Skip to main content

On Shirley

I was thinking tonight about the ingenuity of Shirley. When the story began I had an impression of Caroline being a very mundane, almost trite person, in love with Robert but on the whole secure and complacent in a very common way. Having no competition, having his obvious regard and their both being single, almost assumptive in her hanger-on visits and French lessons at his estate.

Then, Robert rejects her, and she makes a complete turnaround from being an average young woman in love to a positively tormented soul. And you really see the progression, and see Caroline grow through her pain into a noteworthy being.

The moments that are her darkest, when she visits the old maids and takes comfort in their companionship, burying her pain while confronting her darkest fear, being old and alone. When I look back on those times I am almost sorry Shirley entered the picture. She is loud, annoying, although I know without her the story cannot come to its end.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Snow White and the Prince

I dreamed in darkness, cold and alone. Phantasms shifted around me, frightening me, but I was powerless to escape them or even move, as I was sealed in a casket. I thought of the Queen, my Stepmother, and tears dripped from my eyes as I considered the quasi-poignant moments we had once shared, when we might have been considered to be close, when the Queen had nearly been a mother to me, and the face of love had shone radiantly upon me, before eclipsed again by the storms of Venus. I thought of the huntsman, stung to consider that my only friend had been poised to betray me, to kill me, and again in my mind I felt the horror of his shadow, of waiting while he came behind me, knowing there was no escape for me from a death he would inflict. My heart lifted as images of the Prince entered my mind, his grace atop a white-maned horse, always out of my reach, just beyond the words I longed to speak. If only there had been more time for us to fall in love. He might have saved me from those...
more &

Where does it lie

I look out onto the yellow and brown vegetation beneath my window, at the castle-like buildings far away and wonder where do I lie in all of this? There was a time when I was unfettered. This was a time before I entered the working world, before I was independent. My heart was free as a bird when I was in college. I did not know what happiness I experienced in my creativity because I had never known different. In other aspects of my life I knew pain but my stories, sprung up lately from a gothic mist into an immersing Pre-Raphaelite painting, were a richness and the most beautiful thing I had ever known. That the most beautiful thing I knew to exist happened inside of me made me very happy, even though I didn't know it. Now I know the sun is setting, even though I can't see it, because the bank of brown, twisted trees and shrubs is lit gold, like a reflection from a golden chalice. Slowly, slowly it will fade until everything is a homogenous, uncertain gray. This is the nightma...
more &