suggesting some sort of feminist argument against the Cinderella complex, or against the society which would nourish such fantasies, but the reader simply has no sympathy for this Rima creature by the time the story is over. She is a little girl who cannot or will not grow up and recognize that love involves people who have their feet in the real world and some reasonable knowledge of their own strengths and weaknesses and those of others. Jaffe provides us with a conclusion which seems far too wistful for this reader:
I remembered that the Rima of Green Mansions . . . had been killed in a fire that destroyed her hiding-tree. It seemed to me, that lonely morning in St. Thomas, that the Rima I knew had been killed in many fires, rising again from the ashes of each one like a bright bird to sing the song of some wanderer's need. Had there ever been a real Rima? Born and reborn to a splendid image, she had never looked for herself, nor had anyone else. Being each man's dream of love, she had eventually failed him, and so he had failed her, and so, finally, she had failed herself (Jaffe 312).
This passage is almost total poetic nonsense, romanticizing Rima's tawdry relationships which were doomed from the beginning. There are only two meaningful elements in the passage. The first is the question, "Had there ever been a real Rima?" The answer is no, which is the same as saying that the story is about nothing because it is about a person who is a cipher. The second is the declaration that "she had failed herself," for that is the only worthwhile truth which is contained in this aggravating story of a very aggravating character. Jaffe in these final lines makes clear her sympathy for her character, but she also pins at least some of the blame for Rima's pain where it primarily belongs---on Rima herself. Once burned, twice shy, the saying goes, but when we find a character who is burned three times and throws herself right back into the...