Beneath is an essay comparing the theme of corruption in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ by Oscar Wilde and ‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison. The essay was noted for its ‘seamless movement’ between texts and its integration of minor characters, whilst it lacked a discussion of the settings’ relationships to corruption. It was given 36/40, being Level 5 in both brackets of the markscheme. I hope that it comes in useful 🙂

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In both ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ by Oscar Wilde and ‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison, the writers use the theme of corruption to reveal how corrosive Victorian hypocrisy and generational slave trauma can become. Ultimately, both writers explore corruption through the frame of influence in order to present it as inevitable in a society enveloped by insurmountable trauma.

Firstly, Wilde and Morrison present corruption as being caused by influence. In Chapter 19 of Wilde’s only novel, Dorian Gray condemns Lord Henry (whom he often calls ‘Harry’) for having ‘poisoned me with a book once’. Whilst the verb ‘poisoned’ introduces the concept of corruption, Dorian’s passivity in the phrase could be mimicking that he takes no blame for his actions, but rather holds Lord Henry completely accountable. The allusions to the devil and Dr Faustus produced by the mirroring nickname ‘Harry’ (‘Old Harry’), as well as the involvement of ‘the yellow book’’s activity in Dorian’s condemnation, might imply that literature can have a corrupting influence over its reader. This notion was later rebuked by Wilde himself, writing ‘there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book’ in his Preface to the novel. Here, Wilde seems to be arguing that Dorian’s plea to go unblamed for being ‘poisoned’ is cowardice and that he could have escaped Lord Henry’s corrosive influence if he merely refused it, which he is never capable of, continuing to perpetuate Henry’s rhetoric of his ‘rose-white boyhood’ to the very final chapter. In Morrison’s ‘Beloved’, the writer uses the character of Beloved in a parallel way to Lord Henry, having a controlling influence over the escaped slave ‘Sethe’, her mother. Named the ‘devil-child’ by the community that watches her resurgence, Beloved is arguably the manifestation of Sethe’s guilt after having killed her in a warped attempt of maternal protection. Aligning with the Edenic allusion to Eve’s corruption traced in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, it is clear that Beloved has an engulfing control over Sethe by Chapter 23, in which the voices of the three women convene in repeating ‘You are mine.’. Morrison’s use of heteroglossia in this chorus might be implying that Sethe has lost her individuality due to an unfaced guilt so corruptive that it has physicalised. The supernatural element of their conglomeration also draws parallels to the verb ‘poisoned’, through which ‘the yellow book’ is personified, giving literature itself a supernatural aspect. Perhaps Wilde is lending literature a hyperbolic supernatural facet to educate his readers on the dangers of finding meaning in art, in line with the contemporary notion of ‘Aestheticism’ (‘art for art’s sake’), again referenced in the final lines of his Preface (‘All art is quite useless’).

Similarly, the intermingling of the supernatural with reality through heteroglossia in ‘Beloved’ might be enacting Morrison’s desire to highlight the generational trauma sewn by slavery. In this way, Sethe’s reduction due to Beloved’s consuming influence becomes a cautionary story against the danger of hiding trauma associated with slavery. Arguably, Beloved’s corrupting influence is used by Morrison to educate her readers on the importance of waking up from a period of traumatic dysfunction, which she called ‘national amnesia’. Both texts use influence, embedded with the Gothic trope of the supernatural, to enrich their readership with an understanding of ways to take responsibility and ownership for their actions or the horrors of slavery, whose persisting trauma many in America were born into, as a way to escape corruption.

