Jane Studdock Character Analysis

She liked her clothes to be rather severe and in colours that were really good on serious aesthetic grounds––clothes which would make it plain to everyone that she was an intelligent adult and not a woman of the chocolate-box variety––and because of this preference she did not know that she was interested in clothes at all. She was therefore a little annoyed when Mrs. Dimble met her coming out of Sparrow’s and said: “Hullo, dear! Been buying a hat? Come home to lunch and let’s see it. Cecil has the car just round the corner.”

“How lovely it’s looking!” said Jane quite sincerely as she got out of the car. The Dimbles’ garden was famous.

“You’d better take a good look at it then,” said Dr. Dimble.

[…] “[P]oor dear, her husband is one of the villains of the piece. Anyway, I expect she knows.”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” said Jane.

“Your own college is being so tiresome, dear. They’re turning us out. They won’t renew the lease.”

“Oh, Mrs. Dimble!” exclaimed Jane. “And I didn’t even know this was Bracton property.”

“There you are!” said Mrs. Dimble. “One half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. Here have I been imagining that you were using all your influence with Mr. Studdock to try to save us, whereas in reality––”

“Mark never talks to me about College business.”

“Good husbands never do,” said Dr. Dimble.

There were no houses on her left––only a row of beech trees and unfenced ploughland falling steeply away, and beyond that the timbered midland plain spreading as far as she could see and blue in the distance. […]

Meanwhile Lord Feverstone’s car had long since arrived at Belbury––a florid Edwardian mansion which had been built for a millionaire who admired Versailles. At the sides it seemed to have sprouted into a widespread outgrowth of newer and lower buildings in cement, which housed the Blood Transfusion Office.

This reminded Jane of something. It was a very large garden. It was like […] the garden in Peter Rabbit. Or was it like the garden in the Romance of the Rose? […] Or like the garden on the top of some Mesopotamian ziggurat which had probably given rise to the whole legend of Paradise? Or simply like all walled gardens? Freud said we liked gardens because they were symbols of the female body. But that must be a man’s point of view. Presumably gardens meant something different in women’s dreams. Or did they? Did men and women both feel interested in the female body and even, though it sounded ridiculous, in almost the same way?

The resentment which had been rising and ebbing, but rising each time a little more than it ebbed, for several minutes, had now overflowed. All this talk of promises and obedience to an unknown Mr. Fisher-King had already repelled her. But the idea of this same person sending her back to get Mark’s permission––as if she were a child asking leave to go to a party––was the climax. For a moment she looked on Mr. Denniston with real dislike. She saw him, and Mark, and the Fisher-King man […] simply as Men––complacent, patriarchal figures making arrangements for women as if women were children or bartering them like cattle. […] She was very angry.

She looked ahead: surely that bend in the road was more visible than it ought to be in such a fog? […] Certainly what had been grey was becoming white, almost dazzlingly white. A few yards farther and luminous blue was showing overhead, […] and then all of a sudden the enormous spaces of the sky had become visible and the pale golden sun, and […] she was standing on the shore of a little green sunlit island looking down on a sea of white fog […]. She took a deep breath. It was the size of this world above the fog which impressed her. Down in Edgestow all these days one had lived, even when out of doors, as if in a room, for only objects close at hand were visible. She felt she had come near to forgetting how big the sky is, how remote the horizon.

“[Y]ou do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”

[…] “I thought love meant equality,” she said […]. “I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”

“You were mistaken,” said he gravely; “that is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes––that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. […] Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. […] It is not your fault. […] No one has ever told you that obedience––humility––is an erotic necessity.”

It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical––merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling.

“Do you place yourself in the obedience,” said the Director, “in obedience to Maleldil?”

"Sir,” said Jane, “I know nothing of Maleldil. But I place myself in obedience to you.”

“It is enough for the present,” said the Director. “This is the courtesy of Deep Heaven: that when you mean well, He always takes you to have meant better than you knew. It will not be enough for always. He is very jealous. He will have you for no one but Himself in the end. But for tonight, it is enough.”

She did not doubt that the eldils existed; nor did she doubt the existence of this stronger and more obscure being whom they obeyed…whom the Director obeyed, and through him the whole household […]. If it had ever occurred to her to question whether all these things might be the reality behind what she had been taught at school as “religion,” she had put the thought aside. The things belonged, for her, to different worlds. On the one hand, terror of dreams, rapture of obedience, […] and the great struggle against an imminent danger; on the other, the smell of pews, horrible lithographs of the Saviour […]. But this time, if it was really to be death, the thought would not be put aside. […] Maleldil might be, quite simply and crudely, God. There might be a life after death: a Heaven: a Hell.

