Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of every Shakespeare play. Sign Up. Already have an account?
Sign in. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. Literature Poetry Lit Terms Shakescleare. Download this LitChart! Teachers and parents! Struggling with distance learning? Themes All Themes. Symbols All Symbols. Theme Wheel. Everything you need for every book you read. The way the content is organized and presented is seamlessly smooth, innovative, and comprehensive. Dorian falls in love with her performances, but she finds performance paltry in comparison to true love and her acting suffers after her engagement to Dorian.
Dorian, in turn, is uninterested in her after she no longer has her art. He leaves her heartbroken and Sybil, a Juliet-like martyr for love, commits suicide. She is a symbolic character, pure in her love and embodying an artistic ideal. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:. Chapter 4 Quotes. Related Themes: Surfaces, Objects and Appearances.
Page Number and Citation : 51 Cite this Quote. Explanation and Analysis:. Chapter 6 Quotes. Related Themes: Influence. Page Number and Citation : 75 Cite this Quote. Chapter 7 Quotes. Related Characters: Sybil Vane speaker. Page Number and Citation : 84 Cite this Quote.
Page Number and Citation : 96 Cite this Quote. Page Number and Citation : Cite this Quote. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Victoria Wotton Lord Henry's wife. Victoria appears only once in the novel, greeting Dorian as he waits for Lord Henry. Although he does not intend to tell Lord Henry anything about the young man in the picture, Basil lets slip that his name is Dorian Gray.
Basil explains that Dorian Gray is 20 years-old. Basil met him at a party two months earlier. When Basil first saw him, he felt a "curious sensation of terror". Dorian admits that he murdered Sibyl , "murdered her as surely as if I had cut her little throat," but he continues to say, in a detached manner, that the whole affair seems too "wonderful for tears. Dorian is a young and beautiful man who makes a Faustian pact that his self-portrait, drawn by painter Basil Hallward, would grow older as time past instead of Dorian.
Throughout the story, Dorian commits many sins , for example, using his influence to ruin others' lives and the murdering of Basil Hallward. This once again shows that Dorian is not falling in love with the real Sibyl Vane. Rather, he loves an actress who plays different roles on stage; the woman to whom he is attracted is not Sibyl, but is Juliet, Rosalind, and Imogen. Dorian ends up killing Basil because of his curiosity about Dorian's life.
Basil recognizes that the unity of body and soul, something that he had desired to bring through his own art, is reflected in the painting. The unity of both means that the painting reflects the depravity within Dorian Gray.
He's kind of a super-masculine man in a world full of more ambiguous males; a sailor, traveler, and all around tough guy, he seems to represent a world of brawn over brains that Wilde's not terribly interested in. Lord Henry believes that aesthetic beauty and sensual fulfillment are the only ideals with pursuing in life, and Dorian becomes enamored with this worldview. Lord Henry early in the narrative explains his view on marriage: The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception necessary for both parties.
At the beginning of the novel, Dorian is simple and nature; however, after his excess discovery of hedonism, Dorian's soul became irretrievably evil and corrupted. He runs a gentlemen's club for witches known as Dorian's Gray Room, although he views it as a gentlemen's only club, he will generally serve anybody and is very welcoming and helpful to many characters who need him.
This version of Dorian is not a villain and instead a heroic and wise man. Under Henry's direction, Dorian comes to appreciate Sibyl's death as "a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. Henry goes so far as to state that since the girl was only ever alive on stage, and since Dorian's love for her was rooted in his admiration for the various heroines she portrayed, that "The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died She was less real than [Shakespeare's characters] are.
Henry leaves, and Dorian again looks at the picture. The mean sneer has not shifted, making Dorian think that it had "received the news of Sibyl Vane's death before he had known of it himself. He sees no reason to consider why the picture changes, and decides to allow himself to simply be entertained by its progress. The chapter ends with Dorian leaving to meet Lord Henry at the opera.
Once again, Dorian displays alarming capriciousness and a disturbing blindness to his own vanity. He writes to Sibyl in a passion, taking all of the blame for his actions, but the narrator comments that "there is a luxury in self-reproach.
He falls into a brief spell of grief upon hearing the news of Sibyl's suicide, but proves to be far from inconsolable. Lord Henry, playing the devil to Dorian's Faust, shows him the means by which to transform his pain and guilt into a new, pleasurable experience, for which only the portrait will pay the price. In this chapter, the symbolic significance of the portrait is clearly spelled out for us: "here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin A similar type of selfishness appears when Dorian writes his love letter to Sibyl.
We are told that "There is a luxury in self-reproach When Dorian had finished the letter, he felt that he had been forgiven. Dorian's comment that Sibyl's death seems "to be like simply a wonderful ending to a wonderful play" continues the theme of life imitating art.
It also recalls Dorian's obsession with the characters that Sibyl portrayed. He became disappointed in her when she tried to be her own person, and rejected the falseness of playing a role. Now, her death has given Dorian the ability to once again view Sibyl as a character in a play. When Lord Henry encourages this interpretation of the tragedy, he ensures that Dorian passes the point of no return on his descent into immorality.
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