orrupted conscience and soul, can negatively affect a person's outer appearance.Wilde reveals the process in which influence takes over a person's conscience through the relationship between Lord Henry and Dorian. Lord Henry is witty and therefore able to subtly, almost subliminally, impose his corrupted opinions upon Dorian. He makes his comments nonchalantly and makes them sound so believable that it becomes easy for Dorian to accept his beliefs. Dorian is "dimly conscious that entirely fresh influences are at work within him. Yet they seem to him to have come really from himself" (Wilde 14). The ideas Lord Henry offers are new to Dorian. Regardless, Dorian is weak and easily persuaded to believe that these immoral opinions and ideas are actually moral. Lord Henry even offers justifications. Although Dorian is blind to the corruption of his conscience, Lord Henry is not blind to his negative influence. Lord Henry feels:There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that-perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own. (Wilde 26).The corruption of Dorian's conscience is an intentional plan of Lord Henry's. It is terrible how Henry finds pleasure in controlling a person's life. Unfortunately, Dorian doesn't even realize that Henry's influence is taking over his conscience. Through the characters of Dorian Gray and Lord Henry, Wilde verifies the dangers that evil and corrupt people can pose to those who are weak in our society.Although Henry persistently attempts to corrupt Dorian's conscience, Dorian is able to savor enough of hi...
