Author: may

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray comments on moral corruption through the abstract concepts of art. Dorian Gray acts as an innocent blank slate until Lord Henry fills his mind with misogynistic and unnecessarily cruel thoughts. But what if the true cause of Dorain’s corruption? Is Lord Henry fully responsible for influencing a young man into becoming serial killer? Was Dorian always a serial killer in waiting? Or perhaps the very vanity of art simply corrupted his soul.

Dorian adopts Lord Henry’s views without consideration. Specifically Lord Henry’s misogynistic views teach Dorian to be vain about his own beauty. Even though Sibyll is an actress, Lord Henry believes her actual acting performance will still be a “delightful experience” as long as if she is “lovely” and beautiful (Wilde 73). By claiming the key to maintaining youth, and therefore beauty, is to avoid “unbecoming emotions” (Wilde 73), he claims youth and beauty coincide. Additionally, emphasizing Sibyll’s beauty over her acting skills puts youth and beauty on a higher pedestal than skill, intellect, morals. Dorian, who wishes to stay young and beautiful, now believes he must be vain and proud, and not anything unbecoming, in order to keep his beauty. If Lord Henry claims Dorian’s “tragic” look was unbecoming (Wilde 73), then it’s not far of a stretch to say shame and guilt are also unbecoming. Dorian later commits murder and feels a warped sense of shame, lamenting how Basil dead body was like “a dreadful wax image” (Wilde 135), even though he merciless stabbed Basil himself several times. The portrait Basil painted of Dorian reflects his moral decline.

Yet Dorian keeps the portrait covered by a screen. It is only when he “drew the screen aside, and saw himself face to face” that he realized the portrait had in fact changed from a picture of innocence to Dorain with a sneer (Wilde 82). Upon seeing the portrait changed for the first time, Dorian hadn’t murdered Basil yet, but he had been cruel to Sibyll. Lord Henry had by then filled Dorian’s head with misogynistic views, but is he fully responsible for Dorian’s decline? Can a person really become a serial killer just by listening to a toxic jerk? Although the portrait changes in tandem with Dorian’s decline, Dorian doesn’t see the changes until he uncovers the portrait. In that way, the portrait acts as Schrodinger’s Cat, where the time it unchanged is unknown since it is only observed when the screen is removed. When did the portrait really change? Did it predict Dorina’s decline or simply illustrate it after the fact? If no one checked on the painting, would Dorian still corrupt, would the painting still show beauty instead of cruelty?

Vernon Lee’s Dionea tells the tale of Dionea, an exotic child found adrift from sea, through a man’s letters to his higher up. Although the purpose of the letters is to inform the higher up of their protégé, Dionea’s, progress, the letters mostly fixate on unrelated topics, such as Dionea’s exotic beauty and her supernatural powers. Since Dionea brewed love potions and celebrated mysterious deaths in town, the town treats her as a frightening, powerful supernatural. The man’s letters despise Dionea’s exotic beauty and mysterious powers since they do not adhere to the typical religious townswoman’s role.

In addition to beauty, the man emphasizes religion in many of his letters. When the town attempted to baptize Dionea as soon as they adopted her, “she kicked and plunged and yelled like twenty little devils, and positively would not let the holy water touch her” (Lee 5). The man notes that this failed baptism meant that Dionea had already been baptized, but his diction implies the opposite. By comparing Dionea to “twenty little devils” and specifying the water was “holy,” the diction implies that Dionea refused to ever be baptized because she is an unholy devil. Her supernatural powers often harm religious persons, which suggests her powers are unholy too. At one point Sor Agostino dies right in front of Dionea, which she happily terms “an accident from Heaven” (Lee 15).

