Undergraduate Student Paper Prize

The MMLA congratulates the 2025 winner of the Undergraduate Student Paper Prize: Isabella Martin. Her paper, “Immoral Art: Gender and Pre-Raphaelite Artwork in The Picture of Dorian Gray” investigates the relationship between Wilde’s novel and artwork by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a popular – and controversial – group of artists whom Wilde publicly supported in his early career. The novel’s titular character is described in ways which resemble young men who populate Pre-Raphaelite paintings, such as the Angel Gabriel, Narcissus, and Eros. Dorian Gray is also described with and surrounded by floral imagery, which provides significant weight to his gender coding. Utilizing these painted images, alongside material by prolific contemporary writers such as Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson and John Ruskin, this paper demonstrates that the young Dorian Gray transgresses significantly from Victorian constructions of masculinity, instead occupying a space of gender ambiguity. Dorain Gray’s liminality exhibits how both Wilde and the Brotherhood used beauty as a form of rebellion, questioning the rigid structures of gender within the period, and ultimately informing our own perceptions of identity and expression.  

Isabella Martin is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of Nebraska Omaha. She is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and History with minors in Art History, Medieval-Renaissance Studies, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies. Her research focuses on the influence of material culture, artwork, and antiquity in nineteenth-century literature, and she is particularly interested in the demonstration of liminal gender expression and identity in Victorian Gothic texts. Following the completion of her undergraduate program, Isabella hopes to pursue a graduate degree in English Literature and continue her studies in nineteenth century literature and culture. 

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