Previous
Beatrice Blaine
Rosalind Connage, the younger sister of Alec Connage, has a brief but passionate love affair with Amory that leaves him devastated for the rest of the novel. The two meet at Rosalind’s debutante ball, where they are immediately infatuated with each other. Rosalind is beautiful, clever, sophisticated, and flirtatious, and she has many male suitors whom she tires of easily. Rosalind and Amory are in some ways male and female counterparts: they are both intelligent, attractive, vain, selfish, and charming. And while they’re both prone to infatuation, they’re also quick to change their minds. But their different social positions ultimately leads to the disastrous end of their relationship. As a woman from a respectable, wealthy family, Rosalind is expected to marry a wealthy man who can give her a luxurious lifestyle. Amory, as an educated man from a respectable family, is supposed to provide money for his wife—but his vanishing inheritance and lack of income make this impossible. Eventually, Rosalind chooses to marry Dawson Ryder, a wealthy bachelor who convinces her that she will grow to love him. Rosalind promises Amory that he is the only man she will ever love and that their love was “the first real unselfishness” she ever experienced—however, because of his poverty, their marriage would make both of them miserable. Rosalind’s abandonment sends Amory into a self-destructive drinking binge.
Rosalind Connage Quotes in This Side of Paradise
The This Side of Paradise quotes below are all either spoken by Rosalind Connage or refer to Rosalind Connage. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Book 1, Chapter 4: Narcissus Off Duty
Quotes
She was immemorial…. Amory wasn’t good enough for Clara, Clara of ripply golden hair, but then no man was. Her goodness was above the prosy morals of the husband-seeker, apart from the dull literature of female virtue.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 1: The Débutante
Quotes
SHE: Well, Amory, you don’t mind—do you? When I meet a man that doesn’t bore me to death after two weeks, perhaps it’ll be different.
HE: Odd, you have the same point of view on men that I have on women.
SHE: I’m not really feminine, you know—in my mind.
All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified—their senses of humor crawled into corners to sleep; their former love affairs seemed faintly laughable and scarcely regretted juvenalia. For the second time in his life Amory had a complete bouleversement and was hurrying into line with his generation.
ROSALIND: Amory, I’m yours—you know it. There have been times in the last month I’d have been completely yours if you’d said so. But I can’t marry you and ruin both our lives. (…) I can’t Amory, I can’t be shut away from the trees and flowers, cooped up in a little flat, waiting for you. You’d hate me in a narrow atmosphere. I’d make you hate me.
Book 2, Chapter 2: Experiments in Convalescence
Quotes
“ ‘S a mental was’e,’ he insisted with his owl-like wisdom. “Two years my life spent inalleshual vacuity. Los’ idealism, got be physcal anmal,” he shook his fist expressively at Old King Cole, “got be Prussian ‘bout ev’thing, women ‘specially. Use’ be straight ‘bout women college. Now don’givadam. (…) Seek pleasure where find it for to-morrow die. ‘At’s philosophy for me now on.”
Amory had loved Rosalind as he would never love another living person. She had taken the first flush of his youth and brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had surprised him, gentleness and unselfishness that he had never given to another creature. He had later love-affairs, but of a different sort: in those he went back to that, perhaps, more typical frame of mind, in which the girl became the mirror of a mood in him.
Book 2, Chapter 3: Young Irony
Quotes
Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty.
“Rotten, rotten old world,” broke out Eleanor suddenly, “and the wretchedest thing of all is me—oh, why am I a girl? (…) Here I am with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony.”
Get the entire This Side of Paradise LitChart as a printable PDF.
Rosalind Connage Quotes in This Side of Paradise
The This Side of Paradise quotes below are all either spoken by Rosalind Connage or refer to Rosalind Connage. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Book 1, Chapter 4: Narcissus Off Duty
Quotes
She was immemorial…. Amory wasn’t good enough for Clara, Clara of ripply golden hair, but then no man was. Her goodness was above the prosy morals of the husband-seeker, apart from the dull literature of female virtue.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 1: The Débutante
Quotes
SHE: Well, Amory, you don’t mind—do you? When I meet a man that doesn’t bore me to death after two weeks, perhaps it’ll be different.
HE: Odd, you have the same point of view on men that I have on women.
SHE: I’m not really feminine, you know—in my mind.
All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified—their senses of humor crawled into corners to sleep; their former love affairs seemed faintly laughable and scarcely regretted juvenalia. For the second time in his life Amory had a complete bouleversement and was hurrying into line with his generation.
ROSALIND: Amory, I’m yours—you know it. There have been times in the last month I’d have been completely yours if you’d said so. But I can’t marry you and ruin both our lives. (…) I can’t Amory, I can’t be shut away from the trees and flowers, cooped up in a little flat, waiting for you. You’d hate me in a narrow atmosphere. I’d make you hate me.
Book 2, Chapter 2: Experiments in Convalescence
Quotes
“ ‘S a mental was’e,’ he insisted with his owl-like wisdom. “Two years my life spent inalleshual vacuity. Los’ idealism, got be physcal anmal,” he shook his fist expressively at Old King Cole, “got be Prussian ‘bout ev’thing, women ‘specially. Use’ be straight ‘bout women college. Now don’givadam. (…) Seek pleasure where find it for to-morrow die. ‘At’s philosophy for me now on.”
Amory had loved Rosalind as he would never love another living person. She had taken the first flush of his youth and brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had surprised him, gentleness and unselfishness that he had never given to another creature. He had later love-affairs, but of a different sort: in those he went back to that, perhaps, more typical frame of mind, in which the girl became the mirror of a mood in him.
Book 2, Chapter 3: Young Irony
Quotes
Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty.
“Rotten, rotten old world,” broke out Eleanor suddenly, “and the wretchedest thing of all is me—oh, why am I a girl? (…) Here I am with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony.”
