摘要：The discourse of fairy tale narratives operates under three Victorian conventions – a virtuepersonified beautiful hero, a heterosexual relation, and a happy ending. Working upon these basic assumptions, Vladimir Propp identifies an underlying schematic structure, common to every tale, of 31 functions in narratives. Propp divides an enchanted narrative into 31 short plots. These plots are general functions performed by Propp’s identified seven archetypical characters found at play in every narrative. Propp’s study is based on 102 Russian folk tales, a sub-category of fairy tales. Oscar Wilde subverts the three aforementioned Victorian conventions in Propp’s structural model as a conflict between Victorian idealism and stark reality. This study aims to unveil the subverted structural scheme of the Proppian 31-function model in Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The novel not only subverts the three fairy tale conventions in its content but also rearranges the Proppian linear scheme of functions in its form. Moreover, the study also explores the repetition and absence of some Proppian functions to delineate the Faust theme of selling one’s soul for worldly pleasures for a specific time period, the end of which marks a visceral degeneration of the protagonist.
