The Painted View of Stories
Let’s start by analyzing “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. What’s intriguing about this novel is how social norms alter the reality of the story both inside and out. On the inside we see a rich man, Dorian, who everyone aspires both physically and morally. He is loved by everyone, and this leads to his moral corruption, yet no one in the story can comprehend this because of how he is perceived. Dorian embodies a conflict that he inflicted on himself, and everyone continued to love him, but why? Why does society paint a picture of someone based on their status, and how could this have been prevented? Perhaps to answer this we need to look at the macroscopic level and come out of the pages of the story. The novel was written in 1890 and was banned for a while because Basil’s feelings for Dorian were considered controversial. The story was therefore looked at on a very surface level and this decision led many from not being able to even learn the deeper meanings of the novel, so how much do readers really miss because of the time-period and social norms from the literature that they consume? A person reading this novel in the 1890s vs the present day would get drastically different outcomes from the exact same book. Aubrey writes in his critical essay on “The Picture of Dorian Gray” that “Dorian does not succeed in living the paradox. More involved in the world than Lord Henry and giving full rein to his love of beauty and his quest for novel sensations, he allows himself to become a poisonous influence on those around him.” The trials and tribulations of man vs. society have been present in society for years, yet people fail to realize that this affliction has been a reality outside the fibers of our favorite novels.
“The Awakening” by Kate Chopin- a story embedded in the world of controversies. A “cry of the dying century” by Valkeakari states that “The Awakening ‘tests society’s assumptions about women,’” and that the book “addresses a social problem: the condition of women.” Starting with the society outside the novel, similar to “The picture of Dorian Gray,” “The Awakening” was censored due to its depiction of womanhood, something that is a total result of not only the time that the story was written in, 1899, but the national standard of women as a whole. Valkeakari explains how Chopin was raised in a school run by nuns, one of the few jobs a women could have at the time, so from a young age she was shown “that women can dedicate their lives to aspirations and vocations other than traditional domestic duties.” The society of the time was also exactly mirrored within the book as Edna Pontellier is trying to gain independence in a world where her freedom is looked down on. Others in the story like Adèle Ratignolle symbolize the “ideal woman,” and this is where I want to talk about social barriers. We as people love to classify things but over time these classifications in novels have only led to restraints in an understanding of a character. What if Edna was a man? She would have been praised for “taking a risk” both inside and outside of the novel (at least I doubt that the book would have gotten banned). Now some may say that having a set stereotype character is integral as readers can better understand them and more easily read for the plot of the novel rather than worrying about understanding who they're reading about, but I disagree. Set rules on a character are what limit those reading the novel as it is through the unknown that a heroine can make a story for themselves, otherwise they just fall in the trap of the usual boiled down story that we have all been accustomed to. Why and how do we let something confine our ability to fully cherish a novel? This is where the book that changed all our understanding of social limits comes into place: “Recitatif.”
Little Brain Break: Social Barriers in Music
Imagine reading a book where all you have to do is enjoy the novel for what it is, without the distractions of the bluff that us humans love to focus and obsess over. This was exactly the outcome produced in Morrison’s “Recitatif,” but not without consequence. Morrison never specifies the race of the protagonists in her story, and this leads way for a very different experience for the reader. Benjamin states in “The Space That Race Creates,” that “Race has been, and quite possibly always will be, as central to American literature as narratives of contact and conquest, self-reliance and self-fashioning, modernism and multiculturalism.” Like I was saying with regards to “The Awakening,” people like to limit themselves by decoding a character and Benjamin states, “The impulse to ‘solve’ the racial conundrum permeating ‘Recitatif’ reveals an underlying theme central to Morrison’s short story. Readers want to be able to categorize characters one way or another, to ‘know’ race, and they will go to great lengths to assign racial categories if the writer fails to do it for them.”
Let's synthesize all three books and try to make sense of this. Now we have figured out that people like to place characters into boxes- even to their demise- and that a social construct from a time frame of a generation of readers can negatively impact their understanding of a piece of literature. We’ve seen this both inside and outside novels, and we’ve learned that the author’s circumstances are recurrently mirrored in their characters and in the stories that they’ve created. I suppose this shows the hardships of an author too, because it isn’t easy to try to write a story where you have to worry if too much of the story relies on assumptions, or if the characters seem too confusing as a whole, but at what length should the reader go to overlook what their peers are saying about a book? Why do we rely so much on other’s opinions?
I guess this shows that to answer one question in literature you must ask fifty more, and that there never is a set answer, but I think that this is the beauty of books. This is the reason we are able to explore and interpret very similar themes in novels for years and with a hundred different books, because we never seem to get an answer. I think that finding the answers to our deepest inquiries is the one thing that brings our curiosities to a halt. To ask more questions on an issue is what lets us think of the multiple facets of a problem and that is what ultimately leads to self-found understanding of life’s greatest questions. I hope that made sense. At least I hope that this ignited some questions of your own, and maybe it will lead you into a journey of some of your own answers to your deepest curiosities:)
Work Cited
Aubrey, Bryan. "Critical Essay on 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'." Novels for Students, edited by Ira Mark Milne and Timothy Sisler, vol. 20, Gale, 2005. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420060099/LitRC?u=lom_macombtgps&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=d6a7454f. Accessed 9 Jan. 2024.
Benjamin, Shanna Greene. "The Space That Race Creates: An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’." Short Story Criticism, edited by Rebecca Parks, vol. 336, Gale, 2024. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/UJJIKX175124112/LitRC?u=lom_macombtgps&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=3e9002a1. Accessed 10 Jan. 2024. Originally published in Studies in American Fiction, vol. 40, no. 1, 2013, pp. 87-106.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. Kolaj Institute & Maison Kasini Canada, 2023.
Morrison, Toni, and Helena Hansson. Recitatif. Novellix, 2018.
Osborne, John, and Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oberon Books, 2016.
Valkeakari, Tuire. "A 'cry of the dying century': Kate Chopin, The Awakening, and the Women's Cause." Nordic Journal of English Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, Jan. 2003, pp. 193+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A351789215/LitRC?u=lom_macombtgps&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=22f17424. Accessed 10 Jan. 2024.
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