Margareen

Margareen is introduced as the woman needed to focus a polarity between two male figures, Burrus and Caseous. She becomes the center of a shifting contest, but the narrative offers no settled biography: instead, it makes her legible through song, portraiture, resemblance, and changing verbal forms. Her function is not merely to resolve the opposition around her; her divided attachments complicate it, while the text’s restless descriptions show how a woman can be made into an object of competing interpretations and valuations.

Identity and Introduction

Margareen appears after a discussion of two opposed male poles and an imagined, undistributed middle between them. The speaker says a female presence is needed to bring the arrangement into focus, then introduces M. at an hour called “absolute zero” or the “babbling pumpt of platinism.” The naming shifts almost immediately to Margareen, placing her within the book’s characteristic movement between a person, an initial, and a verbal figure. Her entrance is presented as a structural turn in an argument as much as an individual arrival: the binary has acquired a third point, and the shape of the relation changes.

The narrator marks this turn with an image of coming gently back home, as though the discussion’s abstract motion has returned to a human meeting. Yet Margareen is not developed through a stable account of her past or private thoughts. The evidence instead gathers around the ways she is sung about, pictured, and drawn into other people’s competing accounts. Her identity remains protean, in keeping with a narrative where names and descriptions carry several possibilities at once.

The Burrus–Caseous Contest

Margareen becomes the object of an explicitly divided attachment: she is said to be very fond of Burrus, but also fond of cheese, a comic turn that links her attraction to Caseous through a food-word association. The narrator calls the situation a complication, and says Burrus and Caseous contend for her. The struggle is therefore both interpersonal and verbal: the names themselves suggest opposed substances and invite the narrator to turn attachment into a sequence of puns, balances, and transformations.

That contest does not remain a simple two-sided arrangement. Margareen is also connected with an elusive Antonius, described as having an interest in cheeses of several shades while behaving rudely. The narrator groups Antonius, Burrus, and Caseous into a triad. Margareen’s place within this group makes the original polarity less secure: rather than choosing one side and closing the conflict, her attachments multiply the terms of the dispute. The text gives no final decision or outcome for this contest.

Song and Representation

A period of lyricism follows the introduction of Margareen, and the narrator associates it with two pieces of song: one that expresses longing for her and another that repeats her name while imagining a lump of gold remaining in the bowl. The first is identified as an effort by Caseous, while Burrus’s contribution is used as a toast. The contrast matters: both figures speak through forms of address directed toward or associated with Margareen, but the narrator classifies their songs differently and turns their expressions into evidence within the contest.

The prose then shifts from songs to visual representation. The narrator says that an image of Marge, who resembles her sister, has been titled The Very Picture of a Needlesswoman and placed on a national cruetstand. The portrait is described as a genre concerned with changes of mind, yet it does not supply a clear, independent account of Margareen’s inner life. Its meaning is mediated by the narrator’s framing, by the comparison with her sister, and by the domestic object on which it is displayed. Margareen is thus made visible through an image that also acknowledges how incomplete and interpretive such representation can be.

Narrative Significance

Margareen’s characterization is built from relations and acts of description rather than from a linear personal arc. She is introduced to focus a male opposition, becomes the center of rival songs and attachments, and is then rendered through a portrait whose title and placement fold her into the narrator’s broader comic imagery. Each form offers a different version of her, but none settles the question of who she is outside those representations.

The passage’s transformations—from M. to Margareen, from affection to food pun, from song to portrait—make instability part of the character’s narrative role. Her presence both organizes and unsettles the opposition between Burrus and Caseous: the men’s contest gains a focus, while her attachment to both and the addition of Antonius prevent that focus from becoming a simple resolution. The result is a figure whose significance lies in the changing relations gathered around her and in the text’s exposure of how desire and representation turn a person into a site of interpretation.