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| Julia Cameron, photo of Ellen Terry (1864) |
Answer TWO of the following:
Q1: What does Olalla mean when she asks the narrator, “Is it
me you love, friend? or the race that made me?...We speak of the soul, but the
soul is in the race” (131). According to this speech, what is preventing her
from accepting the narrator’s love? What does she fear he sees--or loves--instead of "her"?
Q2: How does the narrator use the term “race” throughout
this story, and particularly in regards to the family? Though the family is
from noble stock, why does he see himself as superior to them? Does it have something to do with his English identity?
Q3: Why does the narrator fall so desperately (and
foolishly?) in love with Olalla, a woman he only glimpses from a chance
meeting, and has never spoken with? How might this resemble previous lovers in
other stories, particularly in a sentence like this one: “Love burned in me like
rage; tenderness waxed fierce; I hated, I adored, I pitied, I revered her with
ecstasy” (126)?
Q4: The presence of the portrait in his room (as well as the
portraits throughout the house) suggests the old Romantic argument of life vs.
art as we read in Ode on a Grecian Urn. How does his comparison of the
‘dead’ family with the ‘living’ family influence his actions, and make him
respond to the statement, “beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on
earth, and all ye need to know”?
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