Summary
The second section of I for Isobel begins with one of Isobel's girlhood memories: she had come home from school during a rainstorm and had seen a pink fireball appear. Isobel's mother, however, regarded the young Isobel as a liar and treated the fireball as little more than another manifestation of her daughter's habitual dishonesty. Isobel has also been known to "forget" her school money and was chastised for carelessness by her mother, though here the truth may be that Isobel's family was in a bad financial state. In her despair over her qualities, Isboel compares herself to Eileen O'Brien, another young girl who has a reputation for lying, and frets over how the nuns in her community might react if they believe that she is lying to them.
Fortunately, Isobel finds solace from such day-to-day problems in bedtime contemplation. She is presently devising a melodramatic story, in which a young actor named Robert is fleeing his father's bodyguards. Though Robert is in a panic, his friends Gerald and Angelo contemplate ways to help him escape his dilemma. Brilliant plays, sword fights, and moments of tenderness among these characters crowd Isobel's mind, yet she considers that these characters have displaced her Catholic devotion to Jesus and Mary, and thus made her redemption difficult. With so many seeming "lies" leading her away from religion, Isobel reflects that she might be able to repent on her deathbed, though even this process might not be foolproof.
Isobel then thinks over a set of particularly unpleasant incidents from her family life, the times when her mother would ask her "Do you love me?" in a nagging, sentimental, repetitive manner. After a night of reflecting on all these tensions, Isobel is kept home from school and then sent to a different convent school. Her mother then has a talk with the parish priest; as a result, Isobel is reinstated at her old school.
Later on, Isobel, her mother, and her sister Margaret take a bus ride to visit some well-off relatives. Margaret asks what happened to a gold bracelet that she had once possessed; Isobel's mother replies that Isobel herself had lost the bracelet. However, Isobel feels certain that this explanation is untrue. She even remembers a conversation between her mother and Auntie Ann. In this brief discussion, Isobel's mother hinted that a diamond necklace of hers had made its way to a mysterious "solicitor," and Isobel herself is convinced that the gold bracelet is with the "solicitor" as well. One way or another, Isobel feels no need to object to what her mother has just told Margaret. She is secure in her own sense of what is true and false.
Analysis
At least when compared to "The Birthday Present," "False Idols and a Fireball" can be a perplexing read. This section is thematically centered on the question of Isobel's honesty, but does not possess the single slow-burning conflict of the section that precedes it. Though still an unpleasant and antagonistic presence, Isobel's mother does not clash with Isobel herself in any especially dramatic way. Witting's prose continues to move swiftly through Isobel's thoughts, fancies, and perceptions, yet sometimes without filling in or lingering over the full story. It is easy to misread Gerald and Antonio as character's from a book that Isobel reads in bed, not characters from Isobel's own whimsies, if you omit the important detail that Isobel mostly contemplates these characters in the dark. It is also easy to miss the subtext of Isobel's switch of schools, which is driven by her mother's problematic finances.
Yet at this point, Witting also brings into focus one of the most interesting yet unsettling aspects of Isobel's relationship with her mother: the destructive intent behind measures, on the mother's part, that are not especially dramatic or violent. Isobel's mother whittles away at her daughter's self-esteem, first, with the vision of her daughter as a liar. As she tells Isobel after the fireball incident, "you don't know whether you're telling the truth or not" (19). Over time, such contempt leads Isobel to panic over being caught lying; one of her darker imaginings is of an imposing nun who declaims, "A born liar, that Isobel! That child is incapable of telling the truth" (21). Nor is this the only belittling tactic that Isobel's mother uses: the infantilizing "Do you love me?" sequence is an especially pointed way to insult an advanced, intelligent daughter.
"False Idols and a Fireball" also adds an important new thematic element to Isobel's narrative, serving as the novel's first intensive or extended look at Isobel's Catholic upbringing. Isobel's exposure to Christian dogma helps to explain her trepidation where lying is concerned. Moreover, Catholicism and Christianity are important because they clash with one of the other formative influences in Isobel's life - her immersion in a private world of literature and the imagination. At this point, she is both drawn to characters such as Gerald and Angelo and sees them as evidence that she is "a born liar" (27). Isobel has not yet realized, as an adult reader or writer would, that literature can be its own form of devotion and can actually reveal not lies but the truths of human nature.
For all its departures from "The Birthday Present," Witting's second section ends on a similarly positive note. The closing paragraphs of "False Idols and a Fireball" find Isobel confident in her own perceptions: "She had seen a fireball, too. She could never be mistaken about that" (28). Taken together, the early accounts of Isobel's life suggest that Isobel possesses the strength of character that she needs to move beyond both her mother's enmity and her own moments of insecurity. The real drama of I for Isobel, perhaps, is not whether Isobel can evolve beyond the detriments of her upbringing, but how she will decide to evolve.
