Jealousy

Jealousy is a recurring state of threatened attachment in the narrative, arising when affection seems to belong to someone else or when an intimate bond becomes unreadable. It is not presented as a single uniform passion. In Hildred Castaigne, jealousy is entangled with rivalry, delusion, and the desire to control other people’s futures; in Selby, it appears as a recognizable torment that distorts movement, work, and judgment. Across both episodes, jealousy converts love into observation and uncertainty into compulsive action.

Hildred Castaigne and the Hawberks

Hildred Castaigne’s attention to Constance Hawberk is initially organized through her love for another man. When Hildred visits Hawberk’s armourer’s shop, Constance rises to greet him but visibly blushes with disappointment because she had expected his cousin Louis Castaigne. Hildred notices the disappointment and understands its cause. He claims that Constance herself does not interest him personally, yet her love for Louis occupies his thoughts and sometimes keeps him awake at night. The contradiction is crucial: he denies ordinary personal attraction while remaining intensely preoccupied with the attachment that joins Constance to his rival.

His visits to the shop are outwardly explained by a fascination with armour and sound. He listens to Hawberk riveting ancient armour, takes pleasure in the clash of mail and steel, and watches sunlight strike the inlaid metal with almost unbearable intensity. That sensory fixation gives his visits a respectable surface, but the emotional center of the scene is Constance’s preference for Louis and Hildred’s wish to intervene in it. He imagines that everything will come right and that he will arrange the future of Constance and Louis, just as he expects to arrange the future of John Archer. Jealousy therefore appears not merely as hurt feeling but as a claim to manage the destinies of others.

Rivalry and the Threatened Succession

The conflict becomes explicit when Hildred confronts Louis after Louis reveals that he is to marry Constance. Hildred immediately supplies Constance’s name, and Louis’s astonishment shows that Hildred has been closely tracking the relationship. Hildred then frames his hostility through the language of succession and dispossession. He alleges that John Archer knows the secret of the Imperial Succession, has tried to deprive him of his right, and has treated him as mentally deficient because of a fall from his horse four years earlier.

In this account, Louis, Hawberk, and Constance become the remaining people who must be interviewed for the interests of Mr. Wilde and Hildred himself. Hildred flings the paper marked with the Yellow Sign to the ground and demands that Louis renounce the crown. The intimate fact of Louis’s marriage is thus absorbed into a grand political and dynastic fantasy. Jealousy magnifies a personal rival into an obstacle to sovereignty, while the threatened relationship between Louis and Constance becomes, in Hildred’s mind, part of a larger struggle over legitimate power.

Selby’s Restless Jealousy

Selby’s jealousy is less openly delusional but no less consuming. After Foxhall Clifford’s recovery, Rue Barrée begins to respond warmly to Clifford’s respectful salutes. She passes him in the rue de Seine with her music-roll and large straw hat, and the band uncovers itself as she goes by; she colors and smiles at Clifford. Richard Osborne Elliott notices this unexplained thaw in her former frigidity and suspects that some change has occurred, although he never discovers its cause. Selby, however, is jealous, even though he initially refuses to acknowledge the feeling to himself.

His first response is withdrawal. He cuts the studio at Julian’s and spends a day in the country, but the attempt to escape only aggravates the obsession. The woods, fields, brooks, and the mowers’ calls seem to return his mind to Rue Barrée, until the countryside itself becomes an acoustic echo of her name. The episode shows jealousy operating as a form of involuntary repetition: distance does not break the attachment but supplies new surfaces on which it can reappear. Selby returns angry and works sulkily, tormented by the desire to know where Clifford is and what he may be doing.

Surveillance, Rivalry, and Temporary Relief

Selby’s jealousy culminates in an erratic Sunday walk that carries him from the flower market on the Pont au Change to the morgue and back toward the marble bridge. The route has no practical purpose; it expresses the emotional disorder produced by uncertainty. Unable to tolerate the state, Selby goes to see Clifford, who is convalescing in his garden and drinking mint juleps. Their conversation turns to morals and human happiness, and Selby tries, unsuccessfully, to pump Clifford for information.

The drink and Clifford’s company temporarily soothe the jealous wound. Selby’s hope returns, and the two men leave together, each reluctant to part from the other. They successively accompany one another, then decide to dine at Mignon’s and continue their nocturnal wandering, or “flit.” Their elaborate reluctance to separate reveals how jealousy has reshaped companionship: Selby seeks proximity to Clifford in order to reduce uncertainty, while Clifford treats the pursuit as amusing. Yet the relief is unstable. At dinner, as the evening proceeds toward dessert, Selby hears a distant voice describing him as drunk, suggesting that the attempt to master jealousy has ended in loss of composure rather than understanding.

Narrative Function and Significance

The two jealousy episodes contrast different relations between feeling and interpretation. Hildred turns another couple’s love into evidence of a political conspiracy and a reason to demand submission. His jealousy is fused with domination: because he believes he possesses the right to arrange the future, Louis’s marriage becomes an act of theft. Selby, by contrast, recognizes jealousy only gradually and experiences it through avoidance, wandering, intrusive imagination, and the need to remain physically near Clifford. His behavior is comic and socially legible, but the underlying pattern is similar: another person’s apparent access to the beloved produces an intolerable gap in knowledge.

Jealousy also exposes the instability of the book’s social bonds. Constance’s disappointment, Rue Barrée’s blush and smile, Hildred’s demand that Louis renounce the crown, and Selby’s futile attempts to discover Clifford’s whereabouts all make private attachment visible through small gestures and overheard signs. The state is therefore both inward and public. It begins as an interpretation of another person’s preference, then becomes a force that reorganizes speech, movement, friendship, rivalry, and power. In Hildred’s case it helps turn intimacy into persecution; in Selby’s case it drives an absurd but painful cycle of pursuit and temporary relief.