FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray falls into hedonism and in order to feel better about himself as he romanticizes his first love’s, Sybil Vane’s, suicide. Sybil is laid off on the sidelines while the book focuses on Dorian falling deeper and deeper into sin. However, his near-death experience at James Vane’s hand reminds him of her, however, Sybil is never considered as a fully-fleshed-person outside of Dorian’s narrative. To Dorian, Sybil is a fantasy, and when she dies, she becomes a romantic tragedy for him to recount. Dorian’s treatment of Sybil mirrors Bennie, Alex, and Ted’s treatment of Sasha in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. Even as a main character, Sasha’s broken and enigmatic personality captures the attention of men who sexualize her beauty and youth as she passes through their lives. Both Sybil and Sasha represent an ideal of youth to the men in their lives as the men age and desperately try to hold onto their past lives. While Sybil and Sasha are both pieces in the men’s stories, Wilde never fleshes Sybil out past her part in Dorian’s narrative because her death leaves no possibility of becoming someone else, while Egan’s take on Sasha allows her to become her own person outside of the men in her life.

There is no denying Dorian Gray’s infatuation with Sybil Vane. However, Dorian does not really know Sybil at all and is not in love with her. After he finds out about her death he muses:

“When he thought of her, it would be as a wonderful tragic figure sent on the world’s stage to show the supreme reality of Love. A wonderful tragic figure? Tears came to his eyes as he remembers her childlike look, and winsome fanciful ways, and shy tremulous grace.” (Wilde 119)

This quote sums up Sybil’s short presence within the novel from Dorian’s point of view. By calling her a figure “sent on the world’s stage”, he calls back to how he fell in love with her for her acting (Wilde 119). Michael Shea, who studied the character dynamics in Dorian Gray, also supports this idea by saying that “Dorian remains in love with her art” (132). The world of Dorian’s life is quite literally a stage for Sybil, and it is only fitting that her final role was Dorian’s broken-hearted lover who killed herself out of passion for him. According to Sheldon Liebman, Dorian’s obsession with her artistry is the reason they fall apart because he realizes Sybil is not her art (304). Who ‘Sybil Vane’ is as a person does not matter to him because he did not know her, however, acting out her final role as his lover and ending her story after he left her was a fulfillment of her role as an actress. In Shea’s essay, he speaks briefly about the function of Sybil, wherein the collapse of her artistry is the revelation of her true capacity to love Dorian. Before this chapter, on an actual stage, Sybil played the tragic Juliet. In the hidden stage of Dorian’s tragic love story, Sybil plays the scorned lover. Juliet kills herself after Romeo kills himself for her. Sybil kills herself because Dorian no longer loves her. Outside of this role, Dorian’s view of Sybil is simply an actress, not lost daughter or sister. Dorian views Sybil’s suicide as an act of true love for him. In her death, she fulfills the function of loving Dorian and giving him a tragic event that will haunt him in the future.

In Patrick Horan’s short story criticism, he briefly looks at Dorian Gray and his repressed homosexuality in relation to Sybil, and talks about idealization versus authenticity in relationships. As already discussed, Dorian completely idealizes Sybil, not because he loves her, but because of the art that surrounds her. Horan states that Wilde is positing that heterosexual relationships are “destroyed when partners reveal their humanity” (333). This speaks a lot to how Dorian views Sybil before her death and also how he processes her death. Shea interprets Dorian the moment where he recalls her “childlike” youth as regretful moment for him, however, I interpreted almost as concealed admiration (134). Despite tearing up at the thought of her, Dorian’s description of Sybil before her death leads me to conclude he envies her youth. Her death immortalizes her as a girl who will never live past the age of 17, forever young and naive. This immortalization of youth is romanticized by both Lord Henry and Dorian, especially considering how it was related to her love for Dorian. As I wrote before, they both see her suicide as an act of true love. In her death, Dorian returns to seeing her as art. Horan’s statement also can refer to the men in A Visit from the Goon Squad who also idealize the youth and beauty of the main female character, Sasha. However, unlike in Dorian Gray, their image of her is not broken, and their desire for her remains strong because Sasha does not let herself be consumed by the love of the men around her.

