Beatrice Blaine Character Analysis

Beatrice Blaine is Amory’s mother. Born Beatrice O’Hara, she grows up traveling around Europe and learning about art and culture. She has a love affair with Monsignor Darcy but declines to marry him because of his lower-class background. Instead, she marries Stephen Blaine, Amory’s father, for money and status, and they have a loveless marriage and spend much of their time apart. Beatrice raises Amory in the manner of her own upbringing, and Amory attributes much of his haughty disposition to his mother’s influence. When Amory is a young teenager, Beatrice has a nervous breakdown and sends Amory to Minneapolis to live at her father’s Lake Geneva estate. When they reunite two years later, Beatrice reveals that her health problems were the result of excessive drinking. She also laments Amory’s Americanized, bourgeois disposition, wishing that he could have attended traditional schools in England instead of St. Regis. Toward the end of her life, Beatrice invests the remainder of her money in railroads, which proves to be an unwise investment. She donates the rest of her money to the Catholic Church, leaving Amory with no inheritance except for the Lake Geneva estate. Beatrice dies during the war. Amory later compares the women he loves to Beatrice, who seems to provide a model of feminine love that influences Amory’s romantic pursuits.