Chapter
2
Studying prose fiction
2.1 Exploring characterisation in prose fiction 2.2 Exploring narration in prose fiction 2.3 Exploring issues, concerns and ideas 2.4 Exploring prose forms and structures 2.5 Exploring context in pre-1900 prose 2.6 Exploring context in post-1900 prose 2.7 Developing different interpretations 2.8 Writing about a whole prose text 2.9 Evaluating responses to a whole prose text 2.10 Writing about a passage from a prose text 2.11 Evaluating responses to a passage-based question
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This chapter explores in detail the essential concepts and skills required when studying prose fiction as part of Literature in English at an advanced level. Y ou will learn how to approach prose texts by engaging with examples of prose fiction from different time periods and from a variety of genres and forms. Y ou will develop your skills and confidence in analysing the language of prose fiction and also in writing effectively about character, narration, narrative structure, contexts, and wider issues and concerns. Y ou will also develop your own personal responses to texts and learn how to engage meaningfully with alternative readings and interpretations. In addition, you will develop and extend your own writing skills, building towards full exam-style responses at the end of the chapter, and you will have the chance to evaluate your progress against a range of sample responses.
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2.1 E xploring characterisation in prose fiction Big question • How do writers create memorable characters?
WHAT DO CHARACTERS DO? Task 1. Think of your favourite character from a novel or short story. a) Who or what do they love most? Who or what do they hate? b) Where or when were they happiest? Or saddest? c) What is their greatest fear? Or their greatest challenge? d) Do they change over the course of the story? If so, how? Characters draw us into stories. When we care about a character, good or bad, we want to follow them into their world and see it through their eyes. The novelist E.M. Forster said that characters can be described as either ‘flat’ or ‘round’. A flat character is a type or even a caricature: one who does not change as the story progresses. A round character, on the other hand, is convincing: a character who develops through the story. T he test, says Forster, of the round character is ‘that they are capable of surprising in a convincing way’.
Task 2. Do you agree with Forster’s definitions? Discuss your reasons.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS: CREATING CHARACTERS There are many ways a writer can make a character memorable. When you write about characters, it is important to think about how you find out about them and how this makes you respond. For example, does the writer show you the character mainly from the outside or the inside, or both?
USING EXTERNAL FEATURES TO INTRODUCE A CHARACTER Characters can be introduced with a description of the way they look, dress, talk, move or act. Even the way they are named can be revealing.
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Task 3. Think again about your favourite character, but this time consider how they are presented to you by the writer. In the story, how does the writer describe the following: a) their physical appearance b) their past c) other characters’ views of them d) the way they speak e) what they are thinking or feeling f) what they believe.
Exploring characterisation in prose fiction Read the following extract and think about how Dickens uses external features to introduce this character. Sir Leicester Dedlock is only a baronet, but there is no mightier baronet than he. His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely more respectable. He has a general opinion that the world might get on without hills but would be done up without Dedlocks. He would on the whole admit nature to be a good idea (a little low, perhaps, when not enclosed with a park-fence), but an idea dependent for its execution on your great county families. He is a gentleman of strict conscience, disdainful of all littleness and meanness and ready on the shortest notice to die any death you may please to mention rather than give occasion for the least impeachment of his integrity. He is an honourable, obstinate, truthful, high-spirited, intensely prejudiced, perfectly unreasonable man. Sir Leicester is twenty years, full measure, older than my Lady. He will never see sixty-five again, nor perhaps sixty-six, nor yet sixty-seven. He has a twist of the gout now and then and walks a little stiffly. He is of a worthy presence, with his light-grey hair and whiskers, his fine shirt-frill, his pure-white waistcoat, and his blue coat with bright buttons always buttoned. He is ceremonious, stately, most polite on every occasion to my Lady, and holds her personal attractions in the highest estimation. His gallantry to my Lady, which has never changed since he courted her, is the one little touch of romantic fancy in him. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852)
Task
Title is ‘only a baronet’, but to him high status matters. Simile: dismissive attitude to nature, but also suggests they are ancient family. His main concern is how others view him. Contradictory postmodifying adjectives and ‘perfectly unreasonable’ – almost an oxymoron.
Glossary baronet: the lowest hereditary British title; a baronet can use the title ‘Sir’ gout: a disease causing joint pain, often associated with excessive consumption of rich food and drink
Key terms oxymoron: a figure of speech in which opposite or contradictory ideas or terms are combined (for example, ‘sweet sorrow’)
4. a) Make notes on your first impressions of Sir Leicester Dedlock. Consider his family name and its associations. b) Now consider the character questions on the previous page. From the list, identify what information we are given and what at this stage, is missing? c) How do you think we are meant to respond to this character? It is important to analyse the language the writer chooses to describe a character. Look one student’s notes on the first paragraph.
Task 5. Make notes on the use of different features to create character in the second paragraph. a) Which features are external, and which are internal? b) Why is Sir Leicester’s exact age unclear? c) Why is so much information given about his clothing? d) Finally, does the information about ‘my Lady’ and his feelings for her alter our overal impression of his character?
Wider reading Charles Dickens famously used unusual names to signal important qualities of his characters. Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times has a grindingly oppressive love of facts and figures, while the superficial Veneerings provide comic relief in Our Mutual Friend.
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Chapter 2 Studying prose fiction
USING SETTING AND SYMBOLISM TO CREATE CHARACTER Writers can also create powerful characters by describing places, objects or images that are somehow connected with them. For example, in his novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses colour symbolism to create character. Gatsby, the self-made millionaire, longs for ‘the green light’ that glows across the bay. It becomes a motif that represents both Gatsby’s hope of regaining his lost love Daisy Buchanan and also his jealousy. Daisy, on the other hand, is introduced using the colour white, which, rather than indicating purity, symbolises an emptiness or a moral blankness about her character. Now read the following extract from the novel Rebecca, where the young narrator explores a room furnished and decorated by her predecessor in the house, the first Mrs de Winter. Somehow I guessed, before going to the window, that the room looked out upon the rhododendrons. Yes, there they were, bloodred and luscious, as I had seen them the evening before, great bushes of them, massed beneath the open window, encroaching on to the sweep of the drive itself. T here was a little clearing too, between the bushes, like a miniature lawn, the grass a smooth carpet of moss, and in the centre of this, the tiny statue of a naked faun, his pipes to his lips. […] This was a woman's room, graceful, fragile, the room of someone who had chosen every particle of furniture with great care, so that each chair, each vase, each small, infinitesimal thing should be in harmony with one another, and with her own personality. It was as though she who had arranged this room had said: ‘This I will have, and this, and this,’ taking piece by piece from the treasures in Manderley each object that pleased her best, ignoring the secondrate, the mediocre, laying her hand with sure and certain instinct only upon the best. T here was no intermingling of style, no confusing of period, and the result was perfection in a strange and startling way, not coldly formal like the drawing-room shown to the public, but vividly alive, having something of the same glow and brilliance that the rhododendrons had, massed there, beneath the window. Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca (1938)
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Key terms symbolism: device where an object, image or action takes on a meaning within a story that is different from its literal sense motif: an object, image or idea, used symbolically, that is repeated throughout a text
Glossary rhododendron: a shrub with large clusters of bell-shaped flowers; rhododendrons were fashionable in formal gardens of English country houses faun: a Roman rural god, represented as a man with a goat's horns, ears, legs, and tail