"So I have murdered Sybil Vane."

I find that Oliver Wilde's writing style is unique to the other novels I've read from the 1800s.  As seen with Jane Austen, her writing contains long, fluid sentences that have a variety of vocabulary that I struggle to understand.  The contrast between her and Wilde is that Wilde writes in more contemporary sentences.  His descriptions are very basic, very straight to the point.  His dialogue is the only part of the novel where the sentences become confusing, especially with the dialogue of Lord Henry.  The only real struggle with Lord Henry is that everything he says sounds like an iconic speech, and I feel like I need to mark each monologue he has.  For example, as if an American president at a rally, he says to Basil, "the basis of optimism is sheer terror.  We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us," (76).  Though that is what I find beautiful about the style Wilde uses to write, the fact that I find myself having to decipher his meaning and trying to pick and choose what is crucial to the story, and what is just white noise. 

Probably the most important stylistic devices Wilde uses are his allusions and motifs.  For one, as Sybil Vane is an actress in Shakespeare, there is a lot of allusion to his work.  As Dorian mourns for the death of Sybil, who appears to have committed suicide after Dorian broke off their engagement, Henry takes the time to describe how she was never truly alive because she never played herself.  "She was Desdemona one night, and Ophelia the other; that if she died as Juliet, she came to life as Imogen," (103).  As I spent an entire summer trapped in a dorm full of Shakespeare students, I tend to skip over these allusions as Wilde weaves them into his work with ease.  But the allusions he makes to Shakespeare and other playwrights, like Ford, Webster, and Tourneur, all helped to place Sybil and her death almost into a play.  As she was an actress, her life itself was simply "a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy," (104). 

My favorite device though, is Wilde's use of motifs.  Maybe it is because I've been taking English with Mrs. LaClair for so long, but the flower motif Wilde uses was very clear from the beginning to me.  Though he favors roses, especially when addressing Sybil, he speaks to a wide variety of flowers.  Just the opening scene from the novel speaks to roses, "the heavy scent of lilacs" and "the honey-sweet and honey-colored blossoms of a laburnum," (5).   Lord Henry connects flowers to immortality in a way, as he explains to Dorian while sitting in the garden, that all the flowers around them will grow again next year, and the year after that.  Though flowers are entwined throughout the story, it is evident that Sybil is always compared to a rose. Almost every sentence to describe her actions or beauty use roses.  To describe a simple blush of Sybil's cheeks, Wilde uses the phrase, "a rose shook in her blood and shadowed her cheeks.  Quick breath parted the petals of her lips," (62).  I find that Sybil is connected to a rose because of her youth, as she is just seventeen.  Even after her death, Dorian proclaims that even though he essentially murdered her, "the roses are not less lovely for that," (99).  It seems to me that the fact that the rose was not less lovely was because Sybil was still young even in death.  The flower motif I believe Wilde uses to speak towards the importance of youth to the characters, and I feel as if it will grow to mean even more further on in the story.

Also, a quick update on the story as I didn't really speak much to the plot besides Sybil's death, but Dorian's painting has changed since Sybil's death.  Mostly it was his cruelty towards Sybil that caused a change in the painting's expression.  Just thought I should let you all know that little bit of information.