Curless 1

Kate Curless
Ms. Winter
British Literature, period 2
10 May 2016
Dorian Gray and Victorian Female Ideals
A dollar can be worth 75 cents. There is statistical evidence that women only get 75 cents
for every dollar a man makes, even for doing the same amount of work. According to Yasemin
Besen-Cassino, The gender wage gap is among the most persistent and durable facts about
labor markets and women's lives in the United States (Besen-Cassino). This trend of gender
inequality has been a dominant one in society and is clearly seen in Victorian era literature, one
of which being The Picture of Dorian Gray, written by Oscar Wilde and published in 1890. In
The Picture of Dorian Gray, a young man named Dorian Gray sells his soul in order to stay
eternally young and handsome, while a painting of himself grows old and bears the weight of his
sins instead. Upon discovering that the painting is growing older, and at the insistence of his
friend Lord Henry, Dorian throws himself into a sinful and hedonistic life of aestheticism and
pleasure. Along with a profligate lifestyle, Dorian leaves boyhood and enters his manhood; when
he becomes a man, he begins to act cruelly, especially towards women. This is not surprising
given the time that this text was written. The Victorian ideals for women are much harsher than
the Victorian ideals for men portrayed by Dorian Gray. These difference are seen best when
comparing the desire, objectification, and social place of Dorian Gray and the female characters
of various Victorian era texts.
Numerous Victorian era texts portray desire as something men such as Dorian Gray can
feel, but something that women should never even consider. Rather, women should be pleased

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with either what they have or what they have been given by men and desire nothing else beyond
that. Mary Wilson Carpenter states that all women were thought to exhibit the same features of
face and genitals and, more crucially, to display the disfiguring results of unrestrained appetite
(Carpenter). In the poem My Last Duchess, written by Robert Browning in 1842, a Duke is
showing a man a painting of his late wife, the Duchess. The Duke tells this man that the Duchess
"had/ A heart-- how shall I say? --too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er/
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere" (Browning). The Duke clearly believes that, as
his wife, the Duchess should have only cared for him and been impressed only by the gifts that
he gave her, such as [his] gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name (Browning). The Duchesss
apparent promiscuous behavior is not only socially unacceptable for the time period, but also a
great danger to her. Seeing as she does not desire the Duke as completely as he wishes, it is
heavily implied that the Duke has the Duchess killed simply because she does not worship or
desire him the way a proper Victorian woman should. This portrays woman as undesirable and
immoral if they desire something that has not been given by a man. This is also seen in The
Picture of Dorian Gray. A young actress named Sibyl Vane captures the heart of Dorian, but after
falling in love with him, Sibyl desires more than what she has been given and more than what
Dorian has given her. Sibyl tells Dorian "I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and
old, and painted, / that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not what I
wanted to say. /...I hate the stage" (Wilde 73-74). This exclamation of desire causes her to fail in
her place as both an actress and a woman, and ironically makes her undesirable to Dorian, who
enjoyed her only when she desired nothing but him. Dorian is able to live a life where he can
chase his desires; during his first meeting with Lord Henry, Dorian is even told by Henry that he
should follow his desires: Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing A

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new Hedonismthat is what our century wants. / With your personality there is nothing you
could not do (Wilde 23). Later, Dorian becomes the one that punishes women when they step
out of line. When Sibyl desires not to act anymore, Dorian breaks her heart and shuns her,
saying that she has killed [his] love (Wilde 74). By falling to desire, Sibyl must be punished
for breaking the female norms.
When women do go after that which they desire, they face grave consequences. In
Goblin Market, written by Christina Rossetti in 1862, one of the main characters Laura [bows]
her head to hear the cry of goblin men selling fruit (Rossetti). As punishment for falling to
temptation, "Her hair grew thin and gray;/ She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn/ To swift
decay, and burn/ Her fire away" (Rossetti). Eating the goblin fruit is an act of promiscuity and
makes her ugly and worthless in the eyes of men. In Goblin Market, desire is paralleled to sin.
After eating the goblin fruit, a reference to the tree of knowledge, Lauras sense of the
difference between right and wrong is obscured, for when she turns to go home, she knows not
was it night or day, but she clutches in her hand a seed of the fruit, a seed of sin to which she
clings" (Shalkhauser). An interesting observation is made by Marian Shalkhauser, where she
points out that only maidens are mentioned as hearing the cry of sin" (Shalkhauser). This could
possibly be because only women bear the physical weight of their sin and promiscuity in the
form of pregnancy. In contrast, Dorian is the epitome of sin; his painting, which shows the true
state of his soul, is said to look like the devil: You were to me such an ideal as I shall never
meet again. This is the face of a satyr (Wilde 131). Even though his soul is in such a vile state,
the wonderful beauty that had so fascinated Basil Hallward, and many others besides him, never
seemed to leave [Dorian]. Even those who had heard the most evil things against him, / could not
believe anything to his dishonour when they saw him. He had always the look of one who had

