Dove Keeper Character Profile: Rosalie
Rosalie is a middle-aged executioner's wife and former government secretary. She grew enamored with her husband, Anatole, when they bonded at a cycling club. She helped raise her nephew, André, after his mother, her sister Juliette, died from tuberculosis.
She very much behaves as what she would consider to be a "proper lady," though her accomplishments as the first woman cyclist can't be understated. Once lively and now quiet, anxious, and withdrawn, she has kept an emotional distance from her daughter and nephew because of her grief and guilt over the past. This has led to mounted tensions within the household because both Marcy and André question Rosalie's distance and interpret it as somehow their faults. Overall, Rosalie's anxiety and both her and her husband's need to keep the household stable destabilize it till their daughter and nephew can no longer stand to be in the house, and yet where Marcy and André end up may be even worse than an uncomfortable household.
She struggles with anxiety and depression in a time when such things were often kept quiet, though this is still an issue now; in this time, the diagnosis was neurasthenia, a catch-all physical illness attributed to a disturbance in one's literal nerves and treated with rest cures, in which the person remained isolated for a long stint of time. Though a diagnosis more common with women, men were often diagnosed as well, some treated for neurasthenia after the Great War (World War I) when symptoms weren't attributed to "shell shock" from fighting in the war.
Will Rosalie confess her deepest regrets to those she loves? Can the family ever reunite? Will her anxieties over the past and present make her unable to progress in her recovery or save those she loves when they need it the most?