I definitely can see how Mrs. R is Prospero-like in her desire to match up Minta and Paul (Miranda and Ferdinand), and how she feels like the life principle of the book. Her melancholy meditation on how her children will never be happier than now leads her to recognize all the sadnesses life will (probably) bring them--yet she doesn't st…
I definitely can see how Mrs. R is Prospero-like in her desire to match up Minta and Paul (Miranda and Ferdinand), and how she feels like the life principle of the book. Her melancholy meditation on how her children will never be happier than now leads her to recognize all the sadnesses life will (probably) bring them--yet she doesn't stop with those solemn thoughts:
"She felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering, death, the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through with it. To eight people she had said relentlessly that (and the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds). For that reason, knowing what was before them--love and ambition and being wretched alone in dreary places--she had often the feeling, Why must they grow up and lose it all? And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, nonsense."
I definitely can see how Mrs. R is Prospero-like in her desire to match up Minta and Paul (Miranda and Ferdinand), and how she feels like the life principle of the book. Her melancholy meditation on how her children will never be happier than now leads her to recognize all the sadnesses life will (probably) bring them--yet she doesn't stop with those solemn thoughts:
"She felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering, death, the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through with it. To eight people she had said relentlessly that (and the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds). For that reason, knowing what was before them--love and ambition and being wretched alone in dreary places--she had often the feeling, Why must they grow up and lose it all? And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, nonsense."
How wonderful is that sword brandishing!
there is some painful foreshadowing in this quote