Author: quillbot

“It was some foul parody, some infamous, ignoble, satire. He had never done that. Still, it was his own picture.” (Wilde 131)
These lines reflect the tenuous ownership between artist and observer of the art itself. Basil sees his art pulled and twisted into a shape that, in his mind, he never gave it, but that it nonetheless grew into. Yet he still has to recognize his own art in the twisted image it’s become–his signature still scrawled in the corner. For Dorian, though, the painting has become a tool and a scapegoat that he can use to present a semblance of respectability to the world and be judged for that, much like many cults, criminals, and monsters in the real world can present their twisted views under the guise of a more beautiful piece of art. Moreover, Basil, the artist, thinks he has a right to his unchanging art being immortalized, while Dorian has, admittedly unintentionally, co-opted the artwork of himself to suit his own needs and desires. (It is literally his portrait after all.) We tend to understand art as being immortalized and timeless, but while the physical object may or may not deteriorate, vastly changing the way we view it (usually only through discolored varnish rather than a supernatural curse), but so does context. A portrait of a known murderer would become despicable to a viewer without supernatural interference.
When a parent “creates” a child, it may be with a design that determines their most indisputable content. But as they grow into individuals, they inevitably develop their own souls, regardless and sometimes in spite of their creators’ intentions. Is art any different? Does it have its own soul? Much like the meeting of Basil’s intent and soul meeting with Dorian’s soul animating the cursed painting, maybe only in the meeting of souls between the creator and the viewer can art be animated. In that case, the only difference between the souls of art and human is that art can grow infinite new souls that live in each person that experiences it. Wilde’s fantasy captures a thought experiment in which this endoparasite, the soul of an artwork, in some way becomes external and causes the host to become dependent on the leech, perhaps more real than himself.
The true irony, of course, is that Wilde’s own words do not belong to himself. The Picture of Dorian Gray will become his downfall when his own words are twisted and presented back to him, forcing him to take ownership of its now-distorted form.

“’Gerty, you have always been good to me; this last week as well. But that is the worst of you good people: you are as hard as stones. You bring me jelly; you sit up all night with me—but you have never forgiven me. You know that is the truth.’… Gertrude’s head drooped lower and lower over the coverlet; her heart, which had been frozen within her, melted. In an agony of love, of remorse, she stretched out her arms, while her sobs came thick and fast, and gathered the wasted figure to her breast. ‘Oh, Phyllis, oh, my child; who am I to forgive you? Is it a question of forgiveness between us? Oh, Phyllis, my little Phyllis, have you forgotten how I love you?’” (177-178).

This is the last interaction recorded between Phyllis and Gertrude, and it is clearly the narrative conclusion of Phyllis’s life, as the next scene simply dully records Phyllis’ death less than a week later, showing that the death itself is less emotionally resonant than the catharsis of this scene, when Gertrude is finally able to let go of her emotional distance and love her sister before her death.

In a material sense, the event of Phyllis’s death harkens strongly back to the same Victorian trope that was the death of poor Lucy Westenra: being a woman who desired. Even more so than Lucy, Phyllis was sexually promiscuous and planned to commit adultery with the married Sidney Darrell. Even after Gertrude’s intervention, it’s already too late: while Phyllis’ three sisters are all allowed to be happily married, she alone sickens and dies. Phyllis’ question to her sister is rooted in this very social convention that she knows she has transgressed against. Gertrude cannot help but

Of course, nothing can save Phyllis at this point. As much as Gertrude may be beyond forgiving her sister, and as much as she may love her, this book will still be published for a Victorian audience, a society that does not forgive the promiscuity of women. Amy Levy cannot escape this convention, and neither can Phyllis. What Levy can do is challenge that convention with Gertrude’s character. Not only does she forgive her sister, she dismisses the notion of Phyllis needing forgiveness altogether—simply because she loves her. Despite Phyllis’ “sin,” Levy has created a character who is a human being and deserves to be loved no matter her virtue. Phyllis may die, but Gertrude at least knows that she doesn’t deserve to.

“Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!” (Stoker 25). This is one of Dracula’s first comments to Johnathan Harker, provoking unease from the Englishman. However, from a non-Vitorian perspective, there is nothing inherently evil about Dracula’s wistful appreciation of the wolves’ wild beauty. In her article “Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror,” Carol A. Senf alleges that the epistolary format of the novel unfairly maligns its titular vampire, giving too much responsibility to the biased Victorian narrators. “The problem, however, is that these perfectly ordinary people are confronted with the extraordinary character of Dracula… [Stoker] adds a number of humanizing touches to make Dracula appear noble and vulnerable as well as demonic and threatening; and it becomes difficult to determine whether he is a hideous bloodsucker whose touch breeds death or a lonely and silent figure who is hunted and persecuted” (Senf 424). Almost in answer to Senf’s concerns are the works of Anne Rice: Interview with a Vampire and its sequel The Vampire Lestat. The format of the first book directly opposes Dracula’s structure, as it is framed as an interview from the vampire’s point of view, one that the vampire himself acknowledges as an opportunity that he desperately needs.

