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