Dorian Gray And Death In Venice Analysis English Literature Essay

In chapter one I have shown that both Aestheticism and Nietzsche promote art for art’s sake and believe that art justifies itself and does not need to have a purpose since art is purpose in itself, the purpose of life. Nietzsche urges artists to look inside themselves and give importance to both the Apollonian, that is, the rational and the Dionysian, that is, the passionate side of their personality. According to him, only by achieving equilibrium between these two opposite and, in the meantime, complementary forces will artists be able to create authentic works of art. This chapter centers on the analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Death in Venice from the Aesthetic and Nietzschean perspective. In both novels, the protagonists are artists that cultivate beauty in their works and lives and that oscillate between the Apollonian and Dionysian. Since Nietzsche points out that both the Apollonian and the Dionysian govern the human existence, I will show how these two forces compete in each character in their search for beauty.

Both Oscar Wilde and Thomas Mann struggled against what was prevalent and what was expected of an artist in their eras. They fought against becoming what Lord Henry criticises in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality” (Wilde 92). Wilde’s new version of the old aestheticism deploys subjectivity, individuality, and the autonomy of art against the supposed objectivity and professionalism of nineteenth century science and its offshoot in literature, that is, realism. In Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann discovered much of the essential Nietzsche, his “furious war on morality” and his transvaluation of moral into aesthetic values.

As affirmed in “The Decay of Lying,” Oscar Wilde’s philosophy on art insists on the fact that art should find perfection in itself, that it has as its object not simple truth, as Victorians expected it to express, but complex beauty. As he points out in the preface of the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, “the artist is the creator of beautiful things” and “those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated” (Wilde 5). A common feature of The Portrait of Dorian Gray and Death in Venice is their celebration of beauty in artistic creation. Thus, Lord Henry Wotton believes that “Beauty is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It has its divine right of sovereignty” (Wilde 29) and Aschenbach thinks that “nature itself shivers with ecstasy when the mind bows down in homage before beauty” (Mann 460). The artists’ pursuit of beauty constitutes both their inspiration, the purpose of their creation and their perdition.

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Through their celebration of art as a main theme, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Death in Venice share some common points in their analysis of the artist. In his work, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche affirms that artistic creation depends on a collaboration between two opposite forces which he terms the “Apollonian” and the “Dionysian.” He believed that true artistic creations have to be generated by people that were not only highly civilised and cultured, but also passionate. According to him, only in the balance of these forces could art arise. Nietzsche described the good artists as maintaining a balance between two forces, the Dionysian, or those associated with the god Dionysus and the Apollonian, those associated with the god Apollo. While Dionysus was the god of fecund nature, spring, regeneration, wine, and intoxication, and orgiastic extravagance, Apollo was the god of light, of form which shapes drives and instincts into clarity and order. While Dionysus was often associated with music, a passionate, engrossing art form, Apollo was associated with sculpture, a rigid, detached art form. Like Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde and Thomas Mann believe that the conflict between conscious will and uncontrolled passion, between rationality or morality and passionate art represents a very serious struggle in human existence. This is the reason why the artists’ trajectory towards death in both fictional works is a descent to either extreme and a failure to maintain equilibrium between these two opposite forces.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the three major characters, Basil Hallward, Lord Hnry Wotton, and Dorian Gray are at the same time different aesthetes and parts of the same self. In Death in Venice, the poet Gustav von Aschenbach is the only protagonist and artist in the novella, but he has common features with all three different characters from Oscar Wilde’s novel. Each of these artists, unique in their mode of thinking and personality, undergoes serious changes provoked by factors beyond their control.

Aschenbach’s resemblance to Basil is manifested in his Apollonian concern with exhausting work. They both believe that hard work leads to perfection and that perfection is the key to the artistic talent. They both reject passion because they think it blocks the pursuit of excellence. Hallward’s aestheticism is manifested in his complete devotion to exclusive artistic creations. His ambition and struggle is to become one with his art. He searches in the outside world for the perfect manifestations of his soul and when he finds them, he can create masterpieces by painting them. His fatal misake is that in creating the portrait of Dorian Gray, Basil “puts too much of himself into it,” (Wilde 18), which Lord Henry criticises for at some point in the novel, by arguing that “an artist should create beautiful things, but should nothing of his own life into them” (Wilde 25).

Gustave von Aschenbach is introduced as the extreme case of the civilised Apollonian, neoclassical artist who becomes a hero of the times given his self-controlled manner of labouring on the edge of exhaustion:

Gustave Aschenbach was the poet-spokesman of all those who labour at the edge of exhaustion; of the overburdened, of those who are already worn out but still hold themselves upright; of all our modern moralizers of accomplishment with stunted growth and scanty resources. (Mann 426)

He is, thus, the prototypical modern artist. However, the fact that he has spent his entire life without acknowledging his passions and desires foreshadows possible problems in the future because, according to Freud, repressed passions will sooner or later rise to the surface. Thus, he gradually abandons his commitment to Apollo when he first journeys to Venice and, later, when he decides to remain there. He passes beyond balance and reason, substituting beauty for morality, even though the cost of such a choice is death.

