La Malinche

Gianina Jaramillo

Professor Conley

Comp. 2: First Draft Essay

15 December 2005

" To Influence or Not To Influence"

Xavier was a young men of fourteen years old when he started working, of course he didn't stop attending school in the night shift. He started helping at a construction, he had to do so because he belonged to the low economical class. The whole situation with his family wasn't too normal , his father had become partially blind leaving eleven kids without an economical support. Nowadays after 38 years, he is a set example to me as my father. He managed this whole situation with working and studying, sacrificing and eventually thrived by not giving up on life. He is a direct influence in me, mostly because he raised me and shared his life wisdom with me. I got to be aware of this by himself, by his words. In The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde we could find out that the main character Dorian is mainly influenced by the words of a mysterious book, " The Yellow Book". Also in Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, and the rhetoric of agency Papers on Language and Literature, Foster, David writes" In Dorian Gray Wilde fully articulates the theme of aestheticized sensuality" also he expresses "Ð'' one of the first attempts to bring homosexuality into the English novel'" so he was trying to influence the English Novel World with homosexuality, thing that was a taboo for his times. So he needed to find the right and precise words to implicate such topic into his readers.In various circumstances the person who first influenced by words to others, could have generated different reactions and thoughts in them. And once these have been brought up to light trough the employment of words, he could have been again influenced. So there is a reciprocal feedback sort of type between influence and what is being influenced. There is also implicit and explicit influences out there in the cotidiany of the world.

Influence shapes you, they have many different ways of doing so, no mattering what the influenced is. It has a power of creating an effect on someone or something. Like in Wilde's masterpiece PDG, where an obsession of Dorian Gray with the yellow book is present. It was an instantaneously love at first sight, " After a few minutes he became absorbeb. It was the strangest book that he had ever read" he found this book so unusual to him, that he couldn't stop reading." (141). At this time he was going through a bad moment of his life, he had just found out that Sybil Vane had killed herself. She was the first love of his life, Dorian had encountered in her a first illusion of love. Also he was very young at this time when he first read "the copy of the third edition of The St. James Gazette" (140). Dorian felt very much into the book and its " mystical philosophy" (142) or misterious concepts in it.

Most of the times curiosity is such a key word for attraction and fascination into something, that consequently can lead to influence. This is exactly what happened to Dorian Gray with the book that Lord Henry Wotton gave to him as a present. " For years Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book..to free himself from it."(143), the words in that book marked his life. The power that those words had on him unfortunately took him to a sad end of his life, and it is funny how it started with simply wishes to find out about the book. So there is an importance to the exactitude of time, place and person to when, where and who is being influenced. Perhaps Dorian was too young to be reading such a book, he didn't own the enough character to discern. That is why there are books, movies, songs, programs and more dedicated to certain target public.

That same public is the one that has the last decision to take, just as Foster explains: "the power of the individual to identify, confront, and resist dominant cultural forces". It is up to them if to take it under consideration for any "cultural force" to be an influence in them or not. In this case it is left under their responsibility if they want the continuity of such idea expressed to go and form a script of their lifes. To decide if whether they are going to let themselves guide for a fascination from a means of communication or if they are going to be living their lifes by themselves. There is something important with what Lord Henry expresses in PDG " The aim of life is self-development"(20), the aim with influences is to set up a path towards self- development. I mean every person has the right to do so, to be the owner of your growth by means of discovery. To find if what one thinks is more convenient, to have one's own life, and also to respect everybody else.

In PDG there is also another type of influence, but a different one. The one Basil had over Dorian, that majorly influenced his art because he found Dorian inspirational. Dorian's youth and outside beauty hit Basil in such a way that went into obsession. " His personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. I see things differently."(11) It was more of a perception through the senses, the one Dorian had that had caused reactions in Basil. But his personality had to be perceived, and perhaps his outside beauty was realised by the vision, unlike his youthness of spirit had to be perceived by him speaking up his mind. Most of this attraction over Dorian by Basil was based on him trying to influence his readers towards Aestheticism.

In Dorian's case his beauty was a powerful weapon or a weakness. Most of the times a weapon that he knew how to handle among others. But that throughout the book it started to handle him, turning into weakness. It was because his beauty was seing by his close friends and people that he frequented as something to benevolate. Dorian knew how to atrack people,so he acted out his beauty trying to be an admirable and pleasing person most of the time. The others only saw his beauty, his physical characteristics beyond that they didn't even care to know. Basil himself didn't give the importance to it, "He is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a delight in giving me painÐ'...I have given away my soul to someone who treats it as.. a bit of decoration to charm his vanity"(13). In the end Basil spending time with Dorian realized his emptyness in mind, but his fullness in appearance. Still Basil followed his admiration for the "lad". So there is not just one mean of reaching an influence, but with all of the senses that humans have.