How we cite our quotes: (Part.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Since Rachel Baffin is one of the main actors, in a crucial sense perhaps the main actor, in my drama I should like now to pause briefly to describe her. I had known her for over twenty years, almost as long as I had known Arnold, yet at the time that I speak of I did not really, as I later realized, know her well. There was a sort of vagueness. Some women, in fact in my experience many women, have a sort of 'abstract' quality about them. Is this a real sex difference? (1.3.38)
Hmm. Or maybe, Brad, it has something to do with your own perception of women, or with the teensy-weensy slivers of real attention that you bother to pay to their ideas, feelings, and concerns? Just a thought.
Quote #2
Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines. […] Rachel was an intelligent woman married to a famous man: and instinctively such a woman behaves as a function of her husband, she reflects, as it were, all the light onto him. Her 'blankness' repelled even curiosity. One does not expect such a woman to have ambition: whereas Arnold and I were both, in quite different ways, tormented, perhaps even defined, by ambition. (1.3.38)
Something tells us that Bradley Pearson wouldn't think highly of women like Yoko Ono, Jackie Onassis, Margaret Trudeau, Marie Curie, Michelle Obama, Virginia Woolf…need we go on?
Quote #3
The sound of that abandoned weeping was scarcely bearable, and something far too intense to be called embarrassment, yet of that quality, made me both reluctant and anxious to look at her. A woman's crying can sicken one with fright and guilt, and this was terrible crying. (1.3.43)
In The Black Prince, Bradley Pearson demonstrates that the crying of both men and women is deeply disturbing to him. How is a woman's crying different from a man's crying, in his view, and why does it produce different responses?
Quote #4
Then she got terribly angry and lost control and screamed at me, and I hate that. I sort of pushed her to stop her screaming and she clawed my face, see, she made quite a mark on me, God, it still hurts. I felt quite frightened and I just hit her to make her stop. I can't stand screaming and noise and anger, and they are frightening. She was yelling like a fury and saying awful things about my work and I just hit her with my hand to stop the hysterics, but she went on coming at me and coming at me, and then I picked up the poker from the fireplace just to hold it between us as a barrier, and just at that moment she jerked her head, she was dancing round me like a wild animal, and she jerked her head down and met the poker with a most ghastly crack…. (1.3.60)
Although Bradley Pearson does it more than anyone else, he isn't the only man in The Black Prince who uses animal imagery to describe the women in his life. In passages like this one, women like Rachel Baffin become dehumanized—depicted more as animals, demons, or mythical monsters than as sympathetic human beings.
Quote #5
He has taken my whole life from me. He has spoilt the world. I am as clever as he is. He has just blocked me off from everything. I can't work, I can't think, I can't be, because of him. His stuff crawls over everything, he takes away all my things and turns them into his things. I've never been myself or lived my own life at all. I've always been afraid of him, that's what it comes to. All men despise all women really. All women fear all men really. Men are physically stronger, that's what it comes to, that what's behind it all [sic]. Of course they're bullies, they can end any argument. (1.3.100)
Although Bradley Pearson himself doesn't put much stock in the things that Rachel Baffin is saying here, the novel itself suggests that women like Rachel do face some unique difficulties, particularly when they're encouraged to define themselves entirely as their husbands' wives rather than as independent people with personalities and ambitions of their own.
Quote #6
It's sort of shock and relief, you know. I'm probably being unfair to Rachel, and it isn't as bad as it sounds, in fact it isn't bad at all. One must make allowances. At the age she's reached women always become a little bit odd. It passes, I imagine. I suppose they sort of review their lives. There must be a sense of loss, a feeling of the final parting with youth. A tendency to be hysterical isn't too uncommon, I suppose. (1.3.166)
In Bradley Pearson's narrative, Bradley himself isn't the only one who thinks of women—and middle-aged women in particular—as moody, irrational beings who are prone to fits of hysteria. There are moments when Arnold Baffin's opinion of his wife, Rachel, is just as poor as Bradley's view of her.
Quote #7
Priscilla has no zeal and talents and made no efforts. She was spoilt by my mother whom she resembled. I think women, perhaps unconsciously, convey to female children a deep sense of their own discontent. My mother, though not too unhappily married, had a continued grudge against the world. (1.6.2)
What would a feminist reinterpretation of these observations look like? As Bradley Pearson realizes later in the novel, married women in his day and age sometimes have good reason to feel discontented with their lots in life. Why might such women choose to communicate such feelings to their daughters, or communicate them unconsciously, without making an active choice?
Quote #8
Stop, please. I'm not doing you any good by listening to your complaints. You're in a thoroughly nervous silly state. Women of your age often are. You're simply not rational, Priscilla. I daresay Roger has been tiresome, he's a very selfish man, but you'll just have to forgive him. Women just have to put up with selfish men, it's their lot. You can't leave him, there isn't anywhere else for you to go. (1.7.49)
Ugh. Talk about giving some loving sibling advice. Bradley Pearson certainly isn't about to win any awards for Most Understanding Brother anytime soon. Although let's face it: most of the characters in this novel fail to understand each other on any real level.
Quote #9
No one had thought to pull the curtains back and the room was still twilit. There was a horrible smell. I patted the heaving mass of blankets. Only a little of her hair was visible, with a dirty line of grey at the roots of the gold. Her hair was dry and brittle, more like some synthetic fibre than like human hair. I felt disgust and helpless pity and a prowling desire to vomit. I sat for a time patting her with the awkward ineffectual gesture of a small child trying to pat an animal. (1.7.111)
This isn't the first time that Bradley Pearson's descriptions of the middle-aged women in his life dehumanizes those women, and it won't be the last. Although it's hard to say if all of Francis Marloe's opinions of Bradley are right, it certainly seems that there's something to it when he suggests that Bradley hates and fears women, deep down.
Quote #10
Rachel left me. I saw her disappear into the crowd, her battered blue handbag swinging, the plump pale flesh on her upper arm oscillating a little, her hair tangled, her face dazed and tired. With an automatic hand she had scooped up the hanging shoulder strap. Then I saw her again, and again and again. Oxford Street was full of tired ageing women with dazed faces, pushing blindly against each other like a herd of animals. I ran across the road and northwards towards my flat. (1.21.134)
Remember that earlier scene in which Bradley Pearson compares his attempts to comfort his sister to "the ineffectual gesture of a small child trying to pat an animal" (1.7.111)? In this scene, Bradley goes even further in seeing the middle-aged women around him as less than human. From his point of view, they're as mindless and distraught as cattle or sheep. No wonder Bradley falls for the young, boyish Julian rather than an adult woman.