Espelhos e retratos de Dorian Gray na série televisiva Penny dreadful: configurações do gótico na construção do personagem de Oscar Wilde e de John Logan

Abstract

As a transcultural and transhistorical phenomenon (SÁ, 2010) prone to changes in a given time and space, the Gothic has remained in the arts for almost nine hundred years, from its emergence in architecture to contemporary audiovisual forms. In this context, this thesis has as main objective to discuss reflexes of the Gothic in the Anglo-American television series Penny dreadful, whose major plot comes from literary characters of the English tradition. Penny dreadful is an example of television adaptation that pulls away itself from the model of fidelity to the source text, as it has long been attributed to the quality of the adaptation (STAM, 2006), materializing in TV serial fiction a contemporary trend in audiovisual productions which portray the human side of the monstrous characters (ROAS, 2012), (LLOBERA, 2015), understood as a metaphor for the “monsters” that each one can have within him. This way, we chose as a specific category the character Dorian Gray, from the novel The picture of Dorian Gray, by the writer, poet, playwright and Irish critic Oscar Wilde. In the television series, Dorian Gray is characterized as monstrous (JEHA, 2007) and transgressor (BOTTING, 1996) and his actions frame him as an outsider, as stated by Howard Becker (2008), in his study on the sociology of deviation. In addition, when analyzing the character Dorian Gray and the connection to the space he lives, we see the presence of self-reflexivity, which attributes several other meanings to his characterization, closely linked to pictorial art and symbols like the mirror. We understand Penny dreadful as a bricolage (LEVI-STRAUSS, 1971), (DE CERTEAU, 1994) of the 19th century classic Gothic narratives like Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, quotes from poems from English Romanticism and Victorian era horror serials, the penny dreadfuls, which name the title of the TV series. To discuss the narrative on television and TV serial fiction, we use studies by Jost (2007, 2012), Esquenazi (2002) and Machado (2007) and to cinematographic studies, works by Bordwell (2013), Bordwell and Thompson (2015) and Martin (2005), with a special focus on mise-en-scène.