【Written by Valerie Zis】
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray appears at the intersection of Victorian and modern British literature during a period of immense social change. Older British traditions, particularly among the upper classes, began to find themselves the subject of scrutiny and satire. The frivolous and irresponsible nature of the wealthy faced increasing pushback and condemnation from the lower classes, as exemplified through the character of Dorian Gray. His behavior in the novel typifies the callousness and sheer disregard of the upper crust of society towards those considered socially beneath them. Dorian Gray’s initial obsession and later rejection of the talented actress Sybil Vane provokes his spiral from the pure innocence of his youth to the cruelty of his character as the novel progresses. His treatment of Sybil as merely a passing object of interest, as opposed to a sentient human being, embodies the careless disrespect of the wealthy towards the working class, serving to stain his previously untainted soul as represented by the change in his portrait. Dorian’s completely childish and utterly heartless behavior following Sybil Vane’s final performance and the manner in which he dehumanizes her death ultimately leads to his destruction. Simultaneously, the initial transformation of his painting reflects the disintegration of his morals and the rotting of his soul.
Prior to Dorian’s infatuation with Sybil Vane, his youthful innocence and purity had not yet been tainted by Lord Henry and the wealthy classes’ haughty propriety. Basil Howard, the artist behind the initially painstakingly beautiful portrait of Dorian, refers to him as having a “simple and beautiful nature,” untouched by social corruption (Wilde 16). Upon Dorian’s introduction to Lord Henry, Dorian is seen “swinging round on the music-stool in a willful, petulant manner,” much like that of a child. Dorian complains that he does not “want a life-sized portrait of [himself],” as Dorian cannot comprehend Basil’s desire to spend such an alarming amount of time crafting a singular painting of him (Wilde 17). When Dorian notices Lord Henry approaching, “a faint blush coloured his cheeks for a moment” at the notion of being caught behaving immaturely (Wilde 17). Wilde first presents Dorian Gray as a fairly typical, albeit slightly spoiled, youth — sulky and impatient in temper while energetic in physicality. Dorian also appears embarrassed for his juvenile attitude in front of new visitors; he, however, forgoes this quality as he becomes less bothered by the increasing stain upon his reputation and the public’s perception of him. Lord Henry initially observes Dorian as someone who “was wonderfully handsome,” with an unidentifiable quality to “his face that made one trust him at once” (Wilde 17). Within Dorian, one could glimpse “all the candour of youth… as well as all youth’s passionate purity,” still unblemished and unbeknown to the cruel injustice of the world (Wilde 17). Dorian’s true youth, as opposed to the deceptively young physical appearance he maintains decades later, consists of a sheltered innocence and truthfulness attributed solely to worldly inexperience and a steady belief in the inherent goodness of people. Undeniably “unspotted from the world” and its nefarious influences, Dorian’s purity is evident to both Basil and Lord Henry, so much so to the former that he becomes inspired to capture it artistically, and to the latter as a temptation to teach him the supposed darkly realistic truths of life (Wilde 17). It is this Dorian, a temperamental and naïve but otherwise indisputably pure youth, who falls into a hopelessly romantic infatuation with Sybil Vane’s amorous performances.
Dorian’s obsession with the beautiful and pure concept of Sybil Vane, an image somewhat like his own, drives him to declare his eternal love for her due to her overly romantic and incredibly tragic depictions of love on stage. Inspired by Lord Henry, Dorian decides to put aside his prior naivety and develops a new “passion for sensations” that he has never experienced before, becoming “filled with a wild desire to know everything about life” (Wilde 44). It is in this state of mind that he first encounters Sybil Vane, who he depicts as “the loveliest thing [he] had ever seen in [his] life,” promptly falling in love with her beauty and the intensity of her passionate performances (Wilde 46). The uncanny similarity between the two speaks to their mutual fascination with each other, as they both appear young, beautiful, and entirely naïve and ignorant of the world around them. When they interact for the first time, Dorian admits to Lord Henry that “they stood looking at each other like children,” with both of them appearing as though “rather nervous” and unsure as to how to behave in a real-life setting (Wilde 48). Although raised in vastly different social circles, both Sybil and Dorian grew up sheltered from reality. Dorian, born into wealth and privilege, has never faced true adversity nor any sort of hardships outside the ease of upper-class life. Sybil, while poor, lived only for the fabricated romance of the theater and failed to experience much of what life has to offer as well. Dorian, upon later reflection to Lord Henry, explains rather ironically that Sybil “knows nothing of life,” and her childlike purity and disconnect from the real world further his attraction (Wilde 48). Sybil, in Dorian’s eyes, appears as a perfect reflection of himself and views her allure as a gateway to idealistic and impassioned love, sparking his desire to marry her.
