Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

IDENTITY AND DIVERISTY, "Most people are other people. Their thoughts…

- - - - Unhinging the Renaissance assumption that physical beauty corresponds to spiritual beauty, Wilde wants to remind us of the hypocrisy that lies behind the mask of the Victorian society, to which he belongs.
        
        The deformity of the portrait represents immorality and corruption not only of Dorian, but of the whole middle class, at the end of the nineteenth century in England.
    - - In Wilde's novel the soul is the portrait. A portrait that bears the signs of time, of corruption, of the many faults that are hidden behind the mask of Dorian's ageless beauty.
    - - Initially, the title character, Dorian Gray, falls in love with Sybil because she is a wonderful actress. Each night she plays a different heroine in a Shakespeare play. Dorian can believe that she is actually Juliet or Desdemona even though she acts in a filthy theater with bad actors.
        
        When Sybil realizes, however, that she is not a Shakespearean heroine, but an actress in a cheap playhouse, she loses her ability to act.
        
        Dorian cannot love the real Sybil, only the ideal she represented in her roles. Similarly the Ghost can exist solely as a performer of a part. Once his public refuses to believe in his part, the Ghost loses his identity.
- - - - When his identity is threatened, the ghost first lashes out, and then shrinks into shame and despair. Eventually, his shame turns out to be productive: it helps him to realize it is time to move on and let go of his role in order to find peace.
        
        From the collision between past and present, the conflict becomes a desire to transcend one’s notion of identity.
        
        In many ways, the Ghost represents all that is rotten and decaying in Europe. He relishes choosing identities that will provoke particular horror in his victims, such as a murderer. His many costume changes, from “The Headless Earl” to “The Bloodsucker of Bexley Moor,” reveal his underlying shallowness.
        
        The ghost wishes to find some peace and the innocence of Virginia helps him rebelling against the common stereotype that sees the ghost as malevolent and evil.