Dionea strays from the town’s accepted roles for woman as much as she strays from their religious standards. When describing the exotic natural curls of Dionea’s hair, the man writes “I am glad she should be pretty, for she will more easily find a husband…Unfortunately, her character is not so satisfactory; she hates learning, sewing, washing up dishes” (Lee 6). Dionea detests typical chores women are excepted to take care of, like sewing and washing dishes. The man notes that at least Dionea’s beauty will get her a husband, since heterosexual marriage is part of a religious woman’s accepted role in society. Due to the town’s discomfort that a woman has power, they use religion and beauty to fit her back in her place, much like what Lucy experienced in Dracula

As soon as Lucy turned into a vampire, the men that had once loved her knew “had she then to be killed, I could have done it with savage delight” (Stoker 225). Vampires have more power than humans, considering vampires can kill humans by sucking their blood. The men view Lucy as pure when she is human, but unholy when she is a powerful vampire. They called her “callous as a devil” and claimed “her eyes blazed with unholy light” and warded her off with a crucifix, which she “recoiled” from (Stoker 226). Yet the men were still fixated on her beauty, noting her “languorous, voluptuous grace” and “wanton smile” (Stoker 226). Lucy falls into the same situation as Dionea, where they are both women with supernatural powers that humans fear. The men in both books use the women’s beauty to convert her back to the more traditional, powerless woman. For Dionea, the men use her feminine beauty as a reason to make her into a wife. For Lucy, they focus on how her beauty has become unholy as a result of vampirism, and determine she must be killed at once.

 

The Gothic novel Dracula is often praised for its fearsome nature, for its terrible monsters aimed to both horrify and terrify the audience. Bram Stoker translates this horror through the collection of documents and diaries that the main characters narrate together. As Senf points out, all of the narrators are human and they band together against the evil Count Dracula, but the vampire himself doesn’t narrate a single line in the story (424). Along with this narrative bias, Senf shows that Stoker’s young and inexperienced character with limited expertise are “ill-equipped to judge the extraordinary events with which they are faced” (423). Taking on Senf’s view that the narrators are unreliable, Dracula’s motives throughout the book, while still a mystery, shouldn’t immediately be assumed as evil.

During his stay at Dracula’s castle, Harker claims that he is a prisoner (33). The Count, however, tells Harker that “Not an hour shall you wait in my house against your will” (57). Dracula reassures Harker that he doesn’t intend to keep him against his will, like a prison, but Harker doubts Dracula’s good intentions every step of the way. Even at the door about to depart, Harker finds wolves with “champing teeth” blocking the door. Since the Dracula commands the wolves, Harker assumes “I was to be given to the wolves…There was a diabolical wickedness in the idea great enough for the Count” and Harker decides not to leave until morning. (58). Despite Dracula promising to let Harker leave whenever he wanted and constantly calling him a friend, Harker believes the Count would be “wicked” enough to feed him to wolves. But what if Harker gave up too early, right before Dracula had the chance to call off the wolves? The wolves may be bloodthirsty by nature, but Dracula never let any harm come to Harker while he stayed in the castle.

Throughout Harker’s stay in the Transylvanian Castle, Dracula both warns and protects Harker from supernatural harm. Earlier, Dracula warned “let me warn you with all seriousness, that should you leave these rooms you will not by any chance go to sleep in any other part of the castle…there are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely” (40). When Harker disregards this warning and sleeps in a different room, three bloodthirsty vampires appear and Harker remarks “I thought at the time I must be dreaming” (44). Before they can suck Harker’s blood, Dracula stops them and reminds them he had “forbidden” anyone to touch Harker (46). Here Dracula has saved Harker from supernatural harm he didn’t know existed. Dracula’s warning, as well, guides Harker to the safest parts of the castle without explicitly stating the terrifying truth of the existence of vampires. Dracula claims “bad dreams” come to those who sleep outside their room, and the three vampires are dream-like in their vampiric beauty and how their trance connected to some “dreamy fear” (45). Even though Harker often finds his bedroom door “had been locked after I left the Count” (59), trapping him as if it were a prison, Dracula more likely locked the vampires out of Harker’s room rather than lock him in. Similar to how Dracula commands the wolves, he commands the other vampires, and he let neither harm Harker at any time.

Yet Harker is convinced Dracula is planning to kill him purely on the basis that “He knows that I know too much, and that I must not live, lest I be dangerous to him” (49). This basis is more of an assumption, since Dracula has constantly protected Harker from harm. Despite Harker’s fears of murder, he returns home physically unharmed, but with mental shock. Shock is natural—supernatural creatures don’t exist in the everyday world, and Harker just met multiple vampires. Still Harker survived his visit to the castle, mostly thanks to the Count. Dracula never let the wolves or other vampires touch Harker at any point in the visit, nor did he suck Harker’s blood himself, nor did he kill Harker instead of releasing him. Harker’s resulting mental shock relates to “the question of sanity,” which Senf psychoanalyzes the many times the character question their own sanity, including that Harker suffered “a nervous breakdown” after leaving the castle (424). Perhaps Dracula was self-aware to know that humans would go mad if they knew of blood-sucking vampires, and so he hid the truth from Harker. But the human narrators, too mentally unstable to face supernatural terrors, couldn’t conceive the possibility of a supernatural vampire simply acting friendly.

