The Picture of Dorian Gray: A Study of Oscar Wilde's Novel, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Tedesco

Scarica The Picture of Dorian Gray: A Study of Oscar Wilde's Novel e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Tedesco solo su Docsity! Oscar Wilde • Oscar Wilde is one of the most important aesthetes. • Dublin, 1854 - Paris, 1900 • He was an eccentric man, he embodied the figure of the “dandy”, the one who is fashionable, elegant and lives his life as it was a work of art. • He soon became famous and was invited at the most important social events. • He said that Aestheticism was the search for the beautiful. • He wrote a series of short stories as The Canterville Ghost, a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray that was considered immoral, and a series of plays that were considered obscene. • In 1891, Wilde began an homosexual affair with a young nobleman, that when it was discovered costed him two years of hard labour and the exile in France. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) The story • The novel is set in London at the end of the 19th century • The protagonist is Dorian Gray • Dorian’s beauty fascinates a painter, Basil, who decides to paint his portrait • The portrait satisfies the young man’s desires, including that of eternal youth; the signs of age, experience and vice appear on the portrait • Dorian lives only for pleasure, making use of everybody and even letting people die because of his insensitivity • Dorian wants to free himself of the portrait, witness to his spiritual corruption and stabs it • In doing so he mysteriously kills himself • In the very moment of the death the picture returns to this original purity The narrative technique • The story is told by an unobtrusive third-person narrator • The perspective is internal • Dorian appears in the second chapter, this allows a process of identification between the reader and the character • The characters reveal themselves trough what they say or what other people say of them Timeless beauty • The story is profoundly allegorical • Is the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil • In the novel, this soul is the picture, which record the signs of time, corruption and the sins concealed under the mask of Dorian’s timeless beauty • Wilde plays on the idea of the correspondence existing between the physical and spiritual realms: beautiful people are moral people, ugly peppole are immoral people • The picture represents the dark side of Dorian’s personality, his double, which he tries to forget by locking it in a room • The moral of the novel is that every excess must be punished and reality cannot be escaped • When Dorian destroys the picture, he cannot avoid the punishment for all of his sins, that is, death • The horrible picture can be seen as a symbol of the immorality and bad conscience of the Victorian middle class, while Dorian and his pure, innocent appearance are symbols of the bourgeois hypocrisy • The picture restored to its original beauty illustrates Wilde’s theories of art: art survives people, art is eternal Oscar Wilde