CH 28

-         girls are insane

-         “mental illness of the hysteric kind for what it is: a pitiable striving for love and security”

-         “reason and science dissolved; life was a dark machine, a sinister astrology, a verdict at birth without appeal, a zero overall.”

-         “Because he [charles] was more concerned to save appearances than his own soul.”

 

CH 29

-         “with the same divine assumption of possession, a roe deer looked up …”

o       p 239

-         “Charles felt himself walking through the pages of a bestiary, and one of such beauty, such minute dictinctness that every lead in it .. came from a perfect world.”

-         “the Announcing Angel of evolution: I am what I am, thou shalt not pass my being being now.”

o       The narrator doesn’t know what he thinks about evolution

-         “immediate bitterness in this natural eucharist since Charles felt in all ways excommunicated.  He was shut out, all paradise lost”

-         “he could stand here in eden, but not enjoy it”

 

CH 30

 

-         on ms poulteneys face there were “burnt two pink spots of repressed emotion”

-         “two spots began to burn on sarahs cheeks as well”

 

CH 31

-         the Victorians “did not think naturally in opposites, of positives and negatives of the same whole”

-         “four or five seconds of intense repressed emotion passed”

-         To charles, in reference to sarah’s eyes: “what lay behind them did not matter”

o       He lusts for her physically

 

CH 32

 

-         on the middle class: “alone of the three great castes of society it sincerely and habitually despises itself.”

 

CH 33

-         Charles embrace w/ sarah: “he had flagrantly fanned the forbidden fire.”

 

CH 34

-         “biting somehow proved it was gold, just as being on the Undercliff proved it was sin.”

 

CH 35

-         opens by talking of all the sin and all the religious rigamoral in victorian era

-         “The Victorians poured their libido into those other fields; as if some genie of evolution, feeling lazy, said to himself: We need some progress, so let us dam and divert this one great canal and see what happens”

-         “we have sex thrown at us night and day (as the Victorians had religion)”

-         p 269, paragraph about sex, forbidness of it and Victorianism

-         “this tension, then – between lust and renunciation … -- energizes and explains … the whole age itself”

 

CH 36

-         sarah: “then she tore off her bonnet and shook her hair loose in her characteristic way”

-         “then she began to eat, and without any delicacy whatsoever”

o       this chapter describes how sarah naturally behaves

Ch 37

-         on ernestina’s father: “in imitation of an earlier generation of puritan profiteers, who had also preferred hunting sin to hunting the fox – he had become excessively earnest and Christian in his private life”

-         Tina’s father asks charles to join him in commerce. Charles felt: “like Jesus of Nazareth tempted by Satan.”

 

CH 38

-         Charles is a “poor living fossil”

-         Marriage used to be “polite marriage was a publically accepted business contract”

-         “marriage now was a chaste and sacred union, a Christian ceremony for the creation of pure love.”

-         “one noble element in his rejection [of commerce]: a sense that the pursuit of money was an insufficient purpose in life.”

-         “he gained a queer sort of momentary self-respect in his nothingness, a sense that choosing to be nothing – to have nothing but prickles – was the last saving grace of a gentleman.; his last freedom, almost.”

o       “they all rejected or reject the notion of possession as the purpose of life

§         doesn’t religion do this also?

o       Narrator says “the scientist is but on more form; and will be superseded”

-         See charles for what he is: “a man struggling to overcome history”

-         “the meaning of life was not to be found in freeman’s store”

 

CH 39

-         Thomas burgh, the guy at the club: “his eyes had that splendid innocence, that opaque blue candor of the satanically fallen.”

o       There is some connection between intense eyes and satanically fallen

§         Sarah’s eyes

-         Going to whorehouse to: “worship at the muses’ shrine, don’t y’know?”

-         “he saw what all his troubles were caused by: he needed a woman, he needed intercourse.”

o       Earlier, he didn’t care what was behind sarah’s eyes

o       Sarah is just a convenient girl, nothing is too amazing about her other than the novelty of a girl itself.

-         “as he was revolted, so was he sexually irritated”

-         engagement vows hold him back, make him not free, black chains and stuff p 306

 

CH 40

-         prostitute, vomit

 

Ch 41

-         “never mind what his intention had been, he had not committed the fatal deed”

 

CH  

 

CH 43

-         “indeed it was hardly Sarah he now thought of – she was merely the symbol around which had accreted all his lost possibilities, his extinct freedoms, his never-to-be-taken journeys.  He had to say farewell to something; she was merely and conveniently both close and receding”

-         charles is a “potential turned to fossil”