Neo-Victorian Disorientation in Penny Dreadful (FX 2016) and Ivan Allbright’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1944)
This paper extends the concept of ‘orientation’ – as it has being connected to neo-Victorian adaptations of late-Victorian literature – to an aesthetics of ‘disorientation.’ Where orientation connotes a dialogic and reciprocal move towards familiarization, embodiment, and the creation of new meaning, disorientation implies a turning away from a cardinal point, or meaning itself. By comparing two neo-Victorian images – the promotional poster for Season 3 of the television series Penny Dreadful and Ivan Albright’s 1944 painting Picture of Dorian Gray, this paper argues that neo-Victorianism does not ‘represent’ the Victorian age conventionally but rather ‘disorients’ the audience. The poster art for Penny Dreadful disavows any connection to the assumed Victorian context and shows instead a crouching, tormented body fused with the image of a skull. The same dissociation is generated in Albright’s painting where the Victorian phenomenon “Dorian Gray” is reduced to its noumenon: a rotting, disintegrating and abject body. This paper further shows how this aesthetics of disorientation has roots in Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Through Dorian’s singular relationship with his portrait, Wilde proved that art and literature do not merely represent reality but change reality by disorienting and de-familiarizing. Thus, this paper appends the term ‘disorientation’ to Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn’s seminal definition of the neo-Victorian as a genre self-consciously engaged in “(re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians.”
Anhiti Patnaik is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. Her areas of interest include Victorian and World Literature, Crime Fiction, Gender Studies. Anhiti submitted her PhD dissertation Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics of Murder: Jack the Ripper to Dorian Gray at the Department of Cultural Studies, Trent University funded by the Ontario Trillium Scholarship. A Fellow of The School of Criticism and Theory (Cornell) and The Institute of World Literature (Harvard), her research has been published in journals like Neo-Victorian Studies, Victorian Network, and Brontë Studies.
