Draw a character sketch of the Duchess In "The Dutches and The Jeweller"
The Duchess and the Jeweller” is basically a highly successful psychological study of the personality of the Duchess and the Jeweller.The Duchess is a clever and cunning woman. She belongs to that class of society which in spite of being wealthy has lost all moral values. She seems to be the true representative of the woman of that society.
Her life-style is ostentatious. She wears expensive and sparkling clothes. She gambles but tries to keep her bad habits secret from her husband.
She is not faithful to him. She calls him villain and a sharper. She is a cheat and swindler. She tries to grab money from Oliver by selling him fake pearls.
She degrades herself to such a low level that she uses her own daughter, Diana as an enticement for the jeweller to give her money. So it can be said that the Duchess is more loathsome than the jeweller.
The jeweller is highly arrogant and ambitious and is strutting smugness is evident through the animal metaphors used to portray him-from his physical bearing .
His nose was long and flexible, like an elephant'strunk. To his ambition compared to a "giant hog" snuffing for truffles or a (camel sees the blue lake).
He reveals his heart's deepest passion for cold stones rather than other human beings.He does not have any real friends in the story. When Bacon opens his safe to relish his treasures, the jewels-"shining, yet burning eternally, with their own compressed light"-his excitement is clear as he gives human attributes to the germs.
The jeweller, is really the only developed character in the short story "The Duchess and the Jeweller" by Virginia Woolf. The author uses her own words to depicts the enterprising merchant as a many-sided man. He is both ambitious and sympathetic.
Bacon becomes not just the mercantile manipulator, but a man of the British ruling structure.He is an edifice so massive that much of the population remained flattened by its pressures.
However, our sympathies are with the man who recalls his youthful self, and who still incarnates the spirit of "the wily astute little boy,the dark little shop in the street off Bond Street" rather than in the world of the Duchess who, for all her dissipation, still covers the jeweller .
The man who worships the memory of his mother and apologizes to her for paying the Duchess twenty thousand pounds for junk.Trading his self-respect and honor for the opportunity to consort with royalty.
It is this conflict that gives Bacon a degree of integrity.He is aware of his failure and it is his very human decision to waste some of his wealth to achieve what he wants.
We come into contact with personality of Duchess when reality unfolds later in the story. She is left with no prestige and status. These are the virtues she wants to acquire in front of her society.
She is still sticking to aristocratic habits of wasting her money away to show off her status.
She has been gambling and losing money. Class of Duchess is going down its way and struggling class of Oliver Bacon is tracing its way higher on the social ladder.
B.A punjab university 2014
English paper A (first group)
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