Conclusion

‘Dreams and realities, dreams and realities, dreams and realities,’ mutters Terence Hewet as he turns away from eavesdropping on Rachel and Helen one night, wondering whether he is in love with them. ¹ Hewet is at this point contemplating how the experience of falling in love is a continuous process of lurching backwards and forwards. Rachel, however, uses the same two reference points in a rather different context later in the novel: After attending church service—and conversing with, in turn, Evelyn Murgatroyd, Miss Allen and the old Mrs. Paley and before joining Mrs. Flushing's tea party, where the journey to the native South American village is being planned—she realises that it is impossible to understand and describe ‘those other people in the world’ (301). Any sort of otherness or contact with it—whether through being in love or by travelling and observing foreignness—is beyond the self's cognitive and representational abilities. One minute, ‘the world is finally displayed in its true proportions’ and an-other world or subject appears to the witnessing subject ‘with startling intensity … leaving only reality’ (300–301). The next minute, however, the vision of the world becomes ‘dim’ again as a ‘haze of feverish red mist’ clouds knowledge and depiction and Rachel becomes aware that otherness can appear to the self only in ‘a dream’ (301).