Essaythe oval portrait and the picture of dorian gray

The gothic literature style is a style which stresses the mysterious and desolate including death, old buildings with ghosts in them, curses and madness to name but a few of the more common and generally fundamental elements and concepts. Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde had one of the greatest impacts on Gothic literature. The former is famous for all the grief he put up with that he inserted into his horror and mystery stories, especially in his outstanding short story named The Oval Portrait and published in 1850 ; while the latter influenced gothic genre through his brilliant and well-known novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray published in 1890. We will wonder what makes a story develop into gothic type and what kind of elements do we call for when trying to find this type of literature. This synthesis will attempt to explore the gothic atmosphere in both extracts of these stories by firstly examining the gloomy atmosphere, then by looking at the dehumanization of the characters, and finally by analyzing the strange and troubling events which often blur the frontier between reality and fantasy.

The setting is the time and place where a scene occurs. It plays a considerable part in a story and its atmosphere. It can help set the mood, influence the way characters behave, affect the dialog, foreshadow events, invoke an emotional response, and sometimes even reflect the society in which the characters live. With its gloomy setting, the first paragraph of The Picture of Dorian Gray conveys a very mysterious atmosphere because the reader is disoriented, such as the protagonist. There is a lack of information related to space and time. The enigmatic atmosphere is enhanced by the first sentence, “Where he went to he hardly knew.”, in which the author uses an inverted syntactical structure so that we can wonder if the narrator is intoxicated because he appears confused. We also ask ourselves if he is reliable, and the boundaries between reality and imagination are blurred while the night quickly becomes nightmarish. Moreover, the terrific ambiance is stressed by the light-game, as we can easily see the lexical field of darkness : “dimly-lit streets”, “past gaunt black-shadowed archways”, “gloomy courts”, “darkness”, and so on. The murky atmosphere is one of the main characteristic of gothic literature and it leads to a rise of horror in our mind.

Furthermore, in The Oval Portrait, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray, the reader's expectations are not fulfilled. The first-person narrative allows the reader to experience the character’s feelings and thoughts but we don't know a thing about the narrator due to the opening in media res. We just know that he is wounded and that he is accompanied by his “valet.” but we are not aware of what happened. None of the characters are given full back stories. The story opens with dramatic situation instead of exposition, which enhances the dramatic and mysterious atmosphere. Similarly to the extract of Oscar Wilde’s most famous novel, the first sentence helps building a murky atmosphere. It gives to the image of the remote abandoned chateau a tint of mystery and gloom. The alliteration in “g” in “those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur” reflects the narrator's distress and anguish because the author employs harsh consonants. The long sentences and the complex and labyrinthine syntax, mainly in the first paragraph, mirrors the strange place the narrator finds himself in. The setting is unfamiliar to the characters, it is a strange place with dusty, dark and ripped tapestry and a lot of strange paintings that lay everywhere. The setting of the Chateau sets the tone of the story as creepy.

What could make a story turn into gothic literature is also the dehumanization of the characters. In the first paragraph of the extract of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the author employs a myriad of pathetic fallacies which mirror the character's dehumanization : human characteristics are associated to the dwellings as we can see through “evil-looking houses” and “past gaunt black-shadowed archways”. While the surroundings are humanized, we cannot ignore the dehumanization of the inhabitants : not only the women when their voices are illustrated by an alliteration in “h” with “hoarse voices” and “harsh laughter”, but also the drunkards animalized by “monstrous apes”. Furthermore, from line 38 to line 56, art is seen as a revealer of Dorian’s dehumanization. Thanks to the portrait, a magical mirror which reveals Dorian’s real nature and loss of innocence, the reader becomes aware of the character’s cruelty and madness. On the contrary, Dorian refuses to think he is responsible for the change in his painted face, but he is. Then, the portrait splits Dorian in two different people, and it becomes “it” (the painted face) versus “him” (Dorian). It leads to an epiphany produced by art while he faces a sudden and striking insight, as the use of the simple past “came over him” suggests.

In addition, one should note that in The Oval Portrait, the painter somehow dehumanizes his wife. This character embodies mad obsession because he is focused only on mirroring his wife's beauty in his canvas. There is nothing else that holds his attention. In the text interpreting the young woman portrait, art is written with a capital "A", as if it was a person. This personification continues as the painter is described to have "already a bride in his Art". It shows that the painter loves Art more than his wife, so the latter becomes jealous and develops a hatred for all art. His obsession for art consumes him to the point that he fails to see his poor and tenuous wife as a human being. From being a young bride she is now transformed into an inanimate object, and then her humanity is eerily forgotten as it fades into the darkness of the turret-chamber where the session was held. In the last sentences, the author asserts that “the tints were drawn from the cheeks of her who sat beside him”. It is as if with every stroke of his brush the painter takes the life from the young woman and places it into the actual painting. The passive voice used here states the woman as an object, she is not seen as a subject anymore and she endures her

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