Will's mother.

[Arsenic]

So obviously, Will's mom has some sort of mental disorder. I was wondering, specifically, what everyone thought this disorder might be. I guess I was leaning twoard some form of skitzophrenia, but then again I've only studied mental disorders a little, so my knowledge of them is less than vast. Also, do you think she was sick when she got married, or did she develop it later?

[eloquent]

I always thought she flipped because her husband went MIA and because she knew people were going to try to find out about the window. She just got overly obsessed about 'them' and amplified everything inside her head, untill it developed into what I interpreted as paranoid schizophrenia.

[jessia]

some mental illnesses, the ones that are due to chemical imbalances like skitzophrenia... that she could've already had, but did not show symptoms until after her husband went missing, knowing about the secrets she had to protect and the son she had to raise... the stress could have acted as a trigger.

[eloquent]

Yes I agree. She could have had some kind of 'dormant' disorder or susceptibility which made her more likely to develop a condition under stressful circumstances.

[Pyr]

i thought that the specters got her..ask pullman in the next letter

[jessia]

yah, i got that idea too. will suggested that in the book i think, but that the spectres had different forms or something.

[Will]

Always been a strange point this one.

[eloquent]

I always thought that the spectres getting Elaine was metaphorical, and maybe her mental illness represented that. You could even say (at a stretch) that people who were 'sucked' (or whatever the verb for being specterised is) and Elaine were both suffering from the consequences of the subtle knife (it created the windows which made John go AWOL and made the men come after her and it made the spectres), which would mean that 'spectre' could be extended to cover all the reasonable causality-linked detrimental effects of the knife.

(Maybe I'm just reading too much into this ).

[jessia]

from the microsoft encarta reference library dictionary:


spectre
n
See specter


specter
n
1. ghost: a ghostly presence or apparition
2. unpleasant prospect: a threat or prospect of something unpleasant
the specter of my performance review

[Early 17th century. Via French or directly from Latin spectrum “image, apparitionâ€Â

[jessia]

oops, sorry, i had a point to go with that

1. ghost: a ghostly presence or apparition
- this can easily go with the spectres that fed on the souls

2. unpleasant prospect: a threat or prospect of something unpleasant
the specter of my performance review
- this could be will's mother's spectres. she saw unpleasant things, threats, things that others didn't. the craziness was her spectre.

[AySz88]

Definately something to ask Pullman to clarify...

[darren]

Definately something to ask Pullman to clarify...

well, while i'm fascinated by the things that pullman didn't write -- all those unanswered questions -- i think that in certain cases, the answers are there for us, and we have just got to try to understand for ourselves. in other cases, were the answers aren't there, well... pullman has told us he's writing other works set in the lyra universe. if the answers are important enough to need answering, i'm sure he'll answer them in the forthcoming novels. to say that pullman has discarded or forgotten these unanswered threads in the trilogy is perhaps insulting to the author... hmm?

i dunno, that's just my thoughts...

[jopari]

or prequel, like Book of Dust.

[jessia]

the book of dust isn't actually a prequel... see the bod page at btts.

[Pyr]

about the spectres...remember wills mum was counting the bricks the same way as tulio...so maybe the specters actually were in our would but like the dæmons they couldnt be seen...and people who have mental illness are either being preyed on by specters or are the only people who can see them, or have had their souls sucked...maybe a combo to cover different mental illnesses

[AySz88]

I doubt it, really, past some kind of symbolism for the second definition of "specter".

[eloquent]

Yeah, I don't think it is much more than an extended metaphor.

[Pyr]

it kind of implies it in the books though, when hes watching tulio count stones like his mum and he says something like maybe there are specters in my world to, only they call them something different...it makes sense too, as there are windows through to our world, and all the other worlds that had windows had a form of specters...in the mulefa world the "specters" were tulapi.

[eloquent]

That's what I think as well, but only in a metaphorical sense (I doubt for instance that tualapi are literally the same thing as the Ci'gazze spectres, as for one thing they wreck villages instead of sucking souls).

[Pyr]

well not literally as in they are the same forms...but they both come from the knife..i think it says that at the time the knife was made they came into being, which implies that they and specters bot h come from the abyss.