Bea and Ellen
Posted by Cassia on November 11, 1997 at 14:27:00:
In response to Bea, written by Hil on November 10, 1997 at 21:06:29
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] However, I am not so sure that Bea actually knows Ellen's secrets. She knows how she thinks, we see that when everyone asks her why Ellen would have put Christabel's letter in with her own love letters. But I think she has never quite worked out what is at the basis of the bafflement.
Beatrice has worked out as much of the bafflement as anyone can. Ellen teases and tantilises; drops a load of information then retreats. She comes close to saying and quickly retreats. She wants the world to wonder, to have everyone chase their tails like a pack of mad dogs. Anything as long as no one knows the truth.
] Also, Ellen's act of burying the letter is equivocal...she half wants someone to find out about it, but when she is dead and gone. Its as though she doesn't quite believe that the privacy of death should be inviolate. So was Beatrice's desire to leave the box as knowing of Ellen as you imply? When the letter is opened, Bea is, of course, as interested and as moved (maybe more so)as anyone else. Maybe Bea is after all glad that they looked.
Part of fabric of bafflemnt that Ellen leaves behind is due her unwillingness to destroy anything to do with RH Ash. She cannot bring herself to destroy the letters, so she buries them and tells of their existence. She want us to know something went on but she will never say what it was. Coauld it be that she thought it wasn't her place? She says that in one way Christabel is more a wife to Randolf than she. Perhaps to her way of thinking to reveal would have been to harm and this she would not have but to say nothing at all would be harm of a different sort and she wouldn't have that either. Ellen never grew used to making decisions, remember the incident with Bertha, hiding gave her yet another tool against decision making.
Bea is on Ellen's side more than anyone else. She wants Ellen's secrets to remain secret because that is how Ellen would have it. Yet, I do agree Bea benefits when the box is opened. She is a natural detective as well as the others.
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