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Are there specific characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray who represent the three areas of the Unconscious? Which ones? Justify providing quotes from the text

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Are there specific characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray who represent the three areas of the Unconscious? Which ones? Justify providing quotes from the text

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The Id is what influences our desires, our libido, the force that drives us to seek pleasure; the Ego deals with reality, it strives to balance the Id and the Superego and, last but not least, the Superego is the area of the Unconscious which houses judgment (of ourselves and others)

The Id is Lord Henry, because he is the one who influence Dorian to act differently, to pay attention to beauty and that sort of things. He is a man with “wrong, fascinating, poisonous, delightful theories.” He proclaims himself as a hedonist who advocates the equal pursuit of both moral and immoral experience.

The Ego is Dorian Gray who tries to seek a balance between Lord Henry and Basil Hallward (the Superego). He is exceptionally vain and becomes convinced by Henry through a brief conversation about beauty and youth.

And finally we have Basil as Dorian’s superego who want to take care of him and protect him from all the injurious influence of Henry. He is a talented, though somewhat conventionally minded. He is really committed to Dorian which reveals the genuineness of his love for his favourite subject and he is really concerned for the safety of Dorian’s soul

Karen Schvint

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D) Which event marks the beginning of Dorian’s downfall? Does he manage to suppress his Superego by performing this act? Justify providing quotes from the text.

Sibyl’s death marks the beginning of Dorian’s downfall. He blames himself for this and he feels responsible for her death. When he breaks with Sibyl, he said horrible words to her and he believes that for this she commit suicide.
“So I have murdered Sibyl Vane”, said Dorian Gray, half himself – “murdered her as surely as if I had cut her littel throat with a knife.” (…) You don’t know the danger I am in, and there is nothing to keep me straight. She would have done that for me. She had no right to kill herself. It was selfish of her”. (Chap.8, page 80, Wordsworth Classics)

Lord Henry suggests Dorian not to feel guilty but, rather, to regard Sibyl’s suicide as a perfect artistic representation of undying love and appreciate it as such. Dorian, who feels numb rather than anguished, is convinced by his friend’s seductive words and agrees to go to the opera with him that very night. When Lord Henry is gone, Dorian reflects that this incident is a turning point in his existence, and he resolves to accept a life of “eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joy and wilder sins,” in which his portrait, rather than his own body, will bear the marks of age and experience.

"It is an interesting question", said Lord Henry, who found an exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism - 'an extremely interesting question. I fancy that the true explanation is this. It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are not longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us. In the present case, what is that has really happened? Someone has killed herself for love of you. I wish that I had ever had such an experience. It would have made me in love with love for the rest of my life.  (...) That awful memory of woman! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar!". (Chap,8, pages 81-82, Wordsworth Classics)
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Dorian's reaction:
" (...) but I am glad you don't think I am heartless. I am nothing of the kind. I know I am not. And yet I must admit that this thing that has happened does not affect me as it should. It seems to me to be simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded." (Chap.8, page 81, Wordsworth Classics)

Daniela Mora.

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Contribution: Which area of the Unconscious dominates Dorian Gray’s life?

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Contribution: Which area of the Unconscious dominates Dorian Gray’s life?

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As was previously stated the area of the Unconscious that ruled Dorian’s life was the Id. However, we can see the sporadic appearance of the Superego as well: “But he would not sin. The picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience. He would resist temptation.” (Wilde, 1890: 102).

Still, it is clear that his Ego does not do well with balancing the reality of his existence and always ends up favouring the Id. Dorian tried to lead an honourable life when he discovered that the portrait has changed, but the next day and after hearing of Sibyl’s death his Id won the battle: “He felt that the time had really come for making his choice. Or had his choice already been made? Yes, life had decided that for him,— life, and his own infinite curiosity about life. Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins,—he was to have all these things. The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all.” (Wilde, 1890: 122).

Maira Pérez

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b) Which area of the Unconscious dominates Dorian Gray's life? How? Provide quotes from the text to justify your answers.

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b) Which area of the Unconscious dominates Dorian Gray's life? How? Provide quotes from the text to justify your answers.

