Dancing and Diamonds

Will Landschulz
Am. Lit. Per. 2
Mrs. LaMagdeleine

As soon as we are introduced to him, Marco might as well have "TROUBLE" connected to his head in foot-tall flashing Incandescent letters.  Giving a pin (with diamond ominously described as a "heavenly ice cube") to a girl he just met?  Imposing himself upon Esther without noting her reaction or, perhaps, caring?  Gripping her arm so tightly as to leave purple marks where his fingers were?  Of course, this is not lost on Esther, who calls him a "woman-hater" and likens him to a "snake" with "clockwork jaws."  He leads her to dance the tango, ignoring her protests of "I don't dance," brushing it off because "I'll do the dancing."  She goes limp in his arms and gives him exactly what he wants - a woman who's putty in his arms and will do whatever he desires.  That makes her, to him, a "perfectly respectable" partner in his plans.  After the warm-up tango, he leads her outside into a hedged-off area, surrounded by a deserted golf course and lonely property enclosing them into the moonlit garden.  We've been building to this moment for the entire chapter, and sure enough, Marco takes advantage of their convenient solitude to force the situation, so to speak.  Oddly, it doesn't seem to register with her that she's being raped, not until her dress begins to tear off entirely.  She wastes an entire paragraph with her wondering about being raped, and then does she begin to "writhe and cry," jabbing her stilletto heel into his leg, smashing his nose into a bloody mess.  He calls her a slut, completely ignoring the fact that he was the one who started the mess in the first place, and ends up by stealing not only the diamond he gave her, but probably her bag as well.  Then she does something very odd.  Once she has escaped Marco's clutches, she goes home to the Amazon and dumps her entire wardrobe to the breezes.  Maybe she felt that it is unclean?  But that makes no sense.  Why would things she hadn't worn to the rape be unclean, fit only to be tossed to the breeze?  Maybe she feels she is unclean?  that makes more sense, although a much better expedient is simply to take a bath.  After that, her view is distorted and she begins to not care about, well, anything.  The "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's" paragraph becomes gibberish between the sides of the page, she picks up and puts down the idea of a novel, junks her thesis because of the aforementioned gibberish, and watches dumbly as a "hollow voice" throws her friends at Cambridge, and her relationship with Buddy.  In this way, she further isolates herself from the rest of her support group besides her mother, who is not given much of a character thus far.