How soft and gentle her name sounds when I whisper it. It lingers on the tongue, insidious and slow, almost like poison, which is apt indeed. It passes from the tongue to the parched lips, and from the lips back to the heart. And the heart controls the body, and the mind also. Shall I be free of it one day? In forty, in fifty years?
The past year has been quite an ordeal for Philip. That the narration is occurring in a present not that far removed from the past which it accounts must be noted. Many first-person narratives are like memoirs which are recounted from a distant point in the future long enough to provide room for greater perspective. Philip is here describing Rachel after her death, but that death is still a relatively recent event in his memory. The confused commingling of ambiguous emotions reflected her are a solid indication that not nearly enough time has passed for the young man—still in his twenties—to have drawn some conclusions which can assist him psychologically.
I have wondered lately if, when he died, his mind clouded and tortured by doubt and fear, feeling himself forsaken and alone in that damned villa where I could not reach him, whether his spirit left his body and came home here to mine, taking possession, so that he lived again in me, repeating his own mistakes, caught the disease once more and perished twice.
The ambiguity extends throughout the psychology of the narration. Philip must be judged something of an unreliable narrator; at the very least, he must be judged psychologically fragile. Here, he is situating the concept of a sort of transmigration of the soul. His uncle, Ambrose Ashley, not only raised him as a child following Philip’s being orphaned, but also married their distant cousin, the enigmatic Rachel. Not long after the marriage, he died under circumstances mysterious enough to spur Philip’s suspicion—and his conflicted feelings toward Rachel. The transmigration theory makes a kind of sense when one connects it to inheritance. Philip has inherited his uncle’s estate…and inherited Rachel.
“There is a particular affliction of the brain, present above all when there is a growth, or tumor, when the sufferer becomes troubled by delusions. He fancies, for instance, that he is being watched. That the person nearest to him, such as a wife, has either turned against him, or is unfaithful, or seeks to take his money. No amount of love or persuasion can allay this suspicion, once it takes hold. If you don’t believe me, or the doctors here, ask your own countrymen, or read this book.”
Philip believes that Rachel has set to the task of murdering his uncle because of what his uncle has written in his letters. But there is another explanation: that Ambrose Ashley’s paranoia resulted not from Rachel’s malevolence, but a brain tumor. Signor Rainaldi is a close friend of Rachel—both Ambrose and Philip believe a very close friend of Rachel—and Philip is natural reluctant to accept this explanation from him. Which can only lead the reader to question whether Philip is also suffering from paranoia which leads him down the wrong road of suspicion. Is Rachel a murderer? Or the victim of a deteriorating brain?
Somewhere there was a bitter creature, crabbed and old, hemmed about with lawyers; somewhere a larger Mrs. Pascoe, loud-voiced, arrogant; somewhere a petulant spoiled doll, with corkscrew curls; somewhere a viper, sinuous and silent. But none of them was with me in this room.
Philip has come to know Rachel only second-hand and mostly through the letters written by uncle. But, as indicated above, his uncle’s narrative of the events may be less than reliable. Nevertheless, by the time he actually meets her, Philip has already strongly constructed that part of his conflicted emotions ready to see “her as a malevolent, like a spider.” When they finally meet in the flesh for the first time, that spider-woman is firmly imprinted on his mind which, of course, only eases the ability of Rachel to being the process of fracturing it. What had been a simple Renaissance representational portrait of Rachel soon becomes something more along the lines of a Cubist painting.
