Byatt describes these seances and the people who attend them - a compilation of the pompous, the ludicrous, the pathetic, the tragic and the sincere - the story of Arthur's life and death, of his connection to the Tennysons, and of the composition of Alfred's poem gradually unfolds.įor nine years after Arthur's death, Emily dedicated herself to his memory, until Richard Jesse persuaded her to marry him - a decision that was treated as a betrayal by Alfred and by the Hallams. The circle has been trying without success to make contact with Arthur. Jesse, the former Emily Tennyson who was engaged to Arthur Hallam more than 40 years earlier. The spiritualist circle includes Captain and Mrs. William's journal documenting his entomological observations and Matty's insect tTC fairy tale are woven into the text. Unable - to travel abroad to conduct his research, he is coaxed by Matty Crompton, the Alabasters' acerbic, intelligent governess, to study the ant and bee colonies on the estate. William feels superfluous - at best tolerated, at worst ridiculed by the Alabaster clan. Eugenia is compared to a second insect, a rapacious and self-centered queen ant, who uses the male in order to breed offspring and then discards him. William is also a captive, sexually in thrall to Eugenia, who very soon becomes pregnant with twin daughters, then a son, and another pair of twin daughters - all pale, blond Alabasters. It also refers, by extension, to Eugenia Alabaster, whom William woos by devising a cloud of butterflies to hatch around her in the conservatory: "She turned round and round, and the butterflies circled, and the captive water splashed in its little bowl." "Morpho Eugenia" refers to a rare species of butterfly William collected in the rain forest and managed to save from the shipwreck. William falls in love with one of Harald's daughters - beautiful, pale (naturally, all the Alabasters are pale) Eugenia - and, to his astonishment, he wins her hand. William has the unenviable job of cataloging Harald's scientific collection, which causes him "moments of real irritability that treasures for which men like himself had risked life and health should lie here higgledy-piggledy, and decay in an English stable."
The year is 1859 the place, Bredely Hall, the Alabaster estate.
In "Morpho Eugenia," William Adamson, naturalist and Amazon explorer, is taken in by patron Harald Alabaster, a landed gentleman and amateur collector, after William has survived a terrifying shipwreck that destroyed almost all his specimens. A key character, the sea captain Arturo Papagay, makes a cameo appearance in both novellas. The second, "The Conjugial Angel," set in the shadowy realm of seances and spiritualism, reconstructs the story of Arthur Hallam - the brilliant youth, dead at 22, who inspired Alfred, Lord Tennyson's great poem "In Memoriam" and who was betrothed to Tennyson's sister, Emily. The first, "Morpho Eugenia," develops themes based on 19th-century science, specifically studies of insects conducted in the wake of Darwin's theories of evolution.
0 kommentar(er)