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kept himself unspotted from the world (Wilde 106). Not only is Dorian the epitome of sin, but
he also faces no repercussions for his actions. The clearest example of this is when Basil
Hallward says "One has a right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends. yours
seem to lose all sense of honour, of goodness, of purity. You have filled them with a madness for
pleasure. They have gone down into the depths. You lead them there. Yes: you led them there,
and yet you can smile, as you are smiling now" (Wilde 127). Dorian not only follows his desires
and lives a hedonistic lifestyle, but he also drags others to live that life with him. Later in the
text, some of the people that Dorian has corrupted are mentioned, stating that they are shamed by
society or have died, but Dorian himself remains untainted by the rumors around him. Women
faced much harsher consequences for desiring something than their male counterparts did.
Women are avidly objectified more than men throughout Victorian literature. Physical
objectification is seen in My Last Duchess, where, after showing the painting to the man, the
Duke then tells the man to [n]otice Neptune, though, / Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, /
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!" (Browning). This makes the painting, and the
story behind it, just another piece of property for the Duke to own. Having the Duke compare the
painting of the Duchess to a statue furthers the belief that the place of women in the Victorian
age were as objects. Physical objectification is also mentioned in Goblin Market, where there are
references to gold, and "the poem's uses of gold, which Karl Marx, a contemporary of Rossetti,
esteems as the material, albeit tenuous, "expression" of the values of commodities'" (Mendoza)
furthers the physical objectification of women by comparing them to material goods. Gold is
referenced most clearly in the poem when mentioning the character Lauras hair. Her hair is used
as payment for the goblins fruit and the importance behind that exchange is downgraded to her
hair and a tear: "She clipped a precious golden lock, / She dropped a tear more rare than pearl, /

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Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red" (Rossetti). The irony is that women should strive to be
young and beautiful objects, yet it is Dorian Gray that keeps his youth and beauty instead by
selling his soul. He becomes the perfect physical object, yet since he is a man, he is still able to
objectify women. Men are even shown controlling the memory of women, meaning that the
women are still controlled even after their death. The Duke in My Last Duchess physically
controls his wife by controlling the painting, where "[t]he depth and passion of its earnest glance,
/ But to myself they turned (since none puts by/ The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)"
(Browning) and, henceforth, is controlling her memory. He has reduced the importance of the
painting down to an object that only he can see and admire. The painting is constantly smiling,
never aging, always beautiful, quiet, and only for the eyes of the Duke; the concept of the
painting better fits the Victorian ideals for women than the actual Duchess did. Dorian, since he
is a man, is able to control the memory of Sibyl Vane after her death, saying that he "must admit
that this thing that has happened does not affect [him] as it should. It seems to [him] to be simply
like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a
tragedy in which [he] took a great part, but by which [he has] not been wounded" (Wilde 84).
Dorian feels as if he has nothing to do with her death, and even goes so far as to parallel her
death to a play, something for him to view and enjoy, but does not affect him in any way.
Finally, many of the women in these texts are reduced to nothing more than a pretty face.
In The Lady of Shalott, after the Lady dies, "Lancelot mused a little space;/ He said, "She has a
lovely face;/ God in his mercy lend her grace, The Lady of Shalott'" (Tennyson). Lancelot is not
aware that the Lady dies because of him, nor is he aware of her sacrifices and trials. Rather, he
simply muses upon the beauty of a dead woman. The importance is that, even when she is dead,
the Lady is simply something to be looked at and admired by a man. It is similar for Sibyl Vane.

