Reading 1001 discussion

7. How would you describe Mary Oates: is she really merely "good" and "dull" [p. 212] as her sister sees her? Just how astute is she about her husband? From the time of Lizzie's fatal illness, Mary begins to hate her husband, and this hatred eventually "would penetrate the deepest reaches of her soul and make her into the slow and famously dim-witted creature who was commonly thought not to understand half of what her famous husband said" [p. 342]. This sentence implies that earlier, she was neither slow nor dim-witted. What do you think?

Mary was not that naive or dim-witted at the beginning of the book . She eventually put two and two together and figured out what was going on between her sister and her husband.

I think the combination of guilt, betrayal, and resentment changed her. Her personality change was perhaps a coping mechanism that allowed her to continue living with a man she despised and live with the pain of her sister's death.

I read it another way I read it as she deliberately become dull witted and pretended not to understand him as a way to punish him for what had happened.

I agree with Diane. She was no fool, that Mary.

And was this a commentary on Dickens' wife, who eventually left him? She had a sister, living in the same household, who died aged 17. She had another sister, whom rumours linked to Dickens, too. So was Mary more of Dickens wife, than, perhaps, Oates was of Dickens?