Art for art’s sake, which flowered during the 1880s and the 1890s in the works of Wilde,Moore and Symons had many roots in the past.”Its ultimate origins were in the German romantic philosophers and in Keats and Poe. Rossetti, isolated from society, revived Keats and offered an art without moral or social purpose. Morris, desolated by the ugliness around him, tried to restore beauty to useful things. Gautier in , Baudelaire in his poems and in his preface to Poe, and Flaubert in his novels illustrated or reco

Dorian Gray’s “attachement to Sibyl Vane is an experiment in the aesthetic laboratory.She plays Shakespearean heroines, so Dorian is able to aestheticise her in his imagination.”( Ellman 315): “I have been right”, he congratulates himself , “ to take my love out of poetry and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays.”(Wilde 88)

been sordid and ugly. Art has the power to bring people into a place where they have not been, or a place that they don’t have the opportunity to go to in the reality. Dorian has realized, “I love acting. It is so much more real than life” (Wilde 88). Real life is so limited as to in acting, a man can live any scene that he can possibly think of. Dorian’s rejection of Sibyl came upon one night that Sibyl has lost her magic. A night that her acting lost the power to attract and charm the audiences. “Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are” (Wilde 64). That night, “she spoke the words as though they conveyed no meaning to her…she was absolutely self-contained. It was simply bad art. She was a complete failure” (Wilde 96). Sibyl has become herself! She has gotten out of the world of imagination into the real world, into what she is, herself! Sibyl’s mind is occupied by Dorian. “You are more to me than all art can ever be” (Wilde 96). Now, all the wonderful influences that Sibyl had, have been wiped out, but the influence of Dorian Gray. She tried to show Dorian of her love for him, but as the author of the book mentioned in the Preface, “No artist desires to prove anything.” Sibyl is no longer an artist. There is no more imagination for she is “a” person, an individual now, a “Sibyl” that is in love with Dorian, and Dorian only. There is no more curiosity that Dorian can have of her. She voices the heresy that all art is but a reflection of reality and Dorian excommunicates her with the cruel words: “You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art.”

There is no mystery in any of them[…] But an actress! How different an actress is!” (Wilde 60). By imagination that Sibyl has the power to arouse, she can be of any characteristics. Art has no set form, but the purpose of art is to give form to feeling. Sibyl is a person that is able to provide all kinds of feelings that Dorian wishes to experience. Dorian finds extreme pleasure in experiencing through all the sentiments that Sibyl gives. Being a spectator to the different lives and stories amuses Dorian:” One evening she is Roselind and the next evening she is Imogen” (Wilde 60).Lord Henry congratulates Dorian for the fact that she is never Sibyl Vane, that she lives only in the world of shadows, of art and not in reality. Art is something that arouse imaginations, imaginations of the viewer. In order for imagination to live, reality must not exist. “She regarded me merely as a person in a play. She knows nothing of life” (Wilde 63). Art is not “real”, or, rather, it forms its own type of reality, its own world. “…before I knew you (Dorian), acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true” (Wilde 99). Before Sibyl fell in love with Dorian, she lives in a world or Art, a world of imaginations. That great pureness of Art is so powerful that she can spiritualize her audiences, and give them a soul if they lived without one, create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have

Some topics in this essay:
Sibyl Vane, Dorian Gray, Lord Henry, Dorian Dorian, Oscar Wilde, Henry Wotton, Lord Henry’s, Lying” Wilde, Narcissism Dandyism, Basil Hallward, lord henry, dorian gray, oscar wilde, life” wilde, wilde 96, reality dorian, lives world, love dorian, art art, world art, wilde 96 sibyl, failure” wilde 96, complete failure” wilde, 96 sibyl gotten, sibyl gotten world,