A112

Cultures: Book 2
Block 3: Literary classics edited by Nicola J. Watson
Block 4: Cultural journeys edited by Fiona Doloughan
This publication forms part of the Open University module A112 Cultures. Details of this and other Open
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First published 2020
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ISBN 978 1 4730 2875 3

1.1
Contents
Block 3
Literary classics 1
Introduction to Block 3 3
Chapter 1
Twelfth Night: why Shakespeare? 13
Chapter 2
Twelfth Night: disguise, comedy and gulling 45
Chapter 3
Jane Eyre: the making of a classic 75
Chapter 4
Jane Eyre: context, setting and the Gothic 107
Block 4
Cultural journeys 139
Introduction to Block 4 141
Chapter 1
The writer’s journey 151
Chapter 2
Narrative journeys 205
Chapter 3
On the road 271
Block 4 Resources 313
Acknowledgements 319
Glossary 323
Index 329
Block 3:
Literary classics
Edited by Nicola J. Watson
 Introduction

Introduction
Written by Nicola J. Watson
Block 3 is centred on two acknowledged classics of English literature:
William Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night (c.1601), and Charlotte
Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847). They’ve been selected for this block
because they are recognised as classics. But what exactly is a classic?
How and why does a literary work become a classic? And why are
classics important?

Figure 1 Emily Patrick, Penguin Classics, twentieth century, oil on panel.

Private collection. Photo: © Emily Patrick/Bridgeman Images.

The first thing to say is that ‘classic’ is a term related, rather

confusingly, to the discipline known as Classics or Classical Studies. It
derives at a distance from the Latin word classicus, meaning of the
highest social class. It turns up in English for the first time in the
1610s as an adjective meaning ‘of or belonging to the highest class;
approved as a model’. By the 1620s it meant ‘belonging to or
characteristic of standard authors of Greek and Roman antiquity’. And,
by the early eighteenth century, ‘a classic’ referred to ‘a Greek or

3
Block 3: Literary classics

Roman writer or work’. This sense had expanded by the middle of the
eighteenth century to any work or author held to have a similar quality
or standing; an artist or literary production of the first rank (‘Classic’,
Online Etymology Dictionary).
A classic is outstanding of its kind, displaying technical mastery. There
are, however, different kinds of classics and they sit within an implied
hierarchy, which is determined by how original or influential the work
is supposed to be. At the bottom of the hierarchy sits the ‘popular
classic’. This term, applied for instance to Agatha Christie’s crime
writing or perhaps to Russell T. Davies’s scripts for Dr Who, essentially
suggests that these works are the best of their kind, but that their kind
is formulaic, not ‘original’ in style and structure, voice and topic, and
therefore does not sit high up an implied literary hierarchy, however
beloved these works and their authors may be by a large and
continually regenerating readership. Moreover, though these works may
be very influential on others working in the same formula, they are not
felt to exert more wide-ranging influence upon culture either at the
time they are first produced or subsequently.
By contrast, at the top of this imaginary hierarchy, the ‘high’ literary
classic is felt to be a serious and important book that has stood the
test of time, a treasured repository of shared cultural wisdom or moral
understanding to be passed on down the generations. Although
sometimes a book may be regarded as an instant or ‘overnight’ classic,
classic status is more usually accorded to an older work that has been
carefully preserved and in one form or another is felt to be still active
and relevant in the present. How much time needs to elapse between
first release and recognition as classic is, however, variable, and
depends on how ephemeral the genre is thought to be in itself; the
term ‘classic rock’ refers to music that is only some 40 years old. But
it’s worth emphasising that preserving a work as a classic makes it a
conscious exception to the rule that much literature is ephemeral –
although it is possible as a scholar to reconstruct the enormous body
of comedy that was staged in Shakespeare’s time, hardly any of it
makes it into the modern theatrical repertoire, and of the list of novels
that were published alongside Jane Eyre in 1847, only a very few are
still in print.
It is possible for an individual work to be a classic, and it is possible
for an author to be considered classic. The two categories are related,
but do not entirely overlap. For instance, many of you will be familiar
with the children’s classic, The Wind in the Willows (1908), but I

4
 Introduction

suspect very few of you will know very much about the author
Kenneth Grahame’s life, and even fewer of you will have read any of
his other books – titles such as The Golden Age (1895) or Dream Days
(1898) – even though these are still in print. By contrast, once an
author is considered classic, the least accomplished of their works falls
within this magic orbit; hence Charlotte Brontë’s originally unpublished
first novel, The Professor, is now published and pored over. The process
of insisting that the author is a genius turns all of their books into
classics. It also has the effect of making authors’ faces – such as those
of Shakespeare and Charlotte Brontë – familiar to us centuries after
their deaths through their portraits.

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Block 3: Literary classics

1 The literary canon

Together, individual literary classics and classic authors make up what
is known as the canon. ‘The canon’ originally referred to those books
of the Old Testament in the Bible that were considered to be
historically authentic or ‘canonical’; as opposed to ‘the apocrypha’, 14
books which came to be regarded as of unknown authorship or
doubtful origin – apocryphal, in fact. Within literary studies, the canon
is a collection of works that are considered to be culturally
authoritative. There are, however, different canons. Shakespeare’s
works, and indeed Shakespeare as an author, have long been part of
the canon of English literature, but he is also part of the canon of
Western literature, and nowadays he is a strong contender to head up
the select canon of World literature. For instance, Shakespeare features
in the recently installed ‘The World Literary Giant Square’ in Shanghai
(2019) close to the house of a major Chinese classic author, Lu Xun.
This resembles a sort of literary drinks party attended by the greats of
European literature plus Lu Xun (Figure 2). Figures 3–4 show
Shakespeare and Dickens, in company with Goethe, Pushkin and Edgar
Allan Poe. (No women are present, though.)

Figure 2 (left) Lu Xun at The World Literary Giant Square, Shanghai (2019).
Photo: Nicola J. Watson. Figure 3 (centre) William Shakespeare at The
World Literary Giant Square, Shanghai (2019). Photo: Nicola J. Watson.
Figure 4 (right) Charles Dickens at The World Literary Giant Square,
Shanghai (2019). Photo: Nicola J. Watson.

The literary canon is not stable; it can and does change with time. The
idea that a collection of books is culturally authoritative is bound to
cause trouble and dissent, and at times of cultural crisis canons are
often challenged, and can collapse, at least in part. Books and even

6
 1 The literary canon

authors once regarded as classic may suddenly be stripped wholesale of

this dignity. One outstanding example of this is the poet and novelist
Walter Scott (1771–1832) who was once considered to rival
Shakespeare, and who certainly did rival Shakespeare’s global influence
over the nineteenth century. However, few nowadays have read even
his most influential novel Ivanhoe (1819).

Figure 5 Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. Photo: © James Brittain/

Bridgeman Images. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, Poets’
Corner has evolved to memorialise writers considered to be of national
importance. There are comparable places elsewhere: for example, in
France, the Panthéon in Paris and in Italy, the Basilica di Santa Croce in
Florence.

One simple way of seeing these changes in action is to look at the

history of Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey in London (Figure 5).
Poets’ Corner is a collection of monuments devoted to the canon of
English literature. Here you can find Shakespeare, who was installed
pretty late (1740) after his death (1603), and Charlotte Brontë, also
installed long after her death in 1855 (conceived 1939, installed 1947),
in belated acknowledgement that a woman novelist could have become
canonical. On the other hand, there are also all sorts of monuments
that were put up on the deaths of certain writers who were very
famous in their day, but of whom it is very likely you’ve never heard –
the Victorian poet laureate Robert Southey (1774–1843), for instance.

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Block 3: Literary classics

At the time of writing, there are no black, Asian and minority ethnic
(BAME) writers memorialised here. Poets’ Corner, therefore, not only
describes a national canon but its fluctuations and hesitations.
The literary canon, and the classics that make it up, are in fact in a
state of constant making and remaking. This is because the canon of
classics serves, in the main, as a shorthand for an idea of ‘essential
cultural inheritance’. But rather as, when grown-up children come to
clear out the houses of their dead parents, they throw out things that
their parents treasured, considering them hideous or obsolete, while
rescuing other things for sentimental or practical or politic reasons, so
what a culture chooses to describe as its inheritance depends on what
it currently finds valuable. Thus, canons of literature in English will
vary widely depending on where they are located. A library in Mumbai
may well choose to hold different classics to one in Philadelphia or
Jamaica, for instance. And the books they periodically choose to throw
out from their collections are likely to be different too.
The process of making and remaking a classic – and by extension the
canon – depends on a great deal of cultural work to make it fit for
purpose. Examples of such work include new forms of dissemination
and reproduction, illustration and editing. Cast your eye across the
shelves in an airport book shop and you will see some of the work of
publishers and booksellers in action – here ‘classics’ appear in markedly
‘serious’ format with arty black and white covers, alongside bestsellers
which are by contrast obliged to scream with metallic embossing to
attract the traveller’s attention. Look at the London Review of Books or
the Times Literary Supplement and you will see the beginnings of the
making of classics. If you have been to the home of the Brontë sisters
in Haworth or the houses associated with Shakespeare in Stratford-
upon-Avon, you will have witnessed the mature stages of this process.
Somewhere in between the first reviews and the creation of museums
sits the making and remaking of Shakespeare’s plays in performance
and film, and the creation of period costume dramas out of Jane Eyre
and the lives of the Brontë sisters. A classic may apparently be an old
text, but it is in fact thoroughly contemporary, retooled continually for
new contexts and new readers. In fact, as the chapters in this block
argue, a work achieves and retains classic status not because it is a
perfectly formed fossil, but because it is remarkably good at sparking
controversy and revealing uncanny topicality.

8
 2 The power of classics

2 The power of classics

In this block, you will be looking at some of these mechanisms as they
work in relation to Shakespeare and Brontë, and then, in the last week
of study on the module website, in relation to literary texts (both
ancient and contemporary) and the visual arts. Just before you start out
on your study of Shakespeare and Brontë, though, it’s worth reflecting
very briefly on the power of classics and the desirability of being
familiar with the classics of English literature. Over the last 30 or 40
years within universities, academics have become rather anxious about
the idea of the classic and of the canon, feeling that it is elitist and
exclusive, and so have expended considerable effort both on
challenging the canon and expanding it, a work that is very much
ongoing. Nevertheless, it still seems worth saying that, at the most
basic level, to be familiar with the classics of English literature is to
come into a very rich and remarkable cultural inheritance and that,
recognising this, you can and perhaps should argue for additions to, or
exclusions from, it.

Figure 6 François Bonvin, Still Life with Two Books, 1858, oil on panel, 20 ×
26 cm. Private collection. Photo: © Christie's Images/Bridgeman Images.

9
Block 3: Literary classics

Literary classics and cultural capital

In his novel about academia, Changing Places (1975), David Lodge
invented a literary parlour game called ‘Humiliation’, which is said
to remain popular in certain circles. Players name classics of
literature that they have not read, the winner being the one who
exhibits the most woeful literary ignorance. In Changing Places,
Lodge’s obnoxious American academic, Howard Ringbaum, admits
that he has never read Shakespeare’s Hamlet – and thus wins the
game, but also loses his job.
Lodge himself owns up to never having read Leo Tolstoy’s War and
Peace (1869). What do you make of this game? And if you were to
play it, what would you ‘confess’?

Take a look at the following list of books and consider the ones you
think probably count as classics:
. The Odyssey by Homer
. King Lear by William Shakespeare
. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
. Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré.
The titles that you choose will depend on what you understand a
classic to be. You might have decided that you have to at least heard
of the book, or the author. You may have decided that age matters
when it comes to calling books classics and that they have to date
from a previous century or perhaps be at least 50 years old. What do
you think about children’s literature, historical fiction and spy fiction?

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 2 The power of classics

Do you see them as part and parcel of the classics or do you see them
as in a separate category or subgenre?
As I have already remarked, there is a kind of hierarchy of types of
writing in the world of books. There are some ‘big names’ in this list
such as Homer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Charles
Dickens and Leo Tolstoy, whose inclusion in the national and indeed
world canon is nowadays not in doubt. This is, in part, because what
they wrote is still securely regarded as great literature and because the
books have individually survived the test of time. The case of Virginia
Woolf is more complicated. Although she was appreciated in her day
by a group of writers and artists called The Bloomsbury Group, she
fell foul of the novelistic norms and conventions of the day and was
not considered by many to be as ‘good’ a writer as, for example, her
contemporary Arnold Bennett. Many critics did not know how to read
her writing or what to do with it. However, a century or so later,
Bennett has largely been forgotten, and Woolf is considered one of the
greats of modernist fiction. The case of Woolf and Bennett suggests
that the canon can change and that with time a writer’s work can either
increase or decrease in value.
In the same way, time will tell with regard to Colson Whitehead’s
novel, The Underground Railroad (2016), which is set in ninteenth-
century America and is about two slaves who make a bid for freedom.
Whitehead says that he took his narrative model from Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels (1726), which suggests a deliberate bid for canonicity
on the part of this winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His subject
matter lies at the heart of American national identity and its anxieties.
So there is a chance that this novel will become an American classic,
possibly a twenty-first-century version of Mark Twain’s Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1884).
As to the le Carré, this book is nowadays felt to be a founding text of
spy fiction, and as such is regarded as rather more than a popular
classic. More recently, the novel by Chevalier has been immensely
popular, but neither romance nor historical romance aimed at women
readers has generally fared well when it comes to being regarded as
classic, despite the examples of Austen and the Brontës. The same may
be said of literature for children. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has
been so spectacularly successful that the argument as to its quality or
originality (two criteria even for children’s classics) has been
exceptionally fierce and is so far unresolved. Again, time will tell.

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Block 3: Literary classics

References
'Classic' (no date) Available at: https://www.etymonline.com/word/classic
(Accessed: 25 September 2020).

12
Chapter 1
Twelfth Night:
why Shakespeare?
Written by Richard Danson Brown
Contents
1 Introduction 17
2 Why Shakespeare? 18
2.1 Shakespeare’s portrait 19
2.2 ‘Not of an age, but for all time’? 21
3 Shakespeare’s language 24
3.1 The Priest 24
3.2 Viola’s soliloquy 31
3.3 Maria and Sir Toby 39
4 Summary 42
References 43
 1 Introduction

1 Introduction
Studying Shakespeare for the first time can feel like an intimidating
experience that raises many questions. You probably have some sense
that his language can be difficult, that the culture he was a part of was
very different from our own – after all, he lived over 400 years ago,
between 1564 and 1616. At the same time, you may be intrigued about
the ins and outs of his extraordinary cultural status. Does William
Shakespeare really deserve the kind of superstar status that our culture
still gives him – almost as a rock star writer, whose influence
transcends the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century period in
which he lived? This chapter will endeavour to answer some of these
questions in the context of Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, a comedy
which is concerned both with love and the social worlds in which our
romantic relationships inevitably take place. We will begin directly with
the question of Shakespeare’s reputation, and then turn to the language
he uses in Twelfth Night.

Study note
In this chapter, all references to Twelfth Night are to the set book:
The Oxford Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, edited by Roger Warren
and Stanley Wells (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994).

17
Chapter 1 Twelfth Night: why Shakespeare?

2 Why Shakespeare?
Let’s start by having a look at Shakespeare, or at least an idea of what
he might have looked like (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Martin Droeshout, Portrait of William Shakespeare; title page

engraving from ‘Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and
Tragedies’, 1623. British Library, London. Photo: © British Library Board/
Bridgeman Images.

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 2 Why Shakespeare?

2.1 Shakespeare’s portrait

Figure 1 shows the portrait of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout,
which adorns the title page of the 1623 First Folio, the first collected
edition of Shakespeare’s plays. (At this point, you might like to think
back to the work you’ve done on Renaissance portraiture in Block 2.)
Droeshout’s image (it’s in fact an engraving, a portrait which has been
incised onto a flat surface to produce a template that could be reused)
is in many ways a strange picture. Droeshout was only 15 years old
when Shakespeare died in 1616, and 22 when the First Folio was
published, so it’s likely that this portrait wasn’t drawn from the life
with Shakespeare in the room, but was instead copied from another
image (Schoenbaum, 1975, p. 258). Though the face is almost instantly
recognisable (as a child, I had a Royal Shakespeare Company badge
adorned with this image and the rather naff slogan ‘Will Power’), when
you look at the relationship between the head and the body, something
seems to be not quite right. As one of Shakespeare’s biographers tartly
puts it:

The huge head on a plate of a ruff surmounts a

disproportionately small tunic. One eye is lower and larger than
the other, the hair does not balance at the sides, light comes from
several directions.
(Schoenbaum, 1975, p. 258)

As Schoenbaum concedes, not everyone has been so negative – in

1966, the critic A. L. Rowse suggested that the image showed the
‘searching look of the eyes understanding everything’, as though the
portrait confirmed the singular intelligence he discerned in
Shakespeare’s plays (quoted in Schoenbaum, 1975, p. 258). Though it
would be wonderful to have a portrait of Shakespeare by an artist with
the skill and psychological insight of painters like Rembrandt van Rijn
(1606–1669) or Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), I’m asking you to look
at this picture less for the human qualities Rowse thought he could see
in the engraving and more because it suggests that, even by 1623,
Shakespeare had almost become an abstract idea. We’re looking at an
icon – the idea of a writer – rather than an objective or illusionistic
portrait like Velázquez’s near-contemporaneous painting of the Spanish
baroque poet Luis de Góngora (1561–1627, Figure 2).

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Chapter 1 Twelfth Night: why Shakespeare?

Figure 2 Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Don Luis de Góngora, 1622, oil on

canvas, 51 × 41 cm. Prado, Madrid. Photo: © Bridgeman Images.

Where Velázquez’s careful shadowing and sombre colours manage to

convey something of Góngora’s personality – this is a man who looks
shrewd, careworn and world-weary all at once – Droeshout’s image of
Shakespeare is flat and without psychological depth. This is almost
precisely what the playwright and poet Ben Jonson (c.1572–1637)
indicates in his short poem, which was printed opposite Shakespeare’s
portrait. He warns us that the engraver has been unable to draw
Shakespeare’s ‘wit’ – his intelligence – so we should ‘look/Not on his
picture, but his book’ (Jonson, 1975, p. 263; see also Shakespeare,
1996, p. 2). In other words, if you want to know more about
Shakespeare, turn the page to his plays and ignore the picture.

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 2 Why Shakespeare?

2.2 ‘Not of an age, but for all time’?

The Droeshout engraving isn’t the only supplementary material that
the First Folio gives to its readers: it also includes a number of poems
in praise of Shakespeare, at the head of which is another one by
Jonson, with the impressively long title, ‘To the Memory of My
Beloved, the Author Mr William Shakespeare: and What He Hath Left
Us’. (In this context, ‘My Beloved’ conveys the idea that Jonson and
Shakespeare were close friends, not that they were lovers; see ‘beloved,
adj. and n.’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.) Though Jonson had
some reservations about Shakespeare – Jonson was a proud man and
considered his own work to be at least the equal of Shakespeare’s – his
poem is the best review or reference you can ever imagine having.
Jonson compares Shakespeare with other great English writers, such as
the poets Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser, and to the most
celebrated tragic dramatists of the ancient world, ‘thundering
Aeschylus,/Euripedes, and Sophocles’, to underline Shakespeare’s utter
singularity:

Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show,

To whom all the scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
And all the muses were still in their prime,
When like Apollo he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm!
(Jonson, 1975, p. 264)

Jonson’s thinking here is quicksilver and a little hard to catch, so I’m

going to unpack what he’s saying in greater detail: ‘Britain has in
Shakespeare a dramatist who is the equal of all previous European
drama (“all the scenes of Europe”); he transcends this specific “age”,
and is in fact so excellent that he can be compared only to the classical
Muses (who inspire poets and dramatists), and to Apollo, the Greek
god of poetry, and to Mercury, the Greek god of rhetoric and
eloquence.’

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Chapter 1 Twelfth Night: why Shakespeare?

Figure 3 Giorgio Ghisi, Apollo and the Muses, c.1557. Photo: Artokoloro/
Alamy. Apollo (playing the lyre in the centre) sits on the top of Parnassus,
the Greek mountain sacred to Apollo and the Muses, surrounded by the nine
Muses, each of whom sponsored a different form of poetry or art. Compare
with Block 1, Unit 3 on Delphi, which is on Mount Parnassus.

In a sense, Jonson’s poem is saying that Shakespeare inaugurated a kind

of Golden Age of writing – that’s the point of his invocation of the
Muses, Apollo and Mercury, who were the legendary sources and
sponsors of poetry, music and eloquence (see Figure 3). Of course, as
you have learned elsewhere on this module, these classical gods have
other attributes in other contexts, but for Jonson, it’s their association
with the arts that is paramount. In this stunning formulation,
Shakespeare is better than all previous human dramatists, and is aligned
with the Greek gods who created these arts. The key phrase here –
which encapsulates Jonson’s sense of Shakespeare’s excellence and has
been repeated numerous times since 1623 – is the line ‘He was not of
an age, but for all time!’.

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 2 Why Shakespeare?

Activity 1
(Allow around 10 minutes to complete this activity.)

Let’s pause on this for a moment. How do you react to Jonson’s poem?
Is there anything about his claim that Shakespeare ‘was not of an age,
but for all time’ that strikes you as implausible? Jot down a couple of
thoughts.

Discussion
My main feeling about this passage is that it is extravagantly over the
top. Indeed, the work I’ve done to explain what Jonson is driving at
suggests the datedness of some of his central assumptions about
culture. Apollo, the Muses and Mercury are no longer as familiar as they
were; the same goes for Aeschylus and Euripides. You will have similar
queries about references like these as we study Twelfth Night: not
everything Shakespeare wrote about still feels like it was written ‘for all
time’. And yet that’s not the whole story. Jonson’s line is famous
precisely because it expresses so well what so many people feel
generally about Shakespeare – that his work is in some way universal
and is ‘for’ as broad an audience as possible.

While writing this chapter, I came across a magazine column by the

journalist Andrew Marr, in which he reflects on seeing a performance
of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and (perhaps inadvertently) comes up
with a sentence that is strikingly like Jonson’s: ‘And clever WS [William
Shakespeare] continues to speak to us in unexpected ways, muttering
from the side of his mouth’ (Marr, 2019, p. 7). It’s now time to listen
to that ‘muttering’ directly. Keep thinking about Shakespeare’s
relevance as you work through the next two chapters and come back
to your initial thoughts at the end: has your thinking changed at all?

23
Chapter 1 Twelfth Night: why Shakespeare?

3 Shakespeare’s language
As the work you’ve done on Jonson’s poem suggests, the language of
Shakespeare and his contemporaries is distant from us. The poem
raises the question of what is taken for granted by a culture. Jonson
assumes his readers will have some knowledge of the classical world,
and of writers both in England and on the continent; he is, in other
words, writing for readers who were as well read as he was. It’s worth
noting that although neither Jonson nor Shakespeare went to university,
Jonson was formidably learned, and his works show an intimate
knowledge of the classics. This lies behind the backhanded remark in
an earlier line of ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr
William Shakespeare’, where Jonson writes that Shakespeare had ‘small
Latin, and less Greek’ (Jonson, 1975, p. 264). Although it’s true that
Shakespeare was not as scholarly as Jonson, as we shall see, he did read
widely (though perhaps he was not as much of a show-off).
Shakespeare’s language is distant from us not just in terms of cultural
assumptions but also in terms of specific usages, idioms and taste. I’m
now going to take you through three examples from Twelfth Night,
which we’ll look at in close detail to give a sense of the range of styles
in the play. We start towards the end of the text, with the Priest’s
speech in Act 5, Scene 1.

3.1 The Priest

Activity 2
(Allow around 15 minutes to complete this activity.)

Read through the Priest’s complete speech (5.1.152–59):

A contract of eternal bond of love,

Confirmed by mutual joinder of your hands,

Attested by the holy close of lips,

Strengthened by interchangement of your rings,

And all the ceremony of this compact

Sealed in my function, by my testimony;

24
 3 Shakespeare’s language

Since when, my watch hath told me, toward my grave

I have travelled but two hours.

(5.1.152–59)

Using the explanatory notes to help you with any difficult words (p. 208),
try to paraphrase the content of this speech in a single sentence of no
more than 30 words.

Discussion
Here’s my attempt at a 30-word version:

[This was] a betrothal, which you confirmed by joining your

hands, by kissing, and exchanging rings; the business of this
agreement, which I oversaw as priest, happened two hours
ago.

You will have used your own words, so don’t worry if your version looks
different from mine. I’m going to have another stab at paraphrasing this
speech in a moment, so you can as well.

How did you find this activity? I have to say, I found it difficult. The
Priest’s speech begins in mid sentence, because he’s answering Olivia’s
earlier query, ‘I charge thee […]/Here to unfold[…] what thou dost
know/Hath newly passed between this youth and me’ (5.1.147–51) –
that’s why I found I needed two extra words at the start to explain the
first few lines. The other difficulty is the unfamiliar words that
Shakespeare uses like ‘joinder’ and ‘interchangement’. To make sense of
these terms, the notes in your set text are essential. The editors, Roger
Warren and Stanley Wells, explain that ‘joinder’ means ‘joining’ and
‘interchangement’ means ‘exchange’. They usefully hint that these
terms were odd even in 1601: by citing the Oxford English Dictionary
(OED), they stress the unusualness of ‘interchangement’. ‘Joinder’ is
even odder. If you look it up in the OED, you’ll see that this is the
first recorded example of the word in English (‘Joinder, n.’, 2020),
which suggests that it’s an example of Shakespeare’s fondness for new
coinages – as the editors explain, it’s a borrowing from the French

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Chapter 1 Twelfth Night: why Shakespeare?

word, joindre (the verb meaning ‘to join’), and also of his liking for
unusual, puzzling pieces of vocabulary.
More familiar words in this passage also need careful attention:
‘compact’ means agreement, while ‘function’ conveys the idea of the
Priest’s role as someone with the authority to oversee betrothals
(Shakespeare, 1994, p. 208). You’ll notice that in my summary sentence,
I’ve used the word ‘betrothal’ rather than wedding: that’s because what
Olivia proposes earlier to Sebastian in the line, ‘Plight me the full
assurance of your faith’ (4.3.26), is a preliminary contract, or a binding
engagement before the actual marriage ceremony (see the notes to this
line on p. 199 of your set text). Summarising the Priest’s speech is
challenging because we need to get a grip on Shakespeare’s idioms. At
the same time, what he is saying is familiar because his speech recalls
the patterns of the traditional Christian wedding service. The Priest’s
words recall the form of service used in the Book of Common Prayer,
a crucial text of the Protestant Reformation, which stipulated ritual
practice in the Church of England during Shakespeare’s lifetime
(Cressy, 1997, p. 336).
You may well have felt that there is a whiff of long-windedness about
the Priest’s speech. That’s why I asked you to summarise it in 30 words
– the Priest spins out his relatively simple message in as many words
as possible. The original speech is 57-words long, and the last two lines
in particular are just a convoluted way of saying ‘all this happened two
hours ago’. ‘Since when, my watch hath told me, toward my grave/I
have travelled but two hours’ deploys the rhetorical trick of
periphrasis, or circumlocution – instead of saying directly when the
betrothal took place, the Priest employs more words than he needs to,
giving the audience almost an excess of information. Why?
There are two answers to this, both of which bear on the differences
between Shakespeare’s culture and our own. The first is that an
Elizabethan audience was more tolerant of circumlocution than we are.
Look again at the first four lines of the speech: a minimalist summary
would be just ‘You two got betrothed’ – we don’t need the detail of
the hand-holding, kissing or the swapping of rings to get over the
central message of what happened between Olivia and Sebastian (or is
it Cesario?). Therefore, my second attempt at summarising this speech
would just be: ‘Two hours ago, I betrothed you two’ – seven words to
Shakespeare’s 57. This is the way that a TV scriptwriter would often
approach a speech of this kind: cut down the script to the bare bones
of what needs to be communicated. In contrast, Shakespeare’s culture

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 3 Shakespeare’s language

was one that enjoyed verbal display and speechifying much more than
we do. There are a range of reasons for this, but it is worth saying that
language in Shakespeare’s theatre is functional – it enables the audience
to see things that the dramatist can’t do in other ways. To pursue the
analogy with TV drama: where TV relies on devices like flashbacks,
different scenery and computer-generated effects, Shakespeare only had
an unlit stage, costuming and language to stimulate his audiences (see
Figure 4 and Womack, 2006, p. 41).

Figure 4 Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London. Photo: © James Brittain/

Bridgeman Images. This is a view across the stage, showing the
undecorated stage and painted roof. Shakespeare’s Globe is a modern
reconstruction of the theatre Shakespeare and his company worked in; it
was first opened in 1997, and is near the site of the original building.

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Chapter 1 Twelfth Night: why Shakespeare?

Activity 3
(Allow around 5 minutes to complete this activity.)

Let’s work on the second explanation of why the Priest might be wordy.
Read his speech (5.1.152–59) again now and think about what it tells
you – and therefore an audience – about how the part should be played.

Discussion
It seems to me that this speech makes various subtle suggestions about
the Priest’s age and character. We’ve just been looking at some of these
features: a liking for expansive words and phrases where one or two
would do, and also (perhaps) the reference to time and his death, which
could imply that he thinks he is closer to death than Sebastian or Olivia.
With this in mind, I would describe the Priest using phrases like ‘elderly’,
‘formal’, and perhaps ‘somewhat inclined to verbosity’.

What I’m suggesting, then, is that Shakespeare uses periphrasis as a

way of characterising the Priest. Although the Priest’s role is a walk-on,
walk-off part, in these lines, the script conveys a lot about how the
character might be played. So while the mention of his grave is
ornamental, it also conveys that the Priest was perhaps played by an
older actor; you can see similar elements in his liking of verbal padding
in phrases like ‘Confirmed by the mutual joinder of your hands’ – this
is a character who is enjoying the sound of his own voice, and is
telling his tale at his own speed. Even so, death is never far from the
surface even in comedy – think of Viola’s assumption that Sebastian is
drowned at the start of the play, and Olivia’s mourning for her dead
brother; the Priest’s almost offhand mention of his grave is part of the
same broader human context in which the action of the play takes
place.
Shakespeare’s texts don’t have the kind of detailed advice about staging
that we find in the works of later dramatists like Samuel Beckett
(1906–1989) or Harold Pinter (1930–2008), so there is a sense that
Shakespeare uses language to make minute discriminations between
different characters. Of course, the Priest is much less important than
Olivia, Viola and Orsino to the play as a whole, and his speech is
often reduced by modern productions. Yet in the slight tension

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 3 Shakespeare’s language

between Olivia’s urgency, the Priest’s loquaciousness and Orsino’s

subsequent outraged reaction to Viola – ‘O thou dissembling cub, what
wilt thou be/When time hath sowed a grizzle on thy case?’ (5.1.160–
61) – we get a focused sense of the comic dynamism of Twelfth Night.
What I mean by ‘comic dynamism’ is that this is a play where different
characters often talk at cross purposes, in slightly different registers or
styles of speaking, and frequently with little or no understanding of the
perspectives and desires of the characters they’re talking to. As we shall
see, this is an important ingredient of Shakespearean comedy, and part
of what has given this genre and this particular play its classic status.

Study note
Orsino’s imagery in these two lines (5.1.160–61) is fascinating; I
suggest you use Warren and Wells’s notes to follow up what is
conveyed by the terms ‘cub’, ‘grizzle’ and ‘case’: what do these
images transform Cesario into in Orsino’s judgement?

One of the things you might have noticed about the Priest’s speech
(5.1.152–59) is that it’s written in verse, known as blank verse, because
generally it avoids rhyme (see Baldick, 2008, ‘blank verse’). Blank verse
is written in iambic pentameter, which is the technical name for an
extraordinarily flexible metrical form that you can see on just about
every page of Twelfth Night: for example, ‘If music be the food of love,
play on’ (1.1.1). Iambic pentameter means a line with five major
stresses (this is the pentameter, after the Latin and Greek words for
‘five’) in the form of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one
(this is the iamb). Iambic is named after a Classical Greek unit of
metre – that is, the rhythmical shape of a line of verse – in which a
syllable with a long vowel sound follows one with a shorter vowel
sound. In Orsino’s line (1.1.1), I’ve shown you the pattern at work by
italicising the stressed syllables – you can do the same thing with the
Priest’s speech, ‘A contract of eternal bond of love’ (5.1.152). It’s
important to note the intrinsic flexibility of this verse form – blank
verse works because it can convey vastly different moods and attitudes
in the same loose structure of about ten syllables with the same
alternating stress pattern.

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Chapter 1 Twelfth Night: why Shakespeare?

If you were an actor performing these lines, you wouldn’t emphasise

each stressed syllable robotically – the ‘of ’ in the Priest’s line is less
prominent than ‘bond’ and ‘love’. Similarly, if you were playing Orsino,
you would naturally give more emphasis to the first syllable of ‘music’
and ‘food’ because these are the most important words in terms of
meaning. The flexibility of iambic verse is also shown by the Priest’s
lines ‘Strengthened by interchangement of your rings’, and ‘I have
travelled but two hours’. The first of these lines inverts the first iamb,
demonstrating that metrical patterns don’t have to work mechanically –
you’ll often find this sort of variation in Shakespeare’s work, which in
turn adds variety to the script in performance. The second line is even
more arresting: it’s both two feet short, with three main stresses, and
slurs the first two words ‘I have’ into the space of a single syllable –
again, this is a common variation. But it’s the gap left at the end of the
line that is particularly striking: by having a space at the end of the
Priest’s speech, Shakespeare conveys Orsino’s shock at what he’s heard:
not only has Cesario not told him the whole truth, ‘he’ has actually
agreed to marry Olivia, or so the Duke believes at this intensely
dramatic moment. That pause in the metrical pattern is Shakespeare’s
way of letting Orsino draw astonished, outraged breath. You don’t have
to remember all of this detail about verse form. The important thing
to remember about blank verse is that it’s a flexible device, which
Shakespeare often twists for effect, as in this case.

Activity 4
(Allow around 5 minutes to complete this activity.)
To put into practice what I’ve just been explaining, I’d like you to have a
go at marking the stressed syllables in the first two lines of Orsino’s
speech, which immediately follows the Priest’s (5.1.160–161).
Remember that iambic pentameter usually takes the form of an
unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. This should be a quick
activity – read the lines again carefully, and then mark the stresses on
the text below.

O thou dissembling cub, what wilt thou be

When time hath sowed a grizzle on thy case?

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 3 Shakespeare’s language

Discussion
Here’s how I would mark the stresses in these lines:

O thou dissembling cub, what wilt thou be

When time hath sowed a grizzle on thy case?

I hope you can see that these lines work exactly according to the
description of iambic pentameter that I have previously set out: the
stressed syllable always falls after an unstressed syllable. In general, the
iambic pattern works to accentuate the important words in the speech –
look again at ‘dissembling’ (in other words, ‘you cheat’, ‘you liar’, ‘you
pretender’), ‘cub’ (with its suggestion that Cesario is a wild animal),
‘time’ and ‘grizzle’. That’s not to say, however, that each metrical
emphasis is precisely the same; an actor is not likely to dwell as much
on the ‘on’ in the second line as on the first syllable of ‘grizzle’ or on
‘case’.

3.2 Viola’s soliloquy

We’re now going to look at a speech of Viola’s, also in blank verse.
This is her soliloquy at the end of Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 17–41.

Activity 5
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)
Find the lines in your set text (2.2.17–41) and read Viola’s speech
through a couple of times.
I’d like you to continue summarising Shakespeare’s meaning in your own
words, so again, using Warren and Wells’s notes, write a sentence
explaining what Viola’s dilemma is.

Discussion
Here’s my sentence: ‘Viola’s dilemma is that firstly she realises that
Olivia has fallen in love with her in her disguise as a young man, while
secondly she herself has fallen in love with Orsino, who doesn’t realise
that she is really a woman.’

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Chapter 1 Twelfth Night: why Shakespeare?

Again, your version may differ, but this is the key perspective that Viola
reveals in her soliloquy: her disguise makes her the subject of female
desire, yet also conceals her as a potentially erotic subject from Orsino.

This time I’m not going to go into the meaning of individual words in
as much detail as I did with the Priest’s speech, because you can use
Warren and Wells’s notes to guide your reading, but I will pause on
two particular aspects of Viola’s soliloquy. To start with, let’s look again
at the phrase ‘the pregnant enemy’ (2.2.28), which you might first
assume has something to do with having children, or even that Viola’s
enemy is a pregnant woman; rest assured, nothing could be further
from the truth! Warren and Wells gloss this phrase as a ‘resourceful’
enemy who is ‘always ready […] to take advantage’, which is how they
understand ‘pregnant’ in the sense defined by their version of the
OED as meaning receptive or ready (in Shakespeare, 1994, p. 122).
Other editors of the play go further: Keir Elam cites the work of Dr
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), one of the most influential early editors
of Shakespeare, to suggest that ‘the pregnant enemy’ is the devil, who
is always on the look out to trap the unwary (Shakespeare, 2008,
p. 210).
My point here isn’t to side with Warren and Wells, or with Elam and
Johnson, but is rather to stress that this kind of difference of opinion
isn’t unusual in a scholarly reading of Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s
language is highly suggestive, and – as we have seen already – can be
unusual in all sorts of ways. A phrase like ‘the pregnant enemy’ is a
useful way of underlining both these disagreements and the distinctive,
poetic quality of Shakespeare’s language. When you see Twelfth Night
in the theatre, I suspect you won’t worry much about who or what ‘the
pregnant enemy’ is, but the phrase may stay in your mind, both
because it’s so remote from the conventional meaning of ‘pregnant’,
and because it’s a turn of phrase that encapsulates Viola’s dilemma.
Finally, note that ‘pregnant’ is repeated by Viola in Act 3, Scene 1, and
the unusualness of the word as a compliment is immediately noted by
Sir Andrew (ll. 87–88).
I also want us to think about Viola’s tricky and troubling lines about
disguise and female affection (ll. 27–32). There are two things to note
here: first, Line 30 is a metaphor, that is, figurative language where
one thing is described in terms of another. Viola imagines women’s

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hearts as being like the wax in which a seal makes its impression or
‘form’. Figure 5 shows a contemporaneous wax seal, which – rather
nicely, considering this context – shows Queen Elizabeth I riding on
horseback, holding the symbols of her authority, a sceptre and an orb.
This seal is from the reverse of Elizabeth I’s second Great Seal
designed by the artist Nicholas Hilliard (c.1547–1619). Seals of this
kind were important aspects of public display, which manifested the
will of the monarch to her people – this one was first used in 1586 on
documents that announced the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
(Goldring, 2019, p. 192). In Twelfth Night, Malvolio is partly convinced
by Maria’s forged letter because it is sealed by Olivia’s wax signature –
‘the impressure her Lucrece, with which she uses to seal’ (2.5.89–90;
see Warren and Wells’s note for Lucrece as a symbol of Olivia’s
chastity; in Shakespeare, 1994, p. 146). Viola’s metaphor conveys what
she sees as the weakness of women – the way their hearts can be
moulded by stronger, male forces.

Figure 5 Wax impression made from the reverse of Queen Elizabeth I’s
second Great Seal designed by Nicholas Hilliard. Ashmolean Museum,
University of Oxford. Photo: © Bridgeman Images.

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Chapter 1 Twelfth Night: why Shakespeare?

The second point to note about Viola’s lines 27–32 – closely related to
the first point – is that Shakespeare makes her voice a misogynist
truism while at the same time claiming that this isn’t altogether
women’s fault: ‘our frailty is the cause, not we,/For such as we are
made of, such we be’ (ll. 31–32). These lines take on a rather abstract
quality – signalled by the use of a rhyming couplet – which brackets it
off as a kind of conventional wisdom (compare with ll. 40–41,
discussed later). This doesn’t make it any less problematic, but at the
same time Twelfth Night is a play that raises profound questions about
female and male agency, as we see in Viola’s later discussion with
Orsino where she queries his sexist assertion that ‘no woman’s heart’ is
‘So big’ as his own (2.4.92–121). Viola’s speech nevertheless raises
profound differences between our culture and Elizabethan culture in
terms of the status and independence of women. Viola’s sense of
female weakness reflects what Peter Womack calls the ‘generalized
cultural misogyny’ of early modern societies (2006, p. 267). Even
though their monarch was a woman, Elizabethan society was deeply
hierarchical, and women’s options were typically shaped by a patriarchal
ideology, which upheld that women should be subject to men in
almost all aspects of life.
As well as understanding individual words, it’s important to understand
how speeches like this are constructed, and what this one tells us
about Viola as the play’s central character. Let’s remind ourselves of
the dramatic situation: the speech is precipitated by Olivia’s hasty
decision in Act 1, Scene 5, Lines 289–301 to send Malvolio after
Cesario with a ring that she falsely claims ‘he’ left with her. Realising
what this lie means, Viola/Cesario proceeds to explore the implications
of Olivia’s ambiguous gift.

Study note
You will notice I use ‘Cesario’ and ‘he’ when discussing the
character in relation to Olivia and Orsino, since this is their
experience of ‘him’. Note that the name ‘Viola’ is only used after
Sebastian names his missing-presumed-drowned sister (see Act 5,
Scene 1, Line 235).

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 3 Shakespeare’s language

Activity 6
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)

Let’s now look at Viola’s soliloquy (2.2.17–41) in more detail. When

you’re approaching a speech like this, it can be helpful to break it up into
smaller units to see how the whole fits together. So, I want you to have a
go at identifying smaller sections within Viola’s speech.
You might use sentence breaks to help you with this, but don’t rely on
those alone – I’d like you to try to isolate slightly larger units of meaning
– you might think of these almost as the paragraph breaks within Viola’s
speech.
As a hint, think about where Viola turns from the question of the ring into
broader issues, such as the lines about disguise and female agency,
which we have just looked at.

Discussion
I would say that there are three different sections in this speech:

. Lines 17–26 unpack the meaning of the ring: because Viola didn’t
leave any token with Olivia, she rightly concludes that Olivia is in love
with her; ‘I am the man’, as she comically puts it.
. Lines 27–32 continue this thought in relation to Viola’s disguise.
Viola’s thinking is now more abstract, moving from the perils of
‘disguise’ to a series of linked generalisations about female affection.
She says that it’s ‘easy’ for ‘false’ men to imprint their ‘forms’ in
‘women’s waxen hearts’, implying women are weaker than men. As
we’ve seen, this section is the most complicated in the speech,
precisely because it moves from the particular situation to more
general reflections.
. Lines 33–41 ask the central dramatic question: ‘How will this fadge
[turn out]?’ Viola/Cesario is in a hopeless position in relation to both
Olivia – who loves a ‘dream’, the confected-not-real man Viola seems
to be – and Orsino – who doesn’t realise that Viola is just as
unrequitedly in love with him as he is with Olivia. Viola is a ‘poor
monster’ (l. 34) because she is caught between these two characters
in a disguise that doesn’t help either Orsino or Olivia. The speech
closes with a rhyming couplet that has a proverbial, generalising
quality: ‘O time, thou must untangle this, not I./It is too hard a knot for
me t’untie.’ Viola is saying that because she can’t work out this

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Chapter 1 Twelfth Night: why Shakespeare?

dilemma, the play – or the abstract figure of time – must do so. The
couplet also functions as a quick, stylistic nod to the audience: this
scene is finished, the action hurries on to the next one.

What I hope this structural map of Viola’s soliloquy does is to break

the speech down into more manageable units of meaning. Though as
we’ve seen, Viola’s speech includes idioms and word choices that are
unfamiliar to a modern audience, it’s moments like this that have
contributed to the play’s classic status. When she steps forward with
the sudden realisation that Olivia has in fact fallen in love with her,
Viola sympathetically and empathetically opens the action up to the
audience to engage with as an imaginative construct. In sharing Viola’s
sense of her ‘desperate’ state, we enter into the romantic and erotic
convolutions generated by her disguise. For me, this is crystallised in
the lines ‘As I am woman, now alas the day,/What thriftless sighs shall
poor Olivia breathe!’ (ll. 38–39). In comparison with the rest of the
speech, this is relatively direct: Viola laments Olivia’s condition
immediately after she has lamented her own, and intimately imagines
the quality of Olivia’s ‘sighs’ – these will be ‘thriftless’ (without profit
or result), just as she imagines her own sighs will be for Orsino, and
Orsino’s are for Olivia. It’s in such moments of overlapping empathy
that we get close to what Ben Jonson was getting at in his poem. Even
if Shakespeare’s language and cultural assumptions are distant from
ours, he still seems to encapsulate universal emotional dilemmas.
Before leaving Viola, you need to bear in mind a couple of contexts
that impinge on the differences between how the play is performed
now (see Figure 6) and how it was performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime.
In 1601, the original Viola would have been played by a boy, not a
young woman, as there were no Elizabethan professional actresses
(Womack, 2006, pp. 267–70; Gurr, 1980, pp. 93–97). This has huge
implications for how we understand the cross-dressing elements of
plays like Twelfth Night and As You Like It (another of Shakespeare’s
plays where the heroine dresses as a young man). In effect, what
Elizabethan audiences would have seen in such plays were boys
pretending to be girls who were pretending to be boys.

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 3 Shakespeare’s language

Figure 6 Kananu Kirimi in the role of Viola in a Royal Shakespeare Theatre

production of Twelfth Night, Stratford-upon-Avon, 2005. Photo: © Bridgeman
Images.

Though some modern performances have experimented with such

casting (see Figure 7), in general, this is a difference that underlines
another cultural chasm between the early 1600s and now. We don’t
know how Elizabethan audiences responded to male actors taking
female roles, because the information that has come down to us is
scanty. Most likely, it was an accepted convention, as unsurprising as
having an actor come on stage in the middle of a sunny day and say
‘Tis now struck twelve’ (i.e. it’s midnight); because you were used to
female parts being taken by men, you would probably not have
thought twice about it (Shakespeare, 2006, p. 148). At the same time,
as the critic Peter Womack puts it, ‘women in the plays are the more
distinctly represented as female because the representation is male’
(2006, p. 267). In other words, because real women were absent from
Shakespeare’s stage, his plays had to work harder to give the idea of
femininity more emphasis – women in the plays ‘are the more
distinctly represented as female’ because of their literal absence from
the performances.

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Chapter 1 Twelfth Night: why Shakespeare?

Figure 7 Johnny Flynn (Viola), Samuel Barnett (Sebastian) and Mark

Rylance (Olivia) in Twelfth Night, Apollo Theatre, London, 2012. Photo:
Tristram Kenton. © Bridgeman Images.

The gender of early modern performers points to the second

important context: the changing social and cultural status of
homosexuality. When Viola says of Olivia ‘she were better love a
dream!’ (2.2.26), you may have wondered why this should be – were
homosexual relationships unheard of ? The short answer is: yes, in the
main. Certainly, there was no accepted language for homosexuality, and
homosexual acts were seen in judgemental terms, and could even result
(for men) in capital punishment (Smith, 1994, p. 3). Elizabethan society
was not liberal in its attitudes to sexuality and was generally repressive
(following the teachings of the Bible) in regards to what kind of sex
was permissible. In essence, any form of sexual activity that didn’t
occur within the confines of marriage was socially and morally
unacceptable. Of course, that’s not to say that there was no
homosexuality in early modern England; there is evidence from
Shakespeare’s plays that homosexual desire was widely understood and
expressed. The role of Antonio is fascinating in this respect. This is a
character who unmistakably identifies Sebastian as his love object: ‘If
you will not murder me for my love, let me be your servant’; ‘I do
adore thee so/That danger will seem sport, and I will go (2.1.31–32;
42–43). But you’ll notice that Shakespeare doesn’t go further than

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‘love’ and ‘adore’: there are no specifics about how Antonio loves
Sebastian, though as Warren and Wells note, ‘the text permits’
homoerotic interpretations and performances (in Shakespeare, 1994,
p. 42). So, when Viola makes her soliloquy, we need to remember both
the original Viola – the boy playing a girl playing a boy – and the
complex aspects of entertainment, titillation and curiosity ‘he’ probably
stimulated.

