This paper examines the parallel use of female characters in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, arguing that each author deploys a central female figure — Liza and Sibyl Vane, respectively — to expose the vanity of the male protagonist and to mark a decisive turning point in his moral decline. The paper further argues that this individual vanity functions as a microcosm of broader social corruption, which is the animating theme of both works. Through close reading of key passages, the essay demonstrates how these women, as unwilling sacrifices to the protagonists' self-interest, illuminate the debauched nature of the societies each novel critiques.
The paper demonstrates effective parallel structure in comparative literary analysis. Each claim about one text is mirrored with a corresponding claim about the other, creating a balanced argument that illuminates both works simultaneously. This technique — sometimes called a point-by-point comparison — prevents the essay from becoming two separate character studies and instead sustains a unified analytical thread throughout.
The essay opens with a brief introduction establishing the comparison and thesis. Two body sections each analyze one protagonist's relationship with a female character, supported by quoted evidence. A third body section synthesizes the turning-point function of both female characters. The conclusion restates the central theme and ties both narratives together, emphasizing the women as symbolic sacrifices that expose societal corruption.
There are definite parallels between Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and Oscar Wilde's The Picture 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 consign 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 Dorian Gray in Wilde's work. Such vanity is indicative of the general debauched state of society that each protagonist attempts to escape, a motif that runs concurrently 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 named Liza, beds her, and then begins shamelessly moralizing with her about family values, 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 her relationship with her parents. Perhaps even worse, he 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 uses Liza solely to feel good about himself, since she is one of the few people in the novel who is in a worse position than he is. His vanity, and his dismay at being found out — that all of his moralizing was largely inane — is demonstrated in the following passage, in which he laments her impending arrival and the exposure of his true powerlessness. He thinks 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 valued his time with Liza only because it allowed him to present himself as a hero, and because she believed him to be one — which was even more gratifying to his sense of vanity. The narrator's fear of being exposed as less than the ideal version of himself he projects ultimately drives him to shun society altogether.
Sibyl Vane, a young actress with whom Gray falls in love in very little time and proposes to marry, also serves as a centerpiece for the vanity of Wilde's protagonist. Although he declares his love for her, 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 in her. It would be difficult to argue that Gray's intentions ever resembled anything noble; he merely wanted to open a theater of his own and have his wife star in it so that he could capitalize on her talent, as the following quotation demonstrates:
"…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. After Basil Hallward paints a mystic portrait of the protagonist, Gray's life becomes a work of art displayed in that soon-to-be repulsive painting. Thus, Gray only truly loves himself, which is as much a display of vanity as the narrator in Dostoevsky's tale moralizing to Liza in order to feel powerful, in control, and superior to someone else.
Each author uses a female character to show the depths of evil and vanity to which the protagonists descend in their respective tales. These depths merely mirror that of society as a whole, which is the central theme of each work. As previously noted, the encounters with these women symbolize the turning point for each protagonist. The death of Sibyl Vane functions as a watershed moment from which Gray's journey into self-destruction — culminating in his inadvertent suicide at the novel's conclusion — springs. In Dostoevsky's work, the narrator's encounter with Liza reinforces the novel's theme that society is inherently base, which is precisely why the narrator has chosen to remain isolated in what is known as "the underground." Both Vane and Liza were unwilling sacrifices whose fates illuminate the depths of the protagonists' failings — and, by extension, the depths of the ills of the societies depicted in both books.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Mahwah: Watermill Press, 1983. Print.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground. 1864. Web.
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