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Question 9: Compare the
ways in which the writers of Beloved and The Picture of Dorian Gray portray the supernatural.
In Wilde’s novel, “Dorian
Gray” the context plays an important role as Victorian reader’s loved
melodramatic plots with cliffhanging suspense and the elements of gothic novel.
The supernatural is portrayed in the novel by how the portrait of Dorian Gray
changes throughout time. The religious and scientific upheavals of the
nineteenth century triggered a fascination on ghost stories and tales of
terror. Dorian Gray shows the characteristics of ghostly elements, extreme
emotions and strong erotic element portrayed with the uncontrollable lust of
Dorian. In Morrison’s novel, “Beloved”
supernatural is portrayed through the involvement of the character Beloved and
other characters reaction to her. The novel shows how the characters are
haunted by their memory and history. At the time Beloved was set people had
many beliefs and traditions that involved supernatural elements and could
explain why Beloved is considered a vampire.
The definition of
supernatural is: 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. This makes the painting a supernatural element as it changes and
gets progressively more horrible throughout the novel to create an effect of
awful decay both physically and psychologically in Dorian. The painting changes
according to Dorian’s sins and evil doings. Paintings often played a sinister
role in Gothic fiction. The first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto included
a figure stepping from a painting and into reality while describing the
haunting gaze of a portrait as it follows the viewer around a room. In Dorian
Gray the gaze of the portrait have a fatal ending for Basil. The use of mirrors
and reflecting surfaces such as “glass
door” and direct and indirect references to selling one’s soul to the devil
represent how the portrait has a life of its own but it’s another form of
Dorian. The glass door is a symbol of Dorian’s life showing how delicate and
special he is and how he can have any door opened for him because his money. “Dorian Gray” has influence of Gothic novels
such as “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” as it takes place in a
modern city, from the slums to the houses of the wealthy hiding secrets behind
closed doors. In both novels the idea of a collection of “selves” is explored.
This connects to how the portrait of Dorian is another form of Dorian’s soul
and that it acts on its own way. Basil emphasises this when he says: “a dream of form in days of thoughts”
which alludes to the idea to educated Victorians of the ´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. The true self and free
self of Dorian is the portrait which has to be hidden to society because the
truth is too hard to handle and society was very judgemental. The reflection of
what Dorian is doing in his private life is what is reflected in the poem. The
fact that Dorian was allowed a private life was because his high status on
society and his good financial situation this then helps him to hide the
portrait. The imagery of evil and the devil is shown throughout the novel for
example in, “They say he has sold himself
to the devil for a pretty face” which demonstrates how Dorian was conscious
of making this deal and it was himself the one that decided to incorporate the
devil to his life. The effect of using the devil is that it creates a violent,
sexual and disrupted image. The idea of demons could be connected to the inner
demon of Dorian which has been repressed and neglected by Basil that starts
when , “ for me he seems to me little
more than a lad” showing the high expectations he has set him which has
made Dorian challenge this and now is threatening to disrupt this ideal . Devil
also connotes to a severe reprimand or expression of anger which could’ve been
triggered by Basil as he expected too much from Dorian. Basil considered Dorian
untouchable and a saint which has caused him to turn into this other form of
himself or even to become his true self.
In
the novel Beloved, the supernatural figure is a vampire which is embodied by
the character of Beloved. In both of the novels the supernatural figures
resemble to the colour red which connotes to danger, sex and blood. The effect
of this is to foreshadow how blood is going to be involved either because
exchanging fluids or because a murder and to show how violence and sex are
going to play a major part in both novels. The
novel “Beloved” is haunted by history, memory, specifically rape and violence
and a spectre that embodies both which is Beloved. The character of Beloved is
not only the ghost of Sethe’s dead child , she is a succubus , a female demon
and nightmare figure that sexually assaults male sleepers and drains them of
semen. She is related to a vampire a sexualized figure that drains a vital
fluid which is blood. This is connected to the African American folklore in the
form of shape shifting witches who “ride” their terrified victims in night which
embodies Beloved herself. Beloved drains Paul D of semen and Sethe of vitality.