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“But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also”

Here we can observe a kind of speech Henry gave to Dorian. The unconscious mind contains our biologically based insticts for the primitive urges for sex and agression.  Freud argued that our primitive urges often do not reach consciousness because they are unacceptable to our rational, conscious selves. So, what Henry is telling to Dorian is this. He tried to convince Dorian about all this thoughts. He wanted him to do all the things he could not do, although he wanted to do them.
Dorian accepted all these speechs, thinking he was a good man and a friend. But it was not true, Henry was an evil man. He convinced Dorian to leave his first love, Sybil Vane, because the area of the Unconscious that dominate Dorian Gray's life are: Id and Ego.
The Id is the impulsive and unconsciuos part of our psyche which responds directly and immediately to the instincts. It operates on the pleasure principle which is the idea that every wishful impulse should be satisfied immediately.

"A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them"

Malena Lagrace

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a) Are there specific characters in 'The picture of Dorian Gray' who represents the three areas of the Unconscious? Which ones? Justify providing quotes from the text

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a) Are there specific characters in 'The picture of Dorian Gray' who represents the three areas of the Unconscious? Which ones? Justify providing quotes from the text

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Basil Hallward represents the Superego. He is an idealist who believes in the innate goodness of makind. He tried to restrain Dorian from wickedness, in order to keep him innocent and pure, but he payed for his optimism and good faith with his life.

"I hate the way you talk about your married life, Harry," said Basil Hallward, strolling towards the door that led into the garden. "I believe that you are really a very good husband, but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose." (Chap. 1, page 7)

Here it is reflected what Basil thniks. Basil believes that people are innately  good, and that his friend's cynicism is just a front.

Lord Henry Wotton symbolizes the Id. He is an hedonistic, selfish aristrocrat, who thinks that everything is just a tool for pleasure to him. His actions doesn't affect him, because his psychological state is marred by a lack of empathy or regret.

"Some one has killed herself for love of you. I wish that I had ever had such an experience. It would have made me in love with love for the rest of my life. The people who have adored me -- there have not been very many, but there have been some -- have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me. They have become stout and tedious, and when I meet them, they go in at once for reminiscences. That awful memory of woman! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar."(Chap. 8, page 82)

Here Lord Henry seems to view the lives and deaths of others as irrelevant, as though every other person out there is just an expendable pawn in his personal game.

Dorian Gray represents the battleground between the id, Henry, and the superego, Basil. In other words, Dorian symbolizes the Ego. Whiole Hery influces Dorian to commit acts of of decadence. Basil attemps to pull Dorian from the path of immorality.

"Dorian made no answer, but passed listlessly in front of his picture and turned towards it. When he saw it he drew back, and his cheeks flushed for a moment with pleasure. A look of joy came into his eyes, as if he had recognized himself for the first time. He stood there motionless and in wonder, dimly conscious that Hallward was speaking to him, but not catching the meaning of his words. The sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation. He had never felt it before. Basil Hallward's compliments had seemed to him to be merely the charming exaggeration of friendship. He had listened to them, laughed at them, forgotten them. They had not influenced his nature. Then had come Lord Henry Wotton with his strange panegyric on youth, his terrible warning of its brevity. That had stirred him at the time, and now, as he stood gazing at the shadow of his own loveliness, the full reality of the description flashed across him. Yes, there would be a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim and colourless, the grace of his figure broken and deformed. The scarlet would pass away from his lips and the gold steal from his hair. The life that was to make his soul would mar his body. He would become dreadful, hideous, and uncouth.
As he thought of it, a sharp pang of pain struck through him like a knife and made each delicate fibre of his nature quiver. His eyes deepened into amethyst, and across them came a mist of tears. He felt as if a hand of ice had been laid upon his heart […]
"How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. . . . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that -- for that -- I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!" (Chap.2, page 24)

In this part of the book, we see how Dorian feels the impending doom of his own mortality. He has never realized how beautiful he is before, and, now that he knows he has youth and beauty, he's prematurely worried about what will happen when they fade. This is clearly an immediate reaction to Lord Henry's influence.

Andrea Cardozo

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Taking this theory into account, discuss:

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Taking this theory into account, discuss:

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a)      Are there specific characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray who represent the three areas of the Unconscious? Which ones? Justify providing quotes from the text.

b)      Which area of the Unconscious dominates Dorian Gray’s life? How? Provide quotes from the text to justify your answers.

c)       What does Dorian Gray’s picture represent? What does it remind Dorian of? Provide quotes from the text to justify your answers.

d)      Which event marks the beginning of Dorian’s downfall? Does he manage to suppress his Superego by performing this act? Justify providing quotes from the text.

e)      Is Dorian able to find a balance between finding pleasure and doing the right thing? Provide quotes from the text to justify your answers.