Appearance vs reality......................................................................................................................4
Beauty...............................................................................................................................................6
Childhood.........................................................................................................................................8
Decay..............................................................................................................................................10
Death..............................................................................................................................................12
Desire..............................................................................................................................................15
Double life......................................................................................................................................17
Fate/inevitability............................................................................................................................19
Friendships.....................................................................................................................................21
Gender inequality..........................................................................................................................23
Good and evil.................................................................................................................................25
Guilt and Punishment...................................................................................................................28
Hauntings, doubles, the supernatural..........................................................................................29
The home.......................................................................................................................................31
Influence, corruption.....................................................................................................................33
Intimacy.........................................................................................................................................37
Innocence.......................................................................................................................................38
Love/Romance...............................................................................................................................39
Male entitlement............................................................................................................................42
Marriage.........................................................................................................................................43
Morality..........................................................................................................................................43
Obsession........................................................................................................................................45
Power, domination.........................................................................................................................46
Pleasure/Pursuit of pleasure.........................................................................................................47
Repression......................................................................................................................................49
Secrets, repressed desires..............................................................................................................50
Self-Destruction/Self hatred..........................................................................................................51
Sibling relationships......................................................................................................................53
Social class......................................................................................................................................55
Social change..................................................................................................................................61
Vanity.............................................................................................................................................63
Youth..............................................................................................................................................64
Lack of sympathy....................................................................................................................66
Possible homoerotic hints.......................................................................................................68
DORIAN GRAY CHARACTERS- Key quotes.......................................................................70
KEY QUOTES- DORIAN GRAY...........................................................................................71
LITTLE STRANGER KEY QOUTES:..................................................................................76
, Faraday as the little stranger........................................................................................................76
Faraday’s descriptions of the family............................................................................................78
Key Ayres family quotes...............................................................................................................79
Gothic descriptions........................................................................................................................79
The details that Faraday notices...................................................................................................80
Hints of Faraday’s malevolent feelings towards the family........................................................81
DORIAN GRAY CONTEXT...................................................................................................82
LITTLE STRANGER CONTEXT..........................................................................................90
ESSAY PLANS- made up questions.....................................................................................118
Supernatural on identity ............................................................................................................118
Tension between supernatural and rational .............................................................................118
Fear of the unknown ..................................................................................................................118
Supernatural to challenge perceptions of reality ......................................................................118
Theme of transformation............................................................................................................118
Appearance versus reality ..........................................................................................................118
Secrecy and revelation ................................................................................................................118
Moral corruption.........................................................................................................................119
Theme of obsession .....................................................................................................................119
Setting to reflect psychological state ..........................................................................................119
Characters haunted by their past...............................................................................................119
Examine the effects of societal decay. ........................................................................................119
Malevolent feelings......................................................................................................................119
Delusions......................................................................................................................................119
Self-hatred....................................................................................................................................120
Intentions.....................................................................................................................................120
Hatred...........................................................................................................................................120
Horror..........................................................................................................................................120
Love..............................................................................................................................................120
The home......................................................................................................................................120
Deception......................................................................................................................................120
Guilt..............................................................................................................................................120
Internal conflict...........................................................................................................................121
Violence........................................................................................................................................121
Hierarchy.....................................................................................................................................121
Death............................................................................................................................................121
Sense of unease.............................................................................................................................121
Supernatural as a form of punishment......................................................................................121
,Characters seem sinister.............................................................................................................121
Create a sense of doubt...............................................................................................................121
Dialogue........................................................................................................................................122
Tension.........................................................................................................................................122
Suspense.......................................................................................................................................122
Danger..........................................................................................................................................122
,Appearance vs reality
Dorian Gray
‘Even those who had heard the most evil things against him, and from time to time strange rumours about his mode of life crept through
London and became the chatter of the clubs, could not believe anything to his dishonour when they saw him.’ -p124
‘They wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of an age that was at once sordid and sensual.’ -
124
‘he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of
the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that
laughed back at him from the polished glass.’ -Dorian, p124
“Mind you, I don’t believe these rumours at all. At least, I can’t believe them when I see you. Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face.
It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the
lines of his mouth…” -Basil, to Dorian, p143
“But you, Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth- I can’t believe anything against you.” -Basil to
Dorian, p143.
