Isabella (condensed) Flashcards
Isabella’s lack of hamartia
‘Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel!’
Expected submission of women
‘lisped tenderly,/ Lorenzo!-here she ceased her timid quest.’
Lorenzo’s low status
‘Lorenzo, a young palmer in loves eye’
‘the servant of their trade designs’
Love as debilitating
‘They could not in the self-same mansion dwell/ Without some stir of heart, some malady’
Love associated with natural imagery
‘like a lusty flower in June’s caress’
Prophetic interjections from the narrator
‘too many tears for lovers have been shed’
the brothers as exploitative capitalist forces
‘enriched by ancestral merchandise’
‘money bags’
‘each richer for his being a murderer’
Narrators disapproval of the brothers
‘Why were they proud’
‘these men of cruel clay’
‘serpents’
Isabella associated with bird imagery
‘Fair Isabella in her downy nest’
‘patient as a hen bird’
the brothers desire for Isabella to marry a Nobel man
‘Twas their plan to coax her by degrees/ To some high Nobel and his olive-trees’
Conservative ethics of interclass relations
‘they fixed upon a surest way/ to make the youngster for his crime atone’
the plot of the brothers
‘these men of cruel clay/ Cut Mercy with a sharp knife to the bone’
‘There is crime-a brother’s bloody knife!’
Lorenzo’s respectful nature
‘Lorenzo, courteously as he won’t/ Bow’d a fair greeting to these serpent’s whine’
The goodbye
‘and as he went she chanted merrily’
Isabella’s peripeteia
‘So sweet Isabel/ By gradual decay from beauty fell’
‘And she forgot the moon and the stars and the sun/ And she forgot the blue above the trees’
‘Youth and beauty should be thrown aside/ By one marked out to be a Nobel’s bride’
