Now all that remains is an analysis of Penny Dreadful against Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). ‘You’ll be back’, says Dorian in the series’ final episode, ‘And I’ll be waiting. That’s why, even if official television sequels are not forthcoming, the world of Penny Dreadful provides almost limitless scope for fan works and reinterpretations. Dorian has escaped from chronicity, and so have many of the supporting characters.
#Penny dreadful dorian gray series
It strikes me that Penny Dreadful has a lot of kairos – a series of divine prophecies being fulfilled – and not a lot of chronos. He discusses the distinction between chronos, that is, passing time, and kairos, the ‘divine plot’ referring to ‘historical moments of intemporal significance’. Kermode also remarks of novel reading in The Sense of an Ending, that ‘in every plot there is an escape from chronicity’. Dorian serves as a powerful metaphor here as well: Poore also draws on Frank Kermode’s theories about the function of endings in narrative, highlighting the infinite possibilities Penny Dreadful creates for the exploration and expansion of this eternal London. Eva Green as Vanessa Ives and Samuel Barnett as Renfield in Penny Dreadful (season 3, episode 7). The series is crowded with figures seemingly queuing up to escape the nineteenth century, but who cannot do so they’re stuck in a fin de siècle moment. To mangle the words of Vincent Starrett, in Penny Dreadful it’s always 1892. How could it be otherwise, when Wilde barely survived the end of the century himself? So it is with Penny Dreadful. In the novel, Dorian never ages, but London never really stops being 1890s London either. The paradox of The Picture is that the portrait is painted in the contemporary London of Wilde’s time, but as time passes and Dorian looks no older, we don’t move forward into the first half of the twentieth century (well, we do in the Oliver Parker film adaptation, but that’s another story). Like Wilde’s novel, and like Dorian Gray himself, Penny Dreadful is destined to be forever trapped in fin de siècle London: Referencing my reading of the show’s ending through Frankenstein and Dracula, Poore adds his own analysis of Penny Dreadful and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). ‘Perpetual Night’ (episode 8) wraps up Victor Frankenstein’s story, and ‘The Blessed Dark’ (episode 9) presents the final showdown with Dracula, the season’s main antagonist. This week I discovered that Benjamin Poore – author of Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre: Staging the Victorians (Palgrave, 2012) and the recent article ‘The Transformed Beast: Penny Dreadful, Adaptation, and the Gothic’ – has cited my reviews in his own blog post with the Journal of Victorian Culture. In my final post, I talked a bit about the show’s intertextual relationships with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). You may recall that I spent the first part of the year reviewing the last season of Penny Dreadful for the Victorianist blog. This post contains minor plot details from seasons 1-3 of Penny Dreadful.
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