I was looking at this very fine Gothic fan vaulting, which Mr. Ruskin says is like the ancient imagination of trees in a forest, overarching, and I was thinking of palms towering in the jungle, and all the beautiful silky butterflies sailing amongst them, high up and quite out of reach" (7). In this opening scene, there is other proof of Adamson's double vision in his descriptions of Mrs. Alabaster: "she moved some of her black silk rolls of flesh on the rosy satin of her sofa" (3). This description makes her seem like a great swollen spider settling in the middle of her web. Throughout the novella, Byatt intends for us to maintain the double vision that so plagues Adamson at the beginning of the story and to continue to see the semblances (and the differences) between insects and humans.
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Double Vision 3.
The character William Adamson is also emblematic of the scientific, reasoned, and empirical attempt to explain the natural order of things in our universe. First and foremost, Adamson is a scientist, who has a name and a destiny to live up to. Adamson or Adam's son must carry on the task of naming the creatures of the earth that was allotted to Adam in the Garden of Eden. But he seems to be lost in a place where he cannot fulfill this destiny until Matty Crompton comes along and rouses him out of his complacency. He is always pondering, collecting, observing, hypothesizing, and theorizing throughout the entire novel. In this way, Adamson is continually introduced to us as a scientist. "He discovered the Crucifers, the Umbellifers, the Labiates, the Rosaceae, the Leguminosae, the Compositae, and with them the furious variety of forms. And then he discovered his ruling passion, the social insects.Here was the clue to the world. His journal became the journal of an ant-watcher" (12). As this quote implies, William Adamson uses scientific thought to explain the world around him.
