A* Essay Plans for The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula
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Course
Unit 2 - Prose (9ET0)
Institution
PEARSON (PEARSON)
A* level highly detailed, comparative essay plans for The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula in English Literature Paper 2: Prose
Contains plans including context, argument and language analysis of location, villainy, symbolism, time, science, imperialism, desire, corruption, supernatural and isol...
Compare the ways in which the writers of your two texts use a range of locations. You must relate
your discussion to relevant contextual factors.
[40 marks]
Both use setting as a mode of transition
DG - public/private
Paragraphs oscillate constantly between public and private locations, 'The next day he did
not leave the house' (18), 'A week later Dorian Gray was sitting in the conservatory at
Selby Royal talking to the pretty Duchess of Monmouth.'
'lying sleepless in his own delicately scented chamber, or in the sordid room of the little ill-
famed tavern under the dock, which under an assumed name, and in disguise, it was his
habit to frequent.' (11) - sibilance blends the contrast of delicacy and vulgarity, increasing
discord between public and private life - takes an almost sinister delight in his identity's
displacement
However, as Dorian and the painting converge, so does his duplicity, in which it becomes
metaphysically static, without location, merely trapped; 'He wanted to escape from
himself.' (16)
o His identity has become inverted/warped, his identity is physically static as he
conflates life and art.
Drac - transition into a vampire/ that of sexual promiscuity
Hinterlands, Transylvania, and 'it was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz'
(1) - liminality, witching hour and death of day.
Similarly to Dorian Gray, Dracula's conflating transitions become unsustainable in reality,
and alter to manifest themself within. 'We thought her dying whilst she slept, and sleeping
when she died.' (16) - chiasmic liminality of Lucy's vampiric transition.
Paradox of liminal transition reflects the dichotomy between Victorian convention and
Decadence (1890s)
Further, the fears of degeneration (Nordau)
Both use setting as a means of aestheticism - paradoxically merging yet realising the mimetic
bridge between art and reality.
DG - orientalism/ library
- Basil Hallwood's studio: 'there came through the open door the heavy scent of lilac, or the more
delicate perfume of the pink-flowering horn' (1) - sense of synaesthesia, intoxicating beauty that
conflates a further disparity between the sense and realism - Pater's Aestheticism, highly conscious,
sensual engagement in moment.
Similarly do last scene (Dorian's death), where this doesn't occur. Wilde keeps us with a
realist notion of the final attic location to portray a negative or unproductive mimesis
between art and reality *grounds us.
Drac - Dracula's castle
While like Wilde, Stoker uses location to adjust a bridge between realism and meta-
physicality, he does for the intention of understanding hierarchical structure and how it
translates from formality to one's being.
'great door' and 'pride of his house and name is his own pride' (3), somewhat chiasmic -
eternal life, he's been present at all battles (subverts western notion of aristocracy).
Ironically, to peasants it may have seemed as if the feudal lord was immortal; there was
always a figure, often at the cost of peasant blood. - Destabilises the notion of perception.
Modern is haunted by its own past. ‘Formation of conscious that has never been conscious…
passes from the parent’s unconscious to the child’s’. Vampire in the enterprise of the
modern – attempts to break from Vampiric pull of past, but it will never be fully possible to
be rid of the dead.
, Both use locations symbolically to comment upon Victorian/Christian conventions.
DG - painting (only place to house repressed desires is metaphysically)
Location of Dorian's soul
‘as soon as you are dry, you shall be varnished.’ – difficult to distinguish between art and
person
‘But now and then a complex personality took place and assumed the office of art.’–
duality, Dorian Gray is a work of art, he is the portrait essence of Basil and beauty of himself,
also, he is fashioned like a character when LH artistically creates him
Extended as he conflates his life with art, not just his soul: ‘like a wonderful ending to a
wonderful play. It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a
great part, but by which I have been not been wounded.’– mimesis, not life itself but life
imitated.
Nietzsche – tragedy is the highest form of art, it can deal with darkest and most sublime
aspects of human nature (esp during darkness of industrialisation).
Fin de Silecla – period at the end of Victorian period, bridge between Victorians and
beginnings of new and modern (decadence)
o Nordau said that fin de siecla imagines a new form that rises above the grim realities
of industrialisation and degeneration
Drac - the chapel - Dracula as the antichrist
Chapel at Carfax
‘The tomb in the daytime’ – biblical illusion
‘follow me onto the grounds of Carfax, in case our friend might be dangerous… I found him
pressed closed against the old iron-bound oak door of the chapel.’ – going to Carfax a
liminal space, crossroads of life/death – sanity/demise
Vampire is a metaphor for the anxious equivocation of the relationship between desire and
convention – pivotal anxiety of Victorian culture. Thus, the vampire is the antithesis
(literally!) of the Christian ideals one should strive to abide.
‘As she looked her eyes blazed with unholy light’ – anti-Christ like Dracula – theme of sight
= loss of purity (outward appearance)
‘because he walked with God’ – R, like Drac – takes Christianity and subverts it. References
Enoch, who was spared death and also recipient of supernatural knowledge
Compare the ways in which the writers of your two texts present villains. You must relate your
discussion to relevant contextual factors.
[40 marks]
Both present villains in differing manners, while Stoker explores the notion of a villains
appearance, Wilde deconstructs this theory.
Dracula's eastern physiognomy
Shklovsky's defamiliarisation - uncanny is dangerous
'sharp white teeth'(2) - resembles primitive predator, repertoire of anxieties focused on the
scapegoat figure of the degenerate, 'whether man or beast' (8) - physiognomy,
antisemitism, anti-east
Contrasted by the appearance of control in westernism, 'Van Helsing, as usual, up to time'
(11) - order and control juxtapose chaos of Dracula and the east
'As she looked her eyes blazed with unholy light' (16) 'It made me shudder to think of so
mutilating the body of the woman whom I had loved.'(16) - Seward realises the
supernatural reality - theme of appearance aligning with monstrosity
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