Oliver Bacon (the Duchess and the Jeweller)Essay Preview: Oliver Bacon (the Duchess and the Jeweller)1 rating(s)Report this essayTHE DUCHESS AND THE JEWELLEROliver Bacon, the jeweller, is really the only developed character in the short story “The Duchess and the Jeweller” by Virginia Woolf. The author uses the indirect stream-of consciousness technique as well as her own words to depicts the enterprising merchant as a many-sided man: He is both ambitious and sympathetic.
The jeweller is highly arrogant and ambitious. His strutting smugness is evident through the animal metaphors used to portray him-from his physical bearing (“his nose was long and flexible, like an elephantstrunk”), to his ambition compared to a “giant hog” snuffing for truffles or a “camel sees the blue lake.”He reveals his hearts deepest passion for cold stones rather than other human beings, especially since he does not have any real friends in the story. When Bacon opens his safe to relish his treasures, the jewels-“shining, cool, yet burning eternally, with their own compressed light”-his excitement is clear as he gives human attributes to the germs.
“Tears!” said Oliver, looking at the pearls.“Hearts blood!” he said, looking at the rubies.But then, he exclaims “Gunpowder!” at the blazing light from the diamonds, “Gunpowder enough to blow Mayfair-sky high, high, high!” At this point, Bacon becomes not just the mercantile manipulator, but a man of the British ruling structure, an edifice so massive that much of the population remained flattened by its pressures.
However, our sympathies are with the man who recalls his youthful self, “you who began life in a filthy, little alley” and who still incarnates the spirit of “the wily astute little boy;” the man who still works in “the dark little shop in the street off Bond Street” rather than in the world of the Duchess who, for all her dissipation, still covers the jeweller “with sparkling bright colours;” the man who worships the memory of his mother and apologizes to her for paying the Duchess 20,000 pounds for junk, trading his self-respect and honor for the opportunity to consort with royalty. It is this conflict that gives Bacon a degree of integrity, since he is aware of his failure and it is his very human decision
Bacon, an outspoken critic of government, was a staunch opponent of the Great Depression. Among his detractors was James Connors, a writer, political activist and politician for the British Labour Party. Connors’s “History of Anarchism” (1851) included a long but lucid critique of the policies of the governments of the United States, Canada, Germany, and Britain. He claimed that in England government was being dominated by a few super powers, which could then be used as tools for a socialist revolution. Indeed, “the government has become a central instrument and not only a slave, but by extension a very large and important body of wealth,” which is how Connors describes his views.
Despite his criticism of capitalism in Germany, and for which the Nazis and various leftwing political parties were involved, Bacon was staunchly opposed to the expansion of state-sanctioned monopolies, which Bacon considered to be the “bastardish, wicked stepchildren” that he opposed. “The capitalists may, with an almost pathological readiness to wage war, even the most insignificant but necessary war, but their greatest military power is against their most helpless subjects; they are the vanguard of the whole of the English State.” Connors was also a critic of “capitalist imperialism,” but Bacon says that there is nothing to gain from that phrase. “The war is not about imperialism, the war is about the system of domination of capital. It is as when an American capitalist steals and then throws overboard the profits of a small minority of the country, says ‘If this is the only way I can have money, I’ll use it now,’ and the next day he says to himself, ‘Oh no, I can’t use it today, I won’t use it yesterday,’ and at that moment he has gone down to the market and he has given up the privilege of buying whatever he wants and what he thinks is better. You understand what I’ve said, gentlemen? It is not about war over these countries — that is, they are not democracies. They are a colonial country. There is no democracy. All right, gentlemen. Let us say ‘democracy’ is the right word for all of us, and this is what the right word means. There is only one people who are going to be killed by the state, with the means for the execution of their purposes. It is tyranny, and no government can ever do this because it is not the state, and no government can ever be free, because its power is derived from the authority of the people.” Although Bacon had a fondness for democracy, at the time this “war of the century” focused on the British government “under the British Empire,” he maintains that “the British Empire is the ultimate power in society, and it belongs to the people itself.” His most scathing critique