3.3 Maria and Sir Toby

Let’s now turn from high emotion to low comedy, specifically to the
Sir Toby–Malvolio plot (which we’ll explore in greater detail in
Chapter 2). For this chapter’s final close-up, I want to go back to the
start of the play and the first conversation between Sir Toby and
Maria. Remember that although this interchange seems distant from
Olivia’s ‘thriftless sighs’ (2.2.39), in fact Sir Toby and Maria’s bantering
and sometimes brutal relationship will itself result in a marriage by the
end of the play.

Activity 7
(Allow around 45 minutes to complete this activity.)

Read Act 1, Scene 3, Lines 1–40 and then answer the following
questions.
1 What stylistic differences do you notice between this passage and
the Priest’s speech and Viola’s soliloquy?
2 Using Warren and Wells’s notes, what joke is Maria making when
she describes Sir Andrew as ‘almost natural’ (l. 26)?
3 Bearing in mind that this is the first time we encounter them in the
play, what impression does this dialogue give you of Sir Toby’s and
Maria’s roles? Just a few adjectives here will do – I’m looking for
your initial sense of these characters based on this extract, though
you may use your broader knowledge of them based on the play as a
whole.

Discussion
Here are my answers. The first two questions are slightly less open-
ended than the tasks I’ve been setting you so far, but you should now be
feeling more comfortable both with Shakespeare’s language and in using
the set text.

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Chapter 1 Twelfth Night: why Shakespeare?

1 There are two main stylistic differences between this passage and
the others. The first is that this scene (like most of the subplot) is in
prose. There’s no verse, although Sir Toby is prone to quoting from
popular songs and Feste sings one later in the play (2.3.37–50). The
second difference is that this passage is a dialogue: until Sir Andrew
enters just after the passage we’ve been reading, this scene is
constructed as a two-hander between Maria and Sir Toby. Instead of
the self-disclosure of Viola’s soliloquy, or the complex social
interaction which underpins the Priest’s speech, we have here a
conversation between two characters, which chiefly consists of a
series of overlapping jokes.
2 ‘Almost natural’ implies that Sir Andrew is ‘almost a complete idiot’.
Maria takes Sir Toby’s phrase ‘the good gifts of nature’, which asserts
(ridiculously, as we are about to find out) that Sir Andrew is a
paragon of learning and ability. Maria reuses Sir Toby’s words
negatively to expose Sir Andrew’s limitations (see OED ‘natural
fool, n.’).
3 I’ll confine myself to three adjectives for each character. Sir Toby
seems carefree, drunken and manipulative. In contrast, Maria seems
shrewd, unimpressed and quick-witted.

Though this scene is written in prose, it’s no less challenging to a

modern reader than the passages we’ve been looking at previously.
Indeed, in some respects, the language of the subplot is even more
difficult – notice that Warren and Wells concede that no one has
satisfactorily explained the phrase ‘Castiliano vulgo’ (in Shakespeare,
1994, p. 95). The wordplay on ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ is tricky, because
the meaning Maria invokes is now obsolete. You are unlikely to have
encountered many ‘coistrels’ before (an Elizabethan word for knave or
rascal), although this word is related to ‘kestrel’, the name of a
beautiful small falcon (l. 37). In general, it’s reasonable to say that the
language of both characters is hard to keep track of. They both pick
up on – and play with – words and their meanings with extreme
rapidity: ‘Confine? I’ll confine myself no finer than I am’ (l. 9); for
Maria, ‘the good gifts of nature’ (l. 25) are rapidly translated to ‘the gift
of a coward’ and ‘the gift of a grave’ (ll. 28; 30). There’s a snappy,
almost snippy, aspect to their dialogue, which is on the opposite side
of the circumlocution that we noticed with the Priest. Where the latter
strings out words for the pleasure of hearing himself say them, these

40
 3 Shakespeare’s language

two bandy terms between one another almost as though they’re playing
table tennis, repeatedly keeping their gags in the air for several lines.
This point relates to another aspect of the dialogue, which I’ve hinted
at already. Maria is Olivia’s ‘chambermaid’ (1.3.47) – that is, her servant
– while Sir Toby is her ‘kinsman’ (1.5.100) – that is, he is a member of
her extended family (see Warren and Wells’s note on ‘niece’ and
‘chambermaid’, in Shakespeare, 1994, pp. 93, 95). So this is a moment
of flirtation between two characters of different social rank. As a
member of Olivia’s family, Sir Toby is not a worker, while Maria, like
Malvolio, is an employee with responsibilities in Olivia’s household.
What we’re seeing here, then, is Maria’s attempt to tell Sir Toby to
shape up: he’s a drunkard who consorts with a buffoon and is
presuming on Olivia’s good nature. But Sir Toby is resolutely poised
against ‘care’ and responsibility of any kind (1.3.2): while he thinks
Olivia is overdoing her grief for her dead brother (an opinion he oddly
shares with Orsino – see 1.1.32–38), he is also smart enough to see the
unfortunate Sir Andrew as a ready source of funds: ‘Why, he has three
thousand ducats a year’ (1.3.20). This is why I describe Sir Toby as
manipulative; he is a carnivalesque character who, as he underlines in a
later scene, never wants the sun to go down on his ‘sack’ (white wine),
or ever go to bed (2.3.178–179). We’ll think more about the play in
relation to ideas of carnival in Chapter 2.

41
Chapter 1 Twelfth Night: why Shakespeare?

4 Summary
In this chapter, we’ve considered why Shakespeare might be a classic
writer through Ben Jonson’s poem of praise. I’ve suggested that the
notion of Shakespeare being ‘for all time’ is complicated by the many
ways in which his language and culture are distant from us. We’ve seen
this distance both in the nuts and bolts of his language, and in
contexts like the use of male-only actors on the Elizabethan stage. At
the same time, we’ve seen elements of the universality Jonson’s poem
identifies; this is evident in Viola’s soliloquy, with its explanation of her
character’s particular dilemma and its concern for the waves of
emotional chaos that her disguise creates for Olivia and Orsino. I
would also say this universality is present in the Priest’s wordy
reminder of his grave, and – from a contrasting perspective – in Sir
Toby’s resolute instance that ‘care’s an enemy to life’ (1.3.2) and that
grief isn’t worthy of the time Olivia spends on it. In this view, Sir Toby
might be seen as the voice of comedy: life is about fun, drinking and
possibly the romance plot that is just below the surface of his dialogue
with Maria.
Even if the specifics of Shakespeare’s language are remote from our
world, the characters he introduces, and their particular ways of
expression, continue to resonate with audiences. Shakespeare keeps on
‘speaking in unexpected ways to us’, as Andrew Marr puts it (2019,
p. 7). We’ll consider these issues in more detail in the next chapter,
where we look at the function of disguise in comedy and at the gulling
of Malvolio.

You should now return to the module website to continue your

study of this unit.

42
 References

References
Baldick C. (2008) The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 3rd edn.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cressy, D. (1997) Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the
Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Goldring, E. (2019) Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Gurr, A. (1980) The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642. 2nd edn.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
‘Joinder, n.’ (2020) Available at: https://www-oed-com.libezproxy.open.
ac.uk/view/Entry/101533?redirectedFrom=joinder& (Accessed: 3
August 2020).
Jonson, B. (1975) The Complete Poems. Edited by G. Parfitt.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Marr, A. (2019) ‘The Diary: Boris Johnson’s Grave Mistake, a
Shakespearean Climate Crisis and Easing Up on the Whisky’, New
Statesman, 28 June, p. 7.
Schoenbaum, S. (1975) William Shakespeare: a Documentary Life.
Oxford: Clarendon.
Shakespeare, W. (1994) Twelfth Night. Edited by R. Warren and S.
Wells. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shakespeare, W. (1996) The First Folio of Shakespeare, Based on Folios in
the Folger Shakespeare Library Collection. The Norton Facsimile. New
York: Norton.
Shakespeare, W. (2006) Hamlet. Edited by A. Thompson and N. Taylor.
London: Thomson.
Shakespeare, W. (2008) Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Edited by K.
Elam. London: Bloomsbury.
Smith, B.R. (1994) Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: a
Cultural Poetics. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Womack, P. (2006) English Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Blackwell.

43
Chapter 2
Twelfth Night: disguise,
comedy and gulling
Written by Richard Danson Brown
Contents
1 Introduction 49
2 Concealment and disguise 50
3 Malvolio and comedy: notoriously abused? 65
3.1 Reading Malvolio 65
3.2 Comedy and carnival 67
4 Summary 73
References 74
 1 Introduction

1 Introduction
You’re now halfway through your work on Twelfth Night. In the
previous chapter, you considered why Shakespeare has the status of a
cultural and literary classic, and took a close look at the play’s language
through three different scenes. We’ve also examined things like
dramatic and poetic forms (for example, soliloquy and blank verse),
and the mores of Shakespeare’s theatre in terms of the all-male casts
and early modern attitudes towards same-sex relationships.
In this chapter, we’re going to look at two of the play’s broader
concerns: disguise, which we previously touched on with Viola’s
soliloquy; and the subplot’s main incident, the deception (or gulling) of
Malvolio. (‘Gulling’ simply means fooling, trickery or deception, and is
the word used by Maria when she instigates the plot against Malvolio;
see 2.3.126.) Both of these issues raise the question of what we mean
by the term ‘comedy’, the genre of Twelfth Night. How we understand
comedy again raises the issue of Shakespeare’s cultural capital. Once
again, the reaction of a modern audience is in all probability slightly
different from that of the original seventeenth-century audience. But
what I will suggest to you is that the play has lasted, and is still often
performed, partly because we still find it simultaneously amusing and
controversial.

Study note
In this chapter, all references to Twelfth Night are to the set book:
The Oxford Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, edited by Roger Warren
and Stanley Wells (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994).

49
Chapter 2 Twelfth Night: disguise, comedy and gulling

2 Concealment and disguise

As we’ve seen from Viola’s soliloquy in the previous chapter, it’s the
action of the play that forces her to recognise the ambiguity of her
disguise: ‘Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness/Wherein the pregnant
enemy does much’ (2.2.27–28). However, Viola has no such hesitation
when she first hatches her plan to dress up in men’s clothing:

Conceal me what I am, and be my aid Please—and I'll pay you well for
this—help me conceal my
For such disguise as haply shall become identity, and find me the
disguise that will suit my
The form of my intent. I’ll serve this duke. intentions. I want to serve this
duke. You will present me to
him as a eunuch . It will be worth
Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him. your trouble, for I can
sing and speak well, and he will
It may be worth thy pains, for I can sing, surely consider me for
his service. What might happen
And speak to him in many sorts of music after that, only time will
tell. You must only match my wit
with your silence and
That will allow me very worth his service. discretion.

What else may hap, to time I will commit,

Only shape thou thy silence to my wit.
(1.2.50–58)

Some elements of this speech are undeveloped in the rest of the play,
perhaps reflecting changes that Shakespeare made as he was writing.
For example, this is the only mention of Viola/Cesario as a ‘eunuch’ (a
castrated man); Olivia’s attraction depends on her at least thinking ‘he’
is ‘the man’ (2.2.25). Nevertheless, Viola’s later soliloquy glances back
to this speech in the sense that ‘time’ will have a decisive impact on
‘What else may hap’ (1.2.57). Like other Shakespearean heroines
(notably, Rosalind in As You Like It, Portia in The Merchant of Venice,
and Imogen in Cymbeline), Viola sees disguise as a means to an end.
Since she can’t serve Olivia (see 1.2.38–43), she suggests to the Captain
that concealing ‘what I am’ will ‘become/The form of my intent’
(1.2.50–52) – Viola is rather vaguely saying ‘in that case, I’ll serve the
duke’, and implying that it will be much safer for her to do this in the
‘form’ of a man than in that of a young woman.

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 2 Concealment and disguise

Activity 1
(Allow around 10 minutes to complete this activity.)

We can get some sense of the issues at stake in Viola’s disguise by

looking at Figure 1, which shows the title page of a slightly later play
about a cross-dressing thief known as Moll Cutpurse.

Figure 1 ‘A seventeenth-century cross-dresser’: frontispiece to Thomas

Middleton (1580–1627) and Thomas Dekker’s (c.1570–1632) The Roaring
Girle or Moll Cutpurse, London, Thomas Archer, 1611. Photo: Lebrecht
Music & Arts/Alamy.

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Chapter 2 Twelfth Night: disguise, comedy and gulling

What impression does Figure 1 give you of the cross-dressed Moll? In

what ways do you think she might be similar to Cesario in Twelfth Night?

Discussion
To my mind, Moll looks pretty intimidating: notice that she’s cradling a
huge sword and smoking, while gazing challengingly straight at the
viewer. There’s nothing obviously feminine about this image.
To that extent, Moll seems rather different from Viola/Cesario, whose
youthfulness and effeminacy are repeatedly referred to in Twelfth Night –
see Orsino’s speech in 1.4.29–34, which explicitly states ‘all is
semblative [i.e. very like] a woman’s part’. Moreover, when Viola/Cesario
comes to fight Sir Andrew later in the play, s/he proves almost
completely useless at fighting; Moll, in contrast, looks very comfortable
with her sword and her ‘man’s part’.

In a male-dominated environment, dressing as a man gives Moll

agency, just as for Viola/Cesario, male clothing literally gives her a
‘cover’. The dramatic attraction of the device is precisely that cross-
dressed characters may be realised in different ways, from the girlish
Cesario to the more boisterous image of Moll Cutpurse.
Why does Shakespeare use this device? Roger Warren and Stanley
Wells’s introduction to your set text gives one answer through the
experience of an early theatre-goer, John Manningham, who saw the
play in February 1602 at the Middle Temple, a law college for well-
heeled young men in the heart of London (see Figure 2). (It is worth
noting that this is the first documented performance of Twelfth Night,
and it shows that plays weren’t only performed at public playhouses
like The Globe but also at court, and at the Inns of Court for
audiences of the social and political elite; see Gurr, 1980, pp. 11, 150–
155.) In 1602, Manningham noted the genetic similarities between
Twelfth Night and older and more contemporary plays: ‘At our feast we
had a play called Twelfth Night, or What You Will, much like The
Comedy of Errors or Menaechmi in Plautus, but most like and near to
that in Italian called Inganni’ (quoted in Shakespeare, 1994, p. 1). There
were several Italian plays with titles like this, and Shakespeare certainly
knew the Roman dramatist Plautus’s play well enough to have imitated
it earlier in his career in his own play, also called The Comedy of Errors
(c.1594), which is another play about the confusions in identity

52
 2 Concealment and disguise

generated by (in this case) two pairs of identical twins. As Warren and
Wells point out, the narrative of a girl dressed as a boy who proves
irresistible to another lady was ‘a story that was “in the air” at the
time’ (in Shakespeare, 1994, pp. 14–15).

Figure 2 Nineteenth-century engraving of Middle Temple Hall, built between

1562 and 1572, where John Manningham saw Twelfth Night in 1602. Photo:
© Look and Learn/Peter Jackson Collection/Bridgeman Images.

This information is important because it points to another element in

Shakespeare’s classic status: he was a writer who was highly alert to
what was fashionable and what was saleable within his culture. Plays
like Twelfth Night aimed to capitalise on a European vogue for plays
with similar plot lines, based around confused identities and the erotic
entanglements that such misunderstandings produced. This is the
meaning of the Italian play mentioned by Manningham, Inganni – ‘The
Mistakes’ (or even ‘The Tricks’); in such plots, mistaken identities
generate comic drama.
Shakespeare, then, was never above following a proven popular trend.
In this respect, his career reminds me of that of the musician David
Bowie during the 1970s. In a sequence of dramatic swerves, Bowie

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Chapter 2 Twelfth Night: disguise, comedy and gulling

latched onto what was ‘in the air’ of his culture, moving from the glam
rock of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
(1972), before presciently adopting the electronic styles of
contemporary German music in LPs such as Low (1977) and “Heroes”
(1977; for commentary, see Doggett, 2011). Shakespeare shows a
similar receptivity to what was of the moment. In the early 1590s, he
wrote a sequence of bloodthirsty plays based around English chronicle
history, then later in his career he turned to more fantastic plots with
improbable happy endings in plays like The Tempest and Cymbeline,
showing a readiness to respond to changing fashions of writing. So
while it’s certainly true that Shakespeare and Bowie were innovators,
they were also highly alert to the tastes of changing markets.

Study note
For a chronology of all of Shakespeare’s plays, see The Oxford
Companion to Shakespeare, pp. 78–79. You can also do an online
search, which will take you to reliable chronologies online: for
example, Wikipedia and the Royal Shakespeare Company websites.

It’s important to notice that Viola’s performance as Cesario is in fact

only the most obvious example in the play. Twelfth Night is
characterised by several different kinds of concealment and disguise,
and Viola’s disguise inevitably produces further confusion in the rest of
the play. What I’d like you to do now is to find some other examples
of concealment and disguise so that we can start to understand how
Shakespeare uses the device of mistaken identity.

Activity 2
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)
Starting with Act 3, Scene 3, flick through the second half of the play
quite rapidly. Don’t reread the text in detail, just remind yourself quickly
of what happens in each scene. As you go through, choose two or three
examples of mistaken identity or disguise.

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 2 Concealment and disguise

Discussion
These are the examples I chose:
1 Antonio’s attempt to conceal himself in Illyria as he follows Sebastian,
and his subsequent mistaking of Cesario for Sebastian (Act 3,
Scene 3, ll. 25–38; Act 3, Scene 4, ll. 299–363).
2 Olivia mistaking Sebastian for Cesario, which immediately follows Sir
Andrew and Sir Toby doing exactly the same thing (Act 4, Scene 1).
3 Feste’s disguise as Sir Topaz when visiting the imprisoned Malvolio,
who believes at first that he is talking to Sir Topaz (Act 4, Scene 2).

How difficult did you find choosing your examples? My list isn’t
comprehensive. I wondered about including Malvolio’s dressing up in
yellow stockings and cross-garters in Act 3, Scene 4 (Figure 3). This is
certainly based on a misunderstanding – he’s comically assuming that
Maria’s letter is from Olivia – and you might see his ridiculous
costume as a kind of disguise. Olivia seems to suggest this when she
says ‘I sent for thee upon a sad occasion’ (3.4.18). But, on balance, I
decided that this wasn’t quite the same as Feste pretending to be Sir
Topaz (‘I will dissemble myself ’ in a false beard and gown; 4.2.4), nor
of the striking confusions of Act 4, Scene 1, precipitated by everyone’s
assumption that Sebastian is Cesario. As Sebastian puts it at the end of
this short scene, ‘Or I am mad, or else this is a dream’ (4.1.59), which
neatly encapsulates the tension that the mistaken identity generates
between common sense and his enchanted response to Olivia. I also
wondered about the Antonio example. Antonio’s attempt to conceal
himself is at best half-hearted, and in Act 3, Scene 4 he is unmasked as
Orsino’s enemy when he rushes to Cesario’s (or is it Sebastian’s?)
defence. I decided to include him partly because he again illustrates the
animating confusion between Viola and Sebastian, but also because of
his initial determination to lie low in Illyria: he must not ‘walk too
open’; he lurks ‘In the south suburbs at the Elephant’, where
presumably he would be less visible to the officers who eventually
arrest him (3.3.37–39).

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Chapter 2 Twelfth Night: disguise, comedy and gulling

Figure 3 Stephen Fry (Malvolio) and Mark Rylance (Olivia) in Twelfth Night,
Apollo Theatre, London, 2012. Photo: Tristram Kenton. © Bridgeman
Images.

What unites these examples is that same sense of mistaken identity

diagnosed by Manningham in 1602. By using the central device of
having his main protagonist ‘conceal’ what ‘she’ is, Shakespeare
develops a series of overlapping confusions that come to a crisis in the
second half of the play. At the same time, the setting of Twelfth Night
(Illyria) is a place where normal rules seem not to apply; as Sebastian
puts it, ‘Are all the people mad?’ (4.1.26). You can see elements of this
uncertain social world repeatedly played out in the role of Feste, who
is at once the most enigmatic of characters (see how many notes
Warren and Wells use to explain his speech), and also one of the most
shrewd in his precarious work as a hired entertainer, which he
brilliantly describes as being Olivia’s ‘corrupter of words’ (3.1.34–35).
Feste’s verbal tryst with Viola/Cesario in Act 3, Scene 1, for example,
gives a good actor ample space to ‘tip the wink’ to the audience that

56
 2 Concealment and disguise

he at least has figured out that Cesario isn’t quite what ‘he’ seems to
be: ‘Who you are and what you would are out of my welkin’ (3.1.55–
56). Indeed, the pretentious word ‘welkin’ (meaning ‘sky’) mocks
linguistic affectation, and perhaps again hints that it is Cesario who is
out of his ‘“element”’ (3.1.58).
Shakespeare’s use of disguise, however, isn’t only used as a plot device,
even though much of what generates the play takes off from Viola’s
initial decision to dress as a boy in Act 1, Scene 2. I’d now like to
return to a moment we touched on in Chapter 1: the dialogue between
Viola and Orsino about the comparative strength of love in men and
women. This takes place in Act 2, Scene 4. The first half of this scene
(ll. 1–78) sets up the teasing yet melancholy tone of what follows:
Orsino quizzes Cesario about the kind of woman ‘he’ should love (see
in particular ll. 22–28, where Viola intimates her affection for Orsino).
Note too that although Orsino goes on to assert the strength of male
passion (ll. 92–102), in the first part of the scene, he concedes that
men’s love is ‘giddy and infirm’ in comparison with women’s (l. 32).
This is followed by Feste’s supremely miserable song, ‘Come away,
come away death’, which mirrors Orsino’s mood: ‘I am slain by a fair
cruel maid’; ‘not a flower sweet/On my black coffin let there be
strewn’ (ll. 53, 58–59). Warren and Wells note that the song may not
actually be by Shakespeare, but this is less important than the role it
plays in the scene (in Shakespeare, 1994, p. 137). It works because its
‘silly sooth’ (l. 45), or ‘simple truth’, presents an image of how Orsino
sees his love: genuine, lasting, not subject to changes in fashion. It’s at
this point that we see one of the most interesting dialogues in the play.

Activity 3
(Allow around 40 minutes to complete this activity.)

1 Now reread Act 2, Scene 4, Lines 78–125. Find the word

‘concealment’: what does it mean in this context?
2 I’d then like you to think about the overall effect of the dialogue
between Viola and Orsino by comparing it with the dialogue between
Orsino and Valentine in the play’s opening scene (1.1.22–40). What
are the main differences between these two scenes in terms of what
they tell us about the characters’ relationships with one another?

Discussion
1 Viola uses the word ‘concealment’ in Line 111, as she describes her
imaginary sister: ‘She never told her love/But let concealment, like a

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Chapter 2 Twelfth Night: disguise, comedy and gulling

worm i’th’ bud/Feed on her damask cheek’. I’ll say a little more about
the imagery shortly, but here ‘concealment’ means the act of hiding
her love. I would go further and say that it tells us (the audience) that
Viola is repressing her feelings towards Orsino through the invented
story of the sister’s stifled feelings.
2 Though the two scenes are alike (in each case, we are dealing with
Orsino’s suit to Olivia through intermediaries), you should see
significant differences between the two. Where in the first scene,
Valentine simply reports his failure to see Olivia, in the second scene
there is a complex exchange of views about how men and women
love, framed through Viola’s beautiful anecdote of her ‘melancholy’
sister. Where Orsino and Valentine communicate only as master and
servant, with Viola and Orsino, the represented relationship is more
of an exchange between equals, with Viola strenuously fighting her
corner: ‘Ay, but I know […] Too well what love women to men may
owe’ (2.4.103, 105).

Reading blank verse

Act 2, Scene 4, Line 105 is a lovely example of the way
Shakespeare varies his blank verse lines for emphasis and
meaning – ‘Too well what love women to men may owe’ demands
consecutive stresses on ‘love’ and the first syllable of ‘women’ to
emphasise the point Viola is making to the resistant Orsino: of
course women feel love as powerfully as men do.

As I noted earlier, the concealment referred to in this passage isn’t

only about actual disguise: here it has become a metaphor that covertly
voices what Viola feels about Orsino. Her speech raises the much
broader question of the hiding of emotions, almost anticipating what
the psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) later called ‘repression’
(Freud, 1984, pp. 145–158). Freud’s writing is difficult, but his key
perception – that human beings repress powerful instinctive emotions
with huge consequences for how we behave – is congruent with what
Viola is saying here, and to an extent, with the emotional work her
speech performs for her character. That’s quite a mouthful, so let’s take

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 2 Concealment and disguise

a closer look at the imagery of this speech to explain what I mean in

more detail:
Her story is blank, my lord. She never

[…] She never told her love,

spoke of her love, but
kept her passion concealed. It
tormented her from the

But let concealment, like a worm i’th’ bud, inside, like a worm trapped inside a
closed flower bud, and
fed on her outer beauty until it faded.

Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought, She pined away
quietly and sadly, and sat like a
sculpture of patience itself,
And with a green and yellow melancholy smiling despite her grief. Now wasn't
this true love? We
men might say more and promise
She sat like patience on a monument, more, but indeed our
words are stronger than our passions.
We are good at
Smiling at grief. making vows of love, but worse at
keeping them

(2.4.110–115)

Shakespeare uses a surprisingly violent simile (cued by the word ‘like’)

to convey the consequences of ‘concealment’. Warren and Wells don’t
gloss the ‘worm i’th’bud’ (which is a reminder that scholarly editions
are not always as helpful as they might be!); Viola’s worm is the
caterpillar of a moth that eats roses (this is the ‘damask’ she refers to)
from within. The simile works by formally comparing concealment to
the caterpillar – the girl allows the repression of her feelings to eat her
up from within. The next lines take the imagery in different directions:
first, Viola depicts the girl as suffering from ‘a green and yellow
melancholy’, or a love sickness which, as Warren and Wells note, may
have erotic undertones; and second, through the image of the imagined
sister as ‘a figure on a memorial statue symbolizing patience’ (in
Shakespeare, 1994, p. 140).
In these lines, Viola translates (or transposes) her sister into an even
more complex simile, this time comparing the imaginary girl to an
imaginary work of art. This sort of comparison is a way of making the
thing evoked seem more vivid, more concrete, to the audience. The
technical term for it is ekphrasis, which means the literary description
of a work of art (see ‘Ekphrasis, n.’, 2020). Remember Viola is trying
to convey the effects of repressed emotion. In this context, the
ekphrasis does two things at once: first, it makes the girl become the
abstract quality or virtue of patience; second, it fixes her as a funereal
‘monument’ – Viola invents a sister who she turns to stone. Both of
these transpositions enforce her broader point to Orsino: women love
as intensely as men, and the ‘concealment’ of their love can be fatal.

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Chapter 2 Twelfth Night: disguise, comedy and gulling

And, of course, she is covertly telling Orsino that her own emotions
have been similarly petrified.

Figure 4 John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Patience on a Monument

Smiling at Grief, 1884, oil on panel, 127 × 111 cm. De Morgan Collection,
courtesy of the De Morgan Foundation. Photo: © Bridgeman Images.

For such imagery to work, we don’t necessarily need any visual

analogues – ekphrasis is a kind of storytelling through imagery, so it
might be argued that Viola’s lines are more effective if we don’t tie
them to a specific image. It is nevertheless irresistible to provide visual
equivalents for both what Shakespeare himself may have had in his
mind, and also what this passage has stimulated from visual artists.
Figure 4 shows the nineteenth-century painter John Roddam Spencer
Stanhope’s luscious, pre-Raphaelite visualisation of Viola’s speech.
Figure 5 shows a contemporaneous image of Patience as an allegorical
figure from a book by the Italian iconographer, Cesare Ripa, which
some scholars have have connected with Viola’s ekphrasis. It shows the
kind of imagery Shakespeare may have been thinking of; it is not a
precise visual source for the passage in the play so much as a culturally

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 2 Concealment and disguise

analogous work which illuminates aspects of Early Modern thinking.

Stanhope’s painting shows the influence of Shakespeare’s play and the
attraction it exerted during the nineteenth century, suggesting that a
literary classic can be seen as something that stays culturally relevant.
Stanhope’s painting comes from a culture where the mere quotation
from Twelfth Night is enough to conjure up a whole range of
associations.

Figure 5 Cesare Ripa, ‘Patienza’, from Iconologia, o vero Descrittione

d’Imagini delle Virtù, Vitij, Affetti, Passioni humane […] Opera di C. Ripa […]
Di novo in quest’ ultima edizione corretta […] e accresciuta, 1611, Padova.
British Library, London, Digital Store 637.g.26. Photo: © British Library
Board/Bridgeman Images.

Activity 4
(Allow around 15 minutes to complete this activity.)

Now reread Viola’s speech (2.4.110–115) and look again at Stanhope’s

painting (Figure 4) and Ripa’s woodcut (Figure 5). Which illustration
would you say is closest to Viola’s imagery, and why?

Discussion
There isn’t a right or wrong answer to this question. Because of its age,
Ripa’s image may seem closer to what Shakespeare wrote in the play.
But on the other hand, Stanhope’s painting tries to represent the play we

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Chapter 2 Twelfth Night: disguise, comedy and gulling

know, and in many ways is nearer to the melancholy mood of the Viola-
Orsino dialogue than Ripa’s personification of an abstract moral quality.
One way of putting this might be that Ripa’s woodcut tells us something
about Shakespeare’s culture, while Stanhope’s tells us something about
the way Shakespeare’s works helped to influence later cultures.

I would say that Stanhope’s painting (Figure 4) taps into the

languorous loveliness of both the speech and the scene as a whole –
beautiful girls in a perfect (rather Victorian) garden with appropriate
neoclassical statuary mourning in the background. What it doesn’t have
is the edge of tension that runs through the scene, visible in Feste’s
teasing of Orsino in Lines 72–77; the ‘melancholy god’ surely protects
Stanhope’s garden without any external, ironic commentary. In
contrast, Ripa’s woodcut suggests precisely those things that Stanhope
excludes – the hard edges of Patience as a moral virtue. Note the way
that Ripa’s figure is weighed down by a ploughing yoke over her
shoulders: this detail underlines the endurance that is inherent in the
virtue of Patience. As the critic Keir Elam comments, Viola’s version
takes out the imagery of ‘feminine submission’ to concentrate on the
sister’s ‘heroic self-denial’ (in Shakespeare, 2008, p. 34). Another way of
putting this would be that Shakespeare’s adaptation of Ripa’s image is
already in the process of becoming the raw material of Stanhope’s
painting.
I previously mentioned the emotional work that this passage does for
Viola. What I meant by this is that through her elaborate similes of the
worm in the rosebud and patience on a monument, Viola indirectly
voices her love to Orsino. Of course, she doesn’t say explicitly
‘Actually, I’m that girl myself, and I’m just as much in love with you as
you are with Olivia’, but many productions take the hints in this
passage in that direction. Christopher Luscombe’s 2018 Royal
Shakespeare Company (RSC) production has Nicholas Bishop (Orsino)
passionately – guiltily – kissing Dinita Gohil’s Viola/Cesario, before
breaking off to remember the forgotten ‘theme’ of his pursuit of
Olivia (2.4.122). By expanding Orsino’s horizons, making him
interested in something that is outside his own rather self-obsessed
trains of thought, this scene prepares for his later realisation of what
Viola has been telling him all along (5.1.260–261).

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 2 Concealment and disguise

Before we leave the theme of concealment, I’d like to take us to the

end of the play, and the climax of the main plot where Viola’s true
identity is revealed (5.1.202–274).

Activity 5
(Allow around 25 minutes to complete this activity.)
Reread Act 5, Scene 1, Lines 202–274. What would you say is the most
moving moment in this extract, and why?

Discussion
There’s a lot of dramatised emotion here: Sebastian’s delight and relief
at seeing Antonio again (ll. 211–213); Olivia’s wonder at the apparent
doubling of Cesarios (l. 219); and Orsino’s realisation (at last, you might
think) that Viola is a girl who might be in love with him. These are all
terrifically theatrical moments that bring together aspects of the plot that
have been hidden from the characters – if not the audience – up to this
point. But Shakespeare lavishes most attention on the reunion of
Sebastian and Viola (ll. 220–252). Through Viola’s answers to the key
questions, ‘What countryman? What name? What parentage?’ (l. 225),
Shakespeare ratchets up the tension – first delay, then confirmation – in
the climactic disclosure of her true identity, which even at this point is
deferred until she has her ‘maid’s garments’ again, beyond the scope of
the play: ‘Were you a woman […] I should my tears let fall upon your
cheek/And say “Thrice welcome, drownèd Viola.”’ (ll. 269, 233–235). To
an extent, reactions to passages like this are always subjective, but
Warren and Wells’s note is helpful in clarifying how the art of revelation
works in this scene: ‘This is the first time that [Viola’s] name is spoken
on stage: Shakespeare has reserved it for this climax’ (in Shakespeare,
1994, p. 213).

Figure 6 shows the theatrical effect this scene can have as Chris New
(Viola) and Iain McKee (Sebastian), looking for all the world like ‘An
apple cleft in two’ (5.1.217), embrace in a way that aptly recalls some
of the oddness implicit in Shakespeare’s text. The all-male cast of this
production inevitably reminds us of the early performance that
Manningham saw at the start of the seventeenth century with men in
the female roles. What I hope this section of the chapter helps you to

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Chapter 2 Twelfth Night: disguise, comedy and gulling

see is the way in which the related plot elements of concealment and
disguise – and the inevitable revelation of who’s who at the end of the
play – help to structure Twelfth Night and its pervasive concern with
stifled emotions that awkwardly come to light.

Figure 6 Chris New (Viola) and Iain McKee (Sebastian) in the Royal
Shakespeare Company’s production at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-
upon-Avon, 2007. Photo: Tristram Kenton. © Bridgeman Images. Note the
impact of all-male casting on the moment when Viola and Sebastian are
reunited.

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 3 Malvolio and comedy: notoriously abused?

3 Malvolio and comedy: notoriously

abused?
Stifled emotions that awkwardly come to light are also at the heart of
the Malvolio subplot, though in a very different key. We’re now going
to turn to the ways in which the main plot meets with the subplot in
Twelfth Night; as you’ll have noticed, the last extract we looked at from
Act 5, Scene 1 closes with the memory of the Captain and Malvolio’s
role in his imprisonment (ll. 269–271). As we saw in Chapter 1, the
role of Malvolio has always been a central part of the appeal of Twelfth
Night, although the meanings audiences take from that plot have
shifted enormously since the seventeenth century. This section of the
chapter explores the extent to which audiences are expected to
sympathise with Malvolio, or rather, to celebrate his comeuppance.

3.1 Reading Malvolio

Activity 6
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)
I’d like you to take some initial soundings on Malvolio by rereading three
short passages. These lines provide assessments of Malvolio firstly by
Olivia, then Maria, and finally by Malvolio himself:

. Act 1, Scene 5, Lines 78–91

. Act 2, Scene 3, Lines 130–142
. Act 2, Scene 5, Lines 21–37.
In each case, you’ll need to remind yourself briefly of where the extract
takes place in the play as a whole. When you have done so, answer the
following questions:
1 What do you make of these three views – is there any consistency
between them?
2 Where do you think the audience’s sympathies should lie in these
scenes?

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Chapter 2 Twelfth Night: disguise, comedy and gulling

Discussion
1 I would say that there are some aspects of consistency between the
three passages, but by no means complete agreement. Olivia says
Malvolio is ‘sick of self-love’ (1.5.85), and this is confirmed by the
later scene when he says ‘that should [Olivia] fancy it should be one
of my complexion’, and the usually very funny line, ‘To be Count
Malvolio!’ (2.5.23–24, 32). Malvolio takes himself enormously
seriously. This last quotation chimes with Maria’s attack in the middle
scene: ‘so crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is his
grounds of faith that all that look on him love him’ (2.3.139–141).
Against this, Maria seems almost as confused as Sir Andrew by
whether Malvolio is ‘a puritan’ (i.e. a sympathiser with the radical
wing of the Protestant reformation), and how to react to him if he
were one. Though Malvolio clearly dislikes Feste and Sir Toby (see
Figure 7), in both Act 1, Scene 5 and Act 2, Scene 5, his social and
religious views are enigmatic. What Act 2, Scene 5 does show – in
the allusion to ‘the Lady of the Strachey’ (l. 36) – is that Malvolio is
(like Maria herself) very interested in marriages that cross social
boundaries.
2 This question is simpler: in Act 1, Scene 5 and Act 2, Scene 5, it’s
clear that Malvolio is presented as being ridiculous, both in his rather
pompous moral evaluations and in his lack of self-awareness.
Audiences laugh in Act 2, Scene 5 because Malvolio speaks with no
sense that he is being overheard by his enemies (which usually
allows much stage business as the three conspirators hide from the
oblivious Malvolio), and because of the transparent falseness of his
opinions – neither Maria nor Olivia ‘fancy’ him. Act 2, Scene 3 is a
little more ambiguous. How an audience reacts to Maria’s plot will
depend on how a production presents the previous action in the
scene when Malvolio interrupts their ‘coziers’ catches’ (cobblers’
songs; 2.3.85). If you think Malvolio is a pompous party pooper, you
will probably be cheering Maria on at this point. If, on the other hand,
you think Sir Toby is a boorish boozer and Sir Andrew is ‘a foolish
knight’ (2.5.73) – you may well think the issues at stake here are
more complex. We’ll get more purchase on these issues as we
continue with the chapter.

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 3 Malvolio and comedy: notoriously abused?

Figure 7 Paul Shelley (Sir Toby Belch) and Patrick Stewart (Malvolio) in
Act 2, Scene 3. Chichester Festival Theatre, 2007. Photo: Tristram Kenton.
© Bridgeman Images.

Again, it’s worth noting that Malvolio’s self-aggrandising line about

Olivia ‘fancy[ing] […] one of my complexion’ echoes what the
audience has just heard in the previous scene, where Viola/Cesario
tells Orsino she loves someone ‘Of your complexion’ (2.4.25). This is
typical of the way Shakespeare’s main and subplots intersect – the
wording and dramatic situations of one storyline are mirrored in the
other – and to an extent it complicates our reactions to Malvolio. The
echo of Viola’s speech reminds us of the previous scene, though in a
very different key; while most productions accentuate the high emotion
of the earlier scene, Malvolio’s echoing of Viola usually underlines the
sense of his comic self-absorption.

3.2 Comedy and carnival

How did Elizabethans view comedy as a genre, that is a distinct form
of writing with given rules and conventions (see Baldick, 2008)? We’ve
seen something of this already in Manningham’s seventeenth-century
remarks about disguise, and the analogies he makes with other comic
plays. For an educated young man like Manningham, comedy exists in
the cultural context of other plays he’s seen and read. Turning to the
Malvolio plot, he wrote:

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Chapter 2 Twelfth Night: disguise, comedy and gulling

A good practice in it to make the steward believe his lady widow

was in love with him, by counterfeiting a letter as from his lady,
in general terms telling him what she liked best in him, and
prescribing his gesture in smiling, his apparel, etc., and then when
he came to practise, making him believe they took him to be mad.
(quoted in Shakespeare, 1994, p. 1)

There’s a lot we can learn about Elizabethan views of drama from this
passage: note the way Manningham labels the Malvolio plot ‘A good
practice’, or as we might say ‘a clever trick’ (‘practice, n. 5.b’, 2020; see
also 5.1.343, and Warren and Wells’s note in Shakespeare, 1994,
p. 218). Though Manningham gets some of the detail of the play
wrong – Olivia is not a ‘lady widow’ – he remembers the subplot in
such detail that it was clear that this was the part of the play he was
most excited by. And in doing so, he tells us quite a bit about how the
play was performed in 1602. Unlike some modern productions, which
see the gulling of Malvolio as a practical joke that goes too far, the
performance Manningham saw almost certainly presented the subplot
as ‘a good practice’, exposing ‘the steward’ to merited ridicule and
laughter.
This connects with the dominant literary view of comedy during
Shakespeare’s lifetime. In the words of the poet and courtier Sir Philip
Sidney (1554–1586), comedy exposes ‘the common errors of our life
[…] in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is
impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one’ (Sidney,
1973, pp. 95–96). Sidney is saying that comedy’s fundamental purpose
is to highlight human folly to show the audience (‘any beholder’) what
they should avoid. This view is implicit in Manningham’s notes: most
likely, he enjoyed the subplot because of the ‘ridiculous and scornful’
presentation that Malvolio received on stage. There is, of course, an
important caveat we must make about both Manningham and Sidney:
contemporary views of comedy are very different. Our culture doesn’t
generally see comedy – particularly stand-up comedy – in the moral
terms Sidney uses, although elements of this model are still present in
satirical TV shows and stage dramas, where political leaders and
celebrities are mocked for the more ludicrous elements of their public
personae. The broad point is that an Elizabethan audience would have
expected comedy to include exaggerated characters – characters who
even put themselves outside of social norms by the extravagance of
their actions.

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 3 Malvolio and comedy: notoriously abused?

One of the most influential twentieth-century studies of Shakespearean

comedy further pursues the idea of comedy as a social and even a
moral theatrical form. In his book Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959),
critic C. L. Barber takes an anthropological approach to comedy by
stressing the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays intersect with
Elizabethan ideas of festivity and popular celebration. Barber argues
that Shakespearean comedy is indebted to popular holiday customs
such as the May games and the misrule that gives this play its title. The
feast of Twelfth Night (usually held around 5 or 6 January, the night
before the feast of Epiphany) was traditionally associated with ‘licensed
“misrule”, revelry, and topsy-turveydom’ in the period after Christmas
(Warren and Wells, in Shakespeare, 1994, p. 5). Or as Barber puts it,
‘The title tells us that the play is like holiday misrule – though not just
like it, for it adds “or what you will”’ (Barber, 1959, p. 241). Figure 8
reproduces a detail from a marvellous painting by Pieter Bruegel the
Elder (c.1525–1569), which shows some of the same aspects of popular
festivity that Shakespeare and his audiences would have been familiar
with. It shows The Battle Between Carnival and Lent: on the left is
Carnival – a fat, Toby Belch-like figure astride a barrel of ale – and on
the right Lent – as a starving nun riding on a flimsy chariot.

Figure 8 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, detail from The Battle Between Carnival
and Lent, 1559, oil on oak, 118 × 164 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna, GG_1016.

These contexts are evident in some of the play’s key characters: both
Sir Toby and Feste (think about his name) are ‘festive’ figures, on the
side of topsy-turvy rather than the straight and narrow. A festive view
of the world is vividly apparent in Sir Toby’s famous rebuke to

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Chapter 2 Twelfth Night: disguise, comedy and gulling

Malvolio, ‘Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no
more cakes and ale?’ (2.3.107–108). In a related spirit, the name
‘Malvolio’ is a clear nudge to the audience of how to see him: as
Warren and Wells indicate, ‘his name is against him’ because of its
derivation from the Italian words meaning ‘ill-will’ (in Shakespeare,
1994, p. 45).
In Barber’s view, Feste and Sir Toby represent the ‘holiday’ spirit of the
Elizabethan theatre, which emphatically rejects Malvolio’s puritanical
leanings: ‘The festive spirit shows up the kill-joy vanity of Malvolio’s
decorum’ (Barber, 1959, p. 249). Barber resists readings and
performances that elevate Malvolio’s sufferings, or which present him
as the tragic victim of cruel bullies. You can see his approach in the
following quotation, which begins with Act 4, Scene 2 (where Feste as
Sir Topaz visits the imprisoned Malvolio) and then turns to the final
scene. At the end of the passage, Barber suggests that the English
Revolution of the 1640s – which led to the execution of Charles I and
the closing of the playhouses under Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth
– could be seen as the ultimate triumph of Malvolio over Sir Toby and
his friends:

The pack of them are wanton and unreasonable in tormenting

[Malvolio]; but his reasonableness will never let him out into “the
air; ... the glorious sun” (IV.iii.1) which they enjoy together. To
play the dark-house scene for pathos, instead of making fun out
of the pathos, or at any rate out of most of the pathos, is to
ignore the dry comic light which shows up Malvolio’s
virtuousness as a self-limiting automatism. […] Yet, seen in the
perspective of literary and social history, there is a curious
appropriateness in Malvolio’s presence, as a kind of foreign body
to be expelled by laughter, in Shakespeare’s last free-and-easy
festive comedy. He is a man of business, and, it is passingly
suggested, a hard one; he is or would like to be a rising man, and
to rise he uses sobriety and morality. One could moralize the
spectacle by observing that, in the long run, in the 1640’s,
Malvolio was revenged on the whole pack of them.
(Barber, 1959, pp. 256–257)

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 3 Malvolio and comedy: notoriously abused?

Activity 7
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)

1 Write a couple of sentences to summarise Barber’s opinion of

Malvolio.
2 Now reread the whole of Act 4, Scene 2 and Act 5, Scene 1,
Lines 293–368, in the light of Barber’s viewpoint. Do you agree with
him?

Discussion
1 It seems to me that Barber’s view of Malvolio is both complicated and
balanced, so my sentences would be something like: ‘Barber
suggests that although Malvolio doesn’t deserve the “tormenting” he
receives from Feste, he is still a “self-limiting” character who
deserves much of the treatment that comes his way. In the second
excerpt, Barber suggests that Malvolio is a disruptive presence who
needs to be “expelled” from the “free-and-easy” world of
Shakespeare’s comedy.’
2 Obviously whether or not you agree with Barber will depend on your
view of the play. In light of the revelation of Viola’s identity in Act 5,
Scene 1, one thing I will note is that Barber’s stress on Malvolio as a
‘hard’ figure and ‘a rising man’ chimes with the fate of the sea
captain. Though we hear nothing further about ‘Malvolio’s suit’
against him (5.1.270), Barber’s reading honours the complexity of
Shakespeare’s play: Malvolio is tormented by Feste, but he does
some offstage tormenting of his own.

Barber is not the final word on Twelfth Night, and the performance
evidence of recent years suggests that Malvolio’s role continues to give
actors different ways of approaching him and the play as a whole (see
Warren and Wells, in Shakespeare, 1994, pp. 42–52). As I said at the
outset, Twelfth Night is both amusing and controversial. Thus, it’s not
uncommon for the same audience that is delighted by Malvolio’s
ridiculousness in Act 2, Scene 5 and Act 3, Scene 4 to be made
profoundly uncomfortable later by what happens to him in Act 4,
Scene 2 and Act 5, Scene 1. As Barber hints, the social dynamic of the
play presents a conflict between the traditional forces of festivity – of
cakes and ale, of songs and dances – and those of a more austere
moralism. That’s one of the things I like about Barber’s analysis – his

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Chapter 2 Twelfth Night: disguise, comedy and gulling

emphasis on the way Malvolio ‘uses sobriety and morality’. In other

words, the play doesn’t really portray him as a puritan, but rather as a
figure who exploits puritanical ways of thinking for his own ends. This
is related to Barber’s broader approach to comedy as a form that
captures aspects of social tension and change.
From this perspective, it is inevitable that there is a tense face-off
between the unrepentant Malvolio and Feste in the final scene: festivity
cannot live with pseudo-sobriety. It’s not accidental, then, that Feste
has the last word in the play with the famous – and potentially very
rude – song, ‘When that I was a little tiny boy’. (As so often with the
character of Feste, Shakespeare exploits double entendres on words like
‘thing’, meaning ‘penis’; see Warren and Wells’s notes in Shakespeare,
1994, p. 220, and compare with Feste’s related playing with meanings
of ‘wanton’ in 3.1.15–16, and notes.) Malvolio has objected to this kind
of performance throughout the play, and we can almost still hear him
muttering offstage while Feste sings, ‘I marvel your ladyship takes
delight in such a barren rascal’ (1.5.78–79). In this view, the happy
ending of the main plot (in the beautiful resolution of Viola’s confused
identity) is offset by the exclusion of Malvolio (and to an extent by the
marriage of Sir Toby and Maria, who are also offstage) from the final
moments of the play.

