Disillusioned vs. disillusioned.
Dear Tara,
I agree with you that Miss MacIntosh’s behavior the morning after the rape is just as disturbing as the violence. Vera is gaslit by her rapist:
“You have been very sick and unusually stubborn, but you have recovered…What a way to have behaved at your first birthday party, even though no guest came, and it was a very simple business. Dancing is never to be encouraged…I’m sure you did not intend to tear your party dress…anyhow it was immoderate and most unnecessary. However, let bygones be bygones. We shall turn over a new leaf.”
And with the new day Miss MacIntosh’s appearance has returned to form as though she had never been different than she is now.
Chapter 22 is one of my favorites. I cannot seem to get enough description of the sea-blackened house, nor the quantities and obsolete nature of the items inside. Remarkably Miss MacIntosh dispenses of the broken crockeries she normally deploys for serving breakfast and instead puts to use the Haviland china and silver service, “one of the hundred and forty or more silver services under our roof. There were forty silver soup tureens, four hundred finger bowls, five hundred salt shakers not one of which would work. There were enough dishes of royal design to have run a grand hotel, but we had never used them, for they had been much too fine for us…”
And a bit later: “…the impractical house, so overblown, so exaggerated, a monstrous growth of dark rooms cluttered with helmed cherubim riding in boats and stuffed reindeer and royal sleighs with rusted sleigh bells and triple-crowned griffins with gold eggs between their gilded paws and stringless harps in empty music rooms.”
These fascinatingly detailed itemizations allow our minds to gorge on images that comprise the gothic splendor of the ruins that Vera and Miss MacIntosh inhabit.
Creepier still is Miss MacIntosh’s implicit refusal to break routine as she directs her usual stream of quiz-like questions at Vera regarding the Bible, geography, and various esoterica.
Vera refuses to play along.
“Did you throw away my party dress as a punishment?”
“I shall dance again, even with my own shadow, Miss MacIntosh. You cannot stop me.”
In Miss MacIntosh’s attempts at subterfuge, of glossing over the extraordinary events of the previous night and acting like nothing has changed, Vera recognizes that Miss MacIntosh lacks something essentially human, her attitude of direct approach serving as a foil for her evasions.
With her new knowledge of Miss MacIntosh, Vera is confronted with the fact that everyone in her life is living within disillusionment—her mother, Mr. Spitzer, the household servants, and now too, her nursemaid.
Tara, I’ve been thinking about the question in your last letter: is Young defining a hierarchy of illusions/delusions by which her characters navigate the world? I’m not sure. But it feels to me as if Vera finds the delusions of the others in her small circle to be less repugnant than those of Miss MacIntosh. Perhaps because she had been duped by the latter while with the others, she’s been aware all along that they live amongst phantoms and specters?
Still sorting my five hundred broken saltshakers,
Lori