ENG 632 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Green Carnation, Aestheticism, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Document Summary
Dorian gray is characterized by this: consider aestheticism and decadence to be dominant cultural movements. There is a middle class drive to conformity. Celebration of the indivudal and personality: basil talks about his art as a new personality, opposition to nature, green carnation: vic. Era has no natural green carnation, became a symbol of the transition to gay recognition: science addresses foreign alters to a racialized discourse, orientation of sexual difference became rooted in a kind of bind. Hetero love was natural, but homo love was not: the cultivation and appreciation of the artificial. Male desire as a key motif: henry and dorian own a home together, dorian ruins a number of men, dorian lives a double life, as gay men had to live. Doppelgangers and the uncanny: portrait becomes a symbol of the uncanny, dorian hides it away in the schoolroom to hide his fear, perhaps the schoolroom is a way of trying to restore purity to the portrait.
