Tom Rymour: As a
widower who remarried, I can confirm that a jewel case may
be appropriated in short order. Hoping that there's no
postunnurost...
JM: Shade's
scheduled "paradise" has to keep careful registers and
archives, if widowers aren't allowed to to meet any former
lovers, except their serially, lawfully-wedded. wives. Elysian
bureacracy!
btw: The widower, in PF, has been
twice widowed, or so I gather. Wasn't the second wife already
waiting around in "Elysium" (with an averted face), when the husband
finally got there?
After reading Tom's, and Matt's,
considerations about Hazel and Shade ("And she,
the second love, with instep bare/ In ballerina black, why does she wear/ The
earrings from the other’s jewel case?/ And why does she avert her fierce young
face?"), I suddenly remembered Du Maurier's novel, "Rebecca," and,
in particular, Hitchcock's 1940 movie, based on her novel. I should have
visualized a scene with emerald ear-rings, if there is one, when the
second wife wears the other woman's costume-dress. A haunting rival but in
PF the haunting must have been Aunt Maud's: wasn't her room "kept
intact", like Rebecca's ?
Matt Roth's lines from Mary Shelley's
"Mathilda" are convincingly close to the Hazel idea and the
matter of romantic oedipal fixations (Matt, what do you make out
of Percy B.Shelley's own drama, "The Cenci"?)