2) Compose a blog response using direct quotations from the text and the philosophies of Oscar Wilde. Think about the conversations from class regarding life imitating art, the nature of evil, etc.
I look forward to your responses...
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Due Monday, April 9th - "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde - Chapters XIV - XVIII (pages 118-154)
1) Read The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde - Chapters XIV - XVIII (pages 118-154). We will read the last two chapters together.
2) Compose a blog response using direct quotations from the text and the philosophies of Oscar Wilde. Think about the conversations from class regarding life imitating art, the nature of evil, etc.
I look forward to your responses...
2) Compose a blog response using direct quotations from the text and the philosophies of Oscar Wilde. Think about the conversations from class regarding life imitating art, the nature of evil, etc.
I look forward to your responses...
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During another gathering of London’s elite, Lord Henry, who bears the same ideas as Wilde, expresses another of his philosophies. While talking about names and literature, Lord Henry grumbles, “My one quarrel is with words. This is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature”(142). Once again, Lord Henry states another of Wilde’s famous ideas. “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art”, as seen in The Decay of the Living, another work by Wilde. Harry believes that it is better to exaggerate and fib than to speak the truth, for it is ugly and appalling. Yet again, in another chapter, the audience can see how Lord Henry’s ideas have become a part of Dorian. As Dorian takes a carriage to the opium bar, he ponders “Ugliness was the one reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life...were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of Art…”(136). There is no beauty in reality, yet that is what Dorian seeks.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that the nature of evil to Dorian Gray is death's coming. He describes death as having "monstrous wings [that] seem to wheel in the leaden air around [him]." This is in response to being attacked by the brother of the girl that he made commit suicide over him. Her brother vowed to get revenge. The brother found out where Dorian was after overhearing a woman talk to him at a bar "a hideous laugh broke from the painted lips of the woman who had taken his money. "There goes the devil's bargain!" she hiccoughed, in a hoarse voice." On a different note, Dorian seems to interpret most of the bad things in his life as demonic/satanic. I guess that's because he believes that whoever is trying to kill him is evil and he associates that with the devil.
ReplyDeleteThis is Yuval
DeleteThe conversation... (or rather, the big reveal - a tragedy really), is a disastrous one [I apologize for the length of the quote I selected, but I feel that it is necessary to do this justice]. "...Can't you see your ideal in it?" said Dorian bitterly.
ReplyDelete"My ideal, as you call it..."
"As you called it."
"There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful. You were to me such an ideal as I shall never meet again. This is the face of a satyr."
"It is the face of my soul."
"Christ! what a thing I must have worshipped! It has the eyes of a devil."
"Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil," cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair.
Hallward turned again to the portrait and gazed at it. "My God! If it is true," he exclaimed, "and this is what you have done with your life, why, you must be worse even than those who talk against you fancy you to be!" He held the light up again to the canvas and examined it. The surface seemed to be quite undisturbed and as he had left it. It was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come. Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful."
This part just keeps getting peculiar and stranger (for lack of better words). Honestly, to explain it, one is not really sure where, what and/or how to explain the peculiarity. Dorian's "saint-esque" playing faulty, he plays the game of a wanting sinner (as in the The Penitent Thief from the Bible), while also in truth asking himself (or God), why he cannot save himself (his actions, his fault; like the Impenitent Thief, the other criminal found sentenced to be crucified alongside Jesus).
In chapter 19 we see that Dorian has been trying to do good, he says "I have done too many dreadful things in my life. I am not going to do any more. I began my good actions yesterday." Even though he tried to do something what he considered "good", he actually did something horrible.
ReplyDelete"I spared somebody. Hetty was not one of our own class, of course. She was simply a girl in a village. But I really loved her. I am quite sure that I loved her. All during this wonderful May that we have been having, I used to run down and see her two or three times a week. Yesterday she met me in a little orchard. The apple-blossoms kept tumbling down on her hair, and she was laughing. We were to have gone away together this morning at dawn. Suddenly I determined to leave her as flowerlike as I had found her."
Dorian's logic is that by leaving her, he is sparing her from his corrupt nature. At the same time, he broke her heart, and now any man who marries her won't be able to live up to the expectations Dorian set. To quote Brody from the class discussion "Doing a good thing for the sake of being good, is not good at all."
Near the end of the story Dorian justifies his evil decisions saying:
"Basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life. He could not forgive him that. It was the portrait that had done everything. Basil had said things to him that were unbearable, and that he had yet borne with patience. The murder had been simply the madness of a moment. As for Alan Campbell, his suicide had been his own act. He had chosen to do it. It was nothing to him."
Finally, and thankfully, Dorian dies at end by stabbing his own portrait. This is an example of life imitating art because he became what his portrait looked like, and his portrait became what it originally was. My question is, if the painting reflects Dorian's soul, does that mean by it turning back to normal, Dorian was forgiven by killing himself?
I believe the entirety of the books meaning, weather it be from Wilde's aesthetic ideology seeping through to the book, or from the message the main characters sent and expressed throughout, is summarized best in the last chapter as seen from two quotations.
ReplyDeleteThe first part comes as Dorian is contemplating weather or not to stab the painting he has long despised. His incessant obsession with maintaining his beauty both in appearance, and in virtue counteracts what he sees in the painting. This change in the picture, especially after hoping it would have changed for the better after performing a "good deed", soon leads him to stab the picture with the same knife he killed Basil with.
"As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter's work, and all that that meant. It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free. It would kill this monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace."
Dorian believes that in the end, his true character will be released from the painting after it is ripped, and that his soul will be set free as a result of the art being no more, however Wilde plays on this idea of murdering the art in reference to Dorian's sealed character with the second part of the quote which reads:
When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage.
with this passage, Wilde brilliantly wraps up the book with some well needed dramatic closure, reinstitutes and finalizes his view on life imitating life, aswell as making the audience question what really occurred. Dorian said he would kill the work/art, however with his body found dead, did he
a)Cut the picture, killing himself in the process due to the strange connection between the both of them, or
b)kill himself, to set himself free, as he was the art the entire time.
Both seem plausible; but Wilde leaves it to the imagination of the audience. These passages not only wrap up Wilde's aesthetic stance throughout the book, however, also ends the book in a very cohesive, and needed way.
In these chapters the book is taking a great turn of events and becoming a murder mystery, because after Basil gets to Dorian's house we see that Dorian murders Basil since he doesn't like the way the painting of him looks now. Dorian gets Campbell (A person who is well versed in chemicals) to dispose of Basil's body. This also gets to the point of where Dorian is not himself. Another interesting thing is the fact that the painting of Dorian is seemingly taking in all of Dorian's sins and letting him be pure and beautiful.
ReplyDelete"I have no terror of death. It is the coming of death that terrifies me. Its monstrous wings seem to wheel in the leaden air around me. Good heavens! don't you see a man moving behind the trees there, watching me, waiting for me?" (18.15)
ReplyDeleteDorian’s downwards spiral has made him paranoid. As someone who leaves a trail of death and destruction behind him and the suddenness of Basil’s murder, it is logical that he fears not knowing when he will die. My interpretation is that the “man” following him is his conscience. Though he shows limited remorse for his actions, his conscience is greatly affected.
"I think that it is better to be beautiful than to be good"(17 Lord Henry)
Lord Henry is envious of Dorian’s inability to grow old and ugly. The irony of this statement is that as learned from the end of the book, being immoral makes Dorian ugly. This statement also sparks the conversation of Aestheticism. Some critics of aestheticism believe that it corrupts people. But why must the two be separated? Most of the ugly people I know aren't very good people.
-Samantha