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 4 Summary

4 Summary
This chapter has developed the issues we considered in Chapter 1 by
looking in greater detail at the themes of disguise and concealment and
the deception (or gulling) of Malvolio. This has meant that you’ve been
spending a lot of time engaging both with a classic literary text and the
culture that produced it. As in the previous chapter, your study has
said something about Shakespeare’s claims to universality, and the
numerous ways in which his plays are products of a specific place and
time. In reading Act 2, Scene 4, we’ve looked at how Shakespeare uses
metaphorical devices like simile and ekphrasis; this may have made the
play’s text seem very distant from us. And yet, when looked at in
detail, we’ve developed a sense of the immediacy of such moments and
the complex psychologies that underpin them, and their broader
cultural impact.
Similarly with the subplot, our work on festivity and popular culture
has both distanced Malvolio and stressed the ways in which this
portion of the play continues to be theatrically controversial. As I said
at the start of Chapter 1, Ben Jonson’s line that Shakespeare ‘was not
for an age, but for all time!’ seems at first like praise that’s almost too
extravagant, particularly when you start to understand how much of
Shakespeare’s ‘age’ is present in his work (Jonson, 1975, p. 264).
Nevertheless, the ongoing vitality of these plays – not just as texts we
study academically but as scripts regularly staged for performance –
suggests that Jonson wasn’t far wrong in his ecstatic assessment of the
work of his friend.

You should now return to the module website to continue your

study of this unit.

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Chapter 2 Twelfth Night: disguise, comedy and gulling

References
Baldick C. (2008) The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 3rd edn.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barber, C.L. (1959) Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: a Study of Dramatic
Form and its Relation to Social Custom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Doggett, P. (2011) The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie in the
1970s. London: Vintage.
‘Ekphrasis, n.’ (2020) Available at: https://www-oed-com.libezproxy.
open.ac.uk/view/Entry/59412?redirectedFrom=ekphrasis#eid
(Accessed: 6 August 2020).
Freud, S. (1984) On Metapsychology. Translated from German by A.
Richards. London: Penguin.
Gurr, A. (1980) The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642. 2nd edn.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jonson, B. (1975) The Complete Poems. Edited by G. Parfitt.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Shakespeare, W. (1994) Twelfth Night. Edited by R. Warren and S.
Wells. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shakespeare, W. (2008) Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Edited by K.
Elam. London: Bloomsbury.
Sidney, P. (1973) Miscellaneous Prose. Edited by K. Duncan-Jones and J.
Van Dorsten. Oxford: Clarendon.

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Chapter 3
Jane Eyre:
the making of a classic
Written by Sara Haslam
Contents
1 Introduction 79
2 A ‘striking and exciting’ novel 83
3 Form in the opening of Jane Eyre 87
3.1 The first-person and third-person narrator 89
4 Technique in Jane Eyre 92
5 Character in Jane Eyre 96
6 Plot and the Bildungsroman 99
7 Summary 105
References 106
 1 Introduction

1 Introduction
Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre was published in 1847 and was the
first novel by a member of the extraordinary Brontë family to find its
way into print. Figure 1 shows the title page of the first edition, as
published by the London firm Smith, Elder & Co. But where is
Charlotte Brontë’s name? The answer to this question is closely bound
up with issues of writing and gender in the nineteenth century.
Brontë’s novel might not have made it into print at all if ‘Currer Bell’
had not helped it on its way.

Figure 1 Title page of the first edition of Jane Eyre, 1847.

Private collection. Photo: © Bridgeman Images.

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Chapter 3 Jane Eyre: the making of a classic

Do you notice any similarities between the name ‘Currer Bell’ and that
of the author of Jane Eyre? They share the same initials. This is
because they are, in fact, the same person. Currer Bell is a made-up
name, or pseudonym, adopted by the author in order to disguise the
fact that Jane Eyre was written by a woman. Charlotte’s sisters, Anne
and Emily, joined her in what they felt was necessary subterfuge in
order to be taken seriously by publishers and the reading public. In
1845, while they were planning the publication of a joint collection of
their poems, Charlotte opted for the pseudonym Currer Bell; Anne,
author of novels including The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), for
Acton Bell; and Emily, author of Wuthering Heights (1847), chose Ellis
Bell.

Figure 2 Philip Norman, No.15 Waterloo Place, 1904.

The offices of Smith, Elder & Co. publishing firm.

80
 1 Introduction

Currer Bell was therefore the name under which Charlotte submitted
the manuscript of Jane Eyre to the publishing firm Smith, Elder & Co.
(Figure 2). A need to earn a living was one of her main reasons for
looking to publish her work. The Brontë family was not rich, and
Charlotte’s father was going blind and would soon need caring for at
his parsonage in Haworth, Yorkshire. The precocious Brontë family
had already suffered the early loss of a wife/mother and two siblings.
The surviving girls and their brother, Branwell, a writer and artist,
continued to live with their father (a curate) and their aunt after the
death of their mother in 1821. All four children read widely, were
artistic and imaginative in their games, and, as soon as they were able,
wrote fiction.
Jane Eyre was not the first novel that Charlotte had sent to Smith,
Elder & Co. for consideration. The publishers had recently rejected a
book she had submitted called The Professor. It had been rejected not
because they thought it was a bad novel but because they feared it
would not sell. Charlotte was therefore somewhat encouraged by the
terms of this rejection and, already close to completing Jane Eyre, she
(as ‘Currer Bell’, of course, to disguise her female identity) wrote to the
firm in July 1847, asking them to reconsider their decision and to look
at a further novel:

Your objection to the want of varied interest in [The Professor] is,

I am aware, not without grounds – yet it appears to me that it
might be published without risk if its appearance were speedily
followed up by another work from the same pen of a more
striking and exciting character.
(quoted in Barker, 1997, p. 526)

Senior figures at the firm, who included George Smith and William
Smith Williams, replied once more that they would not publish The
Professor, but they did express willingness to look at Currer Bell’s other
book with the ‘more striking and exciting character’: Jane Eyre. So,
Charlotte sent them the manuscript of her new novel.
George Smith’s account of his first read of the novel is impressive. The
manuscript was posted from Yorkshire and this seasoned publisher
later admitted that he could not put it down. He cancelled a Sunday
engagement and ate lunch at his desk, finishing the novel the same day

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Chapter 3 Jane Eyre: the making of a classic

that he had started it (Barker, 1997, p. 527). On the Monday, he

accepted the book for publication by the firm.
Jane Eyre was published on 16 October 1847 and caused a sensation.
The first edition (probably around 2500 copies) sold out within three
months. It had to be reprinted in January, and then again in April 1848
(Barker, 1997, p. 537). It represented a huge financial success for the
firm – although less so for its author (Barker, 1997, p. 527). We will
turn to the first reviews of the novel, published in the newspapers and
magazines of the day, later in the chapter once you have read some of
it yourself, but you can explore them at any point in your set text (see
‘Appendix A: Opinions of the press’, beginning on p. 441). The
reviews certainly fanned the flames of the book’s popularity, calling
Jane Eyre ‘the best novel of the season’ and one of ‘decided power’
(quoted in Brontë, 2019 [1847], pp. 447, 441).

Study note
In this chapter, all references to Jane Eyre are to the set book:
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, edited by Margaret Smith, with an
introduction and notes by Juliette Atkinson (Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2019 [1847]).

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 2 A ‘striking and exciting’ novel

2 A ‘striking and exciting’ novel

How and why did Jane Eyre make such an impressive mark? This is a
question that you will return to throughout this chapter and the next.
We can begin to work out an answer, however, by looking again at the
image of the title page (Figure 1) and exploring Brontë’s opening
chapter. Decisions about the form that the novel would take helped to
create the ‘striking and exciting’ book that the author advertised to its
eventual publishers. The next two activities will help you to understand
more about those crucial decisions and learn more about the novel
genre at the same time.

Activity 1
(Allow around 15 minutes to complete this activity.)
Scan (or look quickly over) the title page of the first edition of Jane Eyre
(Figure 1) again. We have already considered the name ‘Currer Bell’ that
appears there, and the name and location of the publisher.
What other information does the title page include? Does any of it
warrant further investigation?

Discussion
You will probably have noted the title of the novel, which appears in the
largest print and might therefore be considered the most important
information on the page. At the very bottom, just below the street
address of the publishers, the year of publication appears. However, you
may have raised questions about the final pieces of information on the
page: ‘IN THREE VOLUMES./VOL. I.’, ‘An Autobiography’ and ‘EDITED
BY’, as these do not seem to fit with what you have learned so far about
this novel.

To explain the final pieces of information on the title page, we first

need to turn to the question of how novels were published, sold and
read in the nineteenth century. From the 1830s until near the end of
the century, they often appeared in the form of the three-volume novel
(or ‘triple-decker’). Printing books in this way was an expensive option
and they were therefore not available for all readers to buy and own.
Three-volume novels were instead published mainly to be bought by

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Chapter 3 Jane Eyre: the making of a classic

private circulating libraries, such as Mudie’s Select Library (a circulating

library set up by publisher Charles Edward Mudie in 1842) and then
borrowed by their members. As the title page suggests, Jane Eyre was
originally published like this, with Volume 1 containing Chapters 1–15,
Volume 2 containing Chapters 16–26, and Volume 3 containing
Chapters 27–38 (if we number them sequentially). The fact that readers
had to borrow the novel did not harm its success.
Although the more exclusive and expensive ‘triple-decker’ format
meant that Jane Eyre would have been beyond the financial reach of,
say, a teacher or governess, the rise of lending libraries since the
eighteenth century helped to ensure that novels could still be widely
read, which they increasingly were in this period. On the very first
page of the novel, Brontë shows us that reading was of vital
importance to her main character. This observation, emphasised by its
early mention, was based on an acute cultural sensitivity for which,
along with her other skills as a novelist, Brontë was rewarded by the
size of her readership. This was an audience that valued novels in
general and, it turned out, her novel in particular. As literacy rates rose
further across the century, the price of novels came down, and, quite
quickly after first publication, Jane Eyre appeared as a cheap one-
volume edition in 1850.
The remaining two elements of Jane Eyre’s title page are related to one
another and give clues about the type of book that is to follow. Jane
Eyre is a novel, a ‘fictitious prose narrative’, as the Shorter Oxford
English Dictionary entry explains (1988). However, the title page
suggests that this is a novel pretending to be an autobiography (or
‘true story’ about a life) and that it has been edited, rather than written
by, Currer Bell. Exploring this aspect of Brontë’s attempt to create a
‘striking and exciting’ book for her readers means brief comparison
with one of the earliest English novels. The roots of the novel genre
are deeply buried in stories about ‘real life’, as this particularly vibrant
example demonstrates (Figure 3).
Moll Flanders, a novel published in 1722 by the novelist and journalist
Daniel Defoe (c.1660–1731), also presented itself as an autobiography
of its title character. Defoe chose to present it in this format in order
to assert and emphasise his book’s claim to be a first-hand tale of
crime and excitement that his readers could believe in, at least
temporarily.

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 2 A ‘striking and exciting’ novel

Figure 3 Front cover of Oxford World’s Classics 2011 edition of Daniel

Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through
PLSclear.

Moll Flanders’s life was extraordinary in many ways, but Defoe still
wanted it to be related to ‘real life’ in readers’ minds. Such a book
could combine the thrill of the exciting but credible ‘news’ piece –
which he knew all about due to his experience as a journalist – with an
imagined story sustained over many pages. Defoe’s novel did this very
successfully, and he developed a style of authenticity and readability
that would remain important in later examples of the genre. The title
page of Moll Flanders actually read (take a deep breath): ‘THE
FORTUNES AND MISFORTUNES OF the FAMOUS Moll Flanders,
etc, Who was Born in NEWGATE [a prison] and during a Life of
continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, besides her childhood, was
Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own

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Chapter 3 Jane Eyre: the making of a classic

Brother) Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in

Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest, and died a Penitent, Written
from her own MEMORANDUMS’. I hope you can see the effect of a
journalist’s career in that extended, prurient and dramatic title, written
fully in the knowledge of what will make people want to read on –
despite the fact that he gives away the ending!
Brontë’s decision to add ‘An Autobiography’ to her novel’s title page
must be understood partly in the light of this history of the novel
genre and its roots in texts like Defoe’s. She also wanted her readers to
find ‘real life’ in her story and to identify with her main character. But
part of the answer to the question about why Jane Eyre is presented as
an autobiography edited by Currer Bell also lies once more in the fact
that Currer Bell was an assumed name. Once she had admitted as
much to her publishers (she and Anne travelled to London to meet
them in person in July 1848), they jointly decided that this new
subterfuge would help to maintain the disguise as to the author’s true
identity, and thereby ensure better sales. However, in fact, the ruse
increased speculation that the writer of the text Bell had ‘edited’ was
female. William Makepeace Thackeray was a highly successful and well-
respected nineteenth-century novelist (and a hero of Brontë’s). He
wrote to Smith, Elder & Co. having been sent an early copy of Jane
Eyre, wishing that they had not asked him to read such a wonderful
book when he was so busy. He told them some of the ‘love passages’
made him cry. And he also observed that ‘It is a womans [sic] writing,
but whose?’ (Barker, 1997, p. 535).
Charlotte Brontë had a vivid imagination and she had read widely. She
was no Daniel Defoe with a story of transatlantic crime and
corruption, but the decisions she made about how to present Jane Eyre
were taken in order to make her novel as ‘striking and exciting’ (as well
as believable) as it could be. We will now turn to Jane Eyre’s opening
chapters, where you will have the opportunity to explore those
decisions and their effects in more detail.

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 3 Form in the opening of Jane Eyre

3 Form in the opening of Jane Eyre

Before you read the opening chapters of Jane Eyre and begin to
consider how the novel is structured and organised (or its ‘form’), here
is a summary of some early key themes: There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been
wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the
morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no
company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it
. unhappy childhood clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door
exercise was now out of the question.%
. gender inequality I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly
afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw
. the safety, or otherwise, of domestic space twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by
the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the
consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and
. the importance of reading. Georgiana Reed.

The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round
their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by
the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time neither
Study note quarrelling nor crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had
dispensed from joining the group; saying, “She regretted to be
under the necessity of keeping me at a distance; but that until she
Writing to a specific number of words, as you are asked to do in heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation,
that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more
the next activity, is good practice for writing a focused answer to sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly
manner --something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were --
a question in formal assessment. Your notes are important – and she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for
you should always keep them all – but developing these into a contented, happy, little children.”

piece of prose of a set length is an additional necessary skill. You “What does Bessie say I have done?” I asked. “Jane, I don't like
cavillers or questioners; besides, there is something truly
don’t need to be absolutely precise about the word count in this forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner. Be
seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain
chapter’s activities, but elsewhere in your studies you will need to silent.” A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped
in there. It contained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a
pay close attention to the word limit and follow related guidance. volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures. I
mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-
legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain
nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement.

Activity 2
(Allow around 1 hour to complete this activity.)

Read the first two chapters of Volume I, from pp. 7–18 in your set text.
As you read, underline any words, phrases or sections that stand out to
you, keeping the early part of the novel’s key themes in mind.
When you have finished your active reading of this section, answer the
following questions:
1 Who is telling the story, and when do we learn this character’s name
and any other basic information about them?
2 How do these chapters develop your understanding of the novel’s
themes?
Write about 150 words in response to the first question, and about 350
words in response to the second question.

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Chapter 3 Jane Eyre: the making of a classic

Discussion
1 We learn near the bottom of p. 7 that the character who is telling the
story is called Jane. She tells the story from her own point of view,
using ‘I’: ‘I was glad of it: I never liked long walks’ (p. 7). At the
beginning of Chapter II, we see that Jane is also called ‘Miss Eyre’,
so we now know that the novel gains its title from the name of the
character who is in charge of delivering the story to its readers.
Perhaps you also noticed that the second and third paragraphs of the
novel suggest that this character is a child when we meet her (we
discover on p. 9 that she is ten years old), and that she is physically
weak in some way, at least in comparison with the other children,
who are named Eliza, John and Georgiana Reed.
2 If you noted the names of these other children, perhaps this helped
you to think about the themes of the book further. The theme of
childhood is probably the most prominent one at the beginning of the
novel, as well as the dramatic differences in the experience of
childhood as Jane relates them. That experience, along with that of
the domestic space represented here, seems to depend completely
on a surname. The other three children have a different surname
from Jane, and she looks on, separate from them, as they sit near
the fire with ‘their mama’ (p. 7). Mrs Reed prevents Jane (who we
learn in Chapter II is her niece) from joining them, characterising her
as a disruptive influence and punishing her for it. Putting this
information together, perhaps you decided that this domestic setting
is only a happy and contented one for those with the name ‘Reed’.
Jane is an orphaned outsider and one that receives no love in the
home. Indeed, she receives violence instead.
Jane deals with her sense of exclusion by reading. With her book on
her knee, secluded from the group and protected from the November
weather, Jane is ‘happy’ to an extent (p. 9), until John Reed finds
her. Her solitude, occasional thrill of fear at the book’s images and
absorption are brutally ended at this point. Reed shockingly cuts her
head with the book. But this ten-year-old girl does not submit readily
to her treatment (spirited resistance or protest is an additional theme
in this book). Despite her physical weakness, her orphaned and
financially ‘dependant’ status (p. 10), and her fear, Jane discovers a
powerful sense of injustice in this first chapter: so powerful that it
makes her brave and strong. She rebuffs and attacks the cowardly
boy, and the adults then step in to contain her. Jane is imprisoned in
the terrifying red-room (a return to the theme of unhappy childhood),
a forbidding place of imposing furniture, associated with death.

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 3 Form in the opening of Jane Eyre

Overwhelmed by her physical and psychological responses to her

treatment, she has a fit and loses consciousness as Chapter II
closes.

The opening of Jane Eyre presents memorable scenes. Is Brontë’s aim

of a ‘striking and exciting novel’ realised here, do you think? She
attempts to engage her reader in several key ways: by suggesting, for
example, that a transformation of some kind has occurred in Jane,
meaning that she will no longer submit to her harsh treatment. This is
an effective narrative ‘hook’. Brontë’s use of ‘I’ to tell the tale may also
help her readers to identify with Jane more successfully and find her
story more credible (as we learned in the previous section when we
looked at the power of autobiography). And if our sympathy is aroused
in this way, then we will want to move further into the story with the
character – partly in the hope that her life will improve. Similarly,
perhaps Jane’s experience of reading a thrilling and disturbing book is
one that you also shared when reading about her fear of ghosts and
apparitions in the red-room.
In a play, such as William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the action and Point of view, in literature, the vantage point from which a
dialogue between the characters unfold in front of the audience. But story is presented.

where there is a story, there has to be a storyteller. The storyteller (in A common point of view is the omniscient, in which, in the
third person grammatically, the author presents a
this case Jane) should be distinguished first of all from the real-life panoramic view of both the actions and the inner feelings
of the characters; the author’s own comments on
author of a novel. Charlotte Brontë wrote Jane Eyre and chose the title developments may also appear within the narrative.
Another type of third-person point of view is presented from
character to be her storyteller. This decision was discussed when you the limited standpoint of one of the major or minor
characters in the story who is not omniscient and who
were considering the subtitle ‘An Autobiography’ as one possible usually presents a markedly partial view of narrative
events.
reason for the success of her novel in drawing readers in, and you’ll
In a first-person narrative, the “I” point of view is most often
explore it in more detail in the remainder of this section. that of the character in the story who best serves the
author’s purpose. Thus, the practical and matter-of-fact
first-person narrator Lemuel Gulliver lends an aura of
credibility to the fantastic adventures in Jonathan Swift’s
3.1 The first-person and third-person narrator Gulliver’s Travels (1726). A naive first-person narrator is
unaware of the import of the events he relates.

In the late 19th century, point of view became a matter of

When we talk about or study a novel, we normally refer to our critical importance, notably in the prefaces of Henry James.

storyteller as a narrator. Some narrators are closely involved with the

The omniscient (Third person narration: he, she, they),
intrusive point of view came to be frowned upon as

action and tell the story as a witness or participant. Other narrators,

destructive of the novel’s illusion of reality, although many
of the great masters of the novel—Henry Fielding, George

meanwhile, stand apart from the events, telling the story not using ‘I’ Eliot, Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, and Leo Tolstoy
—themselves deployed this point of view. By the early 20th

but using ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘they’. Do you think Jane Eyre is an example of century, novelists were shifting between different points of
view within the same work, as in William Faulkner’s The

the first or second type of narrator? Sound and the Fury (1929), which is structured around
three first-person narratives followed by a final section
related in the third person.

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Jane Eyre is a participant in the action and is therefore an example of

the first type of narrator, also known as a first-person narrator,
because the story is told from her point of view, using ‘I’. The other
type of narrator is called a third-person narrator. A good example of
this contrasting way of telling a story is offered by the opening of a
novel by another Victorian author, Elizabeth Gaskell, titled Wives and
Daughters (1864–66):

To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there

was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town
there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in
that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl;
wide awake and longing to get up, but not daring to do so for
fear of the unseen power in the next room; a certain Betty, whose
slumbers must not be disturbed until six o’clock struck, when she
wakened of herself ‘as sure as clockwork,’ and left the household
little peace afterwards. It was a June morning, and early as it was,
the room was full of sunny warmth and light.
(Gaskell, 1987, p. 1)

This narrator is also describing childhood, but not from her own
perspective. Instead of being involved in the story, this narrator begins
with a high and wide view of the action, able not just to see and tell us
about the childhood that is the subject but, at first, the whole country
it is set in. Do you see how the narrator’s view of that action then
narrows down to the ‘little girl’ until she becomes the narrator’s focus?
At that point, the narrator is able to tell us with absolute confidence
something about what that little girl is feeling. One advantage of the
third-person narrator, and one major reason that authors choose this
kind of narrator to be their storyteller, is that they can have
unrestricted access to many characters’ thoughts and feelings and can
tell readers about them. By contrast, a first-person narrator must rely
mainly on their own thoughts and feelings to tell the story, although
they can also report, imagine or deduce others’ actions or views: for
example, when Jane tells us that John Reed ‘had not much affection
for his mother and sisters’ (p. 10).
If a third-person narrator does have a wide-ranging and privileged
access to many characters’ inner thoughts and feelings in a story, they
are called omniscient, or ‘all-knowing’. Many novels in the nineteenth
century (like Wives and Daughters) were written in this way, with a

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narrator who enjoyed a complete view. Brontë’s use of a first-person

narrator in Jane Eyre set her apart from this trend, and also, as we have
seen previously, possibly contributed to her notable ability to draw
large numbers of readers in, encouraging them to identify with the
individual perspective of the narrator telling the tale. Charles Dickens
was one very popular nineteenth-century writer who, nonetheless,
followed Jane Eyre’s example: his decision to use a first-person narrator
in David Copperfield (1849–50), and later in Great Expectations (1860–61),
was in part a response to the astonishing success of Brontë’s novel.
Use of a first-person narrator can be one important way of realising a
novel’s aim to be representative of ‘real life’. In Chapter I, when Jane
looks out of the window and sees a ‘scene of wet lawn and storm-beat
shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly’ (p. 8), the terrible
weather is more clearly brought home to readers because a first-person
narrator is telling us about it. Her observations, especially as they are
of what might be a familiar rainy scene, can feel like a view that we
share. This closeness to ‘real life’ is such a significant element of the
novel genre’s history that another important literary term has evolved
to describe it: realism. This term denotes a kind of fiction where there
is a high level of potentially recognisable content in a book, relating to
story, place or character. The Concise Oxford Companion to English
Literature defines ‘Realism’ as, ‘A broad tendency in literature that
emphasizes fidelity to the observable and complex facts of life’ (Birch
and Hooper, 2013). The question of how far this definition, which
highlights how the realist author might attempt to represent multiple
different ‘facts’ of life as s/he sees them, describes Brontë’s novel will
now become the focus of our attention. (It’s a question that may
provoke different answers as your knowledge of the text develops.) On
its publication, one review of the novel noted that Jane Eyre’s ‘style as
well as its characters’ were ‘perfectly fresh and life-like’ (quoted in
Brontë, 2019 [1847], p. 444). Let’s see if that rings true as a description
of Brontë’s technique as Jane is sent away to school.

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4 Technique in Jane Eyre

As we have seen, one element of Brontë’s technique in this novel is
her realism, and in this section you’ll begin to explore in more detail
how she uses it and to what effect. Figure 4 shows an undeniably real
building, upon which Jane Eyre’s Lowood School is thought to have
been based. We will revisit the status of this claim later in this section,
but first let’s continue to read the novel and travel with Jane to school.

Figure 4 Postcard showing the building upon which Lowood School in Jane
Eyre is supposedly based, Cowan Bridge, Lancashire.

Activity 3
(Allow around 1 hour 15 minutes to complete this activity.)

Read Chapters III to VII in Volume I of the novel, from pp. 18–66 in your
set text.
As you read, continue to underline any words, phrases or sections that
stand out to you, making notes on any aspects that seem particularly
related to the form of the novel or its realism.
As part of your note-taking:
1 Find one or two instances in the chapters where the narrator focuses
on examples of the ‘observable and complex facts of life’
(‘Realism’, 2013). Make a note of the page number(s) where they

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 4 Technique in Jane Eyre

appear, and either copy out a relevant line or two of the text or jot
down what is being observed.
2 Are we introduced to any new events and ideas in this section that fit
the realism approach less clearly? If you can, find one or two
examples and make a note of the page number(s) where they
appear. You might want to create a bullet point list to describe them.

Discussion
1 Perhaps your examples of ‘observable and complex facts of life’
(realism) included one or more of the following:

◦ Jane’s unhappiness, which features again in the early part of

Chapter III. She describes her tears and feelings of misery
and illness with clarity and in detail (pp. 18–19). She cannot
eat, but she responds positively to thoughts of a book, as well
as to the kind and astute questioning from the apothecary (a
kind of doctor) about her case (p. 23).
◦ The character of Mr Lloyd, a scientist by training who is
wedded to the kind of observable facts that ‘realism’
privileges. Mr Lloyd encourages Jane to tell him the story of
her life so far, and so, with him, we learn the facts of her past.
◦ On p. 29, there is a paragraph with an excellent illustration of
Brontë’s realism: Jane’s breath clears a space on the clouded
January window and she watches closely as a carriage
approaches, followed by a robin looking for food.
◦ Jane’s description of Mrs Reed on pp. 34–35 is similarly
detailed, almost forensically so.
◦ Jane’s impressions of her carriage journey are also detailed.
Starting at the bottom of p. 41, she tells us what her new
school looks and feels like, creating as lifelike an impression
as she can of, for example, the ‘nauseous mess’ of the
porridge (p. 45).
2 In response to your search for any new events or ideas that seem
less like realism, you may have noted the following:

◦ Jane’s insistence on the ghosts that the scientifically driven Mr

Lloyd rejects (p. 23).
◦ When Jane speaks with one of the other school girls across
the book she is reading, and watches how she deals with the
experience of punishment later, she feels she is watching
something that cannot be easily described: a girl who finds
something secret and internal, which allows her to hold herself
apart from the judgement of the schoolroom (p. 51).

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Chapter 3 Jane Eyre: the making of a classic

◦ Later, Jane suggests that Helen Burns (as we come to know

her) ‘considered things by a light invisible to my eyes’ (p. 55)
and, as this section of the novel comes to an end, she
provides Jane with a psychological rescue due to that same
light that Jane does not herself understand. On her stool,
shamed, Jane is able to borrow some of Helen’s courage and
to survive the experience as a result (p. 66).
This last example and the one before it illustrate Jane struggling to
describe and understand what she is observing, therefore suggesting
that these sections are not part of Brontë’s realism but instead indicate a
more spiritual or religious realm. That’s true. However, it’s also the case
that part of Brontë’s realism in this section actually lies in showing what
Jane as a young girl does not yet understand. Much of Helen’s
experience is beyond her comprehension, and Brontë wants to
demonstrate that as she continues to introduce Jane’s character to us.

As your reading for this activity will have shown, despite the presence
of themes that challenge its absolute dominance, Brontë relies to a
great degree on the technique of realism in this first section of the
novel. Our narrator has focused on creating a credible observable
world, and experience of that world, as she tells her story. One other
relevant element of Chapters V and VI deserves specific mention: the
way in which the narrative feels almost like it is taking place in ‘real
time’, with focus on each meal, on each morning as it dawns, and the
close of each day, like a diary might do. Through this repetitive
structure, which creates a strong sense of the autobiography that the
text is presented as, the girls’ ritual may start to feel like the reader’s
ritual, emphasising the realism and once more drawing the reader very
close to the action. You will return to the less realistic themes and
techniques, which challenge realism’s dominance, as you read further
and encounter more examples in the text. Despite her ability to
describe the intense cold and impoverished existence of an unhappy
school with impressive detail, Jane’s susceptibility to the unseen ghosts
of the red-room never leaves her. For many readers, this susceptibility
creates one of the most compelling aspects of her tale.
The third photograph included in Juliet Barker’s biography of the
Brontë family is the same as the one shown in Figure 4. In Barker’s
book, the caption reads ‘The Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan

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 4 Technique in Jane Eyre

Bridge’. This school, still viewable on the road between Leeds in

Yorkshire and Kendal in Lancashire, opened in 1823, with a mission to
attend to the families of clergy in financial need. The fees were
cheaper than other similar establishments, which was an important
factor in a family of five girls such as the Brontë’s. Maria and Elizabeth
were the first in the Brontë family to attend this school. They both
tragically contracted tuberculosis and did not survive their school days.
The three younger girls, Charlotte, Anne and Emily, endured without
them, finally leaving the school to return to Haworth in the summer
of 1825.
In the public’s imagination, Cowan Bridge and the novel’s Lowood
School have long been taken to be one and the same place. There is
no doubt that this significant, traumatic part of Charlotte’s life story
and her own experience of school informed her novel and helped her
to enhance the realism that was a major element of her technique.
However, when reading a work of fiction, it is always necessary to
remember that any elements of real-life experience have been creatively
transformed. Cowan Bridge may well have been a strict, harsh and
even cruel educational establishment, but that does not mean that it
can be exactly equated with Lowood School.
There’s a final aspect of Brontë’s realism that warrants exploration
before we move on. This was briefly mentioned at the end of the
Discussion to Activity 3. We have focused on the realism associated
with the ‘observable and complex facts of life’, like the cold, terrible
food and the robin through the window that Jane presents to her
readers with such immediacy. However, Jane Eyre is also known for its
‘psychological realism’, which is a way of describing its attention to
internal processes, emotions and experiences and how they are
represented. When Jane collapses on the floor of the red-room in what
she describes as a ‘fit’, she has blacked out due to the ungovernable
feelings within her, extremes to which she has been driven by her
terror and misery. This focus on individual consciousness and its
manifestations is an aspect of Brontë’s technique that you may want to
look out for in your reading of subsequent sections of the novel.

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Chapter 3 Jane Eyre: the making of a classic

5 Character in Jane Eyre

It is impossible to think of any approach to the study of Jane Eyre and
its impact and popularity as an example of nineteenth-century fiction
without considering its presentation of character. One of the main
elements of a novelist’s technical armoury is characterisation. This
refers to the way in which the novelist creates imaginary and distinctive
characters to populate the world of a novel and, through their actions
and the dialogue (or speech) that they employ, uses them to tell its
story. A novel’s characters may be imaginary, but if they are well-drawn
and interesting, they are often the element of a novel that is most
vividly recalled by its readers. (Think about one of your own favourite
novels to test if this is true.)
We know characters in books are not real people, although they might
be based to some degree on autobiographical experience, as with
Brontë’s representation of Lowood school. Despite this knowledge,
while reading and enjoying a novel, do you sometimes find yourself
thinking of the characters as though they are real? This is fine when on
a summer holiday and reading purely for pleasure. However, as
students of a novel, it’s important that we also focus on the characters
as a technical device. Therefore, if you have time, it is sometimes
beneficial to reread a section of a novel in order to answer a question
about it. That way, you read it first for the story and then again in
order to do the more careful thinking. In the remainder of this section,
we will focus on Brontë’s presentation of character in Jane Eyre.

Activity 4
(Allow around 1 hour to complete this activity.)

Read Chapters VIII and IX of Volume I of the novel, from pp. 66–81 in
your set text.
As you read, continue to underline any words, phrases or sections that
stand out to you, making notes on any aspects that you would like to
think about further.
Then, in a paragraph of about 200 words, answer the following question:

In what ways does Helen Burns’s character compare and

contrast with that of Jane Eyre, and why do you think Brontë
chose to create these comparisons and contrasts?

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 5 Character in Jane Eyre

One way of performing this task would be to split a piece of paper into
two halves. Give one half the heading ‘Helen’ and the other ‘Jane’. In
each half, note words and phrases describing each character, either
from the text itself or those you come up with while you are reading: for
example, where Jane seems ‘desperate’ or Helen strikes you as
‘patient’. These notes will form the basis of your paragraph, where you
will assess some of the ways in which these two characters compare
well to each other (or are similar in mood, thought or behaviour) and the
ways in which they can be contrasted to each other (or are different in
mood, thought or behaviour). You’ll need to consider possible reasons
for what you have noticed before you begin to write your response.

Discussion
We were introduced to Helen in Chapter V, when Jane spots her
reading. We already know that books are significant to Jane, so in this
way Brontë is signalling a likely similarity between the two characters,
the basis for a friendship. From this point on, though, Brontë presents
differences between them, which are gradually revealed in the chapters
before Helen dies. In Helen’s speech on p. 68, the reason for these
differences becomes plain: Helen considers Jane too focused on the
world around her and a need for human affection. Helen has her mind
fixed on another realm, buoyed by a Christian faith, which Jane has
previously seen manifested in the incomprehensible ‘light’ of her
character. Helen, it becomes clear, does not fear pain, punishment or
death itself. She is patient, faithful and accepting. The passionate sense
of injustice that fires Jane does not affect her. One lasting similarity,
however, is their capacity for affection, and this is movingly drawn in the
final pages of Chapter IX.

The differences between the characters of Jane and Helen are designed
to highlight their individuality, of course, and therefore increase our
interest. They also progress the story significantly by catalysing (or
generating) changes in our narrator. The experience of tea with Miss
Temple (pp. 69–72), and the very welcome and wide-ranging
conversation Jane witnesses between her and Helen, introduces Jane’s
first experience of shared (as opposed to solitary) happiness, and a
linked desire to explore her rural surroundings as summer comes. Jane
sees and thinks about things differently as a result of meeting Helen –
and is, of course, liberated as well by the restoration of her own
reputation in the same chapter. Helen’s death soon after represents a

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brutally swift change of direction in the narrative, and Jane’s insistence

on sleeping alongside the gravely ill Helen (Figure 5) displays the
importance of this relationship to her. Jane has been transformed by
their encounter and will never be the same again.

Figure 5 Peggy Ann Garner (left) in the title role of Jane Eyre with Elizabeth
Taylor (right) as Helen Burns, dir. Robert Stevenson (Twentieth Century
Fox, 1943). Photo: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy.

Jane is the protagonist (or main character) in the story of which she is
also the narrator. In this section of the novel, both Helen and Miss
Temple are designed to demonstrate the growth and development of
Brontë’s protagonist in ways that simultaneously develop the reader’s
interest. You will explore this idea in more detail in the next section
and in this chapter’s final guided reading of the novel.

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 6 Plot and the Bildungsroman

6 Plot and the Bildungsroman

So far in your study of Jane Eyre there has been little reference to
another key term in the study of fiction: plot. You encountered a
discussion of plot in your study of Twelfth Night and will learn more
about it when you embark on your Creative Writing studies. While
there are some similarities in what plot means in both fiction and
drama, in this chapter we will be focusing on what it means with
regard to a novel.

Activity 5
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)
Read this definition of ‘Plot’ from the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms:

The pattern of events and situations in a narrative or dramatic

Forster in Aspects of the
work, as selected and arranged both to emphasize Novel who developed this
relationships—usually of cause and effect—between incidents idea and established the
and to elicit a particular kind of interest in the reader or difference between ‘story’
audience, such as surprise or suspense. Although in a loose and ‘plot’, defining a story as
sense the term commonly refers to that sequence of chief ‘a narrative of events
events which can be summarized from a [narrative or dramatic arranged in their time
work], modern criticism often makes a stricter distinction sequence.’
between the plot of a work and its story: the plot is the
Forster wrote a story ‘can
selected version of events as presented to the reader or
only have one merit: that of
audience in a certain order and duration, whereas the story is
making the audience want to
the full sequence of events as we imagine them to have taken know what happens next.
place in their ‘natural’ order and duration. The story, then, is “The king died and then the
the hypothetical ‘raw material’ of events which we reconstruct queen died” is a story.’
from the finished product of the plot. […] Plots vary in form
from the fully integrated or ‘tightly knit’ to the loosely episodic. ‘A plot is also a narrative of
In general, though, most plots will trace some process of events, the emphasis falling
change in which characters are caught up in a developing on causality – “The king died
and then the queen died” is a
conflict that is finally resolved.
story.’ But ‘“the king died and
(‘Plot’, 2015) then the queen died of grief”
is a plot. The time-sequence
Make notes on the definition, perhaps first by highlighting key words. is preserved, but the sense
Then, in a paragraph of about 100 words, try and link what you have of causality overshadows it.’
learned from the definition to what you know so far about the plot of
Jane Eyre.

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Chapter 3 Jane Eyre: the making of a classic

Discussion
These are the key words that I highlighted:

. pattern
. relationships (of cause and effect)
. interest
. story
. order and duration
. sequence of events
. change
. developing conflict
. resolved.

This definition discusses the difference in meaning between two related

but distinct literary terms: ‘plot’ and ‘story’. Both terms refer to the things
that happen in a fictional work. ‘Story’, however, means the chronological
sequence of events, while ‘plot’ describes how this sequence is
presented. Jane Eyre is an example of a novel in which there is a strong
chronological structure, as we have discussed: we meet Jane as a child
and watch her grow. But occasionally, as we read, we are made more
aware of the ‘plot’, or the ‘selected version of events as presented to the
reader […] in a certain order and duration’.

As you read the final section of the novel that we will focus on in this
chapter, you’re going to be concentrating on the novel’s plot, on Jane’s
‘selected version’ of the chronological events (the story), and the way
in which they are placed together. Once you’ve done so, you will learn
more about the term Bildungsroman, which appears in the heading
of this section. This is a German term (literally combining the words
for ‘education’ and ‘novel’), used widely now to describe a kind of
novel in a way that is useful in the approach to Jane Eyre, as we’ll see.

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 6 Plot and the Bildungsroman

Study note
As you read the chapters in the following activity, you will spot
the asterisk after the words ‘Bluebeard’s castle’ on p. 105. This
lets you know that there is an ‘Explanatory Note’ to this phrase
in that section of your set text (see p. 474 for additional
information that will help you to get the most out of your
engagement with the text at this point).
There have been earlier explanatory notes, but this struck me as a
particularly interesting example. See the ‘Explanatory Notes and
Selected Variants’ section that begins on p. 457 of your set text,
and think back to your work on the notes to Twelfth Night here
too.

Activity 6
(Allow around 2 hours to complete this activity.)

Read Chapters X to XV of Volume I of the novel, from pp. 81–148 in

your set text.
As you read, continue to underline any words, phrases or sections that
stand out to you, making notes on any aspects that you would like to
think about further.
As part of your note-taking, answer the following question:

When and where do you most notice the structure of the

novel, or the role of its narrator in ordering events and thereby
shaping Brontë’s plot?

To help you answer this question, take a close look at the very first
paragraph of Chapter X. This may encourage you to reflect again on
what we learned earlier regarding the use of the term ‘autobiography’.
This activity asks you to engage closely with a long section of the novel,
up to the close of Volume I. The discussion covers a few key points, but
you may have selected other examples.

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Chapter 3 Jane Eyre: the making of a classic

Discussion
At the opening of Chapter X, we are made very aware of a narrator who
is making decisions about her plot. She reminds us that, so far, she has
spent necessary detailed time on an account that is now going to speed
up. The next eight years do not hold much interest for the reader, she
tells us, and so she is going to more or less pass over them. You may
have noted also that, with this paragraph, Jane signals that she is an
adult looking back over her childhood years. (If you have had a sense
already that some of the descriptions and vocabulary were not wholly
those of a child, this shift will mean that you no longer feel that way as
you’re reading.)
The beginning of Chapter XI includes a similar reference to the
narrator’s role. On this occasion, Jane addresses us as ‘reader’,
simultaneously reminding us that it is a novel that we are reading, not
real life we are participating in, and creating a directness and sense of
intimacy in the personal address. It seems that Brontë has different tools
for hooking her readers that she calls on throughout the novel. See also
how, in this same paragraph, the narrator uses the present tense: ‘my
muff and umbrella lie on the table, and I am warming away the
numbness and chill’ (p. 91). Even though she has just addressed us
directly as ‘reader’, she then uses her realism to help us to imagine the
scene as though it is happening now, in front of our mind’s eye, as we
engage with it in the novel.
For the remainder of this chapter, the reader is kept very much allied to
Jane’s consciousness and her experience of Thornfield Hall. There is
also a return to the thrill of fairy tale in the mention of ‘Bluebeard’s
castle’ (p. 105). Another brief foray into a childhood world of mystery and
fairy tale sets the scene for Jane’s first encounter with Mr. Rochester
(p. 110). Jane announces its significance by pausing on it soon
afterwards because it ‘marked with change one single hour of a
monotonous life’ (p. 113). There can be no doubt that Mr. Rochester is
going to play an important role in Jane’s story from this point on.
Finally, you may have focused in your notes on the opening of
Chapter XV, when Jane moves forward in the chronology in order to give
us information that she thinks we now require about Mr. Rochester’s
ward, Adèle, and her background (p. 137).

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 6 Plot and the Bildungsroman

Through revealing Adèle’s history in Chapter XV, Jane is also telling us

more about Mr. Rochester himself. The final chapters in the volume
are notable for the intensity of the conversations between Jane and Mr.
Rochester, for the ‘demoniac laugh’ that Jane once more hears during a
sleepless night (p. 144), as well as, of course, for the dramatic fire that
Jane’s wakefulness prevents from becoming murderous.
There is a term associated with the narration of Jane Eyre from the
start of Chapter X: the ‘dual I’. From this point forward in the novel,
although the first-person narrative remains ‘in charge’ of delivering the
story, as readers we become aware that the narrative is split between
the adult Jane who is reflecting on her life, and the earlier, younger
Jane whose thoughts and feelings the adult relates to us. The self-
conscious way in which the adult narrator announces that she will
dwell on key scenes of her younger self ’s development as she
constructs her plot is one reason that this novel is an excellent
example of the type of novel called a Bildungsroman.

Activity 7
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)

Read this definition of Bildungsroman from the Oxford Dictionary of

Critical Theory:

A sub-genre of novel focusing on the personal development of

the protagonist, usually from childhood through to adulthood.
The prototype is J. W. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
(Willhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795–6), but the form was
widely adopted in Europe throughout the nineteenth century.
Other famous examples include: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
(1847), Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) and
Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). As these examples
suggest, the development is not merely personal, inasmuch as
it generally takes the form of both a move away from rural
origins towards the modern city and an upward movement
from one social class to another. In this regard, the personal
history can be read as an allegory of a particular trajectory
within a national history.
(‘Bildungsroman’, 2018)

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Chapter 3 Jane Eyre: the making of a classic

Make notes on the definition and then, in a paragraph of about 100

words, link it to what you know so far about the plot of Jane Eyre.

Discussion
As you will have noted from the Bildungsroman definition, Jane Eyre is
considered a prime example of this subgenre, or subtype of novel. And,
as you have explored so far in your reading, our novel opens with a
protagonist who is a child and who grows to adulthood as the plot
develops. This process is managed by the ‘dual I’. The definition of
Bildungsroman suggests that the development is ‘not merely personal’
but can often be read against a more general background. Perhaps in
the case of Jane Eyre, that more general background might be
childhood, religion or education in the nineteenth century. This will
become clearer as you read on.

As you continue to read the text, you may want to make notes at the
points at which Jane’s growth and development, and thus the relevance
of the Bildungsroman subgenre, become most apparent.

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 7 Summary

7 Summary
In this first chapter on Jane Eyre, you have worked in detail on the
first volume of the novel. You have learned how, despite now being a
widely recognised and accepted classic text, this novel had an especially
fraught journey into print, due to the fact that it was written by a
woman. After close analysis of its title page, you continued to work on
its form, character and plot, considering such matters as the narrator
Brontë chooses and why, and the Bildungsroman subgenre. You have
also explored the ways in which Brontë’s technique (such as the use of
realism) might have helped to ensure that this novel became a hit with
its readership.
Brontë’s realism has been shown to give powerful life to the feelings
and experiences of our young protagonist in a way that might
encourage readers to identify with those feelings and experiences. The
realistic representation of the unhappiness of a young orphan may have
encouraged your empathy, in particular, and a desire to read on and see
if things improved for Jane Eyre. Another of Brontë’s narrative hooks
that you have discovered in this chapter involved her turning away
from realism. The dramatic suggestion of ghosts and the attention to
mysterious noises at Thornfield Hall offer a different kind of attraction
to readers looking for a novel to draw them in.

You should now return to the module website to continue your

study of this unit.

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Chapter 3 Jane Eyre: the making of a classic

References
Barker, J. (1997) The Brontës. Orion Books: London.
‘Bildungsroman’ (2018) Available at: https://www-oxfordreference-com.
libezproxy.open.ac.uk/view/10.1093/acref/9780198794790.001.0001/acref-
9780198794790-e-83?rskey=anHhoz&result=3 (Accessed: 25 June 2020).
Birch, D. and Hooper, K. (eds) (2013) ‘Realism’, in The Concise Oxford
Companion to English Literature, 4th edn. Available at: https://www-
oxfordreference-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/view/10.1093/acref/
9780199608218.001.0001/acref-9780199608218-e-6334?
rskey=5UO9cc&result=4044 (Accessed: 25 June 2020).
Brontë, C. (2019 [1847]) Jane Eyre. Edited by M. Smith, with an introduction
and notes by J. Atkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gaskell, E. (1987) Wives and Daughters. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
‘Plot’ (2015) Available at: https://www-oxfordreference-com.libezproxy.open.
ac.uk/view/10.1093/acref/9780198715443.001.0001/acref-9780198715443-e-
885?rskey=YkbpoD&result=4 (Accessed: 25 June 2020).
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1988) 3rd edn. London: Guild Publishing.

