Sibyl Vane

Sibyl Vane is a seventeen-year-old actress of extraordinary beauty and natural genius, whose brief romance with Dorian Gray and tragic death form the first great crisis of the novel and the first visible alteration of the enchanted portrait. She is introduced as a figure of pure artistic wonder, a girl who lives entirely within the roles she plays on stage, and whose fall from that ideal precipitates Dorian's first conscious act of cruelty and the beginning of his moral descent.

Identity and Background

Sibyl Vane is a young actress, hardly seventeen years of age, with a little flower-like face, a small Greek head with plaited coils of dark-brown hair, eyes that are violet wells of passion, and lips like the petals of a rose. She lives with her mother, a faded, tired woman who played Lady Capulet in a sort of magenta dressing-wrapper on the first night Dorian saw her, and who looks as if she had seen better days. Sibyl is bound to the manager of the third-rate theatre where she performs, a hideous Jew with greasy ringlets and an enormous diamond, for a period of three years—at least two years and eight months from the time Dorian meets her. She knows nothing of life outside the theatre; she regards Dorian merely as a person in a play. Her world is one of shadows and painted scenes, and she believes in everything she performs.

Artistic Genius and the Romance with Dorian Gray

Dorian Gray first sees Sibyl Vane performing Juliet in a wretched little theatre in the East End, and is immediately captivated. He describes her voice as unlike any he has ever heard—very low at first, with deep mellow notes that fall singly upon the ear, then becoming like a flute or a distant hautbois, and later having the wild passion of violins. He goes night after night to see her play, watching her as Rosalind, Imogen, Juliet, and other heroines. She is, to him, all the great heroines of the world in one, more than an individual. He tells Lord Henry that she has genius, and that he loves her and must make her love him. After a performance of Rosalind, he goes behind the scenes, and they kiss. She flings herself on her knees and kisses his hands. Their engagement is kept a secret, even from her mother. Dorian declares that he has taken his love out of poetry and found his wife in Shakespeare's plays.

The Failed Performance and Dorian's Rejection

The crucial turning point comes when Dorian brings Lord Henry and Basil Hallward to see Sibyl perform Juliet. On this night, she is curiously listless and acts in a thoroughly artificial manner. Her voice, though exquisite, is absolutely false in tone, taking all the life from the verse and making the passion unreal. She over-emphasizes everything, declaiming the beautiful passages with the painful precision of a school-girl taught by a second-rate professor of elocution. Even the common audience grows restless, and the play ends in a storm of hisses. Dorian is devastated. When he goes behind the scenes, he finds her not in despair but transfigured with joy. She explains that before she knew him, acting was the one reality of her life, but he has freed her soul from prison and taught her what love really is. She declares that she is sick of shadows, that she can no longer mimic a passion that burns her like fire, and that she will never act well again. Dorian, in a brutal rage, tells her she has killed his love, that she is shallow and stupid, and that without her art she is nothing—a third-rate actress with a pretty face. He leaves her weeping at his feet.

Suicide and Aftermath

That same night, Sibyl Vane swallows poison in her dressing-room and dies. The inquest returns a verdict of death by misadventure. Lord Henry brings the news to Dorian the next morning, but Dorian's reaction is not one of simple grief. He feels that he has murdered her as certainly as if he had cut her throat with a knife, yet he also finds the event strangely beautiful, like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. He notes that the portrait has already changed, showing a touch of cruelty around the mouth, and he realizes that it received the news of her death before he knew it himself. He briefly resolves to marry her and make amends, but her death prevents that, and he ultimately accepts Lord Henry's interpretation that she was less real than the heroines she played, a dream that has passed away. Sibyl Vane's suicide is the first direct consequence of Dorian's wish, the first stain on the portrait, and the first death that marks his descent into a life of corruption and crime.