A Study Of The Devil Prototype In Faust And The Portrait Of Dorian Gray

Faust was a great work in the 18 th century,influencing the whole Europe,and also the Goethe's most important works of drama.Since it was published,researches about this book had never stopped.The Portrait of Dorian Gray was a famous British novel in the 19 th century.The author,Oscar Wilde,made a strong critique of the impact of consumer society on traditional values through this book.These two works through a similar character,plot and theme to express the relationship between people and the devil,a controversial topic that have been debated for hundreds of years.This paper attempts to analyze the inheritance and replacement of the devil's prototype image in Faust and The Portrait of Dorian Gray through the theoretical methods of mythological archetypal criticism and text reading,and then through the comparison to find out the similarities and differences between the two and their cultural connotation.This article will be described in three parts.The preface part is to sort out and summarize the current situation of foreign and domestic research of Faust and The Portrait of Dorian Gray,to point out the limitation of current research and reveal the significance of this paper.This article will through the mythological archetypal criticism compare the devil image in the two works and cultural implication behind the two.The first part combs the origin of the devil prototype,determining the prototype and characteristics of the devil image in Bible,and analyzes the replacement of the devil prototype in the two works.The second part focuses on the analysis of the relationship between the devil and the lured in the two works,and different performance and results of the lured facing the devil.The third part is to study the deep causes and cultural connotations of the devil's similarities and differences in the two works,and analyze the devil's expression in the two works from the influence of different social backgrounds and academic development.Conclusion summarizes,the differences in the connotations of the devil archetypes in different times,different texts,and the performance of protagonist in the two works.With the development of human society,their attitude towards desire is also changed.How to balance the desire and ethics,the relationship between the individual and society is still a problem worth discussing.