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Chapter 4
Jane Eyre: context,
setting and the Gothic
Written by Sara Haslam
Contents
1 Introduction 111
2 Setting 113
3 The Gothic in Jane Eyre 116
4 Jane Eyre and the critics 123
5 Journeys in Jane Eyre 128
6 Summary 133
References 135
Readings 136
Reading 4.1 Gothic fiction 136
 1 Introduction

1 Introduction
At this point in your studies, you might consider Jane Eyre’s reputation
to be largely based on its first-person appeal to readers, combined with
a strongly realistic depiction of an unhappy childhood. The novel
certainly offered a new and revolutionary approach to the
representation of its young protagonist. Or perhaps that reputation as
a literary classic is more likely to be wedded to the way it shows the
growth and development of Jane’s character? As you have learned, Jane
Eyre is an important and influential example of the Bildungsroman
form, in which Jane’s developing character is compared with very
different types, such as Helen Burns’s religious certainty and patient
acceptance. Both of these represent valid points of view, but the
novel’s classic status, as well as its popularity, may also derive from its
ability to surprise and electrify readers. This example of nineteenth-
century fiction provides a genuinely new kind of heroine, however
firmly rooted in her historical period she may be.
Do keep returning to questions related to this novel’s popularity and
reputation as you read the text and consider critical reactions to it.
This is one good way of keeping in touch with your own developing
views of Jane Eyre, and there can sometimes be more than one right
answer to a question!
We now move into Volume II of Jane Eyre. As you will remember, the
way in which this novel was first published meant that Volume I was
originally a separate book of its own, one which closed on a powerful
narrative hook. Jane has been tossing and turning in her bed, her
sleeplessness caused by the drama of saving Mr. Rochester from the
Thornfield fire along with the conflicting feelings she is experiencing.
Delirium and passion are matched by good sense and judgement, and
as Jane rises with the dawn and the volume ends, it is unclear which
partnership has the upper hand (p. 148). Charlotte Brontë judged that
this would be an effective way of persuading her readers to buy or
borrow Volume II, so that they could find out.

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Chapter 4 Jane Eyre: context, setting and the Gothic

Study note
In this chapter, all references to Jane Eyre are to the set book:
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, edited by Margaret Smith, with an
introduction and notes by Juliette Atkinson (Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2019 [1847]).

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 2 Setting

2 Setting
Setting offers an important way of engaging with context when
studying a novel – or indeed any other cultural artefact. In this section,
setting will be your focus as you read deeper into the novel. When
Volume II opens we are still in Thornfield Hall, but, as you will see,
the tone of the narrative has changed almost completely. Yes, Jane is
thinking about Mr. Rochester, but he does not appear. The reader is
presented with a scene of domestic bustle rather than a climactic
encounter. The effects of the fire have been almost erased, and all has
been ‘restored to complete order’ (p. 149), suggesting that the
murderous night-time raid has been deprived of its ability to shock,
even if it is not forgotten.

Activity 1
(Allow around 2 hours to complete this activity.)
Read pp. 149–214 of the novel now, up to the end of Chapter V in
Volume II. As you read, consider how this section develops Jane’s story
and your understanding of her character.
Then answer the following questions, the first in a couple of sentences
and the second in two or three paragraphs totalling around 500 words:
1 What variety of settings do we encounter?
2 In what ways does setting heighten either plot or character
development? (Try to find some short quotations to illustrate your
points.)

Discussion
1 The variety of settings might seem limited in this section of the novel,
as we remain with Jane at Thornfield Hall throughout. However, much
of the imaginative force of these chapters is produced by the extreme
contrast in the nature of events in distinct parts or rooms of the Hall,
those already familiar to Jane and those that are not.
2 The extreme contrast noted above means that the ways in which
setting heightens both plot and character change enormously
according to where we are in the Hall and who is present. After the
initial scene of domestic labour in Chapter I, Jane’s loneliness and
sense of threat are heightened by the empty dwelling, and then
replaced by amazement as she is confronted by Grace Poole
(p. 151). Furthermore, the energy of a potential love affair is quickly
dispelled in the dark and quiet of Jane’s room: ‘The door remained

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Chapter 4 Jane Eyre: context, setting and the Gothic

shut: darkness only came in through the window’ (p. 153). Perhaps
there is an echo here of her early experience in the red-room? Now
she is older but similarly shut away, unable to express her feelings to
an inexplicably absent Mr. Rochester. Only a few pages later,
however, the mood changes again, lightened by a sense of
expectation. The whole Hall is opened up, becoming a hive of
purposeful activity (p. 159), and Jane becomes aware of its grandeur
and plenty (‘the sideboard flashed resplendent with plate’, p. 161).
One of the most striking scenes in this section comes as Jane
watches the female guests assemble on p. 163. Look at how Brontë
compares her position as a watcher in the dark with the contrasting
light and lustre of the women at the other end of the gallery. Can you
see how hard the setting is working for the author to develop our
understanding of plot and character in scenes such as this? Then
lavish descriptions of the food, music and the individual women take
over: all senses are catered for in ways that we might recognise from
the glossy pages of a lifestyle magazine shadowing the rich and
famous.
Jane, it seems, cannot avoid a declaration of love for Mr. Rochester
(to her readers only, at this stage) against this backdrop: she is
carried towards it on a tide of activity and excitement (pp. 169–170).
The ‘Merry days’ (p. 176) are merry for Jane too. But the mood
changes swiftly again, signalled this time by an extravagant game of
charades placed carefully in the library – the seat of knowledge in the
Hall. In contrast to the expectation of a setting that should inspire
quiet pursuit of knowledge and relaxation, instead disguise,
performance and pretence loom large. These playful elements are
enhanced further by the fortune-teller, in Mr. Rochester’s carefully
planned attempt to find out Jane’s thoughts about him.
The final setting in this section of the novel is the third floor of
Thornfield, an area concealed behind a secret door. The moon and
the terrifying cry warn readers that something unpleasant is again
about to happen, and its shocking introduction is equal to the events
that take place (p. 200). Blood and fear of murder dominate the
narrative for the rest of Chapter V, including images of vampires
(‘She sucked the blood: she said she’d drain my heart’, p. 207).
Combined with Jane’s lack of understanding of plot events, which
means that she cannot explain them to her readers, this development
signals a concerted move away from Brontë’s technique of realism in
the novel.

114
 2 Setting

The game of charades in Volume II, Chapter IV is one of the most

effective and unsettling scenes in the novel because Jane is forensically
analysed, and her most private feelings sought, by Mr. Rochester as he
himself maintains a disguise. Distracted by this development, Jane is
unable to prevent the plot from hurtling towards the chaotic violence
that closes this section. Jane recognised that Mr Mason was significant
on his arrival (pp. 185–186), as the others were thinking only of their
entertainment, and he remains ignored for some time. The move away
from realism at this point in the novel (marked by the horror
experienced behind the locked door) means that we can now turn to
explore other novelistic techniques and literary subgenres that Brontë
makes use of in her novel. Realistic attention to food, clothing and
bed-making, for example, does feature prominently in the opening
chapters of Volume II, but as the chapters progress, the novel becomes
less concerned with representing a world that readers may, to some
degree, recognise. Brontë is looking elsewhere to create her desired
effects.

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Chapter 4 Jane Eyre: context, setting and the Gothic

3 The Gothic in Jane Eyre

A particularly powerful element of Jane Eyre’s appeal to the reading
public, both when it was first published and across all the years since,
is the unique way in which it combines subtypes, or subgenres, of
fiction. Think of the realistic representation of Lowood School
(Chapter 3, Figure 4) that you worked on in some detail as you were
learning about this technique, and then compare it with the poster
advertising the 1996 film adaptation of Jane Eyre directed by Franco
Zeffirelli (Figure 1; this poster advertising the film is aimed at the
French market, but a similar UK version was also used for publicity).

Figure 1 French advertising poster for Jane Eyre, dir. Franco Zeffirelli
(Miramax, 1996). Photo: © Bridgeman Images.

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 3 The Gothic in Jane Eyre

In this image of Jane and Mr. Rochester (Figure 1), emphasis is given
to the novel’s status as a love story, or romance. Far from the
depiction of the lonely child we recall from Volume I, this is an aspect
of the text that has become more evident in recent chapters, during
which Jane has privately expressed her feelings for Mr. Rochester.
Coupled with the ‘love angle’ dominating this image is the
representation of a remote and grand location, almost a fantasy castle.
Combined, they remind us of Mr. Rochester’s wealth and connections
to high society, and that, as well as appealing to readers through
realism, Brontë’s plot and effects are also escapist and thrilling.
In writing about Mr Mason’s gruesome injuries, Brontë also explores
fictional territory that is further still removed from realism. In so
doing, she is employing elements of a highly influential subgenre
known as Gothic fiction, which you will learn more about in
Activity 2. The related use of horror, fear and fright, to which you
were introduced by the red-room early on in the text (p. 11), has
grown alongside Jane’s passion for Mr. Rochester – perhaps Brontë is
thereby suggesting a link between strong and ungovernable feelings of
any kind? Exploration of the Gothic subgenre in the following activity
will allow you to develop your understanding of setting in the novel
and return to it in more detail.

Activity 2
(Allow around 45 minutes to complete this activity.)
Turn to Reading 4.1, which is an extract describing and defining Gothic
fiction.
After you have read this extract, answer the following question:
Which Gothic characteristics do Volume II, Chapters I to V of Jane
Eyre exhibit?
To structure your response, write three paragraphs of around 50 to 100
words each, using these three headings:
1 The emotion of the characters
2 The events that take place
3 The setting for those events.

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Chapter 4 Jane Eyre: context, setting and the Gothic

Study note
If the Gothic is a subgenre that appeals to you, Reading 4.1 may
help you decide on other novels you’d like to read, but for now
your focus should be on gaining some ideas for thinking again
about the chapters of Jane Eyre that you have recently read,
especially Volume II, Chapter V.

Discussion
1 The emotion of the characters
At the opening of Chapter V, in great contrast to the ease with which
Jane has gone to her bed and slept at the close of the previous
chapter, the night’s silence is dramatically disturbed by what could be
described (using the terms of Reading 4.1) as ‘horrifying events’. A
‘fearful shriek’ erupts (p. 200), and Jane is gripped by a sense that
her heart has stopped and that her outstretched arm is paralysed as
a result. A few pages later, despite Mr. Rochester’s comparative calm
in the circumstances, Jane expresses the view that they are trapped
in a ‘web of horror’ (p. 205) and has detailed her fear at the thought
of ‘Grace Poole bursting out’ at her (p. 204).
2 The events that take place
Again, using the terms employed by the extract, Jane is very clearly
an ‘apprehensive heroine’ faced with horrifying events that seem, at
first at least, to be caused by ‘supernatural’ (or other-worldly) agents.
Did you perhaps also note a relationship between Mr. Rochester and
the Gothic type of ‘aristocratic villain’ of the extract? In the discussion
section to the previous activity (Activity 1), I mentioned the plot
imagery that brought vampires to mind, and Reading 4.1 also makes
note of this element of Gothic fiction. Blood is mentioned repeatedly
in Chapter V, as the impact of the violence is presented.
3 The setting for those events
Your attention to setting might well have focused on the
claustrophobia and sense of imprisonment that Jane experiences.
Keys are turned on small spaces, which are full of threat. Jane fears
‘the cell’ that she is locked in, and is repeatedly plagued by her
enclosed and haunted setting (p. 204).

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These ‘enclosed and haunted’ settings, often dark and miserable places
inside big old houses or castles, are a staple of Gothic fiction, as you
now know. They can also be broadly defined as interior settings, as
opposed to exterior settings. (You will think more about exterior
settings later in this chapter.)
As mentioned previously, what takes place in the attic of Thornfield
Hall runs strongly counter to the realism that Brontë has employed in
earlier stages of the narrative. The realism may become dominant
again, of course, and you should be watchful for realistic treatment of
plot or character as you continue to read, but in this section of the
novel the darkness and violence are used to highlight Jane’s
vulnerability, even as her strength of character is also demonstrated as
she waits for the doctor. Jane’s vulnerability is made prominent not just
in the obvious ways suggested by threat and bloodshed but in the
contextual terms related to her employment. Some elements of realism
are maintained here due to the simple fact that Jane is working as a
governess and needs her job.
I suggested in the previous activity that the romance aspects of the
novel might also be a way of introducing the Gothic excesses of
Chapter V. Passion can be an ungovernable feeling in its own right.
And at this moment in the plot, as Jane falls in love, she is shown to
be gradually losing her way of understanding and responding to the
world at the same time. Her relationship to reality (her belief in
‘Reason’, for example – see p. 195) is changing, as she becomes more
strongly attracted to an employer with horrifying secrets. These secrets
extend to his heart. Even as her love grows, a feeling that she
describes as a sickness or ‘fever’ (p. 181), she believes that Mr.
Rochester will marry the socialite Blanche Ingram, and this gives an
unsettled, disturbing tone to the love story that was one of Jane Eyre’s
most popular elements.
The Gothic turn of events has been introduced in Volume II,
Chapters I to V not just by Brontë’s twist on romance but by a strong
and growing thread of mystery. The theme of secrets and of disguise
introduced by the game of charades was initially of great interest to
Jane. She cannot help but be fascinated by the spectacle of the rich at
play. Later, though, that mystery becomes much more dangerous –
related as it is to the attack on Mr Mason and the threat posed,

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apparently, by Grace Poole. The fact that Jane suspects there is far
more to this murderous attack than she so far understands is shown by
her questions on pp. 204–205.
Before you move on in the novel, you are going to practise your skills
in close reading of the text and develop what you have learned about
setting and the Gothic. Your reading in this section so far has focused
on interior setting. The interior of Thornfield Hall – the parts of it we
have seen before and parts that have until now been kept secret and
housed secret events – has provided all the examples that you have
needed to answer the previous activities. Gothic techniques tend to be
used to demonstrate aspects of real or imagined life that are, because
of society’s strictures or codes of conduct, usually hidden from plain
view in claustrophobic and unfamiliar places. The violent captive in the
attic is one good example of this. You’ll explore interior settings
further in the next activity.

Activity 3
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)

Compare and contrast the representation of two interior settings from

pp. 70 and 203 of your set text.

. Read from ‘And a tray was soon brought’ to ‘not enough for three’
(p. 70).
. Read from ‘I saw a room I remembered’ to ‘door behind him’ (p. 203).
Then write a paragraph in which you consider in detail the language and
descriptions that are used in these two passages and the different
effects that are created. Identify where you see realist techniques and
where you see Gothic techniques displayed.

Discussion
Jane’s delight at her surroundings is clear in the language of the first
passage. All is neat, ordered and colourful. The rhythmic pattern of the
‘steam of the beverage, and the scent of the toast’ is childish in its
excitement, leading to that final exclamation mark of eager anticipation.
This punctuation had been used in the previous sentence also,
emphasising the positive and excited tone. Jane’s senses are employed
in recording what she is seeing and smelling, a realistic technique
underlined by her honest dismay at what seems like too little bread for
the three of them. But all is in plain sight and being enjoyed by each of
the characters at the table. There are no secrets here. In comparison, in

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the second passage, Jane’s senses are employed in nervously

responding to mainly what has been, or remains, hidden. The first lines
serve to express how things are not as they seemed: there is a door that
was ‘concealed’ before. Jane can hear, but she cannot see and therefore
identify what is making the noise in the ‘room within’, and the repeated
exclamation marks this time are not joyful but punctuate wild and
aggressive sound before the door is closed, preventing her from
understanding any more.

Throughout Jane Eyre, Brontë uses homes and possessions to develop

her readers’ understanding of her characters, their behaviour and their
outlook on life. In the opening of the novel, the formal, sparse chill of
the red-room, with its bed supported on ‘massive pillars of mahogany’
(p. 13) (a dark and imposing wood), was compared with the sofa and
the one fire-warmed spot in Gateshead Hall. This cosy territory was
exclusively occupied by Mrs Reed and her children. But during the tea
that Jane later shares with Helen Burns and Miss Temple (note the
religious name) at Lowood School, Jane’s intellectual and emotional
enjoyment is heralded by the feast before her eyes: ‘the ‘pretty’ china
cups and ‘bright teapot’ on the tray, where colour and possessions
demonstrate a heartening and inclusive social and intellectual ritual
(p. 70).
Exterior settings are also important in this novel, which is illustrated
through Brontë’s use of pathetic fallacy (the attribution of human
feelings and responses to inanimate things) when, for example, Jane
arrives at Lowood school. This importance is not only because of the
way in which the landscape and weather can be used effectively to
heighten aspects of character and plot, but because of the significance
of the movement between locations in Jane Eyre. This novel of growth
and development is signified, in part, by what are real as well as
symbolic journeys between various locations. In your reading so far,
this has included physical journeys from Gateshead Hall, Lowood
School and Thornfield Hall.
Before we turn to explore Jane Eyre’s journeys in more detail (in
Section 5), we are now going to focus on a shorter section of the
novel that explains the terrible events that occurred in Thornfield’s
attic in Volume II, Chapter V. These few chapters have generated as

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much, if not more, critical response to the novel as its representation

of childhood. As you will see, this next section highlights the novel’s
attitudes to gender, ethnicity and psychological distress, all of which
have to be read with a keen eye on context. It inspired two twentieth-
century critics to use the title The Madwoman in the Attic for their
investigation of nineteenth-century literature from the perspective of
feminist criticism (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979).

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4 Jane Eyre and the critics

Jane Eyre’s reputation as a classic novel is matched by its reputation as
a key source for critics who are interested in feminist interpretations of
texts, and for critics who are interested in tracing the lasting impact of
colonial structures and practices on former colonies in texts (generally
called post-colonial criticism). The section of the novel that you are
about to read in the following activity is one that critics with these
interests most often focus on.

Figure 2 Bela Lugosi in the title role of Dracula, dir. Tod Browning,
(Universal, 1931). Photo: Kobal/Shutterstock.

Your set text provides some useful explanatory notes (pp. 492–493) on
this part of the novel, so make sure that you turn to them once you
have worked your way through it – and before completing Activity 4.
(Referring to the notes after you have finished reading avoids the need
for spoiler alerts.) These notes offer a brief and contextual account of

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the striking terminology that Brontë employs in this part of the book,
or is known to have been aware of. For example, her ‘Vampyre’
description on p. 276 is related to its use in English literature from the
1740s – culminating, many believe (p. 492), in the publication of Bram
Stoker’s Dracula in 1897, which, like Jane Eyre, has been adapted into
film many times (see Figure 2).

Activity 4
(Allow around 2 hours to complete this activity.)
Read from Chapter VI to the end of Volume II (pp. 214–288), then read
the relevant Explanatory Notes at the back of the book (pp. 485–494).
Focusing on Chapters IX, X and XI, address the following:
1 Summarise the plot events and the explanations given for them in
these three chapters.
2 What is your view of these explanations, and which characters gain
your sympathy during this section of the novel and why?

Discussion
1 These chapters cover major events. Jane returns to Gateshead as
Mrs Reed is dying and meets again with her Reed relatives. Marriage
and various plot complications related to marriage take up much of
the following chapters. Mr. Rochester, having told Jane that he is not
engaged to Blanche Ingram, proposes instead to her. But the
marriage is prevented in the most dramatic fashion imaginable when
a solicitor enters the church to declare that the marriage between
Jane and Mr. Rochester cannot take place. (You may have thought
that Jane’s dreams in the previous chapter, pp. 273–275, were a
strong indication that all would not go well at the altar.) The party is
removed to Thornfield Hall following Richard Mason’s testimony, and
for the first time Jane comes face to face with Mr. Rochester’s legal
wife, Bertha Mason, a Caribbean heiress whom Mr. Rochester
married, sought to escape, and then imprisoned in Thornfield Hall.
She was treated in this way, readers are told, because she is a
‘mysterious lunatic’ – daughter of ‘idiots and maniacs through three
generations!’ (p. 283).
2 Your answers to this second question will vary. There is no single
correct response to the serious moral and ethical questions that
Brontë poses in this section of her plot. Perhaps you feel most
sympathy for the son who found himself unwittingly married to a
woman who was not well? Perhaps Jane receives most of your
sympathy, as her hopes of marriage to a man she loves are dashed?

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Or perhaps Brontë’s representation of the degraded and abandoned

Bertha Mason was most sympathy-inducing? However you answered,
you should think closely about your reasoning and be prepared to
listen to others who disagree.

Just as Brontë’s novel needs to be read with a critical eye on contextual

factors (which include the treatment of insanity and ideas about
ethnicity in her place and time), your responses to the second question
in this activity need to be understood with regard to your own
contextual factors, both general and more personal. All such
combinations of contextual factors and responses might be described
as contributions to a cultural conversation, which for Brontë took the
form of a novel, and in your case have helped to build a critical
position in relation to that novel. The large and serious subjects that
Brontë handles in Jane Eyre have provoked numerous responses, or
further additions to the conversation, across the period between first
publication and your engagement with the text, as those contextual
factors have changed along with developments in science, for example,
and the law. When Brontë was writing her novel, scientific
understanding of insanity and many related psychological conditions
was very limited. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1988) notes
an 1897 definition of ‘insanity’ as simply ‘a disease of the brain
affecting the mind’. Under nineteenth-century English law, insanity did
not provide grounds for divorce. This law changed in 1937, and the
years since Jane Eyre’s publication have seen explosive growth in the
scientific disciplines of Psychology and Psychiatry, in terms of both
understanding and treatment.
One of the most noteworthy responses to Brontë’s novel – a response
that has been said to have ‘permanently altered reception’ of Jane Eyre
– took the form of a novel itself (Alexander and Smith, 2018 [2003],
p. 451). The Dominica-born British writer Jean Rhys published Wide
Sargasso Sea in 1966. In doing so, she continued that cultural
conversation by telling a new version of the story of Mr. Rochester’s
marriage (Figure 3). Her fictional reaction brought attention to Jane
Eyre’s treatment of ethnicity and gender, as well as the relation of both
of these issues to the experience and representation of madness in
Brontë’s novel.

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Figure 3 Eric Thomas designed the cover of the first edition of Jean Rhys’s
Wide Sargasso Sea (London, Andre Deutsch, 1966).

Rhys explored these issues in far more detail than they receive in Jane
Eyre, partly because of her own individual contexts and interests, and
partly because of the way in which the understanding of mental illness
had developed in the time since Jane Eyre was published. For example,
Rhys gives ‘Bertha Mason’ her own voice in the novel, using the first-
person point of view to represent her experience of being locked away
in an attic upon coming to England. Rhys’s novel, itself well known
and frequently studied now, in turn inspired many later responses.
Before you complete your reading of Jane Eyre in Activity 5, let’s pause
on one other key example of criticism: Elaine Showalter’s The Female
Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (1987
[1985]). Showalter’s text (a development of Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic) offers a feminist critique of what
she calls ‘the female malady’, and how it was manifested and
represented in English culture across 150 years, including in Brontë’s

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novel. Showalter describes Jane Eyre as an ‘important analysis of female

mental disorder’ (1987 [1985], p. 66). She goes on to suggest that:

the portrait of Bertha Mason depicts a time before moral

management, when it was common for crazy women to be kept
hidden in homes … or to behave and be treated like wild beasts
in cruel asylums. […] Bertha’s violence, dangerousness, and rage,
her regression to an inhuman condition and her sequestration [a
strong word meaning her imprisonment] became such a powerful
model for Victorian readers, including psychiatrists, that it
influenced even medical accounts of female insanity.
(1987 [1985], pp. 67–68).

Both Rhys and Showalter demonstrate that Bertha Mason is one of the
most powerful and influential legacies of Brontë’s novel, by
encouraging us to consider the gender and racial politics that
contributed to her creation. (The word ‘Creole’ is defined on pp. 492–
493 of your set text.) Is the idea of madness ‘through three
generations!’ (p. 283) credible, and what social, political and economic
contexts might have combined to make it so? These and similar
questions have been picked up and explored by many later critics,
evidence of the ways in which literature both represents the
development of such issues through time and stimulates discussion.
We turn now to the final section of this chapter on Jane Eyre. Here
you will finish reading the novel and equip yourselves with the
information you need to complete your studies of Brontë’s text.

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5 Journeys in Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre opened at Gateshead Hall, with a young protagonist reaching
the limit of her submission to suffering. Since that point, the plot has
taken us a long way, both in time (Jane has grown up) and space (Jane
has travelled and changed location), but perhaps more particularly we
have also travelled in psychological and emotional terms. As the
nineteenth-century journal Fraser’s Magazine put it in regards to the
novel’s charm: ‘it is soul speaking to soul: it is an utterance from the
depths of a struggling, suffering, much enduring spirit’ (quoted in
Brontë, 2019 [1847], pp. 442–443).
Volume II closed with Jane in despair. Biblical allusion and quotations
have been frequent in the novel up to this point, as you will have
discovered through the Explanatory Notes. However, these allusions
increase sharply in the closing pages of Volume II, and biblical
metaphors are employed to show the extent of Jane’s misery as well as
its cause (see the descriptions of death and destruction on p. 287, and
the ‘torrent’ on p. 288). Jane was, after all, on the verge of marrying a
bigamist, and you would not have needed to be particularly religious or
conventional to be profoundly shocked by this possibility in
nineteenth-century Britain. Many contemporary writers made regular
reference to the Bible in their work – it was one of the few books that
most people were guaranteed to have read or have heard read at some
stage in their lives – but Brontë’s religious upbringing meant that she
relied on this text more than most to help her to express her novelistic
aims.
Although a long section of dramatic and emotionally powerful dialogue
(or speech) between Jane and Mr. Rochester features prominently in
the opening chapter of Volume III (as you will see in Activity 5), Jane
nevertheless decides to leave Thornfield that same day, and her belief
in God is shown to be a major reason for her decision. Before Jane
goes, in keeping with the kind of faith she professes, which is very
different from that of, for example, Mr Brocklehurst, she forgives Mr.
Rochester (p. 290). She forgave Mrs Reed too in Volume II,
Chapter VI, as you will recall. In leaving Thornfield, the location in
which she has come closest to happiness in her life, the orphan within
Jane comes once more to the fore. This is a vital part of her character,
as she is repeatedly shown to have no family bonds (‘Not a tie holds

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me to human society at this moment […] I have no relative but the

universal mother, Nature’; p. 314).
As you read the final volume of Jane Eyre in the following activity, you
will be asked to consider the theme of journeys, actual and symbolic,
to help you to come to a final understanding of Brontë’s plot design
and the structure of her Bildungsroman. Does the book have a happy
ending? Is there further growth to be undertaken, by Jane or any of
the other characters, and does the story feel unfinished in any way?
How does completion of the novel affect your understanding of its
classic status? These are additional questions that might help you to
frame your thoughts on plot as you complete the novel.

Activity 5
(Allow around 3 hours to complete this activity.)

Now read Volume III of Jane Eyre, pp. 289–440 in your set text.
In addition to making notes on the ways in which your understanding of
plot and character are developed in this final volume, think about the
following question as you read:
What further settings (both exterior and interior) do you encounter,
and how does the plot develop in each one?

Discussion
This last volume closely details Jane’s time on the moor through the use
of pathetic fallacy and her experience of being geographically lost in
ways that underline her similar emotional state. Having left Thornfield,
Jane does not know where to go or what to do. The exterior setting of
the real and lonely moor is therefore mirrored by and also helps to
illustrate her internal landscape. But there is a change coming as a
result of Jane’s own ‘light’ (p. 322), which could be compared with Helen
Burns’s different light earlier in the novel (p. 55).
Your notes on Marsh End probably focused on the way in which Jane,
for the first time, finds a place with a sympathetic family, who are, as we
find out before she does, related to her. Did Jane’s conversations about
books with the sisters (p. 341) also remind you of her happiness with
Helen Burns? The contrast in terms of grandeur between this location (‘a
grey, small, antique structure’, with its hardy ‘potent’ plants, p. 341) and
Thornfield is carefully chosen to highlight Jane’s strength of character:
she would rather experience less comfort and wealth, away from the
man she loves, in order to live out her morality and faith.

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Jane is then rewarded with a pause in the plot, in the school at Morton –
time to reflect and acclimatise to her new life and potential. But Jane
continues to look back, and to test, mentally, her own character and the
differences between her form of religious faith, which can include
personal happiness, and St. John’s, which is more exacting.
Brontë chooses to set the amazing news of Jane’s inheritance in a
further interior setting, a cottage that is even smaller and more basic
than Marsh End (p. 349). Does it strike you how, as the locations shrink,
her character first contracts into dismayed acceptance (p. 350), though
she both knew she was doing the right thing and would take some
pleasure from teaching these children, and then expands suddenly into
the potential offered by unimagined wealth (p. 375)? At exactly the same
time – one plot event would not mean half so much without the other –
Jane also learns that she is part of a family. Blood relationships and
financial security come to her simultaneously, in the same materially
impoverished setting. Demonstrating her humility and lack of self-interest
at this stage of her life, she feels most keenly aware of her power to
change the lives of her relatives, enabling them all to move more
securely into their future.
When discussion of a new marriage rears its head in the plot, it is linked
to the thought of missionary work abroad. Jane can anticipate such a
journey while unmarried, but not otherwise. Did you ever think that this
would be the resolution? It is not the one Brontë chooses, and, instead,
Jane refinds Mr. Rochester, a Mr. Rochester who has also left Thornfield
and is, moreover, much physically reduced due to his injuries. The plot
event that causes this final reunion returns us to its Gothic aspects –
voices on the wind and what Jane calls ‘superstition’ (p. 408). Jane and
St. John therefore separate: him for India, her to find Mr. Rochester, as
clear an indication of their different characters, beliefs and potential for
development as Brontë can find. In this way, Jane is freed to undertake
her ultimate journey to Ferndean Manor, the final setting of the novel,
and the scene of her reunion with Mr. Rochester.

In Jane Eyre, our protagonist has undertaken eight major journeys to

new locations:
1 Gateshead Hall to Lowood School
2 Lowood School to Thornfield Hall
3 Thornfield back to Gateshead
4 Gateshead back to Thornfield

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5 Thornfield to Marsh End

6 Marsh End to Morton
7 Morton to Thornfield
8 Thornfield to Ferndean.
Jane’s final destination is indicated partly by the fact that, being new, it
breaks the somewhat cyclical nature of the plot. A culmination is
signified. Smaller versions of this climax have occurred before but have
taken place in one of the other familiar settings, ahead of a return to
somewhere else Jane already knows: Jane’s forgiveness of Mrs Reed;
her coming into wealth, for example. The shadow side of these happy
events can also often be seen, as in Helen’s death and Bertha’s
discovery, which then prefigure a restless and unhappy departure. At
Ferndean, readers are freed from the cycle, and Jane, we imagine, has
‘arrived’ in all the senses her creator has imagined for her.
The buildings featured in the novel, grand or small, with their
significations of wealth or of poverty, and the other ways in which they
highlight elements of particular characters, have been a crucial part of
Brontë’s technique. But the spaces between them have in some ways
been just as significant: the long coach rides in which Jane explores her
internal world, or the pitiful scene on the moor when she nearly
starves due to her total lack of comprehension as to how to move
forward after losing Mr. Rochester.

Study note
You will look at how to write creatively about journeys, both real
and imagined, in more detail in the next three chapters of this
book.

How does this discussion of setting, journeys and the novel’s

conclusion help to develop what you already know about the Gothic
subgenre of this text, or about its reputation as a classic? The romance
elements of the novel are certainly given a (modified?) happy ending.
The realism in the couple’s reduced circumstances and Mr. Rochester’s
physical decline undercuts the idea of a fantasy wedding in the castle
from the film poster (Figure 1). But then Jane bears a son and Mr.
Rochester is shown to be recovering, providing what could certainly be
described as a conventional ending for a Bildungsroman. ‘Reader, I

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married him’ (p. 436) is one of the most famous and frequently quoted
lines in the whole novel and has evidently offered great satisfaction to
many of its readers. But St. John’s dangerous missionary work and
Bertha’s suicide may leave you with active questions as to some of the
plot’s other elements. These elements, along with the plight of women
who worked as governesses, are among those that the author Lucasta
Miller argues we should not lose sight of as readers of the novel. If we
focus on the marriage, and on this climax to the ‘fairytale’ of the ‘poor
plain governess’ who nonetheless ‘snares’ the hero, we may be at risk
of eradicating the full and contradictory richness of the story and
‘blandly categorising it as a classic’ (Miller, 2016). Miller believes that
Jane Eyre’s classic status is necessarily reductive, simplifying a complex
novel and rendering it less powerful. I’m not sure I agree. But I do
suggest that close, contextual study of Jane Eyre is the only way to
appreciate the range of its techniques and the variety of its appeal.

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 6 Summary

6 Summary
By working through this second chapter on Jane Eyre, you have
completed your close reading of the novel and studied Volumes II and
III in detail. Congratulations on this achievement! I hope you have
enjoyed your guided encounter with this classic example of nineteenth-
century fiction, and that your confidence in studying literary texts has
increased along with your knowledge of Brontë’s most famous work.
Your first reading activity focused on the ways in which Brontë uses
setting to develop and heighten plot and character in Jane Eyre. You
then explored the ways in which setting also allowed Brontë to add to
her realistic technique. Romance and fantasy come further to the fore
once Jane has reached Thornfield Hall, and the Hall’s attic is the
location for some of the most Gothic sections of the text. As well as
improving your knowledge of related terminology, these sections gave
you the opportunity to think more about the popularity of this novel.
Brontë found a range of ways to hook her readers’ interest, adding, as
she does, a love story and thrills and frights to the realism of her story
of an unhappy orphan Jane.
During your study of this chapter, you have also developed your
understanding of the novel as a source of critical attention by feminist
and post-colonial critics. You spent time considering the representation
of Bertha Mason and the issues of gender and ethnicity that this
character provokes. What happens to readers’ engagement with a text
when contexts change, in ways related to, for example, the
understanding of race and ethnicity or of mental illness? The critics
you studied here helped you to answer that question in ways that you
can build on as you examine other cultural artefacts in and across time
and space.
Although the red-room is one of the most well-known locations in this
novel, not all the memorable locations created by Brontë are interior
ones. In your focus on Jane’s journeys throughout the novel, you
learned about the exterior settings and their symbolic functions in the
story of Jane’s growth and development. Culminating, as this story
does, in her blissful (p. 438) marriage with Mr. Rochester and in her
new-found religious certainty (p. 440), you were encouraged in the final
section of the chapter to consider the extent to which this novel offers

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the simple satisfactions of a ‘happy ending’ to readers. Jane’s happiness

after all her suffering might well feel like a proper conclusion to her
story, but perhaps the novel leaves us with things to think about after
we’ve closed it and moved on.

You should now return to the module website to continue your

study of this unit.

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 References

References
Alexander, C. and Smith, M. (eds) (2018 [2003]) The Oxford Companion to the
Brontës. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Birch, D. (ed.) (2009) ‘Gothic fiction’, in The Oxford Companion to English
Literature, 7th edn. Available at: https://www-oxfordreference-com.
libezproxy.open.ac.uk/view/10.1093/acref/9780192806871.001.0001/acref-
9780192806871-e-3192?rskey=gkpl9B&result=2 (Accessed: 2 July 2020).
Brontë, C. (2019 [1847]) Jane Eyre. Edited by M. Smith, with an introduction
and notes by J. Atkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gilbert, S. and Gubar, S. (1979) The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Miller, L. (2016) ‘The Victorians regarded Charlotte Brontë as coarse and
immoral – and deplored Jane Eyre’, The Independent, 10 March. Available at:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/the-
victorians-regarded-charlotte-bront-as-coarse-and-immoral-and-deplored-jane-
eyre-a6923616.html (Accessed: 2 July 2020).
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1988) 3rd edn. London: Guild Publishing.
Showalter, E. (1987 [1985]) The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English
Culture, 1830–1980. London: Virago.

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Readings
Reading 4.1 Gothic fiction

Source: Birch, D. (ed.) (2009) ‘Gothic fiction’, in The Oxford

Companion to English Literature, 7th edn. Available at: https://
www-oxfordreference-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/view/10.1093/
acref/9780192806871.001.0001/acref-9780192806871-e-3192?
rskey=gkpl9B&result=2 (Accessed: 2 July 2020).

A mode of narrative fiction dealing with supernatural or horrifying

events and generally possessed of a claustrophobic air of oppression or
evil. Frightening or horrifying stories of various kinds have been told
in all ages, but the literary tradition confusingly designated as ‘Gothic’
is a distinct modern development in which the characteristic theme is
the stranglehold of the past upon the present, or the encroachment of
the ‘dark’ ages of oppression upon the ‘enlightened’ modern era. In
Gothic romances and tales this theme is embodied typically in enclosed
and haunted settings such as castles, crypts, convents, or gloomy
mansions, […].
The great vogue for Gothic novels occurred in Britain and Ireland in
the three decades after 1790, culminating in the appearance of Charles
Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). During this period, the leading
practitioner of the new genre was Ann Radcliffe, whose major works
The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and
The Italian (1797) were decorous in their exhibitions of refined
sensibility and of virtue in distress. Udolpho in particular established
the genre’s central figure: that of the apprehensive heroine exploring a
sinister building in which she is trapped by the aristocratic villain. […]
[…] Radcliffe […] was careful to distance herself from vulgar belief in
ghosts or supernatural marvels, by providing rational explanations for
the apparitions and nocturnal groans that frighten her heroines.
Some of Radcliffe’s contemporaries and immediate successors managed
to achieve comparable effects of apprehension and claustrophobia in
novels with more modern settings: William Godwin in Caleb Williams
(1794), his daughter Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, or The Modern

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 Readings

Prometheus (1818), and the Scottish writer James Hogg in The Private
Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) all evoked powerful
unease without employing medieval trappings. Although each of these
three novels includes prominent prison scenes, the principal strength is
the evocation of psychological torment, guilt, self-division, and
paranoid delusion. […]
By the 1820s, the Gothic novel had given way to the more credible
historical novels of Walter Scott, its clichés by now provoking less
terror than affectionate amusement […]. Some of the tales of terror
published by Blackwood’s Magazine and its London rival the New
Monthly Magazine, however, retained the Gothic flavour in more
concentrated forms, and John Polidori’s story ‘The Vampyre’ (1819)
launched the powerful new Gothic sub-genre of vampiric fiction,
which commonly expresses middle-class suspicion of the decadent
aristocracy. From these sources the first master of American Gothic
writing, Edgar Allan Poe, developed a more intensely hysterical style of
short Gothic narrative, of which his story ‘The Fall of the House of
Usher’ (1839) is the classic model. Since Poe’s time, the strong
tradition of American short story writing, from Nathaniel Hawthorne
to Joyce Carol Oates, has frequently resorted to Gothic themes and
conventions.
In English and Anglo-Irish fiction of the Victorian period, the Gothic
influence is pervasive, not just among minor authors such as Edward
Bulwer-Lytton and Bram Stoker but among some major figures: the
novels of the Brontë sisters are strongly Gothic in flavour […].

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Block 4:
Cultural journeys
Edited by Fiona Doloughan
 Introduction

Introduction
Written by Fiona Doloughan
In comparison with the subject areas you have studied to date –
namely Classical Studies, Art History and English Literature – your
final area of study, Creative Writing, is ‘the new kid on the block’! Of
course, age is a relative concept, and you may be surprised to learn
that even though Creative Writing as a formal subject area (rather than
just something that people did in their own time) is a relatively new
addition to the undergraduate curriculum in the UK, it has actually
been around in some parts of the English-speaking world for about
100 years. In fact, the first usage of the term ‘Creative Writing’ to refer
to a course of study was in 1925 in a book entitled Creative Youth: Or
How a School Environment Set Free the Creative Spirit by an American
schoolteacher and poet, William Hughes Mearns (Dawson, 2004, p. 52).
Understanding something of the origins of Creative Writing as a
discipline will help you see that it has a longer history than you might
think and that its relationship with literary studies has been, at
different times, both complementary and antagonistic.

Figure 1 The joy of Creative Writing, based on an image from

Shevs/Shutterstock.

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Block 4: Cultural journeys

What I hope will become clear in the course of working through these
Creative Writing chapters is that, while there are methods and
questions that are unique to Creative Writing as a discipline, it
nevertheless complements the study of literature and, like other
subjects in the arts and humanities, it is a discipline concerned with
understanding and documenting human experience. Perhaps where it
differs from some subjects is in the emphasis it places on creative self-
expression and in recognising that the practice of writing is a means of
generating valuable insights and forms of knowledge. As we will see,
Creative Writing draws on multiple sources of information and
knowledge; it often requires research in the basic sense of finding out
about things you don’t know, and then transforming that learning into
a variety of textual forms. In some ways, it is learning by doing, and it
rewards persistence and craft as much as insight and innovation.
Creative writers are also the producers and purveyors of contemporary
literary culture. They don’t just write about it, they create it!

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 1 What is Creative Writing?

1 What is Creative Writing?

Creative Writing started life in universities in the United States as a
complement to the study of English and American literature. The idea
was that by engaging in the practice of making or creating text,
students of literature would come to understand from the inside, so to
speak, what it takes to write a convincing and carefully crafted piece of
work that draws readers into an imaginatively constructed world and
makes them want to continue reading. The initial impetus, then, was to
create better critics and analysts of literature by giving them the
opportunity to understand what went into the making of an
imaginative text. As the practice of writing became allied to the
workshop, where apprentice writers learned their craft under the
direction and guidance of professional writers, a separation began to
take place between those responsible for the creation of literature
(facilitated by professional writers) and those tasked with the academic
and critical study of literature (overseen by literary historians, critics
and theorists of literature). In the US, the fact that the Masters in Fine
Arts (MFA) is awarded to postgraduate students of Creative Writing is
indicative of its status as a professional arts qualification.
In the UK, Creative Writing began at the University of East Anglia as
a postgraduate qualification in the 1970s under the direction of
Malcolm Bradbury, a novelist, academic and critic. The subject quickly
gained in popularity and there was an explosion of courses at UK
universities, not just at postgraduate but also at undergraduate level.
Many of these courses were embedded in English Literature
programmes, but some were also allied to subject areas such as Media
and Film, and Art and Design.
Nowadays, Creative Writing is not limited to the production of purely
‘literary’ texts but encompasses lots of different types of writing, in
both fictional (e.g. short story and novel) and non-fictional
(e.g. memoir and autobiography) genres. It is characterised by a focus
on the process of producing a piece of new writing and on consciously
reflecting on that process. Of course, that does not mean that the final
product is unimportant. It simply means that producing a piece of
writing that is apt and successful in a specific context for a particular

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set of readers demands time, energy and engagement in a process of

drafting and reworking a text over time in response to feedback and
critique by both self and peers. As a practice-based discipline, Creative
Writing focuses on the actual practice of writing, as well as on
acquiring techniques and developing strategies designed to aid you in
becoming a better writer.

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 2 What will you study in this block?

2 What will you study in this block?

This block, entitled Cultural journeys, is concerned with helping you to
understand the culture of Creative Writing as an academic discipline
and is designed to take you on a figurative journey as a prospective
creative writer. Creative Writing has, if you will, its own culture or set
of preferred methods and conventions. It recognises the importance of
learning through doing, and thereby acquiring skills and techniques that
can facilitate your production of narrative and other texts. Creative
Writing also involves imaginative responses to the cultural worlds that
we encounter and in which we live and work as writers, as well as
thinking about how to communicate those worlds using language.

Figure 2 Machu Picchu, Peru. Photo: imageBROKER/Shutterstock.

For example, Figure 2 shows an important cultural site in Peru –

Machu Picchu – which has generated work by writers, such as Lost
City of the Incas by the American archaeologist Hiram Bingham
(Figure 3).

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Block 4: Cultural journeys

Figure 3 Cover of Lost City of the Incas by Hiram Bingham, Orion, 2003
edition.

Machu Picchu is also a site that tourists, travel writers and others
respond to in all sorts of ways in their diaries, notebooks, travel
accounts, postcards and letters home. One such response can be found
among the winning entries to a travel writing competition sponsored
by The Guardian newspaper in 2013. The winner of the history
category, Edward Tew, includes the following rather original
description in his published piece:

White waves of a cloudy swell crept round the rocky Andean

spires that encircle the ancient site. The mountains of Peru were

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 2 What will you study in this block?

sculpted by glaciers that moulded landscapes like overzealous old

masters.
(Tew, 2014)

In my view, what makes this description interesting and original is the

way in which Tew uses language to evoke the scene such that the
reader can visualise it and its movements (e.g. ‘waves of a cloudy
swell’). His use of simile is also arresting – the glaciers are compared
to ‘overzealous old masters’ in the way in which they ‘sculpt’ the
mountains. This associative use of language is very powerful. Nature is
presented as an active agent in the design and shaping of a changing
environment.
Taken together, the chapters in this block will introduce you to what is
involved in the practice of Creative Writing. You will hone your own
writing skills through practice as well as through feedback from peers
and tutors; by carefully reading the published texts of experienced
writers, you will also learn what works and what is less successful in
particular contexts, and you will be able to apply this knowledge to
your own writing practice. The writing activities in this block will offer
opportunities to experiment in your writing, such as drawing on your
own observations and experience; you may also draw on your
memories, your prior reading and your imagination, as you create short
texts in response to triggers or prompts. For those of you who are
new to Creative Writing and who may have some anxieties about
writing creatively, fear not: you will be taken slowly and by the hand in
all that you do. Each chapter is designed to guide you on your Creative
Writing journey and to ensure that the route is signposted clearly as
you proceed.
The first chapter you encounter is entitled ‘The writer’s journey’. As
you will learn, this metaphorical journey is not always a linear one,
taking you directly from A to B and then on to C. Sometimes it will
involve taking a step sideways in order to see things from a different
perspective, or even returning with new knowledge to a previous stage
of the writing process. Essentially, this chapter will introduce you to
the culture of Creative Writing and will equip you with the tools and
know-how to start writing your own creative pieces. You will learn
how to unleash your creativity through freewriting, then how to
harness it in a more consciously disciplined way to create particular

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stylistic effects in your writing. You will also learn how to read as a
writer, and to apply your insights and newly acquired skills and
techniques to your own writing. There will also be the chance to hear
from other writers about their motivation for writing, and about their
routines as writers, including their drafting, revision and editing
processes. This first chapter, then, is a staged and gentle introduction
to the craft of creative writing.
Chapter 2, entitled ‘Narrative journeys’, continues the metaphorical
play on the journey theme, this time in relation to the creation of
narratives or texts designed to tell stories. In this chapter, you learn
about the importance of structure in helping to scaffold the stories
that you read and the stories that you tell. You are given opportunities
to do a structural analysis of a variety of short texts as well as to use
some of the structures discussed (e.g. the five-act structure and the
stages of the Heroic Journey) to create structural outlines of story
ideas of your own. Just as reading as a writer is an important
underpinning concept in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 focuses on the
importance of wide reading for any would-be writer, regardless of what
kind of text they wish to write. In effect, it is through reading that
writers can find solutions to technical problems they may be having in
their own writing, and can draw inspiration from the vast repertoire of
published works.
Chapter 3, ‘On the road’, focuses on writing about journeys and about
place. The connecting thread here is the fact that journeys, whether
real or imagined, involve movement and leaving one place for another.
Sometimes this involves encounters with different cultures or brings
into new focus what we consider to be distinctive or important about
our own. Writing can relate to actual journeys (e.g. travel literature),
but journeys can also be imagined – in my mind I’m travelling
overseas, though in reality I’m sitting at my laptop writing this
introduction – or metaphorical, meaning that they represent or stand
in for something else. My imagined journey might be an antidote to
being in one place for too long or might simply point to an inability to
focus on the task in hand! As we have already seen in Block 3,
literature can also stage a protagonist’s journey in the sense of their
development over time, as they mature and come to better understand
the world around them. Sometimes these protagonists are real
individuals writing their life stories in memoirs and autobiographies,
and sometimes they are fictional characters (e.g. Jane Eyre) whose first-

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 2 What will you study in this block?

person narration gives us access to their behaviour and thoughts such

that we may find them as interesting and as credible as real-life people.
As we will see, knowing how to create a sense of place through the
effective use of language and pertinent imagery in order to create
conflict and dramatic tension is as important as being able to depict
characters and structure events. And, of course, characters are in many
instances products of their environments and/or reflectors of the
cultural and linguistic locations that they occupy. So, by the end of this
block, you should have a better understanding of how to construct
‘place’ in a text, and an enhanced sense that it is more than just a
backdrop or the equivalent of wallpaper on a computer screen; rather,
it can be a vital actor in a story.
In summary, over the course of this block, you will learn how to move
from early ideas and jottings to the construction, over time, of longer,
more complete pieces of writing that more closely reflect your aims.
You will learn how to improve your writing through reading, research
and practice. You will also learn about the culture of Creative Writing
and will begin to adopt its working methods and practices. Having
gone on your own writing journey, you will also, hopefully, have
enhanced your control of language and your capacity to use effectively
the narrative tools and techniques that you have been introduced to for
your own purposes. Understanding better how to control your
language, structure your thoughts and create stylistic and rhetorical
effects in a piece of writing should benefit your academic writing tasks
as well.

