Gragoatá (Jun 2009)
Metaphor and death in “the Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde
Abstract
Circumscribing as corpus The picture of Dorian Gray (1891), the only novel by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), this essay finds its originality in the texture of metaphor and in the play of death. Will metaphor be the death of the real? Will the real be the death of metaphor? With this postulate, in form of chiasmus, we analyze the texture of the Wildean novel, in which the change of symbolic places between the model and the picture causes an aesthetic and ethic tension. Finally, Art will remain, metaphor of a real, dead, but always susceptible to artistic transfiguration.
