Gudrun the Objectifier

Holla holla, team! Is that too informal? Oh well, c'est la vie. Or YOLO. Whichever life motto you prefer.

In our discussion last Thursday (led by Chad, Emily, and Vincent, I believe?), the following passage was brought up for close-reading:

"Gudrun watched them closely, with objective curiosity. She saw each one as a complete figure, like a character in a book, or a subject in a picture, or a marionette in a theatre, a finished creation. She loved to recognise their various characteristics, to place them in their true light, give them their own surroundings, settle them for ever as they passed before her along the path to the church. She knew them, they were finished, sealed and stamped and finished with, for her" (14).

You may remember that in this close reading, I brought up the notion that Gudrun, at least in this passage, objectifies the wedding guests as they arrive in their carriages. She does not relate to these people subjectively, rather she observes them in an objective manner so as not to become attached. Gudrun places the guests in their "own surroundings" in her mind, taking each person in as an inanimate object which is to be categorized. This objectification has now been reiterated in this past weekend's reading:

"She sat with Gerald drinking some sweetish liqueur, and staring with black, sullen looks at the various groups of people at the tables. She would greet nobody, but young men nodded to her frequently, with a kind of sneering familiarity. She cut them all. And it gave her pleasure to sit there, cheeks flushed, eyes black and sullen, seeing them all objectively, as put away from her, like creatures in some menagerie of apish degraded souls. God, what a foul crew they were! Her blood beat black and thick in her veins with rage and loathing" (380).

This passage obviously differs in feel from the first, yet the meaning is still clear: Gudrun, on the whole, objectifies those whom she is unfamiliar with.

In the first passage, Gudrun's objectification of the wedding guests is explained to us as "objective curiostity," yet the detachment Gudrun invokes within the second passage seems to be a sort of self-defense. She feels uncomfortable and slightly better than her human counterparts at the Pompadour Cafe, and the only way she knows how to cope with this it to view them as nothing more than objects. I feel like these two passages really solidify the character of Gudrun for me and I'm glad I stumbled across the second passage in our most recent reading.