Drama and novel notes

The estate is Sorin’s, by a lake. Konstantin Treplev, young writer, stages an outdoor play: Nina Zarechnaya as the World Soul, a speech of lonely spirits after all life has gone. His mother, Irina Arkadina, a famous actress, mocks the form. Treplev stops the play. He loves Nina; Nina is drawn to Boris Trigorin, the successful novelist who is Arkadina’s lover. Masha, in black, loves Treplev and will marry the schoolmaster Medvedenko out of despair. Dorn, the doctor, is almost the only one who takes the young play seriously. Already the pattern: art against career, mother against son, everyone loving the wrong person. It is not a well-made plot of villains. It is Chekhov’s comedy that hurts.

Act II: croquet weather, idle talk, Nina lingering near Trigorin. Treplev has shot a seagull and lays it at Nina’s feet — a piece of his own ruined theatre. Trigorin notes a subject: a girl lives by a lake; a man comes; he destroys her as that bird was destroyed, for want of something to do. Nina does not hear the warning as warning. She hears fame. Hold the bird as emblem before it is a title: wasted life, made into a story, offered as a love-token that is really a wound. Stay with the lake, the failed play, the dead bird, the notebook. Treplev’s restless talk of old theatre is enough; do not turn the act into a lecture on Hamlet.

Act III: packing, bandage, quarrel. Treplev has tried to shoot himself and failed. Arkadina binds his head, then they tear each other — her stinginess, his need, Trigorin between them. She keeps Trigorin by a scene of actress-passion. Nina finds Trigorin; they agree she will follow him to Moscow. The lake will lose her. Act IV is two years later, autumn, Treplev’s study, the same house. He has some success in magazines and no peace. Masha is married and still unhappy. Nina has been a poor actress, has had Trigorin’s child, the child is dead, Trigorin has gone back to Arkadina. She comes in the night, wet, calls herself a seagull, then an actress, recites the old World Soul speech, and leaves. Treplev tears up his manuscripts. A shot offstage. Dorn closes the door so that Arkadina will not be told at once. The play ends on that muffling, not on a tragic oration.

Nina’s last visit is the growth inside the wreck: “I am a seagull… No, that’s not it… I am an actress.” She has failed and still chooses the work. Treplev has talent and no faith in a form; he cannot live. Trigorin will go on fishing and writing. Arkadina will go on touring. The stuffed bird on the shelf is Shamraev’s doing: the estate manager had it mounted because Trigorin once asked; Trigorin no longer remembers. That is Chekhov’s symbol: not a riddle to decode once, but a wasted thing kept in the room. Senelick’s English is the named text; do not import another Chekhov play. Do not call this a Victorian comedy of manners; it is 1890s Russian ensemble, on this paper’s nineteenth-century list by date and by the syllabus’s two names.

The Preface is Unit 1’s aestheticism in exam sentences: the artist is the creator of beautiful things; there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book, only well written or badly written; all art is quite useless. Then the story tests the doctrine. Basil Hallward paints Dorian in a London studio. Lord Henry Wotton talks youth, sensation, the new Hedonism. Dorian looks at the finished portrait and wishes that the picture would age and that he would stay as he is. The wish takes. From here the plot is a double: the face in the world, the face in the attic.

Lord Henry is not the narrator and not Wilde in a simple way; he is the tempter whose epigrams Dorian lives. Basil loves Dorian and wants the picture to stay his secret. Dorian becomes the work of art that walks. Victorian earnestness (Houghton) would educate a young man through work and marriage. This novel educates him through a studio, a garden, and a poisonous book Lord Henry later sends. Keep the Preface and the wish as the first room. The next lessons walk the cost. Do not start an answer with Sibyl’s death and skip the doctrine.

Dorian falls in love with Sibyl Vane, a poor actress who plays Shakespeare in a mean theatre. He loves her as Juliet, as Rosalind — as art. When she loves him, her acting dies: the painted heroines are nothing beside a real person. He rejects her in the name of ruined art. That night the portrait changes: a touch of cruelty in the mouth. Sibyl kills herself. Lord Henry converts the suicide into a romance; Basil wants repentance; Dorian locks the picture away and chooses Henry’s reading of the event. The yellow book (a poisonous French novel Henry sends) becomes the handbook of his later style.

The irony of aestheticism is already visible. He wanted a girl who was a work of art; when she became a woman who loved, he called that a bad performance. The portrait, not the Preface, now keeps the moral. Hawthorne’s friends showed their vice in the room; Dorian hides his in the attic and walks beautiful. Hold Sibyl as the first corpse of the doctrine, not as a subplot to skip.

About eighteen years pass. Dorian does not age. Rumours of corruption gather; he is still received because the face is innocent. He shows Basil the portrait. Basil begs him to pray. Dorian murders Basil and has the chemist Alan Campbell destroy the body. James Vane, Sibyl’s brother, hunts him and dies by accident at a shooting party. The last night Dorian resolves to be good, tests the portrait, finds a look of cunning added to the rest, and stabs the painted canvas. The servants find an old, withered man they hardly know, and a portrait of their master as they had last seen him, exquisite. The double is reversed at the cost of a life.

So the novel both proclaims aestheticism and cannot quite escape a moral fable: the soul (or the picture) keeps accounts. That is why Unit 1 called it the exhibit and the cost. Chekhov’s shot is offstage and social; Wilde’s knife is in the attic and allegorical. Do not write “art for art’s sake” and stop: add the wish, Sibyl, Basil, the stabbed canvas. If a question quotes the Preface, gloss the uselessness of art, then show the plot that refuses to stay useless.