MDMD5: Call off the Wedding, again

[Paul Nightingale]

We have already seen, in Ch3, that Mason is fascinated by the supernatural.
There, and also here in Ch7, there is a connection with, or reference to,
his dead wife. In Ch7 he is cast in the role of "the widower with that
Melancholick look": this is what, apparently, makes him 'attractive' as a
donor. Is he afraid of Cornelius, who seems blissfully unaware of what is
happening under his nose? Certainly patriarchy insists that women's role is
in defining the relationship between men: Austra points out that "English
Marriage [is no] different from the Service I'm already in" (p65).

Mason then asks Dixon to help him find "an Indifference-Draught" (p67) -
just as, in Ch3, he was seduced by the possibility of communicating with his
dead wife, "that, through this Dog-reveal'd Crone, he will be allowed at
last to pass over, and find, and visit her, and come back, his Faith
resurrected" (p25). Unreason is a necessary adjunct to Reason, the man of
science unable to surrender belief in the supernatural (which, of course,
includes religious fictions). In Ch7, far from being open-minded as Dixon, a
freethinker, Mason assumes that magic is the preserve of the racial Other
("your Malays and Pygmies"): this is part of his anglocentric (and
implicitly racist) outlook.