LICEO SCIENTIFICO DELLE SCIENZE APPLICATE
CLASSE V
INGLESE
- The Gothic Literature
- Mary Shelley and Frankenstein
- Robert Louis Stevenson and the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde
- Oscar Wilde and the Picture of Dorian Gray
- Edgar Allan Poe
- James Joyce and Ulysses
- T. S. Eliot and The Waste Land
- Virginia Woolf
- Siegfried Sassoon
- George Orwell
- Samuel Beckett
- Should or Ought to?
- May, Might and Could
- Present Perfect Continuos
- Past Perfect Simple
THE GOTHIC LITERATURE
What Is Gothic Literature?
Gothic literature is a deliciously terrifying blend of fiction and horror with a little romance thrown in. The Gothic novel has a long history, and although it has changed since 1765 when it began with Walpole's Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, it has maintained certain classic Gothic romantic elements, through Shelley's Frankensteinof 1818 and Stoker's infamous Dracula of 1897, until today, with authors like Stephen King. "Gothic Fiction" Is Often Called "Gothic Horror"
Elements and Conventions of Gothic Literature
• Dark, Abandoned, Decaying Settings. “Gothic” also alludes to a style of grand, ornate architecture in France in the 12th century. In Gothic lit, you see lots of haunted houses, cobwebbed castles, derelict churches, and other once-glorious architecture that has fallen into disrepair. You also see dark, cramped, and claustrophobic interiors with hidden doors and secret passageways, settings with hidden skeletons. The outside world in Gothic literature is usually portrayed as being a dark, wild, and treacherous place full of wrathful weather, malevolent forests, and ghostly graveyards.
• Romanticized Past. In line with its settings, Gothic lit often romanticizes and revisits the past.
• Plot conventions. Common Gothic plots include revenge, familial secrets, prophecies, and curses. The past is somehow still living, breathing, and controlling the drama.
• Horror. Gothic lit often elicits intense, suspenseful feelings of fear, shock, dread, or disgust in the reader.
• Supernatural Beings. Monsters, demons, witches, ghosts, banshees, vampires, and other supernatural creatures often play parts in Gothic fiction.
• Explorations of Romance and Sexuality. During uptight Victorian times, Gothic lit gave authors and readers an opportunity to explore romance and sexuality, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses, although usually in fairly heteronormative ways. Gothic sexuality is usually somewhat repressed—women are expected to be pure and somewhat helpless while men
are expected to be quietly predatory. It's also patriarchal, with men making moves and women reacting to them.
• Anti-Heroes. The Gothic protagonist is often portrayed as a flawed, lonesome, isolated, or outcast figure who has to overcome obstacles in order to rejoin society.
• Heavy Reliance on Symbolism. Characters, settings, and objects are weighted heavily with symbolic meaning in Gothic literature.
• Common Devices, Themes, and Motifs: Curses, prophecies, hauntings, insanity, psychological flips and twists, damsels in distress, women as victims, doppelgängers, fallen societies. . . you see these often in Gothic lit.
Characteristics of the Gothic Villain or Antagonist
• The Villain Is Dark and Alluring. The Gothic villain—usually male—is often extremely handsome, intelligent, successful, talented, and/or charming, although there is usually some telltale warning sign to warn us that his looks are deceiving. Gothic villains often pose as innocents or victims. (Think Lord Dracula, Heathcliff, and Dorian Gray.)
• Anti-Villain. Just as the hero or protagonist is typically flawed in Gothic lit, the villain often has extremely attractive qualities. Gothic lit likes to flirt with the boundary between good and evil and keep us guessing which is which. So the good guy might look like a monster when the bad guy is a total heart- breaker. Sometimes, you'll see a villain whose complex, conflicting psychology makes him the most interesting and likable character in the story. (See Byronic hero and Satanic hero.)
• Hero-Villain. A Gothic bad guy oftentimes has such such a sympathetic psychology and past that readers stop thinking in simple terms of black and white. He becomes a hybrid between bad and good.
What Is American Southern Gothic Literature?
Southern Gothic is a sub-genre of American Gothic fiction set in the South that uses ironic and macabre characters and scenes to highlight the South's implicit values and beliefs. So the purpose of Southern Gothic literature is to address the underlying
social and cultural issues of the South, and this makes it slightly more political than American Gothic literature in general.
Themes of Southern Gothic Literature
Southern Gothic lit often examines falls from former glory into decay, despair, and madness, the lasting effects of slavery and racism, the trials of a dispossessed Southern aristocracy, xenophobia, and class.
Southern Gothic Settings
You'll see many rural or antique Southern settings, plantations, grand antebellum houses, and old churches.
Examples of Southern Gothic:
• Dorothy Allison: Bastard Out of Carolina
• Truman Capote: Other Voices, Other Rooms
• Harry Crews: The Gospel Singer
• William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury
• Charlaine Harris: Sookie Stackhouse True Blood series
• Cormac McCarthy: Child of God, Blood Meridian
• Carson McCullers: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
• Toni Morrison: Beloved, The Bluest Eye
• Edgar Allan Poe: short stories like "Fall of the House of Usher"
• Anne Rice: The Vampire Chronicles series
• Eudora Welty: her novels and short stories
Where Did Gothic Literature Come From?
In many ways, the Gothic novel is a direct response to eighteenth century ideals of formal realism, which is why it is essential to understand formal realism in order to understand Gothic literature.
Formal realism is about creating a reality through the experience of one single character. It explores an individual's internal (rather than the external) drama and individual consciousness and perception. Furthermore, formal realism uses diction that is less elaborate and ornate than the literature of the past in order to reflect everyday life. Its overall goal is to educate the reader on both how to read and how to behave.
In Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel, he claims that Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Daniel Defoe are the authors of works that were the very beginnings of formal realism and the rise of the novel in eighteenth century England. He highlights how Richardson and Fielding in particular viewed themselves as the originators of a new form of writing as they turned away from the old romances. Furthermore, Watt says that
"if the novel were realistic merely because it saw life from the seamy side, it would only be an inverted romance; but in fact it surely attempts to portray all the varieties of human experience, and not merely those suited to one particular literary perspective: the novel’s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents but in the way it presents it."
Richardson's infamous novel, Pamela, and Fielding's Joseph Andrews are both clear examples of formal realism and how it portrays reality through they way the story is presented more than in the story itself.
Pamela is about the titular servant girl who finds herself in the service of a gentleman who attempts to seduce her. In the end, she gets married and becomes nobility, which is highly unrealistic for the times. However, it is presented in a series of letters with censored information (her lord is only ever called Mr. B), which seemed so real to audiences at the time that they actually believed Pamela Andrews existed.
