The Aesthete’s Progress

The following essay is comprised of two lectures by Bruce Gardiner included in Literature and Pedagogy: Studies in Honour of Bruce Gardiner edited by Anthony Cordingley and published by Sydney University Press. Gardiner taught seminars on The Picture of Dorian Gray from 2007 to 2011 and lectured on it from 2016 to 2020, every time in relation to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, G.W.F. Hegel’s Aesthetics, Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, and Henry James’ ‘The Last of the Valerii’. The script is of lectures Gardiner gave in November 2020, in which he quotes from the 1891 version of the novel, as edited by Michael Gillespie (New York: Norton, 2007).

‘Withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage’ is how Dorian’s portrait and then Dorian’s corpse finally look. In Dorian’s mind, and in his approach to beauty, his body is a time bomb that will surely disfigure and kill him, however much it may seduce and divert him for a time from its murderous intent. Insofar as Wilde’s aesthetic thinking mirrors Dorian’s, time and beauty are inimical and immiscible, contradicting every one of the theorists of aesthetics we have reviewed so far. According to Kant, the ontological indifference or neutrality of the imagination affords us as plastic a relation to time as possible. According to Hegel, our creation of beautiful tokens with which to think transforms our sensible subjection to time into our intellectual mastery of it. According to Ruskin, because the passage of time confirms our persistence in time, time beautifies all that it carries along with it, including us. Perhaps most remarkably, according to Pater, all time is immanent within the present moment, allowing us to relish its Darwinian whimsy as a kind of Hegelian totality. 

Time completely unnerves and terrifies the narrator and protagonist of The Picture of Dorian Gray, both describing it as ‘horrible’, the novel’s most frequently repeated descriptor. Henry Wotton warns the teenage Dorian Gray that he will one day become ‘old and wrinkled and ugly’ (Chapter 2), a collocation of terms unimaginable in Ruskin. Hiding the portrait that ages so that he need not, Dorian reflects that ‘it might escape the hideousness of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it’ (Chapter 10, echoed in Chapter 11), the future a boobytrap eluded only by the decoy of art. As Dorian later broods on his treasured ‘poisonous book’, he reflects on ‘the ruin that Time brought on beautiful and wonderful things’ (Chapter 11), his use of the term ‘ruin’ as derogatory as Ruskin’s is laudatory. Even later, as he recalls his life as it was in his thirties, he muses that ‘Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his Soul away’ (Chapter 16). Finally, haunted by the deaths of James and Sibyl Vane and Basil Hallward, when Dorian contemplates his much-altered portrait, ‘Out of the black Cave of Time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin’ (Chapter 18). 

In his ever-greater antipathy to time, Dorian inclines increasingly to the aesthetic theory of Arthur Schopenhauer, whose response to the ontological neutrality of Kant’s aesthetics is the obverse of Ruskin’s. Whereas for Ruskin being is inherently beautiful in proportion to its persistence, for Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation (1818, augmented 1844), being human is hardly compatible with being beautiful. I quote him at some length: 

Schopenhauer’s thesis that our aesthetic sense abstracts us from the here and now to which we are tied, as Orpheus’ lyre briefly frees Ixion from the rolling wheel of fire to which he is bound, sounds something like Kant’s. But Schopenhauer transforms Kant’s notion of the ontological indeterminacy of aesthetic judgements into an actual ontological state into which we may enter briefly as if into a Parmenidean eternity, a specific experiential ideal rather than the basis of all possible experience. Whereas for Ruskin, our aesthetic sense reveals and certifies the beauty of time, for Schopenhauer it reveals and saves us from the hideousness and terror of time. For Ruskin, the natural is beautiful; for Schopenhauer, Wilde and Dorian Gray, only the unnatural and the artful are beautiful. Nature is irredeemably nasty; it causes us to suffer and kills us. The body and its appetites must be denatured and pressed to serve unnatural, untimely, unsettling, and inevitably immoral ends, insofar as morality serves to bind us to nature. In brief, one’s body and one’s biography must be transformed into artworks. As Henry Wotton explains to Dorian, ‘now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting’ (Chapter 4), taking his cue from the Romantic idea of character formation and Pater’s idea of human speciation. 

