![]() In expressing her anger, Mary also exposes her own feeling of being disturbed by Moses. When Mary whips Moses, the source of her impropriety-with respect to the unwritten rules of Southern Rhodesian racism-is not the violence but rather the emotion she puts behind the violence. What had happened was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by the personal relation and when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip. Dick can continually look the to future, but Mary already sees herself on the other side of wasted years this thought sends her into the despair we witness in the free indirect discourse of this passage. Mary realizes that all of her and Dick's plans to make money and resolve their debts, whether by raising pigs or planting tobacco, will likely end in naught. ![]() The miraculous reprieve was not going to be granted. It would certainly mean no more than a partial recovery. Dick's ineptitude with the farm disturbs her. Narrator, 134Įven though Mary feels a sense of self-satisfaction after taking control of some farm operations while Dick is sick, ultimately she does not see herself as a person to run the place or to take Dick's place. She needed a man stronger than herself, and she was trying to create one out of Dick. When she saw him weak and goalless, and pitiful, she hated him, and the hate turned in on herself. She needed to think of Dick, the man to whom she was irrevocably married, as a person on his own account, a success from his own efforts. When one, who we later learn is called Moses, does not immediately obey her, she feels deeply offended and ends up hitting him in the face with a sjambok. When Dick falls ill with malaria, Mary, already easily irritated by the native houseboys, goes to supervise the fieldworkers. And she saw in his eyes that sullen resentment, and-what put the finishing touch to it-amused contempt. She opened her mouth to storm at him, but remained speechless. That lazy insolence stung her into an inarticulate rage. ![]() ![]() ![]() The thought that she will therefore have to continue living in poverty makes her feel trapped and helpless. Narrator, 94Īs she spends more time married to Dick, Mary realizes that she cannot change how he thinks, nor can she influence him to run their farm better. The women who marry men like Dick learn sooner or later that there are two things they can do: they can drive themselves mad, tear themselves to pieces in storms of futile anger and rebellion or they can hold themselves tight and go bitter. This leads her to wonder what other sorts of things she has been overlooking in the past. She realizes first of all that the man is making fun of Dick, but then, more significantly, she realizes that she would not have noticed the former's undertone of ridicule before. Narrator, 89ĭuring a visit to the station with Dick, Mary hears a farmer making a thinly concealed joke at her husband's expense. She wondered for the first time, whether she had been deluding herself. She who had once taken everything at its face value, never noticing the inflection of a phrase, or the look on a face which contradicted what was actually being said, spent the hour’s drive home considering the implications of that man’s gentle amusement at Dick. ![]()
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