Meeting Sibyl Vane

Dorian Gray's first encounter with Sibyl Vane is the pivotal romantic event of his early life, a meeting that transforms him from a passive admirer of beauty into an active pursuer of passion and sets the stage for the first great crisis of his soul. It occurs not in the fashionable West End but in a squalid, third-rate theatre in the labyrinthine streets east of Piccadilly, a place Dorian discovers one evening while wandering in search of adventure, his senses newly awakened by Lord Henry Wotton's intoxicating philosophy of life as a search for new sensations.

The Discovery of a Genius

Dorian's account of the meeting, confided to Lord Henry over lunch at Curzon Street, is charged with the fervor of a convert. He describes how, driven by a "wild desire to know everything about life" and a "passion for sensations," he ventured eastward one evening, losing himself in a "labyrinth of grimy streets and black, grassless squares." At about half-past eight, he passed a little theatre with "great flaring gas-jets and gaudy play-bills." A hideous Jew with greasy ringlets and an enormous diamond, standing at the entrance, offered him a box. On a whim, Dorian paid a whole guinea for a stage-box and entered. The play was Romeo and Juliet. The orchestra was dreadful, presided over by a young Jew at a cracked piano. Romeo was a stout elderly gentleman with corked eyebrows and a figure like a beer-barrel. But when Juliet appeared, Dorian was transfixed. He saw a girl of hardly seventeen, with a "little flower-like face, a small Greek head with plaited coils of dark-brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion, lips that were like the petals of a rose." Her voice, he told Lord Henry, was unlike any he had ever heard—low at first with deep mellow notes, then rising like a flute or a distant hautbois, and in the garden-scene possessing "all the tremulous ecstasy that one hears just before dawn when nightingales are singing." He was so moved that a mist of tears came across his eyes.

The First Meeting Backstage

For three nights, Dorian returned to the theatre, each time throwing flowers to Sibyl on stage. On the third night, after she had played Rosalind, the persistent Jew manager finally persuaded him to go behind the scenes. In the dusty greenroom, Dorian found Sibyl shy and gentle, with something of a child about her. Her eyes opened wide in "exquisite wonder" when he praised her performance, and she seemed unconscious of her own power. The Jew stood grinning at the doorway, making elaborate speeches, insisting on calling Dorian "My Lord." Dorian had to assure Sibyl he was nothing of the kind. She replied simply, "You look more like a prince." From that moment, Dorian was lost. He began to attend her performances every night, seeing her as Rosalind one evening, Imogen the next, Juliet the night after. He told Lord Henry that she was "all the great heroines of the world in one," that she had genius, and that he loved her. He declared, "Sibyl Vane is sacred!"

The Transformation of Dorian's Soul

The meeting with Sibyl Vane is not merely a romantic episode; it is the first concrete expression of the new self that Lord Henry's words had awakened in Dorian. In Basil Hallward's studio, after hearing Lord Henry's panegyric on youth and his terrible warning of its brevity, Dorian had felt "entirely fresh impulses" at work within him, and life had suddenly become "fiery-colored." The meeting with Sibyl gives these impulses a focus. He tells Lord Henry that he goes to see her act every night, that he gets "hungry for her presence," and that when he thinks of the "wonderful soul" hidden in her "little ivory body," he is filled with awe. Lord Henry, watching Dorian's excitement, notes with pleasure how different he is now from the "shy, frightened boy" he had met in the studio. Dorian's nature, he observes, "had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of scarlet flame." The meeting with Sibyl is the first fruit of Lord Henry's influence, the moment when Dorian's newly awakened desires take on a concrete object. It is also the beginning of his tragic misapprehension: he loves not the real woman but the artistic ideal she represents, a confusion that will lead directly to her destruction and his own moral fall.