The resurrection of the body

“The resurrection of the body” names a counter-ideal to a life dominated by intellect, money, and talk. Introduced by Tommy Dukes as a hope for a future “democracy of touch,” the phrase reaches Connie before she can explain it: it comforts her first as a mystery, then returns amid the March wood as language for bodily renewal.

A Challenge to Mind and Money

At a gathering, Tommy Dukes rejects the claim that only the spirit is worth having. He calls instead for “the resurrection of the body,” imagining that it will come when people have pushed aside “the cerebral stone” and money. His accompanying vision, “a democracy of touch, instead of a democracy of pocket,” makes bodily contact the alternative to a social order measured by wealth. The phrase therefore carries both a physical and a social possibility: the body’s value might be restored, and human relations might be grounded in touch rather than possession.

Connie’s First Reception

Connie inwardly repeats Dukes’s words, including his appeal for a “democracy of touch.” She does not know what they mean, but they comfort her all the same. That response matters because the phrase reaches her not as a proposition she has reasoned through but as something felt before it is understood. Around her, conversation has become intolerable: after the guests leave, the continual talk still weighs on her, and her days seem to grind by while she grows thinner. Against this exhaustion, the bodily ideal offers a consolation that abstract discussion cannot provide, even before Connie can give it a definite meaning.

Spring and the Possibility of Return

When spring comes back, Connie is stronger and able to walk better. She remembers the keeper she had forgotten in her depression and wants to leave behind the world of people she experiences as lifeless. Walking in the wood in March, she gathers phrases of rebirth and repeats, “I believe in the resurrection of the body!” She joins the words to the image of a grain falling into the earth and to the crocus’s emergence: “When the crocus cometh forth I too will emerge and see the sun!” The phrase has moved from a conversation to a felt hope for her own return to life.

The seasonal setting gives the idea a concrete shape without making Connie’s recovery complete or effortless. Her increased strength and capacity to walk mark a change in her condition; the wind, flowers, and the first violets accompany her excited movement through the wood. Earlier, the white tombstones on the hillside had seemed to Connie like a ghastly prospect of her own burial. In the spring passage, the movement is reversed: instead of imagining herself added to the dead, she imagines emerging with the crocus. “The resurrection of the body” thus links Dukes’s critique of a disembodied, money-governed life to Connie’s personal longing for renewal, expressed through seasonal change and bodily experience.