Character Analysis
Early on, Bradley Pearson tells us that Rachel Baffin is not only "one of the main actors" in "The Black Prince," but is "in a crucial sense perhaps the main actor" (1.3.38).
Wow. Okay.
So what does Rachel do to merit such high regard? Well, according to Bradley Pearson, she bludgeons her husband to death and frames old Bradmatazz himself for the murder, thereby enjoying a sweet dish of cold revenge on two men who tossed her aside like an old and grimy dishrag.
We suppose we should offer some kudos to Bradley for never uttering the words "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" as he levels his accusations at Rachel. To come right out and say it would have been so totally clichéd.
Dramarama
Let's dive into Rachel Baffin's Shakespearean associations before taking a closer look at her unique characteristics.
If Arnold Baffin's counterpart in Shakespeare's Hamlet is the ghostly King Hamlet, it should come as no surprise that Rachel's counterpart is Gertrude—the recently-widowed, newly-married queen of Denmark who, some say, is the truest target of Prince Hamlet's hatred and passion.
Been a while since you've cast your eyes over Hamlet? We've got your back. In the play, Gertrude was the wife of the late King Hamlet, our Hamlet's dad. When Papa Hamlet suffered his untimely death by inner-ear poisoning, Gertrude promptly married his brother (and murderer), Claudius. At the time, their marriage would have been considered incestuous.
As if that wasn't bad enough, they jumped into the marriage bed so quickly that the play's melancholy prince gets to joke bitterly that the same food served at the funeral was used for the marriage feast.
Yikes. Talk about leaving a bad taste in the mouth.
Throughout Part 1 of The Black Prince, it seems as though Bradley Pearson and Rachel Baffin are heading toward a modern Claudius-Gertrude—or, as we like to call it, Clodrude—relationship. Sure, neither of them is plotting to kill Arnold Baffin (probably), but they are experimenting with a romantic relationship that both of them think of as a way of wresting power away from Arnold. Here's Rachel, as Bradley describes her, in one of her more passionate outbursts:
Oh, everything's changed so since even a little while ago. We can live in the open, there's nothing to be secretive about. I feel free, I've been set free, like Julian's balloon, I'm sailing up above the world and looking down at it at last, it's like a mystical experience. We don't have to keep secrets. Arnold has somehow forged a new situation. I shall have friends at last, real friends, I shall go about the world, I shall have you. And Arnold will accept it, he'll have to, he might even learn humility, Bradley, he's our slave. I've got my will back at last. We've become gods. Don't you see?" (1.16.101)
According to Bradley Pearson, Rachel Baffin is deeply unhappy in her marriage, and so she's desperate to find fulfillment elsewhere.
For Bradley, their relationship presents an opportunity to enjoy "a crude and simple sense of scoring off Arnold"—of there being "something important to him which I knew and he did not" (1.15.4). Sure, this is nowhere near as gruesome as killing a king and usurping his throne, but Bradley and Rachel's little affair is an attempt to carry out the psychological equivalent of overthrowing a powerful man.
We'll say just one more thing about Rachel-as-Gertrude before moving on to take a closer look at Rachel Baffin's unique characteristics. In Parts 2 and 3 of "The Black Prince," once Arnold and Rachel unite against Bradley to stop him from pursuing a relationship with Julian, Rachel stops playing the Gertrude to Bradley's Claudius. Instead, she plays the Gertrude to Bradley's prince—which is to say that she becomes the interfering mother figure who complicates the hero's attempts to pursue his goals.
If this transition from romantic object to meddlesome parent seems really weird, just remember what Bradley tells Julian about certain psychoanalytical interpretations of Hamlet, which is that Hamlet suffers from an Oedipus complex, is in love with his mother, and his unconscious mind identifies his actual lover, Ophelia, with his mother, Gertrude (1.23.71-86).
You don't need to buy this interpretation to understand that Iris Murdoch is playing around with it in The Black Prince and is exploring how the characters' various actions and shifting desires alter the roles that they play in one another's lives.
Speaking of shifting roles, Rachel also has at least one other Shakespearean counterpart that's worth mentioning, and that's Lady Macbeth from—you guessed it—Macbeth.
Throughout Bradley and Rachel's whole Clodrude love affair, Bradley represents Rachel as being the instigator, the one who eggs him on and says that they're going to make Arnold their slave. That kind of goading is straight out of Lady Macbeth's handbook. Oh, and did you notice this little detail from the scene when Bradley finds Arnold's bashed-up body?:
Rachel was still whispering, standing in the doorway of the room. She had stopped crying and staring and her eyes seemed larger and wider, she kept rubbing her hands rhythmically upon her dress. (3.16.17).
