"And so?"

I picked the image of a dead pigeon because that scene in the story really stuck out to me (pages 402-413). It's full of violence, death, killing. There's also a lot of talk from Maryrose and the narrator about how beautiful the pigeons are and what a shame it is for them to die. I found this striking. Anna has repeatedly asserted that beautiful things save her, or give her "immunity." Yet here the characters are killing beautiful things and we are told all beautiful things must die (like Maryrose's butterflies). So do beautiful things really have any power to save at all?

My allusion/reference also comes from this scene. The group is in a kopje full of barricades built by the Mashona in defense of the Matabele. These two groups were native tribes to Rhodesia, and the Matabele attacked and killed many Mashona until Britain began to protect the Mashona. The Matabele were known for taking Mashona women captive as sexual prizes. On page 403, Paul says "Imagine... Here we are, a group of Mashona besieged. The Matabele approach, in all their horrid finery. We are outnumbered." Paul puts the group into the perspective of the victims, not the conquerors. I wondered why he chose to take that perspective and what he thought the looming danger was. I'm still not totally sure. What I did infer, however, had to do with the plight of women at the time. Anna and Maryrose both say they would rather kill themselves than be sexually imprisoned like the Mashona women (403). The men, however, assert that women love them "all the more for our brutality" (411). Obviously, the men here aren't listening to what the women say. The women would rather die than lose their freedom, but the men seem to believe that men that are warlike (taking women captive) are also virile and loved by the captured women. These two conflicting perspectives cannot both be true, can they? Are the problems in the novel's relationships because the men don't take enough control, or because they take too much? Love is submissive, and Anna would rather die than to submit.

As Mrs. Marks would say, "And so?"