THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY and "THE GAY ARTIST AS TRAGIC HERO IN THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY"

Below are some discussion questions to continue pushing our ideas about The Picture of Dorian Gray. Feel free to draw from these questions or develop your own. You can also continue on exploring some themes from last week or feel free to respond to another student's blog.

• Do some internet research on the following terms and explain their relationship to the novel: hamartia, homo-erotic, or queer theory. On page 30, Lord Henry’s uncle calls him a “dandy.” For this week you might want to do some background research on this term and explore how this figure and “dandy-culture” bears on some of the themes in the text.
  Some critics have called this novel a “gothic” story. What do you think makes this novel “gothic”? I would encourage you to do a little bit of internet research to better define that term and explain how it might relate to the novel.
  Henry M. Alley calls Basil “the principle hero” of The Picture of Dorian Gray. What do you think he means by that statement? Do you agree? Why or why not? Alley cites Jeffrey Nunokawa who states calls Basil "the hero of the coming-out story." What do you think Nunokawa means by this statement? Is The Picture of Dorian Gray a "coming-out story." What does Alley say to this claim? What do you think?
• At the end of Alley's essay, he quotes from Oscar Wilde's son who writes, "The worst aspects of Victorian hypocrisy have now disappeared, and today my father would not have been hounded to his death as he was fifty years ago. The self-righteousness of that age was really camouflage to disguise its own hypocrisy, and the poeple who were loudest in their condemnation of my father were often those whose own lives could least bear investigation, Nothing makes the transgressor so indignant as the transgressions, of a different kind, of his fellow-men; except, perhaps transgressions of the same kind" (8). What does he mean by this statement? Where do you see displays of hypocrisy in the novel? Where do you see Wilde satirizing or commenting on "the worst aspects of Victorian hypocrisy" in the novel?