Hmmm. Obsessive hand rubbing? Yeah, that's definitely a Lady Macbeth thing, too.
The One, the Only, Rachel
Now that we've got a sense of the various roles that Rachel Baffin plays in The Black Prince, we can take a closer look at the things that make her unique.
Like her late husband, Arnold, Rachel is younger than Bradley Pearson. Although Bradley doesn't tell us exactly how old she is during the events that he describes, we do know that Arnold is younger than 46 years old, and it's safe to assume that Rachel is, too.
Whatever her actual age, Rachel is described as being a thoroughly middle-aged woman. Bradley tends to have a pretty low opinion of middle-aged women, what with all of their dissatisfaction and hysteria and wandering around London like—ahem—baffled cows, and his descriptions of Rachel are characteristically unflattering, even when he's trying to be sort of nice. Here's a good example:
She was a large smooth-faced, slightly freckled, reddish-blonde person, with straightish gingery wiry hair and a pale complexion, a bit tall for a woman and generally on a larger scale physically than her husband. She had been putting on weight and some might have called her fat. (1.3.38)
Here's another one:
Rachel, who kept rubbing her eyes and drooping her head, seemed today like an ill person. Her listlessness and her puffy tired face reminded me of Priscilla. Her eyes were vague and she would not look at me. She was wearing a sleeveless cream-coloured dress. The back was unhooked, the zip not fully up, revealing lumpy vertebrae covered with reddish down. A satiny shoulder strap, not clean, had flopped down over the vaccination mark on her plump pallid upper arm. The armholes of the dress cut into the bulging flesh of the shoulder. (1.21.4)
Reading passages like these throughout The Black Prince, it's pretty hard not to agree with Francis Marloe when he says, in his postscript to Bradley Pearson's story, that Bradley is one of the many men who "see women as unclean" and who believe that "[t]he female principle is what is messy, smelly, and soft" (Postscript by Francis: par. 2).
As Francis puts it: "We find him gloating (I fear there is no other word) over the physical discomfiture, the uncleanliness, the ailments of his women" (Postscript by Francis: par. 2).
With this being the case, it's hard to know how far we can trust Bradley's descriptions of Rachel. Ultimately, we have to keep in mind that what little we seem to know about Rachel is really what we know about Bradley's perception of her.
Here are some other things that Bradley tells us about Rachel:
- She's smart, and she occupies herself by getting involved in charitable causes and "mild left wing politics" (1.3.38).
- She's self-effacing in public and social settings and tends to redirect attention back toward her famous husband (1.3.38).
- She's unhappy and unfulfilled—in more ways than one, if you catch our drift—in her marriage, and she's desperate for autonomy and personal validation.
If we believe Bradley's side of the story, then we also have to accept that Rachel's fury at her husband's infidelity provoked her to bash Arnold's head in with a poker. We have no way of knowing if that's what really happened—Rachel herself certainly sings a different tune—but the possibility of Rachel having murdered Arnold does tell us one more crucial thing about her character.
Think back to Queen Gertrude in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Throughout the play, the extent of Gertrude's guilt is very much in question. King Hamlet's ghost accuses Gertrude of having cheated on him with Claudius beforehe was murdered, and Prince Hamlet himself seems to suspect that his mother may have even been complicit in his father's murder.
Was Gertrude unfaithful to her husband before his death? Did she know about Claudius's plan to murder the king? The play is open-ended enough to provoke some serious debate about these questions, not to mention Hamlet's own responses to them.
Significantly, Bradley Pearson is of the opinion that Gertrude didn't cheat on her husband before his death, and his argument is that she was simply "[t]oo conventional" and too lacking in courage to take such a decisive step (1.19.77). We can assume that Bradley feels the same about Gertrude's involvement in her husband's death.
What does this tell us about Rachel Baffin—or Rachel as Bradley sees her? A lot, actually.
From Bradley's point of view, Rachel Baffin is a far more daring and complex character than Shakespeare's Gertrude ever was. Whereas Gertrude is, in Bradley's opinion, a conventional woman who acts passively throughout the play, Rachel Baffin is a sexually aggressive, violently avenging fury who decisively takes matters into her own hands. These are the very qualities that make Rachel a kind of mash-up of Hamlet's Gertrude and Macbeth's Lady Macbeth.
There's no fun in having just one Shakespearean counterpart, after all.