Dorian Gray ultimately becomes enamored not of Sybil Vane herself but of the Shakespearean lovers she portrays on the stage and the raw emotion generated through her worthy performances. As an actress, Sybil’s identity elicits a sort of mystery that Dorian craves, unlike the boredom of “ordinary women” who never “appeal to one’s imagination” (Wilde 46). Dorian, desperate to abandon his previous innocence and enjoy all the world has to offer, is besotted by her because she appears as several women at once, allowing him to experience every love story imaginable simultaneously. To Dorian, Sybil Vane is not a real person but a menagerie of differing personalities, an abstraction of passionate and dramatic love at its very essence. Therefore, when the theater’s manager attempts to introduce Dorian to her following the first performance, Dorian “was furious with him, and told him that Juliet had been dead for hundreds of years and that her body was lying in a marble tomb in Verona” (Wilde 47). Dorian cannot comprehend Sybil’s humanity; to him, she is simply a work of art come to life, and thus he treats her like one. While Dorian continues to rave on about Sybil’s accomplishments as Juliet, Imogen, and the countless other Shakespearean ladies, Lord Henry facetiously inquires if she ever is herself. Dorian responds indignantly that Sybil “never” is, for she “is more than an individual,” transforming her from a mere human to some ethereal and multifaceted being he must “worship” (Wilde 49). Although Dorian insists that he truly loves her, what he really desires is passionate emotion — so strong as would make the fictional “Romeo jealous” and allow for all “dead lovers of the world to hear [their] laughter and grow sad” (Wilde 49). Spurred by Lord Henry’s depictions of society and the realization of his own sheltered innocence, Dorian yearns for the opportunity to experience the very depth of human emotion, a desire Sybil Vane fulfills until her final performance.
Following Dorian’s marriage proposal to Sybil Vane, she loses the ability to feign love for her fellow actors on stage as a result of her exposure to true love and adoration. This stunts her acting abilities, which, in turn, prompts Dorian himself to lose interest in her altogether. Although “still certainly lovely to look at,” she delivers her dialogue in an “artificial manner” and “showed no sign of joy when her eyes rested on Romeo” (Wilde 71). She has morphed into a poor and unemotional actress, with nothing but her external beauty to generate interest in the play. When Dorian confronts Sybil over her horrific acting, she appears overjoyed rather than insulted. Serenely, she explains that as a result of their mutual love, she “shall never act well again” because he “made [her] understand what love really is” and feels like (Wilde 74). Therefore, she can no longer portray false passion. Rather than returning her affections, Dorian instead insists that her dreadful acting has only “killed [his] love” for her and that she is “nothing to [him] now” without her artistic talent (Wilde 74). Dorian never genuinely loved Sybil herself; he only used her acting skills to inspire some sort of passion within himself, which was subsequently extinguished the second she ceased to be the romantic Shakespearean heroine of his dreams. With the emotion in her performance now “unreal,” Sybil inadvertently humanizes herself and thus shatters Dorian’s expectations of her as an otherworldly personification of human passion (Wilde 71). Dorian only loved her because she “realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art,” and now that she no longer represents the fervent emotion of art that he craves, Sybil can no longer hold his attention or “curiosity” (Wilde 74). Hence, just as Dorian grew bored with her performance, he tires of Sybil herself as well. Without her talent, she becomes the same type of ordinary woman he despises and consequently ends their engagement. By the time Dorian’s fear of the altered portrait begins to remind him of his cruelty towards her, it becomes too late to make amends and Basil’s painting, along with Dorian himself, is changed forever.
