Pygmalionic Fantasies in 19th-Century Fiction: A Detailed Comparison of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s Tomorrow’s Eve

Abstract

In my thesis, I set out to investigate the nature of the animation fantasy in two novels of the period, namely Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s Tomorrow’s Eve (L'Ève future, 1886). My goal is to define the basis of metamorphosis in the aforementioned novels as well as how the economy between the animate and the inanimate is present in them. I base my argumentation on Kenneth’s Gross postulation that statues always touch upon a fundamental human fantasy concerning the boundary between the artificial and the real or that between the living and the dead. When this porous boundary is stepped over by either of the characters in the novels in question, metamorphosis as an act of violation of the spheres is often put to use. I also use Mary Shelley's Frankenstein az an intertext to ilustrate how the gothic as a mode of representation and science fiction merge with Pygmalionic fantasies in the turn-of-the-century context and how mysoginistic anexieties of the period productively build on the myth of Pygmalion and the Frankenstenian scenario.