People are good at inventing their own forms of evil. As Rice’s more self-aware vampire describes his irritation at a priest’s “’immediate and shallow carping about the devil; his refusal to even entertain the idea that sanctity had passed so close,’” he points out that, “‘People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil.,’” because, ‘”Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult’” (Interview 13). To Van Helsing, bastion of civilization, Dracula is most valuable as a surmountable symbol of the evil that must be hunted. Rather than putting energy into masking and policing their own desires, “Becoming like Dracula, they too would be laws unto themselves—primitive, violent, irrational—with nothing to justify their actions except the force of their desires. No longer would they need to rationalize their ‘preying on the bodies and souls of their loved ones’ by concealing their lust for power under the rubric of religion, their love of violence under the names of imperialism and progress, their sexual desires within an elaborate courtship ritual.” (Senf 428) Best of all, the opposing force of Dracula’s greater Ultimate Evil validates the “lesser evil” that the team hunting Dracula falls victim to. Dracula then becomes purely evil in the narrative because that is what the narrators require from him. Johnathan quickly forgets Dracula’s sad, quite assertion that “’I, too, can love’” (Stoker 46); he learns to ignore any evidence of a soul.

Rice’s contribution flips the script and forces the narrative to truly follow and learn about the vampire. The darkness and foreignness that the vampire inherently represents cannot be pushed to the side. Even narrator of Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has a distinct accent which the interviewer placed but couldn’t mark (Interview 5). Even after centuries, the vampire is still the eternal wanderer, or as Dracula puts it, the eternal stranger: “’Well I know, that did I move and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger… a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not—and to know not is to care not for”’” (Stoker 27). And despite Johnathan’s reassurance that Dracula “’speak[s] English excellently!’” his first assessment of Dracula’s accent is to record the impression: “excellent English, but with a strange intonation,” (Stoker 22), revealing that he does indeed consciously mark Dracula’s otherness. As an outsider, these characters can safely be eternally shunned, as Lestat describes: “’You sense my loneliness… my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I’m evil, that I don’t deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily. My horror that I can never reveal myself to mortals’” (The 310). This speech does not describe someone who is evil: it describes someone who has been told that he is evil. He believes himself to be evil, unworthy of love, and unable to connect with humanity, and yet his desire for love and bitterness at being shut out proves the opposite. He is still just as much a person. He, too, can love.

The Longman Anthology includes this quote by John Morley, “it was the age of science, new knowledge, searching criticism, followed by multiple doubts and shaken beliefs.” The discoveries of Darwin and the accompanying implications of the contemporary early archaeology have thrown off thousands of years of faith in creationism and made them ridiculous.

May Kendall’s poem “The Lay of the Trilobite” playfully addresses humanity’s new-found upheaval over scientific revelations through the eyes of an ancient arthropod. “’How all your faiths are ghosts and dreams,/ How in the silent sea/ Your ancestors were Monotremes –/ Whatever these may be;/ How you evolved your shining lights/ Of wisdom and perfection/ From Jelly-Fish and Trilobites/ By Natural Selection” (l 25-32). The dismissal of the previously held beliefs as “ghosts and dreams” is excruciating to people who held creationism as not only true but holy up until now, and the apparently ridiculous new truth of natural selection is an especially hard pill to swallow with the ridiculous and degrading assertions that humans descended indirectly from plain animals: a monotreme (an animal that the speaker is unfamiliar with), jelly fish, and the comical and extinct trilobite.

In line 16 the speaker declares “And I should be a Man!” A triumphant statement in which the word man is capitalized and elevated, distinguishing its category above common nature. Up until Darwin’s proposals in On the Origin of Species, people were able to assume that their human form was indeed holy, made in God’s image. With the revelation the people may have simply evolved from beasts, educated society was thrown into tension. A theme strongly depicted in horror literature of the time is rooted in this new reality that humanity was not inherently separate from lower nature, including the absolute fear of regression. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, the titular Doctor attempts to construct new humans surgically from animals and watches them rapidly regress to their animalistic urges. Dracula, in contrast, fully embraces the holiness and nobility of man in an epic battle for the immortality of the human soul, in which the educated protagonists demonstrate their uniquely human nerve and unselfishness in the face of Dracula’s supernatural evil. May Kendall promptly pokes fun at both responses, pointing out the frenzied but circular nature of philosophy, saying “’You’ve Kant to make your brains go round,/ Hegel you have to clear them” (ll 33-34). Yet the Trilobite’s statement that “I never took to rhyme,” (l 54) Kendall draws attention to the absurdity of her own personification of the trilobite to prove a point, assuring readers that her own poem too is absurdist and should be given no more weight than any side of the argument.

In response to the Trilobite’s line “I didn’t care—I didn’t know/ That I was a Crustacean.’” Kendall includes the footnote that “He was not a Crustacean. He has since discovered that he was an Arachnid, or something similar. But he says it does not matter. He says they told him wrong once, and they may again.” Once again, Kendall’s Trilobite asserts that it does not matter. He ridicules both sides of the argument that humanity is so heavily invested in as pointless. Yet he refuses to fix his mistake. For the sake of a rhyme and correcting a technical inaccuracy of the poem, Kendall included this note, but it speaks so perfectly to the human resistance to changing a long-held view. As the Trilobite has observed, people don’t truly form an attachment to the logic of their stance but rather the simple familiarity of them. In this way, the scientific method is a deeply non-ergonomic design in which scientists continually readjust their beliefs and suspicions as to how the world works based off of new information. This naturally creates a distrust of the process that asks people to discard their old beliefs and never promises to be correct. It is uncomfortable, even to the Trilobite, who adopts a humanism in refusing to adjust his previous belief. (This same human tendency is represented in Dracula when Professor Van Helsing must slowly lead John Steward to the conclusion before him. Having built up the logic of one belief system all his life, Steward cannot bring himself to abandon it for the truth.)