ABSTRACT
The happiness of visit is marred afterwards by Carrie’s realization that Mr Evans is very jealous of Nick’s delight in Hepzibah. Carrie’s miserable discomfort in being caught up in this bitter family quarrel is intense, for it echoes her own unresolved problem about how to put together the fragments of her own experience. Carrie’s own complex personality renders her very vulnerable in certain ways. Carrie’s anxiety about Mr Evans’s jealousy of their happiness at Druid’s Bottom is exaggerated – she confuses her own jealousy at seeing Nick’s easy intimacy with Hepzibah, Louisa, and Johnny, with Mr Evans’s reactions. Carrie’s inner problem of sustaining loyalty to her various parental figures meets up at this crisis in the story with a raw conflict between Mr Evans and Hepzibah Green and the beginning of a bitter parting of the ways between Samuel and Louisa.
