Edgar attacks Stella during a jealous breakdown

Edgar attacks Stella during a jealous breakdown, and the encounter turns on a shift in what she fears: not only his violence, but the illness she recognizes behind it. After he finds her with Nick, he accuses her of infidelity, strikes her, and sharpens a knife. His strange suspicion of an orange then recalls his delusions about Ruth Stark and makes Stella understand that she must get away from him.

Causes and Background

The confrontation begins on a Sunday morning after a night of drinking. Nick has passed out, and Edgar remains unconscious when Stella gets up. She leaves the studio quietly with Nick, saying that she needs fresh air and has a bad hangover. They walk to the river, but the gray, chilly weather drives them into a pub. When they return about an hour later, Edgar is waiting in the doorway of his dark studio, with the shutters still closed.

Stella calls out cheerfully that they have brought him breakfast, while Nick holds up two bottles of brown ale. The casual welcome meets Edgar’s glare. The drinks have stirred the alcohol remaining in Stella’s blood from the night before, and she is already unsteady; she does not initially read the encounter as the immediate danger it becomes. Edgar’s attention fixes on Nick and Stella together, turning their shared walk and return into the occasion for his accusation.

The Attack in the Studio

As Nick’s footsteps recede down the stairs, Edgar calls him a bastard. He then accuses Stella of being with Nick and adopts a public-school accent like Nick’s. Stella says she does not understand, but the narration makes clear that she does understand what Edgar is alleging. When he mimics her denial and tells her not to lie, she feels exhausted by a breakdown she has encountered before, though never in this form and never directed at Nick. She sits down, lights a cigarette, and feels sick and depressed.

Stella quietly says that Edgar’s nonsense bores her. She picks up an orange from the table and turns it in her fingers. Then he crosses the room, drags her to the floor, and lifts her partly by the wrists as he shouts that she is sleeping with Nick and thinks him a fool. She does not answer, believing there is no point. Edgar slaps her harder than he did on a previous occasion, and she falls, turns over, and buries her face in her arms. The orange rolls toward the window; even while hurt and frightened, she thinks of telling him not to tread on it because oranges are expensive.

She lies still, breathing into her arms, unable to tell how long it has been since the blow. Afraid that moving might provoke him further, she waits. Across the room, Edgar stands with his back to her and makes a scraping sound. Stella sits up, touches her throbbing face, and reaches for her powder compact. In its small mirror she sees one side of her face changing color. She recognizes the sound: Edgar is sharpening a blade against a stone. When she asks what he is sharpening, he eventually answers that it is a knife. Stella fears he means to cut off her head, but he does not attack her with it in this scene.

Recognition and Reversal

The knife sharpens the threat, but the decisive change in Stella’s understanding comes when Edgar cuts another slice from the orange and tentatively brings it to his lips. His manner makes her recall what Peter Cleave had told her: Edgar had believed that Ruth Stark was poisoning his food. Until this moment, Stella has rationalized his violence and explained away his jealousy. The suspicion directed at the orange breaks through those defenses because it links his present behavior to the delusions associated with Ruth.

Stella understands that Edgar may do to her what he did to Ruth Stark. She is afraid not simply of the man she thought she knew, but of the madness she now believes can take control of him. The narration records her distinction: she stresses that her terror is of the illness, rather than of Edgar as a person. Even so, she fears that he is already out of control and that the smell of her fear could provoke him. She wants to flee but does not dare leave the room, convinced that he might sense her intention. She says only that she is going upstairs.

Edgar remains in the studio throughout the afternoon, working on Stella’s head. Peter Cleave presents his interpretation as conjecture: Edgar may be trying, through this work, to see Stella clearly and master the madness in himself. Stella does not know this. Upstairs, she waits and makes mental preparations to escape, smoking among the bedclothes with her back against the bricks. The thought of Ruth Stark’s murder, which she had long denied, now occupies her; even while terrified, she pities Edgar because she understands his madness as disease.

Escape and Consequences

Shortly after dark, Edgar leaves without speaking. Stella acts at once. She has already planned what to do, and within ten minutes she has packed her suitcase and dressed. Wearing a raincoat, head scarf, and sunglasses, she goes down the stairs and through the passage, pauses to look into the empty yard, and reaches the street. She checks by the wall that Edgar is not returning, then hurries away in the cold wind off the river.

Half an hour later, Stella cautiously enters the saloon bar of a shabby pub near Waterloo. Its warmth and quiet offer only uncertain shelter: she thinks of rooms across London that appear safe but remain exposed to the possibility that Edgar might walk in. She takes a large gin and tonic and a packet of cigarettes to a small table beside the gas fire, with her bruised cheek turned toward the wall. A man in a gray raincoat watches her briefly from the bar before returning to his newspaper. The scene ends with Stella away from the studio but still alert to the danger of being found.

Narrative Significance

The encounter begins as a familiar jealous accusation and becomes a turning point through a small domestic object. The orange first belongs to Stella’s distracted thought about its cost; when Edgar tastes it with suspicion, it becomes evidence that his delusional thinking has entered the room. The knife and the fruit thus mark different kinds of danger: one visible and immediate, the other recognized through the history of his beliefs about Ruth Stark.

The scene also separates what Stella has previously managed to keep apart. She has treated Edgar’s jealousy and violence as things she can explain, while suppressing what she knows about Ruth. His suspicion of poisoned food collapses that separation and changes her response from waiting out another episode to preparing an escape. Her departure does not resolve the danger, but it is the consequence of a recognition she can no longer suppress.