Secondly, Morrison and Wilde explore corruption as inevitable for those restricted by tragedies of the past. After the killing of Beloved, ‘Denver took her mother’s milk right along with the blood of her sister’. The active and demanding verb ‘took’ introduces a sense of irony, as the baby is unaware of what she is drinking along with Sethe’s milk. This irony underpins a sense of tragic inevitability and reframes the image of maternal love to one perhaps metaphorical of the passing on of trauma and corruption, embodied by the grotesque imagery in ‘the blood of her sister’. Morrison’s attempt to prove the insurmountable nature of corruption might be being enforced by Wilde in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, ‘whom, for his strange likeness to his mother, [Lord Kelso] had always hated and desired to keep at a distance.’, keeping his grandson locked in the Gothic prison of the ‘attic’. The introduction of the uncanny through the adjective ‘strange’ perhaps might also be implying homosexuality, deemed as a ‘sin’, especially after its illegalisation in 1885. Through this understanding, it might be argued that Dorian was always destined to be susceptible to corruption due to his ostracisation from a young age. His uncanny ‘likeness’ to his mother might, in addition, suggest that Dorian Gray, much like Beloved to Sethe, acts as the physicalisation of Lord Kelso’s corruption, who ordered the murder of Dorian’s father, leading to the death of his ‘poor mother’ (Chapter 1). This warped understanding of love is passed down to the susceptible orphan, Dorian, a concept epitomised after Sibyl Vane’s suicide, whose role as an actress allows Dorian to agree that she ‘never really lived, and so she has never really died’ (Chapter 8). This inevitable corruption of love is mirrored by Morrison’s character Paul B, who condemns Sethe’s ‘love with a handsaw’. The juxtaposition between ‘love’ and ‘handsaw’ in Morrison’s chosen oxymoron speaks to the omnipotence of corruption over a love unhinged by the trauma of slavery. In both texts, corruption is presented as inevitable due to the constrictions of an isolating and segregated society.            

In conclusion, both Wilde and Morrison ultimately present corruption as only being escapable if humanity accepts its own responsibility for influence, in spite of ever-constrictive and inevitable corruption embedded by Victorian ideals around homosexuality and contemporary silence concerning the heritage of slavery

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Here is an essay that I wrote on the presentation of women in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ and ‘Beloved’. The essay was scored 34/40, but has since been revised with some corrections (shown in italics). I hope that you find it useful.

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Throughout both ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ by Oscar Wilde and ‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison, the authors use women to mirror and act as foils for the masculine-dominated Victorian and post-Civil War societies in which the characters find themselves. In ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Wilde exhibits the female experience as being thought of as inferior by the Victorians during ‘La Fin de Siècle’, whilst Morrison propels female emancipation into being a force to heal the horrors of humanity as she reflects on slavery. Ultimately, women are presented as a marginalised group in society who must live with the consequences of brutal class strictures enforced upon them by dominant patriarchal understanding.