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Upon stating that she desires more than what she has, Dorian Gray says "I would have made you
famous, splendid, magnificent. The world would have worshipped you, and you would have
borne my name. What are you now? A third-rate actress with a pretty face" (Wilde 74). Once
Sibyl desires more, Dorian rejects her because she has lost all of her worth to him if she cannot
be objectified as an actress for his pleasure. Now, he sees her as nothing more than a pretty face.
Females must also conform more harshly to their social place than men. It was expected
for the women to stay out of the mans way and act as the angel of the house. In The Lady of
Shalott, "Four gray walls, and four gray towers, / Overlook a place of flowers, / and the silent
isle imbowers The Lady of Shalott" (Tennyson). The Lady is not only in a separate place because
she is a woman, it is taken a step further and she is physically placed away from everyone else
and faces punishment should she look at the real world, which could parallel women wishing to
join a masculine social place. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Sibyl Vane is in a similar position.
After performing horribly one night, Sibyl says to Dorian, "before I knew you, acting was the
one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was
Rosalind one night, and Portia the other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of
Cordelia were mine also. I believed in everything. The common people who acted with me
seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows,
and I thought them real" (Wilde 73). In context to the female ideals, Sibyl believed that her world
was real as she only knew her social place, and it was this that made her desirable to Dorian.
Excelling as an actress meant that she excelled as a woman seeing as she stayed in her place.
Wishing to leave this behind makes her worthless to Dorian. Dorian Gray, as a man, has the
ability to be in many social places at once, from dinners with the elites down to the opium dens,
but faces no repercussions from jumping from social place to place: its nigh on eighteen years

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since I met him (Wilde 160). This danger of non-conformity is also seen in Figure 1. It is told
that the woman had an affair, thereby abandoning her social place as the woman of the house.
Her wrists are bound, symbolizing that she is still trapped because she is a woman, and she is
lying at her husbands feet, symbolizing her social place beneath him. Behind her, her daughters
play with a fallen house of cards, which symbolize the broken familial structure that has been
broughten by the womans immorality.
It has been proven that female ideals were much harsher in the Victorian era than those
experienced by men. The belief that women are the weaker sex has travelled through society all
the way to modern times. It is through these texts that we are able to analyze the social
implications that women have had to face throughout history. It is possible that analyzing these
texts will allow for a more equal society in the future.

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Work Cited
Besen-Cassino, Yasemin. The cost of being a girl: gender earning differentials in the early labor
markets. NWSA Journal 20.1 (2008): 146+. Literature Research Center. Web. 9 May
2016.
Browning, Robert. My Last Duchess. Sixth Course Literature of Britain with World Classics.
Austin: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 2003. N. pag. Print.
Carpenter, Mary Wilson. Eat me, Drink me, Love me: The Consumable Female Body in
Christina Rossettis Goblin Market. Victorian Poetry 29.4 (Winter 1991): 415-434. Rpt.
in Literature Research Center Detroit: Gale, 2016. Literature Resource Center. Web. 26
Apr. 2016.
Egg, Augustus Leopold. Past and Present, No. 1. 1858. oil painting on canvas. Tate Museum,
London.
Mendoza, Victor Roman. "'Come Buy': The Crossing of Sexual and Consumer Desire in
Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market." ELH 73.4 (Winter 2006): 913-947. Rpt. in Poetry
Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 119. Detroit: Gale, 2011. Literature Resource Center.
Web. 26 Apr. 2016.
Rossetti, Christina. Goblin Market. poetryfoundation.org. Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, n.d.
Web. 1 May 2016.
Shalkhauser, Marian. "The Feminine Christ." The Victorian Newsletter 10 (Autumn 1956): 1920. Rpt. in Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale, 2016. Literature Resource Center.
Web. 26 Apr. 2016.
Tennyson, Alfred Lord. The Lady of Shalott. Sixth Course Literature of Britain with World
Classics. Austin: Holt, Rinehart, ad Winston, 2003. N. pag. Print.

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Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Ed. Micheal Patrick Gillespie. 2nd ed. New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. Print.