The Bell

“Before their marriage Paul had warned Dora that they were likely to quarrel; but he had added that when one was really in love fighting was half the fun of being married. The quarrels, which began soon enough, brought no pleasure to Dora. They left her humiliated and exhausted.”

Dora and Paul have vastly different personalities, which at first serves to bring them close. In Paul, Dora finds the older, worldly man who fuels her fantasy life, but she soon realizes he is a despot who enjoys domination. This is why he has chosen Dora—she is pliable and young enough to accept subordination. What he sees as fun in a marriage—the power struggle—goes only as far as he is the winner. By leaving him, Dora threatens to take the upper hand.

“She was returning, and deliberately, into the power of someone whose conception of her life excluded or condemned her deepest urges and who now had good reason to judge her wicked. That was marriage, thought Dora; to be enclosed in the aims of another. That she had any power over Paul never occurred to her. It remained that her marriage to Paul was a fact, and one of the few facts that remained in her disordered existence quite certain. She felt near to tears and tried to think of something else.”

Dora’s decision to return to Paul comes not from love but from her sense of helplessness and, to a certain extent, boredom with “humdrum” reality. Though not intellectually savvy, Dora understands that her urges are valid yet invalidated, and her choice to return to Paul only because he will offer her a false sense of security soon proves to her that she must become independent.

“She had retained her prejudices when she lost her religion. A murmur of voices suddenly surrounded her, and a dialogue was begun between the priest and the congregation. Dora ventured a quick glance sideways at Paul. He knelt with shoulders squared and hands behind him, looking ahead and slightly upward toward the cross at the far end of the room. He had the solemn somewhat noble look which he often wore when he was thinking about his work, but rarely when he was thinking about his wife.”

Dora’s attitude toward organized religion is like many other things in her life: half-formed and murky for lack of contemplation. However, her vital energy dictates her dislikes, and as she observes the ritual, she focuses not on the mystic quality of the process, but on her husband’s solipsistic enjoyment of the rite. At this moment, a big part of Dora realizes Paul is never going to be able to love her as she desires, which constitutes her own process of ritual awakening.