The Picture of Dorian Gray in the postcolonial perspective

Abstract

Postcolonial criticism offers an analytical perspective that allows us to reflect, also from the literature, how different peoples and nations involved by Colonialism and its imperialist practice are portrayed. From this, we can observe both literary texts that subvert the imperial logic, as texts that reproduce it, analyzing the aspects of this context, such as othering. As England was during the nineteenth century the greatest colonizing empire in the world, English literature, especially from this period, therefore, has many reflections of this scenario and served both to criticize it and to propagate the supposed superiority of the English. The portrait of Dorian Gray, written by the Irishman Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) and published in 1891, in the end of the Victorian Age, is analyzed through the postcolonial perspective. The main objective is to demonstrate how the narrator and the characters present marks of the imperial mentality and how the othering influences the description of the characters and the spaces.