Joseph Andrews is a response to Pamela in the form of a parody of sorts. Joseph is Pamela's brother and undergoes the same challenges in preserving his chastity as she does. In the end, he discovers he is actually of noble birth and marries a poor woman who is just as virtuous as he is. Unlike Pamela, this novel is in the form of a story told directly to the reader by the author. The use of a direct voice for the storyteller and references to the amount of research it took to find this story helps to make it seem like a real life story rather than fiction.
In the end, we must remember that Gothic lit is a response to formal realism and it strives to work in almost the complete opposite direction that formal realism did. The very basic aspect of Gothic fiction is that it does not strive to reflect everyday life, like the works of Fielding and Richardson. This is why, while reading a Gothic novel,
you can expect to find ghosts and other supernatural features absent from the works of formal realism.
Elements of a Gothic Novel
• Supernatural imagery. If asked to describe Gothic Literature, you might first think of dark and/or supernatural imagery, which are key devices used against the confines of realism.
• Elaborate diction. Where formal realism uses simple diction, Gothic novels go elaborate.
• External drama. Where formal realism focuses on the inner workings of the individual, Gothic novels home in on the environment and how all the character's actions come into play.
• Romance. A Gothic novel is something of an inverted romance, as it tends to see things from the seamy side.
• Blend of Fantasy and Realism. However, what makes Gothic Literature unique is not in the type of life it sees and represents but in how it blends the real with the imaginary. This blend produces terror because of the suspense and unpredictability associated with the paranormal and unknown and also makes the characters within Gothic Literature even more realistic than those in novels from other genres.
• Real People in Unreal Situations. No matter how fantastical and insane the situation is, a Gothic novel's characters always react in ways that are truer to everyday responses to these circumstances than the circumstances themselves, even providing natural explanations for what the reader knows is supernatural. This is a key element in Gothic Literature. Its blend of realism and fantasy means that the characters are developed as true to what they would be in the real world while they are place in situations that are completely unreal. To put it simply, Gothic Literature is about how real people react in unreal situations. For example, if a monk is offered a deal with the Devil he can't refuse, will he take it or just walk away?
In the end, it's pretty safe to say that the works of Gothic literature do everything formal realism would not even touch, which can either delight those readers who hate formal realism or disgust them with stories that seem too ridiculous to take seriously.
MARY SHELLEY AND FRANKENSTEIN
Life
Mary Shelley, born on 30 August, 1797, was a prominent, though often overlooked, literary figure during the Romantic Era of English Literature.
She was the only child of Mary Wollstonecraft, the famous feminist, and William Godwin, a philosopher and novelist. She was also the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary's parents were shapers of the Romantic sensibility and the revolutionary ideas of the left wing. Mary, Shelley, Byron, and Keats were principle figures in Romanticism's second generation. Whereas the poets died young in the 1820's, Mary lived through the Romantic era into the Victorian.
Mary was born during the eighth year of the French Revolution. From infancy, Mary was treated as a unique individual with remarkable parents. High expectations were placed on her potential and she was treated as if she were born beneath a lucky star. Godwin was convinced that babies are born with a potential waiting to be developed. From an early age she was surrounded by famous philosophers, writers, and poets. A peculiar sort of Gothicism was part of Mary's earliest existence. Most every day she would go for a walk with her father to the St. Pancras churchyard where her mother was buried. Godwin taught Mary to read and spell her name by having her trace her mother's inscription on the stone.
At the age of sixteen Mary ran away to live with the twenty-one year old Percy Shelley, the unhappily married radical heir to a wealthy baronetcy. To Mary, Shelley personified the genius and dedication to human betterment that she had admired her entire life. Although she was cast out of society, even by her father, this inspirational liaison produced her masterpiece, Frankenstein.
She conceived of Frankenstein during one of the most famous house parties in literary history when staying at Lake Geneva in Switzerland with Byron and Shelley. Interestingly enough, she was only nineteen at the time. She wrote the novel while being overwhelmed by a series of calamities in her life. The worst of these were the suicides of her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, and Shelly's wife, Harriet.
After the suicides, Mary and Shelley, reluctantly married. Fierce public hostility toward the couple drove them to Italy. Initially, they were happy in Italy, but their two young children died there. Mary never fully recovered from this trauma. (Their first child had died shortly after birth early in their relationship.) Nevertheless, Shelley empowered Mary to live as she most desired: to enjoy intellectual and artistic growth, love, and freedom.
When Mary was only twenty-four Percy drowned, leaving her penniless with a two year old son.
For her remaining twenty-nine years she engaged in a struggle with the societal disapproval of her relationship with Shelley. Poverty forced her to live in England which she despised because of the morality and social system. She was shunned by conventional circles and worked as a professional writer to support her father and her son. Her circle, however, included literary and theatrical figures, artists, and politicians.
She eventually came to more traditional views of women's dependence and differences, like her mother before her. This is not a denial of her courage and integrity but derived from socialization and the conventions placed on her by society. Mary became an invalid at the age of forty-eight. She died in 1851 of a brain tumour with poetic timing. The Great Exhibition, which was a showcase of technological progress, was opened. This was the same scientific technology that she had warned against in her most famous book, Frankenstein.
The "Birth" of a Monster
Frankenstein can be read as a tale of what happens when a man tries to create a child without a woman. It can, however, also be read as an account of a woman's anxieties and insecurities about her own creative and reproductive capabilities. The story of Frankenstein is the first articulation of a woman's experience of pregnancy and related fears. Mary Shelley, in the development and education of the monster, discusses child development and education and how the nurturing of a loving parent is extremely important in the moral development of an individual. Thus, in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley examines her own fears and thoughts about pregnancy, childbirth, and child development.
Pregnancy and childbirth, as well as death, was an integral part of Mary Shelley's young adult life. She had four children and a miscarriage that almost killed her. This
was all before the age of twenty-five. Only one of her children, Percy Florence, survived to adulthood and outlived her. In June of 1816, when she had the waking nightmare which became the catalyst of the tale, she was only nineteen and had already had her first two children. Her first child, Clara, was born prematurely February 22, 1815 and died March 6. Mary, as any woman would be, was devastated by this and took a long time to recover.
Mary's second child, William, was born January 24, 1816. (William died of malaria June 7,1819). Thus, at the time that Mary conceived of the story, her first child had died and her second was only 6 months old. There is no doubt that she expected to be pregnant again and about six months later she was. Pregnancy and child-rearing was at the forefront of Mary's mind at this point in her life.