Following his rejection of Sybil Vane, Dorian arrives home and discovers that his portrait has transformed to reflect his heartless treatment of Sybil, spurring a sense of remorse that arrives too late to save either of their souls. He notices the appearance of “the lines of cruelty around [the painting’s] mouth,” as though he had been admiring himself after committing “some dreadful thing” (Wilde 77). This transformation forces Dorian to confront his own behavior that night, and upon consideration of his brutal callousness towards Sybil, “a feeling of infinite regret comes over him,” although not a result of her heartbreak but instead over the portrait’s alteration (Wilde 77). Dorian’s selfishness and immense egotism regarding his physical beauty and sense of self-importance, as reflected in the portrait, sparks his desire to apologize to Sybil, as he greatly fears any further stain on the painting as a result of his sin. To him, she remains “shallow and unworthy” of his attention, “nothing to him now” but a disappointment (Wilde 77-78). His portrait, on the other hand, “taught him to love his own beauty,” and he finds that he cannot bear the thought of its destruction, inspiring him to attempt to “resist temptation” of further sin (Wilde 77). Thus, when he decides to marry Sybil Vane, he does it purely for his own gain, believing he can cleanse himself of his sin and restore the painting’s beauty: the one thing he cares about almost as much as himself. He convinces himself that he may love Sybil Vane again and will attempt to live happily with her if it means that the painting will once again depict his radiant perfection and innocence. However, by the following day, when Dorian announces to Lord Henry his intention to marry Sybil, she has already committed suicide as a result of his cruel words. Dorian’s cold dismissal of Sybil’s love prompts her to kill herself. Consequently, Dorian himself has unwittingly “murdered her as surely as if [he] had cut her little throat with a knife,” and now his sin will go unremedied forever (Wilde 83). Dorian’s treatment of Sybil Vane becomes the first cruel action in a series of immoral deeds that tarnishes his soul, and even though he attempts to deflect responsibility for her death by belittling her life, the increasing disfigurement of the portrait reveals his inevitable and continuing corruption.
Although initially in a state of distress over her death, Dorian’s discussion with Lord Henry about the insignificance of Sybil Vane’s life allows him to justify his behavior and depicts the negligence of the upper class. While comforting him, Lord Henry brushes off Dorian’s halfhearted concerns regarding his cruelty by reminding him that Sybil “never really lived, and so she has never really died” (Wilde 87). Instead, she was a “dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare’s plays and left them lovelier for its presence” (Wilde 87). Again, in order to avoid a sense of responsibility for her death, Dorian and Lord Henry objectify her and completely devalue her life, reducing her to nothing more than an inhuman collection of passion and emotion, only existing within the confines of the theater. Her sole purpose in life is described as enhancing the quality of the Shakespearean plays she performed, and her significance only stretched as far as her ability to entertain those in the upper class, like Dorian and Lord Henry. The moment that Sybil loses her talent, she “touched real life” for the first time, and then “marred it, and it marred her, so she passed away,” for she was incapable of surviving in real life (Wilde 87). The loss of her acting ability as a result of her love for Dorian robs her of any value that she may have possessed, and therefore, she must die. Lord Henry instructs Dorian to “mourn for Ophelia” or any of the other characters that Sybil played but not to “waste [his] tears over [her],” for “she was less real” than any of the Shakespearean women she portrayed (Wilde 87). By dehumanizing Sybil in this way, Dorian and Lord Henry can remain blame and guilt free, for her death ceases to matter. With that, they can continue with their lives as though she never existed, because to them, she did not. Dorian manipulated Sybil and toyed with her for as long as she brought him pleasure, so when he tired of the affair, he simply removed her from his life without a second thought. Essentially, the brief spark that was his time with Sybil was nothing but a new and “marvelous experience” for Dorian, one that temporarily fulfilled his desire for novelty and destroyed her as a result (Wilde 87). Sybil Vane was an actress and one of the lower classes at that. Hence, in the eyes of the wealthy like Dorian, she did not deserve better treatment or even the least bit of consideration. Her desires, and ultimately her life, unlike Dorian’s, were not deemed important, and therefore were entirely disregarded.
Basil Hallward’s portrait of Dorian Gray prompts Dorian’s realization of his own beauty and his desperation to maintain his physical perfection at any cost. Through his first callous act of cruelty in the rejection of Sybil Vane’s affections following her failed final performance, he inadvertently stains the painting with his sin irreparably. By the conclusion of the novel, Dorian’s character transforms from one of youthful innocence to apathetic villainy. He becomes less concerned with the thoughts and feelings of others and more obsessed with his own desires for never-ending passion. Dorian’s elitist mentality and complete disregard for the lower classes allow him to continue down a dark path of corruption and debauchery that further serves to destroy the beauty of the painting, a direct reflection of the rotting of his own soul.
Works Cited
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Third ed., W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2020