And he now knew, for the first time, what he had secretly meant to do with Jane. If all had succeeded, if he had become the sort of man he hoped to be, she was to have been the great hostess––the secret hostess in the sense that only the very esoteric few would know who that striking-looking woman was and why it mattered so enormously to secure her good will. Well…it was lucky for Jane. She seemed to him, as he now thought of her, to have in herself deep wells and knee-deep meadows of happiness, rivers of freshness, enchanted gardens of leisure, which he could not enter but could have spoiled.

“Merlin is the reverse of Belbury. […] He is the last vestige of an old order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused. For him every operation on Nature is a kind of personal contact, like coaxing a child or stroking one’s horse. After him came the modern man to whom Nature is something dead––a machine to be worked, and taken to bits if it won’t work the way he pleases. Finally, come the Belbury people, who take over that view from the modern man unaltered and simply want to increase their power by tacking on to it the aid of spirits […]. In a sense, Merlin represents what we’ve got to get back to in some different way.”

But there it was––solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment. He was not thinking in moral terms at all; or else (what is much the same thing) he was having his first deeply moral experience. He was choosing a side: the Normal. “All that,” as he called it, was what he chose. If the scientific point of view led away from “all that,” then be damned to the scientific point of view! The vehemence of his choice almost took his breath away; he had not had such a sensation before.

He was himself, he felt, as helpless as the wooden Christ. As he thought this, he found himself looking at the crucifix in a new way––neither as a piece of wood nor a monument of superstition but as a bit of history. Christianity was nonsense, but one did not doubt that the man had lived and had been executed thus by the Belbury of those days. And that, as he suddenly saw, explained why this image, though not itself an image of the Straight or Normal, was yet in opposition to crooked Belbury. It was a picture of what happened when the Straight met the Crooked, a picture of what the Crooked did to the Straight––what it would do to him if he remained straight. It was, in a more emphatic sense than he had yet understood, a cross.

She liked her clothes to be rather severe and in colours that were really good on serious aesthetic grounds––clothes which would make it plain to everyone that she was an intelligent adult and not a woman of the chocolate-box variety––and because of this preference she did not know that she was interested in clothes at all. She was therefore a little annoyed when Mrs. Dimble met her coming out of Sparrow’s and said: “Hullo, dear! Been buying a hat? Come home to lunch and let’s see it. Cecil has the car just round the corner.”

“How lovely it’s looking!” said Jane quite sincerely as she got out of the car. The Dimbles’ garden was famous.

“You’d better take a good look at it then,” said Dr. Dimble.

[…] “[P]oor dear, her husband is one of the villains of the piece. Anyway, I expect she knows.”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” said Jane.

“Your own college is being so tiresome, dear. They’re turning us out. They won’t renew the lease.”

“Oh, Mrs. Dimble!” exclaimed Jane. “And I didn’t even know this was Bracton property.”

“There you are!” said Mrs. Dimble. “One half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. Here have I been imagining that you were using all your influence with Mr. Studdock to try to save us, whereas in reality––”

“Mark never talks to me about College business.”

“Good husbands never do,” said Dr. Dimble.

There were no houses on her left––only a row of beech trees and unfenced ploughland falling steeply away, and beyond that the timbered midland plain spreading as far as she could see and blue in the distance. […]

Meanwhile Lord Feverstone’s car had long since arrived at Belbury––a florid Edwardian mansion which had been built for a millionaire who admired Versailles. At the sides it seemed to have sprouted into a widespread outgrowth of newer and lower buildings in cement, which housed the Blood Transfusion Office.

This reminded Jane of something. It was a very large garden. It was like […] the garden in Peter Rabbit. Or was it like the garden in the Romance of the Rose? […] Or like the garden on the top of some Mesopotamian ziggurat which had probably given rise to the whole legend of Paradise? Or simply like all walled gardens? Freud said we liked gardens because they were symbols of the female body. But that must be a man’s point of view. Presumably gardens meant something different in women’s dreams. Or did they? Did men and women both feel interested in the female body and even, though it sounded ridiculous, in almost the same way?

