradiction to the lack of tolerance a limitation of that era; of course inspired due to Wilde’s personal life. All the restrictions of the Victorian England lead him to a sort of anarchism against what he found to be incoherent rules, and he expressed all this to his art. His literature is a strong, political and social criticism. He gave a different point of view to controversial topics such as life, morality, values, art, sexuality, marriage, and many others, and epigrams, for what he is very well known, where the main source to the exposure of his interpretations of this topic.
One that clearly describes this situation. You aim to tell the English that life isn’t that glorious for everyone, that in the English glorious lifestyle the poor Irish are being exploited. Jonathan Swift was a well off Irish satirical essayist who took it as a mission to write about Ireland’s situation back then. His writings were characterized by a harsh satirical tone. Swift employed no mercy when it came to his satire reflections about his current situations.
The idea of identity and how we reflect on our ‘self’ is a key theme threaded through the entirety of Ulysses. Specifically on the idea of what it means to be Irish and how colonialism has greatly paralysed and usurped this notion within Ireland. It’s interesting too, that Joyce had to divide himself from his nation to write critically of Ireland. crucial- idea of the ‘other’ within colonialism and nationalism One of the obvious consequences to colonialism within a country is the destruction and loss of its native language. The loss of Irish as a language, and the struggles the people and culture have within preserving and reviving it; in association with the English language is exhibited throughout Joyce’s, ‘Ulysses’.
The Picture of Dorian Gray & Aestheticism Aestheticism is an art movement that supports the emphasis of aesthetic values rather than that of dominant political and social values. The Aesthetic movement argued that projecting social and political ideology onto literary works was a problem and they were particularly prominent in Europe in the 19th century. When Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ was first published in 1890 in ‘Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine’ it was decried as immoral. Wilde, in a revised text a year later included a preface which included an explanation of his philosophy of art. According to Wilde the purpose of art is to have no purpose.
Politics, as referred, and its negative situation in the North at the time of Heaney’s writing of the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’, was the result of British imperialism. Thus, cataphatic language is used in both sonnets I and V with subtle references to this imperialism, references which had previously been used in a negative manner. For example, in the first line of sonnet I the reader sees “Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.” The phrase “opened ground” has been imported from ‘Act of Union’ where it refers to the wound left by British imperialism in Ireland. However, as this is clearly negative, the cataphatic use of language seen here serves to turn the phrase into something more positive. Cataphatic language is also used to describe the boortree in sonnet V. The boortree is the Scottish derivative of the English elderberry, with the latter also referred to in the sonnet.
He governs lyricism in full awareness of the power of his ideas, confronting the immorality and melancholy of the Irish struggle. Two exemplars of Heaney’s ability to aestheticise these appalling events are “The Tollund Man”, from the collection Wintering Out (1972) and “Punishment”, from North (1975). “The Tollund Man” uses affective visual imagery and phonaesthesia to enable the exploration of a despondency towards the sectarian violence which plagued the “Troubles”. Conversely, “Punishment” displays philosophical ideas regarding conscience and the treatment of women. Both “Punishment” and “The Tollund Man” relate the primitive violence of the past to that of the present, yet simultaneously highlight ideological differences in modern society.