The Scarlet Prayer: Genesis Allegory and Christian Symbolism in The Picture of Dorian Gray

Dorian Gray and the Bible (NKJV) seem to agree on at least one semblance of doctrine, if only partially. They both maintain that the body is a temple,...

Throughout the Gothic novel Dracula, Stoker uses symbology and imagery to reveal social anxieties and fears of the late Victorian era, for example the use of animalistic description and blood. Wilde, in his own Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian...

‘Those who go below the surface do so at their own peril’. If the aesthetic exterior of a person is the ‘surface’, it is assumed that below this surface is sensibility and emotion. Wilde warns against probing too deeply, or at all, the conscience;...

All language exists with two definitions. The primary, literal meaning is defined as what the object physically is, and the secondary, symbolic meaning is what the object represents. An object’s literal meaning remains a stationary constant, as it...

In his novel of 1891, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Wilde uses setting and location to explore not only the character and moral conscience of his protagonist but also the divides inherent within Victorian society as he contrasts the wealthy homes...

Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is without a doubt a reflection of its author and its time. As an academic, social, and political figurehead of late 19th century London, Wilde was highly engaged in the ongoing public dialogue surrounding the...

The Picture of Dorian Gray demonstrates a divide between aestheticism and morality that Oscars Wilde depicts by giving each character a very specific persona that either challenges or indulges in the immoral vices of life. This is all while Dorian...

In Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, the concept of influence is clearly reflected in two different characters and in two different forms, and juxtaposes them though the main character and his reaction to the two clashing ideologies...

Dr. James Knoll, a forensic psychiatrist, says, “The paranoia exists on a spectrum of severity. ... Many perpetrators are in the middle, gray zone where psychiatrists will disagree about the relative contributions of moral failure versus mental...

In the novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, an experienced and insightful man shares a compelling life philosophy with a younger, less refined man. This transmission of ideas opens the interpretation of how art and society influence...

In Chapter 20 of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian is presented to us as a figure torn between reforming and alleviating himself from the sin and corruption he has perpetuated on others, and pursuing his exclamatory yearning for his “unsullied...

Although created in different eras, Oscar Wilde’s 1980 gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and Damien Chazelle’s 2014 drama film Whiplash are comparable in the exploration of obsession, destruction and control by the text’s creators. Chazelle...

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, is a classic example of a traditional Gothic novel, despite the fact that it isn’t scary. Gothic literature received its name because many examples of the genre were set during the late-medieval, or...

French author Marcel Proust once stated “Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.” What this quote means is that while names merely are words, they hold...

Horror can be defined as the feeling excited by something shocking or fear-inducing[1]. The physical or represented form of the body certainly can induce these feelings given the appropriate circumstances and contexts. The present paper will...

An antagonist is essential to any story. Establishing a clear “bad guy” gives the story more emotion, uniting the reader with the protagonist(s) against a common enemy that is easy to hate. Every story has an antagonist, but only some are evil....

Aristocratic beauty and values comprise culture which is used as a proxy for social and economic and mobility in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. To at least appear as having the same intelligentsia as the Victorian upper class is to...

In every system of cultural meaning-making, there occur certain words and names which are connotatively "loaded," which have an "emotional valence" in excess of their denotations. Such was the word "Salome" in late nineteenth-century western...

The monologue of King Herod just preceding the Dance of the Seven Veils (Wilde, 50-53) demonstrates the depth of the King's desperate neuroses. While his intention is to implore Salome to dance for him, Herod ends up delivering a capricious,...

“Salome” is a poem taken from Carol Ann Duffy's collection of poems The World's Wife; most of the poems share a common feature: a historically marginalized narrator retelling the story from personal perspective. Salome’s character originally...

Author Shannon Alder once said, “Often those that criticise others reveal what he himself lacks.” Essentially what Alder is saying is that the things we find fault with in other people are really the things that we do not have and therefore...

In Salome, Oscar Wilde’s short drama, the protagonist Salome is objectified into an idealized sex symbol by her male admirers. To see how, a reader must consider descriptions of Salome as an ethereal body, expressions of lustful desire directed at...

In "Anatomy of Criticism", Northrop Frye explains a formula that describes the structure of dramatic comedy. Two key points in the formula are the use of "obstructing characters" and the "movement from pistis to gnosis". An "obstructing character"...

Love and friendship were major themes for Society Drama during the 1890s. An established ‘stock storyline’ of the period was that of domestic life affected by a predicament, concluding in the reassertion of common ideas: fidelity, duty,...