In this respect, Dorian’s aesthetic credo is antithetical to the complementary ideals embodied by Alan Campbell and Basil Hallward. Dorian commandeers Alan’s scientific, biological expertise, doubtless by blackmailing him on account of his biological, sexual susceptibilities, to destroy the corpse of the painter-cum-moraliser whose portrait of him proves lethally misleading, albeit from a biological-cum-moralistic viewpoint. In the world that Dorian creates, initially under the auspices of Henry Wotton and chiefly over the two decades covered in Chapter 11, the organic is excised from time by being mineralised, volatilised, and textualised. Note, in Chapter 1, the prominence of silk derived from insects, lacquerware from insects and plants, carpets from sheep, nicotine and opium from plants, and in Chapter 11, gemstones, vestments, cosmetics and embroideries, all donned and displayed like so many amulets to disarm and divert the evil eye of time with its invidious designs on the aesthete’s body. Even more crucial is the temporising power of conversation and reading, of all human behaviours those most facilely able to free the mind from the here and now, even and especially when the topic of the conversation or the text is the here and now itself. The novel’s narrator and characters are unusually given to being mesmerised and mesmerising each other in conversation and when reading and writing. We as readers are also likely so charmed that we completely forget the time and even time itself. Most wonderfully, Dorian manages to forget completely that he has just murdered Basil when he starts reading Théophile Gautier’s collection of poems, Émaux et Camées [Enamels and Cameos] (1852), the title of which suggests the immortalisation by mineralisation to which Dorian aspires in his own life. 

Moreover, the human mind may dislodge itself from its timebound biology, if only for a time, by disrupting its circadian rhythms: waking up and staying awake when it is more natural to fall sleep and vice versa. Such temporal derangement produces what may be the most surreally beautiful episode in Dorian’s life, just after he witnesses Sibyl Vane’s atrociously artless theatre performance: 

The scene, of London’s vegetable, fruit and flower market, strikes Dorian as a work of art, incised, whether intaglio or in cameo, on a pearl shell, and as a vision in a dream, especially because a figure within it, a white-smocked carter, responds to Dorian as if he, conversely, were a vision in the carter’s dream, their mutual sexual arousal freed from all biological and moral constraint. The lilies generously relieve Dorian of his drowsiness and the flowers dispense their perfume to relieve him of the pain that binds him to his body, as everything around him offers itself to his connoisseurship. Everywhere nature is transformed into art, by horticulture, floriculture, perfumery and jewellery. Even the vegetables are ‘jade-green’, endowed with the gemstone’s beauty and durability, complementing the pearlescence of the sky. Most surreally, as if in dreamy confusion, the fronted adjectival phrases ‘Iris-necked, and pink-footed’ appear at first to refer to the sleeping drivers rather than the pigeons. 

Surely only Wilde’s indulgence of Dorian’s aesthetic disdain of time can adequately excuse a flagrant anachronism in Chapter 11. Dorian, as the narrator tells us, was ‘Saddened by the reflection of the ruin that time brought on beautiful and wonderful things’ as he indulges in several ubi sunt meditations, among which is this: 

A huge sail or awning transforms sidereal time into an artwork, purportedly under the Emperor Nero’s auspices. But the Colosseum was built by Vespasian after Nero’s death on the site of Nero’s demolished palace, the Golden House, to which Dorian refers a little later. Clearly it is imperative that Nero be associated with this time-and-cosmos-conquering canvas, however time and the cosmos might actually object. What better way to declare that art transcends time than by blatant anachronism? Nero has already been mentioned a little earlier when Petronius Arbiter, author of The Satyricon, is placed in ‘imperial Neronian Rome’. Pliny the Elder in his Natural History characterises the pleasure that Nero takes in watching bloody spectacles in the Circus (which Dorian has obviously mistaken as the Colosseum) in the sentence, Gladiatorum pugnas spectabat smaragdo, he used to watch the gladiatorial fights with an emerald, either reflected off a gem’s cabochon surface or transmitted through a laminar emerald glass, or as Dorian paraphrases Pliny more poetically a little later on, he ‘peered through a clear emerald at the red shambles of the Circus’. The novel challenges us to follow Nero in looking at nature smaragdo, through the lens of art, to relish as beautiful a story of suffering and savagery so appalling that only art can redeem us from a destiny no different from it. 

