Étude du roman Le portrait de Dorian Gray de Wilde (document en anglais)

Among the whole of the propositions offered by the notion “the encounter with the other”, I have chosen to put the emphasize on “self-love” and the “monstrous double” thanks to Oscar Wilde’s work of art The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Hanif Kureishi’s novella “The Body”. We can ask ourselves if Dorian Gray and Adam from the body are both torn apart between Heaven and Hell. Firstly I will talk about the vanity, and the double-face of Humans in both novels, and I will finish with the style used by the 2 authors to convey their message.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the male protagonist reminds us of the Greek god Appolon since he’s disturbingly beautiful. His love for himself pushes him into the devil’s arms, since he sought and praised eternal youth, and immortality. And it is rightly at this time that appears Dorian’s monstrous double, he is not the innocent lad anymore, now he yields to all his passions and whims.

In “The Body” we can see that self-love leaded Humans to reach perfection and to reject ageing as far as beauty is concerned. As Oscar Wilde’s novel, the characters in “The Body” also praise and seek immortality and eternal youth by creating a new race of Humans: the Newbodies. We notice that here Humans even take power over God and his nature in the interest of rewriting the original sin’s story, since Adam, who his name has a meaning, is tempted by a Newbody named Ralph to become one of them.

As we can see here there is a clash between Good and Bad.

“It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date . . . I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements.”

Dr. Jeckyll and Mr.Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886

In this quote Henry Jeckyll concludes that human beings are half virtuous, half criminal, half moral and half amoral. His goal in his experiments was to separate the good side and the bad side of one human being in order to create a being pure of good and a being pure of evil. However he failed, Hyde remaito art, the importance is not in the meaning but in the beauty. Wilde for instance criticizes the society by devaluing women in his novel, and makes them less emotional than men, which was the opposite during the Victorian times. He also talks about taboo subjects such as homosexuality.

Just as Oscar Wilde, Hanif

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