2) Compose a blog response. As we did before, please choose 1-2 quotations that give us insights into the philosophy of Oscar Wilde. Aestheticism. The artist's purpose. Religion. Facts. Beauty. Read your classmates' responses and come up with something fresh. There is a lot of ground to cover, here. Feel free, of course, to comment on the plot and your feelings and reactions to what is taking place. Those feelings will be connected to the larger whole that Wilde wants us to experience.
3) Maker connections to Defending Your Life. How are we seeing the idea of beauty? Intelligence? Humor? Iron? Satire? Most importantly - authenticity.
I look forward to your responses.
You find out how shallow Dorian's love is with the quote "you have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been! You are nothing to me now. I will never see you again. I will never think of you. I will never mention your name. You don't know what you were to me, once. Why, once ... Oh, I can't bear to think of it! I wish I had never laid eyes upon you! You have spoiled the romance of my life. How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art! Without your art, you are nothing. I would have made you famous, splendid, magnificent. The world would have worshipped you, and you would have borne my name. What are you now? A third-rate actress with a pretty face." he says this to Sybil when she messes up when acting Juliet in the play. this shows he didn't really love her he loved the different versions of her on stage he also mentions she was prettiest when she played a male role. Him saying this adds to the gay under tones of Dorian Gray. him being so cruel to Sybil when she want want he wanted is one of the first big signs of his descent.
ReplyDeleteIn chapter 7 Dorian continues to fall in love with Sibyl’s beauty and Lord Henry obviously knows that he is in love. Meanwhile during the play Sibyl is acting and Dorian believes that's his acting is terrible and it just keeps getting worse. Dorian is very upset about the performance so Basil and Lord Henry leaves Dorian and goes to seek Sibyl backstage who is happy about her performance. Sibyl explains to them that she never knew what true love felt before Dorian came along and now she had real feelings for him. She realizes that “no words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not what I wanted to say.” Realizing that Dorian is really in love with the character that Sibyl is playing and is very upset because Dorian is only in love with her acting. After the play Dorian returns home and sees himself in the portrait and notices that the portrait has changed, a faint sneer has appeared at the corner of his mouth. “Eternal youth, infinity passions, pleasures subtle and secret wild joy, and wilder sins” in which his painting of himself will have the marks of aging. Meanwhile in the movie Defending Your Life, when you are killed and gone to heaven you cant age, or get fat. You can eat as much as you want and you wont add a single pound. So that contrast with the Picture of Dorian Gray.
ReplyDeleteBethany Yeung
I'm finding it hard to connect Picture of Dorian Gray to Defending you life, but I am seeing a bit of a parallel between Harry and the 'smart' people in the movie. They both seem content to watch and analyze their subjects, who would be Dorian and Daniel, and see how they react to situation in their life. For Lord Henry, this is for his interest in people and humanity, which seems to be a way for Wilde to discuss his views. Stepping back a couple chapters, Henry thinks to himself that, "Soul and body, body and soul---how mysterious they were!... Who could say where the fleshy impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began?" This highlights Wilde's belief that the soul and body are intrinsically connected, which Harry is now discovering in Dorian. This idea also seems to connect to how he views Sibyl, especially after she dies. He tells Dorian that he shouldn't feel to upset because Sibyl never really had her own soul, she just played famous parts in shows, so he shouldn't mourn the loss of a life. As Wilde puts it, "The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died." Not really comforting to me, but it seems to help Dorian feel better, since he is slowly adopting Harry's ideas.
ReplyDeleteChapter 8 brings me back to the idea that Lord Henry sees everything, even the suffering and death of other people, as art. Which i mentioned in a previous blog post. Henry says "There is something to me quite beautiful about her death. I am glad I am living in a century when such wonders happen. " about Sibyls death to Dorian and Dorian is starting to really feel the influence of Lord Henry's ideas. It is difficult to make a connection to Defending your Life but I do think that if Dorian died he would be guilty at this point. Instead of facing his guilt he takes the easy way out and dismisses Sibyl's death in chapter 9. "You must not tell me about things. What is done is done. What is past is past." It could be that Dorian is fearful of the things he has done much like Daniel Miller.
