Why is her name "Stone"?
Also, the first part of the book is called "A Cold Sun," plus there's a literal reference to a March evening where Paolo remarks that he doesn't like to be outdoors after the sun has lost its heat. "I hate a cold sun," he says, and one feels that his words allude also to his aging mistress, whose name unfortunately suggests "stone-cold."
I can't really make out how Williams is using this imagery, because Mrs. Stone really seems, maybe to a fault, the opposite of cold and hard. Any thoughts?
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When she was younger she was certainly cold and hard. But I agree that she no longer is. Do you think that Paolo needs to see her that way? He seems so self-centered that I wouldn’t think he would need to create rationalizations to justify his attempts to exploit Mrs. Stone, but maybe he does.
ReplyDeleteI took the “cold sun” as a parallel to Mrs. Stone’s lost beauty. She no longer has that radiance.
I'm with driftwood - I thought the "cold sun" referred to Mrs. Stone in her latter days. We're told that she still has a "certain grandeur," though, that's replaced her former beauty.
ReplyDeleteYes. And I hadn’t really thought about her name, but instead of coldness, might stone mean hardness in the sense of unchanging durability? And contrary to her expectation of being unchanged for the duration of her life, Mrs. Stone now finds herself much older and very much changed. Ill prepared, she must come to terms with this.
ReplyDeleteRocks don’t drift.