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References
Dawson, P. (2004) Creative Writing and the New Humanities. Abingdon, Oxon:
Taylor & Francis Group.
Tew, E. (2014) ‘The magic of Machu Picchu: readers’ travel writing
competition’, The Guardian, 6 September. Available at: https://www.
theguardian.com/travel/2014/sep/06/machu-picchu-inca-trail-peru (Accessed:
8 September 2020).

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Chapter 1
The writer’s journey
Written by Jane Yeh
Contents
1 Introduction 155
2 Generating material: freewriting 157
3 Keeping a writer’s notebook 162
4 Incorporating details: show, don’t tell 166
4.1 Depicting places 170
5 Being specific: significant details 173
5.1 Drawing on memories 176
6 Storytelling through place 181
6.1 Just visiting 183
7 Revising: tips and techniques 186
8 Summary 190
References 192
Readings 193
Reading 1.1 The Crow Road 193
Reading 1.2 ‘The American Embassy’ 196
Reading 1.3 The Stolen Child 199
Reading 1.4 ‘Eddie Priest’s Barbershop & Notary’ 203
 1 Introduction

1 Introduction
Creative writing draws on many of the skills that you’ve already
acquired on this module, such as: how to study the meaning and
cultural context of a variety of artistic works, the ability to read and
analyse literary and scholarly texts, and the capacity to express your
thoughts coherently in writing. In this chapter, you’ll have the chance
to learn about and practise a different kind of writing, one that is
perhaps more personal and engages with your own experiences and
imaginative senses.

Figure 1 There are many routes that a writer can take when they begin their journey. Moll's Gap
in the Ring of Kerry, Ireland. Photo: © Chris Hill/National Geographic Image Collection/
Bridgeman Images.

Let’s start by examining the process of writing. As you know from

your studies so far, a piece of writing (i.e. a text) doesn’t simply appear
fully formed out of the blue. The writer often begins by thinking about
their subject, jotting down some notes or a rough outline before
writing a first draft. They revise and develop this draft, rewriting and
editing, until a more or less final version of the piece is reached. This
is what’s called the creative process, and it’s how you’d go about
composing any kind of polished text, from an academic essay to a
magazine article or a covering letter for a job application. Where
creative writing differs, however, is that your memories, feelings and
imagination become the source of your subject matter, and you can
learn techniques to make the creative process easier and more
productive.

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Written texts both reflect and help to shape the cultures from which
they come. By trying to produce some creative writing, you’ll have the
opportunity to express your own cultural perspective and experiences,
and participate in making culture yourself. This urge for self-expression
is common to many cultures, even though the creative process may
have been different in past eras and societies.
If you consider the creative process today, you can think of it as a kind
of journey – from vague ideas and emotions to precisely written words,
from interior (the contents of your mind) to exterior (a text that other
people can read). It’s also the journey from the blank page to the
finished product, with all the stages of drafting, revising and editing
along the way. This is the writer’s journey, which you’ll experience in
the following sections of this chapter.

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 2 Generating material: freewriting

2 Generating material: freewriting

Our brains are filled with masses of thoughts and images, memories
and sensory impressions (like the image in Figure 2). The first stage in
the creative process, then, is transferring some of them onto the page
(or screen). To this end, a key method used in creative writing is called
freewriting. To freewrite, you try to write as much as you can within a
set period of time without stopping, and without worrying if it’s any
good. The aim is to write without editing or censoring yourself, and to
suspend the judging instinct that kicks in when most of us try to write:
the critical voice in our heads. Freewriting gives you permission to just
write, no matter how bad it might sound; to let your words and
imagination run free.

Figure 2 Hazel Florez, Thought Bubble Brain, 2016, pen and pencil on card,
48 × 58 cm. Private Collection. Photo: © Hazel Florez/Bridgeman Images.

Because of this, freewriting is a truly effective technique for both

beginning and experienced writers. You can use it to help combat
writer’s block, overcome the fear of the blank page or produce material
for a first draft. As the author Anne Lamott admits:

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For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not

rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is
to write really, really shitty first drafts.
The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out
and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is
going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this
childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come
through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say,
“Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going
to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy,
emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper
because there may be something great in those six crazy pages
that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up
means. There may be something in the very last line of the very
last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful
or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing
about, more or less, or in what direction you might go – but
there was no way to get to this without first getting through the
first five and a half pages.
(1995, pp. 22–23)

As Lamott observes, the key with freewriting is to let it all pour out, to
get it all down on paper, to generate as much material as possible, no
matter how messy or badly written. Even if much of what you produce
ends up being discarded later, there’s usually at least one good idea,
image or phrase you can use as the seed for further work. Writing is a
process of discovery, and freewriting opens up a space in which you
can discover what you want to write about.

Study note
For all writing activities, you can either write by hand or use a
computer, whichever method you prefer.

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 2 Generating material: freewriting

Activity 1
(Allow around 15 minutes to complete this activity.)

Try freewriting for yourself by first choosing one of the opening phrases
listed below and letting your writing flow uncensored:

. There was a knock at the door…

. It wasn’t until later that I realised…
. When she got into the car…
. Don’t look now, but…
. He sat down at the table and…
Remember, there’s no right or wrong way to do freewriting. If you really
feel stuck after trying to write for a few minutes, you can start over and
choose a different opening phrase from the list.

Discussion
I’m always amazed by how liberating it feels to write without having a
predetermined story in mind – to just improvise some events quickly and
randomly, without trying to write a ‘serious’ piece of work. Allowing
yourself to write without an outline or plan may seem strange at first, but
it can be surprisingly enjoyable and productive.
Before moving on, read through what you’ve written and underline any
ideas or phrases (or even single words) that stand out to you. They don’t
have to be literary gems, just things that you’re pleased with or bits that
might hold potential for a future piece. If you feel there aren’t any, or if
you struggled a lot with this activity, don’t despair! You’ll be able to try a
number of other writing activities in this chapter that take different
approaches to introducing you to creative writing.

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Chapter 1 The writer’s journey

Figure 3 An imaginary form of transport drawn by Albert Robida (1848–

1926) in 1883: Parisian air taxis, or hot-air balloons moored to a cathedral
tower to pick up and drop off passengers. Air Taxis: La station d’aérocabs
de la Tour Saint-Jacques. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Photo: © akg-
images.

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 2 Generating material: freewriting

Morning pages
A popular version of freewriting, advocated by the author Julia
Cameron, is to write what she calls ‘morning pages’. This means
writing three pages by hand every morning (or at some other set
time every day, if you can’t do mornings) as quickly as possible,
jotting down whatever pops into your mind, on any subject at all.
The routine of doing morning pages – writing without the pressure
of producing anything in particular – can help get your creative
juices flowing and improve your fluency with language. Think of it
as a warm-up or practice session, like playing scales on an
instrument or stretching before a run.
This kind of writing routine can be an anchor that centres your
imagination, a port from which mental flights of fancy can take off
(like the cathedral tower in Figure 3). If this appeals to you, you can
try using the opening phrases listed in Activity 1 to write some
morning pages, by doing a 10-minute freewrite each morning.

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3 Keeping a writer’s notebook

Another extremely valuable tool for developing your writing skills is
keeping a writer’s notebook. Your notebook may be physical (even
today, all the writers I know still use paper notebooks in addition to
their laptops and tablets), or it can be a file or group of files on your
computer, or even on your phone. Whatever the form, your writer’s
notebook is not intended to be a journal or diary in the ‘This is what I
did today’ sense (though you certainly might find yourself drawing on
your daily experiences for material). Rather, your writer’s notebook is a
place for anything related to the process of creative writing. You can
use it as a repository for your freewrites and morning pages, as well as
a place to jot down notes and ideas for pieces that you’re working on,
or that you might write in the future. It might also be a place to record
descriptions, phrases, scraps of dialogue that you hear, or scenes that
you might use later. Using a writer’s notebook is not unlike the note-
taking that you’ve been asked to do throughout this module, in
response to reading various cultural texts or watching videos about
historical sites. In this case, however, the material you’re making notes
on will often be your own experiences, memories and thoughts, as well
as your perceptions of the world around you.
Try starting your own writer’s notebook and make a habit of writing in
it every day (or as often as you can manage), even if it’s just for ten
minutes on the bus to work or while your dinner is in the oven. By
doing so, you’ll gradually build up a store of material to draw on when
it’s time to write a first draft or compose a more finished piece.
Creative writing is an acquired skill, like drawing or playing music or
sport; the more you practise doing it, the easier it becomes.
For many authors, an important function of keeping a notebook is to
sharpen their powers of observation, to focus their attention on the
external world – the people and places, sights and sounds, that make
up our existence. After all, whether you’re writing an imaginary short
story or an autobiographical memoir, you’ll need to depict such things
believably in order to engage your reader’s interest. The novelist
Andrew Cowan explains how keeping a notebook can provide you with
a rich resource as a writer:

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 3 Keeping a writer’s notebook

Here you can record your observations – your eavesdroppings

and noticings – and so accumulate a bank of words and phrases,
descriptive paragraphs and character sketches, snatches of
dialogue and (perhaps) quotations from other writers that will act
as a kind of deposit account of language from which you can later
make withdrawals to adapt or incorporate into your work-in-
progress, or to form the basis from which you can begin to build
a new work. [....] And when you are feeling especially
impoverished – lacking ideas, struggling for words – your bank of
phrases and paragraphs can be what sustains you.
(2013, pp. 18–19)

The following activity will help you to start generating material to put
in your writer’s notebook. Trying to write about specific things and
experiences will enable you to practise your observational skills
regarding the world you live in.

Figure 4 A selection of writer’s notebooks used by the

novelist Sally O’Reilly.

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Chapter 1 The writer’s journey

Activity 2
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)

Choose two of the prompts listed below. For the first one, set a timer
and write for 10 to 15 minutes on the topic; try to get down as much as
you can without stopping. Don’t worry how it sounds! Then set your timer
for another 10 to 15 minutes and write about your second chosen
prompt. (You can take a break in between doing the two prompts, or do
them in two separate writing sessions, if you prefer.)

. Describe something you’ve seen in the past or are looking at right

now: it might be a landscape, a room, an object, an animal, etc.
. Recount a memorable conversation you’ve had, or one you’ve
overheard.
. Describe a person you’ve seen or met only briefly; you can invent
information about them to add to your description if needed.
. Write about a photo, painting, song or a piece of music, describing
how it makes you feel (for instance, you could pick one of the images
in this chapter to write about).
To finish, think for a moment about whether you found this activity easier
or harder than Activity 1. Does having a specific subject to write about
help you to feel inspired? Which of the two prompts produced a better
result for you? Jot down your thoughts on this activity, and on how
you’re finding the writing process so far, in your notebook.

Discussion
Again, there’s no right or wrong way to do this activity. The important
thing is to gain practice in writing and putting your observations into
words. Anything that you write about can end up being useful – your
description of a person you’ve only seen briefly might be the inspiration
for a character in a short story, or your feelings about a song might
remind you of an incident from your past that you want to explore
further.
At the end of this activity, you were asked to reflect on your experience
of it. This type of self-reflection on the creative process is a central part
of studying Creative Writing. Consciously reflecting on your own writing
is something that all students are expected to do in their Creative Writing
assessments. Often, you’ll have to write a short commentary to
accompany your piece of creative writing when submitting it, which is
why most of the writing activities in this chapter ask you to reflect on
what you’ve written in some way. (You’ll learn in more detail about why
and how to write this kind of commentary in Chapter 3, ‘On the road’.)

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It might not necessarily seem like it at the moment, but freewriting and
gathering material in your writer’s notebook often leads to creative
discoveries. I’ve frequently seen students write successful work based
on an idea that they found in their notebooks (and I have done the same
myself).

The literary and artistic productions of any culture are rooted in their
makers’ experiences – the lives they lived and the societies they lived
in; their perceptions of people, places and things; their thoughts on the
world surrounding them. This is the raw material that goes into
creating cultural artefacts like a Mughal portrait or a Shakespearean
comedy, a sculpture of a charioteer or a poem by Martial. As a creative
writer (in other words, a maker of contemporary texts), your own
experiences and observations will form the basis of your work.
Keeping a writer’s notebook is a way of accumulating a storehouse of
material to eventually shape into an artwork of your own.

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4 Incorporating details: show, don’t tell

When studying Creative Writing, one of the most essential concepts is
‘show, don’t tell’. This saying is a kind of shorthand for expressing
how to make your writing vivid and effective, how to engage a reader,
and how to convey an experience convincingly. So what does it mean
to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’?
We can ‘tell’ the story of Jane Eyre as a synopsis, or condensed
summary, like this:

Jane Eyre is an orphan who grows up at Gateshead Hall, bullied

and abused by her aunt and cousins. She is sent off to a charity
school called Lowood, where she suffers under the harsh regime
until a new management committee is formed to thwart the
school’s cruel director, Mr Brocklehurst. After eventually
becoming a teacher at Lowood, Jane leaves to work as a
governess at Thornfield Hall for the mysterious Edward
Rochester...

But how flat and lifeless is that compared to reading even a few pages
of the novel itself ? The reason a successful piece of creative writing
draws us in is because it ‘shows’ us a world that we can see, hear and
feel – one that we can inhabit imaginatively. So instead of summarising
the plot of a story, you need to dramatise or ‘show’ the reader the
individual scenes that compose it. Instead of telling the reader that a
character is shy, you need to show them they are (i.e. to portray the
character in such a way that the reader can see their shyness for
themselves).
A crucial method of ‘showing’ is to incorporate carefully chosen details
into your writing. Including small but significant details will help
breathe life into your characters and construct a believable world for
them to inhabit. You want the reader to be able to imagine whatever
you’re writing about, from the setting and locations to what the
characters are doing and thinking.

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Figure 5 Franz Marc, The Dream, 1913. Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland.

Photo: © Bridgeman Images.

The novelist John Gardner famously described writing as the creation

of a fictional dream – that is, a world dreamed up by the writer that
becomes shared with the reader, who enters into and becomes
absorbed by it. Here he explains the value of details in engaging the
reader:

If we carefully inspect our experience as we read, we discover that

the importance of physical detail is that it creates for us a kind of
dream, a rich and vivid play in the mind. We read a few words at
the beginning of the book or the particular story, and suddenly
we find ourselves seeing not words on a page but a train moving
through Russia, an old Italian crying, or a farmhouse battered by
rain. We read on – dream on – not passively but actively,
worrying about the choices the characters have to make, listening
in panic for some sound behind the fictional door, exulting in

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characters’ successes, bemoaning their failures. In great fiction, the

dream engages us heart and soul; we […] respond to imaginary
things – sights, sounds, smells – as though they were real.
(1991, pp. 30–31)

What Gardner is pointing to in this passage is the importance of

physical details in making the imaginary seem real. Such details are what
make a text come alive, transforming mere words on the page into a
vivid scene playing out in the reader’s mind. The next activity will help
you to observe how a writer achieves this in practice.

Activity 3
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)
Turn to Reading 1.1, which is an excerpt from the novel The Crow Road
(1993) by Iain Banks (Figure 6). The narrator of the novel is a young
Scottish man named Prentice, who has returned home from university to
attend his grandmother’s cremation and funeral. The setting is Scotland
in the 1970s.

Figure 6 Author Iain Banks. Photo: ©

John Foley/Opale/Bridgeman Images.

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First, read straight through the extract to gain an understanding of the

plot and characters. Then read it again slowly, paying attention to how
Banks uses various kinds of details to bring the scene to life.
Make a list of (or underline) 8 to 10 details that strike you as vivid and
significant. For example, I noticed that Banks briefly describes each
character’s clothing in order to enable us to visualise them as individuals
– James wears a ‘borrowed great-coat’, while Ashley (or Ash) is in a
‘knee-length black skirt’ and ‘medium-high heels’. What other types of
details does Banks include in this excerpt?

Discussion
In addition to describing what his characters are wearing, Banks
incorporates further details of their physical appearance into this scene.
Note the way that James leans against a wall with his earphones in,
listening to music, or how Ash’s ‘long fawn hair’ is ‘gathered up’, her
face ‘dominated by a blade of a nose and a pair of large round-lensed
glasses’. All of these physical details help to establish the characters’
personalities in our minds, as well as convincing us of their existence.
In order to dramatise what’s happening in this scene, Banks also
includes the gestures and movements that the characters make, from
Ash ‘put[ting] her hand on the side of my shoulder’ to the narrator
‘nodding, still looking at [her] legs’. Some more examples are: ‘Ash
frowned a little, her slightly magnified grey eyes searching mine’; ‘Dean
shook his head and looked mystified’; ‘Dean prodded his sister in the
back’. Without such details, the scene would seem far less believable.
Notice too how these gestures subtly ‘show’ us what the characters are
feeling without the author having to ‘tell’ us explicitly. Instead of the
narrator baldly stating, ‘Ash was concerned for me’, a physical action like
‘[Ash] put her hand on the side of my shoulder, patting [it]’ shows us her
concern.

Analysing even a short passage by a skilled author, as you’ve just done,

is a central component of studying Creative Writing. Examining how
authors use details allows you to learn from their example, so that you
can apply the same principles to your own writing. This kind of close
reading, which involves paying careful attention to the nuances of a
text, is not dissimilar to the kind of reading and analysis that you’ve
done previously in this module. When studying Creative Writing,

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though, your focus will primarily be on how an author crafts a piece of

writing, and then putting what you’ve learned into practice.

4.1 Depicting places

Descriptions of setting or place – the where in which a piece of writing
occurs – offer an effective means of ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’. In
the previous excerpt from The Crow Road, the author makes sure to
depict just enough of the surroundings in which his characters interact
for us to envision them vividly. Details such as ‘the low grey granite of
the crematorium buildings’, or ‘it was a calmly sombre day, chill and a
little damp’, create a believable environment (1993, pp. 17–18). These
depictions of place work to convey the atmosphere or mood of the
scene as well, which is solemn and a bit depressing. Similarly, in the
next activity, you’ll be asked to try describing a place so as to evoke or
suggest a particular mood.

Study note
The word counts given in the following activities are suggested
guidelines; don’t worry too much about the exact number of
words that you end up producing. If you’re writing by hand, just
estimate roughly. For instance, your response to Activity 4 might
be one to two pages long.

Activity 4
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)
First, choose one item from each of the columns below:

Place Mood
City street Peaceful
Beach Sad
Mountain Cheery
Nightclub Hopeful
Woods Sinister

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Now write 150 to 250 words describing your chosen place in such a way
as to reflect your chosen mood. (For example: a description of a beach,
evoking peacefulness.) Try to use physical details in your description to
convey the mood that you have selected.
When writing, avoid explicitly mentioning your chosen mood in your
piece. For instance, if the mood is ‘sad’, you can't use the words ‘sad’,
‘sadness’, ‘sadly’ or the like anywhere in your description. Show, don’t
tell us, what the mood of this place is.
A few things to consider:

. What time of day and/or year is it?

. What things, animals or people are in this place? What are they
doing?
. Be specific. ‘The trees were beautiful’ is so broad that it could mean
anything, whereas a detail like ‘deep green leaves’ creates a specific
image in the reader’s mind.

Figure 7 A city street in Crete, Greece. Photo: Ageev Rostislav/Alamy.

Discussion
Having a particular place in mind when you write – even an imaginary
one – is a surprisingly fruitful starting point, I’ve found. Once you’ve
established a setting and mood, a story will often emerge from it
naturally. You might remember something that once happened to you in

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this place, or start imagining the characters who would live there or visit
it. As the saying goes, everything happens somewhere. By depicting a
specific place and mood in the piece that you’re writing, you set the
scene for the events that you’ll go on to recount.

It might be helpful to read a sample response to the previous activity.

The following extract is what one of my colleagues (who had never
tried creative writing before!) came up with:

Tall trees in full leaf fill this Edwardian street; the red brick and
semi-detached house tiles of the three-story semis peep through and round the trees,
ornamental building material some with terracotta reliefs on the gables. Upstairs, my window
box is full of busy lizzies in red, some pinks and white, standing
the triangular upper part of a
wall at the end of a ridged roof out against the red brick. It’s about 1986 and I’m not usually
around at this time of day as I’m usually at work, but although
there’s distant noise of buses and cars from the main road this
a street or passage that is closed at one is a cul-de-sac and ends at the park so there are fewer cars,
one end and still fewer people. The house is quiet, too.

The writer initially chose ‘city street’ and ‘cheery’ as her assignment,
then found herself struggling with the mood, so she switched to
‘peaceful’ instead. It’s fine to change your mind like this when doing a
writing activity; in fact, it’s a natural part of the creative process. The
goal of most writing activities is to explore and discover ideas as you
go along. You can always go back and change things later.
This attempt is a fairly typical first draft, with some rambling sentences
and awkward word repetitions, not a finished piece of writing. It’s not
especially well or poorly written, but you can see how the author has
attempted to include believable details in her description. This is a
decent starting point that could, given more time, turn into something
better. Basically, these writing activities are designed to help you
generate draft material for future use. Once you’ve got something down
on the page to work with, you’ll find it easier to come up with more
ideas and to keep writing.

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5 Being specific: significant details

Creative writing is about recreating an experience in words, whether
your subject matter is autobiographical (taken from your lived
experience) or fictional (an experience that you’ve imagined). Sensory
details – that is, descriptions that appeal to any of the five senses – are
especially powerful in evoking an experience. The smell of a cake
baking, the rough texture of a dried leaf, the sound of rain against a
window, the sharp taste of a lemon, the particular colour of an
overcast sky: our lives are made up of such details, but we often forget
to include them when we sit down to write.
Being specific when recreating an experience means choosing evocative
details to include. Even when you’re writing about events that are close
to you and that might be emotionally fraught, you still need to
incorporate significant details to construct a believable world for the
reader. For example, in the poem ‘How It Is’, Maxine Kumin writes
about grieving over the suicide of a close friend (the poet Anne
Sexton). Yet instead of using vague words like ‘grief ’ or ‘pain’, she
describes the old blue blazer that her friend always wore, and the tuna
mayonnaise sandwich that was Sexton’s last meal. These details
establish the specific reality of Kumin’s experience while also vividly
evoking her sense of loss. I first read this poem many years ago at
university, but to this day I remember that blazer and that sandwich –
such is the power of significant details.
The critic and novelist Francine Prose explains the importance of such
details in this way:

Details are what persuade us that someone is telling the truth [...].
Great writers painstakingly construct their fictions with small but
significant details that, brushstroke by brushstroke, paint the
pictures the artists hope to portray, the strange or familiar realities
of which they hope to convince us: details of landscape and
nature (the facts of marine and whale biology in Moby Dick), […]
of fashion [...], of music (the little phrase that haunts Swann in
Swann’s Way), of sports, art, of all the things with which we
humans express our complex individuality.
(2012, pp. 151, 152–53)

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What Prose is pointing to is how authors use all sorts of details to

build up a convincing reality in their work. ‘Small but significant
details’ are what make a written experience seem real to the reader.
Such details are the difference between a piece of writing that sounds
flat and lifeless, and one that rings true. Be specific in your writing and
the reader will be drawn into your world. The difference between ‘a
car’ and ‘a mud-spattered van with dirty windows’ is that we can
picture the latter more precisely in our mind’s eye.
Of course, there’s also such a thing as too much detail. If you include
details that aren’t significant (or relevant) to the story you’re telling, the
reader will become confused or impatient. ‘A mud-spattered, white
2008 Ford Transit van with dirty exterior windows’ is a description
containing too much information (as well as being quite a mouthful).
Make sure that the details you incorporate are there for a good reason.

Figure 8 Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Photo: © Catherine Helie/Gallimard
via Opale/Bridgeman Images.

In particular, significant details are valuable because they help to ‘show’

rather than ‘tell’ – they communicate information about character,
setting, mood and so on, without the author having to spell things out
explicitly. Perhaps the character who drives the mud-spattered van is a
farmer who’s too busy during lambing season to keep their vehicle

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clean. Or, if the van is featured in the setting of a story – say, parked
in a dark alley – it immediately suggests a sinister atmosphere. Being
specific will help you convince the reader that what you’re depicting is
real. Notice, in the following activity, how the author Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie (Figure 8) constructs a deeply believable, yet fictional
world through carefully chosen details.

Activity 5
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)
Turn to Reading 1.2, which is the opening scene of Adichie’s short story
‘The American Embassy’. The protagonist of the story is an unnamed
woman in modern-day Lagos, Nigeria, who is applying for a visa to travel
to America.
First read the excerpt straight through, then read it again slowly.
Underline (or list in your writer’s notebook) several examples of how
Adichie uses details to bring this scene to life. Then ask yourself the
following questions:

. What are some of the sensory details that Adichie includes?

. What are some of the actions and activities that she describes?
. How do these details ‘show’ us the protagonist’s feelings (which are
never directly, or explicitly, stated)?

Discussion
Adichie uses numerous sensory details to establish the reality of the
setting, from the sound of ‘the newspaper vendors who blew whistles’ to
the sight of beggars ‘holding out enamel plates’, from the feel of ‘moist
heat’ in the air to the sound of ‘ice-cream bicycles that honked’. She
depicts her protagonist through her actions, or rather, her striking lack of
them: the woman stares ‘straight ahead, barely moving’ and doesn’t ‘fan
herself with a magazine or swipe at the tiny fly hovering near her ear’.
The woman’s air of detachment, we soon learn, is due to the death of
her four-year-old son – a tragic event that Adichie ‘shows’ us by
describing the woman’s memory of ‘her son Ugonna’s small, plump body
crumpling before her’. Likewise, the brutality of the soldier whipping a
bespectacled man is shown through the physical details the woman
observes: ‘She saw the man’s glasses slip off and fall. She saw the heel
of the soldier’s boot squash the black frames, the tinted lenses’. Without
ever ‘telling’ us, Adichie swiftly conveys the woman’s feelings of grief
and horror.

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In the last paragraph of this excerpt, Adichie depicts the woman’s

everyday life prior to her son’s death through a list of her typical
activities: ‘she had taken Ugonna to school, had bought him a sausage
roll at Mr. Biggs, had sung along with Majek Fashek on her car radio’.
These details, like the rest, allow us to engage with the world of the
story and care about the protagonist.

As we’ve seen, reading attentively, with an eye to what an author

includes or leaves out, is vital to understanding the foundations of
good writing. Normally when we read, we aren’t consciously analysing
how a text was created. But as a creative writer, you’ll discover that it’s
quite useful to read more closely, with your writer’s hat on – that is, to
examine how authors achieve particular effects. Reading with this kind
of analytical eye is sometimes called ‘reading like a writer’ or ‘reading
as a writer’.
Reading thoughtfully and learning from examples is as much a part of
creative writing as learning by doing (i.e. actually writing). In fact, from
the ancient world through to Renaissance times, writing was taught
through imitation: students were instructed to write their own works
by rigidly copying the format and structure of existing ‘classic’ texts.
Even today, if you listen to interviews with professional authors, they
always emphasise the importance of reading in their development as
writers. Whether you realise it or not, you absorb lessons about
storytelling, characterisation, writing style and more, every time you
read a text. Reading widely (that is, books by a broad variety of
authors) is one of the best ways of becoming a better writer.

5.1 Drawing on memories

Reading and creative writing both require empathy: they involve our
curiosity for learning about and understanding other experiences and
cultures. When you read, you enter into another world, one which is
outside of yourself. You temporarily inhabit someone else’s existence,
whether that of a man in 1970s Scotland or a woman in twenty-first-
century Nigeria. Similarly, when you write a fictional story, your
empathy is called upon in order for you to imagine your characters’
thoughts and experiences. And when you write an autobiographical
piece, the writing process requires you to look upon your experiences

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from a certain distance (as though they’re separate from yourself) in

order to be able to recreate them skilfully, so that your reader will
empathise with you.
Writing about your own experiences is often called autobiography,
memoir or life writing (as well as terms that you may have heard
elsewhere, like creative non-fiction or the personal essay). Learning to
draw on your memories for material will help sharpen your eye for
significant details. Some students also find writing about their
experiences to be a more accessible form of creative writing. Even if
you’re mainly interested in fiction, trying to write autobiographically
can help you to develop your writing skills and discover ideas or
images to use in a story later.

Study note
When writing autobiographically, it can be inspiring to explore
your personal history, but it can also sometimes be uncomfortable
when painful memories are involved. If you feel that certain
episodes in your life are too harrowing to write about at this
point, you can choose to focus on other memories.
It’s also sensible not to share pieces of writing that are deeply
personal with your tutor or fellow students unless you’re sure that
you’re comfortable with having them discussed and evaluated
impersonally in terms of the quality of the writing, rather than as
episodes of your life.

The following activity asks you to write about some of your

experiences of childhood by focusing on your sense memories –
memories of sights, sounds, smells and the like.

Activity 6
(Allow around 45 minutes to complete this activity.)
In this activity, you’ll draw on sensory details to recreate an experience
from your past. First, think back to when you were ten years old.
To jog your memory, consider:

. What calendar year was it and which school year were you in?

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. Where were you living and who else lived there?

. What did you look and sound like?
Photos from that time (like the one in Figure 9) or other mementos might
also help you to remember details from this stage of your life.

Figure 9 Children playing in fountains, Sheffield Peace Gardens. Photo:

Katy Blackwood/Alamy.
For each of the five senses below, jot down one or two sense memories
that come to you. Focus on your physical memories of a particular place
and time. Be specific.
1 Sight
2 Smell
3 Sound
4 Taste
5 Touch/texture.
Each of these sense memories will have a story, anecdote or experience
behind it (for instance, the feeling of stiff new shoes rubbing painfully
against your ankles might make you think of the first day of school). Now
jot down a few of these anecdotes quickly – rough notes or incomplete
sentences are fine. The aim is to capture your memories while they’re
fresh in your mind. Don’t worry if your memories aren’t of dramatic or
life-changing incidents – good writing often concerns our everyday
existence.

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Lastly, write a piece of about 250 to 350 words (or two to three pages if
handwritten) that incorporates some of these memories. But don’t try to
tell an entire story or cram all of the recollections that you jotted down
into such a short piece! You might want to focus on just one anecdote,
for instance, or write only the opening scene of what would be a longer
narrative.

Discussion
When you have finished writing, read through your piece and consider
whether you’d like to expand it into a longer piece in the future. Look
again at the notes that you made about your sense memories and their
related anecdotes; would you like to write a new piece about one of
them sometime, or perhaps turn it into fiction by using it as the basis for
a short story? These sorts of reflections are an intrinsic part of the
creative process, just like generating material, drafting and revising. The
writer’s journey is often circular, rather than a straight line from A to B.
It’s not unusual to write a first draft, then find yourself uncovering new
ideas once you’ve evaluated it, only to redraft it, read it again, generate
more new ideas, and so on.
Also consider sharing your piece (or just some of your sense memories)
with others. The first time that I did this activity with a group of students
in a classroom, I could hardly recall any of my own childhood sense
memories. But hearing other people’s memories and anecdotes helped
me to remember my own. One woman mentioned the smell of the roast
beef her mother made for her birthday dinner, and I suddenly found
myself remembering my own mother wrapping clumps of glutinous rice in
bamboo leaves to be steamed (a favourite treat when I was little) – and
the distinctive smell and texture of those leaves.

Your childhood memories might involve notable occasions like

birthdays, weddings or holidays. Then there are school-oriented events
such as sports days, plays, concerts, bake sales and so on. Perhaps your
experiences might not seem like the stuff of ‘literature’, but in fact
masters of the short story – from the nineteenth-century Russian
author Nikolai Gogol to modern writers like Bharati Mukherjee and
Alice Munro – have created compelling narratives about ordinary
individuals living everyday existences. One of the core values of
Creative Writing is that anyone’s experiences are worthy of attention;

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literature and culture aren’t the exclusive province of the elite or

supposed ‘geniuses’. The makers and the subjects of cultural artefacts
may be ordinary people, like the anonymous ancient Greek who
painted the red-figure water jar that you examined when studying
Classical Studies, or the abused orphan who becomes a teacher and
governess in Jane Eyre. Creative Writing enables any of us to tell our
story and share our experiences with the world.

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6 Storytelling through place

Returning to your childhood memories requires making a mental and
emotional journey, a metaphorical visit to the past. For the next
activities in this chapter, you’ll consider actual visits to real-world
places, and explore how to convey such experiences vividly.

Activity 7
(Allow around 1 hour to complete this activity.)
Now read Reading 1.3, which is taken from Sanjida Kay’s novel The
Stolen Child (2017) and is set in contemporary Ilkley, in the county of
West Yorkshire, England (Figure 10). The narrator is an artist named
Zoe who’s getting her two children (seven-year-old Evie and two-year-
old Ben) ready in the morning before walking them to school and
nursery, along with their dog, Bella.

Figure 10 Author Sanjida Kay. Photo: ©

Sanjida O’Connell.
Then turn to Reading 1.4, which is a poem called ‘Eddie Priest’s
Barbershop & Notary’ (1995) written by Kevin Young (Figure 11). This is
set in a Black barbershop in the southern United States during
the 1980s. (The ‘eagle’ in line 4 is a reference to an American 25-cent
coin, a ‘quarter’, which is embossed with an eagle.)

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Figure 11 Poet Kevin Young. Photo: Everett

Collection Inc/Alamy.
After you have read both the excerpt and the poem straight through,
reread them while considering how each author employs sensory details
and physical actions to dramatise (bring to life) the scenes and places
that they portray. The following prompts may help you:

. What details does Kay incorporate to depict the chaos of the family’s
morning routine at home, in contrast to their journey to school?
. How does Young vividly portray the multitude of events taking place
in the barbershop?
. You may also find it useful to underline or list in your writer’s
notebook some of the action-related words (i.e. the verbs and verb
phrases) in each piece.
For the purposes of this activity, don’t worry about analysing the ‘poetic’
aspects of Young’s poem (like form or rhythm), just focus on his use of
sensory details and action words.

Discussion
Although Kay’s excerpt is heavy on dialogue, it’s the specific details and
actions performed by her characters that make the scene in the family
home come alive: the way that Evie ‘flounces into the garden’ in a strop,

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and how the narrator feels ‘hot in my winter coat’ after rushing around
the house looking for her daughter. Kay uses actions to create a
believable reality – rather than simply telling us ‘Ben is full of beans’,
she adds that he’s ‘running manically around, pulling a caterpillar on
wheels behind him [while] singing’.
Young likewise offers a plethora of details that appeal to the senses –
the sounds of jazz and blues music; the feel of pulling a comb through
matted hair and ‘cold breezes’ on one’s skin; the smell of wintergreen
tonic. The scene is full of physical actions, from the turning of rusty fans
to the mother gathering hair off the floor and the barber quickly brushing
a newly shorn head. Young’s precise descriptions engage us fully in the
barbershop experience – it’s as though we’re in the shop with him.

The ability to convey a particular reality in words, to make the reader

feel like they’re right there with you, is what you should be striving for.
There’s a kind of magic in how specific details and actions enable you
to depict the world from your personal and cultural perspective, and
allow others to experience it too. I’ve never been to a barbershop or
taken care of young children, but thanks to these authors, I can see
and smell and feel what such an experience would be like.

6.1 Just visiting

Drama often arises when you journey away from home, for however
long or short a time. Think of how some of the most basic stories,
such as fairy tales, begin with a journey – Little Red Riding Hood
leaves home and goes into the forest to visit her grandmother; Jack
goes to market to sell a cow and meets a man who offers him magic
beans. Visiting different places and interacting with other people can
be the catalyst for all sorts of stories. In your everyday life, you might
visit a workplace or supermarket, a cinema or park. There are also
more unusual journeys away from home, like being rushed to hospital
or going to court for a trial. The next activity asks you to write about
somewhere you’ve visited in order to generate material for either an
autobiographical or a fictional narrative.

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Activity 8
(Allow around 1 hour to complete this activity.)

Think about a place that you’ve been to at least once. It might have
been a short or long visit, a business trip or family holiday, a visit to a
dentist’s office, football ground, restaurant – whatever you like. Your visit
can have happened recently or long ago – again, it’s up to you.

Figure 12 Montage of seaside beach huts, Hamworthy, Dorset. Photo:

Becky Stares/Alamy.
Jot down some notes or freewrite for about 10 to 15 minutes about the
place that you visited, describing what happened when you were there.
This can be a commonplace event, like getting a haircut (as in
Reading 1.4), or a special trip, like the visit to the American embassy in
Adichie’s short story (Reading 1.2).
Next, use your notes or freewritten material as the basis for writing 350
to 500 words about a visit to this place (about three to four pages
handwritten). You can choose to write an autobiographical piece about
your own experience, or you can write a fictional piece inspired by your
material.
Don’t try to tell a whole story in such a short word count; just start out
with a scene or two. Remember to incorporate significant details and
descriptions of people’s actions to bring your scene(s) to life for the
reader.
After you’ve written your piece, read through it and consider how
effective it is. Underline or highlight the phrases and passages that you
feel were most successful in capturing what you were attempting to
depict. Are there areas where you could add significant details to make
your scene(s) more convincing? Or are there areas that contain too

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much detail that isn’t really needed? Jot down your thoughts on these
aspects, or any other reflections you have on this activity, in your writer’s
notebook.

Discussion
Mining your own experience in a tightly focused way, as in this activity, is
a useful technique for discovering story ideas and memories that you
might not have realised you had. However, if you were challenged by
this activity, don’t panic – not everyone finds writing about themselves
rewarding or inspiring! Experimenting with different types of creative
writing and figuring out what works for you are standard parts of the
learning process, and another stage on the writer’s journey.

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7 Revising: tips and techniques

Now that you’ve completed a number of writing activities and
produced some first drafts, the final part of the writer’s journey is to
learn about revising your work. At this point, you should think of
revision as primarily developmental – that is, the process of expanding
and fleshing out your drafts, building on the work you’ve done so far.
This should help prepare you for the following Creative Writing
chapters, as well as for working independently at future points in the
module.
As you’ve learned, the writing process isn’t a linear journey from A to
B, or even from A to B to C. After the initial stage of generating
material (perhaps by freewriting and jotting down notes), you write a
first draft. But this is just the beginning. You may have drafted an
entire story, or only the opening of one; a comprehensively detailed
scene, or just a sketch to get the bare bones down. You read over your
draft and start evaluating what to do next. Do you need to develop
parts of it further? Discard some bits outright, replace others with new
material? Maybe you’ve started at the wrong point in the plot and need
to draft an entire other scene first?
This self-evaluation of your writing is where revision begins. The word
‘revision’ comes from Latin: the prefix ‘re’ meaning ‘again’, the verb
‘visere’ meaning ‘to see’. So revising literally means seeing it again –
rereading your piece in an attempt to see it afresh. Revising is not only
an integral part of the creative process but an enjoyable one, too.
Improving a draft requires an imaginative eye, not just an analytical
one; creative thinking, not just critical. It can involve adding material as
much as it does rewriting and cutting. You might find yourself writing
a new scene to dramatise the action better, or adding a descriptive
passage to make your portrayal of a character more convincing. In fact,
revision includes all the other elements of the creative process within
itself – generating new ideas, redrafting, replacing and rewriting.
Unavoidably, revision does involve cutting and editing, which requires
you to be honest in judging your work’s weaknesses. Learning to
consider your own writing with an objective eye takes practice. It
means shifting from the author’s point of view to the reader’s, thereby
gaining a critical distance from your creation – which you may have
spent hours pouring your heart into – so that you can see it anew.

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Figure 13 Pages from authors’ manuscripts showing their handwritten revisions. From left to right,
pages by: Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and James Joyce (1882–1941).
Photos: © Lebrecht Authors/Bridgeman Images and © Bridgeman Images.

Revising includes both developing a draft (enlarging and improving it)

and editing it (cutting and rewriting). Broadly speaking, though,
revision is about trying to discover the best way to tell a story, whether
autobiographical or fictional. It’s about using language to convey what’s
in your mind clearly and effectively, and engaging the reader in a world
of your making. Poets Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux summarise
some of this here:

In an early draft, the language on the page should be considered

temporary language, ripe with possibilities, with the gifts your
subconscious mind has offered up. In the act of getting down a
first or second or fourth draft, you’re likely to have tapped into
not only some raw, pure, evocative language but also a lot of
received language and attitudes – clichés, easy solutions, awkward
phrasing, habitual ways of articulation, vague generalities. [...]
Maybe you’ve been melodramatic in an attempt to be powerful, or
sentimental when you wanted deep feeling. Maybe the [piece] is
unfocused, with too many incidents, too confused a sense of what
it’s about, or no sense at all. The true [piece], in other words –
the one you wanted to write, the inspiration that got you

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feverishly tapping out lines on the computer at three a.m. – may

not yet have found its realization on the page.
(1997, p. 187 [emphasis added])

Getting a piece of writing to find its realisation on the page is what all
authors strive for. Thinking of your language, your writing, as
‘temporary’ is a good way to remind yourself that nobody’s perfect.
After all, Charlotte Brontë didn’t sit down and write the Jane Eyre we
read today in her first draft. Don’t be discouraged if you feel
dissatisfied with one of your drafts; it can be improved as long as
you’re willing to put in the effort of revision.
If you don’t know where to start, or feel as though there are too many
problems with a piece to fix at once, try using the ‘Creative Writing
revision checklist’ (Resource 4.1 in the Resources section at the end of
this block). This checklist will help you with the revision process by
focusing on a single area at a time.

Activity 9
(Allow around 1 hour to complete this activity.)

Read through the ‘Creative Writing revision checklist’ (Resource 4.1 in

the Resources section at the end of this block). The methods listed in it
should help you to develop and refine your drafts into more complete,
polished work.
Next, choose one of the creative pieces that you wrote earlier in this
chapter. Choose one or two of the numbered items from the revision
checklist and apply its instructions to your piece. Rewrite, add or delete
material as needed.
Then, read through your redrafted piece and consider how you might
keep revising it further. Also reflect on how you found the revision
process – was it absorbing or tricky? Did you notice any particular
tendencies or habits in your writing, good or bad? Jot down your
reflections in your writer’s notebook.

Discussion
Many authors find revision addictive; the cycle of redrafting and editing
can be continued endlessly, since no text is ever completely finished. But
in the real world, revision must eventually come to an end – an
assignment has to be handed in, a story submitted to a literary

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magazine, and so on. There’s a difference between complacency (not

bothering to revise enough) and being able to let go of a piece after
you’ve done the hard work of revision. Sometimes, too, you can revise
and revise, only to discover that a piece still doesn’t succeed. It might be
painful, but being brave enough to start over from scratch is part of the
creative process as well.

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8 Summary
When the science-fiction novelist Octavia Butler was once asked to
give advice to students, she said:

You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap
and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at
it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
(Butler, 2000)

Becoming a better writer (whether you’re working on a short story, an

autobiographical piece or an academic essay) is a gradual process, a
journey that starts with the basics and involves learning through
practice. Like the collage in Figure 14, a text is composed of many
elements that need to be skilfully arranged to produce a finished piece
of work. The more you practise, the better you’re likely to become.
In this chapter, you’ve been introduced to the different stages of the
creative writing process, beginning with how to generate ideas via
freewriting and keeping a writer’s notebook. You’ve seen how
significant details and sensory descriptions can be employed to recreate
an experience convincingly, and how ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’ can
bring a scene to life for the reader. You’ve been taught how to ‘read
like a writer’ by analysing texts from a diverse group of authors, so as
to learn from their examples of effective writing. You’ve reflected on
your experiences of the writing process, and gained an understanding
of how to evaluate and revise your own work. And throughout, you’ve
been putting these skills into practice via a series of writing activities,
which have asked you to draw on your memories and imagination for
material. Hopefully, you’ll find that your reading, writing and analytical
thinking abilities have been strengthened by studying this chapter –
abilities that are useful in other academic disciplines as well.
Individuals are the products of their cultures, and the texts that they
create can reflect or illuminate, challenge or critique their own and
other cultures in various ways. As a reader and a writer, you get to
participate in shaping the culture you live in (regardless of whether you
realise it!). One of the most lasting cultural values that writers and
readers can exercise in their practice is empathy. Engaging with other
people’s perspectives and cultures through the written word is part of
what makes creative writing so rewarding. As the poet Helen Tookey

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(2019) puts it, ‘I love it when you read a poem and you think, “I
would never have thought of it like that before, but now that you’ve
shown it to me, I can see that’s exactly how it is”.’ Seeing the world in
a different light, and being shown how someone else sees it, is one of
the great pleasures of reading and studying texts. As a creative writer
yourself, a maker of literary texts, you have the opportunity to share
your personal and cultural perspective with others in the same way.

Figure 14 Indian handicraft of Rajasthan collage work. Photo: Dinodia

Photos/Alamy.

You should now return to the module website to continue with

your study of this unit.

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References
Addonizio, K. and Laux, D. (1997) The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the
Pleasures of Writing Poetry. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company.
Adichie, C.N. (2009) ‘The American Embassy’, in The Thing Around Your
Neck. London: Fourth Estate, pp. 128–141.
Banks, I. (1993 [1992]) The Crow Road. London: Abacus.
Butler, O. (2000) ‘Octavia E. Butler: Persistence’, Locus, 44(6). Available at:
https://www.locusmag.com/2000/Issues/06/Butler.html (Accessed: 20
July 2019).
Cameron, J. (2016 [1993]) The Artist’s Way: A Course in Discovering and
Recovering Your Creative Self. London: Macmillan.
Cowan, A. (2013 [2011]) The Art of Writing Fiction. London: Routledge.
Gardner, J. (1991 [1983]) The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers.
London: Vintage.
Kay, S. (2017) The Stolen Child. London: Corvus.
Lamott, A. (1995 [1980]) ‘Shitty First Drafts’, in Bird by Bird: Instructions on
Writing and Life. New York, NY: Anchor, pp. 20–26.
Prose, F. (2012 [2006]) Reading Like a Writer : A Guide for People Who Love
Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. London: Union Books.
Tookey, H. [@PoetryDayUK] (2019) On Empathy Day we’re sharing some of
our favourite observations about the power of #poetry. Here’s
@helentookey1 one of our @ForwardPrizes shortlisted poets
#ReadforEmpathy [Twitter] 11 June. Available at: https://twitter.com/
PoetryDayUK/status/1138347736200359936 (Accessed: 28 September 2019).
Young, K. (1995) ‘Eddie Priest’s Barbershop and Notary’, Poetry Foundation.
Available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52826/eddie-priests-
barbershop-notary (Accessed: 19 January 2019).

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Readings
Reading 1.1 The Crow Road

Source: Banks, I. (1993 [1992]) The Crow Road. London: Abacus,

pp. 17–20.

