The Picture Of Dorian Gray, By Oscar Wilde

Nathaniel Hawthorne portrays the ideology of Puritan society in the novel the Scarlet Letter; however reader also get to witness his characters being an illustration of hypocrisy and victims to their own guilt. In the Scarlet Letter, as in many of Hawthorne’s shorter works, he makes profuse use of the Puritan past: its odd exclusionary belief, its harsh code of ruling, its concern with sex and witchcraft. The Scarlet Letter is a story that is embellished but yet simple. Many readers may view this novel as a soap opera due to the way Hawthorne conveys this Puritan society’s sense of strictness and inability to express true emotion along with the secrecy and how deceiving the characters are being. As the story unfolds the main character Hester Prynne is bounded in marriage at an early age. She engages in an adulterous affair with an unknown member of their small village. Hester soon becomes pregnant and with her husband’s absence the chances of this child belonging to her husband are slim. The towns’ people know that she has committed a sin and imprisons her for her crime.

This ridicule has a trickle down effect on Hester as she too is banished from her own community for committing adultery. The comparison between Hester and Hawthorne defines the external struggle for the reader to fully understand the effect of opinions from society on them Although reluctant to allow Hester to leave prison, the members of the town suggest that her punishment be to wear a scarlet red letter A on her bosom, thereby allowing all to know of her crime. The scarlet letter “ was red-hot with infernal fire, ” (Hawthorne 81) and defined the state she was currently in, that being eternal hell. Though she was forced to marry an older man at a young age, her rebellion to have an affair is not seen as an internal struggle that she overcame; rather, it is merely seen as a woman who sinned, a woman who shall therefore endure the punishment for the sin, rather than a woman who was never given a say in what she wanted with her life. Time and again, Hester Prynne is seen defying society by allowing herself to stand out from societal norm just as the roses “with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner“ (Hawthorne) did. Instead, she returns to the community and is observed aiding those in need, all with seven year old Pearl by her side.

The author, in lines 24 to 29, compares Hester’s scarlet letter to a “passport into regions where other women dared not tread,” and later mentions how the mentors of her life—shame, despair, and solitude—taught her strong but amiss, different from other women. These metaphors depict the dual nature of Hester: the sinful bearer of the scarlet letter and audacious woman of brooding resilience. In spite of her emblem of shame, Hester boldly continued to hold her head high, resisting all the consequences of her adultery. The metaphors employed here, therefore, provide a thorough inspection of Hester’s state of mind and paints a deeper and more poignant picture of Hester Prynne’s

The main character, Hester Prynne, is publicly shamed for adultery and forced to wear a scarlet letter “A” on her chest. Although one might view Hester as an evil character considering that she has committed a rather unbearable sin in the eyes of 1650 Boston, she is not at all a bad person. Though she commits one of the worst sins for a woman, she is not entirely unvirtuous. Though Hester is punished by being forced to wear the scarlet letter, she turns the letter “A” into more than adultery. “Such helpfulness was found in her, - so much power to do, and power to sympathize, - that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength”

Despite the severity of her crime, she does not show any denial - or even regret - for committing adultery. Instead, she embroiders the scarlet letter “A”, a mark that was intended to shame her, onto her dress to make it look pretty. Here, readers can see Hawthorne's use of irony to support his thematic message. By turning her punishment into a display of how her beauty “shone out and made a halo of … misfortune and ignominity,” (Hawthorne, 51) Hester lessens the humiliation she would otherwise have to endure. After serving her prison time, Hester is allowed to roam free and move wherever she pleases; yet she stays in the very town she was shamed in.

In his classic literature piece, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne shows readers how sin can affect people and their lives significantly. In the Puritan town of Boston, Hawthorne uses his characters to convey the theme of sin within the story. To punish wrongdoers and discourage further sinning, the Puritan community publicly shames offenders for their sins, often changing their roles within society significantly. The Scarlet Letter is based around the public humiliation and growth of the character Hester Prynne. Hawthorne represents how sin can change people using Hester Prynne as an example, whose identity within society, physical appearance, and mentality all change as a result of her sin.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter portrays Hester Prynne, a woman who has been stripped of her social standing for committing adultery. By refusing to say who the father is, she is forced to wear an embroidered ‘A’ for the townspeople to view and criticize her for her mistake. Having to deal with conflicts both internally and externally, Hester goes through a journey to make her life better for herself and her daughter. As the years progress, Hester learns that her life is much more valuable than she had first presumed.

