Sibyl Vane is a talented actress and singer, who is at the same time a poor girl falling in love with Dorian Gray. This love destroys her talent of acting, since she can no longer find pleasure in creating fictional love, when real love has entered her life. After learning that Dorian doesn’t love her anymore and trying to escape the world of illusions, she kills herself.
Sibyl Vane is a very important and interesting character of the novel. First of all, Dorian Gray falls in love with her, because she resembles himself with one significant difference – she is pure, innocent, and vulnerable to everything in the world. For her, art of acting is the only thing taking all the space in her own world. From the one side, she considers herself eternally happy with art; however, from the other side, she starts calling this world ‘prison’ after she meets Dorian and cognizes love with him.
She compares herself to the “Lady of Shallot” in Chapter 7, speaking about shadows which made her life unbearable. Just like in the ballade, these shadows are merely substitutions for the real world, which Lady of Shallot suffered from. Lady stays alone at her place weaving among the “shadows of the world” in the reflections of mirrors until she sees Sir Lancelot riding not far from her castle. Their meeting eyes launch the curse which finally kills the lady. In the novel we can trace the same fate in the life of Sibyl Vane – “shadows” of art which constitute all her lonely life and love with a man which brings her to tragic death.
After madly falling in love with Dorian Gray, Sibyl starts performing on the stage worse and worse. Moreover, Dorian criticized her poor acting after one of the performances, when she played thinking of him and their meeting after the performance. His harsh words shocked her and literally and figuratively killed her.
For Dorian Gray, she was nothing more than another piece of art which he eagerly wanted to purchase. She was a desired goal for him with her innocence and purity, which he wanted to corrupt, and what he actually did. Telling his friend, Lord Harry, about Sibyl, he describes only her appearance – her beautiful eyes, charming flute-like voice, dark soft hair, her talent, and so on. He never speaks about her soul, only about the souls of her characters whom she plays. As long as she could skillfully transform into other women with various characters and traits and show them, he adored looking at her and enjoyed her performance. As soon as she lost this skill and started being herself, he totally lost interest in her.
When we analyze the character of Sibyl Vane, we find out that she is actually never herself – Sibyl Vane, - but the characters she plays – Imogen, Giulietta, or another beautiful girl from some play. She perceives everything around her like another play or book – with princes and ladies, with unreal names and castles, with Sirs and knights. She perceives Dorian Fray the same way – she doesn’t even know his name and doesn’t want to know it. He is Prince Charming for her, the most handsome and beautiful creature in her world. However, for him she is only the brightest representative of art with great talent. Actually, he is not able to love another person, and she was not a person at that moment. That’s why, when she failed with her acting, he never wanted to see her anymore.
The character of Sibyl Vane plays a significant role in the novel “Dorian Gray” and helps to reveal the nature of Dorian to the readers. She is a vivid example presenting the relationships between Dorian and art. Sibyl’s art of life on the scene which attracted his attention, the prospect of married well-doing life with correction of personal mistakes – all this is only the opportunity to satisfy his own narcissistic needs and give way to his vanity. Another important role of this woman consists in being a turning point in Dorian’s life. Only after her tragic death – suicide – his portrait started changing and revealing the inner cruelty of the man depicted. Probably, Dorian had not done anything so amoral before that case with Sibyl, while his attitude and behaviour towards Sibyl is absolutely amoral as it is. In his last speech to Sibyl he seems to choose art instead of love, but actually, he chooses his own image of art, which is far from real art.
Thus, we have studied the character of Sibyl Vane and her role in the novel in relation to the main character – Dorian Gray. In the novel we can see her personal development along with the degradation of art together with the degradation of the art of lying. Living without love, the woman acted and built castles in the air right on the scene, lied, and played different Shakespearean and other roles with great success. Learning real love with Dorian, she experiences the fall of the art of lie and tragic changes – she starts playing worse and considers art only a pale reflection of real love, which makes Dorian close before her the door to the world of art, saying that she is nothing without her artistic talent. The desperate woman sees no sense in life without true love or mendacious art and kills herself with poison. At first Dorian is full of grief and sorrow but later Lord Henry treats her death as another page in a tragedy of the 17th century and says that she didn’t die since she never lived. Dorian agrees with him and says that she left the world of real life and entered the world of art again.
Her death symbolizes the turning point in his life and shows his true attitude to art, which turns out to be far from real understanding of it.
Works Cited
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Genoa: Black Cat Pub., 2007. Print.
