SUMMARY, by Elisa Sola Ramos
A man and a woman meet after six years apart. The story is a conversation between them in a café, through which we know details of their relationship and their personality.
During the conversation, it’s revealed that Vera split
up by letter, and he was very touched. We also know that their personalities are
very different, quite opposite: fantasy is dominating in Vera’s mind, and he
seems to be very practical and even stingy. The reader is behind Vera’s mind:
we know her feelings, her name (Vera), but we don’t know the inner feelings of
the man, who doesn’t have a name. He’s a flat character or an archetype: a white
upper-class man, good-looking (in Vera’s words: “far better good-looking than
he had been [in the past]”), with a lot of money that allows him to travel...
He appears as a self-confident character: “he had the air of a man who has
found his place in life”.
On the contrary, Vera has not been able to travel
because she is poor (she had to sell her piano), she’s completely alone, and she seems to be very unstable.
One thing that highlights the differences between them
is that their memories about the same fact don’t match: he remembers one
afternoon in a Chinese pagoda as a wonderful day, and she remembers the maniac
behaviour of him “infuriated out of proportion about the wasps”. In another
point of the story, when he recollects the night when he brought a little
Christmas tree, he remembers how he could speak about his childhood, and she
remembers how stingy he had been with a pot of caviare, which had cost seven
and sixpence, and he compared eating caviare with eating money. Not to mention
that he couldn’t remember his dog’s name, and she did.
In spite of all of that, she is willing to give up
herself, to renounce her vision of the facts (“his [vision] was the truer”) in
order to submit to a man, perhaps to be able to eat, perhaps for survival,
perhaps for emotional submission (another kind of sexist violence), who knows!
There are many metaphors that help the author to create
an atmosphere of sexual desire between the two former lovers or, at least, of Vera’s
sexual desire for him.
The first one is the orange. The image of him peeling
an orange with “his special way”, the smell and the colour, gives the image
that Vera wants to be “eaten” by him.
The second symbol is the veil and the collar. In the
beginning of the story, she “raised her veil and unbuttoned her high fur collar”
as a sign of opening herself, emotionally or sexually, like a bride. The same
image, but reversed, appears at the end of the story: when she decides to
leave, “she had unbuttoned her collar again and drawn down her veil”. Thus,
the author takes up the powerful image of the bride to close symbolically their relationship.
Another symbol is the glove. She explains that “she
was that glove that he held in his fingers”.
The beast she has inside her is another image, a beast
which was “hungry” and “pricked up its ears and began to purr...”. It’s like an
inner force that contrasts with the self-possession of a woman of her class and time.
The last erotic symbol is the dill pickle, which is a
trigger for Vera’s romantic imagination. She completes the explanation about
the scene in the Volga with her own imagination: “She sucked in her cheeks; the
dill pickle was terribly sour...” It’s a comic effect: juxtaposing the
romantic scene in an exotic frame with this prosaic gift and her imagination.
Throughout the conversation, there are many details
that describe a very asymmetrical relationship between the couple. She remembers
how he used to interrupt her in the middle of what she was saying. (It has been
studied that women are much more interrupted than men in large company
meetings, and this trait is a sign of sexist behaviour.) Then, after silencing
her, he says that he likes her voice -the sound-, but not the content of what
she’s saying. It’s an irony. He’s playing with her. All the time, he flirts with
her (he highlights the things that unit them) in order to hook her, because he
knows her dreamy and romantic character. He’s getting his revenge.
The two characters are completely different. They live
in different worlds. The man is Vera’s romantic opponent, and, in the end, we can
have doubts as to his being a rich man because he doesn’t want to pay the small
cream bill. He’s a liar, or he’s a stingy man.
On the other side, Vera doesn’t have either a very good position, because she is ready to give up herself in order to have a husband. Both characters aren’t very well treated by the author.
Some people say that A Dill Pickle is a feminist story by Katherine Mansfield, but I’m not sure about that. Despite the fact that the figure of the man is completely negative, ridiculous, maniac and cruel, the image of the woman is not better: shallow, unstable and unclear.
QUESTIONS
-What can be his special way to peel an orange? Do you
know a singular case of doing something?
-To your view, what does the orange symbolize?
-Do you like being interrupted? What do you do when
someone interrupts you?
-What do you know about Kew Gardens?
-What can you tell us about the Black Sea?
-Why did she know he had been mocking?
-What is the meaning of the dill pickle in the
story?
-Why do you think the man has no name?
-According to you, why does she go away so suddenly?
VOCABULARY
daffodils, muff, meant to, loathe, sniggering, purr, ringers