Sibyl is a doomed soul. The very fact that her existence always fails to synchronize with the linearities of time establishes her inheritance of a wounded temporality. Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray dissects the artistic monopoly of this seemingly peripheral woman and discovers a senile mole/stone. This woman who lives many lives rolled into one is too omnipresent a symbol of passion and ferocity. Her character foreshadows all that can remain unchanged within a static cage of narcissistic simulation despite its seeming outward changes and distortions.

This chapter will centre around Sibyl Vane, the romantic interest of Dorian Gray, Wilde's protagonist in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The romance between Dorian and Sibyl is unable to come to fruition because Dorian fails to love Sibyl beyond the art she personifies in the characters of the Shakespearean heroines she enacts on the stage. Her suicide, after having been spurned by Dorian, is only the beginning of her struggles with temporality and its changing facets.

Sibyl is the nemesis of Dorian; she is the antithetical art to Dorian’s. Dorian sees her as a mesmerizing actress whose acting genius and enthralling beauty serve to fill up the void of timelessness and spacelessness that he has been vying for and that he perceives as the hallmark of happiness and gratification. She is one of those ‘sentimental people’ (Wilde, 1991: 40) that he is so fond of exploiting. Her sentimentality makes her want to ‘attach’ herself, whereas Dorian's sentimentality drives him more and more towards detachment; this, despite Sibyl having had hardly any concrete society and Dorian having had much of it. Sibyl seems to have quite perfected the art of attaching herself even to art and its manifestations, while Dorian enjoys the sport of detachment.