She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Comment: In this passage, Wilde exposes the psychology of projection and romantic self‑dramatization. Dorian Gray is not in love with Sibyl Vane as a real person - he is in love with an idea he has created. When he declares that “She is all the great heroines of the world in one”, he dissolves her individuality and turns her into a symbolic object - an aesthetic fantasy rather than a human being. His desire “to make Romeo jealous” and to awaken “the dead lovers of the world” shows that his passion is performative, theatrical and rooted in vanity. Wilde suggests that Dorian’s love is less an emotional bond and more a stage on which he can enact a grandiose version of himself. Psychologically, this is not intimacy but narcissistic projection: Dorian uses Sibyl to amplify his own sense of beauty, destiny and significance - revealing how easily desire becomes self‑worship when it is detached from genuine human connection.
When Sibyl Vane presents herself to him as a normal, loving being, Dorian Gray reacts as follows - the psychological term of that behavior is called “devaluation”:
“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 marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized 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.”
Sibyl Vane’s real being doesn’t fit to Dorian’s idolized imagination of her - his bubble bursts!
As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that Dorian's unchanged outward beauty, despite his depravity, continues to exert a powerful attraction. However, as soon as people catch a glimpse of his ugly soul, they are repelled – with the exception of Lord Henry, whose "creation" Dorian Gray is. The picture of Dorian Gray is the mirror of his corrupted soul, the sight of which Dorian himself cannot bear. Therefore, he hides his portrait in a remote, locked room of his house so that he and others cannot see his “true self“.