Starter: Chapter 10 recap 1. What evidence is there that Dorian is becoming increasingly paranoid? 2. What information are we given about Dorian’s grandfather? What might this suggest about Dorian? 3. How would you characterise the description of the attic (p.101 & 104)? What might it suggest about Dorian’s psyche? 4. Identify imagery of horror used in the description of what might happen to the portrait. 5. What do you make of Dorian’s fleeting moment of moral self-reflection at the bottom of p.101? 6. What class tensions are revealed in this chapter? 7. Find three quotations which summarise the powerful impact of the yellow book. Extension: find out about A rebours (Against Nature) by Joris-Karl Huysmans.

Gothic isolation This chapter marks the start of Dorian’s self-isolation: many other Gothic figures, and particularly the villains, are isolated, and for many this is self-imposed. For example, Victor Frankenstein, Heathcliff, Dracula. Why is this significant? What is ‘Gothic’ about isolation? In your pairs, share examples of characters who are isolated or who isolate themselves. What is significant about them?

The significance of the ‘yellow book’ ‘this gift might seem to suggest that Lord Henry is deliberately striving to corrupt rather than amuse his young friend’ (Joseph Bristow) ‘tedious’ and ‘deliberately exhausting’ Chapter 11 modelled on A rebours A rebours makes an impact on Dorian in much the same way that Pater’s The Renaissance had a significant impact on Wilde: ‘that book which has had such a strange influence over my life’.

TASK: find evidence in Chapter 11 for each of these ideas and fill out the grid. Don’t forget to use the back of your editions to help you with the allusions.

The Past and Present in the Gothic ‘Just as places are often mysterious, lost, dark or secret in Gothic fiction, so too are its characteristic times. Gothics often take place at moments of transition (between the medieval period and the Renaissance, for example) or bring together radically different times. There is a strong opposition (but also a mysterious affinity) in the Gothic between the very modern and the ancient or archaic, as everything that characters and readers think that they’ve safely left behind comes back with a vengeance. Sigmund Freud wrote a celebrated essay on ’The Uncanny’ (1919), which he defined as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’. Gothic novels are full of such uncanny effects – simultaneously frightening, unfamiliar and yet also strangely familiar. A past that should be over and done with suddenly erupts within the present and deranges it. This is one reason why Gothic loves modern technology almost as much as it does ghosts. A ghost is something from the past that is out of its proper time or place and which brings with it a demand, a curse or a plea. Ghosts, like gothics, disrupt our sense of what is present and what is past, what is ancient and what is modern, which is why a novel like Dracula is as full of the modern technology of its period – typewriters, shorthand, recording machines – as it is of vampires, destruction and death.’ (John Bowen: http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-motifs) How does this link with the allusions to ancient figures and the portraits of Dorian’s ancestors in Ch11?

What do you make of these quotations? ‘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’ (108) ‘There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.’ (124)

How do you respond to these critical views of Chapter 11? Frances Gray: The energy of the plot has to come out of the possibility of repentance. To keep our interest in that possibility alive, the storyteller cannot allow the hero to revolt or disgust us so much that we do not want him to be saved. On the other hand, a damned soul must be guilty of some acts more terrible than people commit in crime stories, to keep the possibility of hell real. Frances Gray: There is an entertaining paradox about this chapter. It may deal with sin and decadence, but it imparts a great deal of information that the interested reader could follow up with a trip to the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum). It has a solidly educational function that even Ruskin might have approved of.

Homework 1 Choose one object from Dorian’s collection and find out all you can about it. What might it mean to him, or what might it symbolise for the reader?

Homework 2 Write a critical appreciation of the passage from Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey, relating your discussion to your reading of the Gothic.