“We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. . . . Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.”
-Lord Henry
Here, we see the first instance of Lord Henry beginning to influence Dorian. Basil was worried about this, and here it is understandable why. Lord Henry is clearly a person who does not necessarily believe in many of the victorian ideals of the time. In this passage, he dismisses the notion of sin as merely a piece of the imagination. This is very against the Victorian ideals of the time, which strongly encouraged repentance and apologizing for your sins. Henry explains how these sins need too be simply purged from the mind, and we begin to see Dorian think there is something wrong with his way of thinking.
Question: Here, we are presented with a question that has been present for all of the reading at some point: Who is the monster? Clearly Dorian is the one who undergoes this moral change and begins to have less acre about his sins, but if Lord Henry is the one who caused him to do this, would he be the monster? We once gain see this creator-monster relationship begin to develop, and once again there is a debate about who is more responsible.