The novel is a bloody mess. Dorian murders Basil. He is implicated in the suicides of Sibyl Vane, Alan Campbell, a young guardsman, and perhaps Hetty Merton; in the accidental death of James Vane; and in the mental derangement and social ignominy of Henry Ashton, Adrian Singleton, the son of Lord Kent, the Duke of Perth, Henry Wotton’s sister, Lord Gloucester’s wife, and who knows how many others. In the end he commits suicide. The novel challenges us to suppress our natural impulse to sympathise with those who suffer and instead relish art’s capacity to overcome suffering in representing it so beautifully, as in Shakespearian tragedy. Let us contemplate the body and history as Nero contemplated them by transforming them into something as beautiful as a gemstone. Dorian longs for the Neronian capacity to do this, implicitly recalling the emperor’s supposed last words, Qualis artifex pereo, what an artist perishes here. To this end, a large part of the novel is a textbook, emphatically, perhaps too emphatically, not about The Joy of Sex but The Joy of Aesthetics, of the kind that W.B. Yeats advocates in ‘Lapis Lazuli’[…] and that Nero had obviously mastered. 

The first four chapters depict the immaculate conception of an aesthete, the rescue of an orphaned ‘son of love and death’ at an age at which he is just reaching his maximal plasticity and ductility before maturation, so that ‘there was nothing that one could not do with him’ in trying to free him from the biological curse he would otherwise suffer as his beautiful mother’s son. Dorian is reborn by means of the non-biological congress of two aesthetes, not so much of different sexes as of different aesthetic sensibilities, one an artist of the eye and the other of the ear, as the conjoint gestures of the one’s painterly hand and the other’s articulate tongue shape their gorgeous progeny: 

Dorian thus emerges from the painter’s womb within which he is transformed by the conversationalist’s seminal fancy and from which he is freed by that same conversationalist’s maieutic skill. Dorian as image and artwork supersedes Dorian the scion of mother nature, or so all three believe. Basil and Henry endow Dorian not only with a beauty inherited from them but also an autonomous creativity that neither of them ever fully appreciates. Basil is sympathetic, discreet and ethical; Henry is heartless, indiscreet and unethical; Dorian is equivocally like both and like neither. Dorian’s aesthetic parentage wars with his natural parentage. The trio’s intimacies are beyond the order of nature. Wilde would surely be contemptuous of the tendency among the public defenders of homosexuality then as now to declare it natural, when for Wilde its opposition to nature is of its essence. In any case, aesthetic intercourse comprehensively outdoes sexual intercourse. 

Basil’s spirit presides over the graphic, descriptive, figurative and metaphoric dimensions of the narrative. Henry’s spirit presides over its auditory, conversational, epigrammatic and prosopopoeic dimensions. Henry’s voice most informs the Preface and the postprandial debates of Chapters 3, 15 and 17. Basil’s writing most informs the book’s elaborately visualised episodes and Chapter 11. The two styles vie with each other like a married couple who never come to see eye to eye. One of the novel’s most highly wrought passages gives us a vivid description, in Basil’s manner, of Henry’s insinuatingly powerful conversation, as the two together give birth to the new Dorian: 

Insofar as the bee represents the human eye, its scrambling and creeping evoke the chaotic distractibility that guarantees our comprehension of everything in our field of vision. Insofar as the bee represents by its buzzing the musicality of the voice, its exploration of the convolvulus evokes the word’s procreative penetration of the ear, the miracle of auricular or annunciatory conception, of being deflowered by another’s voice, copulation by audition. 

The passage begins with Dorian ‘listening, open-eyed’, aptly enough for an exacting and pedantic lesson about how an aesthete should listen and look, as for instance at ‘the oval stellated globe of the tiny blossoms’ of the spray of lilac. Dorian is not the sole student attending this lesson. Note the phrasing of ‘we may try to develop’, ‘make us afraid’, ‘we are stirred’, ‘we cannot find’, ‘terrifies us’ and ‘calls on us’. We as readers are addressed as the fellows of this star-pupil Dorian, as aesthetic novices no less in need than he of elementary lessons in aesthetics. The novel is a textbook in aesthetics, pedantically and redundantly explanatory, solicitous of our inexperience, reassuring us as we struggle with the radical disruption that aestheticism must introduce into our experience of our senses and social relations. From the Preface onward, the lessons of aestheticism are distilled and debated at what must often seem tediously exhaustive length. Only after the elementary stage of our aesthetic education is completed, in Dorian’s case by his relationship with Sibyl Vane, is a more advanced textbook prescribed, the ‘poisonous book’ that Henry gives Dorian and that Dorian spends about twenty years studying, in Chapter 11. 

If instead of reading this particular scene in the garden as I have read it, we were to take it as a highly euphemistic account of Dorian’s sexual initiation, of the arousal of his oval globes and the penetration of his convolvulus, we would simply reveal ourselves as nature’s dunderheads interested only in smut. The novel repeatedly provokes us into making just such a mistake in order to persuade us that it is always a mistake to read it so. Sexual activity is only a meagre, lacklustre travesty of aesthetic activity, at best a fumbling preamble to the ecstasies of aesthetic pleasure, or so the novel hopes until it can no longer do so. 

