Mrs Rattery: A Fortune -Teller in A Handful of Dust

In A Handful of Dust, Mrs Rattery, a card -player can be regarded as Fortuna. There is a scene where Mrs Rattery tells fortunes with playing -cards. Tony Last, the protagonist, loses his son during a fox hunt. He waits for his wife, Brenda, to come home from London, where she is secretl y

committing adultery. While waiting for her, he has to spend time with Mrs Rattery, one of his guests, in a room for several hours. While Tony rambles on about his grief over his son ’s death, she starts playing a card game , but the game ends fruitlessl y. This suggests the fruitless future of the

protagonist.

When talking about the female figure who control the male

protagonist in this novel, the symbolism of Fortuna is given to Mrs R attery.

Mrs Rattery is described as a highl y modern woman of the 1920s to the 1930s, and, naturally, an alien in Tony ’s country house, where the

Edwardian lifest yle is still observed. She is an American married woman and moves alone from hotel to hotel earning money by playi ng bridge, accompanied neither by her husband nor her children. She comes to Tony ’s country house by jet plane, which she pilots herself. She never praises his gorgeous house, saying onl y that “I never notice house s much” (100). Thus, she behaves as she wants, being indifferent to Tony ’s house or status as her host. At the beginning, she stands like Fortuna, a little apart from the

protagonist.

The description of her while playing a card game includes several allusions to the image of Fortuna. Mrs Rattery starts playing patience, a card game for a single player, in front of Tony.

Mrs Rattery sat intent over her game, moving little groups of cards adroitl y backwards and forwards about the table like shuttles across a loom; under her fingers order grew out of chaos; she established sequence and precedence; the symbols before her became coherent, interrelated. (111)

The movement of Mrs Rattery’s hands playing cards is likened to the

movement of shuttles on a weaving ma chine. To play patience, a player has to line up cards and then arrange them in several heaps, side by side, and the player has to move their hands sideways across the table. That is why the words “shuttles” and “a loom” are used here.

Shuttles and a loom remind readers of their relationship with Clotho, another goddess of fortune. Clotho is one of the Moirai, known as the three goddesses of fortune in Greek m ythology. Her job is spinning the thread of a human’s life, which symbolizes the length and streng th of their life. To spin the thread, a spinning wheel is used. Diego Velazques ’ (1599-1660) painting The Fable of Arachne (c. 1657) shows a good example of a woman spinning thread on a spinning wheel. “Shuttles” and “a loom” relate to the act of spinning thread, because shuttles always move the thread. To use a shuttle and a loom, one must first spin the thread. Here it is easy to find the association between shuttles, spinning, and a spinning wheel; the spinning wheel is naturall y associated with the whee l of fortune. In the scene quoted above, Mrs Rattery is arranging cards as if weaving a cloth with “shuttles across a loom. ” In this way she tries to tell Tony ’s and her fortunes. She plays a complicated game of patience with four sets of cards – over two hundred cards, which suggests their complicated life. Given the allusion to the wheel to spin the thread of fortune and her role as a fortune -teller, Mrs Rattery is also one of Waugh ’s Fortunas, a goddess of fortune.

The outcome of the game also symboli zes the fate of the characters.

This game ends in deadlock, as it is described that “[i]t had nearl y come to a solution at time, but for a six of diamonds out of place, and a stubbornl y

congested patch at one corner, where nothing could be made to move ” (111-12). When Mrs Rattery mutters “It’s a heartbreaking game ” (112), it should be considered that she means not onl y t he result of the card game but also the development of their future. In fact, soon after this, Tony divorces Brenda. He goes abroad to expl ore the jungle along the Amazon and gets lost there. Mrs Rattery’s game, which was discontinued without a clear result, hints at the fate of Tony, who gets lost in his life. Mrs Rattery also steps off the stage in the novel. It is true that Mrs Rattery is onl y a fortune -teller, not strong enough to handle people ’s fate. However, like Margot in Decline and Fall, Mrs Rattery also is a Fortuna of the twentieth century, bound to the wheel of f ortune with others. She moves around the world enjoying with her cards, but all the while her own fate is as shaky as the fate of people sitting on a revolving ride.

Waugh continues to create women whose fates are played with, even while they play with the lives of the male protagonists. At a time when England was moving towards the Second World War, these heroines with both devilishness and weakness were particularl y indispensable to Waugh.

Thereafter, Fortunas are repeatedl y described in Waugh ’s works: Queen Elizabeth in Edmund Campion: A Life (1935), Barbara Sothill in Put Out More Flags (1942), Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited (1945), and so on. These works contain highl y-sophisticated British women who do not hesitate to exert their powers, sailing on t he tide of their times. However, graduall y they are swept away by the tide and out of control. Along with the movements of these women, Waugh describes the restless people and unquiet situation of England as it grows closer to the era of the Second World War.

3. The Appearance of New Heroines after the Second World War

Waugh brings an obvious change in writing female characters after the Second World War. The new heroines are different from his previous Fortuna-t ype women in their origin, social statu s, time, and region. In The Loved One (1948), an ordinary American working girl is featured, and in Helena (1950), the Empress Dowager of Rome. It is necessary to trace the turning point of this change in the flow of his thought after the war.