Frankenstein is probably the first story in Western literature that expresses the anxieties of pregnancy. Obviously male writers avoided this topic and it was considered taboo and in poor taste for a woman to discuss it. Mary's focus on the birth process allowed men to understand female fears about pregnancy and reassured women that they were not alone with their anxieties. The story expresses Mary's deepest fears; What of my child is born deformed? Could I still love it or would I wish it were dead? What if I can't love my child? Am I capable of raising a healthy, normal child? Will my child die? Could I wish my own child to die? Will my child kill me in childbirth? Mary was expressing her fears related to the death of her first child, her ability to nurture, and the fact that her mother died having her. All of this is expresses in Victor Frankenstein's complete failure in parenting.
Victor Frankenstein laboured on the creation of his "child". Finally on a "dreary night in November: he witnesses the "birth":
"I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."
Instead of reaching out to his child, Victor rushes out of the room disgusted by the abnormality of his creation. When the creature follows after him, Victor runs away in horror completely abandoning his child.
While creating his child, Victor never considered whether this creature would even want to exist. He also didn't take enough care with the creature's appearance. He could not take the time to make small parts so he created a being of gigantic size. Victor never considered how such a creature would be able to exist with human beings. He did not take time with the features either and created a being with a horrifying appearance. Unable to accept his creation, Victor abandons his "child" and all parental responsibility. He even wishes that his "child" were dead.
"I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed, and I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I has so thoughtlessly bestowed"
From the moment of the creature's birth, Victor thought of it as demonical and abused it. Frankenstein represents the classic case of an abused and neglected child growing up to be a abuser. The monster's first murder victim is a small child that he wished to adopt. As Mary Shelley wrote the novel, she began to focus more closely on the plight of the abandoned child. The heart of the novel is the creature's discussion of his own development.
The creature, himself, realizes that a child that is deprived of a loving family becomes a monster. The creature repeatedly insists that he was born good but compelled by others to do evil. Mary Shelley bases this argument in Rousseau'sEmile and Second Discourse. Mary's account of the creature's mental and moral development follows the theories of David Hartley and John Locke.
Mary Shelley read Rousseau's Emile in 1816. Rousseau stated that:
God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil."
Rousseau specifically attributed moral failings to the lack of a mother's love. Without mothering and a loving education " a man left to himself from birth would be more of a monster that the rest."
Thus, Mary Shelley is suggesting that a rejected and unmothered child can become a killer, especially a killer of its own family.
Even without the proper nurturing the creature manages to get an education. Mary alludes to Rousseau's theory of the natural man as a noble savage, born free but in chains and corrupted by society. In the battle of nature vs. nurture for development, Mary definitely sides with nurture. The creature is Rousseau's natural man, a creature no different from the animals responding only to physical needs. It is only later through contact with the DeLaceys (society) that the creature develops a consciousness and realizes that he is a societal outcast. While alluding to a couple of Rousseau's ideas, in particular the natural man, Mary Shelley utilized the theories of Hartley and Locke for the development and education of the creature.
The creature's moral development follows David Hartley's theories in Observations of Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations(1749) and Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding(1690). David Hartley argued that early sensitive experience determines adult behaviour and John Locke argued that man is neither innately good nor innately evil but is rather a "blank slate" on which sensations creates impressions which later become conscious experience. The creature first experiences the physical sensations of light, dark, heat, cold, hunger, and pain. This was his period of infancy where he felt the sensations but had no conscious
expression of them. Through time and experience the creature eventually learns to distinguish the various sensations and how to remedy them. He learns to gather food, clothe himself, and acquire shelter. In other words, his sensitive experiences cause him to learn for them and provide for his basic necessities. The creature obtains a moral and intellectual education through his observation of the DeLacey family, who lived in the cottage adjoining his hovel. The DeLacey's provide the creature with an example of a loving, kind, and virtuous family. They stimulate his emotions and inspire him to do good deeds for others (he secretly collects firewood for the family). Through the creature's observation of the DeLacey family, the creature is also stimulated intellectually and is introduced to spoken and written language. Mary Shelley traces the linguistic development of the creature from his earliest acquisition to his ability to grasp abstract concepts and eventually read and write.
Not only does the creature learn morality and virtue from the DeLacey family but also acquires a small library, which enlarges his knowledge of human vice and virtue. From Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Romans he learns about human virtue, heroism, and civil justice. In his reading of Milton's Paradise Lost, he learns the origins of good and evil as well as the roles of the sexes. Finally, in Goethe's The Sorrows of Werther he learns of the range of emotions, from love to depression and despair. The creature also read and received moral lessons from Aesop's Fables and The Bible.
The creature received an excellent education but unfortunately this caused greater distancing from his previous state of "natural man". Once the creature left the state of nature and learned the language and laws of society, he gained a self-consciousness; a self-consciousness of his own isolation from humanity.
I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow-creatures were, high and unsullied descent united with riches...but...I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endowed with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome;...When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me... I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had ever remained in my native wood, nor known or felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat! p. 115
After being rejected by Victor Frankenstein, his father, the DeLacey family, and society, the creature abandons all good and lives out a course of vengeance against Frankenstein. He murders those close to Frankenstein and eventually leads Victor on a journey that will destroy both of them. Even though the creature received a moral and intellectual education, the lack of a nurturing and loving parent as well as companionship and acceptance from society led him to reject morality and instead destroy. The creature as well as the reader realized that he would have been better off without the education. If he wasn't going to have love and acceptance, it would have
probably been best for him to live in an animal like state without a developed consciousness that made him realize how alone he was. Victor never realizes that his lack of parental love and guidance is what led to the creature's murderous path. He only felt guilt from having created the creature. If Victor had only been a loving parent, the creature could have probably overcome all other obstacles and remained moral.
Mary Shelley and the Desire to Acquire Knowledge: As Demonstrated in the Novel Frankenstein
Through the study of Mary Shelley's journals and her biography, one becomes aware of how important study and research were to her. Her biography tells how the influence of her literary parents and husband provided her with a unique educational experience and how she was encouraged to conduct research. She had a great love of research and knowledge and used her studies in her creative output.
The voice of Victor Frankenstein provides evidence that Mary Shelley did not believe that all knowledge was "good" knowledge and instead thought that there were some areas that were beyond human understanding and should not be pursued. Obviously, Victor Frankenstein's desire to explore the mystery of biological creation belonged to the realm of knowledge that should not pursued and that can only lead to dire consequences. Walden was also following the same quest in his search for a passage through the Arctic regions. Only by hearing the tale of Frankenstein is he dissuaded from his pursuit and turns back toward home rather than placing his crew members in mortal danger.
