The Bilateral Leading
Roles of Sibyl Vane
When
the damsel is compromised and falls from her pedestal, it is never pretty; any
hope of regaining her place, her respectability, her innocence, rests in her
ability to pay retribution for her assumed sins, by any means of redemption-
even if that means, as it so often does, death.
Such is the case of the “fallen woman,” so often portrayed in
literature, and such is the case with The
Picture of Dorian Gray’s female martyr Sibyl Vane. However, despite that,
she manages to be an influential woman, not that she knows it, despite her
minimal amount of appearance in person. The place of Sibyl Vane in Oscar Wilde's novel is one of note, because
she both fits this fallen persona and ricochets it to the man that causes her
downfall; she is both the pitiful woman who lost and one of the driving forces
behind the Dorian that is created after her involvement.
“The
fallen woman,” is an archetype occasionally discussed in feminist criticisms.
Outside of the stereotypically weaker personality of the women in question,
there are several qualities that these ladies tend to possess. They are
normally lower class, and the male figure that comes into their lives has a
tendency to hold a social status higher than their own. They have an innocence
or purity about them that draws the male figure to them in the first place.
Somehow they “fall,” be it through sexual promiscuity or the change in
character that comes once a relationship with the male figure is established.
Finally, they have to somehow be redeemed for their folly, which, as mentioned
above, often comes about by way of their death, which is often suicide (Wyman,
167-177). Margaret from Faust and
Ophelia in Hamlet, for instance, are
two of the many fallen women in classical literature.
Sibyl
Vane has the misfortune of being able to check all of the articles off this list.
She and her family is of a lower class and Dorian is a dandy. Sibyl's mother, in
fact, had a similar interaction with her children's gentleman father, who took
advantage of her; if it weren't for the allure of the wealthy life Sibyl might
someday have with him, she might have reacted less supportively of her
daughter's infatuation with Dorian. On the other side of the spectrum,the
difference in status was enough that Basil, when he hears of the engagement
says, "But think of Dorian's birth, and position, and wealth. It would be
absurd for him to marry so much beneath him"(Wilde, 68). Lord Henry even
warns Dorian against holding that relationship as anything too serious and when
Sibyl later dies, he does his utmost to make sure Dorian's name is never linked
with hers.
Sibyl
is innocent, about life outside of her tiny bubble of a world based in the
theatre, as the archetype calls for, but more importantly for Dorian, and
portrayed to the reader through him, she is an embodiment of the thing that
Dorian's existence is so focused on - art and pleasure, in their purest
form. She "realized the dreams of
great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art" (Wilde,
82). When she "falls," in the form of kissing Dorian and beginning to
understand what real life can be like, the purity she loses doesn't just include
the blissful ignorance of a young girl; worse, she loses her art. Where, in
most stories the woman "falls from the grace of God"(Wyman,
170), Sibyl falls from the aesthetic
perfection she once held.
The
first instinct for Dorian Gray, after her terrible performance is to assume,
"you are ill, I suppose,"(Wilde, 81) because for him, no person in
possession of all their faculties would be so intentionally bad when he knew
they could be so much more. If that were the case, then perhaps it could've
been forgiven; he was ready to scold her and tell her not to act when she was
sick. To his horrified amazement,
however, Sibyl had done it on purpose, and despite her reasoning of reality and
his love being better than the staged fictions, he can't bear it. For Dorian,
that is the most monstrous of sins, to lose one's art for anything at all. If
their romance had been like that of the chivalrous Arthurian knights,
unattainable in any tangible way, it is likely that she would have remained
artful, Gray would have remained in love, and it's possible- even likely- that
neither lives would have ended so tragically. That, however, is not the case,
and so her position as a goddess of her art is forfeit.
Not only that, but when Dorian is attempting
to justify his actions in the matter, his heartbroken reasoning was "It
was the girl's fault, not his. He had dreamed of her as a great artist, had
given his love to her because he had thought her great. Then she had
disappointed him. She had been shallow and unworthy" (Wilde, 86). In true
"fallen woman" form, the tone given from the man in question and from
there passed on to the readers, is that it was Sibyl's fault for not being the
perfect creature that Dorian imagined her to be. The allure was taken away by
the attainment of her, and a subsequent abhorrence is grown towards her because
the relationship, finally fulfilled, tainted the pureness that originally
enticed him.
