Doctor Faust and Dorian Gray

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DOCTOR FAUSTUS AND DORIAN GRAY:SUPERMEN IN THE ENGLISH LITERATURE ‘Man is something we must go beyond ‘says Nietzsche granting his Superman the mission of going beyond the human nature. To do that, man has to demolish all the old dogmas to free the self from every superstructure. The result is the Superman, that is the free man who follows his will to the power, who breaks every obstacle and wins over the natural forces. In Gabriele D’Annunzio, too, the Superman is he who goes beyond his human limits and despises a trivial and common life. D’Annunzio exalts his virtues that can raise the country fortune, and makes him become the object of aesthetical admiration. The first example of superman in the English literature is Faustus, protagonist of the tragedy Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Faustus and the other marlowian heroes are motivated by ‘The Will to the Power ‘. The typical marlowian hero wants to overcome every human limit but, unlike D’ Annunzio’s one, he does not aim at any aesthetic purpose; he only wants to satisfy his lust for power. The means to reach such condition can be the wealth, as in The Jew of Malta, an earthly crown, as in Tamburlaine the Great, or the knowledge without limits, as in Doctor Faustus. The condition of ‘superman‘ is always deceptive because, after reaching it, Faustus realizes he has been deceived. He eventually realizes the vanity of his power; he is prey to terror, he is desperate and implores the pity of God. The man who wanted to be a superman, after reaching that condition, tries vainly to return to his human condition. Everything is useless; the parable of his life has run its entire course: a man he was raised to a superman, a superman he falls into a sub-human condition. So Faustus, that had sold his soul to Satan in turn for 25 years of unbounded knowledge during which he did whatever he wanted –

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