Amendments 14, 15, and 19

¶ … Amendments 14, 15, and 19 of the U.S. Constitution take so long to be fully realised?

There are definite parallels between the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes form the Underground, and that of Oscar Wilde, the Portrait of Dorian Gray. One of the most salient is each author's respective use of a female character to evoke strong emotion from the protagonist and to resign those protagonists to their fate. Ultimately, the female characters in each of these works reveal the vanity of the protagonist, the unnamed narrator in Dostoevsky's piece and Gray in Wilde's work. Such vanity is indicative of the general debauched state of society that each protagonist tries to escape, which is a motif that runs concurrent through both works.

The author's use of a female character to demonstrate the vanity of the narrator in Notes from the Underground is abundantly clear. After spending the duration of the book disparaging the ills of society, the narrator suddenly meets a prostitute, beds her, and then begins shamelessly moralizing with her about family values and love and decency. Ironically, he is not in a position to offer any of these things to her, and only succeeds in shaming her about her occupation and relationship with her parents. Perhaps even worse, he and gives her a false sense of hope that he will provide a better life for her. When she takes him up on his offer and comes to visit him ostensibly to work on such a life together, he insults her and reveals that he is powerless to help her. The narrator only uses her to feel good about himself, since she is one of the few people in the novel that is in a position worse than him. His vanity, and dismay at being found that all of his moralizing was largely inane, is demonstrated in the following passage in which he laments her impending arrival to discern his true powerlessness. He thins to himself, " it's horrid that she should see, for instance, how I live. Yesterday I seemed such a hero to her, while now, h'm!" (Dostoevsky). This passage indicates that the narrator only valued his time with Liza because it allowed him to present himself as a hero. Moreover, she believed him to be as such, which was even more gratifying to his sense of vanity. The narrator's fear of being found as less than the ideal version he presents himself as ends up swaying him to shun society altogether.

Sibyl Vane, a young actress whom Gray falls in love with in very little time and proposes to marry, also provides a centerpiece for the vanity of Wilde's protagonist. Although he declares his love for her and hers for him, Gray was actually only in love with Vane's prowess as an actress. Once she became devoted to him her acting talent swiftly fled -- as did Gray's interest with her. It would be hard to argue that Gray's intentions ever resembled anything noble -- he merely wants to open a theater of his own and have his wife star in it so he could capitalize off of her, which the following quotation proves.

…we must get her out of the manager's hands. She is bound to him for three years… I shall have to pay him something, of course. When all that is settled, I shall take a West End theater and bring her out properly. She will make the world as mad as she has made me (Wilde 58).

This passage indicates that Gray's declared love for Vane was merely a love of her art -- which by extension was a love of himself since, after Basil Hallward paints a mystic portrait of the protagonist, Gray's life becomes a work of art displayed in the soon-to-be repulsive painting. Thus, Gray only truly loves himself, which is just as much a display of vanity as the narrator in Dostoevsky's tale moralizing to Liza because it makes him feel powerful, in control, and better than someone else.

This revelation of vanity in each work contributes to the broader theme by establishing a turning point in the lives of the characters. In Dostoevsky's story, the narrator's fleeting experience with Liza, when all he had to do was act as though he were half as much of the thinking, feeling, rational man that he pretends to be, proves the turning point after which he resigns himself to stay in the underground, in his home, and simultaneously eschew and complain about the ills of society. The narrator prefaces the anecdote regarding Liza as one of the few instances in which he ventured to leave the underground which emphasizes the magnitude of his encounter with her. Moreover, his encounter with her is so dramatic and draining, that they abruptly end his notes from the underground. The following quotation proves this fact. Of his encounter with Liza the narrator recalls "Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn't I better end my "Notes" here? I believe I made a mistake in writing them (Dostoevsky). The power of merely recalling the narrator's noxious treatment of Liza implies how corrupt a person he is. His corruption is largely attributed to that of society in general, of which he is just a representative. The narrator functions as a microcosm of the larger macrocosm of society, which is the principle them of this work. Thus, the reader can see how great of an effect Liza has in revealing this facet of the narrator's character, and of the iniquities of society in general.