nevertheless reminds him that roses have thorns (McCullough, 1977:210). I t is
when Dane, the child born out of Ralph and Meggie’s clandestine union, tells her
that he wishes to become a priest that the full import of the name of the roses
becomes apparent:
Ashes of roses ... And I didn’t understand ... Ashes thou wert, unto
ashes return. To the Church thou belongest, to the Church thou
shall be given ... God rot God, I say! God the sod! The utmost
enemy of women, that’s what God is! (McCullough, 1977:425).
The rose motif is used again at Dane’s funeral, where his casket is covered with
roses, but this time of course, symbolising sorrow and grief.
However, here is another of the alchemical keys to the novel; ‘ashes of
roses’ implies that the flower must be burnt to become ashes, to be transmogrified
in the fire in order to produce the colour or appearance of beauty. This, in turn,
reveals the alchemical nature of the novel, and as DeMarr has pointed out, the
novel bears an epigraph which summarizes a Celtic legend of a particular bird that
searches for a thorn on which to impale itself and having done so, before it dies and
because of the thorn, sings so beautifully that its song is the most beautiful in the
world. This is recalled when Meggie explains to Ralph:
Each of us has something within us which won’t be denied, even if
it makes us scream aloud to die ... Like the old Celtic legend of the
bird with the thorn in its breast, singing its heart out and dying.
Because it has to, it’s driven to. We can know what we do wrong
even before we do it, but self-knowledge can’t affect or change
the outcome, can it? We create our own thorns, and never stop to
count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves
it was well worth it (McCullough, 1977:390).
(c) Place and Elsewhere Place
McCullough said in her response to the questionnaire that she uses place
merely as a background or setting; however, in Tim she uses it in a most powerful
manner. I ndeed, place in this work, as it is really throughout the corpus, is both
actual and symbolic. There is the metaphorical idea of place as class, as in social
station, of not moving beyond a designated level of social expectations and
behaviours, and here place exemplifies the clash of working class and middle class.
The symbolic dimension of place is represented by Mary’s holiday beach cottage; for
Mary it represents a place of retreat and in its pristine symbolic associations it is
pure and glowing under the sun and the moon; a place outside of social time for the