Dec 17, 2009

The Duchess and the Jeweller | Characters

Oliver Bacon, the jeweler, is really the only developed character in the short story. The Duchess is more of a stock figure, entering Bacon's office with "the aroma, the prestige, the arrogance, the pomp" of any of her kind, explicitly represented as "all the Dukes and Duchesses swollen in one wave." Like an effective political cartoon, she has a dominant feature, in this case the image of the wave, which Woolf, in a metaphoric flourish, uses to convey her presence:

And as a wave breaks, she broke, as she sat down, spreading and splashing and falling over Oliver...