Candida: A character sketch of Eugene Marchbanks

Eugene Marchbanks

Eugene Marchbanks, an eighteen-year-old poet, the nephew of an earl. Having left Oxford, Marchbanks is found sleeping outdoors by Morell, who brings him home. Marchbanks proceeds to fall in love with Morell’s lovely wife, Candida. He is shy and withdrawn in the early scenes and seems to transform into a brave lad defending his love. Marchbanks is slight, effeminate, frightened, and painfully sensitive, but he has the genuine poet’s insight into human motivations. We learn that he focuses on the belief that Candida is not happy in a relationship with Morell. In order to shape his love for Candida, he provokes Morell into a heated argument discussing who is more suitable for Candida. Here we come to know about Marchbanks being a second strongest character in the play after Candida. He challenges Morell out of his own lectures and messages. There is not a single chance of Marchbanks influenced or convinced by Morell during that heated argument and discussion. Morell is strained to believe that Candida his wife, is a free spirit and is now fed up of this boring life acting as a housewife. He is sure that his own helplessness and inadequacy will prove irresistible to a woman so purely feminine as Candida. He is horrified that Candida must dirty her hands working around the house. Well, he is also seen helping Candida like her boy and takes the least interest in other things. Unable to understand what a woman could find to love in Morell, Marchbanks demands that Candida be given a chance to choose between them. When confronted with the choice, Candida says she chooses “the weakest.” Marchbanks at once understands why Candida loves Morell: He is even more in need of maternal care and pampering than is Marchbanks. Being a strong person commanding emotions Marchbanks do not resist her decision but seems to understand it cautiously. Suddenly a man, Marchbanks leaves to get about his work, after thanking Morell for giving Candida so much opportunity to love.

Role of "BURKINI" in Islam

World War I not only provided impetus to the freedom (openness, secularism, liberalism,etc) movements but it took them to extreme heights. The anti-conceptionist movement had affected France in particular. For over 40 years, birth rate in that country had constantly been falling. In Only 20 out of 87 French Districts birth rate was higher than death rate. Whereas, in the remaining districts, the average death rate was as high as 130, 140, and even 160, against every 100 births. The nation lacked in a sufficient number of combatant young men. There was no other mode, except by raising the national birth rate by all possible means. So the writers, journalists, speakers, even scientists and politicians came out and raised one universal cry requiring the people to bear more and more children without even bothering about marriage formalities. Any spinster or widow, they said, who offered her womb voluntarily in the service of the motherland, deserved to be honoured rather than censured. Lovers of freedom seized this opportunity for spreading among the people all their devilish ideas.

About the same time, the Paris Faculty of Medicine approved a doctoral thesis and published it in its official bulletin. It contained the following sentences also:

“We hope the day will come when without cynical boasting or false modesty we shall say: ‘I had syphilis at twenty years old,’ just as we say nowadays, ‘I have been sent to the hills for spitting blood,… Whoever has passed his youth without contracting those troubles which are as it were the price of pleasure, is but an incomplete being who through cowardice, a cold nature, or religious scruple, has missed the accomplishment of what is perhaps the least degraded of his natural functions”. (Towards Moral Bankruptcy, p.151)

French neo-Malthusian leader Paul Robin says:

“Under the influence of a licentious literature and an immoral stage, divorce and adultery, anti-conceptionist practices and abortion, are acclimatized in our plan of life. Five-and-twenty years ago the very words aroused in the immense majority of people violent feelings of revulsion, even of profound horror and disgust… The automatic reflexes have lost their vigour because the moral atmosphere has changed”. (Towards Moral Bankruptcy, p.152)

Note: To read full article please log on to http://thecompanion.in