Character Analysis
If you've taken a gander at Bradley Pearson's character analysis, then you'll already know that Bradley's sister, Priscilla Saxe, is one of the novel's two Ophelia figures. In fact, Priscilla is the novel's truest Ophelia, as her tragic demise echoes that of Shakespeare's grief-stricken lady much more closely than anything in Julian Baffin's life (as we know it) ever does.
Priscilla is a dissatisfied, middle-aged woman in dire straits when we first meet her in The Black Prince. Having just walked out on her husband, Roger Saxe, she turns up at Bradley Pearson's door in need of support and a place to stay. She doesn't exactly get it—instead, she ends up being tugged back and forth between Bradley, Christian Evandale, and Francis Marloe throughout the rest of the novel—until she finally succeeds in killing herself.
It's an unhappy ending for an unhappy woman, and her misery can never be far from our minds as we read the novel.
Shopgirl
Like her brother, Priscilla grew up in what Bradley describes as a lower-middle-class household, and also like her brother, she seems to have decided that she wanted more out of life. Whereas Bradley decided to move up in the world by becoming cultured, well read, self-educated, and sophisticated, Priscilla took a different tack—she stuck her toes into the beauty and fashion industry and started running with a more well-to-do crowd than the one she'd grown up with.
According to Bradley, things went sour pretty quickly for Priscilla. Here's what he has to say about her youthful attempts to get out of Dodge by marrying up:
To cut a long story short, Priscilla really got quite 'above herself', dressing and behaving 'grandly', and did eventually satisfy her ambition of penetrating into some slightly 'better' social circles than those which she had frequented at first. I suspect that she and my mother actually planned a 'campaign' to better Priscilla's lot. Priscilla went to tennis parties, indulged in amateur dramatics, went to charity dances. She and my mother invented for her quite a little 'season'. Only Priscilla's season went on and on. She could not make up her mind to marry. Or perhaps her present beaux, in spite of the bold face which Priscilla and my mother jointly presented to the world, felt that after all poor Priscilla was not a very good match. Perhaps there was after all a smell of shop. (1.6.4)
Bradley goes on to tell us that Priscilla eventually became "a tart" (1.6.5), which means exactly what you think it means. Can you feel the brotherly love here? Bradley's disdain for his sister is so thick you could spread it on toast.
Listen to Bradley explain exactly what he means by "tart," and try to read between the lines and see things from Priscilla's point of view: "I do not mean that she stood around in the road, but she moved in a world of business men, golf club bar proppers and night-club hounds, who certainly regarded her in this light" (1.6.5).
Now, a more generous description of what Priscilla did after she realized that she might never be able to charm her way into marrying up would be to say that she got romantically entangled with many different men from various parts of the business world, no doubt with the hope that she might find a prospective husband among them. That's just one alternative interpretation that we might read into what Bradley tells us—there could be others, too.
Eventually, Priscilla married Roger Saxe. According to Bradley, she and Roger fooled around for a while without there being any sign that Roger would marry her, and eventually Priscilla got pregnant. As Bradley tells it, Roger forced Priscilla to have an abortion, and then, almost out of the blue, he agreed to marry her about a year later.
As Bradley tells us, they didn't have a happy marriage. Given what he's told us so far, who could be surprised?
Drowning in Sorrow
Even accounting for Bradley's skewed perspective on his sister's life, it's easy to believe that Priscilla has had a pretty tough go of it. Things certainly aren't looking up for her by the time we meet her in the novel: when she arrives at Bradley's door, she's convinced that her husband is cheating on her, and, even worse, she thinks that he's trying to poison her.
Priscilla's grief and distress over her failed marriage—and her limited prospects from here on out—parallel the madness that Shakespeare's Ophelia falls into after her father, Polonius, is killed suddenly by her own true love. Likewise, Priscilla's death by suicide also recalls the death of Ophelia (although some of Hamlet's characters deny that Ophelia took her own life, and her conscious intentions are certainly open to interpretation).
Foiled Again
In addition to being an Ophelia figure, Priscilla is also one of a trio of middle-aged women who bring distractions and unwanted interruptions into Bradley Pearson's life as he yearns desperately to get away from everyone he knows so that he can write a great book. Like the Three Fates in Greek mythology or the three witches who appear in Shakespeare's Macbeth, Priscilla, Christian, and Rachel Baffin influence Bradley's life in strange and frustrating ways.
These three women also represent very different ways of responding to the pain of a failed marriage or the fear of becoming old and unloved. Whereas Christian prospers no matter what hardships come into her life, and whereas Rachel murders her husband in a jealous rage (according to Bradley, anyway), Priscilla succumbs to her heartache and chooses death (her own) rather than life.
Roger Saxe
Roger Saxe is a class act. Said Shmoop sarcastically.
As the wayward husband of the late Priscilla Saxe, Roger Saxe seems like one of the more straightforward characters in The Black Prince. Bradley Pearson certainly paints a pretty much totally negative picture of him:
I first heard of Roger's existence when I learnt that Priscilla was pregnant. There seemed to be no question of marriage. And Roger, it appeared, was willing to pay half of the abortion bill, but demanded that the family should pay the other half. This piece of pure caddishness was my first introduction to my future brother-in-law. He was in fact reasonably well off. My father and I put up the money between us and Priscilla had her operation. This illegal and thoroughly sordid drama upset my poor father very much indeed. (1.6.6)
Years later, when Priscilla walks out on him, Roger doesn't lift a finger to get her back. Instead, he immediately relaxes into the comfort of being able to enjoy spending time with his mistress—who's more than twenty years younger than Priscilla, by the way—and of being able to plan for his second marriage. Oh, and did we mention that he and his mistress have been together for years and years, and that they're expecting a child?
Roger seems like a real piece of work, but things get a bit more complicated when we're exposed to his own side of the story. According to Roger, he was never really sure if he wanted Priscilla to get that abortion, and after she had it, he regretted it deeply. As he tells Bradley:
"She wanted the abortion. I didn't know what I wanted. Then when the child was gone I felt awful about it. Then Priscilla told me she was pregnant again. That was your mother's idea. It wasn't true. I married her because I couldn't bear to lose a second child. And there was no child." (1.11.37)
If this is true, Roger suddenly seems like a much more sympathetic character than the one Bradley Pearson introduced to us earlier on.
But is it true? Ultimately, we have no way of knowing.
What we do know is that Roger benefits hugely from Priscilla's death. Not only is he the beneficiary of her will, but also he suddenly finds himself off the hook as an ex-husband. He won't have to go through a messy divorce, and he won't have to pay any kind of alimony. Instead, he gets to marry again as a respectable widower—a pretty lucky turn of events, so far as he's concerned.
Is Roger a decent man who just happened to find himself in a terrible, loveless marriage, or is he secretly rubbing his hands with glee because everything worked out so well?