The members of Puritan society all pressure the wickedness of Hester’s deed, and their condescending manner puts Hester in an oppressed position, both as an adulterer, and as a woman. As the woman in the adultery, she must take the public shame and care for the daughter, Pearl, who is in her arms as she stands on the scaffold, “a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentered at her bosom” (Hawthorne 10). But despite the prejudice Hester must endure from society, rises much stronger and utilizes the scarlet letter to increase her worth. The book alludes to Anne Hutchinson, who “led a group of religious dissenters” and this allusion “even anticipates the scarlet letter that she wears” (Themes). Hester starts to wear the A with pride, making it her own, and turned her problems into solutions. Even the members of Puritan society “were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped” (Hawthorne 7). She wore misfortune as a badge, and used the A in her own terms. Sally Buckner explains that despite Hester’s isolation from Puritan society and the normal people, she has “come to terms

The character of Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter is the perfect example of a round character: one who is complex as a result of growing and changing throughout the story. Hester is a character through which readers can view growing empowerment, increasing self-esteem, and blossoming confidence. Originally a symbol of sin and wrongdoing, Hester Prynne develops into a figure of ability and strength. From the first time she is introduced in the novel, it can easily be inferred that she is despised by her community. In a world where it is morally unacceptable, she has committed adultery. For that, she is granted the punishment of displaying an attention-drawing scarlet letter “A” on her chest, abbreviating the label “adulterer.” When she is displayed on a scaffold for public disgrace, her peers “were stern enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a theme for jest in exhibition like the present” (54).

“ I wasn 't like this before I met you.” “ Like what?” “I didn’t feel like this. I didn’t think like this. You- you did this to me…(“Fallenoracle”).” This quote from the tv series Quantico does an effective job of expressing what Lord Henry’s influence has done to Dorian Gray throughout the philosophical novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. While some might argue that Dorian 's actual nature does not change significantly, an additional perspective is that Dorian Gray is a dynamic character that gains negative character traits by becoming vain of his youth, increasingly paranoid of someone learning of his portrait as well as the crimes he has committed, and attempting to gain pleasure from a number of deprived acts.

Freud’s belief was that mental health and psychological wellness requires a harmonious relationship between the different parts of the mind and a lack of harmony can lead to neurosis. Plato invented the original tripartite and Freud expanded on it in 1923. The tripartite is divided into the sections: The Superego, the Ego, and the Id. The Superego is basically the conscience of our mind. The Ego is consciousness created by the combination of the Id and Superego. The Id is having thoughts of instincts and drives which are necessary to satisfy. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, we see the main characters representing the Superego, Ego, and Id.

My choice for this summer reading assignment was to read The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. This is a philosophical fiction novel meaning it devotes a significant portion of the novel to sort the questions that are addressed in discursive philosophy, that can include: the role in society, the purpose of living, ethnic or morals, experience, etc. Throughout history art has played a huge role in portraying the structure of society and how the people play in it.The novel takes place in the late 19th century in London. The novel is about a beautiful young man who is hiding a ugly secret. Dorian Gray is a beautiful young wealthy gentlemen that does not age and thats life is dictated my art. He was the subject of one of Basil Hallward,

Vanity and undeniable ego are characteristics of self-destructive properties. In the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde shows how these can lead to a man’s downfall. He displays this through the character of Dorian Gray. The novel explains how as Dorian grows up and through his life, he is ultimately destroyed by his own ego, vanity and inability to change or realize how what he does affects not only him but the lives of those around him. Dorian Gray struggles throughout the novel with the daunting facts that he is Vane, has an enormous ego and cannot realize the full extent of his own actions

When it comes to being a celebrity I find that it is inevitable to avoid being a part of some sort of controversy. At the height of Oscar Wilde’s career is where he found himself in just that. Although Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray is praised today, in the late 1800s it was seen by others as a negative shift in society and literature. In the film “Wilde”, after the release of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s wife Constance and his mother Jane have a conversation in regards to the novel that gives insight to how the public responded to it. In response to Jane, Constance says “People say it is full of dangerous paradoxes” (Wilde, 21:47). Within their conversation, Constance not only verbally says how others feel disdain

One of Oscar Wilde’s most challenging themes, not only in his writing, but also in his professional life, is that of formulating an authentic identity in the realism of a hedonistic, pleasure-seeking lifestyle without boundaries. By first looking at this challenge in all its facets, it will be easier to comprehend the fundamental theme in his book The Picture of Dorian Gray.