Outside it was a calmly sombre day, chill and a little damp. I could
smell leaves being burned somewhere. The view down the
crematorium’s birch-lined drive led towards the town and the ocean. In
the distance, through the haze, North Jura was dark pastel and flat-
looking on the unruffled grey blanket of sea. I looked around; dark-
dressed people were everywhere amongst the parked cars, talking
quietly. Their breath rose in the clouds through the still air. Uncle
Hamish was talking to the lawyer Blawke; Aunt Antonia to my mother.
Dad was with the Urvills. […]
[…]
I also thought about talking to James, but little brother was leaning
against the crematorium wall looking bored but cool in his borrowed
great-coat, earplugs in, getting his Walkman fix at last. Still mainlining
The Doors, probably. For a moment I almost missed my elder brother,
Lewis, who hadn’t been able to make it back for the funeral. Lewis is
better-looking, smarter and wittier than I am, so I don’t miss him
often.
I was standing beside Uncle Hamish’s Jaguar. Maybe I should just
get into the car. Or find somebody else to talk to. I could feel that an
attack of awkwardness – the kind of episode I am unhappily prone to
– was imminent.
‘Hi, Prentice. You okay?’
The voice was deep and throaty but female. Ashley Watt strolled up,
put her hand on the side of my shoulder, patting. Her brother Dean
was just behind. I nodded.
‘Yeah. Yeah; fine. How’s yourself ? Hi, Dean.’
‘Hi, man.’

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‘You just back for this?’ Ash asked nodding her head at the low grey
granite of the crematorium buildings. Her long fawn hair was gathered
up; her strong angular face, dominated by a blade of a nose and a pair
of large round-lensed glasses, was concerned and sad. Ash was my age,
but she always made me feel younger.
‘Yeah; back to Glasgow on Monday.’ I looked down. ‘Wow, Ash; I
don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a skirt before.’ Ash always wore jeans.
We’d known each other since we’d used to crawl around on the same
carpets together, but I couldn’t remember seeing her in anything else
but jeans. Yet there were her legs all right; pretty good-looking ones
too, under a knee-length black skirt. She wore a big naval-looking
jacket with the cuffs turned over, and black gloves; medium-high heels
made her the same height as me.
She grinned. ‘Short memory, Prentice. Recall school?’
‘Oh yeah,’ I nodded, still looking at the legs. ‘Apart from then,
though.’ I shrugged, smiled warily at her. I’d gone through a protracted
Unbearable stage while I’d been at high school – it had lasted from my
first day through to about fourth year – and the most vivid memory I
had of Ash from that time was when I and her two brothers had
carried out a highly successful snowball ambush on her, her sister and
their pals as they’d walked back from school one dark evening.
Somebody’s snowball had broken that long sharp nose of Ashley’s, and I
suspected it had been one of mine if for no other reason than because
as far as I knew nobody else had been deploying snowballs whose
ballistic properties had been enhanced by the judicious reinforcements
of their cores with moderately sizeable chuckie stones.
Her nose had been reset, of course, and we’d got on better since
we’d each left school. Ash frowned a little, her slightly magnified grey
eyes searching mine.
‘I was sorry to hear about the old lady. All of us were.’ She swivelled
briefly to Dean, standing lighting up a Regal behind her. He nodded;
black jeans and a dark blue crombie that looked like it had seen better
decades.
I wasn’t sure what to say. ‘I’ll miss her,’ I said eventually. I’d been
trying to not think about it, ever since I’d heard the news.
‘Was it a heart attack, aye, Prentice?’ Dean inquired through his
cloud of smoke.

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‘No,’ I said. ‘She fell off a ladder.’

‘I thought she did that last year,’ Ash said.
‘She did; off a tree. This time she was clearing the gutters. The
ladder slipped and she went through the conservatory roof. She was
dead by the time they got her to the hospital. Shock from blood-loss
apparently.’
‘Oh, Prentice, I’m sorry,’ Ash said, and put her hand on my arm.
Dean shook his head and looked mystified. ‘Ah thought she had a
heart attack.’
‘She did have one,’ I nodded. ‘About five years ago; got a pacemaker
fitted.’
‘Maybe she had a heart attack while she was up the ladder,’ Dean
suggested. Ash kicked his shin. ‘Oo-ya!’ he said.
‘Excuse Mr Sensitivity here,’ Ash said. ‘But like I said: we were all
really sorry to hear, Prentice.’ She looked around. ‘Haven’t seen Lewis
here; could he not make it?’
‘He’s in Australia,’ I sighed. ‘Being funny.’
‘Ah.’ Ash nodded, smiling faintly. ‘Well, that’s a shame.’
‘For the Australians, perhaps,’ I said.
Ash looked sad, even pitying. ‘Aw, Prentice –’
Dean prodded his sister in the back with the hand he wasn’t rubbing
his shin with. ‘Hoi; what was that about yon guy ye bumped into in
that jacuzzi in Berlin? Said ye were goantae tell –’
‘Oh yeah…’ Ash turned from frowning at her brother to frowning at
me, took a breath, then let it out. ‘Hey; you fancy a pint later,
Prentice?’

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Reading 1.2 ‘The American Embassy’

Source: Adichie, C.N. (2009) ‘The American Embassy’, in The

Thing Around Your Neck. London: Fourth Estate, pp. 128–131.

She stood in line outside the American embassy in Lagos, staring

straight ahead, barely moving, a blue plastic file of documents tucked
under her arm. She was the forty-eighth person in the line of about
two hundred that trailed from the closed gates of the American
embassy all the way past the smaller, vine-encrusted gates of the Czech
embassy. She did not notice the newspaper vendors who blew whistles
and pushed The Guardian, Thenews [sic], and The Vanguard in her face.
Or the beggars who walked up and down holding out enamel plates.
Or the ice-cream bicycles that honked. She did not fan herself with a
magazine or swipe at the tiny fly hovering near her ear. When the man
standing behind her tapped her on the back and asked, ‘Do you have
change, abeg, two tens for twenty naira?’ she stared at him for a while,
to focus, to remember where she was, before she shook her head and
said, “No.”
The air hung heavy with moist heat. It weighed on her head, made it
even more difficult to keep her mind blank, which Dr. Balogun had
said yesterday was what she would have to do. He had refused to give
her any more tranquilizers because she needed to be alert for the visa
interview. It was easy enough for him to say that, as though she knew
how to go about keeping her mind blank, as though it was in her
power, as though she invited those images of her son Ugonna’s small,
plump body crumpling before her, the splash on his chest so red she
wanted to scold him about playing with the palm oil in the kitchen.
Not that he could even reach up to the shelf where she kept oil and
spices, not that he could unscrew the cap on the plastic bottle of palm
oil. He was only four years old.
The man behind her tapped her again. She jerked around and nearly
screamed from the sharp pain that ran down her back. Twisted muscle,
Dr. Balogun had said, his expression awed that she had sustained
nothing more serious after jumping down from the balcony.
“See what that useless soldier is doing there,” the man behind her
said.

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She turned to look across the street, moving her neck slowly. A
small crowd had gathered. A soldier was flogging a bespectacled man
with a long whip that curled in the air before it landed on the man’s
face, or his neck, she wasn’t sure because the man’s hands were raised
as if to ward off the whip. She saw the man’s glasses slip and fall. She
saw the heel of the soldier’s boot squash the black frames, the tinted
lenses.
“See how the people are pleading with the solider,” the man behind
her said. “Our people have become too used to pleading with
soldiers.”
She said nothing. He was persistent with his friendliness, unlike the
woman in front of her who had said earlier, “I have been talking to
you and you just look at me like a moo-moo!” and now ignored her.
Perhaps he was wondering why she did not share in the familiarity that
had developed among the others in the line. Because they had all
woken up early—those who had slept at all—to get to the American
embassy before dawn; because they had all struggled for the visa line,
dodging the soldiers’ swinging whips as they were herded back and
forth before the line was finally formed; because they were all afraid
that the American embassy might decide not to open its gates today,
and they would have to do it all over again the day after tomorrow
since the embassy did not open on Wednesdays, they had formed
friendships. Buttoned-up men and women exchanged newspapers and
denunciations of General Abacha’s government, while young people in
jeans, bristling with savoir faire, shared tips on ways to answer
questions for the American student visa.
“Look at his face, all that bleeding. The whip cut his face,” the man
behind her said.
She did not look, because she knew the blood would be red, like
fresh palm oil. Instead she looked up Eleke Crescent, a winding street
of embassies with vast lawns, and at the crowds of people on the sides
of the street. A breathing sidewalk. A market that sprung up during the
American embassy hours and disappeared when the embassy closed.
There was the chair-rental outfit where the stacks of white plastic
chairs that cost one hundred naira per hour decreased fast. There were
the wooden boards propped on cement blocks, colorfully displaying
sweets and mangoes and oranges. There were the young people who
cushioned cigarette-filled trays on their heads with rolls of cloth. There
were the blind beggars led by children, singing blessings in English,

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Yoruba, pidgin, Igbo, Hausa when somebody put money in the plates.
And there was, of course, the makeshift photo studio. A tall man
standing beside a tripod, holding up a chalk-written sign that read
EXCELLENT ONE-HOUR PHOTOS, CORRECT AMERICAN VISA SPECIFICATIONS.
She had had her passport photo taken there, sitting on a rickety stool,
and she was not surprised that it came out grainy, with her face much
lighter-skinned. But then, she had no choice, she couldn’t have taken
the photo earlier.
Two days ago she had buried her child in a grave near a vegetable
patch in their ancestral hometown of Umunnachi, surrounded by well-
wishers she did not remember now. The day before, she had driven her
husband in the boot of their Toyota to the home of a friend, who
smuggled him out of the country. And the day before that, she hadn’t
needed to take a passport photo; her life was normal and she had
taken Ugonna to school, she had bought him a sausage roll at Mr.
Biggs, had sung along with Majek Fashek on her car radio. If a
fortune-teller had told her that she, in the space of a few days, would
no longer recognize her life, she would have laughed. Perhaps even
given the fortune-teller ten naira extra for having a wild imagination.

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Reading 1.3 The Stolen Child

Source: Kay, S. (2017) The Stolen Child. London: Corvus,

pp. 125–128.

Ben is full of beans, running manically around, pulling a caterpillar on

wheels behind him singing, ‘Raining, raining,’ while I try to chivvy Evie
into getting ready. She eventually appears in the kitchen.
‘I want toast,’ she says as she sits at the table.
‘Please.’
‘Uhhh, please. Not brown! You know I hate brown bread!’ she
shrieks when I put a couple of slices in the toaster.
‘You ate it last week. We don’t have any white bread.’
‘But I didn’t like it. I hated it. I’ve always hated it.’
‘So you don’t want toast?’
‘Yes, with chocolate spread so I can’t taste the brown.’
‘We don’t eat chocolate spread for breakfast,’ I say, wondering if I’ve
just made that up; perhaps I’ve been eating Nutella in front of the kids
and setting them a bad example? And is jam really any different? It’s
full of sugar; at least chocolate spread has nuts in it.
‘Cheerios, then.’
‘We’ve got Shreddies or Weetabix.’
‘That’s so boring. Why can’t we have nice cereal like at Sophie’s
house? Or when we went on holiday and we had Frosties.’
‘Evie! Shreddies, Weetabix or toast!’
She sighs elaborately and asks for Weetabix but with warm milk.
While I heat it, and spread butter on her toast for me, she starts
needling Ben, pinching his knees and his elbows. I don’t think she’s
deliberately trying to hurt him, but he starts crying.
‘Evie! Stop it! You’ll have to sit at the other end of the table if you
do that again.’

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She takes her cereal bowl and flounces into the garden. I wince at
the blast of cold air that funnels into the house. […]
[…] I check the time – we’re going to be late. I go outside and find
Evie by the sandpit, humming tunelessly and staring into space.
‘Evie! You need to go upstairs and wash your face and brush your
teeth. Why are you sitting out here? You’re such a daydreamer!’
‘I am NOT! You need to say, “Brush my teeth and then wash my
face” or I’ll get it all wrong! And then you’ll shout at me. As usual!’
‘You’re seven years old!’ I yell. ‘You’re old enough to get washed
every morning without having to be reminded by your mummy!’
I go back indoors, wipe Ben’s face and the table, and clear up all the
breakfast stuff and get both of us into our outdoor things – I even
manage to find my purse and mobile without a last-minute panic – but
Evie still has not reappeared. I strap Ben into the buggy and put Bella
on the lead. When Evie doesn’t come, I run upstairs. She’s not in the
bathroom and she clearly hasn’t washed because her facecloth and
toothbrush are dry. I fling open the door to her bedroom but the
room is empty. I start to feel anxious.
Downstairs, Ben, trapped in the pushchair, starts to scream, ‘Out!’
and drum his feet against the wall. I’ve reached the point where I want
to scream and bang my head against the wall myself. I’m hot in my
winter coat and feel faint. I look in my bedroom and the studio. I find
her in Ben’s room, half hidden by his bed. She’s crouching on the floor
and she turns and gives me a beautiful smile.
‘Look, Mum, it’s a space ship called Noah. It’s going to take all the
animals off the earth before the aliens destroy the planet. We’re going
to start a new world called Paradise Bottom.’
She gives a little giggle at the silliness of her stellar name. She’s
made a tall, thin, skyscraper of a sculpture out of Ben’s Duplo,
complete with Playmobil animals hanging onto ledges and peering out
of windows.
‘Evie! Ben is crying downstairs, in his buggy. We are all waiting for
you! Again! Why can’t you just do as you are told? For once in your
life!’

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Her face clouds and the light goes out of her eyes. She stands up
and kicks her sculpture in the middle. Pieces of Duplo ricochet round
the room.
‘Evie! For God’s sake!’ I shout again.
There’s a wail and a crash, and I turn and run down the stairs. Ben
has managed to push the wall so hard, he’s upended the buggy and is
now upside down, still strapped in and yelling. He’s hit his head on the
hall floor, and when I right the buggy, there’s a red mark. […]
‘Look what you’ve done to your brother!’
Evie is slowly putting her coat on. Her voice is quiet and precise.
She says, ‘He’s not my brother.’
‘Of course Ben is your brother!’ I kiss him but Ben continues to cry.
‘Why would you say something like that?’ I ask, as I manoeuvre him
out of the front door.
‘Because he’s not. None of you are my real family.’
‘Evie, we are! We are your family.’
‘I hate you all,’ she says. I’m going to run away and live on the
moor.’
‘Now you’re being ridiculous,’ I say, losing patience.
We walk to school in silence, apart from Ben, who sobs
intermittently and says, ‘Ow,’ pointing to his head with one fat finger. I
need to try to talk to her, when I’m calmer and can work out what to
say. By the time we reach the playground, I start to feel like a human
being instead of a bomb. My heart rate has returned to normal and
I’ve stopped thinking I’ll shake her or slap her if I’m not careful.
‘Evie,’ I say, bending down next to her.
I want to tell her that she needs to be grown up and to take
responsibility for getting ready by herself and that I’m sorry I shouted
at her, because I love her – I love her to the moon and back – but
before I can say anything, she says, ‘You’re not very nice,’ and runs off
to her classroom.

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I feel horrible. I look around me, cringing in case anyone else has
heard her. None of the other mums are paying me any attention, but
then I see Hannah [the teaching assistant], standing in the door,
watching me, and my cheeks burn.

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Reading 1.4 ‘Eddie Priest’s Barbershop & Notary’

Source: Young, K. (1995) ‘Eddie Priest’s Barbershop and Notary’,

Poetry Foundation. Available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.
org/poems/52826/eddie-priests-barbershop-notary (Accessed: 19
January 2019).

Closed Mondays

is music is men
off early from work is waiting
for the chance at the chair
while the eagle claws holes
in your pockets keeping
time by the turning
of rusty fans steel flowers with
cold breezes is having nothing
better to do than guess at the years
of hair matted beneath the soiled caps
of drunks the pain of running
a fisted comb through stubborn
knots is the dark dirty low
down blues the tender heads
of sons fresh from cornrows all
wonder at losing half their height
is a mother gathering hair for good
luck for a soft wig is the round
difficulty of ears the peach

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faced boys asking Eddie

to cut in parts and arrows
wanting to have their names read
for just a few days and among thin
jazz is the quick brush of a done
head the black flood around
your feet grandfathers
stopping their games of ivory
dominoes just before they reach the bone
yard is winking widowers announcing
cut it clean off I’m through courting
and hair only gets in the way is the final
spin of the chair a reflection of
a reflection that sting of wintergreen
tonic on the neck of a sleeping snow
haired man when you realize it is
your turn you are next

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Chapter 2
Narrative journeys
Written by Heather Richardson
Contents
1 Introduction 209
2 Beginnings 211
2.1 Novels and short stories: ways of beginning 211
3 Narrative structures 216
3.1 Scenes 217
3.2 Scenes in the short story 220
3.3 Acts 223
3.4 The five-act structure 224
3.5 Using act structures in your own writing 226
4 The Heroic Journey 230
5 Endings 235
6 Summary 239
References 240
Readings 242
Reading 2.1 Novel openings 242
Reading 2.2 Short story openings 244
Reading 2.3 ‘By the Bog of Cats…’ 245
Reading 2.4 The Great Gatsby 248
Reading 2.5 ‘The Impossible Planet’ 250
Reading 2.6 ‘Blue Denim’ 261
Reading 2.7 ‘The Dirt We Do Not Eat’ 264
Reading 2.8 Novel endings 266
Reading 2.9 Short story endings 268
 1 Introduction

1 Introduction
One of the most remarkable things about narrative structure is that
almost everyone, whatever their age and educational background,
understands and recognises it. You’ll recall from your study of Delphi
in Book 1 (where you looked at the stories written about the oracle in
the mid fifth century BCE) that many of the tales had structural
similarities. As you work through this chapter, you’ll find out more
about how deeply rooted narrative structure is in the way that stories
are told across cultures. In essence though:

What [narrative] has to do is move – end up in a different place

from where it started. That’s what narrative does. It goes. It
moves. Story is change.
(Le Guin, 2015 [1998])

For most of us, our first exposure to narrative structure comes in early
childhood, through nursery rhymes, fairy tales and children’s television
programmes. The nursery rhyme ‘Humpty Dumpty’ illustrates this well:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

The simple narrative structure here is as follows:

. Humpty is in one situation (sitting on the wall).
. That situation changes (he falls off).
. This results in consequences (he breaks, and can’t be put back
together again).
You will probably be able to think of other nursery rhymes that display
a similar structure.

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Figure 1 Ron Embleton, ‘Humpty Dumpty on the Wall’.

Photo: © Look and Learn/Bridgeman Images.

As we grow up, we continue to absorb the concept of narrative

structure through every novel or short story we read; every TV drama,
film or stage play we watch; and every radio play or audiobook we
listen to. We recognise when a structure isn’t successful – when we
lose interest halfway through a film or finish a novel feeling dissatisfied
with the ending, for example. You might think this would mean that
when we come to practise creative writing of our own we’d have no
problem with structure, but many writers – myself included – have to
work hard to build a successful structure for their writing.
As you progress through this chapter, you’ll look at examples of how
novelists, short story writers and dramatists work with structure and
demonstrate different narrative techniques. Not only will the writing
activities in this chapter equip you with an additional method of
analysing literature and literary techniques, but you will also develop
skills that you can use in other types of writing, such as academic
essays. When you produce a piece of writing, you gain a better
understanding of the processes an author goes through as they shape
and develop their work. This is insight that you can apply to your
study of literature, whether you’re reading stories from the ancient
world, a nineteenth-century novel or a contemporary autobiography.

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2 Beginnings
You have already encountered the Greek philosopher Aristotle from
your study of Athens in Book 1. Drama, in particular tragedy, was
one of the many aspects of cultural, ethical and political life that
Aristotle analysed in his work. His treatise Poetics, written in the fourth
century BCE, identifies something that may seem obvious: that to be
complete, a story must have a beginning, a middle and an end. He
goes on to explain some of the properties of a beginning, saying that it
is ‘that which itself does not follow necessarily from anything else, but
some second thing exists or occurs after it’ (Aristotle, Poetics 7;
Aristotle, 1996, p. 13). To put it more simply, the beginning is the
point before things happen. This places quite a burden on the
beginning: it has to be a suitable starting point for all that is to follow.
For writers, deciding where to begin the narrative is one of the most
important aspects of the craft. One common pitfall is to start a story
too soon, perhaps spending several paragraphs or pages on the
background to the main events. You may have discovered that you do
this in your own writing, and in actual fact many established writers go
through this process with their first draft of a piece (something you
will explore further in Chapter 3). Sometimes we have to get some
writing on the page (even if it is not included in the final draft) in
order to discover where the story begins.

2.1 Novels and short stories: ways of beginning

Novels and short stories are both forms of fiction, and you’ll have
encountered several examples of them in the module so far, such as
the novel Jane Eyre (1847) and Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The
Oval Portrait’ (1842). The most obvious difference between the two
forms is their length. Generally a short story will be anywhere between
1000 and 10,000 words long – although it can be longer or shorter. A
novel is usually over 50,000 words – but it can be shorter. Sometimes
very short novels are referred to as novellas. There are no hard and
fast rules. Much of our focus in this chapter will be on the way that
narrative structure is used in the short story, and in the next activity
we will also touch on how structure can be applied to the novel.

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Activity 1
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)

Now turn to Reading 2.1, which provides the opening paragraphs of

three different novels:
1 The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald is set in 1920s New
York.
2 An Awfully Big Adventure (1989) by Beryl Bainbridge is set mainly in
a provincial English theatre in the early 1950s.
3 Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1983) by Gabriel García Márquez is
also set in the 1950s, but in a small town in Colombia, South
America.
As you read the extracts, take note of what the writer does to indicate to
you, the reader, where you are in the chronology of the story, and what
you can expect of the narrative journey ahead.

Discussion
1 The extract from The Great Gatsby establishes the voice of the
narrator. When a piece of fiction has a narrator, their role is to
convey the events of the story from their point of view. Sometimes a
narrator can sit ‘outside’ the events of a narrative, such as in Charles
Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) where the narrator describes
what is happening to Scrooge and the other characters. However, in
The Great Gatsby the narrator is a character in the novel – Nick
Carraway – giving his account of what has happened. By quoting his
father’s advice he hints to the reader that we’re about to hear about
people we may be inclined to condemn or disapprove of.
2 An Awfully Big Adventure opens with the aftermath of a theatre
production. There’s a sense of disquiet and disorder – the mysterious
crying of a phantom child; the abandoned teddy bear – and so we
guess that something bad has happened or is going to happen.
3 Chronicle of a Death Foretold opens by telling us exactly who is
going to die, and when. As the first paragraph continues, we realise
that the story is being recounted many years after the killing
occurred.

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The opening lines that you have just read are not situated
chronologically at the beginning of the events that will be described in
the rest of the narrative. The story of Jay Gatsby, and his effect on
Nick Carraway, is being told in retrospect. An Awfully Big Adventure
opens (and closes) just after the death of one of the main characters in
the novel. The rest of the novel tells the story of events leading up to
that death. Chronicle of a Death Foretold opens as the key character
Santiago Nasar wakes for what will be the last morning of his life. Like
The Great Gatsby, it is also being told some time after the key events
of the novel, but while the narrative of Gatsby unfolds over several
weeks, Chronicle focuses on just two hours. The bulk of Chronicle has
something of a documentary tone, as the narrator recounts what led
up to that day and speaks to witnesses.
The beginning of a short story must perform the same function as the
beginning of a novel – it must be the point after which things happen
– but because the short story is a more compressed form it will often
do so more economically. By this I mean that its opening lines need to
immediately bring us into the world of the story. We can then quickly
grasp who the main character is, their situation, and what is likely to
be the theme of the piece.

Activity 2
(Allow around 20 minutes to complete this activity.)
Reading 2.2 contains more opening lines, this time from three short
stories with contemporary settings:
1 ‘Natterbean’ (2018) by June Caldwell is set in Dublin.
2 ‘Here, Where We Live’ (2014) by Meg Pokrass is set in California.
3 ‘Tonde’s Return’ (2009) by Lawrence Hoba is set in Zimbabwe.
When you’ve read each of them, make a note of what the opening lines
tell you about the world of the story and the characters themselves.

Discussion
1 You may have picked up that the main character in ‘Natterbean’ is
resentful, angry and poorly paid – he drinks cheap beer, and loathes
the off-licence owner who can afford private healthcare.

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2 The narrator of ‘Here, Where We Live’ has moved away from their
home town. We also get a sense of their anxiety following their
mother’s surgery for breast cancer.
3 In ‘Tonde’s Return’, we know that an older sister is reunited with a
brother who has been away so long that he’s a stranger to her.
If you compare what you’ve learned here with what you learned from the
novels’ openings in the previous activity, you’ll see that while both set
the narrative in motion, the openings of the short stories are more clearly
situated at the point where the events begin.

Later in this chapter, we’ll return to the three novels and short stories
that we have looked at in the previous two activities to find out how
their authors bring them to an end.
Now that you have looked at how other writers open their stories, it is
time to think about your own writing. When you come to write the
beginnings of your own stories you should aim for sentences that
quickly draw the reader in, engaging their interest and making them
intrigued about what happens next. Before starting the next activity,
you might like to look back at how the short story writers (in the
previous activity) achieved this – perhaps it is the vivid imagery, the
sensory detail, or simply the choice of words that catches your
attention.

Activity 3
(Allow around 15 minutes to complete this activity.)

Have a go at writing the opening sentences of a story (about 50 to 100

words).
Don’t worry about how the story is going to develop, as the purpose of
this exercise is simply to grab the reader’s attention. You don’t need to
know where the story goes after this.
If you wish, you can use one of the following starting points:

. The first time I met…

. The front door was open, but the house was…
. His grandmother always said…

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Discussion
From creating your own opening lines, you should now have a better
idea of what goes into crafting an effective beginning. Sometimes
coming up with that opening sentence is enough to get you started on
writing a complete story.
I have written stories that started life as no more than one line, where I
had no idea where the story was going to go. For example, my short
story ‘The Walled-In Room’ (2004) grew out of just one sentence:
‘Freedom was all very well, but it didn’t put food in my belly.’ As soon as
I wrote it, I immediately had a sense of my narrator’s ‘voice’ and who he
was – someone who’d recently been released after serving a long prison
sentence. The story developed as I allowed that character to begin to
make his way in a world he barely recognised because he’d been locked
away for so long.

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3 Narrative structures
We’ve looked at the way narratives begin so now let’s consider how
they are structured. As you’ll recall from the interview with Lisa Smith,
Edward Hogan and Thomas Crowe on the module website, writers
often don’t consciously think about the structure of their work until
they’re a fair way into the writing process. They may, however, have a
loose idea as to the overall shape. For example, when I began writing
my short story ‘All the Rules We Could Ask For’ (2017), I knew that
the narrative would take place over the course of a ferry crossing from
Ireland to Britain, and that the events would occur in chronological
order, but I had no real idea of what those events would be, who they
would involve or how they would unfold. I was content to let these
details emerge through the process of writing. Nevertheless, it’s still
instructive to analyse how structure operates in a piece of writing, and
to do this we’ll take a closer look at the building blocks of structure.

Figure 2 Artist’s view of a fractal universe. Photo © Illustration Gregoire

Cirade/Novapix/Bridgeman Images.

You may have come across the mathematical concept of fractals (see
Figure 2), where a pattern is made up of smaller copies of itself, and
each of those smaller copies is itself made up of smaller copies, to
infinity. In some ways narrative structure is constructed in a similar
way, with the overall beginning, middle and end being made up of
smaller sections with their own beginnings, middles and ends. To

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understand this better it can be useful to use terms that derive from
drama, and the way a play is usually made up of acts, which are
themselves made up of scenes.
Fiction and drama are, of course, very different literary forms, but they
both have narratives, and many fiction writers (myself included) look to
some of the structural techniques that drama uses to tell stories to help
understand and shape our own work.
These days we’re most likely to encounter drama in film, television,
stage plays or radio drama, but it is a literary form with a long heritage
across many cultures, and already on this module you’ve encountered
the work of one of the best-known dramatists, Shakespeare. What we
call Western drama developed from the theatrical culture in the ancient
world, and dramatic forms were also a feature of ancient Indian and
Chinese literary culture among others.

3.1 Scenes
So what exactly is a scene? The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
defines it as the following:

A scene normally represents actions happening in one place at

one time […] In the study of narrative works, ‘scene’ is also the
name given to a ‘dramatic’ method of narration that presents
events at roughly the same pace as that at which they are
supposed to be occurring, i.e. usually in detail and with substantial
use of dialogue.
(Baldick, 2008b)

At its most basic, a scene is a block of narrative where a change

occurs. It may be anything from a few sentences to many pages long.
According to the playwright Noël Greig:

the fortunes of the protagonist have changed by the end of the

scene. They may be large or small changes, emotional or material
changes, etc., depending on the story you are writing and the
needs of the narrative; but the characters leave the scene changed
in some way.
(2005, p. 178)

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Let’s look at how scenes can change a character’s circumstances,

knowledge or state of mind in the next activity.

Activity 4
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)
For this activity you’ll read two scenes: one from a stage play and one
from a novel. As you read, bear in mind the questions that follow.

Figure 3 Playwright Marina Carr. Photo ©

Sophie Bassouls/Bridgeman Images.
First read Reading 2.3, which is a complete scene from the stage play
By the Bog of Cats… by Irish playwright Marina Carr (Figure 3). The
protagonist of the play is Hester Swane, whose former lover, Carthage
Kilbride, is marrying a younger woman, Caroline Cassidy. Carthage has
been trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade Hester to leave the area. Like
many of Carr’s plays, By the Bog of Cats… is set in the Irish midlands
– Carr grew up in County Offaly in Ireland – but her work often draws on
Greek drama and the myths it explores, which demonstrates how
narratives can cross cultures. In the case of By the Bog of Cats…, Carr
echoes the ancient Greek playwright Euripides’ tragedy Medea
(431 BCE).

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Then read Reading 2.4, in which we return to The Great Gatsby. In this
second short scene, Nick Carraway is trying to process the catastrophic
events of the night before, which led to a fatal car accident. He receives
a phone call from Jordan Baker, the young woman he’s been having a
half-hearted relationship with.
As you read the two scenes think about:

. How the two protagonists (Hester Swane and Nick Carraway)

illustrate Greig’s point that the character should leave a scene
changed in some way.
. What has changed for both of them?
Jot down some notes after you’ve read each extract.

Discussion
At the beginning of the scene in By the Bog of Cats…, the two women
have different kinds of dominance over each other. Caroline Cassidy is
in her wedding dress – a visual message that she has successfully won
the battle for Carthage Kilbride’s love. She also has public opinion and
her family’s wealth on her side. However, she’s nervous, and easily
intimidated by Hester Swane. In many ways, Hester has the upper hand,
taking Caroline by surprise, threatening her verbally and – by the end of
the scene – physically. Hester’s behaviour towards Caroline makes the
younger woman more determined than ever to get her moved on. So, by
the end of the scene, both women are completely entrenched in their
positions, and both have issued threats that they’ll find it hard to back
down from.
In the scene from The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway experiences a
sudden reversal of his feelings towards Jordan Baker. Everything about
her – her voice, her actions, her suggestions – irritates and aggrieves
him. He goes from being on the verge of falling in love with her to not
caring if he never sees her again.
Look at your own notes and compare and contrast your impressions of
the two scenes.

Now it’s your turn to try your hand at writing a dramatic scene, in the
style of a play script. Don’t worry if you’ve never written anything like
this before: the purpose of the activity is to help you understand how
a scene is constructed, and there will be simple step-by-step guidance

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to help you. You may wish to use some of the conventions of drama
layout, as seen in By the Bog of Cats… (Reading 2.3), but there’s no
need to include stage directions for the purposes of this exercise.

Activity 5
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)
Write a very short scene (between 10 and 15 lines) of a confrontation
between two characters. For example, it could be a teacher
reprimanding a pupil, or a supervisor criticising an employee.
Follow this breakdown to help you:

. Use the first three to five lines to establish the situation, including
who is in the dominant position.
. In the next three to five lines, you might show if the power dynamic
between the two people is shifting.
. During the final three to five lines, make it clear that there’s been a
reversal of the dominance between the characters – the dynamic
between them has changed.
If you’re not sure how to begin, here are some lines to start you off:
Supervisor Nice of you to join us. You do realise you’re meant to
start at 9am on the dot?
Employee Sorry, sorry. Traffic was a nightmare, and then I couldn’t
find a parking space.

Discussion
Sometimes when writing a scene between two characters, the dialogue
between them can quickly run out of steam. That shouldn’t have
happened to you here, though, because you were deliberately changing
the power balance between the characters at given points, and that will
have moved the scene on. Don’t worry if your scene ended up being
melodramatic or unrealistic. The important thing was that something
changed in the dynamic between the two people over the course of their
encounter and at least one of them left the scene changed in some way.

3.2 Scenes in the short story

To further develop our understanding of how scenes work, let’s
consider the structure of a short story and look at how ‘scenes’ come
together to form a complete narrative.

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Activity 6
(Allow around 1 hour to complete this activity.)

For this activity you’re going to read a complete short story – ‘The
Impossible Planet’ (1953) by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Dick
published prolifically, particularly during the 1950s and 60s, and his
fiction reveals anxieties about consumerism, conformity and
authoritarianism. Although first published in 1953, ‘The Impossible
Planet’ shows ecological concerns that feel very current.

Figure 4 Exoplanet Kepler-64b. Photo: © Ron Miller/Novapix/Bridgeman

Images.
Read the story (Reading 2.5) through once to get an overall picture, then
read it again, noting how many scenes there are. As you do, make some
notes on the following points:

. How can you tell where one scene ends and the next begins?
. What reversals do the characters experience in each scene in ‘The
Impossible Planet’?
. How does the power dynamic between the characters change from
the beginning to the end of the scene? Is this reflected in the overall
structure of the whole story?
. ‘The Impossible Planet’ is about a literal journey, but what personal
journey (emotionally or ethically) does each character go on?

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Discussion
My reading of ‘The Impossible Planet’ is that it is divided into five
scenes, which I have listed below. Sometimes the transition from one
scene to the next is indicated by what’s called a ‘paragraph break’,
where one section of text ends and then there’s some blank space
before the next paragraph begins. There are examples of that between
Scenes 1 and 2, and 3 and 4. At other times the beginning of a line is
indicated by a change of scene, such as ‘Emphor III turned silently
below them’ at the beginning of Scene 3. The end of a scene can be
indicated by what sounds like a concluding line, such as ‘“Strange,” he
said’ at the end of Scene 4.
1 In the first scene, spaceship pilot Andrews is faced with an
impossible request: to transport 350-year-old Irma Gordon and her
robot servant to a planet that doesn’t exist, the mythical place known
as Earth. After initially telling her that he can’t take her, Andrews
changes his mind and says he can, in return for a large payment.
Andrews is the dominant character – in charge of the ship – but his
routine has been disturbed by Irma Gordon’s request.
2 In the second scene, Andrews explains his plan to his co-pilot Norton
that he intends to take Irma Gordon to another planet, pretending
that it’s Earth. Norton tries to assert dominance over Andrews by
dissuading him from going through with his plan, but is unsuccessful.
3 In the third scene, their spaceship approaches the planet, which has
been gutted for its minerals and metals, leaving it devastated. Irma
Gordon is distressed by what she sees. Andrews compels Norton to
accompany her on an excursion to the planet’s surface. Although
Andrews is still holding on to his dominant position, he is being
challenged and unsettled.
4 The fourth scene happens later in the chronology of the story, as
Norton tells Andrews what happened on the excursion: Irma Gordon
died at the shore of a toxic sea, and her robot servant disappeared
into the water carrying her body. Norton tells Andrews that he no
longer wants to work with him and doesn’t want his share of the
payment. Andrews picks up a small metal disc that he finds on the
ground. Norton finally gains dominance over Andrews. Irma Gordon’s
death has pushed him to take a moral stance on Andrews’s actions.
5 In the brief, final scene back on the spaceship, Andrews looks again
at the disc he picked up. He makes out the Latin words E Pluribus
Unum engraved on it, but they mean nothing to him, so he throws it
away. The reader realises that the metal disc was an American coin,
and that the planet was, in fact, Earth – ecologically ruined by human

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activity. This reversal puts the reader in the dominant position,

because we know more than Andrews.
At the start of the story, Andrews is unscrupulous and mercenary, Norton
is just doing his job and Gordon is being exploited. By the end, Andrews
is unsettled, Norton has shown moral courage, and Gordon has
achieved her heart’s desire – she has returned to humanity’s birthplace.

3.3 Acts
Just as beginnings are points after which something happens, so each
scene must be followed by another one. In drama, scenes are organised
into acts. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines an act as:

A major division in the action of a play, comprising one or more

scenes. A break between acts often coincides with a point at
which the action is interrupted before resuming at a later fictional
time, or at which it moves to a different venue.
(Baldick, 2008a)

Traditionally, a play is made up of three or five acts. Twelfth Night

(1601–02), which you studied in the previous block, has five acts, each
made up of anywhere from one to five scenes (although these act
breaks were likely to have been added to Shakespeare’s plays by later
editors). We will look at the five-act structure in more detail in
Section 3.4. More recent works, such as By the Bog of Cats…, are often
structured as two acts – possibly for the pragmatic reason that modern
theatre audiences expect there to be an interval during the
performance. Another popular form in contemporary theatre is the
one-act play, which is generally around 15 to 30 minutes long.
Regardless of how many acts there are in a play, the pattern of change
we identified at scene level can also be seen at act level. If, as Greig
explained, characters leave a scene having changed in some way, a
similar process also operates in each act, moving the narrative forward.
John Yorke explains it like this:

Acts are a unit of action bound by a character’s desire. They have

their own beginning, middle and end, the latter of which spins the
narrative off in a new and unexpected direction […] It’s

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something the Greeks called peripeteia, a word most commonly

translated as ‘reversal’.
In simple terms, a character is pursuing a specific goal when
something unexpected happens to change the nature and direction
of their quest. While minor reversals can occur in every scene,
bigger ones tend to divide the work into specific acts.
(2014, p. 25)

For example, you can see reversals in action in the second act of
Twelfth Night as each scene takes one of the narrative strands forward.
We find out that Sebastian is alive, but thinks his sister, Viola, is dead.
We see Viola – disguised as a young man – is falling in love with
Orsino. But most importantly, from the point of view of change,
Olivia’s pompous steward, Malvolio, is deceived into thinking that his
mistress is harbouring a secret passion for him. The act ends with this
pivotal moment, which initiates much of the humorous action for the
remaining three acts of the play.

3.4 The five-act structure

Another model we can ‘borrow’ from drama to analyse a piece of
fiction is the five-act structure, which you’ve already encountered in
Twelfth Night. Unlike in a script for a play, in prose fiction it’s not
spelled out where a new act begins. However, once you get tuned in to
analysing a story’s structure you will start to notice the transition from
one act to the next, as we did in the previous activity with scenes.
Let’s look at the key features of the five-act structure:
. Act 1: the set-up, where we are introduced to all or most of the
main characters. Something will happen (known in scriptwriting as
the ‘inciting incident’) that sets the events of the story in motion.
The act ends with a turning point.
. Act 2: things start to become more complicated. The main
character may achieve an initial objective.
. Act 3: the journey (literal and/or metaphorical), where the main
characters pursue their desires and confront various challenges and
problems. The main crisis of the narrative happens in this act,
usually at the midpoint of the whole narrative. The main

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characters will make a decision from which there is no going back.

This crisis is often linked to the turning point at the end of the act.
. Act 4: increasing complications and reversals.
. Act 5: the resolution, where the story reaches its climax, and
where the consequences of the decision made in Act 2 finally denouement
become apparent. There will often be some kind of final ‘battle’,
and the narrative will reach its conclusion.
This structure rather elegantly demonstrates the dramatic arc, where
the action rises until the midpoint and falls or races towards the
resolution at the end. Although some of the terms we’ve been using
here sound very dramatic – like ‘crisis’ and ‘climax’ – this structural
framework can be seen in all sorts of writing, from Shakespearean
tragedy to gentle romance, from literary fiction to Hollywood
blockbuster.
In Activity 6 we broke the short story ‘The Impossible Planet’ into
scenes, but now we’re going to look at it through the lens of the five-
act structure:

Act Events
Act 1 The set-up establishes the characters and setting of the story –
Irma’s request is the inciting incident; the turning point is
Andrews finally agreeing to her request, for a large payment.
Act 2 Increasing complications – Norton tries to dissuade Andrews
from his plan to con Irma. Andrews struggles to find a planet
that he can fool Irma into thinking is Earth.
Act 3 Crisis/midpoint – they are all shocked at the state of the planet,
with Irma particularly devastated. She insists on being taken to
the sea.
Act 4 Increasing complications and reversals – Irma dies and is
carried into the sea by her robot. Norton tells Andrews that he
no longer wants to work with him. Andrews picks up a metal
disc.
Act 5 Climax – Andrews looks at the Latin words on the metal disc,
which mean nothing to him, but an American reader (Dick was
writing primarily for an American audience) will realise that it's
a US coin and that the planet really was Earth.

So as you can see, the dramatic arc of ‘The Impossible Planet’ maps
quite neatly onto the five-act structure. Let’s now see how other genres
of fiction may display this.

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Activity 7
(Allow around 20 minutes to complete this activity.)

Reading 2.6 is a short romantic story called ‘Blue Denim’ (2013) by Della
Galton, which was first published in the magazine Woman’s Weekly.
Read it through and note how it maps onto the five-act structure.

Discussion
The inciting incident comes right at the start of the story, when the
narrator meets and falls in love with her blue-eyed fairground worker.
She faces family opposition, and her own doubts and insecurities about
her lover – the increasing complications found in the run up to the
midpoint. The crisis comes when she falls pregnant. There are more
complications and reversals as the young man struggles to adjust to
settled life, and then he is suddenly gone. The climax is the revelation
that he is dead – and that they did not tell her disapproving family about
his terminal illness. The resolution is the narrator’s hope that her pain
will pass and that their baby daughter, and the memory of their love, will
sustain her.

3.5 Using act structures in your own writing

What is the significance of structural analysis when it comes to your
own creative writing? If you already have some experience of writing
short stories, you’ll probably be familiar with the problem of a story
running out of steam making it difficult to finish. If you have managed
to finish a piece, you may have a niggling feeling that it hasn’t worked:
perhaps the ending feels flat, or it ‘sags’ in the middle. In both these
situations, it can be helpful to examine how the piece maps on to the
five-act structure. When I’m revising troublesome pieces of my own, I
find the five-act structure a particularly useful tool. Some of the things
I will check are:
. Has the inciting incident been followed through?
. Does the main character have a desire?
. Have they encountered obstacles of increasing difficulty?
. Is there a midpoint crisis, with a decision that has consequences?

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. If my story is finished, does the ending follow logically from the

crisis? If it isn’t finished, do I need to revisit some of those earlier
points to change something?
Of course, there can be reasons other than structural problems that
weaken a story. Perhaps the main characters are not sufficiently
complex, or the underlying premise doesn’t give enough scope for the
story to develop. However, my experience as a writer is that answering
the structural questions raised above has a positive impact on all
aspects of a piece, and can resolve other, non-structural issues.
As well as using the five-act structure to redraft or refine writing that’s
already been done, it can also be useful as a way of planning out work.
Having even the sketchiest ‘road map’ before you begin can save a lot
of wasted effort and wrong turns. The following table shows a worked
example, using an idea that I’ll probably never get around to turning
into a finished piece. The scenario is that a middle-aged librarian (let’s
call her Sue) is faced with redundancy. In my mind, this is going to be
a comedy. Sue is obsessed with the books of the children’s author
Enid Blyton and keeps asking herself: ‘What would Enid do?’.

Figure 5 A collection of Enid Blyton’s books. Photo: Elly Godfroy / Alamy.

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Act Event
Act 1 Sue finds out she’s going to be made redundant due to local
authority cuts (inciting incident).
Act 2 Sue seeks comfort in rereading her childhood collection of Enid
Blyton books. She also consults her friends for advice: Tasha, a
flaky life coach; Bill, a retired bus driver and local history
obsessive; Danni, a teenage tearaway.

A new and additional concern is that a property developer is

planning to tear down a nearby Victorian mill in order to build a
shopping centre. Inspired by the courageous characters in
Blyton’s books, Sue and Bill try to reason with the hard-hearted
boss of the property company, without success (increasing
complications as she tries to follow her friend’s conflicting
advice about what to do with her life and also battles against
the building plans).
Act 3 After several failed attempts at new jobs (telesales, market
research) and increasingly desperate for money, Sue takes a
job as a cleaner at the headquarters of the property developer.
Egged on by Danni, she tries to sabotage the plans for the
shopping centre (crisis/midpoint). It all goes wrong and she
gets arrested (turning point).
Act 4 Sue’s court case draws public attention to the plan of knocking
down the Victorian mill. She gets lots of public support, but also
objections because the shopping centre will create new jobs.
The hard-hearted property developer is impressed by her
tenacity and ingenuity. He discovers her passion for Enid
Blyton and is reminded how much he enjoyed the same books
when he was young. Sue is found guilty, but the judge lets her
off with a community service order (increasing complications
and reversals).
Act 5 The new shopping centre is built, but the Victorian façade is
preserved. Sue succeeds in opening a new library in the
shopping centre, fully funded by the property developer (climax
and resolution).

As you can see from this brief plan, I still have a lot of thinking to do
if I want to turn my idea into a complete story or play, but planning
out the events in this way is a good starting point. The plan allows a
lot of scope for development: for example, if I wanted to turn it into a
romantic comedy, I could make the boss of the property company
handsome and lonely as well as hard-hearted. That way I could have
him and Sue get together at the end, bonding over their shared love of
Enid Blyton. As it stands, the story idea is very middle class and

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conventional, conforming to a lot of the tropes of romantic fiction,

such as boy-meets-girl, and culture-versus-commerce. If I chose to, I
could tell the story from a different perspective entirely, or work within
the same structure to subvert or challenge these conventions.

Activity 8
(Allow around 20 minutes to complete this activity.)
Sketch out a plan for a story of your own, using the five-act structure as
your framework. Don’t go into too much detail and remember that you
don’t need to know exactly how all the elements of the story will work.
Aim to write no more than 500 words in total.
You may already have an idea for a story (perhaps arising from
Activity 3 or Activity 5). Alternatively, you can use one of these
scenarios:

. A young person leaves their rural community to seek work in the big
city where their lover is studying.
. Two siblings make a dangerous journey to escape political unrest in
their home country.
. The harmony of a group of allotment owners is disrupted by a new
arrival.

Discussion
As you worked through this activity, you may have found that being
forced to come up with some of the key structural elements we’ve
discussed prompted your creativity. Perhaps your characters’
personalities emerged as you invented obstacles for them to face. You
may also have found that the story changed as you planned it, meaning
you had to go back and change some earlier components so that the
structure made sense.

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4 The Heroic Journey

You’ve already encountered some of the myths of ancient Greece and
Rome earlier in this module, so you will be aware of the cultural
significance of myth in art and literature. Myth is also at the heart of
one of the core concepts in narrative and Creative Writing, namely the
Heroic Journey. This concept is based on Joseph Campbell’s analysis
of the structure of myths, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). The
implications of Campbell’s ideas for writers were later developed in
Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey (1999). In simple terms, the
Heroic Journey is a structural pattern that can be seen in stories
throughout history and prehistory – from myths and legends that were
passed down orally by storytellers long before being written down, to
modern films and novels.
Vogler identifies 12 stages to the Heroic Journey:

1 Ordinary world
2 Call to adventure
3 Refusal of the call
4 Meeting with the mentor
5 Crossing the first threshold
6 Tests, allies, enemies
7 Approach to the inmost cave
8 Ordeal
9 Reward (seizing the sword)
10 The road back
11 Resurrection
12 Return with the elixir.
(1999, p. 14)

One of the most frequently cited feature film examples of the Heroic
Journey is Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope
(1977), but it’s possible to see this pattern in everything from The
Hunger Games trilogy (2008–10) to Sanskrit epics such as the
Mahabharata (c.400 BCE) and the Ramayana (seventh to fourth century
BCE). Narratives don’t always mirror the steps of the journey slavishly.