So far, the account I have offered of The Picture of Dorian Gray is by and large that of its original 1890 serialised version. It is not yet an adequate account of the much-augmented version Wilde published as a book in 1891, which added to the original thirteen chapters a Preface, greatly magnifying the stridency of the book’s aestheticism, and six extra chapters, now numbered 3, 5, and 15 through 18, four of which drastically magnify the importance of Sibyl Vane, her brother James, and their mother. Without the extra chapters, Dorian’s murder of Basil far outweighs in importance his part in prompting Sibyl to commit suicide; but with the extra chapters, the two deaths are equally central and more closely entangled. 

Wilde must have felt that his original version either begged crucial questions about Sibyl or at least answered them awry. In the original version, she appears as no more than incidental and exemplary. Yet even as Wilde originally conceived her, there is something patently unsatisfactory about thinking of Sibyl in this way, and his revisionary dreamwork lifts much into view that the original work repressed. In the revised version, which deconstructs the first, the hitherto marginal comes to occupy the centre, and perhaps the hitherto central is relegated to the margins. The first version mistakes Sibyl as the subject of a portrait in the sentimental manner, whereas the second version suggests, albeit surreptitiously and equivocally, that she is a major artist and militant aesthete in her own right, and that the book could as justly be titled The Picture of Sibyl Vane. Sibyl may even supersede Basil and Henry as the painter of Dorian’s portrait, deftly retouching it after her predecessors have lost touch with Dorian as both artwork and artist. Even if we acquiesce in Wilde’s title, we should perhaps add to it a subtitle, The Picture of Dorian Gray Painted by Sibyl Vane. Basil seems not quite to know what moves him to portray Dorian as he does, offering a touching but puzzling account of his motives in Chapter 9. Basil may be little more than the unwitting amanuensis of a psychic force that Sibyl more fully understands and masters. 

Dorian’s dealings with Sibyl occupy Chapters 4 through 10. As an actress, she performs Shakespearian roles that in Shakespeare’s day were performed only by boys who, as beings of pluripotent promise, portrayed indifferently every possibility of sexual difference and sexual preference. This is how Dorian describes her to Henry: 

Thus is the fan smitten by the diva. For Dorian, Sibyl is wholly a creature of art, with no personality of her own, only the personalities with which Shakespeare’s art invests her. Her regard for Dorian is no less a matter of art. By calling him Prince Charming, Sibyl absorbs him into her world of art, he also thereby ceasing to be whom he would otherwise naturally be. Sibyl inveigles Dorian out of nature as Shakespeare inveigles her. In the wake of this conversation, Henry envisages Dorian’s personality as an ‘aesthetic masterpiece’ and complacently reflects that he, Henry, is largely its creator and curator, the youngster’s Svengali. Henry’s reveries are obtuse in two ways, both stemming from his misogyny. First, Henry cannot think that Sibyl exerts over Dorian anything like the influence that Basil and he have done. Second, he cannot conceive that Sibyl herself may be an aesthetic masterpiece either Dorian’s equal or his superior. What Henry regards as the logical consequence of his thoughts is, on more fair-minded inspection, a series [of] non sequiturs concerning women always as creatures of art but never its creators. 

Throughout both versions of the novel, Henry Wotton is ever so wittily and chivalrously misogynistic. Even when he pictures Dorian as ‘one of those gracious figures in a pageant or a play’ (Chapter 4), he cannot picture Sibyl in the same way. Yet Henry depends abjectly on women as his chief audiences, patrons, and partners in repartee, particularly Lady Narborough in Chapter 15 and the Duchess of Monmouth in Chapter 17. Moreover, he appears discreetly but utterly crestfallen when his wife Victoria moves to divorce him in Chapter 19. It is as if his politely misogynistic banter is a blustering protest at this dependence on women, as if he fears being stigmatised as a superannuated Cherubino, ashamed that his aestheticism effeminises him. He may refuse to take women seriously in protest that men do not take him seriously. 

