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Fwd: "The Vane Sisters" and "Dorian Gray"
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----- Forwarded message from papilionaceous@yahoo.com -----
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2005 04:53:54 -0700 (PDT)
From: Benjamin Wagner <papilionaceous@yahoo.com>
Reply-To: Benjamin Wagner <papilionaceous@yahoo.com>
Subject: "The Vane Sisters" and "Dorian Gray"
To:
Although, personally, I find Wilde's 'Dorian Gray' a pat-ball attempt compared
to VN's champion game (to borrow a phrase) - I found Wilde's Sybil such a
wonderful candidate for resurrection by VN. She lived in Shakespeare:
"It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was
Rosalind one night, and Portia the other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and
the sorrows of Cordelia were mine also. I believed in everything . . . The
painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them
real. You [Dorian] came - oh my beautiful love! - and you freed my soul from
prison. You taught me what reality really is . . . I saw through the
hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always
played." (Sybil to Dorian in 'Dorian Gray')
And, of course, along destroying Sybil's world, making an "empty pageant" of
Shakespeare, Dorian finishes by destroying Sybil herself . . . And I can
imagine nothing that would incense VN more - in his own words:
"In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far
from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin,
cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel - and assigning sovereign
power to tenderness, talent, and pride." (VN, October, 1971, Kurt Hoffman
Interview)
And it seems Dorian opens the door for the mode of revenge: "Strange, my first
passionate love-letter should have been addressed to a dead girl. Can they
feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead? Sybil! Can she
feel, or know, or listen?" (Dorian's musing in 'Dorian Gray').
In short, could Dorian's injustice (rather than Wilde's writing per se) have
contributed to the development of VN's metaphysics of poetic justice? A
'cuffing at the cruel and vulgar and restoring sovereignty to to the tender and
talented' - like poor Sybil Vane the starry-eyed Shakespearean starlet?
-Ben Wagner
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