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For example, in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Scrooge meets a trio of

mentors – the spirits of Christmas past, present and future – each of
whom leads him through some sort of spiritual trauma before he faces
the ultimate ordeal of seeing what the future holds if he doesn’t change
his ways. He ‘seizes the sword’ and vows to change, and then takes the
road back to his ordinary world, now equipped with the ‘elixir’ (his
changed heart and the willingness to do good). Given the nature of the
myths they are drawing on, Campbell and Vogler’s focus is mainly on
the male heroic model. However, the Heroic Journey can also be
traced through work with female protagonists, such as in Jane Eyre.

Activity 9
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)

Roxane Gay is an American writer of Haitian descent. Her short story

‘The Dirt We Do Not Eat’ (2018) is set in Haiti and is told from the point
of view of the protagonist Elsa, through the letters she exchanges with
her cousin Sara in Miami.

Figure 6 Cap-Haïtien, northern Haiti. Photo: © Alison Wright/National

Geographic Image Collection/Bridgeman Images.
Now read the story (Reading 2.7) and make a note of the ways in which
it maps on to the Heroic Journey.

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Discussion
Elsa’s journey is an emotional one. The ‘call to adventure’ is, in some
ways, an attractive but deceptive voice: her cousin Sara telling her how
wonderful life is as a migrant in the USA. Elsa is by turns jealous,
resentful and sceptical. Part of her longs to join Sara, but she is also
sure that the stories of plenty and luxury are far from the truth. The
‘ordeal’ is Sara’s question asking whether Haitians have been reduced to
eating mud pies. Elsa is offended at the contempt implied by the
question and rediscovers her pride in her homeland. She responds to
Sara by boasting of the white sand, clear sea and delicious food
(although the latter is in short supply). The ‘elixir’ for Elsa is her pride in
Haiti.

You may have noticed that the stages of the Heroic Journey can also
be mapped on to the five-act structure that we explored in the
previous section. Here is what the two structures look like when they
are compared side by side:

Five-act structure Heroic Journey

Act 1: set-up, inciting incident 1. Ordinary world

2. Call to adventure

3. Refusal of the call

4. Meeting the mentor

5. Crossing the threshold

Act 2: increasing complications 6. Tests, allies, enemies

7. Approach to the inmost cave

Act 3: midpoint, crisis, turning point 8. Ordeal

9. Reward
Act 4: increasing complications, 10. The road back
reversals
Act 5: climax, resolution 11. Resurrection

12. Return with the elixir

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Activity 10
(Allow around 15 minutes to complete this activity.)

Go back to the five-act narrative that you planned out in Activity 8 and
map it on to the Heroic Journey. Some questions to think about are:

. What aspects of your story does this structural model help you to
develop?
. Did you change any elements of the story as a result of mapping on
to the Heroic Journey?

Discussion
When I mapped my story idea about Sue the Enid Blyton-obsessed
librarian on to the Heroic Journey, it helped me to identify some ways of
firming up the narrative.
‘Meeting the mentor’ got me thinking about who exactly I wanted Sue’s
mentor to be, and I decided to give her two: Tasha, the flaky life coach
(who would in turn have to become a more prominent character), and
Enid Blyton herself (as an imagined voice in Sue’s head, issuing firm,
stiff-upper-lip advice). I think there’d be great comic potential in these
two contrasting (and equally unhelpful) mentors.
Using the Heroic Journey as a model, I could also see that the climax of
my story idea is a bit weak, leaving Act 5 feeling a bit flat. I’d need to
come up with some final element of jeopardy before everything is happily
resolved. One way to do this might be to develop the romance element
between Sue and the hard-hearted property developer, and then throw a
late spanner in the works regarding their relationship. Perhaps you found
something similar with your own story idea.

You may have found yourself resisting the idea of using the kinds of
structural frameworks we’ve explored in this chapter in your own
writing, equating it with a formulaic approach to creativity. It’s true,
that if used clumsily (particularly if an important element like character
development is neglected), these structural formulas can result in
clichéd and predictable stories. I would argue that they are primarily a
tool to help you understand your own writing better and aren’t
something you should use in isolation. When it comes to developing
your skills in narrative structure, the most essential activity is to read
widely and attentively. Read canonical writers, such as William

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Shakespeare and Charlotte Brontë; seek out new writers from different
cultures; read popular thrillers and stories in magazines; read
experimental work that challenges and perplexes you. By doing this,
you will absorb the ways in which writers map out the narrative
journey of their work. And if you also analyse these works through the
lens of some of the structural frameworks that we’ve discussed, you
will accelerate your understanding of how stories are constructed.

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 5 Endings

5 Endings
Aristotle simply sums up the end of a piece as ‘there is nothing else
after it’ (Poetics, 7; Aristotle, 1996, p. 13). While that may literally be
true – there are no more words in the novel, the final curtain has
come down on a play – it doesn’t really represent what happens
imaginatively. The most memorable narratives leave us with a sense
that the story continues in some way even after the part we’ve
witnessed has finished. But in a structural sense – even in work that
concludes in an open-ended or ambivalent way – there needs to be
some completion. The journey must come to an end. As author and
literary critic David Lodge says:

We should distinguish between the end of a novel’s story – the

resolution or deliberate non-resolution of the narrative questions
it has raised in the minds of its readers – and the last page or two
of the text, which often act as a kind of epilogue or postscript, a
gentle deceleration of the discourse as it draws to a halt.
(1992, p. 224)

With Lodge’s words in mind, let’s look at the endings of the novels
and short stories whose beginnings we read earlier in this chapter.

Activity 11
(Allow around 20 minutes to complete this activity.)
Let’s first look at the endings to the novels The Great Gatsby, An Awfully
Big Adventure and Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which can be found in
Reading 2.8. You'll recall that you read the beginnings of these three
novels in Activity 1.
As you read the extracts, see if you can detect Lodge’s ‘gentle
deceleration of the discourse as it draws to a halt’ in the final words. You
might find it helpful to read each out loud.
Do you get a sense of what changes or reversals the main characters
have experienced from these closing lines?

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Discussion
The very last sentence in each extract has a sense of finality, of
completeness, of significance. Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby is
newly aware of the futility of hopes and dreams. Stella in An Awfully Big
Adventure is being blamed for something, but the only ‘person’ she can
confide in is the telephone speaking clock service. We finally witness
Santiago Nasar’s death in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and the fact
that we have known throughout the novel that he is going to die doesn’t
make the moment any less powerful.

You may have found it difficult to make a judgement on the changes

or reversals that the main character has experienced, because it can be
tricky to assess these things when you only see the opening and closing
lines and haven’t read the whole novel. You might find it helpful to
answer the same question of the complete texts that you studied in
Block 3, such as Jane Eyre and Twelfth Night. In both cases you’ll
notice there are multiple reversals – it’s not simply the main character
who is changed. For example, in Jane Eyre, Jane begins the novel poor,
powerless and friendless. By the end she’s independently wealthy and
happily married with a child. Her love interest, Mr. Rochester, first
appears in the novel as a rich, powerful and somewhat dominant man,
albeit one with private unhappiness and secrets to conceal. By the end
of the novel his secrets have been revealed, he has been permanently
disabled, and he is humbled by his experiences. Jane and Mr.
Rochester’s marriage is much more equal than it would have been
before her inheritance and his injuries. Indeed, in the end Jane is the
one in the more powerful position, both physically and emotionally.
As Lodge says, there are two different elements to the ending of a
novel: there are the closing pages or lines, and what he calls ‘the
resolution or deliberate non-resolution of the narrative questions’
(1992, p. 224). As the novelist Edward Hogan (2020) said on the
module website, ‘your beginning has to contain a promise and your
ending has to speak to that same promise’.
Having considered how endings work in novels, let’s now look at the
endings to the three short stories whose opening lines you read earlier.

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Activity 12
(Allow around 20 minutes to complete this activity.)

Turn to Reading 2.9 and read the three short story endings. You've
already read the beginnings of these stories in Activity 2. As you read,
consider what changes or reversals the main characters have
experienced.
When you have finished, think about the following:

. Do you think there’s a difference between the ways that the short
stories end compared with the novel endings?
. Which of the six examples (in Readings 2.8 and 2.9) do you think is
the most effective?

Discussion
Like the novel examples, these final sentences also have a sense of
completeness. The jaded, angry narrator of ‘Natterbean’ ends his day on
a happier note, looking forward to going home to his wife. The young
person in ‘Here, Where We Live’ is less fearful, and seems to have
made an emotional connection with someone else. Tonde’s sister in
‘Tonde’s Return’ has accepted her much-changed brother, and is willing
to be a friend to him.
In my view, there are only slight differences between the ways that short
stories and novels end. This is mainly to do with the simple fact of short
stories being short, and novels being long by comparison. The narrative
of a short story is compressed, and the ending needs to reflect that
compression, whereas the novel is more expansive, allowing space for a
more drawn-out ending.

Now that you’ve read the beginnings and endings of these novels and
short stories, it’s time to return to the opening lines that you wrote for
Activity 3.

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Activity 13
(Allow around 15 minutes to complete this activity.)

Look at the opening lines that you wrote in Activity 3. Your challenge
now is to come up with compelling closing lines to your story (between
50 and 100 words).
Remember, you don’t need to know what’s happened between the
beginning and the ending.

Discussion
You may have found when writing your closing lines that you had to
think carefully about word choice and sentence construction. Strong
closing lines have a certain ‘weight’ and rhythm, and sometimes even
include repetition of a word or phrase in order to emphasise a thought.
At their very best, strong endings stay with the reader long after they’ve
finished reading. I have a soft spot for novels that tell me what
subsequently happened to all the characters, but that is very much a
matter of taste. My favourite ever closing lines, which always bring a tear
to my eye, are from Middlemarch:

But the effect of her being on those around her was

incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is
partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so
ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to
the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in
unvisited tombs.
(Eliot, (1994 [1871–72]) p. 688)

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 6 Summary

6 Summary
In this chapter, we have looked at examples of the beginnings and
endings of fictional narratives, and considered their crucial role in the
structure of a novel or short story. We’ve studied structural elements
that have their roots in drama, such as scenes, acts and the five-act
structure, and observed them in action in plays, novels and short
stories. We’ve also considered the Heroic Journey, and how this model
can help us to refine our own story ideas.
Understanding structure in fiction and drama as a narrative journey is
an important practical skill for creative writers, but it is also a way to
gain greater insight as a reader, helping you to better understand
novels, short stories and plays.
I hope you’ve found that focusing on structure has stimulated your
creativity and helped you to generate new ideas. You’ll also have noted
that the narrative structures we’ve looked at have a long heritage,
stretching back at least as far as ancient Greece, and probably even
further. Their shape can be seen in all kinds of literary works from all
ages and cultures.

You should now return to the module website to continue your

study of this unit.

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References
Aristotle (1996) Poetics. Translated from the Greek by M. Heath. London:
Penguin Books.
Bainbridge, B. (2011 [1989]) An Awfully Big Adventure. London: Hachette.
Baldick, C. (2008a) ‘Act’. Available at: https://www-oxfordreference-com.
libezproxy.open.ac.uk/view/10.1093/acref/9780199208272.001.0001/acref-
9780199208272-e-11?rskey=DJfGPp&result=11 (Accessed: 6 April 2020).
Baldick, C. (2008b) ‘Scene’. Available at: https://www-oxfordreference-com.
libezproxy.open.ac.uk/view/10.1093/acref/9780199208272.001.0001/acref-
9780199208272-e-1019 (Accessed: 6 April 2020).
Caldwell, J. (2018) ‘Natterbean’, in Room Little Darker. London: Apollo
Books, pp. 131–144.
Carr, M. (1999) ‘By the Bog of Cats…’, in Plays One. London: Faber and
Faber, pp. 283–285.
Dick, P.K. (2017) ‘The Impossible Planet’, in Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams:
Volume One. London: Orion Publishing Group Ltd, pp. 41–52.
Eliot, G. (1994 [1871–72]) Middlemarch. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions.
Fitzgerald, F.S. (2001 [1925]) The Great Gatsby. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth
Editions.
Galton, D. (2013) ‘Blue Denim’, Woman’s Weekly (Fiction Special), p. 73.
García Márquez, G. (1983) Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Translated from the
Spanish by G. Rabassa. London: Pan Books.
Gay, R. (2018) ‘The Dirt We Do Not Eat’, in Ayiti. London: Corsair.
Greig, N. (2005) Playwriting: A Practical Guide. Abingdon: Routledge.
Hoba, L. (2009) ‘Tonde’s Return’, in The Trek and Other Stories. Harare:
Weaver Press.
Hogan, E. (2020) ‘Heather Richardson interviews Lisa Smith, Edward Hogan
and Thomas Crowe’ [Audio]. A112: Cultures. The Open University. Available
at: https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?
id=1602394&section=3 (Accessed: 10 July 2020).
Le Guin, U.K. (2015 [1998]) Steering the Craft: A 21st Century Guide to
Sailing the Sea of Story. New York, NY: Mariner Books.
Lodge, D. (1992) The Art of Fiction. London: Penguin.
Pokrass, M. (2014) ‘Here, Where We Live’, in Beckel, A. and Rooney, K. (eds)
My Very End of the Universe. Brookline, MA: Rose Metal Press.

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 References

Vogler, C. (1999) The Writer’s Journey. London: Pan Macmillan.

Yorke, J. (2014) Into the Woods. London: Penguin Books.

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Readings
Reading 2.1 Novel openings

Extract 1

Source: Fitzgerald, F.S. (2001 [1925]) The Great Gatsby.

Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, p. 3.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some

advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
‘Whenever you feel like criticising anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember
that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve
had.’
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually
communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a
great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all
judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me
and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The
abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when
it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I
was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the
secret griefs of wild, unknown men.

Extract 2

Source: Bainbridge, B. (2011 [1989]) An Awfully Big Adventure.

London: Hachette, p. 1.

When the fire curtain had been lowered and the doors were at last
closed, Meredith thought he heard a child crying. He switched on the
house lights, but of course there was no one there. Some unfortunate
had left a teddy-bear perched on the tip-up seat in the third row.
The girl was waiting for him in the property room. At his approach
she stepped backwards, as though afraid he would strike her. He didn’t
look at her; he simply told her, in that particular tone of voice which

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 Readings

in the past he had always used for other people, that he wasn’t
interested in excuses and that in any case there were none that would
fit the bill.

Extract 3

Source: García Márquez, G. (1983) Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Translated from the Spanish by G. Rabassa. London: Pan Books,
pp. 1–2.

On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-
thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.
He’d dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a
gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his
dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit.
“He was always dreaming about trees,” Plácida Linero, his mother, told
me twenty-seven years later, recalling the details of that unpleasant
Monday. “The week before, he’d dreamed that he was alone in a tinfoil
airplane and flying through the almond trees without bumping into
anything,” she told me. She had a well-earned reputation as an accurate
interpreter of other people’s dreams, provided they were told her
before eating, but she hadn’t noticed any ominous augury in those two
dreams of her son’s, or in the other dreams of trees he’d told her
about on the mornings preceding his death.

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Reading 2.2 Short story openings

Extract 1

Source: Caldwell, J. (2018) ‘Natterbean’, in Room Little Darker.

London: Apollo Books, p. 131.

He knew he smelt like a sardine but that’s what Polish beer does to a
man on a low wage. With names like Tatra, Tyskie, and Żywiec, he may
as well have been downing fermented donkey piss the night before.
The smug knotty face on the bent cop who ran the off license on a
privately paid-for unflappable hip made him madder than a hacksaw.

Extract 2

Source: Pokrass, M. (2014) ‘Here, Where We Live’, in Beckel, A.

and Rooney, K. (eds) My Very End of the Universe. Brookline,
MA: Rose Metal Press.

I think about how breasts are meant to be life-giving forces while

peeling oranges at night in Nana’s front yard—now our front yard.
Since Mom’s mastectomy, I miss Pittsburgh more than I did before.
People there had character.

Extract 3

Source: Hoba, L. (2009) ‘Tonde’s Return’, in The Trek and Other

Stories. Harare: Weaver Press.

Mukoma Tonde – as she has been taught to call him, even though he
is two years younger than her – stood beside the pillar supporting the
sagging verandah roof of the old store. It was just where the
messenger said they would find him. She approached, unsure of
whether it really was her brother after all these years.

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 Readings

Reading 2.3 ‘By the Bog of Cats…’

Source: Carr, M. (1999) ‘By the Bog of Cats...’, in Plays One.

London: Faber and Faber, pp. 283–285.

Enter Caroline Cassidy in her wedding dress and veil. Twenty, fragile-
looking and nervous. She goes to the window of Hester’s house and knocks.
Caroline Hester – are ya there?
Hester comes up behind her.
Hester Haven’t you the gall comin’ here, Caroline Cassidy.
Caroline (jumps with fright) Oh! (Recovers.) Can come
here whenever I want, this is my house now, sure ya
signed it over and all.
Hester Bits of paper, writin’, means nothin’, can as aisy
be unsigned.
Caroline You’re meant to be gone this weeks, it’s just
not fair.
Hester Lots of things isn’t fair, Daddy’s little ice-pop.
Caroline We’re goin’ ahead with the weddin’, me and
Carthage, ya think ya’ll disrupt everythin’, Hester
Swane. I’m not afraid of ya.
Hester Ya should be. I’m afraid of meself – What is it ya
want from me, Caroline? What have I ever done on you
that ya feel the need to take everythin’ from me?
Caroline I’m takin’ nothin’ ya haven’t lost already and
lost this long while gone.
Hester You’re takin’ me husband, you’re takin’ me
house, ya even want me daughter. Over my dead body.
Caroline He was never your husband, he only took pity
on ya, took ya out of that auld caravan on the bog, gave
ya a home, built ya up from the ground.

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Hester Them the sweet nothin’s he’s been tellin’ ya? Let’s
get wan thing straight, it was me built Carthage Kilbride
up from nothin’, him a labourer’s son you wouldn’t give
the time of day to and you trottin’ by in your first bra,
on your half-bred mare, your nose nudgin’ the sun.
It was me who tould him he could do better. It was my
money that bought his first fine acres. It was in my bed
he slowly turned from a slavish pup to a man and no
frigid little Daddy’s girl is goin’ to take him from me.
Now get off of my property before I cut that dress to
ribbons.

Caroline I’ll have to get Daddy. He’ll run ya off with a

shotgun if he has to.
Hester Not everyone is as afraid of your Daddy as you
are, Caroline.
Caroline Look, I’ll give ya more money if ya’ll only go.
Here’s me bank book, there’s nearly nineteen thousand
pounds in it, me inheritance from me mother. Daddy
gave it to me this mornin’. Ya can have it, only please
go. It’s me weddin’ day. It’s meant to be happy. It’s
meant to be the best day of me life.
She stands there, close to tears. Hester goes over to her, touches her veil.
Hester What ya want me to do, Caroline? Admire
your dress? Wish ya well? Hah? I used babysit you.
Remember that?
Caroline That was a long time ago.
Hester No that long at all. After your mother died,
several nights ya came down and slept with me. Ya were
glad of the auld caravan then, when your Daddy’d be off
at the races or the mart or the pub, remember that, do
ya? A pasty little thing, and I’d be awake half the night
listenin’ to your girly gibberish and grievances. Listen to
me now, Caroline, there’s two Hester Swanes, one that is
decent and very fond of ya despite your callow treatment
of me. And the other Hester, well, she could slide a knife
down your face, carve ya up and not bat an eyelid.

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(Grabs her hair suddenly and viciously.)

Caroline Ow! Lave go!
Hester Listen to me now, Caroline. Carthage Kilbride is
mine and only mine. He’s been mine since he was sixteen.
You think you can take him from me? Wrong. All wrong.
(Lets go of her.) Now get out of me sight.
Caroline Ya’ll be sorry for this, Hester Swane.
Hester We all will.
And exit Caroline, running.

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Reading 2.4 The Great Gatsby

Source: Fitzgerald, F.S. (2001 [1925]) The Great Gatsby.

Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, pp. 98–99 [footnotes
removed].

Up in the city, I tried for a while to list the quotations on an

interminable amount of stock, then I fell asleep in my swivel-chair. Just
before noon the phone woke me, and I started up with sweat breaking
out on my forehead. It was Jordon Baker; she often called me up at
this hour because the uncertainty of her own movements between
hotels and clubs and private houses made her hard to find in any other
way. Usually her voice came over the wire as something fresh and cool,
as if a divot from a green golf-links had come sailing in at the office
window, but this morning it seemed harsh and dry.
‘I’ve left Daisy’s house,’ she said. ‘I’m at Hempstead, and I’m going
down to Southampton this afternoon.’
Probably it had been tactful to leave Daisy’s house, but the act
annoyed me, and her next remark made me rigid.
‘You weren’t so nice to me last night.’
‘How could it have mattered then?’
Silence for a moment. Then: ‘However – I want to see you.’
‘I want to see you, too.’
‘Suppose I don’t go to Southampton, and come into town this
afternoon?’
‘No – I don’t think this afternoon.’
‘Very well.’
‘It’s impossible this afternoon. Various –’
We talked like that for a while, and then abruptly we weren’t talking
any longer. I don’t know which of us hung up with a sharp click, but I
know I didn’t care. I couldn’t have talked to her across a tea-table that
day if I never talked to her again in this world.

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I called Gatsby’s house a few minutes later, but the line was busy. I
tried four times; finally an exasperated central told me the wire was
being kept open for long distance from Detroit. Taking out my time-
table, I drew a small circle around the three-fifty train. Then I leaned
back in my chair and tried to think. It was just noon.

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Reading 2.5 ‘The Impossible Planet’

Source: Dick, P.K. (2017) ‘The Impossible Planet’, in Philip K.

Dick’s Electric Dreams: Volume One. London: Orion Publishing
Group Ltd, pp. 41–52.

‘She just stands there,’ Norton said nervously, ‘Captain’, you’ll have to
talk to her.’
‘What does she want?’
‘She wants a ticket. She’s stone deaf. She just stands there staring and
she won’t go away. It gives me the creeps.’
Captain Andrews got slowly to his feet. ‘Okay. I’ll talk to her. Send her
in.’
‘Thanks.’ To the corridor Norton said, ‘The Captain will talk to you.
Come ahead.’
There was a motion outside the control room. A flash of metal.
Captain Andrews pushed his desk scanner back and stood waiting.
‘In here.’ Norton backed into the control room. ‘This way. Right in
here.’
Behind Norton came a withered little old woman. Beside her moved a
gleaming robant, a towering robot servant, supporting her with its arm.
The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly.
‘Here’s her papers.’ Norton slid a folio onto the chart desk, his voice
awed. ‘She’s three hundred and fifty years old. One of the oldest
sustained. From Riga II.’
Andrews leafed slowly through the folio. In front of the desk the little
woman stood silently, staring straight ahead. Her faded eyes were pale
blue. Like ancient china.
‘Irma Vincent Gordon,’ Andrews murmured. He glanced up. ‘Is that
right?’
The old woman did not answer.
‘She is totally deaf, sir,’ the robant said.

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Andrews grunted and returned to the folio. Irma Gordon was one of
the original settlers of the Riga system. Origin unknown. Probably
born out in space in one of the old sub-C ships. A strange feeling
drifted through him. The little old creature. The centuries she had
seen! The changes.
‘She wants to travel?’ he asked the robant.
‘Yes, sir. She has come from her home to purchase a ticket.’
‘Can she stand space travel?’
‘She came from Riga, here to Formalhuat IX.’
‘Where does she want to go?’
‘To Earth, sir,’ the robant said.
‘Earth!‘ Andrew’s jaw dropped. He swore nervously. ‘What do you
mean?’
‘She wishes to travel to Earth, sir.’
‘You see?’ Norton muttered. ‘Completely crazy.’
Gripping his desk tightly. Andrews addressed the old woman. ‘Madam,
we can’t sell you a ticket to Earth.’
‘She can’t hear you, sir,’ the robant said.
Andrews found a piece of paper. He wrote in big letters:
CAN’T SELL YOU A TICKET TO EARTH
He held it up. The old woman’s eyes moved as she studied the words.
Her lips twitched. ‘Why not?’ she said at last. Her voice was faint and
dry. Like rustling weeds.
Andrews scratched an answer.
NO SUCH PLACE
He added grimly:
MYTH—LEGEND—NEVER EXISTED
The old woman’s faded eyes left the words. She gazed directly at
Andrews, her face expressionless. Andrews became uneasy. Beside him,
Norton sweated nervously.
‘Jeez,’ Norton muttered. ‘Get her out of here. She’ll put the hex on us.’

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Andrews addressed the robant. ‘Can’t you make her understand. There
is no such place as Earth. It’s been proven a thousand times. No such
primordial planet existed. All scientists agree human life arose
simultaneously throughout the—’
‘It is her wish to travel to Earth,’ the robant said patiently. ‘She is three
hundred and fifty years old and they have ceased giving her sustention
treatments. She wishes to visit Earth before she dies.’
‘But it’s a myth!’ Andrews exploded. He opened and closed his mouth,
but no words came.
‘How much?’ the old woman said. ‘How much?’
‘I can’t do it!’ Andrews shouted. ‘There isn’t—’
‘We have a kilo positives,’ the robant said.
Andrews became suddenly quiet. ‘A thousand positives.’ He blanched
in amazement. His jaws clamped shut, the color draining from his face.
‘How much?’ the old woman repeated. ‘How much?’
‘Will that be sufficient?’ the robant asked.
For a moment Andrews swallowed silently. Abruptly he found his
voice. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Why not?’
‘Captain!’ Norton protested. ‘Have you gone nuts? You know there’s
no such place as Earth! How the hell can we—’
‘Sure, we’ll take her.’ Andrews buttoned his tunic slowly, hands shaking.
‘We’ll take her anywhere she wants to go. Tell her that. For a thousand
positives we’ll be glad to take her to Earth. Okay?’
‘Of course,’ the robant said. She has saved many decades for this. She
will give you the kilo positives at once. She has them with her.

‘Look,’ Norton said. ‘You can get twenty years for this. They’ll take
your articles and your card and they’ll—’
‘Shut up.’ Andrew spun the dial of the intersystem vidsender. Under
them the jets throbbed and roared. The lumbering transport had
reached deep space. ‘I want the main information library at Centaurus
II,’ he said into the speaker.

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‘Even for a thousand positives you can’t do it. Nobody can do it. They
tried to find Earth for generations. Directorate ships tracked down
every moth-eaten planet in the whole—’
The vidsender clicked. ‘Centaurus II.’
‘Information library.’
Norton caught Andrews’ arm. ‘Please, Captain. Even for two kilo
positives—’
‘I want the following information,’ Andrews said into the vidspeaker.
‘All facts that are known concerning the planet Earth. Legendary
birthplace of the human race.’
‘No facts are known,’ the detached voice of the library monitor came.
‘The subject is classified as metaparticular.’
‘What unverified but widely circulated reports have survived?’
‘Most legends concerning Earth were lost during the Centauran-Rigan
conflict of 4-B33a. What survived is fragmentary. Earth is variously
described as a large ringed planet with three moons, as a small, dense
planet with a single moon, as the first planet of a ten-planet located
around a dwarf white—’
‘What’s the most prevalent legend?’
‘The Morrison Report of 5-C2 1r analyzed the total ethnic and
subliminal accounts of the legendary Earth. The final summation noted
that Earth is generally considered to be a small third planet of a nine-
planet system, with a single moon. Other than that, no agreement of
legends could be constructed.’
‘I see. A third planet of a nine-planet system, With a single moon.’
Andrews broke the circuit and the screen faded.
‘So?’ Norton said.
Andrews got quickly to his feet. ‘She probably knows every legend
about it.’ He pointed down—at the passenger quarters below. ‘I want
to get the accounts straight.’
‘Why? What are you going to do?’
Andrews flipped open the master star chart. He ran his fingers down
the index and released the scanner. In a moment it turned up a card.

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He grabbed the chart and fed it into the robant pilot. ‘The Emphor
System,’ he murmured thoughtfully.
‘Emphor? We’re going there?’
‘According to the chart, there are ninety systems that show a third
planet of nine with a single moon. Of the ninety, Emphor is the
closest. We’re heading there now.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Norton protested. ‘Emphor is a routine trading system.
Emphor III isn’t even a Class D check point.’
Captain Andrews grinned tightly. ‘Emphor III has a single moon, and
it’s the third of nine planets. That’s all we want. Does anybody know
any more about Earth?’ He glanced downwards. ‘Does she know any
more about Earth?’
‘I see,’ Norton said slowly. ‘I’m beginning to get the picture.’
Emphor III turned silently below them. A dull red globe, suspended
among sickly clouds, its baked and corroded surface lapped by the
congealed remains of ancient seas. Cracked, eroded cliffs jutted starkly
up. The flat plains had been dug and stripped bare. Great gouged pits
pocketed the surface, endless gaping sores.
Norton’s face twisted in revulsion. ‘Look at it. Is anything alive down
there?’
Captain Andrews frowned. ‘I didn’t realize it was so gutted.’ He
crossed abruptly to the robant pilot. ‘There’s supposed to be an auto-
grapple some place down there. I’ll try to pick it up.’
‘A grapple? You mean that waste is inhabited?’
‘A few Emphorites. Degenerate trading colony of some sort.’ Andrew
consulted the card. ‘Commercial ships come here occasionally. Contact
with this region has been vague since the Centauran-Rigan War.’
The passage rang with a sudden sound. The gleaming robant and Mrs
Gordon emerged through the doorway into the control room. The old
woman’s face was alive with excitement. ‘Captain! Is that—Earth down
there?’
Andrews nodded. ‘Yes.’
The robant led Mrs Gordon over to the big viewscreen. The old
woman’s face twitched, ripples of emotion stirring her withered
features. ‘I can hardly believe that’s really Earth. It seems impossible.’

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Norton glanced sharply at Captain Andrews.

‘It’s Earth,’ Andrews stated, not meeting Norton’s glance. The moon
should be around soon.’
The old woman did not speak. She had turned her back.
Andrews contacted the auto-grapple and hooked the robant pilot on.
The transport shuddered and then began to drop, as the beam from
Emphor caught it and took over.
‘We’re landing,’ Andrews said to the old woman, touching her on the
shoulder.
‘She can’t hear you, sir,’ the robant said.
Andrews grunted. ‘Well she can see.’
Below them the pitted, ruined surface of Emphor III was rising
rapidly. The ship entered the cloud belt and emerged, coasting over a
barren plain that stretched as far as the eye could see.
‘What happened down there?’ Norton said to Andrews. ‘The war?’
‘War. Mining. And it’s old. The pits are probably bomb craters. Some
of the long trenches may be scoop gouges. Looks like they really
exhausted this place.’
A crooked row of broken mountain peaks shot past under them. They
were nearing the remain of an ocean. Dark, unhealthy water lapped
below, a vast sea, crusted with salt and waste, its edges disappearing
into banks of piled debris.
‘Why is it that way?’ Mrs Gordon said suddenly. Doubt crossed her
features. ‘Why?’
‘What do you mean?’ Andrew said.
‘I don’t understand.’ She stared uncertainly down at the surface below.
‘It isn’t supposed to be this way. Earth is green. Green and alive. Blue
water and …’ Her voice trailed off uneasily.
‘Why’
Andrews grabbed some paper and wrote:
COMMERCIAL OPERATIONS EXHAUSTED SURFACE

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Mrs Gordon studied his words, her lips twitching. A spasm moved
through her shaking the thin, dried-out body. ‘Exhausted …’ Her voice
rose in shrill dismay. ‘It’s not supposed to be this way! I don’t want it
this way!’
The robant took her arm. ‘She had better rest. I’ll return her to her
quarters. Please notify us when the landing has been made.’
‘Sure.’ Andrews nodded awkwardly as the robant led the old woman
from the viewscreen. She clung to the guide rail, face distorted with
fear and bewilderment.
‘Something’s wrong!’ she wailed. ‘Why is it this way? Why …’
The robant led her from the control room. The closing of the
hydraulic safety doors cut off her thin cry abruptly.
Andrews relaxed, his body sagging. ‘God.’ He lit a cigarette shakily.
‘What a racket she makes.’
‘We’re almost down,’ Norton said frigidly.
Cold wind lashed at them as they stepped out cautiously.
The air smelled bad—sour and acrid. Like rotten eggs. The wind
bought salt and sand blowing up against their faces.
A few miles off the thick sea lay. They could hear it swishing faintly,
gummily. A few birds passed silently over-head, great wings flapping
soundlessly.
‘Depressing damn place,’ Andrews muttered.
‘Yeah. I wonder what the old lady’s thinking.’
Down the descent ramp came the glittering robant, helping the little
old woman. She moved hesitantly, unsteady, gripping the robant’s metal
arm. The cold wind whipped around her frail body. For a moment she
tottered—and them came on, leaving the ramp and gaining the uneven
ground.
Norton shook his head. ‘She looks bad. This air. And the wind.’
‘I know.’ Andrews moved back towards Mrs Gordon and the robant.
‘How is she?’ he asked.
‘She is not well, sir,’ the robant answered.
‘Captain,’ the old woman whispered.

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‘What is it?’
‘You must tell me the truth. Is this—is this really Earth?’
She watched his lips closely. ‘You swear it is? You swear?’
Her voice rose in shrill terror.
‘It’s Earth!’ Andrews snapped irritably. ‘I told you before. Of course it’s
Earth.’
‘It doesn’t look like Earth.’ Mrs Gordon clung to his answer, panic-
stricken. ‘It doesn’t look like Earth, Captain. Is it really Earth?’
‘Yes!’
Her gaze wandered towards the ocean. A strange look flickered across
her tired face, igniting her faded eyes with sudden hunger. ‘Is that
water? I want to see.’
Andrews turned to Norton. ‘Get the launch out. Drive her where she
wants.’
Norton pulled back angrily. ‘Me?’
‘That’s an order.’
‘Okay.’ Norton returned reluctantly to the ship. Andrews lit a cigarette
moodily and waited. Presently the launch slid out of the ship, coasting
across the ash towards them.
‘You can show her anything she wants,’ Andrews said to the robant.
‘Norton will drive you.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ the robant said. ‘She will be grateful. She has wanted
all her life to stand on Earth. She remembers her grandfather telling
her about it. She believes that he came from Earth, a long time ago.
She is very old. She is the last living member of her family.’
‘But Earth is just a—’ Andrews caught him. ‘I mean—’
‘Yes, sir. But she is very old. And she has waited many years.’ The
robant turned to the old woman and led her gently toward the launch.
Andrews stared after them sullenly, rubbing his jaw and frowning.
‘Okay,’ Norton’s voice came from the launch. He slid the hatch open
and the robant led the old woman carefully inside. The hatch closed
after them.

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A moment later the launch shot away across the salt flat, towards the
ugly, lapping ocean.

Norton and Captain Andrews paced restlessly along the shore. The sky
was darkening. Sheets of salt blew against them. The mud flats stank in
the gathering gloom of night. Dimly, off in the distance, a line of hills
faded into the silence and vapors.
‘Go on,’ Andrews said, ‘What then?’
‘That’s all. She got out of the launch. She and the robant. I stayed
inside. They stood looking across the ocean. After a while the old
woman sent the robant back to the launch.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. She wanted to be alone. I suppose. She stood for a time
by herself. On the shore. Looking over the water. The wind rising. All
at once she just sort of settled down. She sank down in a heap, into
the salt ash.’
‘Then what?’
‘While I was pulling myself together, the robant leaped out and ran to
her. It picked her up. It stood for a second and then it started for the
water. I leaped out of the launch, yelling, It stepped into the water and
disappeared. Sank down in the mud and filth. Vanished.’ Norton
shuddered. ‘With her body.’
Andrews tossed his cigarette savagely away. The cigarette rolled off,
glowing behind them. ‘Anything more?’
‘Nothing. It all happened in a second. She was standing there, looking
over the water. Suddenly she quivered—like a dead branch. Then she
just sort of dwindled away. And the robant was out of the launch and
into the water with her before I could figure out what was happening.’
The sky was almost dark. Huge clouds drifted across the faint stars.
Clouds of unhealthy night vapors and particles of waste. A flock of
immense birds crossed the horizon, flying silently.
Against the broken hills the moon was rising. A diseased, barren globe,
tinted faintly yellow. Like old parchment.
‘Let’s get back in the ship,’ Andrews said. ‘I don’t like this place.’

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I can’t figure out why it happened. The old woman.’

Norton shook his head.
‘The wind. Radioactive toxins. I checked with Centaurus II. The War
devastated the whole system. Left the planet a lethal wreck.’
‘Then we won’t—’
‘No. We won’t have to answer for it.’ They continued for a time in
silence. ‘We won’t have to explain. It’s evident enough. Anybody
coming here, especially an old person—’
‘Only nobody would come here.’ Norton said bitterly. ‘Especially an
old person.’
Andrews didn’t answer. He paced along, head down, hands in pockets.
Norton followed silently behind. Above them, the single moon grew
brighter as it escaped the mists and entered a patch of clear sky.
‘By the way,’ Norton said, his voice cold and distant behind Andrews.
This is the last trip I’ll be making with you. While I was in the ship I
filed a formal request for new papers.
‘Oh.’
‘Thought I’d let you know. And my share of the kilo positives. You can
keep it.’
Andrews flushed and increased his pace, leaving Norton behind. The
old woman’s death had shaken him. He lit another cigarette and then
threw it away.
Damn it—the fault wasn’t his. She had been old. Three hundred and
fifty years. Senile and deaf. A faded leaf, carried off by the wind. By
the poisonous wind that lashed and twisted endlessly across the ruined
face of the planet.
The ruined face. Salt ash and debris. The broken line of crumbling
hills. And the silence. The eternal silence. Nothing but the wind and
the lapping of the thick stagnant water. And the birds overhead.
Something glinted. Something at his feet, in the salt ash. Reflecting the
sickly pallor of the moon.
Andrews bent down and groped in the darkness. His fingers closed
over something hard. He picked the small disc up and examined it.
‘Strange,’ he said.

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It wasn’t until they were out in deep space, roaring back towards
Fomalhaut, that he remembered the disc.
He slid away from the control panel, searching his pockets for it.
The disc was worn and thin. And terribly old. Andrews rubbed it and
spat on it until it was clean enough to make out. A faint impression—
nothing more. He turned it over. A token? Washer? Coin?
On the back were a few meaningless letters. Some ancient, forgotten
script. He held the disc to the light until he made the letters out.
E PLURIBUS UNUM
He shrugged, tossed the ancient bit of metal into a waste disposal unit
beside him, and turned his attention to the star charts, and home…

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Reading 2.6 ‘Blue Denim’

Source: Galton, D. (2013) ‘Blue Denim’, Woman’s Weekly, (Fiction

Special), p. 73.

“Nothing — however wonderful it is — lasts forever.”

You said that the first time we met, in the shadow of the candyfloss
stall, as you watched me tear off the last little pieces of fluffy pink
sweetness and sigh. I knew you were talking about the candyfloss. But
there was a secret smile in your eyes.
Then later, when we knew each other better, you said, “We have to do
everything now, Jeannie, because we might not have tomorrow.”
I believed you, too. You could have told me anything in that voice of
yours, caramel with a hint of spice, and I’d have believed it.
Mum told me to beware. “Never trust a man who sings you love songs
in blue denim,” she said, while she made bread in our old farmhouse
kitchen, kneading and throwing the dough around with floury arms
and a cross expression on her face. Filling the kitchen up with the
scents of yeast and baking.
Mum thought I should go out with one of the farm lads, who grew
straight and tall as the maize Dad planted. Lads from the fair on the
green were rough and unreliable and couldn’t be trusted, however cute
they were and however convincing a line they spun.
I didn’t listen to Mum, I listened to your eyes, and your eyes were
honest: summer blue and deep like the sky, summer blue with a hint of
sparkle.
“We have to do this now, love, right now. We might not have
tomorrow.”
“Why won’t we have tomorrow?’ I asked you one gorgeous cinnamon-
scented evening, as we sat chatting in a barley field and you stroked a
curl of hair back off my forehead. “Are you going to run away? Is that
what you’re planning?”

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You shook your head, your eyes darkening, and I didn’t dare voice the
fears I had that you’d be gone by summer’s end. Off with your fair —
with me just a candyfloss memory in your heart.
“It’s not that, Jeannie. It’s…just that…well…let’s just say that life’s in a
constant state of flux.”
I wasn’t even sure what flux meant. But I was sure of your smile. And
you smiled then, plucked another chord on your guitar, leaned back on
the five-bar gate and serenaded me with promises of paradise, mystery
and a hint of sadness.
And it was paradise, too, wasn’t it, my blue-eyed man? You and I in
those fields of gold. With a butterfly on every stem and the sky a
fairytale pink above our heads.
Getting pregnant wasn’t quite such a paradise, but that was OK, too. I
saw the shock in you. A little piece of permanence, after all, then. A
little piece of us.
I was half surprised when you stayed, when you didn’t travel on with
your fair, but got work on the land. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t just the
farm women who didn’t trust the gypsies, it was the farmers, too. You
were shunned by many, but finally you found a job in the brewery,
loading barrels onto the vans.
It was a far cry from the open roads, and I knew you missed the
freedom of travelling. I saw it sometimes in your eyes, although you
tried to hide it.
Nevertheless, you were by my side when our baby girl came. We called
her Summer, after our love.
You were gone before her first birthday. There will be no, ‘I told you
sos.’ I won’t allow them. You did warn me, after all, that we might not
have tomorrow.
Words like commitment-shy spring greedily from my family’s lips, and
irresponsible abandoner, travelling minstrel, fairground trash. Words
that cut deep into my heart. But my family never did like you. You
weren’t good enough for them. So we kept ourselves private, never
sharing completely what we had found. Never telling them the whole
truth.
One day, I will them the whole truth, tell them the true words that
describe you. Words like remission, courage and dignity. Chemotherapy

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should have made Summer impossible, but nothing is impossible.

That’s one of the things you taught me.
So now, I stand tight by your grave on this chilly afternoon, swaying a
little in the spring rain, a dusting of love on my face. Just for now, you
are still with me. Maybe you will be forever with me: a star on some
dark night, the line of silver beneath a winter wave, a love song played
on an old guitar.
I have to believe that, for tonight, at least, you are still with me. And
that nothing—however painful it is—lasts forever.

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Reading 2.7 ‘The Dirt We Do Not Eat’

Source: Gay, R. (2018) ‘The Dirt We Do Not Eat’, in Ayiti.

London: Corsair.

Once or twice a month, Elsa in Cap-Haïtien receives a letter from her

cousin Sara in Miami. The letter is thick with news and US dollars and
promises of a better life, a better place, a better time, better things.
I wish you could see South Beach, Sara writes. The men are more
beautiful than the women. They all wear makeup and fine clothes. The
beach is not like home. It is crowded. It is dirty. After work my friends
and I, we run along the water barefoot. We drink straight from bottles
of wine. We eat McDonald’s and other good food that is also bad.
They put so much salt on the French fries for hours you can suck the
grains from your fingers, feel them on your lips.
Elsa saves these letters in a tin box she keeps beneath the narrow bed
she shares with her boyfriend who she pretends is her husband even
though he has another woman on the side.
My dearest cousin, Elsa writes back, South Beach sounds like a dream.
I have never tasted wine but worry not. We still have our rum. You
should know Christian is up to his old tricks, he won’t work, he won’t
stay, and yet he does not leave. I think of you often. I wait for you to
steal me away.
Elsa misses Sara. She does. She hates Sara. She does. She hates the
letters, the news, the promises, the lies. She hates hearing about air-
conditioning, and water always running cold, safe to drink from the
faucet, and TV shows about strippers and millionaires and more.
Is it true Haitians are eating mud pies? Sara wants to know. Has it
been so long since I’ve been home that the land sustains us? Last night
I ate Dairy Queen. The ice cream reminded me of the poem we read
when we were in secondaire about plums in the icebox, so cold and so
sweet. I will never be able to enjoy another treat if it is true that all we
have left is the ground at our feet, wet with water, a little salt,
squeezed between our hands, baked in the hot sun, dry in our mouths.
Those left behind have heard these stories on Euronews and on Radio
Metropole because one eager journalist saw what he wanted to see, saw

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an old woman at the side of the road, squatting over her pies, her bare
knees peeking out from the folds of her skirt.
Ma chère cousine, writes Elsa. I read your letter while walking on
white sand burning my bare feet. I looked out at the water so clear
blue it hurt my eyes. Last night, maman made us griot and diri ak pwa
and Christian who can smell a good meal from between a woman’s
thighs finally came home. The three of us ate together and we laughed.
There wasn’t much food but what there was, was enough. I’ll tell you
this. We do not enjoy as much food as perhaps once we did. When
Christian goes to get rice from MINUSTAH, he must take his gun,
three friends. Some mornings we wake, our stomachs empty, our
stomachs angry, but never do we look to the ground beneath our feet
with longing in our mouths. We chew on our pride. The dirt we do
not eat.

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Reading 2.8 Novel endings

Extract 1

Source: Fitzgerald, F.S. (2001 [1925]) The Great Gatsby.

Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, p. 115.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year
recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow
we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine
morning –
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
the past.

Extract 2

Source: Bainbridge, B. (2011 [1989]) An Awfully Big Adventure.

London: Hachette, p. 197.

She rang the familiar combination of numbers. ‘It’s been awful,’ she
said. ‘There was a man who seduced me.’
‘The time,’ mother intoned, ‘is 6.45 and 40 seconds precisely.’
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Stella shouted. ‘I’ll know how to behave next time.
I’m learning. I’m just bending down to tie a shoe-lace. Everyone is just
waiting round the corner.’
‘The time,’ pretty mother said, ‘is 6.47 and 20 seconds precisely.’

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Extract 3

Source: García Márquez, G. (1983) Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Translated from the Spanish by G. Rabassa. London: Pan Books,
p. 122.

He stumbled on the last step, but he got up at once. “He even took
care to brush off the dirt that was stuck to his guts,” my Aunt Wene
told me. Then he went into his house through the back door that had
been open since six and fell on his face in the kitchen.

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Reading 2.9 Short story endings

Extract 1

Source: Caldwell, J. (2018) ‘Natterbean’, in Room Little Darker.

London: Apollo Books, pp. 143–144.

He’d give her the mucky glare alright. Always got a trouser twitch after
driving for hours. She’d be wearing her vampire slag purple lippo.
There wasn’t a woman in Ireland who looked as scorchingly horny
with it lathered all over her big gob, the dirty minx. ‘Love, I’m
natterbean out all day grafting, the least you can do is shut that
sinkhole and put the kettle on.’ Then he’d smile like a donut and tell
her she’d a nice ripe arse.

Extract 2

Source: Pokrass, M. (2014) ‘Here, Where We Live’, in Beckel, A.

and Rooney, K. (eds) My Very End of the Universe. Brookline,
MA: Rose Metal Press.

He says he lives in dreams but he wants that to end. This feels like a
scene in a movie that comes somewhere right near the middle, when
the popcorn tastes just right.

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Extract 3

Source: Hoba, L. (2009) ‘Tonde’s Return’, in The Trek and Other

Stories. Harare: Weaver Press.