Unlike Henry, Basil appears to have no current relations of any kind with women, given to ardent, Platonic same-sex intimacies in the manner of his heroes, Michelangelo, Montaigne and Winckelmann, mentioned in Chapter 10. So, for quite different reasons, both Basil and Henry overlook the possibility of female aesthetes. Therefore, the narrator must, as a matter of dreamlike compulsion, do everything he can to contradict Basil and Henry by conjuring up a female aesthete from source material that the male aesthetes would most likely dismiss, which is a Dickensian melodrama about the plebeian adoration of Shakespeare in London’s East End and further east in the docklands, told in a luridly Gothic way. As if inspired by Pip’s visit to a performance of Hamlet in Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861), Sibyl draws Dorian into a Shakespearian-cum-Dickensian world of her own making to teach him a lesson about art, specifically her art. 

In Chapter 5, added to the novel in 1891, we see Sibyl with her mother and brother James, neither of whom appears to understand her, and both of whom think her defenceless and in need of her brother’s protective cudgel and her mother’s exploitive cunning, Dorian looming ambiguously as both her protector and predator. To Sibyl, her brother and mother appear as puppets unconscious of the commedia dell’arte roles in which they are trapped, which only she can see for what they are: ‘Jim – you are like one of the heroes of those silly melodramas mother used to be so fond of acting in.’ Although her brother and mother see Sibyl as a victim, we on the contrary see them as victims. The Vane family triangle eerily echoes that between Basil, Henry and Dorian. Witness the earnestness of Basil and James, the devious wit of Henry and Mrs Vane, and the beauty of Dorian and Sibyl, each family the parody of the other, as if the question were, whose folks are weirder?  

Dorian asks Basil, ‘I have been right, haven’t I, […] to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays?’ (Chapter 6), as Sibyl casts him in a neo-Shakespearian love tragedy of her own making. Two aesthetes cast each other in plays they wish to direct, each treating themselves as director and the other as their star performer. Dorian’s reading of the ‘poisonous book’ in Chapter 11 not only prolongs for twenty years the intermission between the acts of Sibyl’s play in which he has no choice but to act, but also tests our credentials as their fellow aesthetes. If we find the chapter tedious, we must be philistines, not aesthetes. 

The most disconcerting observation in the entire book opens Chapter 7: ‘For some reason or other, the house was crowded that night.’ The night is that on which Basil and Henry accompany Dorian to see Sibyl perform the role of Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Why ‘for some reason or other’? The novelist decides not to decide that which is his sole prerogative to decide, suggesting that it is not important, or that he has not looked into it, or that it is not worth looking into, or that he has decided actively to avoid looking into the matter. We cannot tell how casual or careful the observation is, and a similar uncertainty reigns throughout the chapter, complicating our assessment of Sibyl’s acting, or failing to act, or acting to persuade her audience that she is not acting. A ‘common uneducated audience’ ensures that the theatre is ‘crowded that night’, a crowd from which the three aesthetes are doubtless keen to distinguish themselves, thinking the Philistines around them aesthetically obtuse. But I would say that the trio entirely fail to distinguish themselves from the crowd among whom they sit and fail completely to understand that Sibyl may most artfully be acting as if she were artlessly failing to act. 

Sibyl gives a performance of Juliet that the whole audience, aesthetes included, think woeful. When Dorian rushes to her dressing room afterward to excoriate her, Sibyl explains in her defence: 

In defiance of the crowded house, Sibyl decides to play a part for Dorian only, whose understanding, which she repeatedly appeals to, is at issue. Her apology is a bravura performance about failing to give a bravura performance, a diva’s stagey farewell to the stage, indeed a quintessentially Shakespearian lament about the artifice of the theatre, as well as a free paraphrase of Juliet’s declaration of love, to all elements of which Dorian proves as deaf as he is blind to the transfiguration Sibyl undergoes during her apology. He, and perhaps we, hear neither the provocative tautology of ‘how reality really is’ nor the patent absurdity of the claim that Shakespeare’s own words are ‘unreal’ and his plays hollow and silly shams. Sibyl challenges Dorian to make the finest distinctions between the artfulness and artlessness of her performance, which he proves incapable of doing. Sibyl also invokes Victorian melodrama, against which Dorian harbours a hapless and thoughtless prejudice, and he cannot read her meaning even when she finally exclaims, ‘Oh! Don’t go away from me. My Brother […] No, never mind. He didn’t mean it. He was in jest,’ whereby she sets in motion her brother James as the nemesis that will destroy Dorian. From this point on, Dorian has no choice but to act like a puppet in the melodrama of Sibyl’s devising, as James circumnavigates the world for twenty years before returning to London to kill him. Dorian is as witless as Dickens’ Pip in not knowing what to make of the play in which he is now caught. Immediately afterward, in Chapter 8, Sibyl continues her bravura performance by committing suicide, as well she might in her Baz Luhrmann inspired spinoff of Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy that mandates a double suicide, as occurs in Wilde’s novel. 