To Bennie, Sasha is his young assistant who lets him flirt with her without ever turning him down harshly. After getting a divorce and going through custody trials, Bennie finds himself with low libido, and uses Sasha as a test to rediscover his sexuality. By then, Bennie is a 40-year-old with a dying music career, unable to find the same spark he had for life and music the way he did when he was younger. After he hears some terrible music and panics, he muses:

“he concentrated on Sasha, just to his right, her sweet and bitter smell, and found himself remembering a girl he’d chased at some party when he first came to New York… some delicious blonde...” (Egan 160)

The quote itself already shows how Sasha reminds Bennie of his younger days. Sasha smells bittersweet, which also refers to how even though he lived out his dream of working in music and how he can feel that time is coming to an end. Sasha’s presence also takes him back to his younger skirt-chasing days, and he sexualizes the unnamed woman as a “delicious blonde”, further diminishing her importance or relevance by adding the word “some” (Egan 160). That woman is now replaced with a younger woman, Sasha, who Bennie sexualizes too, but he cannot have Sasha. That woman all those years ago is just a memory of a life he used to have and will never have again, no matter how much he chases after the past.

In the end, after spending the entire chapter looking at Sasha’s breasts, Bennie realizes he does not lust for her. However, internally, he feels a filial love for her, a “safe” kind of love (Egan 29). As his assistant, she has become this safe place for him since his home life is a wreck and work is not going well, but despite it all, Sasha will be by his side. Sasha’s life is seen in flashes throughout the novel, however despite working for Bennie for 12-years, the readers do not see Sasha’s life through Bennie’s eyes beyond seeing him trying to lust after her. However, Sasha seems able to read Bennie, knowing what he is thinking before he does it, and he takes it all for granted up until the day he has to fire her for stealing from him.

Another man who desires Sasha is her one-night stand, Alex, who finds himself drawn to the mystery of Sasha years after they met. The recurring image throughout his chapter is youth. When he and Bennie ring on the door of Sasha’s old apartment, Alex finds himself both reminiscing and imagining about “his young self, full of schemes and high standards” (Egan 274). Alex is remembering a different time, a different him, a younger Alex who had different hopes and dreams. He is taken back to his younger self because of how he remembers Sasha, compared to how he grew up, his memory of her has not aged, suspending her in the age he met her.
Even when he is jarred by the memory of her name for the first time, the actual memory of Sasha “seemed to wink at him (green eyes?) and slip away” (Egan 263). The wink, besides being a flirtation, is also like his mental image of Sasha enticing him to follow his curiosity of her. However, Alex questions what she looks like and comments her eyes might be green. The color green indexes growth and vitality. Alex has grown physically, but is drained of life, while his memory of young Sasha is bright and wild, someone he clearly cannot forget even if he cannot remember what she looked like.

In the end, Sasha does not answer the door because she is not there, and as Bennie and Alex walk away, disappointed, they whirl around at the sound of jingling keys only to be disappointed again because “it was another girl, young and new to the city” (Egan 274). This drives home the point of passing youth in Alex’s narrative and his view of Sasha. This new girl serves as a proxy for Sasha, however she also serves as a reminder of Alex and Bennie’s past. She is on the same path as them, young and full of hope, in the city and following her dreams. Bennie and Alex were like that young girl once. However, time has passed and now it was for another, and because this girl is young and new, she is the future.

