The Gothic genre, classical allusion and other influences in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

David E Robinson

doi:10.4102/lit.v42i1.1737

Abstract

This article will outline the aspects of influence and allusion in the novel, with reference to Victorian Gothic, classical mythology, the psychological double, monster theory, the Faustian bargain, the mask and a prominent memento mori in Huysmans’ A Rebours , his description of Rodolphe Bresdin’s lithograph, ‘The Comedy of Death’. Wilde’s novel is a complex, multi-layered text, and a richer, more profound understanding of it becomes possible when it is situated within this context of influence and allusion.

Highlights

Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a Victorian-era novel in the Gothic genre, is one of the two possible texts selected for study in Grade 12 Home Language English in South African government/state schools (Department of Basic Education [DBE] 2016:2, 2018:4)
While the historical perspective discussed at the end of the previous section has its own value, seeing the Gothic in general in the terms presented by Cohen might enable us to read The Picture of Dorian Gray in the light of a morality tale not limited to a particular time and place
In his introduction to Against Nature (A Rebours) by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884), Robert Baldick makes it clear that Wilde was here referring to Huysmans’s novel. Wilde acknowledged this in one of his trials (Baldick 1959:5). In this novel we find a thematically important grotesquery: Huysmans (1959) describes the lithograph known as ‘The Comedy of Death’ by Rodolphe Bresdin – if not explicitly Gothic, it certainly participates in a Gothic atmosphere: This depicts an improbable landscape which bristles with trees, coppices, and thickets in the shape of demons or phantoms and full of birds with rats’ heads and vegetable tails

Summary

Introduction

Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a Victorian-era novel in the Gothic genre, is one of the two possible texts selected for study in Grade 12 Home Language English in South African government/state schools (Department of Basic Education [DBE] 2016:2, 2018:4). Christopher Nassaar, believes that, following his reading of the yellow-backed French novel offered to him by Henry Wotton (to be more fully discussed in the penultimate section of this article), Dorian Gray experiences an intensification of Pater’s position (Wilde 2003:162): he goes ‘beyond anything the race – including...

Results

Conclusion