Convey the threat of VIOLENCE and SELF-DESTRUCTION
BELOVED
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DORIAN GRAY
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·
Slavery-violence ( dedicated to the “sixty million and more”
·
Murder to daughter to protect her from slavery- animalistic manner-
“too thick”.
-with bare hands –minimalistic
belongings
-no money to run away : She is
punished
·
Guilt and regret
·
Dramatic Irony- the ghost
·
Sethe’s stolen milk.
·
Halle witnesses how Sethe is abused and for this loses his reason. (Self-destruction).
Last seen beside the butter churn, spreading butter on his face. “no butter
play would change that”.
·
Sixo’s death- humiliation of the “neck-jewellery”. “How much is a
nigger supposed to take?”.
·
Self-destruction, as in losing their manhood. Schoolteacher is
contributing.
·
Paul D- self-destruction; not allowing his feelings to go out and
repression , “tobacco tin”. Violence: attempt to kill his new owner (after
Sweet Home) , fights on both sides of Civil War. He envies extended families,
having been denied roots by the system of slavery. ( Same system undermines
his sense of manhood so that he feels dispossessed)
·
Beloved dominates Sethe, swelling in size as her mother shrinks.
·
Denver drank her sister’s blood along with Sethe’s milk. (p.152)
-when Beloved disappears in cold
house she feels she has lost her self but realises she has a self of her own
“to look out for and preserve”.
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·
Victorian age – reputation, homosexuality
not seen with good eyes, Victorians loved scandalous literature
·
Murder to friend for own
pleasure and comfort – violent approach “three times”
-no punishment –money allows him this.
·
Intense relief when hearing
of James Vane’s death and after Basil’s.
·
“the curved wrinkled of the
hypocrite”- portrait in the mirror
·
Basil’s comment on Dorian
selfish purposes. “Now and then… he is probably thoughtless, and seems to
take a real delight in giving me pain”.
·
The use of the mirror further points out his narcissism.
This is also the same mirror that he crushes under his feet the night he
tries to "kill" the painting.
·
Dorian uses a mirror to compare himself to the painting
(one that Lord Henry gave him) and seems to take pleasure in his corruption:
"...looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the
fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. The
sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. He grew more
and more in love with of his own beauty, corruption of his own soul ...
wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the
signs of age"
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CONTEXT:
Beloved
as symbol of America’s past of slavery, with her memories of the Middle
Passage.
Paul
D experience in the Civil War and time spent in prison camp. –relates to
culture and society at the time.
As
a slave Baby Suggs has no self, denied of “the map to discover what she was
like”. – Dispossessed of her sense of identity and only when freed regained.
Margaret
Garner: The Black Book; Killed children rather than save life.
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CONTEXT:
Melodrama plots with cliffhanging suspense had
popularity between the working and lower-middle class throughout the 19th
century. Music was originally used to evade the licensing laws which made it
difficult for theatres to stage spoken drama.
Psychological self-destruction: the tapestry in
Dorian’s old room may inspire story of Vernon Lee, story about a boy who
imagines himself in a world depicted on the tapestry in his room, and becomes
obsessed with image of beautiful woman. In the end he falls in love with the woman,
who turns to be a serpent.
Victorian Gothic fiction, alongside Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s
Dracula (1897) as a representation of how fin-de-siècle literature explored
the darkest recesses of Victorian society and the often disturbing private
desires that lurked behind acceptable public faces. -
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Quotation:
‘Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I
don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime is to them what
art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations’ – ( said
by Henry) Dorian Gray . Chapter 19
Concept
Dorian Gray:
Dorian, with his visits to opium dens and his
delight in high culture combines the criminal and the aesthete – the very
definition of ‘decadence’ distilled into a single person and a disturbing
example of the split between the wholesome public persona and the furtive
private life. -
Portrayal of the SUPERNATURAL in the novels
BELOVED
|
DORIAN GRAY
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·
Characters are haunted by the past, the choices
made, by tree branches growing on backs, by infanticide, by slavery.
·
Who is Beloved? – Supernatural succubus, vampire (sucks
the soul, heart and mind of her mother ) or real person?
·
Beloved domination over Sethe- physical embodiment of the spiteful
poltergeist, strangles Sethe.
·
No character remembers what Beloved has said. (epilogue) idea that she
only said and thought what they themselves were thinking. (p.274)- Reincarnation
of Sethe’s sense of guilt and unforgiving memory.
·
Beloved emerges from water in Ohio River. Sethe has no wish to die on
the “bloody side of the Ohio river”. Foreshadows the supernatural part. – When
seethe first sees Beloved she experiences an artificial delivery.
·
How characters react to it:
Paul D – drives the ghost out.
Describes her as “a room-and-board witch”
·
Tree symbolises: that
the past has attached itself to her but the haunting of it has not stopped growing.
·
vampire
or parasitic aspect of motherhood is amplified. Fetus is a parasite to the
mother whose uterus it is sucking life from and continues to nourish its body
by gleaning the nutrients from the mother's body after birth by nursing;
Beloved is the supernatural representation of that. Beloved takes on the
bodily form of a pregnant woman though she may be likened to a mosquito that
has swelled with a host's blood.
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·
Sibyl’s comment “I have grown
sick of shadows” –curse
·
Basil: “a dream of form in
days of thoughts” – alluding to idea to educated Victorians: “Theory of
Forms”. This states that earthly life is filled with imperfect copies of a
divine reality and that the perfect “form” – exists in another plane.
·
Elements of the supernatural: the painting which changes
showing Dorian's sins and evildoings, the use of mirrors, and direct and
indirect references to selling one's soul to the devil.
·
the painting changes,: supernatural definition : Any experience, occurrence, manifestation or object that is
beyond the laws of nature and science and whose understanding may
be said to lie with religion, magic or the mystical"
The painting gets progressively more horrible throughout
the story, to portray an awful decay.
·
"They say he has sold himself to the devil for a
pretty face" and Basil Hall ward
in viewing the painting the night Dorian killed him: "Christ! What a
thing I must have worshipped! It has the eyes of a devil"
·
End: Dorian dies and his dead body
is old and wrinkled, and the picture recovers it’s old state magically.
·
Dorian to reflect whether ‘some strange
poisonous germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own?’ (ch.
11). -
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CONTEXT:
Beloved-
slavery embodiment
Used
in funerals and weddings symbolise past and future.
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CONTEXT:
Sibyl described as a “narcissus”- rejecting the love
of all others, including the nymph Echo, was transformed into a white flower
after dying of love for his own image in a pool.
Paintings often play a sinister role in Gothic
fiction. The first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
(1764) includes a figure stepping from a painting and into reality while
Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), written by Oscar Wilde’s great-uncle Charles
Maturin, describes the haunting gaze of a portrait as it follows the viewer
around a room.
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Concept Beloved:
As with the
haunting of 124, the haunting of the occupants inside, the reader of the novel
is haunted by the memories of the experience of reading it. Beyond the
supernatural that most people would reject to believe in, the true hauntings
that happen to people are very real. Everyone grapples with their demons.
Slavery may seem like a distant evil this country and its people no longer have
a conscious awareness of. The haunting this novel demonstrates reverberates
even today as this country's psychological being still is haunted by slavery.
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