Dorian Gray - Passions & Feelings
Dorian Gray a viable character due to his complexity but hard to imagine as a paradoxical personality is capable of such varied and alternating feelings that the reader most often asks himself the question … "How can this Dorian pass from one mood to another with such easiness?". It is generally agreed that Oscal Wild's style is the one which makes us believe (even for a short period of time) in the intensity and constancy of the character's feelings: now something makes him feel in one way, than something else awakes other feelings, that seem more intense.
When lord Henry first opens Dorian's eyes upon his passing youth and beauty, he induces a feeling of melancholy in the protaginist.Dorian looks for the first time at his picture and becomes aware of his beauty.The hero is amazed in front of his own self, this time seen through the eyes of an artist who only reproduced reality mutiplying it with the infinite admiration he felt for the muse.Dorian lives a powerful emotion which is in fact the premise of one of the most constant feelings experienced by him, later transformed into a passion: self-love.
Seeing the rictus spotting the picture, the character has weak and short throbs of remorse… Instead, all he can do is pitty the portrait, which was destined to pay for his sins.How noble of Dorian… he then decides to live a pure and simple life and to marry Sibyl. It is easy for him to put passion in a letter written to the actress… "passion on paper" as it seems…
'Forunately' for him, fate has other plans: Sibyl kills herself and Dorian follows a totally different path… with all the pity he felt for his own soul, he forgets the promises and decides to benefit from the turn, the chance destiny has offered him.
At the age of 38, when we usually assume that Dorian's mind was ripen enough to help him have an objective outlook on real life (whithout useless emotional implications and moody feelings), and make him a person capable of taking the right decisions regarding himself, our character kills Basil. It is as if he had killed the last resource of humaneness that could have saved his ugly soul.The awful crime reveals the meanness and dispare in Dorian's soul.The awful gesture is an equivelnt to a discharge of energies, to a revenge of his savage and cruel inner life.The awarenessof his act is terrifing : he kills not only his best friend, but also the author of his soul, the one who saw the purity in Dorian.
His perception is distorted.He is living a double life, which, obviously, changes himfor the worse, complicating his capacity of living revealing feelings and passions.His duplicity makes him not recognise the evil not even when it is obvious, or, if he recognises it, the uglyness in his soul urges him to accept misery as it is, a natural enviroment for a sinful soul and a corrupted mind.
The good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful are playing round Dorian.He wanted beauty and paid with the evil and the ugly, a dearly price for a broken mind and such a complicated soul…
Alternating feelings and transient passions, a soul smeared by life and a mind too devious to be understood… that is Dorian Gray.
Bara Brandusa, X F1
