In the last dramatic chapters of the novel, it becomes apparent that each of the characters is involved in some sort of unrequited love and each relationship is left in misery. (Sorry the diagram left out someone, if anyone doesn't know this is Roderick's spot). The love that is most intriguing to me however, is Roderick's love and constant pursuit of pure beauty, as manifested in Christina Light, which leads to his ultimate self-destruction. As an artist, Roderick wrestles with the concept of pure beauty in sculpture, and thought that for sure he had found this essential beauty in Christina Light. "To see Christina sit there in the purity of her beauty and say this, might have made one bow one's head with a kind of awe (309)." Despite the consistent awe that Christina evoked from others, Rowland quickly became aware of the danger of her beauty. "Yet Rowland remembered his first impression of her; she was 'dangerous,' and she had measured in each direction the perturbing effect of her rupture (298)." Christina even alludes to her own awareness of her corruptive effect: "I am fond of being looked at. I am corrupt, corrupting, corruption (310)!" This ideal of beauty, found in Christina, so entranced Roderick that he admited he would have sacrificed everything in his life to have her. Can we blame Roderick for losing himself over this girl? What does it show about his character that he would give everything to attain this one object of perfect beauty? Roderick insists that Christina did everything that she could to lead him to believe he could have her ... "everything that her infernal coquetry and falsity could suggest (324)." She doesn't even let him go once she is married: "we shall meet again! (367) However, when Roderick was without this object of beauty, he became depressed, lifeless, dead. "An essential spring had dried up within him, and there as no visible spiritual law for making it flow again (334)." His path to destruction began: "clad always in white, roamed about like a restless ghost (340)."
He starts to bemoan the beauty of the world and how it mocked him: "Beautiful! he cried; 'of course it's beautiful! Everything is beautiful; everything is insolent, defiant, atrocious, with beauty. Nothing is ugly but me - me and my poor dead brain!" On page 348 he speaks of his desire to die buried in an open grave, and he wishes to be remembered "with a sense of beauty and sweetness of life." However, when he sees Christina for the last time he feels that she has "waked" him and makes him feel alive again.
Rowland's death is actually everything he wished it to be. He becomes a beautiful corpse. "The whole face seemed to awake. The rain had washed away all blood; it was as if Violence, having done her work, had stolen away in shame. Roderick's face might have shamed her; it looked admirably handsome (386)." Singleton mentions how beautiful he was, and Rowland turns to drink in the sunshine with closed eyes; an anomaly of a death scene. Roderick's corpse lies peacefully in a pastoral scene: a picturesque image. In seeking the one ideal object of beauty, he failed, only to become an object of beauty in death. Observation and perception have been major themes throughout the novel, the corpse now is being observed and perceived as a painting would.
What does the destructive and dangerous nature of beauty here reveal about femininity?
What do we make of the fact that Roderick never regreted anything, and never noticed his selfishness during his time with Rowland?
Would Roderick have self-destructed with this unfulfilled lust for 'beauty' if Rowland had not pressured him to produce sculpture? Can we blame his death on the overwhelming expectation of his mother? Did Rowland cause his death? Did Christina?
Why did Rowland keep quiet until the very end about his feelings toward Roderick and Mary?
What did Mary think that Rowland thought of her? (see scene with flower retrieval)
Belief in others seems to play a large role in the novel, starting with Rowland's initial belief in Roderick.
what do we make of this line?
"'It's very strange!' said Roderick presently. 'It's like something in a novel.'" (377)
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