Edwin does come across brutal and unpleasant, though he strikes me as the sort of emotionally repressed man for whom anger is the only acceptable means of expression. In fairness, he's been through a stressful time (separation, death, prospective loss of children, pressured into a marriage he has doubts about), and he probably found the confident, challenging Marlows would be hard to cope with.
My sense of Edwin is of an awkward intellectual who has been raised under a cold-showers-to-toughen-'em-up regime of discipline where any sign of rebellion or emotional vulnerability is something to be ridiculed and quashed. A strict boys' boarding school or brutal father, perhaps.
I've met men with that combination of intellectual rigour and emotional repression. Maybe Edwin was attracted to Rosemary because her warmth and gentleness, which he both craved and despised, and she to him because there's something deeply touching about being the one to lure the broken child out of the beast. She had to live with both, though, and perhaps seeing the beast in Edwin-as-father was what led her to leave. What does Edwin do then? He latches onto another nice, unthreatening woman, the much younger Karen, and then commandeers her to provide his children with the warmth he on some level understands to be desirable but could never provide himself.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-01-22 01:01 am (UTC)My sense of Edwin is of an awkward intellectual who has been raised under a cold-showers-to-toughen-'em-up regime of discipline where any sign of rebellion or emotional vulnerability is something to be ridiculed and quashed. A strict boys' boarding school or brutal father, perhaps.
I've met men with that combination of intellectual rigour and emotional repression. Maybe Edwin was attracted to Rosemary because her warmth and gentleness, which he both craved and despised, and she to him because there's something deeply touching about being the one to lure the broken child out of the beast. She had to live with both, though, and perhaps seeing the beast in Edwin-as-father was what led her to leave. What does Edwin do then? He latches onto another nice, unthreatening woman, the much younger Karen, and then commandeers her to provide his children with the warmth he on some level understands to be desirable but could never provide himself.