Title: "The Picture of Dorian Gray": Wilde's Parable of the Fall
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
In the article "The Picture of Dorian Gray": Wilde's Parable of the Fall, by Joyce Carol Oates, the author emphasizes that the complexity of Oscar Wilde’s imagination is not easy to understand like what the most reader think. The intension of “The picture of Dorian Gray” appears like a puzzle for reader, but there are variety answers from the reader. That’s also one of the reasons make the reader be “poisoned by a book.” Readers can pervert his subject, but the value of Wilde’s allegory is about how people think of innocence inevitable, the scene of the loss of illusion tragic, or it’s just a merely farcical.
First, the author talks about how Wilde implies his knowledge, image, and a tragedy of violent into his book. Moreover, the relationship, affects, and position of these characters, Dorian, Basil, and Henry were described perfectly. Basil can symbol for a good one, but he meaning less to Dorian. The one link these character together is the Dorian’s portrait - Basil was in love with his own painted Dorian’s picture. That caused his feeling that he could be an artist without Dorian. It also is the artist oscillates between the frenzy of inspiration and the lucidity of an almost impersonal wisdom.
Next, the author stares Wilde show his terrible logic of the imagination through the death of a girl and Dorian is a murderer. From an unintentional murderer, Dorian becomes a real one kill Basil to preserve his life out of other’s lives after the girl’s death. The picture is his wish for keeping his youth and his beauty, it slowly changes his soul and presents him with an utterly new. Through Dorian’s functions, the artist’ muse Oates claims that by way of Dorian and his fate and Basil and his fate, the artist who succumbs to the spell of beauty will be destroyed, and so savagely destroyed that nothing of him will survive.
The author conclude his journal by stating that the illusion, which was created by the child, can empower possessing and control everything for its charm even in adulthood. Beside of implying Wilde’s knowledge into The Picture of Dorian Gray in order to attract the reader, the value of Wilde’s allegory, how readers questions some details of the book, and answer them by their experience in real life, also make the readers be “poisoned by a book.”
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a popular fable of Victorian anxieties,
