“Images are the brood of desire”

“Images are the brood of desire” is the narrator’s account of how longing breeds imagined futures, including illusions that their makers do not recognize as illusions. Applied to Peter Featherstone’s carefully staged funeral, the expression exposes the gap between the power he expected to enjoy after death and the reality that anticipation was the only part of that imagined drama available to him.

Desire and Imagination

The passage begins by treating imagination as common to everyone: people form images under the influence of desire. Featherstone, despite laughing at the ways other people deceive themselves, is no exception. His pleasure in designing his burial depended on picturing the scene in advance and imagining the vexation he could cause through the “rigid clutch of his dead hand.” The phrase turns an image of posthumous control into a sign of the desire that produced it.

The narrator’s point is not simply that Featherstone planned an expensive funeral. His plan let him imagine himself still exercising power after death, when he could no longer experience its effects. He failed to distinguish the pleasure of anticipating the funeral from any pleasure he might have in the funeral itself. The expression therefore links desire not only to what a person hopes to possess, but also to the imagined scenes through which that hope becomes emotionally gratifying.

The Funeral as a Designed Scene

Featherstone had wanted a handsome funeral and had ordered that people attend who would rather have stayed at home. He also wished female relatives to follow him to the grave. His sister Martha made a difficult journey from the Chalky Flats for the occasion; the request might have seemed a belated recognition of relatives he had disliked seeing while alive. But the invitation was extended to Mrs. Vincy as well, making its meaning uncertain: she was not a blood relation, and her handsome mourning dress seemed to advertise hopes of inheritance.

The funeral unfolded according to Featherstone’s written orders. Three mourning coaches were filled, horseback pallbearers wore rich scarves and hatbands, and even the under-bearers had costly trappings of mourning. The procession’s elaborate display gives material form to the old man’s desire to choreograph how others would appear around his death. Yet the small churchyard, the wind-shivering black draperies, and the blossoms and sunshine make the planned spectacle look incongruous rather than sovereign. His imagined drama has become a public event, but its meaning is not under his control.

The Dead Hand and the Limits of Power

The narrator describes Featherstone as loving money both for the peculiar tastes it could gratify and for the power it gave him to make others uncomfortable. The funeral plan extends that habit beyond his lifetime: he relished the prospect of imposing his will when he could no longer act in person. In this sense, the “dead hand” is both a figure for posthumous control and an image generated by a living appetite for control.

But the passage marks a sharp limit. Featherstone’s consciousness had become absorbed in the imagined scene, as though he were already present in his coffin, enjoying the vexations he expected to cause. The narrator observes that, insofar as he contemplated a future life, he pictured only this gratification. The desire could create an image of continuing power; it could not make that imagined future an experience. The expression thus gives the funeral its double meaning: the ceremony fulfills the external plan, while exposing the private illusion that had made the plan pleasurable to its author.

Narrative Significance

The episode places Featherstone’s self-deception within a broader account of human imagination rather than treating it as a peculiarity confined to one miser. His capacity to laugh at others’ self-deceptions does not exempt him from the fellowship of illusion. The narrator’s general statement opens outward from this specific funeral, making the old man an example of how desire can shape the stories people tell themselves about their power and future.

The scene also complicates the apparent certainty of Featherstone’s intentions. He had arranged who should attend and how the ceremony should look, but other people read those arrangements through their own hopes, relationships, and suspicions. His carefully imagined drama survives as a funeral, not as the private triumph he anticipated. The expression captures that difference between an image made gratifying by desire and the less controllable reality in which others must interpret it.