Natural Or Wilde?

The paper argues that the best way to understand the narratological dilemma of the split between author and writer is through the images of ghosts, doppelgangers, and Dorian Gray's cursed portrait

Many of the ambiguities of Dorian Gray result from the fact that Wilde's novel is a curious textual hybrid in which the discourses of several genres intermingle: most importantly, those of the comedy of manners and the gothic horror story. Detached from the novel, the story of the portrait evokes the world of Poe's tales, most notably that of " The Oval Portrait " , and fits the fin-de-sičcle obsession with (gothic) explorations of the doppelgänger theme: the sealed room that is revealed at the end of the narrative resembles not only Frankenstein's operating theatre but also the studio of Dr. Jekyll and the surgical theatre of Dr. Moreau (in this respect, the difference between Wilde and the other gothic texts is that Dorian Gray presents the fin-de-sičcle crisis of subjectivity in the context of art rather than science, exploring the monstrosity of Dorian in terms of the art/life divide). 1 This textual doubleness or duplicity is further complicated by the presence of other discursive strands F 0 B E for instance, the melodramatic revenge tale of Jack Vane. The end result is a text with obvious parabolic and allegorical tendencies; it is, however, much more difficult to decide what exactly it is that is being allegorised here. This difficulty is due not simply to the discursive heterogeneity of the novel, but also to the fact that the allegorical impulse is, as it were, splayed, opening up the allegorical interpretation of the central scenario in so many directions that the different directions end up subverting or cancelling each other. In addition to the obvious moral exemplariness that is triggered off by Basil Hallward's prophetic remarks in the opening chapter (" we shall all suffer " F 0 5 B Wilde 1992, 7 F 0 5 D), the text inscribes itself into several other traditions, for example by evoking mythological parallels: the myths of Narcissus and Pygmalion, apparently invoked in order to stabilise the meanings of the allegorical parable, themselves require further allegorical intrerpretation. Although both mythological stories are concerned with transgressions between life and representation, the Pygmalon story (extremely popular in late Victorian art) keeps this transgression within the sphere of art, whereas the Narcissus story places it in the drama of the subject's self-cognition. The focus or fulcrum of these allegorical impulses is clearly the portrait, or, more precisely, the relationship between the portrait, its object (Dorian), its maker (Basil Hallward) and its spectator (Lord Henry Wotton). The allegorical overdetermination manifests itself in a telling lack: apart from a few vague references, there is no ekphrastic attempt in the novel to describe the portrait (perhaps because what is important is not on the painting anyway), which thus remains empty and asemic, the site of allegorical excess, overburdened with too much " meaning, " functioning like the attic room, offering a place where the text can store and sequester its unsolved tensions. The portrait is " outside " the text, establishing " a gap whereby unverbalized meaning can enter the text " (Cohen 1996, 113). The portrait, then, is primarily and initially a work of art (setting off an allegorical narrative concerned with the nature of art and the relationship between art and life) that gradually becomes a gothic double (the monstrous embodiment of conscience, guilt or the Super-Ego). 2 The two basic allegorical discourses overlap and intersect in unpredictable ways throughout the text. 1 The portrait in the attic room fulfills the function of the cheval glass that confronts Mr. Utterson in Jekyll's studio. The studios of Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, Jekyll and Hallward (as well as the attic room of Dorian) are emphatically secluded places in which the solidity of human identity is radically challenged, and which therefore give birth to liminal and monstruous creatures that ought not to exist. Wilde's novel is discussed in the context of the Gothic tradition by

The Sigma Tau Delta Review, 2015

My paper aims to fill a gap in emergent studies of violent and queer desires in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by analyzing the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde as one which highlights the transformability of a masochist's violence against the self into a sadist's violence against the other and vice versa. In particular, I examine the critical analysis of Gilles Deleuze in “Coldness and Cruelty” and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s "Venus in Furs" to demonstrate the queer projection, deferral, and intrapersonal violence of the masochist-sadist relationship within Stevenson’s story.