Far from being fruitful to the artistic purpose of their lives, their vulnerability to the perfect classic beauty of both Dorian Gray and Tadzio overshadows the resulting art itself. Both Basil and Gustave’s worlds start revolving around their muses and, unawares, they grow dependent on their presence. Thus, Hallward admits that: “I couldn’t be happy if I didn’t see [Dorian] every day. He is absolutely necessary to me” (Wilde 18) and Gustave, once he meets Tadzio, can no longer leave Venice, even though the city does him serious harm: “He felt the rapture of his blood, the poignant pleasure, and realized that it was for Tadzio’s sake the leavetaking had been so hard” (Mann 455).

The obsessive admiration for the perfect physical beauty is what binds Basil Hallward and Gustave Aschenbach and what leads them towards destruction. Once they discover perfect beauty, the Dionysian force is unleashed and it can hardly be controlled. Both artists worship beauty in their creations. As Aschenbach declares, “in almost every artist’s nature is inborn a wonton and treacherous proneness to side with the beauty that breaks hearts, to single out aristocratic pretensions and pay them homage” (Mann 441). The ideal of beauty is represented in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Death in Venice by the youthful Dorian and Tadzio. Basil confesses that Dorian “is all my art to me now” (Wilde 16) and Gustave decides that “[Tadzio] should be in a sense his model, his style should follow the lines of this figure that seemed to him divine” (Mann 461). However, the beauty of the two young men is not only a source of artistic inspiration, it very soon starts exerting influence on the artists. Basil argues that “[Dorian’s] personality has suggested me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. I see things differently, I think of them differently. I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me before” (Wilde 17) and in Aschenbach’s case, “[Tadzio’s lovely apparition] was that filled him with content, with joy in life, enriched his stay, and lingered out the row of sunny days that fell into place so pleasantly one behind the other” (Mann 457).

Once conscious of the serious role beauty plays in their lives, Basil Hallward and Gustave Aschenbach become concerned to hide it, fearful that if they reveal it, they will in fact, unveil their souls. Thus, Basil tells his friend, Lord Henry, that he will not exhibit the portrait, his grand masterpiece, because “I will not bare my soul to [the world’s] shallow prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope. There is too much of myself in the thing, too much of myself” (Wilde 18). Aschenbach, too, feels a strange relief because “the world sees only the beauty of the completed work and not its origins nor the conditions whence it sprang; since knowledge of the artist’s inspiration might often but confuse and alarm and so prevent the full effect of its excellence” (Mann 461).

The tragic ending of Basil and Gustave is a consequence of their inability to find a balance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian sides of their lives. Lord Henry warns the artist that “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” (Wilde 26). Accustomed to resist any other thoughts than those related to artistic creation, Hallward and Aschenbach find themselves incapable to control their excessive admiration for beauty and they are, therefore, destroyed by it.

Lord Henry Wotton is an aesthete of the mind. If Basil is an artist who uses the brush, Lord Henry is an artist who uses words. Lord Henry’s philosophy on life and art resembles in a great measure that of Nietzsche, in that they both celebrate the primacy of individual senses and feelings over reason and morality. Lord Henry, like Nietzsche, urges the artist to accept his Dionysian, dark and mysterious world of the instinct, to live his life fully and take advantage of its pleasures, for art is a form of exaggeration, the product of spontaneity:

I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream, I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism and return to the Hellenic ideal, to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, as it may be. (Wilde 25)

Lord Henry, like Nietzsche, believes that the unsatisfactory status of modern art is due to the individuals’ fear to acknowledge their passions, that is, the Dionysian side of their own selves, and turn them into something beautiful and authentic: “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 poison us” (Wilde 25).

The influence that Lord Henry’s philosophy exerts on Dorian Gray can be compared to the influence that the trip to Venice has on Gustave Aschenbach. Both Lord Henry and Venice represent the voice that alerts the repressed side of Dorian and Aschenbach. Both Dorian Gray and Aschenbach change completely when they come in contact with the delightful influence of Lord Henry’s magic words and the exoticism of Venice. When he meets Henry Wotton, Dorian feels that “the few words that Basil’s friend had said to him had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses” (Wilde 26). The perspective of travelling to Venice unleashed in Aschenbach a “craving for freedom, release, forgetfulness” which the artist admitted to be “an impulse towards flight, flight from the spot which was the daily theatre of a rigid, cold and passionate service” (Mann 420-421).