What rhetorical strategy does Wilde use in chapters 9-12 of The Picture of Dorian Gray?

Rhetorical devices are persuasive devices. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. A chief way a writer tries to persuade readers is through appealing to their emotions. Wilde builds sympathy and worry for Dorian through interior monologue, description, and suspense building.

In these chapters, Wilde is trying to persuade the reader that Dorian is torn between his conscience (or what's left of it), which is represented by the picture, and his desire for a life of dissipation. The picture fills him with shame, and he is endlessly fearful that it will be discovered and expose his dissipated life. Dorian's feelings about the portrait help persuade us that he still has a moral compass. In the passage below, from chapter X, Wilde uses Dorian's interior monologue as a rhetorical device:

Now it was to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself—something that would breed horrors and yet would never die. What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty and eat away its grace. They would defile it and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive.

Wilde also uses rich descriptions of objects of material beauty to convince readers of Dorian's attraction to sensuality. His delight in objets d'art becomes a stand-in for other sensual acts Wilde couldn't have described at that time without being arrested for indecency.

Wilde uses description as a rhetorical device to show Dorian's love of the material and the extent to which he absorbs himself in it to block out his tormented conscience:

He would often spend a whole day settling and resettling in their cases the various stones that he had collected, such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that turns red by lamplight, the cymophane with its wirelike line of silver, the pistachio-coloured peridot, rose-pink and wine-yellow topazes, carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous, four-rayed stars, flame-red cinnamon-stones, orange and violet spinels, and amethysts with their alternate layers of ruby and sapphire . . .

Finally, every writer wants readers to keep turning the pages of their book. Wilde therefore uses the rhetorical device of building suspense by starting chapter XII with a mysterious sentence that makes the reader curious to find out why the ninth of November would become a memorable date to Dorian:

It was on the ninth of November, the eve of his own thirty-eighth birthday, as he often remembered afterwards.

In chapter 9 of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward is incredulous when he hears that Dorian Gray has gone to the opera with the knowledge that Sybil Vane is dead and that her body is likely in a disreputable location. Basil is shocked and dismayed at Dorian's casual treatment of Sybil's suicide because Dorian, with his cruel disregard for Sybil, no longer seems familiar to Basil; he is utterly changed from "the Dorian Gray I used to paint."

In order to justify his manner, Dorian employs the rhetorical strategy of allusion, comparing the death of Sybil Vane to "the great romantic tragedies of the age" and Sybil herself to Juliet, of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. This allusion, or reference, to a work of tragedy in which the heroine dies a meaningless death allows Dorian to hold Sybil at a distance. Dorian is able to treat her as a fictional character who dies in a play, a work of imagination, instead of as a living human being who is now dead thanks to his irresponsibility. This distance absolves Dorian of any responsibility for her suicide because he can think of it as something that happened in a work of art, not real life.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde uses epigrams, aphorisms, rich descriptions, and irony to describe the transformation of Dorian Gray into this new Hedonistic person that Lord Henry has lured him to turn into.

One specific ironic moment is Dorian's reaction to the death of Sybil Vane. When Basil goes to Dorian's house to comfort and ease him over the death of Sybil, Dorian simply said that Sybil should be proud to have lived her passion to the last, and that she died like a heroine in a Shakespeare play, which is what she did for a living.

To this, of course, Basil reacted in shock, since Dorian made this statement merely a day after Sybil was found dead and called the incident to be "a thing of the past".

Additionally, Wilde presents how the transformation of Dorian is correlated to the deterioration of his picture. It is in chapters 9-12 where you find him at his most hedonistic, and more extreme while the picture is shockingly hideous. Therefore, the irony of the whole thing is more palpable in this part of the story and is perhaps one of the place where more rhetorical strategies can be witnessed in the story.

Analyze one rhetorical strategy Wilde uses in chapters 13-17 of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Well, certainly in any novel a whole host of rhetorical strategies are used in every chapter, but I am going to focus on chapter thirteen and how it reflects Wilde's interest in the Gothic novel. Certainly, this novel can be viewed as a more "modern" version of its predecessors, focussing as it does on the supernatural and many binary oppositions such as alive/dead and good/evil that are explored in this work. However, a key part of Gothic fiction is setting, and how eerie, supernatural and disturbing places are brought to life through imagery.

The description of the attic where Dorian is just about to show Basil his picture is no exception. Note how imagery is used to appeal to the five senses and create a setting that is foreboding in its intensity:

They walked softly, as men do instinctively at night. The lamp cast fantastic shadows on the wall and staircase. A rising wind made some of the windows rattle.

Clearly, the "fantastic shadows" combined with the onomatopoeia of the windows "rattling" serve to create a spooky atmosphere. Note too how the picture furnishes a secret lair full of damp, death and decay, and once Dorian has killed Basil, the "drip, drip, drip" of his blood is loud enough to be heard as it falls and splatters on the carpet.

So, in Chapter 13 Wilde shows why this novel is considered as a modern Gothic by the setting and atmosphere he creates, which eerily point towards the supernatural, the excessive violence within Dorian and the diabolic pact that he has made.

What is one rhetorical strategy Wilde uses in chapters 18-20 of The Picture of Dorian Gray?

What I find interesting in Chapter Eighteen is the way that Dorian Gray is identified with the hunt, as indeed, he has become an animal who is trying to escape being tracked down and killed. Let us remember that in Chapter Seventeen he has seen the face of James Vane watching him, clearly with malicious intent, wanting revenge for the way that Dorian treated his sister.

Interestingly, we see Dorian for the first time in icy winter - the first scene of the novel took place in summer. This is also the first time we see Dorian in anything resembling a natural landscape, and he seems like a hunted animal gone to earth. Note how Dorian tries to save the life of the hare, being "strangely charmed" by its graceful movement. Important to note and focus on is Dorian's judgement on hunting:

"The whole thing is hideous and cruel."

Interestingly, Dorian acts as a mouthpiece for Wilde's own thoughts about hunting, but we need to recognise that Dorian's compassion for hunted things as expressed in this Chapter springs from the fact that he is one of them himself. And, as he is well aware, the hounds are closing.