Such an explanation of Gabrielle’s lack of enthusiasm is at first glance somewhat superficial. The Gabrielle of the poem who has moved us so profoundly is not the woman Penn-Raven describes in this manner. Gabrielle was not motivated by selfishness and cowardice. She did not die because she feared her husband. Yet, however one interpret Gabrielle, this judgment of her, which Penn-Raven voiced, remains partially correct. Gabrielle was essentially “flower and weed together”. In the eyes of the men the weed was uppermost and, provokingly at that, discouragingly beautiful. Wintergreen and violets! This weed to Bartholow was just a bit shallow and colder than any fish in any ocean. She mocked his renascent gestures, his Greek, and even mistook Apollo for Narcissus when she found him looking in his mirror. She even had a cursed habit of innuendo, so it seemed, for after a pretty speech of his about a soul groping in its loneliness, out she came with a furtive remark that the fish upon her plate was “beautiful, even in death”.
Shallow Gabrielle! Selfish, faithless, beautiful Gabrielle! Thus men saw her until it was too late to see her again. Like Flammonde, what was she and what was she not?
Gabrielle’s superficiality, at first so evident, appears to be explained by her later actions. In cantos IV and V Gabrielle is very far from any taint of superficiality. It is only at the outset that she gives the impression. This is done by Mr. Robinson in order that the reader may understand the attitudes of Bartholow and Penn-Raven toward her. What Gabrielle really is the reader will shortly discover. But the touch of the weed, nevertheless, remains. It was part of Gabrielle and she employed it as a protection against her lovers. Fearing lest Penn-Raven find her suffering, she preferred to be tortured by him rather than reveal herself. Against Bartholow she adopted it because, knowing herself to be totally outside his mystical experience, she hoped to ease his desires of building impossible houses.
Gabrielle, indeed, is worthy of infinite pity. Beset at once by the Raven’s exhortations that she go away with him, and by her husband with his mysticism, her situation was precarious. No light had come to her, but since it had fallen blessedly upon her husband, to aid him in his holding it was her duty. That she might desert him to sink again into the night she refused to consider. That she might do nothing but remain with him she pondered carefully. If so she stayed she could not save him. She was not worthy, as he himself had bitterly reproached her, of his mysteries. Yet how he prayed she might be! Without her all would be as it had been, though Gabrielle knew differently. She knew he must follow the Light alone. Such was the law. It was decreed that she look with “tired and indolent indifference” upon the spring that was for Roman the beginning of a new life. “I am not worthy of your mysteries”, she had said with an insight at once supreme. Afterwards she told him,
You understand it
You and your new-born wisdom, but I can’t;
And there’s where our disaster like a rat,
Lives hidden in our walls.
...
Even a phantom house if made unwisely