\u201c\u2018We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Even when one has been wounded by it, Harry?\u2019 asked the duchess after a pause.<\/p>\n
\u2018Especially when one has been wounded by it,\u2019 answered Lord Henry.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The characters from The Picture of Dorian Gray <\/em>in the scene quoted above are talking about romantic experience, but their dialogue is ambiguous enough that it set me thinking about experience in general. How would their endorsement of experience \u2013 any experience, and at any cost \u2013 apply to the characters in the other novels we\u2019ve read, particularly The Island of Doctor Moreau <\/em>and Dracula<\/em>? The characters of the other novels are entirely focused on trying to end or escape their awful experiences, not savor them or milk them for future memories, and they have certainly been wounded by what has happened to them. Much of what renders their experiences so horrible is that they themselves are ordinary people, totally unprepared and unwilling to be thrust into the grotesque worlds of their stories. That is how the horror genre works: it emphasizes its outlandish events by setting against them people you could meet any day. The type of character has become an essential element of the genre.<\/p>\n The characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray, <\/em>on the other hand, pride themselves on not <\/em>being ordinary; at being superior to the vast masses of common, boring, good people. Thus they are able to enthuse about the value of experience without needing to qualify that it must be good or worthwhile. Is it possible to imagine them in the worlds of Dracula <\/em>or Doctor Moreau, <\/em>or would that genre fall apart if the characters placed in them are scarcely less appalling than the horrors that befall them? I think it would. I think that the ordinary people who populate horror stories are vital to the structure of the genre, since it achieves its effect by allowing the reader to inhabit the minds and fears of the characters \u2013 a difficult job if the characters are as bizarre and artificial as those in Dorian Gray.<\/em><\/p>\n What about the reverse \u2013 if the ordinary men and women of Dracula<\/em> were placed in the setting of Dorian Gray<\/em>? There the story\u2019s structure would fall apart as well, because someone like Mina Harker could not work within its artificiality \u2013 either she would be treated as a laughingstock by someone like Lord Henry, or she would simply leave Wilde\u2019s world of exquisite drawing rooms. Both in Dorian Gray <\/em>and in Dracula <\/em>and Doctor Moreau, <\/em>genre is dependent on character, and each genre has evolved its own kind of staple character to carry the novel\u2019s story and atmosphere. The ordinary person who stumbles into something awful is undeniably well known in horror, and a quick look at Oscar Wilde\u2019s other works \u2013 or at mannered comedy in general \u2013 bears out the similarity, and artificiality, of the typical characters. I suspect Oscar Wilde would hate to be told that he had anything in common with Dracula,<\/em> but the otherwise different genres share reliance on a particular type of character.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201c\u2018We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.\u2019 \u2018Even when one has been wounded by it, Harry?\u2019 asked the duchess after a pause. \u2018Especially when one has been wounded by it,\u2019 answered Lord Henry.\u201d The characters from … Continue reading How Essential is Character to Genre?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1581,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[123782,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-blog-post","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1581"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}