Reading Dorian Gray as an Androgynous Figure
Date Issued
2006
Date
2006
Author(s)
Wong, Hiu Wai
DOI
en-US
Abstract
Abstract
The thesis re-examines and establishes the deviant gender image of Dorian Gray in the context of Victorian intellectual and aesthetic culture. I argue that in The Picture of Dorian Gray, besides the well-known eccentric dandy, Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian Gray is an unprecedented gender figure that has long been ignored by most critics, and should thus be explored in details. Historically speaking, Oscar Wilde’s portrayal of this androgynous youth is not a singular, personal creation; the fictional character in fact crystallizes the Victorian Oxonians’ aesthetic pursuit of beautiful boy with ambiguous gender traits. And curiously enough, Dorian Gray is not only a captivating boy who employs the power of an invincible beauty, but also a sinner who hurts and kills both himself and others, and is therefore entirely excluded from the middle-class society. It is thus interesting to trace the historical background which moves Oscar Wilde to create such an androgynous character, to analyze how Dorian Gray functions as an anti-middle-class figure, and to probe into the possible implication of his overwhelming surface beauty.
The first chapter traces the Victorian cultural phenomena such as the Oxford Movement, Uranian poetry, W. E. Gladstone and Walter Pater’s aesthetic claim, and speculates the recurrently depicted androgynous characters in Wilde’s works, who are the young king, Mr. W. H., and Dorian Gray. The second chapter aims at exploring the anti-middle-class implication of Dorian Gray, through comparing him with Lord Henry Wotton, whose behaviors in fact never quite fulfills the anti-middle-class mode. The third chapter scrutinizes the camp sensibilities in the androgynous Dorian Gray, since he successfully exemplifies the rich potentialities of the shallow surface of beauty. In a word, Dorian Gray does not only epitomize the Victorian demands of boy’s ambiguous gender appearance, but also serves as an avant-garde figure that anticipates the twentieth-century camp challenge of deep subjectivity. He mirrors Oscar Wilde’s love for the enchanting youthful boy, and in the meantime unfolds his bitter conflicts with the heterosexual hegemony of the Victorian middle class.
Subjects
奧斯卡王爾德
牛津運動
雌雄同體性別形象
坎普理論
反中產階級姿態
Oscar Wilde
Oxford Movement
androgynous gender image
camp
anti-middle-class posture
Type
thesis
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