Firstly, Morrison and Wilde present women as being unnoticed and marginalised by the world that surrounds them. In ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, after Dorian Gray degrades and threatens her with the breaking of their engagement, Sibyl Vane commits suicide. Whilst consoling Dorian, Lord Henry tells him that ‘the girl never really lived, and so she has never really died’. The adverb ‘really’ might be exposing Lord Henry’s derogatory intent, as well as underpinning his idea that because she was an actress, Sibyl never had autonomy over her own identity. This is intertwined with the systemic belittling of women across the breadth of the 19^th century, especially during the time of the later Gothic writers, as seen in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, where women are almost entirely absent. Could it be that Oscar Wilde is musing off this absence by the use of the metaphor surrounding Sibyl’s whole life being an act, drawing on the Gothic trope of doubling and the division between dual versions of the self (as seen in Stevenson’s work)? The repetition of ‘never really’ emphasises this satire. Similarly, in ‘Beloved’, after the exorcism of Beloved, Morrison writes that ‘they forgot her like a bad dream’. If one was to interpret the supernatural character of Beloved (‘skin, lineless and smooth’) as being a metaphor for the wider female slave experience, could it be that Morrison is attempting to educate her reader on how the African American women’s strife during slavery has been forgotten about? Through the ambiguous plural pronoun ‘they’, Morrison could also be pointing the blame for this forgetting to a universal crowd of people who are ignorant of or wish to ignore the plight of African American women, and how slave trauma continues to influence life today. The attempted erasing of women and their experience through Lord Henry’s stealing of Sibyl’s identity and the community’s forgetting of Beloved links to Toni Morrison’s theory of ‘national amnesia’, through which she posed her interviewer the question on why female history is being dismantled and disremembered. Talking of Sibyl Vane’s and Lord Henry’s influential voices over him, Dorian says that he does not ‘know which to follow’. Here, it could be argued that because Sibyl has some power over Dorian’s actions, Dorian esteems her to be more than just an actress. However, after Dorian’s acceptance of Lord Henry’s concept of Sibyl not truly being human (‘we will not talk of what has happened’ (chapter 8)), Dorian now involves himself in the covering-up of Sibyl’s life and death. Wilde might be using women, here, to present the egotistical lifestyle of members of the upper classes as Dorian chooses the sanctity of his reputation over the continuation of Sibyl’s memory. Additionally, because Lord Henry reduces Sibyl to her role as an actress, and therefore art though the preposition of time ‘never’, might Wilde be involving the notion of Aestheticism, mentioned in the Preface as ‘All art is quite useless’? Through the Aesthetic lens, Sibyl merely becomes art, a thing of beauty, and is stripped of her completeness as a woman, perhaps introducing the idea that male ego inhibits female significance, much like with the character of Beloved, who is disremembered. The third-person omniscient narrative of Morrison’s final chapter may, just like the disconnected plural pronoun ‘they’, be being used to distance the reader from the forgetting of female slave trauma, a forgetting that threatened healing by removing half of the story. Morrison might, here, be mimicking the removal of women from the slave narrative, just as Lord Henry and Dorian removed Sibyl, pretending that she never ‘really’ lived, for the hedonistic good of their reputations. However, the final word in the novel is ‘Beloved’. Could this suggest that Morrison believes that society can one day heal the wounds sewn by the removal of the female voice, or might the proper noun be acting itself as a tribute to histories that the world will never bring itself to hear? In both novels, the unrecognition of the female voice may be being exposed as symptomatic of a society dominated by male-centric history, though Wilde may arguably be perpetuating this through his novel’s lack of a commanding female voice.

Secondly, women are presented as being controlled by the societies that they live in. In ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Wilde focuses on the Vane family in chapter 5 of the novel. Mrs Vane, Sibyl’s mother, is described as having ‘bismuth-whitened hands’. Whilst the centring on the cosmetic description of women might again be reducing them to a two-dimensional role, it might also be that the allusions created by the compound adjective ‘bismuth-whitened’ refer to the inevitability of women becoming actresses in the Vane family and by extension the societal disempowering of women into a role classified by their beauty and lack of identity. This ownership is also developed by Morrison in chapter 23, where the chorus of Denver, Sethe and Beloved chant ‘You are mine’ in repetition to end the chapter. By use of heteroglossia, Morrison could be presenting women as being drained of their identity because no one outside of 124 can comprehend the events of Sethe’s life. This lack of identity is highlighted by the confusion surrounding the repetition, as who is saying it is ambiguous. However, Morrison might be implying that the women find identity through one another and can access the idea of ownership (‘you are mine’) and a sense of autonomy through their togetherness. The second-person pronoun ‘you’ also involves the readers within the chorus, so might Morrison here be more didactically educating her readers on the power found if women unite, again drawing to the idea that generational slave trauma can only be healed once that female voice is reincluded. However, the women in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ are never even allowed their own free indirect speech, as most of the men are. Could this suggest that Wilde does not offer the same hope of female unity and liberation as Morrison does, despite the dysfunctional consequences of the women’s bond?

In conclusion, Morrison and Wilde present women as being ostracised from society, having to play their parts for survival. Despite their best efforts, both writers argue that women have been reduced to second-class citizens and offer little hope in their empowerment if society forgets their stories.

Alexander Stephenson

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Beneath is an essay donated by a truly brilliant Year 13 student. Tackling the presentation of menace in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ and ‘Beloved’, the work scored 31/40.