ReplyDeleteAt the beginning of the reading it seemed like Lord Henry’s grasp on Dorian was loosening. Dorian’s romance with Sibyl was making him develop a conscience, and reject Henry’s selfish outlook on life. Dorian says that “I am changed, and the mere touch of Sibyl Vane's hand makes me forget you and all your wrong, fascinating, poisonous, delightful theories” in the beginning of chapter 7. In response, Henry says that "Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy”. Henry believes that humans should follow their nature and endeavor to derive pleasure from life at every moment, regardless of the morality of our decisions or the consequences. It is interesting to compare this to Defending Your Life’s philosophy. Is listening to your basic instincts the same as living without fears? I think Lord Henry would say yes, for isn't the only thing holding us back from succumbing to our more animalistic nature fear? This suggests that the logic of Defending Your Life is flawed. I believe that it is necessary, even healthy, to live with some fear. Once Sybil kills herself, Dorian falls even father from grace, using Henry’s toxic philosophy to rationalize the suicide as something beautiful, absolving himself from guilt. Dorian is slowly turning into a reflection of Henry.
ReplyDeleteLord Henry’s twisted views on life are once more apparent in this section, as seen on page 57. He says that “One’s own life – that is the important thing. As for the lives of one’s neighbors… they are not one’s concern.” In his philosophy about life, Lord Henry has determined that oneself ought to be the sole concern of each individual. Now that Dorian Gray has found a love interest to pursue, he takes this philosophy as his own – thinking only of himself and his own embarrassment, he leaves Sybil and her feelings in the dust. After seeing the change in the painting, he contemplates the incident to see if he was indeed cruel. However, he resolves that he is not to blame for his actions, but that “His life was well worth hers. She had marred him for a moment, if he had wounded her for an age… Why should he trouble about Sibyl Vane? She was nothing to him now” (67). His feelings towards others has now shifted to one of a self-centered egotist, and no one is valued as much as himself. My connection to Defending Your Life – so far, Miller is not this self-centered in the least, but he is definitely not as concerned about others as Julia, who knows the names of her mailman and butcher and such characters that Miller had overlooked in his lifetime.
ReplyDeleteIn chapter 8, Dorian's frustration with Sibyl's death is starting show by him saying that "So I have murdered Sibyl Vane," said Dorian Gray, half to himself, "murdered her as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife. Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden. And to-night I am to dine with you, and then go on to the opera, and sup somewhere, I suppose, afterwards. How extraordinarily dramatic life is! If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears. Here is the first passionate love-letter I have ever written in my life. Strange, that my first passionate love-letter should have been addressed to a dead girl. Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead? Sibyl! Can she feel, or know, or listen? Oh, Harry, how I loved her once! It seems years ago to me now. She was everything to me. Then came that dreadful night—was it really only last night?—when she played so badly, and my heart almost broke. She explained it all to me. It was terribly pathetic. But I was not moved a bit. I thought her shallow. Suddenly something happened that made me afraid. I can't tell you what it was, but it was terrible. I said I would go back to her. I felt I had done wrong. And now she is dead. My God! My God! Harry, what shall I do? You don't know the danger I am in, and there is nothing to keep me straight. She would have done that for me. She had no right to kill herself. It was selfish of her." He starts blaming himself for the death of his wife, but soon after realizes that he does not feel as tragic as he should be feeling. I feel that Dorian is finally starting to see the vision of Lord Henry, he is embracing death. In chapter 9, Dorian makes Sibyl's death non existent by saying "You must not tell me about things. What is done is done. What is past is past." This is similar to Defending your Life, in the way that you are blocking your fears away so you don't have to deal with them.
