Red Dragon

William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun is an important symbol in the novel, so much so that it functions as the title and one of the identities of the primary antagonist. Importantly, the painting is an obsession for Francis Dolarhyde. After glimpsing the painting one time, he is enraptured by it. He is “stunned” (92) by the dominating, powerful composition in which a masculine dragon figure stands above a woman. Dolarhyde is struck by the painting because the striking composition offers a symbol of everything he is not. He is afraid of women, afraid of being emasculated, afraid of being dominated by the world. The Dragon, in contrast, provides him with a template of being. The Dragon becomes Dolarhyde’s alternative identity because it symbolizes everything that he aspires to be. Rather than anything technical or formal about the painting, Dolarhyde’s obsession is an act of pure symbolism. He covets what the painting represents, and, in turn, he wishes to become the Dragon. He “great Becoming” (217) is a symbolic transformation, a transition from Dolarhyde to Dragon, a process of becoming everything that the painting symbolizes to atone for the pain and the shame of the past.