Many of the works that Mary Shelley studied are evident in the voice and character of Frankenstein's monster and through this character the reader is given a demonstration of the pursuit of knowledge as related to one's search for his origins.
The most significant mark of the monster's alienation from society was his lack of a name. The absence of a name denies the monster the knowledge of who he is, his familial origins, and a connection to successive generations (Duyfhuizen, 480). The monster's lack of a name and place in society, which caused him such distress, is shown in the following passage when he his narrating his experiences to Victor.
Mary may have also felt, at times, as the monster does in the above passage. She was human, like all others, but had parents who were political radicals, had a singular educational experience, had the origin of her own creation published for the entire world to read, and ran off with a married man. The combination of the above experiences set Mary apart from society and caused her to feel the isolation and alienation of an outcast; an outcast like her monster and Milton's Satan. She differs
from the monster in that she is notorious for her name, not her appearance, while the monster has no name and is instead an outcast due to the differences in the way he appears to others. In many ways Mary Shelley saw herself as the monster that she created and identified further with the monster by having him read the same works that she did.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON AND THE STRANGE CASE OF
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
Early Life
Stevenson was the only son of Thomas Stevenson, a prosperous civil engineer, and his wife, Margaret Isabella Balfour. His poor health made regular schooling difficult, but he attended Edinburgh Academy and other schools before, at age 17, entering Edinburgh University, where he was expected to prepare himself for the family profession of lighthouse engineering. But Stevenson had no desire to be an engineer, and he eventually agreed with his father, as a compromise, to prepare instead for the Scottish bar.
He had shown a desire to write early in life, and once in his teens he had deliberately set out to learn the writer’s craft by imitating a great variety of models in prose and verse. His youthful enthusiasm for the Covenanters (i.e., those Scotsmen who had banded together to defend their version of Presbyterianism in the 17th century) led to his writing The Pentland Rising, his first printed work. During his years at the university he rebelled against his parents’ religion and set himself up as a liberal bohemian who abhorred the alleged cruelties and hypocrisies of bourgeois respectability.
In 1873, in the midst of painful differences with his father, he visited a married cousin in Suffolk, England, where he met Sidney Colvin, the English scholar, who became a lifelong friend, and Fanny Sitwell (who later married Colvin). Sitwell, an older woman of charm and talent, drew the young man out and won his confidence. Soon Stevenson was deeply in love, and on his return to Edinburgh he wrote her a series of letters in which he played the part first of lover, then of worshipper, then of son. One of the several names by which Stevenson addressed her in these letters was “Claire,” a fact that many years after his death was to give rise to the erroneousnotion that Stevenson had had an affair with a humbly born Edinburgh girl of that name. Eventually the passion turned into a lasting friendship.
Later in 1873 Stevenson suffered severe respiratory illness and was sent to the French Riviera, where Colvin later joined him. He returned home the following spring. In July 1875 he was called to the Scottish bar, but he never practiced. Stevenson was frequently abroad, most often in France. Two of his journeys produced An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879). His career as a writer developed slowly. His essay “Roads” appeared in the Portfolio in 1873, and in
1874 “Ordered South” appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine, a review of Lord Lytton’s Fables in Song appeared in the Fortnightly, and his first contribution (on Victor Hugo) appeared in The Cornhill Magazine, then edited by Leslie Stephen, a critic and biographer. It was these early essays, carefully wrought, quizzically meditative in tone, and unusual in sensibility, that first drew attention to Stevenson as a writer.
Stephen brought Stevenson into contact with Edmund Gosse, the poet and critic, who became a good friend. Later, when in Edinburgh, Stephen introduced Stevenson to the writer W.E. Henley. The two became warm friends and were to remain so until 1888, when a letter from Henley to Stevenson containing a deliberately implied accusation of dishonesty against the latter’s wife precipitated a quarrel that Henley, jealous and embittered, perpetuated after his friend’s death in a venomous review of a biography of Stevenson.
In 1876 Stevenson met Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, an American lady separated from her husband, and the two fell in love. Stevenson’s parents’ horror at their son’s involvement with a married woman subsided somewhat when she returned to California in 1878, but it revived with greater force when Stevenson decided to join her in August 1879. Stevenson reached California ill and penniless (the record of his arduous journey appeared later in The Amateur Emigrant, 1895, and Across the Plains, 1892). His adventures, which included coming very near death and eking out a precarious living in Monterey and San Francisco, culminated in marriage to Fanny Osbourne (who was by then divorced from her first husband) early in 1880. About the same time a telegram from his relenting father offered much-needed financial support, and, after a honeymoon by an abandoned silver mine (recorded in The Silverado Squatters, 1883), the couple sailed for Scotland to achieve reconciliation with the Thomas Stevensons.
Romantic Novels
Soon after his return, Stevenson, accompanied by his wife and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, went, on medical advice (he had tuberculosis), to Davos, Switzerland. The family left there in April 1881 and spent the summer in Pitlochry and then in Braemar, Scotland. There, in spite of bouts of illness, Stevenson embarked on Treasure Island (begun as a game with Lloyd), which started as a serial in Young Folks, under the title The Sea-Cook, in October 1881. Stevenson finished the story in Davos, to which he had returned in the autumn, and then started on Prince Otto (1885), a more complex but less successful work. Treasure Island is an adventure presented with consummate skill, with atmosphere, character, and action
superbly geared to one another. The book is at once a gripping adventure tale and a wry comment on the ambiguity of human motives.
Robert Louis Stevenson, 1880.
In 1881 Stevenson published Virginibus Puerisque, his first collection of essays, most of which had appeared in The Cornhill. The winter of 1881 he spent at a chalet in Davos. In April 1882 he left Davos; but a stay in the Scottish Highlands, while it resulted in two of his finest short stories, “Thrawn Janet” and “The Merry Men,” produced lung hemorrhages, and in September he went to the south of France. There the Stevensons finally settled at a house in Hyères, where, in spite of intermittent illness, Stevenson was happy and worked well. He revised Prince Otto, worked on A Child’s Garden of Verses (first called Penny Whistles), and began The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1888), a historical adventure tale deliberately written in anachronistic language.
