Life Imitates art.

My mind has been growing with ideas and aspirations for the future, a quote that entices me to push forward is, “Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations.” This quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray really speaks to me and hearing it spurs me on to fight and chase what I am after in life.


My friends will tell you that I am always thinking and that my mind will not switch off. This personality trait makes me very observant as well as being a key speaker in debates. I believe thinking and reading critically is somewhat innate to me but is a technique we are constantly learning and that language is a manipulative form of expression.

During my first year of study at Solent University I have learnt many criticism theories, my favourite being Post-Colonialism. I chose to write my essay answering a quote from Edward Said’s Orientalism on how colonised writers represent the ‘other’. The novel I chose to do this on was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and how she represents the inhuman and middle-eastern characters. She manipulates the reader into sympathising with the monster, as he has learnt all the European discourses yet because of his deformity cannot join this Eurocentric culture. Later when a Turkish woman called Safie joins the European cottagers she is welcomed because her features are of a “regular proportion” to the patriarchal image they have learnt. Even though Safie has not learnt the European discourses she can still be included in their culture because she will always be subordinate to it and has similarities to the patriarchal image that is idolised.

This theory basically states, we take for granted how strange we must look to other cultural discourses. We take for granted that our imperialism is seen as the norm and that what ‘others’ do is bizarre.

Barthes is a favourite theorist of mine and I work hard to grasp and apply his post-structuralists ideas. Meaning is constantly deferred and we as critics learn as much as we can by reading around the text, yet it is impossible for us to know the meaning exactly. Our learnt discourses are imposed onto the text, that is why the “birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author” (Barthes, R. 1968).

I believe that fiction plays a major part in the movement of cultural ideas. In George Elliot’s novel Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen behaves radically for a woman of the 19th Century, “Gwendolen rather valued herself on her superior freedom in laughing where others might only see matter for seriousness.” This satirical behaviour is popular today and goes to support fiction slowly changing attitudes realistically. Showing that fiction is a way to deal with an emotion tentatively; just like holocaust fiction helps remind the reader how terrible it was. Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Shooting Stars’ supports this theory by having graphic detail so that it burns into our mind so we “Remember. Remember those appalling days which make the world forever bad.” These writers identify inequalities and help culture become more liberal. This is therefore fact portraying fiction, just like Oscar Wilde famous sentence, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”