Aesthetic Anguish

After his callous dismissal of Sibyl, Dorian exhibits some contradictory feelings within his newly acquired detachment.  When asked about Sibyl, he expresses his detached stance to Basil by saying, “If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it didn’t happen. It is simply expression, as Harry says, that gives reality to things” (108).

Dorian seeks to displace the emotions surrounding Sibyl’s death, with Lord Henry’s influence over his mind clearly on display. 

Lord Henry’s ideology inflects Dorian’s chilling rationalization of his role in Sibyl’s death, describing the tragedy as her “[passing] again into the sphere of art” while pitying her “wasted beauty” in martyrdom. Claiming that any repeated emotion is only for “sentimentalists,” Dorian’s desire is to either “forget what has happened” or “to see it from a proper artistic point of view” (110-11). This all-or-nothing viewpoint that values ‘proper artistic’ qualities is nebulous at best, a reflection of the dangers that accompany the freedom Dorian employs within Lord Henry’s hedonistic world of aesthetic sensation.

Dorian also seemingly gains the ability to see ‘ugliness’ to comfort his personal situation as easily as he learns to see obtuse, abstract ‘beauty’ in his life-robbing cruelty. He struggles with “how horrible real ugliness made things” (124), but quickly dismisses this feeling as he becomes immersed in a new book. In this section Dorian seems to be a grim reminder of the necessity to confront emotional challenges as they arise, rather than avoid ownership of them through convoluted external philosophies like aesthetics.