A Jungian Psychoanalysis Of The Fall Of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde is regarded as one of the most outstanding writers in the 19 th century English literature. He is the representative of aestheticism who is famous for the advocate of “art for art’s sake”.The Picture of Dorian Gray is his only novel but also the most famous one. With the late Victorian Era as the background, this novel bitterly satirizes the upper class of that time. It is mainly about a man called Dorian Gray, who appears as a pure, kind and beautiful one when young, but step by step, he goes on the way of downfall, and becomes a person with corruption of mind and spirit so as to lose his own soul.The researches on The Picture of Dorian Gray at home and abroad experienced the process of the first subjective and narrow-minded moral judgments to the objective study on different aspects of the text, then to the studies on the underlying culture of this novel, but almost all of these researches are based on Wilde’s aestheticism.The purpose of this thesis is trying to further interpret the causes of Dorian Gray’s fall under the background of Victorian era through the angle of Jungian psychoanalysis theory, by brief studies of the three main archetypes of the persona, anima and shadow as represented in Dorian Gray. It is argued that Dorian’s failure to recognize his psychological archetypes and the conflicts between his different archetypes that cause his fall and the final death. Dorian’s fall also reflects the multiple social contradictions at the time, which deeply disclosed and criticized the hypocrisy of Victorian traditional morality and the corruption, decadence and extravagance of the upper class. Firstly, this thesis analyses Dorian’s inflated persona which makes him lose his true self and go on the way of downfall. The imbalance between his inflated persona and his anima leads to his over feminine tendency which drives him to make a deal with his portrait for his eternal young beauty with his soul. And he refuses to accept Sibyl’s love that is actually the incarnation of his anima. The imbalance also results in the revenge of the anima which leads him to refuse his nature and brings about his love affairs with many young men from the upper class. But homosexuality was an actually forbidden topic in Victorians’ mind, and these homosexual affairs cause these young men to suffer tragic life. The conflict between his inflated persona and shadow makes Dorian go further and further on the way of downfall. He refuses to accept his shadow and tries his best to hide or cover it and even project it on others. However, the repressed shadow crouches in his unconscious still bursts out and drives him to kill his best friend Basil and also brings about his self-destruction.This thesis tries to make an in-depth research through Jungian psychoanalysis theory into the psychological cause of Dorian Gray’s fall in this novel. It shows that it is the disharmony between Dorian’s inflated persona, anima and shadow that has caused his fall, which also reflects the decadence of late Victorian upper-class society. This thesis shows the importance of a harmonious psyche not only for the individual level but also for the collective level.