Elisabeth “Bethsy” Buddenbrook Character Analysis

“Would she, as Madame Grünlich, drink chocolate every morning?”

“Why do you constantly use the expression ‘Good God’?” Thomas asked in annoyance. But that was not really what upset him. He felt as if Christian told this story with such relish because it gave him an opportunity to scorn and ridicule work. At which point their mother discreetly changed the subject.

“There are so many ugly things in this world,” Elisabeth Buddenbrook, née Kröger, thought to herself. “Even brothers can hate or despite each other; that does happen, as awful as it may sound. But no one ever speaks of it. They gloss over it. It’s best to know nothing about it.”

Days of tense waiting followed, and then came Herr Permaneder’s reply, an answer that no one—not Andreas Gieseke, or Elisabeth, or Thomas, not even Antonie herself—had expected. In simple terms, he agreed to the divorce.

He wrote that he sincerely regretted what had happened, but that he respected Antonie’s wishes, realizing as he did that he and she “don’t rightly belong together.” If he had been a source of sorrow for her in the past few years, he hoped that she would try to forget and forgive. Since he would probably never see her and Erika again, he wished her and the child every possible happiness in the future—signed Alois Permaneder. In a postscript he expressly offered to make immediate restitution of her dowry. He could live without worry on his own income. He would need no extra time, since no business transactions were necessary. The house was paid for, and money was available upon demand.

Tony was almost a little ashamed and for the first time felt inclined to see something laudable in Herr Permaneder’s lack of passion when it came to money matters.

“The lung is affected?” [Thomas] asked, looking from doctor to doctor.

“Yes—pneumonia,” Dr. Langhals said, with an earnest, correct bow.

“Just the least touch of infection in the right lung,” the family physician replied, “which we must do our very best to localize.”

“I became what I am,” Thomas said at last, with emotion in his voice, “because I did not want to become like you. If I have inwardly shrunk away from you, it was because I had to protect myself from you, because your nature and character are a danger to me. I am speaking the truth.”

She wept bitterly when the time came to say farewell to her little Johann. He embraced her: then, putting his hands behind his back and shifting his weight to one leg while balancing his other foot on the toe, he watched her depart; and his gold-brown eyes rimmed with bluish shadows had the same brooding, introspective look that they had taken on when he stood beside his grandmother’s corpse, when his father died, when their grand old home was broken up—or on so many other occasions, which had less to do with life’s external events. As he saw it, old Ida’s departure was consistent with the other instances of decline, dissolution, and termination that he had witnessed. That sort of thing no longer astounded him—had never astounded him, strangely enough. Sometimes, when he would raise his head with its curly brown hair and flair his nostrils fastidiously, his lips slightly twisted as always, it looked as if he were cautiously sniffing the air and the atmosphere of life around him, expecting to catch a whiff of that odor, that strangely familiar odor, which the fragrance of all those flowers beside his grandmother’s casket had not been able to overpower.