Christa Giles

sinister quality. When Basil Hallward first sees Dorian he is
mesmerized and overcome with a disturbing feeling:
I turned half-way round, and saw Dorian
Gray for the first time. When our eyes met, I
felt that I was growing pale. A curious
sensation of terror came over me. I knew that
I had come face to face with some one whose
mere personality was so fascinating that, if I
allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole
nature, my whole soul . . . 243
Dorian cannot help but corrupt, and takes a perverse
pleasure in doing so. The ˝devil’s bargain˝ 244 is fated to
destroy all that is innocent that he comes into contact with.
Basil confronts Dorian and makes a revealing accusation:
You corrupt everyone with whom you
become intimate . . . it is quite sufficient for
you to enter a house, for shame of some kind
to follow after. 245
He becomes incapable of prayer, and ˝with a soul hungry
for rebellion˝ perverts the Catholic mass:
the Roman ritual had always a great
attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more
awful really than all the sacrifices of the
antique world, stirred him as much by its
superb rejection of the evidence of the senses
as by the primitive simplicity of its elements
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