Hunting Dorian:

Drawing on Dennis Denisoff's “Oscar Wilde's Conviction, Speciesism, andthe Pain of Individualism”, collected by Julia M. Wright in A Companion toIrish Literature, the aim of this paper is to highlight the use of animalimagery in some of Oscar Wilde's works written between 1885 and 1891,starting with his short stories and ending with his novel, The Picture ofDorian Gray.We will begin by confirming Wilde's association of animal suffering withsocial denunciation in several of his works, some of which were writtenafter the novel. We will continue to briefly review the role of animals in theliterary tales collected in The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), both asprotagonists and as narrators of “human fables”. From A House ofPomegranates (1891), we will briefly analyse “The Star-Child”. Finally, wewill look at three perspectives of the animal world that Wilde takes in hisonly novel: the creation of characters and scenes, hunting and vivisection.From this analysis, we will see how animals could supplant humans andthat when Dorian Gray is most in touch with his instincts, he is sometimeshunter and sometimes prey. We will also note how a change in British lawregarding vivisection a few years before the novel's publication, may bereflected in two crucial moments in the text.