A Description After Death

‘The widower only sighed and puffed his cigar fiercely out of the open window. Perhaps he was thinking of that far-away time—little better than five years ago, in fact; but such an age gone by to him—when he first met the woman for whom he had worn crape round his hat three days before. They returned, all those old unforgotten feelings; they came back, with the scene of their birth-place. Again he lounged with his brother officers upon the shabby pier at the shabby watering-place, listening to a dreary band with a cornet that was a note and a half flat. Again he heard the old operatic airs, and again she came tripping toward him, leaning on her old father’s arm, and pretending (with such a charming, delicious, serio-comic pretense) to be listening to the music, and quite unaware of the admiration of half a dozen open-mouthed cavalry officers. Again the old fancy came back that she was something too beautiful for earth, or earthly uses, and that to approach her was to walk in a higher atmosphere and to breathe a purer air. And since this she had been his wife, and the mother of his child. She lay in the little churchyard at Ventnor, and only a year ago he had given the order for her tombstone. A few slow, silent tears dropped upon his waistcoat as he thought of these things in the quiet and darkening room.’ Pg 53

This paragraph stands out in its strong use of imagery. The structure of the paragraph takes us from George’s current situation, to his past, fleetingly allowing us to glimpse his wife, then back to George’s thoughts. The long, ornate sentences seem to echo the seemingly unending melancholy that George has sunken into upon his wife’s death, which is further intensified by the repetitive words and sentence styles. In particular, the repetition of the word ‘old’ reminds us that these images exist only in the past, and can be revisited only in memory. The entire passage is far more descriptive than it is active, which points to the change in George’s personality; from a likable, active ‘doer’ to a quiet, contemplative ‘lounger’, after his wife’s death. The ‘quiet and darkening room’ perfectly reflect George’s mood, his misery.

It is interesting to note that the woman described in the paragraph seems holy and almost goddess-like, since she almost breathes a ‘purer’ air. The idea that she was, in some sense, above him, comes through by the very well thought out use of words like shabby and dreary to describe George’s own surroundings, while she is described as charming, almost ‘too beautiful for earth’. Reading in hindsight, this shows us one of many examples where MEB uses imagery to show Lady Audley as someone sacred and untouched in her beauty, so when our beliefs are finally shattered, we are all the more scandalized.