The Vixen and Immortal: A Comparison of Brett Ashley and Dorian Gray

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Within The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sun Also Rises, Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway respectively illustrate characters that hold a fascination for their own beauty. Through this essay I will compare and contrast those characters, Dorian Gray and Brett Ashley, and their obsession with their said beauty. Within The Picture of Dorian Gray both Dorian Gray and Lord Henry value youth to extreme extents, and Dorian is able to grasp a sense of eternal youth only to drive himself to his own demise. Brett Ashely on the other hand, uses her beauty to find a powerful identity within a patriarchal society, and at the end of the novel she finds herself cycling back to who she was in the beginning of the novel. While both characters use their beauty to gain power, Ashely is able to avoid the downward spiral that Dorian suffers due to her dependent relationship with Jake Barnes. Within The Picture of Dorian Gray, Basil is incapable of forming any reciprocal relations with Dorian, thus allowing Lord Henry to mold him. Henry plants the seeds for Dorian’s development, but Dorian breaks away from Henry and begins to develop an overzealous form of masculinity that excludes all external relationships. It is due to this disconnect that Dorian is unable to reach the same fruition of his goals as Ashely is. Through their tales both Dorian and Ashely developed into strong idealized figures of beauty, but only Brett is capable of maintaining her mentality.
Dorian Gray loses his eternal youth due to his disconnect with the world, but to realize this disconnect the reader must first examine the context for his connections to Basil Hallward and Lord Henry. Nikolai Enders examines these relationships within his article, “Platonic Love and Closet Eros in...

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...h the society around him and begins to connect only with the portrait that hangs within his home. Dorian begins to defy the natural aging process of nature and thus disconnects himself from nature as a whole. As Pappas states, “men are an integral part of nature and that their…denying there real relationship to it can be calamitous, can lead to their reduction to a purely animal state of existence and to the most squalid sort of extinction” (46). At the end of the novel Dorian finally breaks out of this cycle and is forced to accept his connection with nature through his own death. When Dorian stabs the portrait in an attempt to break away from the all-consuming relationship that drove him away from nature, he is finally able to absorb the aging and process of nature that he so adamantly denied through the novel. As Dorian re-embraces nature he meets his own demise.

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