If one is an aesthete, shaping one’s life so that it is as little disfigured by nature’s artless crudities as possible, then one will especially want to shape one’s own death, otherwise nature’s crudest and most artless insult, and make an art of dying sublimely, as we may when trying to imagine our own admirable obituary. I do not doubt that a certain aestheticism lies at the heart of the practice of Voluntary Assisted Dying, as the newly approved style of suicide is called. So, Sibyl’s suicide, like that of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, may demonstrate her aesthetic autonomy rather than the abject victimhood on which everyone else in the novel insists, in so vulgarly sentimental, presumptuous, and thus entirely unpersuasive a way. Everyone including Dorian all too quickly decides that Dorian is responsible for Sibyl’s suicide, denying her the slightest agency. ‘I have murdered Sibyl Vane,’ laments Dorian as he and Henry shape Sibyl’s story into a neo-Jacobean tragedy they suppose of their own devising, presuming Sibyl herself oblivious of the aesthetic significance they alone may confer on her. As Henry tells Dorian in no uncertain terms, 

It surely behoves us to object to Henry’s offensive nonsense, especially as it so fully accords with James Vane’s misjudgement that Sibyl is a victim, albeit of a sexual rather than an aesthetic crime. We await Sibyl’s posthumous contradiction of misogynistic Aesthete and sentimental Philistine alike, who agree on nothing except women’s dependence on them. 

Immediately after satisfying themselves that they have done Sibyl justice, Dorian and Henry attend that evening a performance by the then prima donna assoluta of the opera stage, Adelina Patti. ‘It’s a Patti night,’ enthuses Henry. ‘Remember, Patti is singing,’ he reminds Dorian a little later. But when Basil hears that the two have thus amused themselves, he is scandalised: 

But despite this dispute, none of the trio understands what listening to Patti at the opera must mean ‘while Sibyl Vane was lying dead’ elsewhere. If it is a Patti night then it is no less a Sibyl night, Sibyl’s performance no less sublime than Patti’s, and had Patti been performing Ruggero Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci (1892), one could hardly have distinguished between two melodramatic masterpieces. 

Once James Vane returns to London decades later, he devotes himself to stalking and murdering the man whom he and Sibyl know only as Prince Charming. Chapters 16 through 18 each conclude with Dorian’s terrified recognition of his nemesis, first on the street in London’s docklands, then at the window of Dorian’s estate, Selby Royal, and finally, in the woods of the estate, accidentally killed by the local fox hunt’s beaters. Although Dorian is thoroughly unhinged by these three shocks, he then relaxes in a false sense of security after this first embodiment of his nemesis perishes, wilfully forgetful that nemesis is inescapable and that if one of its agents fail then another will appear in its stead, almost certainly unrecognisable, as duly happens when Dorian falls in love with Hetty Merton, whom he fatuously persuades himself may serve as the medium of his redemption when he refrains at the last moment from compromising her, which fantasy Henry justly derides in Chapter 19. As Sibyl recalls the novels of Charles Dickens, so Hetty recalls those of George Eliot, specifically Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede (1859), as if Dorian will meet his nemesis or comeuppance in whichever Victorian novel he reads. 

Involving Dorian in a tragedy of her devising, Sibyl is the aesthete who confers meaning on Dorian’s performance, rather than the converse as Dorian and Henry think, contradicting the tendency of the ‘poisonous book’ Dorian reads in Chapter 11 that reduces aestheticism to a drag show for beautiful men. Sibyl’s history confirms women’s capacity to conquer the forces of nature that they are misogynistically believed to embody, and it is important that Sibyl wields the aegis of Shakespeare, performing parts once reserved for the boys. This is the cryptic but essential burden of Wilde’s dream text. If Dorian’s aesthetic life does not go according to plan, it is because Sibyl’s aesthetic life does. Sibyl’s coup de théâtre mesmerises Wilde in his revisionist dream even though Wilde the conscious writer and reader may not know what Wilde the dreamer means. Wilde wrote to an admirer that ‘I am so glad you like that strange coloured book of mine – it contains much of me in it – Basil Hallward is what I think I am; Lord Henry what the world thinks of me; Dorian Gray what I would like to be – in other ages perhaps.’ He does not mention Sibyl. Wilde is as likely to misread his work sentimentally as anyone else, but Sibyl’s is the dream text, which is the truthful text.