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th. The word “mythos” originally appears inGreek, which means “stories and legends about gods and heroes”, but the scholarsspecializing in myth assumes that “story” is only the extrinsic manifestation. Myth is “theprimitive’s original understanding of the natural phenomena and social life in the form of thesupernatural image and fantasy”. Myth-archetypal criticism theory is an extremely importantliterary critic theory in the 20thcentury. It is said that archetypal criticism, Marxist criticismand psychoanalysis criticism once comprise the “three pillar” structure of the Western literaryworld. Myth-archetypal criticism theory tries to recognize all kinds of images, narrativestructures and character types which appear repeatedly in literature works, discovers the basicforms behind them, then finds out the universal law of human spirit and reveals the essence ofart. It makes a noise among the contemporary literature and arts research methods because ittries to find out the myth prototypes and the ancient memory through literary phenomenasurface. The word archetype can be traced back to its Greek origin “archetypos”, “arche”means original or primitive while “typos” refers to pattern or model. The moderninterpretation of archetype appears in the late 19thcentury, which is defined as the recurringliterary phenomena, such as theme, characters, narratives, personality, symbols or any otherliterary devices. Of all these contributors, it is generally considered that James G. Frazer’scultural anthropology and Carl Gustav Jung’s analytic psychology laid the theoreticalfoundation of the archetypal criticism.
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Chapter Three The Supernatural Power Represented in The Picture of Dorian Gray............14
3.1 Endymion-the incomplete life...........14
3.2 Dorian-the fallen life without his soul.........15
3.2.1 The death of Sibyl.......... 16
3.2.2 The acceleration of degradation......... 18
3.2.3 The death of Dorian........21
Chapter Four The Moral Metaphor Revealed in The Picture of Dorian Gray....23
4.1 The picture-unity of soul and body............. 23
4.2 The changed picture-conflict between soul and body.....25
4.3 The deconstruction of art.........28
Chapter Five Conclusion.....34

Chapter Four The Moral Metaphor Revealedin The Picture of Dorian Gray

Frye once said, “Just as realism is an implicit simile art, the myth is implicit manifestationof the same art through metaphor” (Frye, 2006, p.193). Metaphor is the concentrated myth,myth is expanded metaphor, and every metaphor is a refined fairy tale. The metaphoricalthinking is the basic characteristic of the mythical thinking. Metaphor is an importantfunction of myth-archetypal criticism theory, which is applied in Picture to reflect OscarWilde’s moral outlook. Oscar Wilde himself also admits that Dorian Gray is a story with amoral. The moral metaphor in Picture is represented by the magic picture, which changesconstantly and records all the evil things Dorian has done. The decaying portrait serves as asign of moral degeneration of Dorian, which expresses Wilde’s moral outlook. In order toexamine the moral metaphor in the novel, we should also pay attention to Oscar Wilde’scontinuous quest for the relationship between life and art as well as the social reality of thelate Victorian era.

4.1 The picture- unity of soul and body
In Greek mythology, Pygm