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How do themes, morals, or views compare or contrast in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Wuthering Heights?
Quick answer:
Both Dorian Gray and Wuthering Heights are about passion and the irrationality of love. Both have a dark, Gothic atmosphere, but Dorian Gray is a more sophisticated novel with more ironic humor.
The Picture of Dorian Gray and Wuthering Heights are from very different periods and are stylistically quite different.
Both novels do involve romantic relationships which are fundamentally unhealthy, where passion overwhelms common sense and moral judgement in certain characters. On the other hand, there are major differences in these romantic plots—with Wilde's work having strong homoerotic undertones while Brontë's story is overtly heterosexual. Furthermore, Wilde's work emphasizes desire as aesthetic and sensual and Brontë's emphasizes passion.
The setting is important in both works, but Brontë sets her novel in the Yorkshire countryside and conveys a romantic sense of the windswept moors. Wilde's work, on the other hand, is both urban and urbane.
While Brontë's characters are visceral and passionate, driven by emotions they themselves barely understand, Wilde's characters are sophisticated and decadent with an ironic self-awareness. Ennui and the search for novelty are as much as motivation as immediate emotional...
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Finally, while Brontë's work is straightforwardly a Gothic Romance in nature, Wilde's is ironic and witty—though The Picture of Dorian Gray also has all the hallmarks of a Gothic novel.
Both novels are Gothic, and the Gothic genre involves the manifestation of passion, evil, the supernatural, horror, and darkness throughout the story. Dorian Gray is slightly more supernatural than Wuthering Heights.
The main characters, Heathcliff and Dorian are near- sociopaths. Although Heathcliff came from poverty as an orphan, he still grew up a dangerously ambitious and cruel man. He is etremely vicious and cruel to his wife, and keeps Catherine as a lover. However, they are only fascinated by each other because they are hedonistic and narcissistic.
Dorian is, of course fascinated by himself as well, and when he sells his soul to keep himself forever young, he also became more and more cruel and evil to others. Similarly to Heathcliff, he was cruel and evil to the actress whom he had proposed to marry. So cruel, in face, that she killed herself- as did other mysterious and non-identified characters in the story- on account of Dorian's destructive presence and corrupt nature.
Both novels are also similar in that they distinguish the social classes and mention their differences throughout the story, and that they are both began, developed and ended with the death of the biggest moving force, which in each novel are Heathcliff and Dorian.