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In ‘Beloved’ and ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, the writers present menace through supernatural disruptions of ordinary life that symbolise the threatening presence of the past and past sins. Menace is presented therefore as haunting, although the characters in both texts are largely unperturbed by this at the beginning, not noticing or caring about its effect on their mental stability or morality and so they leave its warning for cleansing unheeded.

The main sources of menace in the texts – the portrait and Beloved – are implied as menacing very soon after we are introduced to them, and yet the ‘victims’ of this menace remain largely unbothered. The first sign of menace in the portrait appears after Dorian’s first sin, his cruelty to Sibyl Vane, and is described as “the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror”. Here the signs of menace stem from Dorian’s actions as the “mouth” reflects his cruel language towards Sibyl, such as calling her a “third-rate actress with a pretty face”, and so Wilde is perhaps suggesting that the menace which disrupts our lives and causes decay is in direct response to our actions, which is also true of Beloved as Sethe’s “blood-soaked child” returned as a symbol of her traumatic past. Also, the simile of “as if he had been looking into a mirror” displays the Gothic trope of mirrors and doubles, demonstrating that the menace derives from within, an idea which dominated Victorian Gothic Literature and comments on the hypocrisy of a class so obsessed with appearance that menace was necessary in order for the moral order to be restored. This trope is also used by Morrison as Beloved says of Sethe “your face is mine”, indicating not only an ominous doppelganger effect but also a supernatural dominance that breaks down Sethe’s mentality and family unit, leading them to “cut Denver out of their games.” Beloved’s first appearance is lined with menace as “her voice was so low and rough each one looked at the other two”. Here Morrison presents the instinctual fear and unease in the face of menace as being the same among each character at first, but, as the novel progresses, Sethe and Denver are desensitised to the menace due to their need to correct the past, missing the implied message that they must come to terms with their past actions and let them go in order to be healed rather than trying to change them, something which Dorian also toys with when he decides to be rid of the menace by “marrying Sibyl Vane”. Thus, Morrison presents menace as being necessarily recognised in order for slaves to come to terms with their own horrific experiences and be free of them, rather than clinging on to the trauma in order to have a sense of identity.

The writers further use menace as a tool to display the extremities to which the characters’ minds have declined and then the failure of menace alone in some healing processes or moral resolutions. In chapter 14 of Dorian Gray, “the events…crept with silent blood-stained feet into his brain” and so the menace is personified, as in Beloved, in an attempt to force the characters to confront reality and their inner evils. The ominous semantic field of silence is also used in Beloved as “she moved closer [to Paul D] with a footfall he didn’t hear”, and so the importance of the menace being visual displays the vividness of slave trauma in the minds of black Americans, and the ever-present mental instability that is worsened once their fears assume a physical form. Wilde finally displays the damning effect of the portrait on Dorian and his use of free indirect speech displays the failure of the menace at truly changing him as his perceived resolution is to “give himself up, and be put to death? He laughed”. His lack of remorse or repentance suggests that menace is not an adequate road to redemption, and so Wilde’s comment in the Preface that art is “for art’s sake” is indicated as art cannot save Dorian. The chorus of women in Beloved in chapter 23 displays Sethe’s decline in the face of menace as, rather than distancing herself and learning from it, she connects with it, as shown by “will we smile at me?” This uneasy shift of pronouns displays Sethe’s lack of understanding and identity and could suggest the belief that slaves had to be associated with their past in order to be of worth, and so Morrison may be sending a message opposing this as Paul D tells Sethe finally “you your best thing, Sethe”, suggesting the importance yet the simultaneous failure of menace in the role of healing.

Therefore, the writers display the significance of a menacing force in the decline and increased mental instability of the characters, yet its role in highlighting aspects of individual life that may contribute to a cleansing process or moral resolution. For Wilde, this menace aimed to critique Victorian hypocrisy and immorality, whilst for Morrison, it played a key role in slave healing.

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We hope that you found this useful. Enjoy your week 🙂