The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Diminishment of Sybil Vane

Ars Gratia Artis

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is one of my favorite stories.

The novel, published in 1890, is the tale of an exquisitely beautiful young man who captures the attention of portrait artist Basil Hallward and his sophisticated, bad hat of a friend Henry Wotton.

When we first meet him, Dorian is as naïve and innocent as his face seems to indicate. But Dorian is corrupted by his relationship with his society buddy Henry, dazzlingly witty and rotten to the core. Wotton’s clever cynicism and hedonistic lifestyle turn Dorian's head. "I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable," says Henry.

His life is true to his declaration.

Early in the tale, Dorian falls in love with a beautiful young actress named Sybil Vane, whom he cruelly rejects when she doesn't live up to his standards, breaking her heart. She commits suicide, and Dorian regrets his cruelty, but the experience hastens Dorian’s fall into darkness.

Over time, Dorian becomes a libertine and murderer, far surpassing his friend Henry in his disregard for morality. "Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime is to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations." Wotton says it, but it is Dorian who lives it, a double life from upper class aesthete to back alley opium dens.

Over the nearly twenty years of the tale, Dorian is kept youthful by the magic of the portrait painted of him during the peak of his bloom by his friend Basil. The enchanted picture becomes horrifically ugly to mirror Dorian’s soul, yet the man keeps his pretty face. Gray hides the painting away in an attic, disgusted by it, yet delighting in the fact that canvas and oil bear the scars of his evil, while his flesh betrays nothing.

Over time, Gray expresses regret over his debauched ways, and affects playing at kindness by deciding not to ruin a beautiful young girl who reminds him of his lost love Sybil. Delighting in the novelty of a good deed, he wonders if the portrait will show some evidence of this attempt at good boy behavior.

Instead, the portrait looks even more monstrous than before, for Dorian’s act was not motivated by genuine concern for another, but by vanity. In a rage, he stabs the picture in the attic, the record of his corruption. Dorian drops dead, now ugly and elderly, while the portrait shows Gray youthful and beautiful once again.

The story was scandalous for its gothic horror elements and homoerotic themes, which are obvious throughout. Even so, Dorian’s love for two women, particularly Sybil Vane, are pivotal relationships and particularly interesting in that when the story is adapted into other mediums, the important role Sybil plays is diminished in such a way as to destroy the central themes of art and morality that Oscar Wilde explored in the text.

In the book, Sybil Vane is a naturally talented young actress who captures Dorian's heart with her artistic accomplishments. She falls in love with Dorian, realizing that the beauty of first love far surpasses the false love she plays at as Juliet on stage. Her acting becomes hollow. Her talent is destroyed as she is swept away by genuine emotions she has never known before.

But the aesthete Dorian has fallen for Sybil’s talent: without it, she is nothing to him. He breaks his vows to her, and in despair, she commits suicide.

In Dorian Gray, we have an accomplished woman who gives up her art for a man. Without it, she is empty, and Dorian’s contempt for her weakness destroys her.

Yet in almost all the theater/film adaptations I've seen, Sybil Vane is not gifted as an artist. In the 1945 adaptation starring a stunning young Angela Lansbury as Sybil, she is all beauty and dubious ability, a chorus hall girl singing about being a caged bird. Dorian’s interest in her is based on looks alone, and when she decides to have sex with him before marriage, Dorian dumps her.

In the 2009 film adaptation with Sybil Vane played by Rachel Hurd-Wood, she is seen onstage stiffly playing Shakespeare with an absurd, lower class accent. Dorian pursues her solely for her beauty, and his comments to friends about her talent come across as the deluded musings of a man in love who has no artistic taste. She dies, Ophelia-like, in the river after Dorian dumps her.

In both films, Dorian discards Sybil after she gave up her virtue: her sexual innocence.

But in the novel, Dorian dumps Sybil because she gave up her true virtue: her art. In adaptations of the work, the accomplished woman is reduced to a silly aspirant who only finds meaning with a man. She has nothing without him, not even the ability Oscar Wilde was good enough to gift her in the novel. She has only the hollow shell of outer beauty. The vital points Wilde makes about art and life are lost with the diminishment of Sybil Vane to a talentless showpiece.

The 1945 version is actually quite good, but making Sybil die for lost virginity is one heck of a different meaning than making Sybil die for lost art.

In the novel, Sybil falls in love with a real love, and Dorian falls in love with an artist. His love is about reflections, and the portrait is a symbol of that. His goodness eaten away by Henry's bad influence, the decaying portrait of Dorian betrays the corruption of his principles and his growing narcissism.

Almost every adaptation shows that Sybil Vane is doomed by the loss of her sexual innocence, and not by the loss of her art.

This is nowhere in the book.

The director of the 2009 film said the central theme of the work is, "What if you were allowed to do anything?" Which is not the central theme of the book. The central theme of the book is art and morality, ars gratia artis, the central theme of the entire aesthetic movement.

A woman's loss of talent would not be seen as primary consideration to a man writing through the male privilege prism. Of course Sybil would want to get a handsome rich man! What woman doesn't? Sybil can only step up her situation in life by her association with Dorian, not via her talent or accomplishments! It does not occur to the writers of the adaptations that Sybil steps down, not by losing her virginity, but by setting aside her art.

She chooses to pursue something real with Dorian: true love. On rejecting her for setting aside her art, Dorian destroys what he claimed to love: art itself.

Dorian is a man of exquisite taste, hence his fascination with Sybil's gifts. The contrast between his corrupt portrait, and his constant, public pursuit of beauty and quality in art is a statement on the hypocrisy of society. By turning Dorian into a besotted goof who falls for a mediocrity, this theme is turned on its head.

In the novel, both Sybil and Dorian fall on the sword of the sacrifice of the self. Dorian is captivated by his friend Henry, a decadent creep. Sybil is captivated by Dorian, on a fast track to becoming a decadent creep. Both Dorian and Sybil are destroyed because both Dorian and Sybil willingly sacrifice the true nature of their selves – goodness and art - to the bad influence of another person.

Dorian's radiant goodness, and Sybil's shining talent are housed in beautiful shells. And both give up their principles to someone else. By making Sybil's virtue a physical state (her virginity) instead of something intrinsic to her as an accomplished woman, she is further diminished as a character, and so is the theme. Sybil is just another girl who is tainted because she was dirtied by sex in Dorian's eyes - no longer pure - instead of being a woman of accomplishment who gave up a lifetime pursuit for a false love.

Sybil's fate was a warning to me, to never give up something intrinsic to myself on the altar of another human being.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is about being destroyed by choices that betray inner beauty. Sybil kills herself when Dorian doesn’t fill up the place in her heart that she gave away.

Dorian realizes what has he has done, but tries to hide his inner ugliness by hiding the portrait.

In the end, they are both destroyed by giving up their virtues, their true selves: true beauty, art, and love.