The
suicide of Sibyl Vane is the final item that tumbles her lot in with the rest
of the "fallen women" of literature. The "balance of sin and
retribution" (Wyman,168) is thus restored with her consumption of the
poison, and Sibyl's status is again that of the exquisite actress in a play. In
speaking to Lord Henry after he hears the news of her death, Dorian tells him
that it doesn't affect him in a real way, but rather like "a wonderful
ending to a wonderful play. It has the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy"
(Wilde, 95). Again, Sibyl is a heroine in a marvelous, dreadful story in
Dorian's mind. They never proceed to the dull and unpleasant lifestyle Lord
Henry describes marriage to be, so Dorian can preserve her in his memory as a
grand romance that he had the good fortune to take part in.
Sibyl
plays a part in multiple levels: on her literal theatre, in the context of her
interactions with Dorian, as well as in the role of the fallen woman of
classical literature. She fills the stereotype of female supporting characters,
sweet and weak, and serves her purpose while her scene is on stage, and then
becomes seemingly unimportant. There is another role, though, that is hers in
this novel.
The
part that Sibyl plays, the woman who falls, has the disparate result of her
becoming more than the pawn, a means to an end that she appears to be on the
surface level. Instead, she has a strong and lasting influence over the life of
Dorian Gray. He is the catalyst to her fall, but she, too acts as one of the
origins for his. He seems to recognize that, too, at first, though he forgets
it along the way. "You don't know the danger I am in," he tells Lord
Henry on the day he learns of Sibyl's death,
"and there is nothing to keep me straight. She would have done that
for me. She had no right to kill herself. It was selfish of her" (Wilde, 94).
Again,
of course, according to himself, Dorian is not to blame in the least, but the
point still stands that she was the first in a long line of misdeeds that
warped Dorian's soul and by extension, his portrait. Despite Lord Henry's
protestations otherwise, she was also potentially the only thing that could
have prevented him from turning out the way he did. For that reason, she begins
to break out of the archetype she has thus far embodied. Though in personality
she is meek and simple, in regard to her influence on Dorian, had she
"worked so hard and tried to improve" as she'd pleaded before he
walked away from her, she could have been a character that held a lot of weight
further down the road. In fact, despite her doing otherwise, she still left a
significant impression; one wonders what else she could have been if she had
the opportunity.
Somehow the "fallen women" archetype,
then, is then passed from Sibyl onto the person that bestowed that title upon
her, which is an interesting thing to see. While Dorian isn't of lower status
and can't be classified as "woman," fallen or otherwise, he does go
through the fall from glory that his once-beloved did, in the space of his
soul. Though he primarily wished to get rid of the ugliness rather than the
life from his perverted portrait, his bad choices, like Sibyl's, were purged by
his death; the innocent and comely
Dorian that once existed was brought back to his rightful place, and the Dorian
that evolved received what was due him.
Poor,
pure-turned-to-tainted, and finally redeemed through death, Sibyl Vane was very
much the "fallen woman," but she was much more than that. Rather than
a passing thought and a pretty face, she was a driving force. Sibyl played both
the damsel and a prime mover in The
Picture of Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde wrote the tragic Ophelia, while still creating
a woman whose seemingly passing position in Dorian's life managed to make a monumental impact on where
the rest of his story would go. She does what is expected, acts as the female
supporting cast for the culturally expected role of women to be fulfilled, but
at the same time acts as a deeper and more critical part of Dorian's life, and therefore
a prominent place in the novel as a whole.
Works Cited
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian
Gray. S.I.: Public Domain, 1994.
Wyman, Margaret.
"The Rise of the Fallen Woman." American
Quarterly 3.2 (1951): 167- 77. JSTOR.
Web. 14 Nov. 2014.
