Bella's Gobstopper

Bella's Gobstopper is one of the sweets Bella Baxter finds preserved in a crystal vase when she returns home after her travels. She makes the sweet a token of her bond with Archibald McCandless and Godwin Baxter, but its intimate ritual of return gives way abruptly to the unresolved absence of her child.

Placement and Form

A lidded crystal vase on the study's overmantel holds the gobstoppers. The candies are not simply put out for eating: Bella Baxter recognizes them as something shared with the men who have remained at home. Their presence makes the unchanged house tangible at the moment she comes back to it.

Bella Baxter's Return

It is a little after midnight when Bella Baxter arrives, her travelling-coat unfastened and its lining darned. A tiny pearl gleams in the lapel; she notices Archibald McCandless looking at it and laughs. She observes that the old place is exactly the same, except for something new, then goes to the fireplace and finds the vase. The reunion is staged through this small, familiar object rather than through a formal declaration.

Bella Baxter calls the gobstopper the covenant of her plighted troth. She removes the lid, takes one, grinds it beneath her teeth, and swallows it. The act gives the sweet the character of a private, bodily pledge: a keepsake becomes something consumed as she re-enters the household. Yet she also says that sweets cannot satisfy a hungry woman, recalling that Duncan Wedderburn taught her this and that he explained the meaning of the scar on her stomach.

Promise and Interruption

The gobstopper's force lies in the contrast between the affectionate ritual and what follows. Having welcomed the familiar sweets and declared how wonderful it is to be home, Bella Baxter suddenly fixes her gaze on Godwin Baxter and asks where her child is. The object thus stands at a threshold between reunion and loss: it briefly makes continuity with the home seem possible, before the question of the absent child unsettles that welcome.