Fear of the Feminine in the Picture of Dorian Gray

At the center of Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, there is an encounter between a young man and a young woman. Dorian's relation with Sibyl Vane may not seem of much consequence, compared with the other issues raised in the book—the nature of Lord Henry's “new Hedonism,” the significance of the aesthetics propounded, and the implications of Basil's fascination with Dorian and of Dorian's “mad prayer” to be allowed to enjoy the “eternal youth” of his portrait (pp. 105 and 143). In this paper, I shall argue that this encounter plays a crucial role in the book. Sibyl is introduced in Chapter 4 and is the main focus of the events in the next six chapters. Her brother reappears in Chapter 16, still determined to find the “Prince Charming” responsible for his sister's suicide some 18 years before, and pursues Dorian through the next two chapters. Thus, almost exactly half the novel is directly concerned with her. Furthermore, insofar as Dorian's treatment of her is the first manifestation of the character that Basil finds so shocking, she also indirectly conditions the events leading to the latter's murder. In spite of this centrality, she has attracted relatively little interest from critics. Even when her importance is acknowledged, as it is by Shewan (1977), there is a strange reluctance to explore the theme of Dorian's relation with her as a determining aspect of the novel.

Starting from a distinction Jung made between emotion and feeling, I shall analyze Dorian's relationship with Sibyl in the light of three very different mythological motifs: the stories of Actaeon and Artemis, Narcissus and Echo, and Adonis and Venus. It seems to me that Dorian's fascination with Sibyl belongs to Wilde's authentic unconscious and that Basil's fascination with Dorian is a substitute experience resulting from an unconscious fear of the feminine. The