the duchess and the jewler

Like Virginia Woolf’s critically acclaimed Mrs. Dalloway, her short story The Duchess and the Jeweller is a study about how everyone and everything is connected; the poor to the rich, the past to the present, the body to the soul, man to animal. She does not simply explain that these things are true, she shows it through the actions, dialogue and very existence of the characters, so that the reader will never be presented with irrefutable evidence of her relative theory.

In the first paragraph, words, mostly material objects possessed only by the wealthy, are repeated. She is writing close to the point of view of Oliver Bacon, the jeweller, and the repetitive words are the way a man who once was very poor would look at his room, perhaps unconsciously saying the words over and over in his head (“…chairs jutted out…chairs at right angles…windows, three long windows…by a manservant: the manservant would…“) because he did not always possess these things, he is very aware of them, and something inside of him is still not entirely assured that these things truly belong to him.

Woolf goes on to show that Oliver Bacon has a physical characteristic who is linked to the very essence of his ambition; a nose that is so long it quivers and the quivering reaches deep inside, keeping everything within him dissatisfied, like “a giant hog in a pasture rich with truffles [that] smells a bigger, blacker truffle under the ground further off.”

However, Oliver Bacon is not just a ground-truffling hog. He has come a long way from selling stolen dogs to rich women in alleyways. As the world’s most sought-after jeweller, he now has prestige, dignity and the power to makes a duchess wait on him, “the daughter of a hundred earls” and in a sense, all of those earls are waiting as well, for she carries them with her: “Then she loomed up, filling the door, filling the room with the aroma, the prestige, the arrogance, the pomp, the pride of all the Dukes and Duchesses swollen in one