Dr. Miles [ Edited ]

[Rachel-K]

What do you make of Dr. Miles? Do you read him as Joseph’s courterpart to Anne? What do you make of his culinary obsession? Don‘t his elaborate meal descriptions seem so strangely paired with his physical repulsiveness? (The yellow skin, those sweets pulling his thin skin up when Angelica would take them? Ick.)

Message Edited by rkubie on 07-27-2007 11:14 AM

[x-tempo]

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rkubie wrote:
What do you make of Dr. Miles? Do you read him as Joseph’s courterpart to Anne? What do you make of his culinary obsession? Don‘t his elaborate meal descriptions seem so strangely paired with his physical repulsiveness? (The yellow skin, those sweets pulling his thin skin up when Angelica would take them? Ick.)

Message Edited by rkubie on 07-27-2007 11:14 AM

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Must have been some good sherry and cake that Miles was served the night he came to take Constance away, because it apparently caused him to retell the whole story of the Russian soldiers to an enraptured Anne who probably took careful note of the part about the difficulty of pinning down the facts (in a tale described as one which turns upon itself three or four times so that one loses all track of who is guilty, mad, or worthy of sympathy.)

[Fozzie]

SPOILER

I am not sure what to make of Dr. Miles. At first, I thought Joseph had hired him to evaluate Constance and have her committed to an asylum. I thought Constance may have convinced him she was sane and so he did not commit her. However, by the end of the book, I thought that maybe Anne had bribed Dr. Miles away from Joseph's intentions and into hers. Again, we see the ambiguity of the story and do not know what really happened. I also liked the foreshadowing of the story he told as compared with the story told in Angelica.