Irresistible Seductiveness of Dorian and Beloved

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with Beloved, which can remind us of the one that Beloved has with Sethe, and how she is willing to defend her sister no matter what. We see this when Denver sees Beloved trying to choke Sethe, “You all right?”, and she still does not say anything about how dangerous Beloved really is. The fact that Denver prefers to have a person to be with rather that keeping her family safe shows how lonely she has been in the past and how desperate she is to socialise with someone her age. An alternative explanation would be that Beloved has a special power over Denver and makes it impossible for Denver to speak up. We can also see this type of influence in The Picture of Dorian Grey over Basil. Basil worships Dorian until his very last breath, to the extent that he will do everything that the young boy will ask him for. “Don’t spoil him. Don’t try to influence him. Your influence will be bad”, here Basil is telling Lord Henry not to mess up with innocent Dorian as he wants does not want him to have a bad influence so that he does not change. This proves how dependent Basil is of Dorian, and we can also see this how Dorian’s change affects Basil; “Dorian this is horrible! Something has changed you completely”.

Sethe is also a character that falls into Beloved’s irresistible seductiveness, she starts being less seduced by Beloved than other characters such as Paul D and Denver, but she gradually ends up in a similar situation as Denver. We can see this when she was about to make the connection that Beloved was her dead child but she was waylaid by another thought; “the suspicion that the girl’s touch was also exactly like the baby’s dissipated”. Here we can see how much power Beloved has over the whole family, she is able to control what each person thinks and to what extent they know her plan. However, this seductiveness is not that powerful as Sethe does end up making this connection, “ And the minute she saw the dress and shoes sitting in the front yard, she broke water”, here Sethe is making clear that she knows that “when her bladder filled to capacity” it was a symbolism of her breaking water. The fact that Sethe wants Beloved to form part of her life after all of the strange things that she has done, proves how she is under some kind of spell. As i mentioned before, Dorian and Beloved have a lot of things in common, however Beloved is more powerful than Dorian due to the fact that Beloved has the ability to control and manipulate all of the characters in the novel whereas Dorian does not have this ability and he is even controlled and manipulated by Lord Henry. “When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy”, Henry is clearly trying to tell Dorian that he should seek happiness whether it’s in a good or in a bad way. Dorian is clearly influenced by this statement as he ends up being a very selfish person. Here we can clearly prove that Beloved’s power of irresistible seduction is a lot stronger than Dorian’s.

As we have seen both characters are irresistibly seductive and they use this ‘gift’ to get their own way. Dorian uses it in a more childish way, he is to greedy and very superficial and wants to have everything he wishes at the reach of his hands, whereas Beloved uses her power in a more intelligent way and manages to fool the whole house in order to make things go how she wants to. The difference in both characters might be because of their different backgrounds, as Dorian is a rich aristocrat during the end of the 19th century and Beloved is a woman who was killed in order to be saved from a lifetime of hell being a slave. These are two opposite ends of the spectrum, specially taking into account that British men were the ones who captured and sold the slaves to America, which can cause differences in personality.