The threat of a cholera epidemic drove the Stevensons from Hyères back to Britain. They lived at Bournemouth from September 1884 until July 1887, but his frequent bouts of dangerous illness proved conclusively that the British climate, even in the south of England, was not for him. The Bournemouth years were fruitful, however. There he got to know and love the American novelist Henry James. There he revised A Child’s Garden (first published in 1885) and wrote “Markheim,” Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The poems in A Child’s Garden represent with extraordinary fidelity an adult’s recapturing of the emotions and sensations of childhood; there is nothing else quite like them in English literature. In Kidnapped the fruit of his researches into 18th-century Scottish history and of his feeling for Scottish landscape, history, character, and local atmosphere
mutually illuminate one another. But it was Dr.Jekyll—both moral allegory and thriller—that established his reputation with the ordinary reader.
In August 1887, still in search of health, Stevenson set out for America with his wife, mother, and stepson. On arriving in New York, he found himself famous, with editors and publishers offering lucrative contracts. He stayed for a while in the Adirondack Mountains, where he wrote essays for Scribner’s and began The Master of Ballantrae. This novel, another exploration of moral ambiguities, contains some of his most impressive writing, although it is marred by its contrived conclusion.
Life In The South Seas
In June 1888 Stevenson, accompanied by his family, sailed from San Francisco in the schooner yacht Casco, which he had chartered, on what was intended to be an excursion for health and pleasure. In fact, he was to spend the rest of his life in the South Seas. They went first to the Marquesas Islands, then to Fakarava Atoll, then to Tahiti, then to Honolulu, where they stayed nearly six months, leaving in June 1889 for the Gilbert Islands, and then to Samoa, where he spent six weeks.
During his months of wandering around the South Sea islands, Stevenson made intensive efforts to understand the local scene and the inhabitants. As a result, his writings on the South Seas (In the South Seas, 1896; A Footnote to History, 1892) are admirably pungent and perceptive. He was writing first-rate journalism, deepened by the awareness of landscape and atmosphere, such as that so notably rendered in his description of the first landfall at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas.
In October 1890 he returned to Samoa from a voyage to Sydney and established himself and his family in patriarchal status at Vailima, his house in Samoa. The climate suited him; he led an industrious and active life; and, when he died suddenly, it was of a cerebral hemorrhage, not of the long-feared tuberculosis. His work during those years was moving toward a new maturity. While Catriona (U.S. title, David Balfour, 1893) marked no advance in technique or imaginative scope on Kidnapped, to which it is a sequel, The Ebb-Tide (1894), a grim and powerful tale written in a dispassionate style (it was a complete reworking of a first draft by Lloyd Osbourne), showed that Stevenson had reached an important transition in his literary career. The next phase was demonstrated triumphantly in Weir of Hermiston (1896), the unfinished masterpiece on which he was working on the day of his death. “The Beach of Falesá” (first published 1892; included in Island Night’s Entertainments, 1893), a story with a finely wrought tragic texture, as well as the first part of The Master of Ballantrae, pointed in this direction, but neither approaches Weir. Stevenson achieved in this work a remarkable richness of tragic
texture in a style stripped of all superfluities. The dialogue contains some of the best Scots prose in modern literature. Fragment though it is, Weir of Hermiston stands as a great work and Stevenson’s masterpiece.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Inspiration and writing
Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson had long been intrigued by the idea of how human personalities can affect how to incorporate the interplay of good and evil into a story. While still a teenager, he developed a script for a play about Deacon Brodie, which he later reworked with the help of W. E. Henley and which was produced for the first time in 1882. In early 1884, he wrote the short story "Markheim", which he revised in 1884 for publication in a Christmas annual. According to his essay, "A Chapter on Dreams" (Scribner's, Jan. 1888), he racked his brains for an idea for a story and had a dream, and upon wakening had the intuition for two or three scenes that would appear in the story Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Biographer Graham Balfour quoted Stevenson's wife Fanny Stevenson:
In the small hours of one morning,[...]I was awakened by cries of horror from Louis. Thinking he had a nightmare, I awakened him. He said angrily: "Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale." I had awakened him at the first transformation scene.
Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson's stepson, wrote: "I don't believe that there was ever such a literary feat before as the writing of Dr Jekyll. I remember the first reading as though it were yesterday. Louis came downstairs in a fever; read nearly half the book
aloud; and then, while we were still gasping, he was away again, and busy writing. I doubt if the first draft took so long as three days."
Inspiration may also have come from the writer's friendship with Edinburgh-based French teacher Eugene Chantrelle, who was convicted and executed for the murder of his wife in May 1878. Chantrelle, who had appeared to lead a normal life in the city, poisoned his wife with opium. According to author Jeremy Hodges, Stevenson was present throughout the trial and as "the evidence unfolded he found himself, like Dr Jekyll, 'aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde'." Moreover, it was believed that the teacher had committed other murders both in France and Britain by poisoning his victims at supper parties with a "favourite dish of toasted cheese and opium".
Louis Vivet, a mental patient who was suffering from dissociative identity disorder, caught Frederic W. H. Myers's attention and he wrote to Stevenson after the story was published. Stevenson was polite in his response but rejected that reading. As was customary, Mrs Stevenson would read the draft and offer her criticisms in the margins. Robert Stevenson was confined to bed at the time from a haemorrhage. Therefore, she left her comments with the manuscript and Robert in the toilet. She said that in effect the story was really an allegory, but Robert was writing it as a story. After a while, Robert called her back into the bedroom and pointed to a pile of ashes: he had burnt the manuscript in fear that he would try to salvage it, and in the process forced himself to start again from nothing, writing an allegorical story as she had suggested. Scholars debate whether he really burnt his manuscript; there is no direct factual evidence for the burning, but it remains an integral part of the history of the novella.
Stevenson re-wrote the story in three to six days. A number of later biographers have alleged that Stevenson was on drugs during the frantic re-write; for example, William Gray's revisionist history A Literary Life (2004) said he used cocaine while other biographers said he used ergot. However, the standard history, according to the accounts of his wife and son (and himself), says he was bed-ridden and sick while writing it. According to Osbourne, "The mere physical feat was tremendous and, instead of harming him, it roused and cheered him inexpressibly". He continued to refine the work for four to six weeks after the initial re-write. The novella was written in the southern English seaside town of Bournemouth, where Stevenson had moved due to ill health, to benefit from its sea air and warmer southern climate.
The name Jekyll was borrowed from Reverend Walter Jekyll, a friend of Stevenson and younger brother of horticulturalist and landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll.