Beloved swells because she has swelled the horrible memories and nightmares of
both of them and poisons herself. Beloved sucks the soul, heart and mind of her
mother. To the point that, “Somebody had to be saved” and Denver leaves home to find help. The physical embodiment of the spiteful poltergeist strangles Sethe and
also has a reference to the Devil shown in “Devil's confusion. He lets
me look good long as I feel bad. “This
demonstrates how Sethe has always been haunted by the evil in her life and not
only on Beloved although when she comes along this is now triggered. This show
how supernatural is harmful for Sethe whilst in Dorian Gray the supernatural
element is parallel to Dorian and they coexist together. Blood is also present
when Denver sucked Beloved’s blood from her mother’s breast. “Swallowed her blood right along with (her)
mother’s milk” links to the obsessive love Sethe has for her daughter and
how Sethe herself was the first that dealt with the passing of blood in the
novel first by being pregnant and then by passing her vampire future daughter’s
blood to her new daughter. Beloved emerges from water in Ohio River. Sethe has
no wish to die on the “bloody side of the Ohio River” the use of “bloody”
foreshadows how something related to blood is going to appear from the water of
the river, in this case Beloved. The vampire or parasite aspect of Beloved is
amplified to the extent of considering a foetus as a parasite to the mother as
it attaches and its sucks life from the mother’s uterus and nourishes its body
by gleaning the nutrients from the mother’s body. Beloved does this for a
second time when she comes to life again and she takes on the bodily form of a
pregnant woman which metaphorically could carry her mother’s guilt inside and
she then lets it grow and eventually want to kill her. This is demonstrated in
how she strangles her and how she is sucking her energy away. When Sethe first
sees Beloved she experiences an artificial delivery which could represent her
guilt and soul flowing away. On the other hand Beloved being a mosquito like
figure is more representative as she could be swelled with a host’s blood.
Morrison uses other elements apart from the
character of Beloved to show how characters are haunted these are by the past,
the choices made, by infanticide, slavery and by the tree on Sethe’s back, “Now
there was a man, and that was a ´tree`” this symbolise how the past has
attached to her and how it haunts her daily and it hasn’t stopped growing.
Sethe hasn’t got the money to spare her actions and she is later judged by Paul
D when he knows about the infanticide,
“You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” which he suggests how he
thinks she acted like a beast in attempting to murder her own children. This contrasts with how Dorian gets the chance to hide his secret
as his has the money to hide the portrait in a room, to hire someone to place
it there and to bribe someone. The differences in class and financial need
between them show how Dorian hasn’t dealt with the consequences of his actions
and perhaps has never fully considered the damage that they might have had on
other people whilst Sethe has had to pay for it going to prison and dealing
with it every day. In Dorian Gray, Wilde similarly uses the character of Sibyl
and describes her as a “narcissus” to incorporate more supernatural elements.
Narcissus rejected the love of all others including the nymph Echo, and was
then transformed into a white flower after dying of love for his own image in a
pool. The use of narcissus was probably to show how Dorian thought of Sibyl and
thinking of her on those aspects could mirror how he thought of himself. Sibyl
did indeed die of love but because her blind love of Dorian whilst Dorian did
die as narcissus as for a reaction of events on his own image in the portrait
and decisions made throughout his life. When Dorian dies in the end his dead
body is old and wrinkled demonstrated in the use of “he was withered, wrinkled
and loathsome of visage” and the picture recovers its old state magically the
use of “loathsome” are used to give an ultimate effect of what Dorian life was.
The effect of this is that life is a cycle and when evil was finally dead then
the good was brought again. Sibyl’s comment, I have grown sick of shadows” make illusions on how she could have
a curse and how could her death be inevitable. The word shadows is effective as
it connotes to mystery and hidden acts.
The reactions to the
supernatural figures in both novels are very important to the audience
understanding of the overall meaning. For example in Beloved it is explained at
the epilogue, “They
forgot her like a bad dream” that no character
remembers what Beloved has said. The idea that she only said and thought what
they themselves were thinking this could mean that she was a reincarnation of
Sethe’s sense of guilt and unforgiving memory. Paul D reacts to the ghost by
driving it out and describes her as a “room-and-board
witch” this demonstrates how in Beloved the characters can’t deal with the
supernatural and it’s a danger for them. In “Dorian Gray” when Basil first sees
the painting which is the night when he was killed he says: “Christ! What a thing I must have
worshipped! It has the eyes of the devil”. This demonstrates that Basil had
an idolised version of Dorian and that he truly believed that all the rumours
were not true but now he is flooded with the truth and maybe the fact that he
knows is able to look right to the devil’s eyes has foreshadowed his death. In
a way the devil’s eyes are like Medusa and petrify Basil which doesn’t know
what to do and stays still. He dies in terror for what he has seen.
The structure of “Beloved”
being flashbacks and glimpses of memory from different perspectives are an
extended metaphor on how the ghost of Beloved appears unexpectedly and how
supernatural elements appear to scare when least expected. It also emphasises
how Sethe’s live is haunted by re-memory of her past and how she is impossible
to continue with her life. On the other hand Wilde uses a chronological order
that emphasises how the devil of Dorian is growing progressively in time. Wilde
uses sensual descriptions such as, “there
were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them”
the use of poison reflects how Dorian is killing himself by what he is
deciding to take in which in this case is the evil actions he is doing and
could also resemble the drugs he is taking which are unhealthy and poisonous.
Similarly Beloved refers to “venom” as
something deadly in the context of “the baby’s venom” which reflects how
Beloved is growing evil.
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