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For Friday: Stevenson, “Olalla” (pp.101-138)


 
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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