The Guide - Character of Rosie

Character of Rosie

Rosie is one of the main characters in the novel. She is presented in the novel as a beautiful dancer, of the Devadasi type of temple dancers, and the wife of Marco. Her marriage is like a curse in disguise to her as Marco is totally engrossed in his career and is totally apathetic and unemotional to her. She is very passionate about dancing but her husband does not allow her to dance. She tries to persuade her husband and bears all the insults by him just for the sake of getting his permission to dance. When she is left in Malgudi by Marco to live with Raju, she devotes herself completely to dancing. She wakes early in the morning and practices hard for three hours everyday. She is always eager to talk about dance and even tries to teach Raju some of it.

She is religious and believes in Goddess Saraswati and has a bronze statue of Nataraja, which is an image of Shiva as the cosmic Lord of Dance, in her office. She does not believe in discriminating between people on the basis of their financial status. When Raju meets rich and influential people, Rosie does not seem to care much about them. Being herself an artist, she respects the arts and likes to be in the company of artists and other music lovers.

Her success does not get to her head even after becoming a very successful professional dancer. Raju becomes upset when Rosie spends a lot of time with different artists rather than with him. He tells her that these artists come to her because they are inferior to her and she replies that she is tired of all these talks of superior and inferior and does not believe in any of these.

She is also portrayed as a traditional Indian wife. Her husband is like God to her. Marco calls her dancing skills as street acrobatics and compares it to monkey dance. Despite all these insults she continues to be his wife. When Marco comes to know about the intimacy between her and Raju he gets very upset and doesn't talk to her and completely ignores her presence. She apologizes to him and keeps on following him like a dog hoping that his mind would change one day but that does not happen. This incident shows her tremendous tolerance power and her optimistic attitude. Even after she becomes very successful in her career and independent of her husband Marco she still has his photograph which conveys that she still considered Marco to be her husband and highlights her traditional Indian wife kind of character. However, she is often referred as 'The Serpent girl' by Raju's mother, because his mother thinks that she was responsible for the ruined condition of her family and her son. Raju also seems to dislike her at the end of the story and holds her as the culprit. Rosie was also disliked by Raju's friends, Gaffur and Sait due to her intimacy with Raju.

character sketch written by - harsh thakran,class xith (st. pauls school)