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The Queer Gothic Hero's Journey In Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Kyle Leon Ethridge
The Queer Gothic Hero's Journey In Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Kyle Leon Ethridge
Master's Theses
This study of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray argues that the novel participates in a Gothic subversion of the archetypal hero’s journey. The novel employs Gothic devices to supplant heroic narremes. As the novel progresses, both Dorian (as a type of hero-character) and the narrative repeatedly deny or subvert the normative idea of heroism later reified in Joseph Campbell’s archetypal theory. While Campbell’s hero attempts to secure and universalize a heterosocial story, Wilde’s hero is recuperated through a reconfiguring of normative failure as queer success. What is ostensibly a failure of the normative hero to achieve his quest …