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Judge Goldsworth
Queen Disa is King Charles’s wife. She first meets King Charles when she is 19 years old, and the King agrees to marry her despite being gay because he feels pressure to produce an heir. Despite Disa’s kindness, charm, and persistence, Charles is never able to consummate the marriage, and he is quite cruel to his young bride. He has very little empathy for her suffering and his affairs publicly humiliate her. While Charles doesn’t feel anything for Disa in waking life, he often has dreams in which he loves her more profoundly than he has ever loved anyone and wants to tell her but cannot find her. His dreams indicate that, on some level, he knows how much she suffers and he sees her kindness in spite of it, but he is unable to express or feel any of this while awake. When their marriage fails, she moves back to her family’s villa on the French Rivera, but she never stops trying to help the King. His whereabouts in the United States are discovered after Andronnikov and Niagarin break into her villa and steal his letter from her bureau.
Queen Disa Quotes in Pale Fire
The Pale Fire quotes below are all either spoken by Queen Disa or refer to Queen Disa. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Commentary: Lines 367-434
Quotes
I am thinking of lines 261-267 in which Shade describes his wife. At the moment of his painting that poetical portrait, the sitter was twice the age of Queen Disa. I do not wish to be vulgar in dealing with these delicate matters but the fact remains that sixty-year-old Shade is lending here a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Now the curious thing about it is that Disa at thirty, when last seen in September 1958, bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade as she was when I met her, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet in those lines of Pale Fire. Actually it was idealized and stylized only in regard to the older woman; in regard to Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that blue terrace, it represented a plain unretouched likeness. I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.
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Queen Disa Quotes in Pale Fire
The Pale Fire quotes below are all either spoken by Queen Disa or refer to Queen Disa. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Commentary: Lines 367-434
Quotes
I am thinking of lines 261-267 in which Shade describes his wife. At the moment of his painting that poetical portrait, the sitter was twice the age of Queen Disa. I do not wish to be vulgar in dealing with these delicate matters but the fact remains that sixty-year-old Shade is lending here a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Now the curious thing about it is that Disa at thirty, when last seen in September 1958, bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade as she was when I met her, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet in those lines of Pale Fire. Actually it was idealized and stylized only in regard to the older woman; in regard to Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that blue terrace, it represented a plain unretouched likeness. I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
