Zola and Wilde

In Zola’s The Experimental Novel he discusses the characters in a novel as being observed as if they were an experiment. When Zola writes, “The novelist starts out in search of truth,” he is seeking to create something real or something naturalistic. He states, “The novelist is equally an observer and an experimentalist. The observer in him gives the facts as he observed them,” or in other words the novelist writes down what he observes the characters doing, where they live, where they came from, and or anything else the novelist can observe. Zola then writes about the experimental part of the novel, “Then the experimentalist appears and introduces an experiment, that is to say, sets his characters going in a certain story so as to show that the succession of facts will be such as the requirements of the determinism of the phenomena under examination call for.”

In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray I would argue that this experiment that Zola writes about starts for Dorian’s character in chapter two. The experiment would be the obvious: what would happen to a man who had no consequences for his actions. I see the experiment start to form when Lord Henry gives his seductive speech. He says, “We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. . . . 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. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.”

The whole idea that not doing something impulsive will eventually poison your mind is very convincing coming from Lord Henry. He discusses this sort of impulse that if you deny that ignored impulse will eat away at your brain. Eventually Dorian is to act on his impulses and to derive pleasure from the bad things he causes to happen; the same impulse that would poison his own brain if ignored will poison the people around him when he acts upon it.

When Zola writes, “The social circulus is identical with the vital circulus; in society, as in human beings, a solidarity exists which unites the different members and the different organisms in such a way that if one organ becomes rotten many others are tainted and a very complicated disease results. Hence, in our novels when we experiment on a dangerous wound which poisons society, we proceed in the same way as the experimentalist doctor; we try to find the simple initial cause in order to reach the complex causes of which the action is a result.”

What Zola says is in a way discussing an experiment like that of Dorian Gray. The bad events in the text like Basil and Sybil’s deaths were just like the rotting fruit Zola discusses in his text. The evil Dorian turned into spread onto the other characters like sick rotting fruit. I would argue that Oscar Wilde’s story is a solid representation of the experimental novel. Dorian’s ability to survive without consequences was the experiment and the outcomes weren’t so good.

My New Proposal

I have significantly changed my proposal. Instead of simply comparing the two genres of the Gothic and Romanticism I would now like to focus on the aspects of feminism that are related in the two. I want to analyze how women were portrayed in the texts of these two separate genres in similar ways. I will discuss how these women are seen as “the victim” in both the Gothic genre as well as in Romanticism. The Books I will be using from our class are Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter and Edgar Allen Poe’s Ligeia from the Gothic readings and Byron’s The Giaour from our readings in Romanticism. I have also found some interesting sources I will be using for this paper and I have posted those below.


Gamer, Michael. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation. Cambridge University Press. 2000. Print.

“This is the first full-length study to examine the links between high Romantic literature and what has often been thought of as a merely popular genre--the Gothic. Michael Gamer analyzes how and why Romantic writers drew on Gothic conventions while, at the same time, denying their influence in order to claim critical respectability. He shows how the reception of Gothic literature played a fundamental role in the development of Romanticism as an ideology, tracing the politics of reading, writing and reception at the end of the eighteenth century.”


Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism. Camden House Press. 1998. Print.

“A new look at the Gothic novel that advances current debates on feminism.As British women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to define how they experienced their eras social and economic upheaval, they helped popularize a new style of bourgeois female sensibility. Hoeveler argues that a female-created literary ideology, now known as "victim feminism", arose as the Gothic novel helped create a new social role of professional victim for women adjusting to the new bourgeois order. These novels were thinly disguised efforts at propagandizing a new form of conduct for women, teaching that "professional femininity" -- a cultivated pose of wise passiveness and controlled emotions -- best,prepared them for social survival.Gothic Feminism takes a neo-feminist approach to these women's writings, treating them not as sacred texts but as thesis-driven works that attempted to instruct women in a series of strategic poses. It offers both a new understanding of the genre and a wholly new interpretation of feminism as a literary ideology.”


Ellison, Julie. Delicate Subjects:Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding. Cornell University Press. 1990. Print.

