Protestant Gothic: Understanding Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray
How does the term 'Protestant Gothic' help us to understand Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray?
Even though his last years were horrible for him, being sent to prison and criticized by lots of people because of one of his own novels, one can’t deny that Oscar Wilde lived a really interesting life. His wittiness -shown in his numerous epigrams, like «The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about»-, sense of humor, vividness and way of thinking made him one of the most interesting people of his time, and also in the history of the literature. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, received terrible reviews from critics and from the society in the moment it was first published, mostly due to its homosexual content (during the trials where he was judged, the book was used as an evidence to prove his homosexuality). It is considered a Gothic novel and one where religion is a prominent theme, with some characters wondering about it and comparing Anglicanism with Catholicism.
The preface of the 1891 edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray makes clear that Wilde was an aesthetic, and so he conceived the writer as «the creator of beautiful things». For him, the purpose of art is to provide pleasure (which links to his hedonistic ideas), and not to send moral messages or show how the real world is. Said preface is a mock by Wilde, where he suggests “the death of the author”: the author himself should not be present in the novel, just his work. In this sense, the reason why he wrote a Gothic novel, despite the fact that some years had passed since its golden times, is quite obvious: it is a genre that rejects realism and embraces the ghostly, the fantasy, etc. “Gothic” was not the first artistic term created with a pejorative connotation that later evolved into a neutral one. The name of the novel is also the best example of the supernatural element found in it and in most of the Gothic stories: the picture that gets older, eerier and
Even though his last years were horrible for him, being sent to prison and criticized by lots of people because of one of his own novels, one can’t deny that Oscar Wilde lived a really interesting life. His wittiness -shown in his numerous epigrams, like «The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about»-, sense of humor, vividness and way of thinking made him one of the most interesting people of his time, and also in the history of the literature. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, received terrible reviews from critics and from the society in the moment it was first published, mostly due to its homosexual content (during the trials where he was judged, the book was used as an evidence to prove his homosexuality). It is considered a Gothic novel and one where religion is a prominent theme, with some characters wondering about it and comparing Anglicanism with Catholicism.
The preface of the 1891 edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray makes clear that Wilde was an aesthetic, and so he conceived the writer as «the creator of beautiful things». For him, the purpose of art is to provide pleasure (which links to his hedonistic ideas), and not to send moral messages or show how the real world is. Said preface is a mock by Wilde, where he suggests “the death of the author”: the author himself should not be present in the novel, just his work. In this sense, the reason why he wrote a Gothic novel, despite the fact that some years had passed since its golden times, is quite obvious: it is a genre that rejects realism and embraces the ghostly, the fantasy, etc. “Gothic” was not the first artistic term created with a pejorative connotation that later evolved into a neutral one. The name of the novel is also the best example of the supernatural element found in it and in most of the Gothic stories: the picture that gets older, eerier and