‘He looked like a boy who had been tired out with play, or study.’ -Dorian, the morning after killing Basil, p155
‘Those finely-shaped fingers could never have clutched a knife for sin, nor those smiling lips have cried out in God and goodness.’ -p167
‘He seemed little more than a lad of twenty summers, hardly older, if older indeed at all, than his sister had been when they had parted so
many years ago. It was obvious that this was not the man who had destroyed her life.’ -James Vane, p182
,‘He had often told the girl whom he had lured to love him that he was poor, and she had believed him. He had once told her that he was
wicked, and she had laughed at him, and answered that wicked people were always very old and very ugly.’ -p209
,Beauty
Dorian Gray
“Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are.” -LH
‘Lord Henry looked at him. Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold
hair…. All the candour of youth was there.’ -LH about Dorian, p19
“Beauty is a form of Genius- is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation…. It cannot be questioned. It had its divine right of
sovereignty. It makes princes of people who have it.” -LH, p24
“To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” -LH, p24
“I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must
lose?” -Dorian, p28
“Oh, she is better than good- she is beautiful,” -LH about Sibyl, p72
‘The curves of her throat were the curves of a white lily. Her hands seemed to be made of cool ivory.’ -p81
“Come to the club with Basil and myself… [we will] drink to the beauty of Sibyl Vane. She is beautiful. What more can you want?” – LH, p83
‘The air was heavy with the perfume of flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an anodyne for his pain.’ -p86
“Sometimes , however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real the whole
thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect.” LH, p98
“Her death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty.” -Dorian, p106
,“I love beautiful things that one can touch and handle. “ -Dorian, p107
“I only knew that I had seen perfection face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes” -Basil (about Dorian), p110
‘How ugly it all was! and how horribly real ugliness made things!’ -Dorian, p120
‘Ugliness was the one reality.’ -p177
“I admit that I think that it is better to be beautiful than to be good. But on the other hand no one is more ready than I am to acknowledge
that it is better to be good than to be ugly.” -LH, p186
“Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues” -LH to Duchess of Monmouth, p186
‘it was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for… His beauty had been to him but a mask.’ -p210
The Little Stranger
‘The gown was an old one and, to be honest, not quite becoming. The low neckline showed her prominent collarbones and the tendons of her
throat, and the bodice was too tight for the swell of her bust.’ -p81
, Childhood
Page The Little Stranger page Dorian Gray Comparison
“my mother died when I was fifteen. She had “every moment of his lonely childhood came back Both Dorian and Faraday had high
miscarriage after miscarriage, it turned out, all to him as he looked round. He recalled the expectations for their lives when they
through my childhood, and the last one killed her.” à stainless purity of his boyish life” and “” were children, and neither are happy
lack of emotion for parents death suggest that he with the outcome of their lives. Both of
doesn’t feel a part of his family. them had resentment to their parents;
Faraday due to his class inferiority and
DG because of his father’s emotional
abuse. Both were outcasted and lonely
in their childhood.
Dorian Gray
‘He winced at the mention of his grandfather. He had hateful memories of him.’ -Dorian, p114
‘It was a large, well-proportioned room, which had been specially built by the last Lord Kelso for the use of the little grandson whom, for his
strange likeness to his mother, and also for other reasons, he had always hated and desired to keep at a distance.’ -Dorian, p117
, ‘Every moment of his lonely childhood came back to him as he looked round. He recalled the stainless purity of his boyish life, and it seemed
horrible to him that it was here that the fatal portrait was to be hidden away. How little he had thought, in those dead days, of all that was in
store for him.’ -Dorian, p118
The Little Stranger
‘The words used to drive me into secret rages, because on the one hand I wanted desperately to live up to my own reputation for cleverness;
and on the other it seemed very unfair, that that cleverness, which I had never asked for, could be turned into something with which to cut me
down.’ -p4
‘busy with bitter little battles of my own.’ -p4
‘My mother died when I was fifteen. She had had a miscarriage after miscarriage, it turned out, all through my childhood, and the last one
killed her.’ -p4
‘My father lived just long enough to see me graduate from medical school and return to Lidcote a qualified man.’ -p4
‘My father had taken on debt after debt in order to fund my education. The debts had probably ruined his health; thy almost certainly helped
weaken my mother. And what had been the result? I was a good, ordinary doctor.’ -p39
‘I remembered going up and down as a boy just about this time of year- carrying out the midday ‘snap’ of bread and cheese to my mother’s
brothers as they helped with the Hundreds harvest.’ -47