Plot
Gabriel John Utterson and his cousin Richard Enfield reach the door of a large house on their weekly walk. Enfield tells Utterson that months ago he saw a sinister-looking man named Edward Hyde trample a young girl after accidentally bumping into her. Enfield forced Hyde to pay £100 to avoid a scandal. Hyde brought them to this door and provided a cheque signed by a reputable gentleman (later revealed to be Doctor Henry Jekyll, a friend and client of Utterson). Utterson is disturbed because Jekyll recently changed his will to make Hyde the sole beneficiary. Utterson fears that Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll. When Utterson tries to discuss Hyde with Jekyll, Jekyll turns pale and asks that Hyde be left alone.
One night in October, a servant sees Hyde beat to death Sir Danvers Carew, another of Utterson's clients. The police contact Utterson, who leads officers to Hyde's apartment. Hyde has vanished, but they find half of a broken cane. Utterson recognizes the cane as one he had given to Jekyll. Utterson visits Jekyll, who shows Utterson a note, allegedly written to Jekyll by Hyde, apologising for the trouble that he has caused. However, Hyde's handwriting is similar to Jekyll's own, leading Utterson to conclude that Jekyll forged the note to protect Hyde.
For two months, Jekyll reverts to his former sociable manner, but in early January, he starts refusing visitors. Dr Hastie Lanyon, a mutual acquaintance of Jekyll and Utterson, dies of shock after receiving information relating to Jekyll. Before his death, Lanyon gives Utterson a letter to be opened after Jekyll's death or disappearance. In late February, during another walk with Enfield, Utterson starts a conversation with Jekyll at a window of his laboratory. Jekyll suddenly slams the window and disappears.
In early March, Jekyll's butler, Mr. Poole, visits Utterson and says Jekyll has secluded himself in his laboratory for weeks. Utterson and Poole break into the laboratory, where they find Hyde wearing Jekyll's clothes and apparently dead from suicide. They find a letter from Jekyll to Utterson. Utterson reads Lanyon's letter, then Jekyll's. Lanyon's letter reveals his deterioration resulted from the shock of seeing Hyde drink a serum that turned him into Jekyll. Jekyll's letter explains that he had indulged in unstated vices and feared discovery. He found a way to transform himself and thereby indulge his vices without fear of detection. Jekyll's transformed personality, Hyde, was evil, self-indulgent, and uncaring to anyone but himself. Initially, Jekyll controlled the transformations with the serum, but one night in August, he became Hyde involuntarily in his sleep.
Jekyll resolved to cease becoming Hyde. One night, he had a moment of weakness and drank the serum. Hyde, furious at having been caged for so long, killed Carew. Horrified, Jekyll tried more adamantly to stop the transformations. Then, in early January, he transformed involuntarily while awake. Far from his laboratory and hunted by the police as a murderer, Hyde needed help to avoid capture. He wrote to
Lanyon (in Jekyll's hand), asking his friend to bring chemicals from his laboratory. In Lanyon's presence, Hyde mixed the chemicals, drank the serum, and transformed into Jekyll. The shock of the sight instigated Lanyon's deterioration and death. Meanwhile, Jekyll's involuntary transformations increased in frequency and required ever larger doses of serum to reverse. It was one of these transformations that caused Jekyll to slam his window shut on Enfield and Utterson.
Eventually, one of the chemicals used in the serum ran low, and subsequent batches prepared from new stocks failed to work. Jekyll speculated that one of the original ingredients must have some unknown impurity that made it work. Realizing that he would stay transformed as Hyde, Jekyll decided to write his "confession". He ended the letter by writing, "I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end." With these words, both the document and the novella come to a close.
Characters
Gabriel John Utterson
Gabriel John Utterson, a lawyer and loyal friend of Jekyll and Lanyon, is the main protagonist of the story. Utterson is a measured and at all times emotionless, bachelor – who nonetheless seems believable, trustworthy, tolerant of the faults of others, and indeed genuinely likable. Utterson has been close friends with Lanyon and Jekyll. However, Utterson is not immune to guilt, as, while he is quick to investigate and judge the faults of others even for the benefit of his friends, Stevenson states that "he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done". Whatever these "ill things" may be, he does not partake in gossip or other views of the upper class out of respect for his fellow man. Often the last remaining friend of the down-falling, he finds an interest in others' downfalls, which creates a spark of interest not only in Jekyll but also regarding Hyde. He comes to the conclusion that human downfall results from indulging oneself in topics of interest. As a result of this line of reasoning, he lives life as a recluse and "dampens his taste for the finer items of life". Utterson concludes that Jekyll lives life as he wishes by enjoying his occupation. Utterson is a good, kind, loyal and honest friend to Henry Jekyll.
Dr Henry Jekyll/Mr Edward Hyde
Dr Jekyll is a "large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty with something of a slyish cast", who occasionally feels he is battling between the good and evil within himself, leading to the struggle between his dual personalities of Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde. He has spent a great part of his life trying to repress evil urges that
were not fitting for a man of his stature. He creates a serum, or potion, in an attempt to mask this hidden evil within his personality. However, in doing so, Jekyll transformed into the smaller, younger, cruel, remorseless, evil Hyde. Jekyll has many friends and an amiable personality, but as Hyde, he becomes mysterious and violent. As time goes by, Hyde grows in power. After taking the potion repeatedly, he no longer relies upon it to unleash his inner demon, i.e., his alter ego. Eventually, Hyde grows so strong that Jekyll becomes reliant on the potion to remain conscious.
Richard Enfield
Richard Enfield is Utterson's cousin and is a well known "man about town." He first sees Hyde at about three in the morning in an episode that is well documented as Hyde is running over a little girl. He is the person who mentions to Utterson the actual personality of Jekyll's friend, Hyde. Enfield witnessed Hyde running over a little girl in the street recklessly, and the group of witnesses, with the girl's parents and other residents, force Hyde into writing a cheque for the girl's family. Enfield discovers that Jekyll signed the cheque, which is genuine. He says that Hyde is disgusting looking but finds himself stumped when asked to describe the man.
Dr Hastie Lanyon
A longtime friend of Jekyll's, Hastie Lanyon disagrees with Jekyll's "scientific" concepts, which Lanyon describes as "...too fanciful". He is the first person to discover Hyde's true identity (Hyde transforms himself back into Jekyll in Lanyon's presence). Lanyon helps Utterson solve the case when he describes the letter given to him by Jekyll and his thoughts and reactions to the transformation. When Lanyon witnesses the transformation process (and subsequently hears Jekyll's private confession, made to him alone), Lanyon becomes critically ill and later dies of shock.
