Both Uses of
malevolent
in
The Phantom of the Opera
- Mysterious though the ghost may at first appear, he will always be more easily explained than the dismal story in which malevolent people have tried to picture two brothers killing each other who had worshiped each other all their lives.
Chpt Prol. *malevolent = evil
- The girl's highly strung imagination, her affectionate and credulous mind, the primitive education which had surrounded her childhood with a circle of legends, the constant brooding over her dead father and, above all, the state of sublime ecstasy into which music threw her from the moment that this art was made manifest to her in certain exceptional conditions, as in the churchyard at Perros; all this seemed to him to constitute a moral ground only too favorable for the malevolent designs of some mysterious and unscrupulous person.†
Chpt 8
Definition:
evil
- of a person -- wishing or appearing to wish evil to others
- of a thing -- exerting an evil or harmful influence