It is Chapter Seven that you need to refer to in answering
this question which features the conversation between Dorian and Sibyl after her
disastrous performance and also the end of their relationship. The answer also relates
explicity to one of the central conflicts or relationships that run through the entire
novel: the relationship between art and real life. Sibyl, in a very moving piece of
dialogue, talks about how her love for Dorian has changed her ideas and concepts about
art and life. Note what she tells him:
I believed in everything. The common people who
acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. Iknew
nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came--oh, my beautiful love!--and you
freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. Tonight, 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.
Thus we can see that
before Dorian entered her life, Sibyl's art was her reality. It was this that ironically
made her attractive to Dorian in the first place, as he makes clear straight after
Sibyl's speech:
I loved you because you were marvellous, because
you had genius and intellect, because you realised the dreams of great poets and gave
shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow
and stupid.
Through her love
for Dorian, Sibyl has exchanged art for reality, and as a result is now no longer able
to act. Dorian, it is shown, clearly prizes art above reality, and therefore now can no
longer Sibyl now she has become Sibyl, a real person, rather than just an actress who
has no concrete identity.
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