Dorian Gray as a Victorian Myth
Cumaean Sibyl is a figure known for her immortality with endless aging in Greek myth. Ovid’s Metamorphosis explains that Apollo, craving for Sibyl’s virginity, seduces her by promising to grant her wish. Sibyl immediately asks for “long-live” but forgets to add, “with eternal youth”. By this careless remark, she since then lived for seven centuries, and three more remains, the amount of time that equals to the numbers of sand grains. This striking figure’s name is found in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, for a female character who becomes the first ‘victim’ of Dorian Gray’s charm and commits suicide at the young age: Sibyl Vane. Dying young can connote that preserving of youth is achieved but contrary to the original myth, a failure to live longer. Why Wilde adopted this name for woman character in contrasting condition can only be guessed, but it is interesting to find that from the death of Sibyl Vane, the ‘corruption’ of the picture of Dorian Gray starts, which can be read as Wilde’s intention of writing his era’s own myth from the end of the former generation.
The basic structure of both stories shares three developmental stages. In Cumaean Sibyl mythology, (1) she is seduced by Apollo for giving her virginity to him (test of temptation), (2) she wishes to live long at the cost (unrealizable wish from desire), (3) and she falls into mistake, becomes repent of it (punishment). Dorian Gray’s case follows the same development. There is no God to realize Dorian’s wish, but Lord Henry can be fall into the category of ‘devil-figure’ in that he seduces Dorian by emphasizing how the youth is beautiful. In addition, he’s influences on Dorian Gray by attraction of voice like an evil spirit and ‘yellow book’ spoils him. In the scene of fatal ‘arrangement’, the exchange is achieved by mere utterance. Dorian makes his wish, without foreseeing about the dreadful outcome of backside. He promises upon the air, by saying: “If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that I would give everything! […] I would give my soul for that! (25)”. This kind of remark is the one we often use in daily lives, but we know that will never become true. Yet both the story of Dorian and Sibyl alarm our carelessness of using language or making promises. This is what myth is aiming at, by depicting fantastic imagination which will never happen in the real world, to moralize or at least to make people aware of our own lives. This metaphor of God and devil-figure who are testing on temptation tries to give lesions: ‘say something before you think, or don’t wish for something impossible or irreversible’. In the story of Dorian Gray, though narrator’s voice this intention is revealed quite directly (“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. […] Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”).
Going directly to the last phase of the myth, it deals with punishment for desire beyond reality. Cumaean Sibyl as a young beautiful prophetess is in the position for being worshipped. Yet it makes her desire to live longer to extend the period for what she possess. Dorian Gray is also “made to be worshipped” according to Basil’s remark (96). And Basil is the one who only look through the point of the whole problem from the first. He confesses at the fatal night of his own death (when he is murdered by Dorian) that he worshipped too much which made Dorian worship himself, and by that they are/will be punished. And how are Sibyl and Dorian punished? Their wishes became verbally realized which, to their disappointment at the end, work as a bridle of punishment. Sibyl, who shrank owing to aging through the sand-grain-numbers of time period, only remains as a voice. And her voice is left only to remorse. What comes of her is to reject and to deny what she has desired, and her wish now is “to die”, contradictory to immortality. In the last chapter in which Dorian Gray stabs the portrait of his (which he, in symbolic reading, commits a suicide), he condemns his youth at last (“[h]e loathed his own beauty […] It was his beauty that ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for”, 181). Another example of this wish-and-punishment can be found in the mythology of Midas which the protagonist wishes for ability to make everything he touches to be gold, but faces the result that he cannot even eat.
The structure of two stories is much the same, but there is difference in what the people of the era desire the most. Dorian takes his wish for youth whereas Cumaean Sibyl for long life. What if the era of Cumaean Sibyl had the development in science that was able to extend life span or Dorian was told by Lord Henry that to live long is better than anything else? Wilde probably thought that nobody in his contemporary era would say his/her wish “immortality” over “eternal youth” as the era and generation changed. The appetite of the era differs and is to be reflected in the stories of contemporaries. Yet, still, as Greek myth is not only for Greeks but for us as well, Victorian myth is also valid, and within us. Victorian myth written by Wilde could be even more pervasive in our own era in the forms of plastic surgery, lookism etc, that alarms, and evokes us.
2009-11-10 [Nineteenth-Century English Literature (2)]