This thesis analyzes the Catholic themes within Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. In order to accurately do so it will establish proper definitions of gothic fiction and...Show moreThis thesis analyzes the Catholic themes within Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. In order to accurately do so it will establish proper definitions of gothic fiction and Catholicism. Moreover, within this analysis on Catholicism and gothic fiction, it will also establish which Catholic themes are significant within the analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray. After these definitions and particular themes are established, an inquiry into Wilde’s personal life, and his relationship to Catholicism, will be executed. Eventually, an analysis of the novel itself, combining the Catholic themes and the biographical information presented in the earlier chapters, will be carried out. After these analyses are carried out, this thesis will establish that The Picture of Dorian Gray illustrates Wilde’s fear of being completely liberated. The judgment he received from the Marquess of Queensberry, the heteronormative Protestant community he grew up in, and even his lover Lord Alfred Douglas would eventually turn his desires to feel as liberated as his mother into a phobia of being completely free, which is depicted in his own conviction of Dorian Gray.Show less
‘Gothic has, in a sense, always been ‘queer’’, or so Hughes and Smith argue in their introduction to Queering the Gothic. Other critics have suggested that Gothic is queer in the sense that it has...Show more‘Gothic has, in a sense, always been ‘queer’’, or so Hughes and Smith argue in their introduction to Queering the Gothic. Other critics have suggested that Gothic is queer in the sense that it has always occupied the liminal spaces and transgressed boundaries in order to interrogate what is “normal” in society . In the Victorian age the sexual aspect of the queer becomes of pivotal importance. When the Labouchere Amendment was passed in 1885, acts of homosexuality became officially criminalised. Research shows how the Gothic then evolved even more strongly into a space for expressing ‘sexual defiance’. Late Victorian authors found ‘a safe location’ in the Gothic genre to ‘explore the landscape of sexual taboos’. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray are both narratives of the late Victorian period and have been widely researched for expressing homosexuality in their narratives. This thesis examines the two novels explicitly for the similar Gothic tropes they use in order to express their queer narrative. This thesis is a close reading of the two novels, comparing and contrastingthese texts by showing how they employ similar Gothic tropes the two novels use to express their homosexual narrative, namely: contemporary anxiety around degeneration, a repressed hidden identity, and the strategical use of elision and “silence”. Through this I will investigate how The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray mirror one another’s queer narratives and how they use the Gothic to criticise and accuse Late Victorian society and law enforcement for marginalising homosexual men and thus creating the internalised double homosexual ‘monster’.Show less