The next person in Sasha’s life is Ted, her uncle, who goes to Naples to retrieve her and instead finds himself having an existential crisis about his unhappiness while exploring art museums. When he first finds Sasha, he observes her and narrates her body by saying “so unstinting its inventory of breasts and hips and gently indented waist” (Egan 170). Readers might argue that Ted has not seen her since she was young and was simply commenting on how she grew up. Though Ted does not lust after his niece, this quote illustrates Sasha growing up from kid to teenager, and also means that Ted had grown up from being a grad student to being an unhappy art professor. Where Sasha grew up into a beautiful young woman, Ted grew into a depressed art history grad. However, by commenting specifically on her breasts, hips, and waist, Ted is also indicating a form of desire, not necessarily lust, but the desire for growth. As stated above, Ted did grow up, however, Ted is stunted by his unhappy marriage and lifestyle. When he describes Sasha’s physical growth, he also speaks about her personal growth, where she has grown up beautifully and is seemingly living a good life.

However, by the end of the chapter Ted’s idealization of her breaks when he sees how Sasha is really living. He calls backs to a memory with his wife where he feels the overwhelming passage of time’s effect on their lives, and this moment mirrors his confrontation of Sasha in Naples. In the moment with his wife, he recognized time passing as the “motion, chaos everywhere— and he held onto Susan’s hand” (Egan 174). Time had seized Ted and Susan in the worst way possible, and they had fallen out of love. Calling back to Horan’s statement, Ted and Susan had ruined their surface level of image of each other, and found themselves unhappy with the lives they had made. As he looks at Sasha, he realizes that someone as young as Sasha had lived that same effect of feeling time pass. The only difference is that she is young, and when he looks at her he says “her hair and face were aflame with an orange light”, literally stating that Sasha still had fire inside of her. Despite what Ted sees right now, he can also tell that Sasha is meant for more.

The main difference between Sasha and Sybil is that we get to see the broken parts of Sasha, we get to see Sasha outside of an object being called art or lusted after by the men in her life. In the first chapter, we see from Sasha’s point of view, understand her struggle with kleptomania as she speaks to a therapist. Bennie, Ted, and Alex all placed their ideas about her beauty and personality onto her, and all only looked at Sasha as a moving piece in their lives. Seeing from their points of view gave us a static view of her: the assistant, the one-night-stand, the niece. Once she passes through their lives, she is someone these men look back on and wonder about. However, Sasha is not just those static character tropes she was assigned in their lives. At the end, she internally muses “I’m changing, I’m changing, I’m changing: I’ve changed!” (Egan 14). Prefacing this quote, Sasha realizes she wants so badly to please her therapist, and wants to be able to say out loud that she has changed as a person. This quote encompasses an internal struggle of wanting so badly to change and not being able to. We do not see this struggle in Bennie and Alex’s narrations, which allows Sasha’s characterization to be lost in an idealization of her. However, we get a brief glimpse of Sasha’s broken lifestyle in Ted’s chapter, which shows us her reality. But the first chapter is years after meeting Ted in Naples, and like any other person, Sasha is still struggling to get her life together too. Unlike the narrow view of Sybil, Sasha’s life is accounted in her own eyes and also later in her daughter’s narrative. Through these two sides of the story, we clearly conclude Sasha is not perfect and that she has a vast life outside of the three men described above.
 
Sybil and Sasha are the one of the most important characters in each of their respective books. Like Sybil, I argue that Sasha comes to encapsulate an aesthetic ideal in the main male characters’ lives in her book. However, unlike Sybil who was discarded after showing her true self through her love for Dorian, Sasha remains an ideal to the men in her life. The three men I describe above idealizes Sasha through her appearance and her enigmatic presence like Dorian idealized Sybil’s beauty and artistry. Where Sybil kills herself, fulfilling Dorian and Lord Henry’s gross idea of “tragic artistry”, Sasha escapes these men grasps and has her own life with a family of her own and making art with all the items she stole. Sybil’s death marks the end of her effect on Dorian’s live and returns her to the artistic ideal Dorian saw her in when she was an actress. Sasha remains alive and away from these men, yet her effect on the men are strong even years after their initial meetings. On the surface, the way these two women were treated by men is similar, however Sasha gets to be imperfect in her own story instead of simply being a piece in someone else's life.