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Jakob Gradus
Sybil is John Shade’s wife and Hazel’s mother. John and Sybil have been married for 40 years, and they’re profoundly in love; Sybil is the only person in the world with whom John shares his drafts, and they share a deep appreciation for nature and domestic life. Like John, Sybil is devastated when their only child, Hazel, commits suicide as a teenager, and the couple struggles to make sense of what—if anything—her death means. Throughout the novel, it’s clear that Kinbote and Sybil do not get along. Kinbote is deeply misogynistic and he thinks that it’s Sybil’s fault that he and John aren’t closer (it doesn’t occur to him that John doesn’t like him very much and that Sybil protects her husband from Kinbote’s badgering presence because of that). After Shade’s death, when Kinbote reads “Pale Fire” and realizes that it isn’t about Zembla, he blames Sybil for that, too, claiming that she censored the poem. Sybil and Kinbote fall out entirely after Shade’s death, likely due to a disagreement over the manuscript of “Pale Fire.” In the immediate aftermath of Shade’s death, Kinbote’s gardener falsely tells Sybil that Kinbote tried to shield Shade from the bullets, and Kinbote uses this to manipulate Sybil into signing over the rights to the poem to him. After she realizes how horrible an idea this is, she tries to insert two other Wordsmith professors as co-editors, which Kinbote finds outrageous. After this, they never speak again.
Sybil Shade Quotes in Pale Fire
The Pale Fire quotes below are all either spoken by Sybil Shade or refer to Sybil Shade. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Commentary: Lines 367-434
Quotes
I am thinking of lines 261-267 in which Shade describes his wife. At the moment of his painting that poetical portrait, the sitter was twice the age of Queen Disa. I do not wish to be vulgar in dealing with these delicate matters but the fact remains that sixty-year-old Shade is lending here a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Now the curious thing about it is that Disa at thirty, when last seen in September 1958, bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade as she was when I met her, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet in those lines of Pale Fire. Actually it was idealized and stylized only in regard to the older woman; in regard to Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that blue terrace, it represented a plain unretouched likeness. I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.
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Sybil Shade Quotes in Pale Fire
The Pale Fire quotes below are all either spoken by Sybil Shade or refer to Sybil Shade. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Commentary: Lines 367-434
Quotes
I am thinking of lines 261-267 in which Shade describes his wife. At the moment of his painting that poetical portrait, the sitter was twice the age of Queen Disa. I do not wish to be vulgar in dealing with these delicate matters but the fact remains that sixty-year-old Shade is lending here a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Now the curious thing about it is that Disa at thirty, when last seen in September 1958, bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade as she was when I met her, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet in those lines of Pale Fire. Actually it was idealized and stylized only in regard to the older woman; in regard to Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that blue terrace, it represented a plain unretouched likeness. I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
