"the gravity of a girl," or The Genius of Suzanne

[stahrwe]

Is Rosamond, as a 'motive', intended to mean that she has been reduced to an abstract of love, or fear, or apprehension? Some certainly shows the ' fear ' men experience approaching a love interest. It seems this is unlikely. But what else, "recites like a motive?" Anarchy, but only to the point where all the detectives are known to each other.

I am left wondering if Rosamond might be abstracted as Sunday in some way. I admit that I am confused by this idea, yet Sunday, Gregory, and Rosalind are the only characters who are themselves throughout the story.

Thoughts, comments?

He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for what seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself with a rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his head, which he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which were to follow, this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again until all his tale was over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she kept recurring like a motive in music through all his mad adventures afterwards, and the glory of her strange hair ran like a red thread through those dark and ill-drawn tapestries of the night. For what followed was so improbable that it might well have been a dream.”

[stahrwe]

I apologize for my sketchy participation over the past several weeks. Hardware problems and then research has curtailed my posts.

I hope that some of the research will helpful and in that regard I will share what I have found. I am posting a passage from Chesterton's Autobiography where he praises a female author of his time. He thought she would become famous but I had never heard of her. Despite that, Chesterton's comments about her, especially the conclusion paragraph remind me very much of Rosamond in the first chapter of TMWWT and the concluding paragraph of the book.

But among these literary figures, there was one figure whom I shall put last because I ought to put it first. It was the figure of a contemporary and companion of all that world of culture; a close friend of Meredith; an artist admired as artistic by the aesthetes and even by the decadents. But Alice Meynell, though she preferred to be aesthetic rather than anaesthetic, was no aesthete; and there was nothing about her that can decay.

The thrust of life in her was like that of a slender tree with flowers and fruit for all seasons; and there was no drying up of the sap of her spirit, which was in ideas. She could always find things to think about; even on a sick bed in a darkened room, where the shadow of a bird on the blind was more than the bird itself, she said, because it was a message from the sun.

Since she was so emphatically a craftsman, she was emphatically an artist and not an aesthete; above all, she was like that famous artist who said that he always mixed his paints with brains.

But there was something else about her which I did not understand at the time, which set her apart as something separate from the time.

She was strong with deep roots where all the Stoics were only stiff with despair; she was alive to an immortal beauty where all the Pagans could only mix beauty with mortality. And though she passed through my own life fitfully, and far more rarely than I could wish, and though her presence had indeed something of the ghostly gravity of a shadow and her passing something of the fugitive accident of a bird, I know now that she was not fugitive and she was not shadowy. She was a message from the Sun.

Is the similarity to TMWWT coincidental or intentional? and if intentional, what does it mean?

[small summer]

I didn't see the sinister interpretation of Rosamund when I finished the book. But the posts here have persuaded me to consider a darker view. I think in the first chapter Syme is drawn to her, infatuated even. The chapter one image Chesterton gives us of her is hardly sinister. But looking back, I think Rosamond triggers Syme's nightmare by asking if (suggesting that) her brother might just be a real bomb-tossing anarchist. Syme dismisses her concern. And she appears convinced, smiling at her brothers "absurdity". But then Syme goes on to have a nightmare where Gregory is a real anarchist and that's really only the beginning. Fast forward past all the ensuing madness. Syme wakes up to find Rosamond again, innocently cutting lilacs, with no idea about the nightmare she's inspired. And Syme recognizes "...the great unconscious gravity of a girl."

As for Chesterton's description of Maynell: His use of the phrase "ghostly gravity" here is partly what brought me to my opinion of Rosamond's character. He clearly admired her as a writer and a person. And I think he created Rosamond's character to be personally admirable in that way. I'm not suggesting that Maynell was the inspiration for Rosamond, I have no idea if the timeline supports that. It's interesting that he's used "gravity" here again, but I need more than gender and one word to connect these two further. Maybe it reveals something about how Chesterton views women in general, or the strong influence of specific women in his life.

[stahrwe]

Small Summer, thank you for your post. Alice Maynell had completed most of her writing by 1900. Chesterton published TMWWT in 1908 so he was certainly familiar with her well before TMWWT.