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Metaphor
Explanation and Analysis—Bacchus and Silenus:
The Portrait of Dorian Gray is chock full of metaphors for the power of language—language as sweet music, language as poison, or language as intoxicating drug. In one striking example, Wilde combines allusion with metaphor to convey the alluring power of Lord Henry’s philosophy as he characterizes it at a party:
The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled before her like frightened forest things. Her white feet trod the huge press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat’s black, dripping, sloping sides.
In this passage, Wilde conveys the intoxicating power of Henry’s worldview through the comparison between his philosophy and a young dancing woman. The metaphor contains an entire story of this woman behaving like a Bacchante—a female priestess of the Roman god of wine Bacchus. Through allusion, therefore, Wilde accesses the ancient mythical figures of Bacchus and Silenus and uses them to anchor his metaphor. Silenus is the foster father of Bacchus, and together with the Bacchantes, the figures are responsible for all manner of wine-soaked debauchery. Through this metaphor, Henry’s philosophy gains the power of a maddeningly drunk ancient ritual. As the reader soon learns, Henry’s colorful speech proves quite effective: Dorian Gray falls prey to his hedonism and, as the metaphor would have it, "drinks the wine" of Henry’s ideas.
This is one in a lengthy catalogue of classical allusions that Wilde uses in reference to Henry and, in particular, Henry’s affinity for Dorian and his own ideology. By surrounding Henry’s character with the world of classical mythology, Wilde is able to more emphatically differentiate between Henry’s hedonism and Basil’s Christian morality.
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