The resentment which had been rising and ebbing, but rising each time a little more than it ebbed, for several minutes, had now overflowed. All this talk of promises and obedience to an unknown Mr. Fisher-King had already repelled her. But the idea of this same person sending her back to get Mark’s permission––as if she were a child asking leave to go to a party––was the climax. For a moment she looked on Mr. Denniston with real dislike. She saw him, and Mark, and the Fisher-King man […] simply as Men––complacent, patriarchal figures making arrangements for women as if women were children or bartering them like cattle. […] She was very angry.

She looked ahead: surely that bend in the road was more visible than it ought to be in such a fog? […] Certainly what had been grey was becoming white, almost dazzlingly white. A few yards farther and luminous blue was showing overhead, […] and then all of a sudden the enormous spaces of the sky had become visible and the pale golden sun, and […] she was standing on the shore of a little green sunlit island looking down on a sea of white fog […]. She took a deep breath. It was the size of this world above the fog which impressed her. Down in Edgestow all these days one had lived, even when out of doors, as if in a room, for only objects close at hand were visible. She felt she had come near to forgetting how big the sky is, how remote the horizon.

“[Y]ou do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”

[…] “I thought love meant equality,” she said […]. “I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”

“You were mistaken,” said he gravely; “that is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes––that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. […] Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. […] It is not your fault. […] No one has ever told you that obedience––humility––is an erotic necessity.”

It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical––merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling.

“Do you place yourself in the obedience,” said the Director, “in obedience to Maleldil?”

"Sir,” said Jane, “I know nothing of Maleldil. But I place myself in obedience to you.”

“It is enough for the present,” said the Director. “This is the courtesy of Deep Heaven: that when you mean well, He always takes you to have meant better than you knew. It will not be enough for always. He is very jealous. He will have you for no one but Himself in the end. But for tonight, it is enough.”

She did not doubt that the eldils existed; nor did she doubt the existence of this stronger and more obscure being whom they obeyed…whom the Director obeyed, and through him the whole household […]. If it had ever occurred to her to question whether all these things might be the reality behind what she had been taught at school as “religion,” she had put the thought aside. The things belonged, for her, to different worlds. On the one hand, terror of dreams, rapture of obedience, […] and the great struggle against an imminent danger; on the other, the smell of pews, horrible lithographs of the Saviour […]. But this time, if it was really to be death, the thought would not be put aside. […] Maleldil might be, quite simply and crudely, God. There might be a life after death: a Heaven: a Hell.

And he now knew, for the first time, what he had secretly meant to do with Jane. If all had succeeded, if he had become the sort of man he hoped to be, she was to have been the great hostess––the secret hostess in the sense that only the very esoteric few would know who that striking-looking woman was and why it mattered so enormously to secure her good will. Well…it was lucky for Jane. She seemed to him, as he now thought of her, to have in herself deep wells and knee-deep meadows of happiness, rivers of freshness, enchanted gardens of leisure, which he could not enter but could have spoiled.

“Merlin is the reverse of Belbury. […] He is the last vestige of an old order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused. For him every operation on Nature is a kind of personal contact, like coaxing a child or stroking one’s horse. After him came the modern man to whom Nature is something dead––a machine to be worked, and taken to bits if it won’t work the way he pleases. Finally, come the Belbury people, who take over that view from the modern man unaltered and simply want to increase their power by tacking on to it the aid of spirits […]. In a sense, Merlin represents what we’ve got to get back to in some different way.”

But there it was––solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment. He was not thinking in moral terms at all; or else (what is much the same thing) he was having his first deeply moral experience. He was choosing a side: the Normal. “All that,” as he called it, was what he chose. If the scientific point of view led away from “all that,” then be damned to the scientific point of view! The vehemence of his choice almost took his breath away; he had not had such a sensation before.

He was himself, he felt, as helpless as the wooden Christ. As he thought this, he found himself looking at the crucifix in a new way––neither as a piece of wood nor a monument of superstition but as a bit of history. Christianity was nonsense, but one did not doubt that the man had lived and had been executed thus by the Belbury of those days. And that, as he suddenly saw, explained why this image, though not itself an image of the Straight or Normal, was yet in opposition to crooked Belbury. It was a picture of what happened when the Straight met the Crooked, a picture of what the Crooked did to the Straight––what it would do to him if he remained straight. It was, in a more emphatic sense than he had yet understood, a cross.