Baglady

This essay will include an analysis and summary of the text “Baglady”. The essay will also contain a description of the characters, the setting and symbols in the story. The text “Baglady”, written by A. S. Byatt, we are introduced to a fiction short story about a middle aged woman named Daphne and she’s attending a business trip with her husband and the company he is working in, to the Far East. Daphne then experiences some oddly things on a shopping trip.

The short story starts in medias res, where we see Lady Scroop talking to the rest of the ladies about the upcoming shopping trip she has planned for them. Daphne Gulver-Robinson’s husband is in a meeting with the directors of the company “Doolittle Wind Quietus” and all the wives of the directors are breakfasting together. Most of the wives are very elegant , and Daphne feels threaten by the other ladies because she is older and dowdier than them. “She has tried to make herself attractive for this jaunt and has lost ten pounds and had her hands manicured; but now she sees the other ladies, she knows it is not enough.”

In a flashback, Daphne tells her husband Rollo, that she would rather stay with the geese and the fantail as usual. But Rollo convinces her that his boss, Lord Scroop, would be angry if she didn’t come along, and he also assures her that she might like the other wives .

Lady Scroop tells the wives that they may spread around in the mall, but they just have to be back on the front entrance at noon precisely so they can catch the next flight to Sydney. The Good Fortune Shopping Mall looks like a prison block, but the wives did not come for the outside, and they quickly go inside the mall. Daphne is very confused not sure whether she likes shopping, “ She looks at her watch, and wonders how she will fill the two hours before the rendezvous”.

She walks past first floor and ascends a flight of stairs, she goes around a corner and she finds an elevator, and she finds herself on a higher, emptier floor. On this floor she buys some fascinating things like a cover with an embroidered circle of fish, red and gold and copper.

The story then makes a transition from a non-fiction like story to a horror story.

After some time, she looks at her watch and decide that it is time to go back to the entrance. “ Time has passed at surprising speed”. She walks towards the exit signs that only lead her to more shops and she begin to think that it is not a coincidence, “They are designed, she begins to think, to keep you inside, to direct you past even more shops, in search of a hidden, deliberately elusive way out”.

She starts running, and she even break a heel off, but it does not matter, she takes her shoes off and start running faster. She looks at her watch once again, only to see that time of the rendezvous is well past. She opens her handbag and sees that her purse and credit card have mysteriously disappeared. So has her fountain-pen and Rollo’s present. She began to run very fast, so fast that holes spread in her stockings.

When her watch also was gone, she starts screaming. A policeman comes and Daphne askes for help, but he need to see her papers first, then