“Addresses the interrelated issues of the history of anxieties about rational violence and the significance of the feminine in romantic literature and fiction.”
Smith, Allan Lloyd. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. Continuum International Publishing Group. 2004. Print
“Following the structure of other titles in the Continuum Introductions to Literary Genres series, American Gothic Fiction includes: A broad definition of the genre and its essential elements. A timeline of developments within the genre. Critical concerns to bear in mind while reading in the genre. Detailed readings of a range of widely taught texts. In-depth analysis of major themes and issues. Signposts for further study within the genre. A summary of the most important criticism in the field. A glossary of terms.”


Fay, Elizabeth A. A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism. Blackwell Publishers. 1998. Print.

“Elizabeth Fay's invaluable book addresses the reader in an immediate and direct manner to provide an unequaled introduction to the issues most important for feminist analyses of Romantic literature. In her opening chapter, Fay offers detailed definitions and a historicized grounding that gives a thorough account of feminist theory's involvement in Romantic studies and provides a rigorous methodology for students to follow, concluding with a highly instructive case study on Jane Austen. Subsequent chapters deal with women and revolutionary politics, the Gothic genre and domestic politics, women and thought, and women and identity, which covers visuality in Romantic texts. Further reading is listed at the end to each chapter. The book includes key illustrations and a comprehensive bibliography.”

THE FINAL PAPER

For my project I would like to compare the aspects of Dark Romanticism and the Gothic. I will be using either Poe’s Ligeia or Berenice (perhaps both) as well as one or two of his poems. Those of which I am still a little undecided. I also want to use Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter even though we didn’t read it for Dark Romanticism week I still think it fits in with the theme and last but not least I will use Brown’s Edgar Huntly to help argue that the aspects of both the Gothic and Dark Romanticism are overlapping. In a way you can’t have one without the other. They are so entwined that I wonder why it is they are even considered to be two separate themes. I would like to argue with the help of these texts that the Gothic and Dark Romanticism are one in the same and that it is impossible to have one without the other. If this seems too easy and lame feel free to let me know.

Daisy Daisy Daisy

Daisy Miller is a book about a girl who is unaware of how her actions are seen by others. The study of Daisy is to me simply that. I don’t think it necessarily stereotypes American girls although who’s to stop someone who reads it from thinking all American girls are not like Daisy?
Howells says, “She is one of the young American persons who amaze and confound European society, and give a strange reputation to American girls.” This is very true in the story. The other ladies don’t know what to make of her. She doesn’t seem to care at all about her reputation and it almost appears as if she is oblivious to the fact that people are talking about her so negatively.
In the text Mrs. Walker tries to interfere and tries to convince Daisy to get in the carriage and go home, “You are old enough to be more reasonable. You are old enough, dear Miss Miller, to be talked about.” To this Daisy’s innocence is shown with a reply, “Talked about? What do you mean?” But then before she gets into the carriage it appears Daisy isn’t as naïve as she presents herself to be by saying, “I don’t think I want to know what you mean, I don’t think I should like it.”
Howells would appear to be dead on when it comes to Daisy in this sense. Daisy has “amazed and confounded” Mrs. Walker. People were starting to talk negatively about the American girl Daisy. I’m not too sure of just how “innocent” Daisy was. She obviously knows that there is something negative about the gossip going on around her or else she would have simply gotten into Mrs. Walker’s carriage. She would have set herself up for a moral lecture she would have been completely shocked by, but she doesn’t because she thinks she would not like what she would hear from Mrs. Walker. She wants to keep having her fun whether it is innocent or not. Daisy thinks she shouldn’t have to change her ways simply because she is visiting another country.
When Howells says, “If an American writer proposes to show the American woman to the world, he should select the best, and not the worst.” The real argument then might be whether or not Daisy does in fact represent American women or whether or not Daisy was as “innocent” as the men around her thought she was. I don’t feel as if Daisy was completely innocent, but I don’t think she necessarily did anything that was wrong. Sure she was out late with boys, but it’s not as if she was doing mind altering drugs behind a bar somewhere in the middle of the night. Does this represent American women? Sure it probably represents some of them…