Mr Poole
Poole is Jekyll's butler who has lived with him for many years. Upon noticing the reclusiveness and changes of his master, Poole goes to Utterson with the fear that his master has been murdered and his murderer, Mr Hyde, is residing in the chambers. Poole serves Jekyll faithfully and attempts to do a good job and be loyal to his master. Yet events finally drive him into joining forces with Utterson to find the truth.
Inspector Newcomen
Utterson joins this Scotland Yard inspector after the murder of Sir Danvers Carew. They explore Hyde's loft in Soho and discover evidence of his depraved life.
Sir Danvers Carew, MP
A kind, white-haired old man and a Member of Parliament. The maid claims that Hyde, in a murderous rage, killed Carew in the streets of London on the night of 18 October (sometime between 11 pm and 2 am by the testimony of the maid). At the time of his death, Carew is 70 years old and is carrying on his person a letter addressed to Utterson, and they find one half of one of Jekyll's walking sticks on his body. As a result, they later go and investigate in Jekyll's house, but cannot find him; they later enter a house where Hyde has been living and find the other half of the stick in one of Hyde's rooms.
Maid
A maid, whose employer Hyde had once visited, is the only person who claims to have witnessed the murder of Sir Danvers Carew. She states that she saw Hyde murder Carew with Jekyll's cane and his feet. Having fainted after seeing what happened, she then wakes up and rushes to the police, thus initiating the murder case of Sir Danvers Carew.
Dualities
The novella is frequently interpreted as an examination of the duality of human nature, usually expressed as an inner struggle between good and evil, with variations such as human versus animal, civilization versus barbarism sometimes substituted, the main thrust being that of an essential inner struggle between the one and other, and that the failure to accept this tension results in evil, or barbarity, or animal violence, being projected onto others. In Freudian theory, the thoughts and desires banished to the unconscious mind motivate the behaviour of the conscious mind. Banishing evil to the unconscious mind in an attempt to achieve perfect goodness can result in the development of a Mr Hyde-type aspect to one's character. In Christian theology, Satan's fall from Heaven is due to his refusal to accept that he is a created being (that he has a dual nature) and is not God. This idea is suggested when Hyde
says to Lanyon, shortly before drinking the famous potion, "...and your sight shall be blasted by a prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan." This is because in Christianity, pride (to consider oneself as without sin or without evil) is a sin, as it is the precursor to evil itself.
In his discussion of the novel, Vladimir Nabokov argues that the "good versus evil" view of the novel is misleading, as Jekyll himself is not, by Victorian standards, a morally good person in some cases.
Public vs private
The work is commonly associated today with the Victorian concern over the public and private division, the individual's sense of playing a part and the class division of London. In this respect, the novella has also been noted as "one of the best guidebooks of the Victorian era" because of its piercing description of the fundamental dichotomy of the 19th century "outward respectability and inward lust", as this period had a tendency for social hypocrisy.
Scottish nationalism vs union with Britain
Another common interpretation sees the novella's duality as representative of Scotland and the Scottish character. In this reading, the duality represents the national and linguistic dualities inherent in Scotland's relationship with the wider Britain and the English language, respectively, and also the repressive effects of the Church of Scotland on the Scottish character. A further parallel is also drawn with the city of Edinburgh itself, Stevenson's birthplace, which consists of two distinct parts: the old medieval section historically inhabited by the city's poor, where the dark crowded slums were rife with all types of crime, and the modern Georgian area of wide spacious streets representing respectability.
Publication
The book was initially sold as a paperback for one shilling in the UK and for one dollar in the U.S. These books were called "shilling shockers" or penny dreadfuls. The American publisher issued the book on 5 January 1886, four days before the first appearance of the UK edition issued by Longmans; Scribner's published 3000 copies, only 1250 of them bound in cloth. Initially, stores did not stock it until a review appeared in The Times on 25 January 1886 giving it a favourable reception. Within the next six months, close to forty thousand copies were sold. As Stevenson's biographer Graham Balfour wrote in 1901, the book's success was probably due rather to the "moral instincts of the public" than to any conscious
perception of the merits of its art. It was read by those who never read fiction and quoted in pulpit sermons and in religious papers. By 1901, it was estimated to have sold over 250,000 copies in the United States.
The stage version of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Although the book had initially been published as a "shilling shocker", it was an immediate success and one of Stevenson's best-selling works. Stage adaptations began in Boston and London and soon moved all across England and then towards his home country of Scotland.
The first stage adaptation followed the story's initial publication in 1886. Richard Mansfield bought the rights from Stevenson and worked with Boston author Thomas Russell Sullivan to write a script. The resulting play added to the cast of characters and some elements of romance to the plot. Addition of female characters to the originally male-centered plot continued in later adaptations of the story. The first performance of the play took place in the Boston Museum in May 1887. The lighting effects and makeup for Jekyll's transformation into Hyde created horrified reactions from the audience, and the play was so successful that production followed in London. After a successful ten weeks in London in 1888, Mansfield was forced to close down production. The hysteria surrounding the Jack the Ripper serial murders led even those who only played murderers on stage to be considered suspects. When Mansfield was mentioned in London newspapers as a possible suspect for the crimes, he shut down production.
OSCAR WILDE AND THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
Life
Oscar Wilde, in full Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, (born October 16, 1854, Dublin, Ireland—died November 30, 1900, Paris, France), Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose reputation rests on his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). He was a spokesman for the late 19th-century Aesthetic movement in England, which advocated art for art’s sake, and he was the object of celebrated civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality and ending in his imprisonment (1895–97).
Wilde was born of professional and literary parents. His father, Sir William Wilde, was Ireland’s leading ear and eye surgeon, who also published books on archaeology, folklore, and the satirist Jonathan Swift. His mother, who wrote under the name Speranza, was a revolutionary poet and an authority on Celtic mythand folklore.
After attending Portora Royal School, Enniskillen (1864–71), Wilde went, on successive scholarships, to Trinity College, Dublin (1871–74), and Magdalen College, Oxford (1874–78), which awarded him a degree with honours. During these four years, he distinguished himself not only as a Classical scholar, a poseur, and a wit but also as a poet by winning the coveted Newdigate Prize in 1878 with a long poem, Ravenna.He was deeply impressed by the teachings of the English writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater on the central importance of art in life and particularly by the latter’s stress on the aesthetic intensity by which life should be lived. Like many in his generation, Wilde was determined to follow Pater’s urging “to burn always with [a] hard, gemlike flame.” But Wilde also delighted in affecting an aesthetic pose; this, combined with rooms at Oxford decorated with objets d’art, resulted in his famous remark, “Oh, would that I could live up to my blue china!”
