Explore how the “victims” are created and used by the authors of both texts, in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”

[Example introduction]Victimisation is a key trope within literature, particularly in dealing with the supernatural. Both Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Grey” and Morrison’s “Beloved” grapple with the concept of the ‘victim’ by questioning who has the agency to construct victimisation within cultural and historical boundaries, and thus within their respective narratives.[Example paragraph]The traditional dynamic of aggressor oppressing the victim is presented and simultaneously inverted in both “Dorian Grey” and “Beloved” - the contrast between the novels is distinguished by the motive for the act itself. In Wilde’s narrative, the character of Dorian Grey is painted as that of a Victorian aesthete, swamped in a toxic lifestyle of sensation-seeking. Thus the downfall of the main protagonist of the tripartite central characters is of his own making, yet the quintessential act that sets Dorian apart is his murder of Basil - the second of the three. Here the traditional dynamic of agency and passivity is shown through Basil’s death - his insistence on Dorian’s repentance leads to a sudden “uncontrollable feeling of hatred for Basil Hallward”. The adjective “uncontrollable” is key to understanding Wilde’s portrayal of Dorian - it detracts responsibility for the murder, due to it’s animalistic, almost fatalistic, connotations, yet it is confirmed by the abstract noun “hatred” that it is a human emotion driving him. Thus this juxtaposition thwarts the traditional dynamic by both engaging and denying the victimisation of Basil. He is the ‘victim’ of a situation he contributed to, but at the hands of his counterpart character. In a similar manner, the central act of “Beloved” is Sethe’s infanticide, triggered again by a powerful, incontrovertible human emotion - yet it is the binary opposite, love. Sethe’s “thick love” for her children is portrayed by Morrison as the greatest thing she could do for her children - physically Beloved the baby may be the ‘victim’, yet it is Sethe that truly emotionally is acted upon by the white slave masters. The actual victimisation of “Beloved” is not the death of the infant at the hands of her mother - it is the perceived decay of Sethe’s humanity forced by Schoolteacher where the true victim is created. Morrison uses a metaphor delivered by Sethe’s romantic counterpart Paul D, “you got two feet, Sethe, not four”, to clarify this; identifying physical characteristics of the human versus the animal in a continuation of the motif of Schoolteacher and his description to his students.