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Why does Sibyl stop acting and how does Dorian react in The Picture of Dorian Gray?
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Sibyl stops acting because her love for Dorian makes her see the stage as hollow and false, as she can no longer pretend to feel emotions she doesn't experience. Dorian reacts harshly, feeling that Sibyl has "killed" his love, as he admired her for her acting talent. His cruel rejection of Sibyl reflects his superficial nature, indicating he never truly loved her but rather the idea of her talent.
As a result of falling in love with Dorian, Sibyl relinquishes her enthusiasm about being an actress and becoming a true artist. It is as if she wants to demonstrate, to Dorian and to herself, that he is all she cares about and that he's going to become not merely the center of her existence, but her entire existence.
It probably wasn't uncommon in the Victorian age, and even much later, for many women to hold this total devotion to a man as their ideal. Women often gave up their careers in order to devote themselves entirely to husband and family. Just as the deepest motivations of both men and women are personal and can't necessarily be understood by others, we cannot know exactly why Sibyl's actions are what they are. What is a mystery is why, even if she's planning to marry Dorian and eventually give up her career,...
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she feels she deliberately must give a bad or indifferent performance as Juliet in front of Dorian and his friends. There is an element of perversity in this, almost as if she's consciously demeaning herself before Dorian and throwing away the talent she possesses.
Of course, even in the nineteenth century women did not necessarily behave in such a self-effacing manner. To suggest that all or most did so would be to perpetuate the old stereotype. There were many women who had professional careers and, just as now, balanced them with their personal lives. In both fiction and history there are innumerable examples of the independence and self-assertion of women long before the feminist movements of the twentieth century and of today. To understand Sibyl, then, we need to look beyond cliches about women in earlier times.
Sibyl's behavior, in my view, is emblematic of a general theme of the perverse that runs through Wilde's novel. All the characters, except possibly for Basil, are bizarre in some way, as is the overall story, existing in a kind of meta-world outside normal human experience. This would be true even without the supernatural element of the portrait's metamorphosis. Dorian himself even at the start of the tale is a narcissist in a way that many people would find repellent. When he confronts Sibyl backstage after her performance, he is cruel and even sadistic. The fact that he has been embarrassed in front of his friends is so devastating to him personally that his feelings for Sibyl instantly evaporate. She understandably is stunned by his rejection, but her tears and her genuine outburst of grief mean nothing to him. He reacts as would an automaton, a creature without emotion of any kind.
How or why any man would act with such coldness to a girl who has done absolutely nothing wrong to him beyond giving a poor performance in a play, is as great a mystery as anything else in the story. But it is in keeping with the bizarre nature of the plot and characters. It is similar to the behavior of the man in Poe's "The Black Cat," who abuses and kills Pluto for no reason. When Dorian sees the first transformation of the portrait, this is perhaps part of the reason he regrets his actions and decides, too late, that he'll take Sibyl back. But there is something unreal, superficial about his change of heart. When he embarks on his new "life-style," he revels in it. The rejection of Sibyl was only the first step in his descent into cruelty and madness.
In chapter seven of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Sybil delivers a poor performance on stage and later declares to Dorian that she will no longer act:
I hate the stage. I might mimic a passion that I do not feel, but I cannot mimic one that burns me like fire.
For Sybil, falling in love with Dorian has completely reversed her feelings about acting. Before, acting represented the only "reality" in Sybil's life. She believed in the characters that she portrayed and felt she was part of their world. Since falling in love with Dorian, however, Sybil views life differently and can no longer take pleasure from being on the stage:
To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played.
Dorian is horrified by Sybil's decision and declares she has "killed" his love. In Dorian's eyes, Sybil is no longer the creative genius he believed her to be and no longer capable of bringing to life the stories and characters he adores.
Ironically, Dorian calls Sybil "shallow and stupid," but that is really a reflection of Dorian's own character. That Dorian would fall out of love with Sybil over her decision to leave the stage demonstrates that he never truly loved her. His love was based purely on an ideal, not reality.