The fin de siècle proved challenging times with the many advancements at the end of the century. Notably, Gothic novels told tales of fantastical monsters preying upon powerless humans, as portrayed by the vampires in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. During the same time period, the British Empire expanded and occupied nearly half the known world. Dracula exemplifies many aspects of the fin de siècle through its characters. In the passage where Lucy is first bit by a vampire, Dracula’s lust for blood mimics the actions of the ever-growing British Empire.

Stoker’s use of contrasting colors paints Lucy as the vulnerable innocent and Dracula as the unknown monster, as is the common dynamic in Gothic texts. In the passage where Mina searches for a lost sleeping-walking Lucy, she finds her friend asleep on their bench by the church with “something, long and black, bending over the half-reclining white figure” (101). Lucy’s position as a figure “half-reclining with her head lying over the back of the seat” leaves her vulnerable, with her neck exposed to any vampire that happens upon her, such as Dracula. As the audience, we know Dracula is the former figure since Mina later describes his “white face and red, gleaming eyes” (101), which are tell-tale vampire traits throughout the book. Furthermore, vampires are more monster than human as Mina notes that Dracula looked like “whether man or beast, I could not tell” (101). Mina continuously describes Dracula as “something dark” and Lucy as “snowy white” (101). In this way, Stoker associates dark, shadowed colors with Gothic monsters, in this case vampires, while pure white colors associate with innocent, helpless prey, such as humans. This contrast between the two figures fits the Gothic theme of unnatural monsters preying upon human victims.

The one anomaly to this color contrast is that Dracula, a dark figure, also has a “white face” (101), even though white is the color associated with Lucy and innocent humans. However, this anomaly allows Dracula to mirror the actions of the British Empire at the time of the fin de siècle. By 1919, the British Empire ruled most of the world, including Canada, Australia, parts of Africa, and multiple pieces of other continents (as depicted in the map from Washington Post shown in class). According to the Longman Anthology text, the Empire perceived this rapid expansion as their “duty to spread British order and culture throughout the world” (1064). This expansion led to some wars and displeasure from the conquered people, some of whom died in British concentration camps (Longman 1064). Interestingly, this duty was phrased “The White Man’s Burden,” and Dracula is a terrifying vampire with a “white face” who sucks blood in order to spread vampirism. Cambridge historian J.R. Seeley, in 1883, describes the empire’s expansion as one who seemed “to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence mind” (Longman 1064). Similarly, Dracula has “a fit of absent mind” since doesn’t care who his victims are—as long as if he eats blood to sustain himself, it doesn’t matter who it takes it from. The British Empire, to some extent, didn’t care who they conquered as long as if the resources from that continent sustained the empire.

The Longman Anthology also states that an Englishman had a duty similar to “The White Man’s Burden,” where he deserved to “rule whatever childlike or womanly peoples he came across” (1063). Lucy resembles both a childlike and womanlike figure. When Mina leads her freshly bitten friend home, she comments Lucy had “the obedience of a child.” As Lucy wakes from her sleep walking, Mina’s description of Lucy’s “moaning” and how she “always wakes prettily…she did not lose her grace” sexualizes her feminine beauty (102). Dracula’s preying upon whatever childlike and womanly peoples he comes across—since he can thrive off the blood of anyone—fits both the description of a Victorian Englishman and the broader implications of the British Empire conquering the world.

Even though Dracula is a foreigner from Transylvania in the novel, he perfects his Englishman façade and moves to England. Dracula, determined to pass as a real Englishman in every way, even learns to perfect the English accent (27). Dracula’s actions mirror not just an Englishman but the entire British Empire at the time. In the same way vampirism sucks the life out of others to selfishly empower the vampire, the British Empire’s expansion trampled foreign lands in order to empower the empire.