Dark Critiques of Victorian Identity: The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Turn of the Screw

Author

• Shania T. Inshan, CUNY Bernard M Baruch CollegeFollow

Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Honors Designation

yes

Program of Study

English

Language

English

First Advisor

Claire Grandy

Second Advisor

Sean O'Toole

Third Advisor

Ami Yoon

Abstract

My thesis highlights the relationship between beauty, art, and identity through a gothic lens using The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I argue that beauty and art fail to sustain innocence and life itself through an exploration of the progressively corrupt identities of the central characters in each novel. Additionally, I find that both authors challenge common conventions of art, beauty, adolescence, and gender of 19th-century British society and expand the list of factors that comprise identity. James’s narrator diverges from the model of the ideal governess and Wilde’s problematic society is modeled after the materialistic qualities of colonial Britain. Both novels embed the dangers of aestheticism as a replacement for humanity at the center of their supernatural conflicts. Wilde deals with a switch between the soul and a portrait while James focuses on a double-ghost possession of two children and the gothic trope of the doppelganger. I appoint romantic poet John Keats and literary aesthete Walter Pater as representatives of romanticism and aestheticism, respectively, to study the extent to which aestheticism drew upon key romantic ideals like human emotion and self-exploration. Between these novels, Victorian identity becomes scattered, jagged, and inhuman. For Wilde, I study the characterization, free indirect discourse, diction, and irony that he utilizes to address the dangers of aestheticism as an ingrained lifestyle in his details of the morally ambiguous and morally corrupt characters of Lord Henry and Dorian Gray, respectively. Likewise, I look closely at the aforementioned tools as well as the narration, metaphors, and doubling James employs in his novel’s adult-child relationship between both the governess and the Bly children as well the children and the manor’s ghosts to evidence the dangers of aestheticism.

Recommended Citation

Inshan, Shania T., "Dark Critiques of Victorian Identity: The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Turn of the Screw" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/bb_etds/225