The Picture Of Dorian Gray Read Online Free PDF

art’ is transformed into a horrifying record of corruption, ‘bestial, sodden, and unclean. What did it matter? No one could see it…. He kept his youth – that was enough.’ For Wilde perhaps this destruction, a form of aesthetic ‘heresy’, is Dorian’s greatest ‘sin’. As he stated in the Preface: ‘Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.’
    A similar illustration of the disastrous effects of life on art, and of confusing ethics with aesthetics, is found in the tragic tale of Sibyl Vane. Dorian Gray falls in love with a beautiful young actress whom he discovers performing in a seedy, third-class theatre. From the outset it is clear that he is in love with Sibyl’s acting rather than the woman herself. As he enthuses to Lord Henry: ‘Tonight she is Imogen… and tomorrow night she will be Juliet.’ ‘When is she Sibyl Vane?’ asks Lord Henry. ‘Never,’ Dorian replies. Dorian intends to ‘take [his] love out of poetry, and to find a wife in Shakespeare’s plays… I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.’ Sibyl plays all the great romantic heroines of the Shakespearean stage, and while she remains within the sphere of art her performance enraptures Dorian. ‘Life’, in the form of the real passion she feels for Dorian, ruins her art: ‘‘‘Dorian, Dorian,’’ she cried, ‘‘before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life.… I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came…[and] taught me what reality really is.… I might mimic a passion that I do not feel,but I cannot mimic one that burns me like fire’’’ (Chapter VII). Dorian’s cruel response is consistent with his aesthetic code: ‘Without your art you are nothing.… A third-rate actress with a pretty face.’ That night Sibyl commits suicide, and Dorian detects the first changes in his portrait.
    However, despite the moral censure suggested by the portrait’s reaction, Wilde discourages such a straightforwardly ‘sentimental’ response to these circumstances. To do this he points to the artificiality of Sibyl and her experiences. As Dorian exclaims to Lord Henry, ‘How extraordinarily dramatic life is! If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears.’ How is the reader, who
does
read about Sibyl’s death in a book, supposed to respond? Perhaps Lord Henry’s interpretation points the way:
    ‘… you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur. The girl never really lived, and so she never really died…. Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled…. But don’t waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are.’ (Chapter VIII)
    Henry is being true to his cynical and amoral self, but he is actually speaking the literal truth, and offering a view that is consistent with Wilde’s own views on art and ethics. This is not to say that Wilde encouraged his readers to adopt Lord Henry’s amorality in their own lives; but he is pointing to the fact that Sibyl is a literary creation and should be regarded as such. To encourage this response, and detract from the pathos of her death, Wilde makes the scenes with Sibyl (especially in the revised version) as artificial as possible. In Chapter V, which he added in 1891, we find Sibyl living in a fairy-tale world, with a mother who ‘plays’ life as she once played the melodramatic stage, constantly adopting striking poses and acting to an imaginary gallery. Her brother James is also characterized in this way. As Sybil exclaims: ‘Oh, don’t be so serious, Jim. You are like one of the heroes of those silly melodramas mother used to be so fond of