In the early 1880s, when Aestheticism was the rage and despair of literary London, Wilde established himself in social and artistic circles by his wit and flamboyance. Soon the periodical Punch made him the satiric object of its antagonism to the Aesthetes for what was considered their unmasculine devotion to art. And in their comic opera Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan based the character Bunthorne, a “fleshly poet,” partly on Wilde. Wishing to reinforce the association, Wilde published, at his own expense, Poems(1881), which echoed, too faithfully, his discipleship to the poets Algernon Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Keats. Eager for further acclaim, Wilde agreed to lecture in the United States and
Canada in 1882, announcing on his arrival at customs in New York City that he had “nothing to declare but his genius.” Despite widespread hostility in the press to his languid poses and aesthetic costume of velvet jacket, knee breeches, and black silk stockings, Wilde for 12 months exhorted the Americans to love beauty and art; then he returned to Great Britain to lecture on his impressions of America.
Oscar Wilde, 1882.
In 1884 Wilde married Constance Lloyd, daughter of a prominent Irish barrister; two children, Cyril and Vyvyan, were born, in 1885 and 1886. Meanwhile, Wilde was a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and then became editor of Woman’s World (1887– 89). During this period of apprenticeship as a writer, he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), which reveals his gift for romantic allegory in the form of the fairy tale.
In the final decade of his life, Wilde wrote and published nearly all of his major work. In his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in Lippincott’s Magazine, 1890, and in book form, revised and expanded by six chapters, 1891), Wilde combined the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel with the unspeakable sins of French decadent fiction. Critics charged immorality despite Dorian’s self-destruction; Wilde, however, insisted on the amoral nature of art regardless of an apparently moral ending. Intentions(1891), consisting of previously published essays,
restated his aesthetic attitude toward art by borrowing ideas from the French poets Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire and the American painter James McNeill Whistler. In the same year, two volumes of stories and fairy tales also appeared, testifying to his extraordinary creative inventiveness: Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories and A House of Pomegranates.
But Wilde’s greatest successes were his society comedies. Within the conventions of the French “well-made play” (with its social intrigues and artificial devices to resolve conflict), he employed his paradoxical, epigrammatic wit to create a form of comedy new to the 19th-century English theatre. His first success, Lady Windermere’s Fan, demonstrated that this wit could revitalize the rusty machinery of French drama. In the same year, rehearsals of his macabre play Salomé, written in French and designed, as he said, to make his audience shudder by its depiction of unnatural passion, were halted by the censor because it contained biblical characters. It was published in 1893, and an English translation appeared in 1894 with Aubrey Beardsley’s celebrated illustrations.
Oscar Wilde, cartoon in Punch, March 5, 1892.
A second society comedy, A Woman of No Importance (produced 1893), convinced the critic William Archer that Wilde’s plays “must be taken on the very highest plane of modern English drama.” In rapid succession, Wilde’s final plays, An Ideal
Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were produced early in 1895. In the latter, his greatest achievement, the conventional elements of farce are transformed into satiric epigrams—seemingly trivial but mercilessly exposing Victorian hypocrisies.
I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy.
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
In many of his works, exposure of a secret sin or indiscretion and consequent disgrace is a central design. If life imitated art, as Wilde insisted in his essay “The Decay of Lying” (1889), he was himself approximating the pattern in his reckless pursuit of pleasure. In addition, his close friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, whom he had met in 1891, infuriated the marquess of Queensberry, Douglas’s father. Accused, finally, by the marquess of being a sodomite, Wilde, urged by Douglas, sued for criminal libel. Wilde’s case collapsed, however, when the evidence went against him, and he dropped the suit. Urged to flee to France by his friends, Wilde refused, unable to believe that his world was at an end. He was arrested and ordered to stand trial.
Wilde testified brilliantly, but the jury failed to reach a verdict. In the retrial he was found guilty and sentenced, in May 1895, to two years at hard labour. Most of his sentence was served at Reading Gaol, where he wrote a long letter to Douglas (published in 1905 in a drastically cut version as De Profundis) filled with recriminations against the younger man for encouraging him in dissipation and distracting him from his work.
In May 1897 Wilde was released, a bankrupt, and immediately went to France, hoping to regenerate himself as a writer. His only remaining work, however, was The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), revealing his concern for inhumane prison conditions. Despite constant money problems, he maintained, as George Bernard Shaw said, “an unconquerable gaiety of soul” that sustained him, and he was visited by such loyal friends as Max Beerbohm and Robert Ross, later his literary executor; he was also reunited with Douglas. He died suddenly of acute meningitis brought on by an ear infection. In his semiconscious final moments, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, which he had long admired.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a Gothic and philosophical novel by Oscar Wilde,
first published complete in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. Fearing the story was indecent, the magazine's editor deleted roughly five hundred words before publication without Wilde's knowledge. Despite that censorship, The Picture of Dorian Gray offended the moral sensibilities of British book reviewers, some of whom said that Oscar Wilde merited prosecution for violating the laws guarding public morality. In response, Wilde aggressively defended his novel and art in correspondence with the British press, although he personally made excisions of some of the most controversial material when revising and lengthening the story for book publication the following year.
The longer and revised version of The Picture of Dorian Gray published in book form in 1891 featured an aphoristic preface—a defence of the artist's rights and of art for art's sake—based in part on his press defences of the novel the previous year. The content, style, and presentation of the preface made it famous in its own right, as a literary and artistic manifesto. In April 1891, the publishing firm of Ward, Lock and Company, who had distributed the shorter, more inflammatory, magazine version in England the previous year, published the revised version of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The only novel written by Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray exists in several versions: the 1890 magazine edition (in 13 chapters), with important material deleted before publication by the magazine's editor, J. M. Stoddart; the "uncensored" version submitted to Lippincott's Monthly Magazine for publication (also in 13 chapters), with all of Wilde's original material intact, first published in 2011 by Harvard University Press; and the 1891 book edition (in 20 chapters). As literature of the 19th century, The Picture of Dorian Gray "pivots on a gothic plot device" with strong themes interpreted from Faust.
Plot
Dorian Gray is the subject of a full-length portrait in oil by Basil Hallward, an artist impressed and infatuated by Dorian's beauty; he believes that Dorian's beauty is responsible for the new mood in his art as a painter. Through Basil, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, and he soon is enthralled by the aristocrat's hedonistic world view: that beauty and sensual fulfilment are the only things worth pursuing in life.