ReplyDeleteIn chapters 5 through 9 we learn more and more bout Lord Henry's thoughts and aestheticism. It turns out that he is not a fan of optimism and the good deeds of people. "The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. I mean everything that I have said. I have the greatest contempt for optimism. As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it. As for marriage, of course that would be silly, but there are other and more interesting bonds between men and women. I will certainly encourage them. They have the charm of being fashionable. But here is Dorian himself. He will tell you more than I can." Lord Henry does not find good qualities in people who do good things for others, and he has an overall bad outlook on optimism and good deeds.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading, I found it interesting how meticulously Wilde incorporates his idea of aestheticism. For example, throughout these few chapters, Wilde makes it evident that Dorian's love for Sibyl was built purely on his love for her beauty and beauty in acting. Naturally, he did not love her for her personality; in fact, he hardly knew her. But whenever Dorian describes his "love" for Sibyl, he either elaborates on her physical features (ex: "When she came on in her boy's clothes, she was perfectly wonderful...") or on her magnificent acting (ex: "When she acts, you will forget everything..."). It is further established that Dorian only cared for Sibyl's beauty in acting as, when she lost some of it in her last show, it led him to declare that, "you have killed my love". He also seemed somewhat unconcerned with her death as he was easily able to move on from it. This highlights how Dorian never truly loved Sibyl as a person, but was rather in love with her materialistic qualities. Additionally, I noticed in these chapters that Dorian's portrait relates to Defending your Life. In that film, people are benefited from the deeds that they do and from having strong character. This advances them to a state of bliss and beauty. Meanwhile, in the novel, Dorian is straying farther from goodness and beauty as he is becoming more sinful and corrupt.
ReplyDelete-Jill Schuck
Oscar Wilde uses Lord Henry to explore and voice many of his own philosophical ideas. Unfortunately, these can only ever be found in gargantuan paragraphs that require a fair amount of sifting through. In Chapter 5, just after Henry tells Basil that Dorian plans to marry Sibyl Vane, he is asked how he could “approve” of this decision. Henry replies with "I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.” I think this is very interesting for him to have Henry say, as looking prior to this statement, it doesn’t seem that Henry really has judged anyone very outwardly. To a degree, it can also be seen as a political statement. “Moral Prejudices” could (and probably does) refer to most people at the time who disliked gays immediately once they found out, no matter who they were.. In relation to Defending your Life, I have found it hard to find any direct similarities. Indirectly, I think the personalities of Daniel and Lord Henry are somewhat similar as they both (more so Daniel) use humor to deflect questions in conversations.
ReplyDelete-Matthew Hebert
Dorian says "You have spoiled the romance of my life. How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art! Without your art, you are nothing. I would have made you famous, splendid, magnificent. The world would have worshipped you, and you would have borne my name. What are you now? A third-rate actress with a pretty face” to Sybil in chapter 7. This shows what his priorities are and in turn shows the reader what Oscar Wilde also prioritizes in someone. Dorian is shown to have only valued Sybil for her acting abilities, and when she can’t act anymore Dorian cannot love her anymore. This is core to aestheticism which values art over the genuinity of someone's value. Comparable to when someone prefers lying to let someone down without hurting their feelings over just letting them know the truth. You can see that this is opposite to the main character of Defending Your Life because the main character would not agree with aestheticism because it requires being a living work of art. The main character doesn’t even have the self confidence or self worth to argue for their deserved salary at their job.
ReplyDeleteThese past chapters have been infuriating to me! Both characters or Harry and Dorian have been acting stupid and cruel to people around them. Dorians whole romance with sibyl I feel is complete lust and hormones. Sibyl is completely in love with Dorian which she has never felt before, and so of course it's going to affect her acting. Dorian only thinks he is in love with sibyl but all he is really in love with is her acting, not actually her. Dorian brings his friends to see the newly in love Sibyl act, but she is terrible. She can't act because she feels so strongly for Dorian, and Dorian is angry by this and confronts her after the play. “no words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not what I wanted to say”. Realizing Dorian doesn't really love her sibyl is crushed and Dorian furious. Lord henry is still a very mean and in my opinion deceitful character. He keeps embedding his ideas in Droians head. He is a very unfortunate but necessary character. In the movie I have a hard time relating it back to the book it seems to be the happy opposite of the picture of Dorian Grey
ReplyDeletei found Dorian's behavior during the recent developments in the story to be moray reprehensible. his mistreatment of his peers has been almost painful to watch as a reader. i understand this is Wilde's point. ascetically Dorian is very pleasing. but his character leaves much to be desired.
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