Quote 1
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 begins his seduction of Dorian’s
mind with these words in Chapter Two. Lord Henry advocates a return
to the “Hellenic ideal,” to the sensibilities of ancient Greece
where the appreciation of beauty reigned. He strikes a contrast
between those glory days and the present mode of living, which,
he believes, is marked by a morality that demands self-denial. The
outcome of denial, he goes on to say, is only a stronger desire
for that which has been denied. This passage is a bold challenge
to conventional and restrictive Victorian morality; it dismisses
the notion of sin as a figment of the imagination. Interestingly,
if sin is relegated to the mind, as Lord Henry would have it, then
it should follow that the body is free from the effects of sin.
According to this line of thinking, Dorian’s tragedy, then, is that
he is unable to purge his “monstrous and unlawful” acts from his
conscience. One must remember, however, that Lord Henry has failed
to put his philosophy to the test. Although he is a great advocate
of sin, he is hardly a sinner, and his understanding of the soul—sickened
or otherwise—never incorporates the knowledge that Dorian gradually
acquires.