Tomorrow she would teach him to live. He had to find his soul and
learn to live again. But she knew that it was more than his illness,
more than his life with Maria, more than a failed life in the city, more
than the mysterious life he had lived afterwards that haunted him.
Tonde had a story to tell and she would listen to it.

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Chapter 3
On the road
Written by Fiona Doloughan
Contents
1 Introduction 275
2 Language and place 278
2.1 Building a sense of place through language 281
2.2 Writing about places of transit 285
3 Creating characters in place 290
3.1 Narrative cultures and storytelling 292
4 Returning home 295
4.1 Writing about home 296
5 Summary 301
References 302
Readings 303
Reading 3.1 Connecting readers to place 303
Reading 3.2 The Art of Travel 305
Reading 3.3 ‘An All-Night Café’: first draft 307
Reading 3.4 ‘An All-Night Café’: second draft 309
Reading 3.5 Concepts of home 310
 1 Introduction

1 Introduction
In the two previous Creative Writing chapters, you’ve seen how we can
think of writing as a figurative journey, which involves the
development of your writing skills as you learn the ‘tricks of the trade’
and as you start to understand how best to harness your creativity.
You’ve also seen how the act of storytelling can be structured and
staged to draw potential readers into the narrative and keep them
interested in the world that you have created in terms of events,
characters and places. In addition, you’ve had the opportunity to
develop your writing skills through creating your own short pieces of
text in response to a range of writing prompts.

Figure 1 On the road in Shetland. Photo: Dominic Sant/The Open

University.

This chapter aims to build on what you’ve learned so far and take you
further on your writing journey. It will do so by focusing on language
and place, and the fact that using language in a particular way can help
enhance the places that you are writing about. I’m using language here
in a general sense to point to the primary (and in most cases only)
building block of stories, though of course some stories (e.g. stories for
children) draw on other resources, such as images. I’m also pointing to

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language in a more particular sense. For most of the UK, writing in

educational contexts will be conducted in the English language, and
English (at least standard English) has a particular set of grammatical
resources and a very large vocabulary base on which to draw upon in
your writing. However, not only are there other languages across the
world in which people write but, even within English, there are
regional variations that writers can use. For example, in his novel The
Valley at the Centre of the World (2018), Malachy Tallack uses a dialect of
Shetland to ‘place’ some of his characters; that is to say, he uses
language and dialect as a marker to signify where people come from
and as an index of their connection to a particular place.
Nevertheless, a sense of place and the characters within it can be
constructed by means other than dialogue or reported speech.
Descriptive passages in novels and short stories also function to create
a sense of place, and to provide a locational base in which characters
act and events occur. In other words, stories involve people in
particular places doing, saying and thinking things, as well as people
moving from one place to another, and describing these aspects in
detail is another way in which a sense of place can come alive.
Not only is describing a place important, sometimes a change of place
can impact a character’s behaviour and/or influence their thoughts. In
Tallack’s 60 Degrees North (2015), for example, leaving Shetland and
travelling around the world along the sixtieth parallel (the line of
latitude that Shetland shares with other places such as Norway,
Greenland and Alaska) serves to disrupt his ideas about Shetland, a
place he comes to call home (Figure 2). This illustrates that a person’s
relationship to a place can change not just over time but also as a
consequence of leaving it and then returning. Putting distance between
yourself and another place, particularly one with which you are familiar
and may call home, can change the way in which you ‘see’ or
remember that place, and motivate, if not determine, how you respond
to it.
As Tallack demonstrates in his work, writers may write from their
personal experiences of travel and place, or they may use language and
descriptions of place to evoke a fictional setting and characters, so that
a reader is able to travel in their imagination to a specific location. In
order to represent a journey and describe a real or fictional place in
such a way that others are persuaded by it, find it credible and can

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visualise it, we need to use language carefully. Therefore, in this

chapter, you will learn how language can be used effectively to write
about place, places of transit and concepts of home.

Figure 2 Cover of Malachy Tallack’s travel memoir, 60 Degrees North:

Around the World in Search of Home, 2015, Polygon.

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2 Language and place

To say that a piece of creative writing is largely, if not exclusively, made
up of strings of words and sentences in sequence on a page might
seem rather obvious, but in fact the type of words that you select and
the order in which you arrange them are of the utmost importance. In
the previous two chapters, you have already explored, to some extent,
the importance of word choice in sending effective signals to a reader
(e.g. language that draws on more than one sense). Skilful use of
language can enable the creation of a sense of place as well as help
ground a particular character in a specific place. As we have seen, in
his novel The Valley at the Centre of the World, Tallack chose to signal
some of his characters’ rootedness in place through the use of
Shetlandic dialect (see the following table). Equally, his atmospheric
descriptions of Shetland’s landscapes reflect the deep attachment of
those characters to the world that they inhabit.
Shetland glossary

athin within
blyde glad
bonxie a great skua
braaly very
bruck rubbish
caain rounding up animals (sheep into a pen, for instance)
caddy a hand-reared lamb
clerty dirty
da day today
da moarn tomorrow
da night tonight
dan-a-days in those days
doot used to express a lack of doubt. ‘I doot it’ll rain’ means
‘I think it will rain’. However, the expression ‘nae doot‘
means, literally, ‘no doubt’.
du/dee/you you (subject, object and plural forms)
dy/dine your/yours
een one (wan is also used)
eenoo just now

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fae from
fairt afraid
fantin starving

‘Shetland Glossary’ from The Valley at the Centre of the World (2018)

The language or languages (including dialect) that a writer uses in their

work may serve a variety of purposes. Often, the use of regional
varieties of a language are used to locate characters in a place, flag up
their cultural identity and help evoke a sense of that place. There are,
of course, many other ways in which writers can situate characters,
express their cultural identity and show what is meaningful to them.
For example, a character’s name may reflect where they come from,
just as the activities in which they engage may suggest something about
their social, geographic or cultural location. To see how this works,
let’s start with an activity that asks you to consider three short
published extracts from writers for whom language is an important
indicator of culture and cultural diversity.

Activity 1
(Allow about 30 minutes to complete this activity.)
Turn to Reading 3.1, which contains extracts from the following three
books (or literary works):

. The Valley at the Centre of the World (2018) by Malachy Tallack

. The House on Mango Street (2004 [1984]) by Sandra Cisneros
. A Place Apart (2014 [1978]) by Dervla Murphy.
As you read, consider how the passages demonstrate the ways in which
language can connect a reader to a place, as well as help to create an
image of a certain kind of character who is immersed in a particular
cultural environment.
Make some brief notes on each extract, thinking about the ways in which
the language used evokes particular places and/or cultures. Don’t worry
that you haven’t read the rest of the book in each instance. The
important thing here is to look closely at how language is used to create
a sense of place and/or identity in each short passage.

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Chapter 3 On the road

Figure 3 Children play on the corner of Independent Street ignoring the

armed soldiers on patrol. Cover of Dervla Murphy’s A Place Apart, 2014,
Eland publishing.

Discussion
Extract 1: The short dialogue in this passage helps to situate the
interaction between David and Mary, who are husband and wife.
Vocabulary such as ‘tatties’ and ‘aye’ signify that a local dialect is being
used. From these short lines, it may not be exactly clear where this
conversation takes place, but the word ‘tatties’ could indicate Scotland.
Extract 2: This extract enacts the kind of associations that names may
carry in different languages. The girl in this extract is called Esperanza,
a name that she has inherited from her great-grandmother. The
reference to her father listening to Mexican records on Sundays
indicates her heritage.
Extract 3: This passage incorporates reported speech from an encounter
in a pub in the Republic of Ireland (although, you might not know that

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without having checked out where Granard is). Through the spelling of
‘language’ and the use of the double negative (‘don’t’ … ‘no’), the
narrator is attempting to indicate how words are pronounced in the local
dialect as well as showing, through use of a localised grammar, where
the ‘weather-beaten old man’ sits on the socio-economic spectrum. He
appears to be a local farmer who has come to sell his produce or
livestock on market day, hence the ‘wad’ of money in one hand and
double whiskey in the other. The seemingly sexist remark at the end of
the passage indicates that the text is probably set at a time when
women were not often expected to socialise in pubs (in this case, in
certain parts of Ireland in the 1970s, when the book was written).

2.1 Building a sense of place through language

As someone originally from Northern Ireland, I grew up in a place
where different languages and cultures (including Gaelic, Ulster Scots
and English) ‘rubbed along’ together, although not always, it must be
said, without conflict. The contact between different languages and
cultures impacts the ways in which writers represent places and people.
For example, in her novel, Milkman (2018), the Northern Irish writer
Anna Burns writes about what it feels like to live in a ‘divided’ city
(Belfast) and shows, with a great deal of dry humour, just how deep
linguistic and cultural attachments can go. In the story, the protagonist
uses what she calls ‘over the water language’ (2018, p. 21): that is to
say, the kind of language that she (an 18-year-old girl from a working-
class Republican part of the city) believes to be used by English people
of a certain social and political class – words like ‘extraordinary’,
‘marvellous’, ‘tremendous’, ‘stupendous’, ‘stunning’, ‘topper’, ‘super’.
These words are emphasised in the text by being presented in italics
and often followed by exclamation marks, which differentiates them
from the kind of language used in the character’s local neighbourhood.
Milkman also contains a whole section on names, which includes lists
of (mostly English middle and upper-middle class) names that it would
not be permissible to give to children growing up in the narrator’s
neighbourhood – names like Nigel, Jason, Jasper, Lance, Percival,
Tristram, Clive, Godfrey, Hector and Hubert. Within the context of the
novel, these prohibitions are seen as part of an attempt to resist
colonisation, but the manner in which it is expressed – over-the-top

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and humorous – also suggests that the narrator finds it somewhat

strange, part of the ‘psycho-political atmosphere, with its rules of
allegiance, of tribal identification’ (2018, p. 24). It is as if parts of the
city have their own cultural and psychic geography, a bit like East
and West Berlin before the wall came down.

Figure 4 Ballywalter, Ards Peninsula, Northern Ireland. Photo: RooM the

Agency/Alamy.

When I return to Northern Ireland, what I tend to remember or

‘recover’ from particular places are regionalisms or dialect words that I
used as a child. While these have not been completely erased from my
vocabulary, they have ceased to be part of my everyday language, since
in the intervening years I have moved away and lived in different
places. (Indeed, if I had continued to use certain regional expressions
in my new locations, I would most likely have been met with
incomprehension!) While travelling recently around the Ards Peninsula
in Northern Ireland, the words ‘poke’ and ‘slider’ came into my mind
as I drove through a seaside town called Ballywalter (Figure 4). These
are Northern Irish terms that relate to different kinds of ice cream: a
‘poke’ is a cornet or cone, while a ‘slider’ is an ice cream sandwich
(using wafers). When I was a child, my great-aunt and great-uncle used
to take me to Ballywalter and we’d always get an ice cream. So, this
language, rooted in place, triggered forgotten memories of my great-

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aunt and great-uncle on my mother’s side of the family. It’s as if

language is a kind of repository of past usages and of associated
memories. Ways of talking, then, can reflect aspects of a cultural reality.
The following activity might remind you of one that you completed in
Chapter 1, where you were asked to choose a place and a mood and
then write a description evocative of that mood. All of the writing
activities in this chapter should give you a chance to build on the skills
that you have learned from previous Creative Writing chapters, in the
context of reading and writing about place.

Activity 2
(Allow around 1 hour to complete this activity.)

Choose a place that is meaningful to you and write around 300 words
about it. In your description, ensure that the following is made clear to
your reader:

. the kind of place that it is (e.g. an urban environment or the

countryside)
. its significance (e.g. a childhood haunt)
. why it still resonates with you (e.g. its sense of history or the
memories it evokes).
If you prefer, you can choose a place such as Hardwick Hall (which you
learned about in Book 1) and write about it imaginatively (e.g. from the
perspective of a scullery maid or a gardener). In other words, this does
not necessarily need to be a personal piece that relates to you – it could
be a fictional piece that allows you to practise using language and the
five senses (taste, touch, sound, sight, smell) to good effect.

Discussion
There will be a diversity of responses to this activity and no one ‘right’
answer. I found myself thinking about going to the beach in Northern
Ireland with my parents as a child and tried to describe an outing to a
particular place. It was as if I had ‘stepped back’ in time, wanting to
recreate in words what appears to be, in some ways, like a photo (or a
series of photos) in my mind. Here is my first draft by way of example:

We leave the car by the roadside tucked into the verge and
carry down to the beach the equipment we have packed. Dad
takes the orange and turquoise windbreak and two folded
deck chairs; mum carries the rattan basket containing a flask

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of coffee, juice in cartons and sandwiches in a Tupperware

box, and we three girls in matching mustard jerkins carry our
bathing costumes wrapped in a towel. My sisters remove their
sandals immediately they reach the fine sand; I hold back until
we’ve found a spot to put the windbreak up, slightly away from
the crowds. Like mum, I don’t want to be sitting on top of
other people; even if we have to walk a fair distance, I prefer
us to have our own space.

Even when the sun shines, it’s windy along the North Antrim
coast and the air still carries a chill in late June. Once at
ground level behind the windbreak, we warm up sufficiently to
remove our clothes and change into swimsuits. It’s always a
competition to see who will get into the water first! It’s a shock
at first, then little by little, your body acclimatises to the water
and once it reaches your hips, you’re ready to dive under and
swim a few strokes just to show that you’re not fazed by the
cold of the Atlantic. You wave at mum and dad sitting on their
folding chairs keeping an eye out. They wave back, just as
one of your sisters grabs your legs from behind and sings the
music from Jaws. You’re not a good swimmer and are taken
aback. You go under and swallow a mouthful of salty water.
When you right yourself and spit out the water, you see your
father approach the water’s edge, just as the shore steadies.
He doesn’t look pleased.
(‘A day at the beach’ by Fiona Doloughan)

Clearly, there are things that I could improve upon in a second draft of
this piece, perhaps in terms of drawing on all the senses (e.g. sound
and smell in addition to visual cues). Something else that might be
important, particularly in a longer piece, is the use of dialogue to give a
sense of interaction between ‘characters’ and to show the kind of
language used in this particular cultural context. One thing that I
realised after drafting this is that the film Jaws was released in 1975. I
don’t think that my sisters and I would still have been wearing our
mustard jerkins then – that stems from a different era, probably
late 1960s. I seem to have drawn on a composite picture. That may
feel like a small detail, but if I want to refer ‘authentically’ to a specific

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era, I would need to check that my reference points tally with the
period in question. Whether you are writing from experience or are
imagining a particular scene, getting these little details right can help
your reader to immerse themselves in the piece of writing.

2.2 Writing about places of transit

As we’ve seen, the choice of particular words and expressions is
important in constructing a sense of place or ‘scene’ in a narrative. I’m
using the term ‘scene’ here to mean setting and its visual
representation through words. You’ve already come across the notion
of scene before in a slightly different way, in Chapter 2, in relation to
the creation of an interaction between characters through dialogue. In
this chapter so far, you have seen how important it is to the
construction of a story to create mental pictures so that a reader can
visualise how characters interact, not only with one another but also
with the landscapes that they inhabit.
In the activity that follows, you will look at an example of how the
travel writer Alain de Botton creates a scene at a motorway service
station. In his book The Art of Travel (2003), de Botton considers why
people travel, what it is they go in search of and how cultures of travel
have changed over time (for example, from the Grand Tour of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to mass tourism in the late
twentieth century). In his book, de Botton looks at how we travel both
in the sense of the means by which we travel (e.g. by train or plane)
and the places at which journeys start and finish (e.g. the airport or the
railway station) or through which we pass on our way to a particular
destination (e.g. a service station). What characterises de Botton’s book
about travel is his focus on the psychology of travel as well as on the
fact that he is interested in how cultures of travel are created. For
example, guidebooks may tell us what we should view in a particular
place or advise us of where to go and what to see. Writers of holiday
brochures, of general travel literature and of the literature of place
have different aims and present different kinds of images through their
words and the pictures that they choose to include.
In the context of a journey from London to Manchester, de Botton
uses what looks like a simple description of place to surface
observations and reflections triggered by the service station, creating
and conveying a distinctive narrative persona. Through his portrayal
of what might be considered a place of transit (a place through which

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people tend to pass on their way elsewhere and which might be

considered to have no intrinsic interest), he creates interest and drama
in the place and the people passing through it.

Activity 3
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)
Turn to Reading 3.2, which is de Botton’s description of a service station
from his book The Art of Travel (2003).
To what extent do you feel that de Botton succeeds in creating interest
in something that might be considered mundane? Pick out any
expressions that you find unusual or worth commenting on.
The important thing in this activity is to read this passage as a writer,
focusing on the extent to which de Botton’s use of particular words and
expressions helps to build up a picture of this place of transit, and to
consider its narrative potential (the extent to which it also tells a story).

Discussion
You may or may not have been impressed by de Botton’s ability to
create a sense of the ambience of the service station. Indeed, in some
ways it is a rather generic piece of writing, which emphasises the forlorn
and potentially depressing atmosphere of the service station restaurant
in general. Yet, through de Botton’s use of language and choice of
expressions, he does manage to conjure up something of the
atmosphere in this place (a service station two hours from London en
route to Manchester) at a specific moment (almost evening) and to
indicate his response to what he sees, smells and hears.
The phrases and expressions that struck me as noteworthy are listed
below. Don’t worry if your list is different from mine!

. ‘a peninsula of baked beans’

. ‘I felt dizzy stepping out of my craft, which gave off a series of clicks
as it cooled, as if paper clips were being dropped through the bonnet’
. ‘I slid a damp tray along a metal runway’
. ‘a uniform ribbon of red and white diamonds extending into infinity in
two directions’
. ‘islands of dried ketchup from the meals of long-departed travellers’.
The reason I picked out these phrases and expressions is because for
me they help to transform the scene in interesting and unusual ways.
They also help provide a certain continuity across the passage, creating

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links by selecting related vocabulary items that serve to transform the

ordinary into something potentially more interesting (e.g. a peninsula of
baked beans; islands of dried ketchup). They take the ordinary and turn
it into something more extraordinary. Think of de Botton ‘stepping out of
[his] craft’; the choice of the word ‘craft’ has the potential to signal an
alien arriving on the scene and introduces an unfamiliar perspective on
something ordinary or banal. Equally, the manner in which the cooling of
the engine is evoked enables the reader to ‘hear’ the series of clicks.
The use of ‘as if’ is also a way of drawing the reader into an extended
image that supports what has previously been said. The use of ‘as if’
and ‘like’ introduce imagined comparisons that bring together ordinarily
disparate things.
Together, all these phrases help to create movement, sound and colour,
which enable readers to visualise the place and see the people involved.
De Botton does not say that the woman ‘idly rotating a teabag in a cup’
is bored but her actions signal that this, or something similar, is the case
– perhaps she has ‘zoned out’ and is on automatic pilot. Actions and
behaviours can speak volumes without the writer having to say exactly
what they mean. This is one way of understanding the concept of
‘showing’, rather than ‘telling’, which you first learned about in Chapter 1.

The previous activity asked you to practise reading as a writer, enabling

you to consider how a narrative scene can be built up through
language. In terms of what happens in Reading 3.2, there is very little
‘action’: de Botton arrives at a service station by car, enters a
restaurant, buys an orange juice and a bar of chocolate, and observes
and reflects on his surroundings. Yet, in five paragraphs, he manages to
build up a picture of the world-in-miniature into which he has entered
and gives us a sense of what he finds there. De Botton is attracted to
such places, an attraction that he attributes to the ‘power of the liminal
travelling place’ (2003, p. 32). By ‘liminal’, he means places through
which one passes on the way to somewhere else and what I’ve called
places of transit. He lists these places as ‘airport terminals, harbours,
train stations and motels’ (2003, p. 32), but you can probably think of
others, such as hallways, which act as ‘holding places’ or thresholds
that you cross in order to move from one place (or space) to another.
Reading 3.2 also shows that de Botton is very much interested in the
work of writers and artists who also choose to depict or represent
places of transit in their work. The artist that he mentions is Edward

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Hopper (1882–1967) whose painting Railroad Sunset (Figure 5) features

a signal box, which might also be considered a place of transit.

Figure 5 Edward Hopper, Railroad Sunset, 1929, oil on canvas,

75 × 122 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N.
Hopper Bequest. Photo: akg-images. © Heirs of Josephine Hopper/ Licensed
by Artists Rights Society (ARS) NY/DACS, London 2020.

The next activity focuses your writing on places of transit. There can,
of course, be many reasons why writers choose to write about these
liminal places, but in the case of de Botton, he has travelled extensively
and written about his (and others’) experience of travel. Of course, you
don’t have to travel far, or even at all, to be able to construct in words
an experience of place. You can bring your reading and imagination to
bear on your writing just as much as your experience. Or you can use
something like the Hopper painting (Figure 5) as a starting point.

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Activity 4
(Allow around 1 hour to complete this activity.)

Choose one place of transit from the list below and write a short
description of it so that the reader can visualise the place, understand
who occupies it and how they feel. Aim to write about 300 words:

. an airport terminal
. an all-night café
. a railway carriage
. a doorway.

Discussion
There is no model answer here as everyone will have drafted something
different. However, it is possible to evaluate the success of your piece by
using a number of criteria. These might include some of the following:

. To what extent is it clear which place of transit is being evoked?

. Have you managed to particularise the environment or is it simply a
general description?
. Who does the reader encounter in this place and what are the
characters doing there?
. How does the language used help the reader to experience what it
feels like to be in this location at a specific time?
You may feel, on reflection, that some improvements could be made to
your piece. If so, you might like to consider how to revise it by, for
example, using language that draws on the senses (taste, touch, sound,
sight, smell) and by including unusual or arresting images such as the
ones that de Botton uses (which I refer to in my discussion of Activity 3).
You will have an opportunity later in the chapter to review your initial
draft and make changes as you see fit (see Activity 6).

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3 Creating characters in place

It is one thing to be able to describe a place, it is sometimes quite
another to be able to create characters who ‘own’ or inhabit that space.
Sometimes there is a deep connection between characters and the place
that they inhabit, such as a farmer whose family has lived for
generations on the same plot of land, or a city dweller who cannot
imagine ever leaving their urban environment. In some instances, it is
the place or landscape itself that becomes the focus of interest in a
narrative, rather than simply being a backdrop against which people
act. You might think again of the moors in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
Eyre (1847) or the role of Shetland in Tallack’s work. In other cases, it
is the dynamic between location and a character that the writer tries to
foreground. You may remember, for example, the reference to
Esperanza in The House on Mango Street (in Activity 1), who, while
having inherited her great-grandmother’s name, didn’t wish to inherit
her place by the window. In other words, the relationship between
character and place can take many forms, depending in part on the
aims of the writer, the conventions of the genre and the expectations
of the reader. In evaluating a piece of work from a Creative Writing
perspective, it is important to keep all of these things in mind.

Activity 5
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)

Read the following opening paragraph, which is taken from a short story
by the Chinese-born British writer Xiaolu Guo (Figure 6), then answer
the questions that follow.

He sits beside a window, utterly indifferent to the planes taking

off and landing outside. Having bought a ticket on the least
expensive flight, he now finds himself stuck for three hours in
Vienna International Airport. Three hours in transit, and not a
single thing to do. All the other travellers seem in a hurry to
be somewhere else. Pulling suitcases or shouldering
rucksacks, plane tickets clutched tightly in hand, they are
scenery in motion, breakers rolling past him like a brightly
coloured tide. Only he remains unmoved. Seated, silent and

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observant, set against the flowing landscape, he resembles

something planted by a window. A still life, or a green, green
tree.
(Guo, 2010, p. 52)

1 Where is the action located and how do you know?

2 What kind of character is presented in this place?
3 Who is telling the story and what impact does this have on how we
receive it?

Discussion
1 The story is set in a departure lounge in Vienna International Airport.
2 The character on whom the narrative focuses at this point is in transit
and appears to be waiting for an onward flight. In contrast to those
around him, he is immobile. He observes those around him. Given
that he bought a ticket for the least expensive flight, perhaps he isn’t
very wealthy.
3 The story is told in the third person. This means that the character’s
story is told by someone else and so, at least to begin with, the
reader views him from the outside and sees him from the narrator’s
perspective. The language used to present the character is filtered
through the narrator’s gaze and is marked by the narrator’s
evaluation.

In Guo’s passage, the language (chosen to represent the space and the
actors within that space) sets up an opposition between movement and
lack of movement. The male character is ‘set against the flowing
landscape’ and ‘resembles something planted by a window. A still life, or
a green, green tree’ (my italics are for emphasis). Within a single
paragraph, contrasts are drawn between stillness and movement;
between dynamism (emergence and growth) and stasis (‘he remains
unmoved’), between art (‘a still life’; a pictorial representation) and
nature/the natural (‘a green, green tree’), as well as between mobile
technologies (here, the planes outside) and the (more or less) static
tree. However, in some ways, the expression ‘a green, green tree’ does
not simply serve to intensify the ‘greenness’ of the tree in this case
but, arguably, also signals the process of growth.

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Figure 6 Writer and film-maker Xiaolu Guo. Photo: Panther Media GmbH/
Alamy.

In this way, Guo shows how best to create characters in place by using
the setting as a point of departure for a story, and by introducing a
particular kind of character who seems in opposition to the scene
around him. In reading this short extract, you may already be
wondering what the protagonist’s role in the drama is going to be and
why he is so still in the midst of motion. This is how the narrator
manipulates reader expectation and creates tension, drawing the reader
in.

3.1 Narrative cultures and storytelling

So far in this chapter, you have learned that even small and seemingly
insignificant elements of language can do important jobs. Of course,
there is more to a story than well-chosen language. There is also an
expectation that something will happen, even if on a small scale. You
might like to imagine what happens next in Guo’s short story: will the
character simply continue to wait or will something happen to disrupt
the status quo? As you have learned when looking at the five-act
structure or the Heroic Journey in Chapter 2, for there to be a story

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something has to happen. There needs to be a change in state or a

change in situation. If nothing happens in a story, we may wonder why
we are reading it and what it is supposed to be about. Of course,
sometimes what is happening relates to a character’s inner life rather
than to events in the outside world, though a character’s movements
and behaviour can of course be used to reflect a change in their inner
life. What counts as a ‘good’ story may have as much to do with a
reader’s (sometimes changing) personal taste and sensibilities as it does
with narrative norms and conventions.
For example, in Book 1 when studying Delphi, you learned about
ancient Greek oracle narratives. This is not a genre that we often
encounter in the modern world, unless we are thinking about
rewritings of older classical stories. It is certainly true that there are
some cross-cultural differences in how stories are told and in the
extent to which the balance between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ is
performed across cultures, even within the same culture at different
times. You may have heard, for example, of the Norwegian writer Karl
Ove Knausgaard (although don’t worry if you have not). Knausgaard is
known for his lengthy digressions and for telling the reader ‘too much’
at times. His work, at least in English translation, is sometimes
criticised for not being selective enough. However, he is a writer who
fits within a Scandinavian (and more broadly European) storytelling
tradition, even if Anglo-American critics think that his work requires
editing down!
While storytelling can differ across cultures and change with time,
when developing your own writing and storytelling practices, it is
useful to bear in mind that the conventions and norms of Creative
Writing that you have encountered to date (such as ‘show, don’t tell’)
are shorthand ways of enabling you to develop your writing in ways
likely to be met with success. The following activity provides you with
an opportunity to engage in the work of revising a text that you’ve
previously drafted. This, as you already know, is another fundamental
practice of the discipline of Creative Writing.

Activity 6
(Allow around 1 hour to complete this activity.)
In light of what you now know about places of transit and creating
characters in place, go back to the piece that you produced in response
to Activity 4 and redraft it.

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You may wish to consider making local as well as global changes. By

local changes, I mean small changes such as removing or changing
certain words. Global changes refer to larger amends that affect the
piece as a whole: for example, you might decide to completely
restructure your piece of writing or write it from a different point of view.
Note down all the changes that you have made between your two drafts
and consider why one solution is better than another. Be as specific as
you can.
By way of example, I have produced an annotated first draft of a piece
written in response to the prompt: ‘An all-night café’ (see Reading 3.3).
This is followed by a second draft in response to feedback with some
comments on the process of reworking my first draft (see Reading 3.4).

Discussion
Again, everyone will have had a slightly different experience in
completing this activity, depending on what you wrote in Activity 4 and
what you now think of your piece with the benefit of hindsight. The
second part of this activity aims to make you mindful of the impact of
both local and global changes.
If you look at my reworked example in Reading 3.4, you will see that I
have taken on board the suggestions made by my Creative Writing
colleague, Heather. In my second draft, I deleted my initial paragraph
and started the piece with what was originally my second paragraph,
since I can see the value of getting straight to the point without
hesitation or ‘throat clearing’. I did, however, consider that if I were
writing a piece of travel literature, I might well want to be more explicit
about framing my writing and explaining my motivation for producing it,
in terms, for example, of the difference between ideas about London by
night and the reality. I also acted on the advice to think about ambient
sounds and to consider whether I could bring in the other senses. I’m
aware that I often tend to focus on the visual and the auditory at the
expense of taste, touch and smell. This is something to develop in my
writing, depending on the kind of ‘scene’ or setting that I’m trying to
produce.

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4 Returning home
So far in this chapter, we’ve been looking at how effective use of
language helps writers to construct a sense of place. We’ve also
considered the dynamic between people and place and seen how
descriptions of particular places can be suggestive of particular
character types. We’ve also considered what it means to write about a
place ‘close up’ and in detail. While it may seem contradictory,
sometimes leaving a certain place can highlight a protagonist’s
connection to it. For example, the subtitle of Tallack’s travel memoir,
60 Degrees North, is Around the World in Search of Home. Indeed, his
book is topped and tailed by two chapters: one called ‘Homegoing’, the
other entitled ‘Homecoming’. ‘Homegoing’ relates to the author’s
teenage dream to travel around the sixtieth parallel, a dream that he
realised a decade or so later. ‘Homecoming’ is the final chapter of the
book, in which he describes his return to Shetland, after completing
his final trip to Norway via a freight boat from Aberdeen to Lerwick.
In this final chapter, he articulates a sense of homecoming now that
his journey has been completed.
Through writing his travel book, Tallack discovered that Shetland had
not only been his home since adolescence; it was also where he felt ‘at
home’. Acknowledging the role of Shetland in his life and of the way
in which its landscape had formed him, he writes:

The landscape that truly shaped me was that of Shetland. This is

where I became the person I became. This is where the conflicts
that would form me were fought out. That I came to love this
place, having once hated it, is strange and yet entirely coherent. It
was a process of understanding, familiarity and, I suppose, of
forgiveness that brought me back here. In the end, I accepted the
centre around which my world was spinning, and I turned
towards it.
(Tallack, 2016, pp. 214–215)

At one level, home is another example of a particular type of place. At

the same time, for some, it is less a specific place and more an idea of
a place towards which they turn. In this last section of the chapter, we
will focus on ideas about ‘home’ and what the search for home means
to writers and characters. In his writing, Tallack expresses a kind of

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resolution to a conflict that has taken time for the writer to name and
understand. It articulates a sense of closure, though in reality it is a
false closure in the sense that the short coda at the end of the book
(similar to an epilogue) relates the disorientation and lack of direction
that Tallack began to experience a few months after his return:

Yet at the end of that year, as I began to emerge from beneath

my own shadow, I left Shetland and moved south. I left Shetland
and I began, once again, to write.
(Tallack, 2016, p. 217)

Whatever the reasons for travel, ‘going away’ often stands in

opposition to staying or being at home. For such a small and familiar
word, the notion of ‘home’ can also be a complicated one. Depending
on a person’s life history and experience, home may refer to a single
place or to multiple locations within a single country, or even across
countries. After all, lots of people move home today for a variety of
reasons, including those not always within their control; and,
unfortunately, there are also those without a home or fixed abode. A
walk through any big city is sufficient to point to the fact that for
some individuals the idea of having a home is no longer a reality,
whether they are literally homeless, sheltering temporarily in hostels or
find themselves in the process of setting up a new home in an adopted
country.
In previously studying Jane Eyre, you have already encountered the
(fictional) story of a young orphan’s search for a home and family of
her own. Home, then, is not always something that you start life with
and can take for granted. Lots of ninteenth-century English novels tell
stories of orphaned children and their sometimes troubled and
conflicted journey through childhood and adolescence to adulthood.
You may know of Oliver Twist (1839) or David Copperfield (1850), both
novels by Charles Dickens, which involve stories about the plight or
circumstances of orphans and their life trajectory.

4.1 Writing about home

Home, then, can be a destination rather than a point of origin. It can
be something that a person seeks or tries to recreate rather than a
place that they simply occupy. Shortly, we will look at a number of

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brief extracts from different sources that present various takes on the
concept of home, but before we do so, let’s consider what home
means to you.

Activity 7
(Allow around 10 minutes to complete this activity.)
In your writer’s notebook, write down whatever comes to mind in relation
to the word ‘home’.
You might wish to create a table with two columns: one listing words and
expressions, the other with associations to home. Here is an example:

Words and expressions linked to Associations with concept of

‘home’ ‘home’
Home is where the heart is Comfort

Then think about drawing lines between certain words in each column
that, to you, seem to be connected in some way.

Discussion
The following table represents some of the thoughts that I had around
home. In reviewing them, I realised that most of the associations are
positive, though the words and expressions I have noted make clear that
there is a strong cultural dimension to my understanding of home. For
example, these thoughts might be quite different from those of Romany
people in parts of the south-east of England or nomadic shepherds in
the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Home might be a caravan or a
shepherd’s hut (at least temporarily), but it might also be connected to
the idea of moving from one place to another in response to the
demands of seasonal work.

Words and expressions Associations of word ‘home’ and its

attributes
Hearth Warmth
Homecoming Return
Homebody Somebody who stays at home
A homemaker Provider of shelter, protection
Homespun (a homespun tale) Not very sophisticated, simple,
unpretentious
To be homesick Missing home

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Words and Expressions Associations of word ‘home’ and its

attributes
Home sweet home Relief to be back at home, sometimes
used ironically
Make yourself at home Relax
Homeland/Country of origin Where you live, where you are ‘at home’
and where you come from may not always
be the same
Keep the home-fires burning Wartime expression encouraging patient
domesticity

The word ‘home’ has both a figurative and a non-figurative dimension.

Homes might refer to ‘houses’ (as in ‘new homes’) or dwellings that offer
accommodation or shelter. We might also think of ‘home’ as a ‘private’ or
domestic space as opposed to a public space. It may also refer to
feelings of security, warmth and protection. Of course, this is not always
the case and for some people (and fictional characters) home can be an
oppressive or challenging space.
However, the fact that there are so many English expressions relating to
home tells you something about its cultural, historical and symbolic
positioning and significance. You may well have come up with other
associations – perhaps some more negative than others.

Now that you have had the chance to explore ideas about home and
its associations reflected in language, the following activity provides
you with an opportunity to consider how other writers engage with
concepts of home.

Activity 8
(Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.)
Read the three extracts presented in Reading 3.5 and then choose the
one that most resonates with you, explaining in a few sentences why this
is so.
Extracts 1 and 2 are both written in prose and taken from memoir (you
have already encountered both these authors on this module). Extract 3
has been taken from a poetry collection by Sinéad Morrissey, a
contemporary poet from Northern Ireland.

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Discussion
I cannot guess your preferred choice of text or the reasons why you
might have preferred one extract to another, but here are my own
responses to each extract:
For me, one of the central ideas in Extract 1 is the emotional nature of
the connection between a place and a person. Rather than a particular
place speaking similarly to a range of individuals or having a set of
observable characteristics, the link that a person feels with a place can
develop over time and be part of a process. For the author Malachy
Tallack, Shetland was a place that he came to call home after having
had a somewhat conflicted relationship with it.
Extract 2 speaks of the author Xiaolu Guo’s somewhat nomadic life
since leaving China in 2002, yet she recognises London as a place
where she has made herself a home. Home, then, refers to the place in
which she has spent a good deal of time and in which she has invested
in lots of different ways (including starting a family). The image she uses
of the fern suggests that one can acclimatise to places rather than
necessarily be born into them.
Extract 3 comes from Northern Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey’s debut book
of poetry, There was Fire in Vancouver (1996). It is part of a sequence of
poems under the title ‘Mercury’ that deals with movement. While poetry
is, of course, a different genre than the previous two extracts (with
different conventions to either travel literature or memoir), this particular
extract is reasonably straightforward in terms of its thematic content,
which speaks of a recognition of going from place to place in search of
something and not finding it. The ‘[s]omewhere you can’t get back to’
may be a childhood home that no longer exists; the ‘walled up room’
might be literally closed off or closed off in the mind. Memories can fade
or be ‘cut off’ from the dynamism of everyday life. It can be difficult to
return to something that you have left behind.
There’s much more that could be said about this poem in terms of
layout, choice of vocabulary, punctuation, imagery, etc., particularly as
these all impact upon the production of ‘meaning’, but for our current
purposes, the point of contact with the previous extracts lies in the
restlessness that may initiate travel, and the fact that travel may turn out
to be a search for home.

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Overall, the three extracts in Reading 3.5 present different takes on

home, suggesting that a home may be something that one grows into
or finds rather than necessarily being born into. This may seem a
strange idea if you have a clear sense of where you are from (your
homeland), and have a definite place that you call home. If, however,
you are less rooted in a specific location and have moved from place
to place, you may find the sentiments expressed in some of the
extracts more familiar. The three writers also make some interesting
points about the differences, confusions and coincidences between the
‘real’ and the ‘ideal’. They portray images of home as a dwelling, as a
point of origin or birthplace, as a place one makes and invests in, or as
something one continues to seek.

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5 Summary
This chapter has given you the opportunity to put into practice much
of what you have already learned in the previous two chapters, and to
pursue storytelling in the context of travel narratives. As a creative
writer, not only do you need to get a handle on the ‘tools of the trade’,
so to speak, but you also need to see how different cultural and
narrative contexts can stimulate your imagination. You have seen how
the various elements of storytelling – principally character, setting and
plot – are enacted in the context of travel, both real and fictional.
You have also focused on the mechanisms, such as dialogue and
dialect, that can be employed to create a sense that people are
embedded in and shaped by particular places, and have seen how
language is pivotal in helping to construct a sense of self.
You have also seen that ‘travel’ involves more than just movement
towards or away from a place, and that journeys in narrative are often
a means of depicting change. Characters may feel differently about
themselves or others after they encounter something different or new.
They may also look back at what or who they have left behind and re-
evaluate their situation. In this sense, writing about journeys is a
journey of discovery in itself, and a way of connecting past to present
and self to others.

You should now return to the module website to continue your

study of this unit.

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References
Burns, A. (2018) Milkman. London: Faber and Faber.
Cisneros, S. (2004 [1984]) The House on Mango Street. London and New York,
NY: Bloomsbury.
De Botton, A. (2003) The Art of Travel. London: Penguin Books.
Guo, X. (2010) ‘Stateless; “She passes by so slowly, turning back every now
and then to glance at him. How strange, he thinks, to see a child so young
walking all alone through an airport. A little red flower in a little red skirt”’,
The Sunday Times, 10 January, pp. 52–53. Available at: https://www.thetimes.
co.uk/article/short-story-stateless-by-xiaolu-guo-bjz9h5xqx3g (Accessed: 9
July 2020).
Guo, X. (2017) Once Upon a Time in the East. London: Chatto & Windus.
Morrissey, S. (1996) There Was Fire in Vancouver. Manchester: Carcanet.
Murphy, D. (2014 [1978]) A Place Apart. London: Eland Publishing.
Tallack, M. (2016) 60 Degrees North: Around the World in Search of Home.
Edinburgh: Polygon.
Tallack, M. (2018) The Valley at the Centre of the World. Edinburgh:
Canongate.

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Readings
Reading 3.1 Connecting readers to place

Extract 1

Source: Tallack, M. (2018) The Valley at the Centre of the World.

Edinburgh: Canongate, p. 11.

‘Darlin, I’m just putting the tatties on. Make sure you’re back in twenty
minutes, okay?’
‘Aye,’ David shouted. He was rummaging for something in the porch
cupboard, then he was gone. The front door opened and closed. A
bustle of cold air arrived in the kitchen, and Mary stepped closer to
the stove. Her husband had a way of hearing without seeming to listen.
It used to irritate her but not any more. She knew he’d be back in time
to eat.

Extract 2

Source: Cisneros, S. (2004 [1984]) The House on Mango Street.

London and New York, NY: Bloomsbury, pp. 10–11.

In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many

letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A
muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday
mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.
It was my great-grandmother’s name and now it is mine.
[…]
[…] Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit
her place by the window.

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Extract 3

Source: Murphy, D. (2014 [1978]) A Place Apart. London: Eland

Publishing, p. 21.

In Granard the Mart was just closing. The pub – one of many – was
full of foul-mouthed farmers, some very drunk. Pulling my pint, the
young woman behind the bar called, ‘Mind yer langwidge, now! There’s
a lady present!’ Whereupon a weather-beaten old man beside the door
– holding a wad of bank-notes in one hand and a double whiskey in
the other – replied swiftly, ‘I don’t see no lady here, on’y a tough
woman in throusers!’

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Reading 3.2 The Art of Travel

Source: De Botton, A. (2003) The Art of Travel. London:

Penguin Books, pp. 31–32.

Overlooking the motorway between London and Manchester, in a flat,

featureless expanse of country, stands a single-storey glass and red-
brick service station. In its forecourt hangs a giant laminated flag that
advertises to motorists and to sheep in an adjacent field a photograph
of a fried egg, two sausages and a peninsula of baked beans.
I arrived at the service station towards evening. The sky was turning
red in the west and in a row of ornamental trees to the side of the
building birds could be heard against the incessant bass note of the
traffic. I had been on the road for two hours, alone with clouds
forming on the horizon, with the lights of commuter towns beyond
the grass banks, with motorway bridges and the silhouettes of
overtaking cars and coaches. I felt dizzy stepping out of my craft,
which gave off a series of clicks as it cooled, as if paper clips were
being dropped through the bonnet. My senses needed to readjust
themselves to firm land, to the wind and to the discreet sounds of
night drawing in.
The restaurant was brightly illuminated and exaggeratedly warm. Large
photographs of coffee cups, pastries and hamburgers hung on the
walls. A waitress was refilling a drinks dispenser. I slid a damp tray
along a metal runway, bought a bar of chocolate and an orange juice
and sat by a window that made up one wall of the building. Vast panes
were held in place by strips of beige putty, into whose chewy
clamminess I was tempted to dig my nails. Beyond the window, the
grass sloped down to the motorway, where traffic ran in silent, elegant
symmetry along six lanes, the differences in makes and colours of cars
disguised by the gathering darkness, leaving a uniform ribbon of red
and white diamonds extending into infinity in two directions.
There were few other customers in the service station. A woman was
idly rotating a teabag in a cup. A man and two small girls were eating
hamburgers. A bearded elderly man was doing a crossword. No one
was talking. There was an air of reflection, of sadness too – only
heightened by the faint sound of piped upbeat music and the enamel

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smile of a woman about to bite into a bacon sandwich in a photograph

above the counter. In the middle of the room, hanging from the ceiling
and dancing nervously in the breeze of an air vent, was a cardboard
box announcing an offer of free onion rings with every hotdog.
Misshapen and upside down, the box seemed only a rough
approximation of what head office must have stipulated, like those
milestones in distant parts of the Roman Empire whose form strayed
from the designs of the centre.
The building was architecturally miserable, it smelt of frying oil and
lemon-scented floor polish, the food was glutinous and the tables were
dotted with islands of dried ketchup from the meals of long-departed
travellers, and yet something about the scene moved me. There was
poetry in this forsaken service station, perched on the ridge of the
motorway far from all habitation. Its appeal made me think of certain
other and equally and unexpectedly poetic travelling places – airport
terminals, harbours, train stations and motels – and the work of a
nineteenth-century writer [Gustave Flaubert] and a twentieth-century
painter [Edward Hopper] he had inspired, who had, in different ways
been unusually alive to the power of the liminal travelling place.

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Reading 3.3 ‘An All-Night Café’: first draft

First draft of ‘An All-Night Café’ by Fiona Doloughan, annotated

by Heather Richardson (see footnotes).

London, the city that never sleeps1, or so they say. In reality it is

difficult to find a place to go in London after midnight. Even the
stations close for a few hours before the return of the early morning
commuters. I know because I once found myself in the uncomfortable
position of having missed the last train northwards from London and
as I didn’t want to fork out on a hotel for the night, I spent the time
looking for a place to ‘hang out’ until the first early morning train2.
The light in the café was so bright it hurt my eyes and the large
windows opening onto the square meant there was no place to hide. It
was like being on display, one of a set of mannequins in a grandiose
shop window. Thankfully, passersby were thinning out, disappearing
into the thickness of the night3.
By 3 a.m. the café had emptied to all but the hard-core night owls and
those of limited means. There is only so much grainy coffee you can
drink without suffering some kind of out-of-body experience. Two
tables along from me4 a 50-something man in an off-white mac was
turning5 over the pages of a magazine. I tried not to look in his
direction. Behind me a muttered conversation was taking place
between one old lady and herself. Wrapped in a woollen shawl that
resembled a large string bag, she filled the vacuum6 with a rash of
expletives.

1
This is a rather over-familiar phrase, and not really needed.
2
I don’t think this opening paragraph is needed at all. It’s locating and explaining, but not
actually describing. Some famous writer whose name escapes me said that we often
begin drafts with a bit of ‘throat clearing’ to get us into the piece, but it should be
dispensed with as we redraft. You can decide if there’s anything essential here that could
be woven in later in the description.
3
This is such a strong paragraph – this is where you should begin.
4
Possibly don’t need this ‘from me’? Deleting this would avoid a repetition of ‘me’ when
you get to the old lady.
5
This is just a little tweak. ‘ing’ words can dissipate the energy of description, although
sometimes they are necessary – as in ‘a muttered conversation was taking place’ in a
sentence’s time. I’ve taken out this first ‘ing’ to avoid having two of them close together.
6
This has made me wonder about the ambient noises of the café. Was there nothing else?
Music or an all-night talk show? Coffee machines or dishwashers?

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Chapter 3 On the road

I opened my notebook and pretended to concentrate on my writing. In

an hour or two I would trek back to Euston and await the grand
opening of the station doors7.

7
This is a good final paragraph – it transitions the reader out of the description of the
café and towards whatever comes next. There’s a lot of strong visual description, and
the sensory detail of the grainy coffee. It might also be worth thinking about smells –
they can be very evocative.

308
 Readings

Reading 3.4 ‘An All-Night Café’: second draft

Second draft of ‘An All-Night Café’ by Fiona Doloughan,

following feedback from Heather Richardson.

The light in the café was so bright it hurt my eyes and the large
windows opening onto the square meant there was no place to hide. It
was like being on display, one of a set of mannequins in a grandiose
shop window. Thankfully, passersby were thinning out, disappearing
into the thickness of the night.
By 3 a.m. the café had emptied to all but the hard-core night owls and
those of limited means. There is only so much grainy coffee you can
drink without suffering some kind of out-of-body experience. Two
tables along a 50-something man in an off-white mac turned over the
pages of a magazine. I tried not to look in his direction.
Behind me a muttered conversation was taking place between one old
lady and herself. Wrapped in a woollen shawl that resembled a large
string bag, she suddenly let out a rash of expletives, prompted perhaps
by some inner demon.
The 50-something man closed his magazine with swift hand
movements and inserted it into his soiled cotton bag. I could hear his
plimsoles squeak as he turned to leave the café.
I opened my notebook and pretended to concentrate on my writing. In
an hour or two I would trek back to Euston and await the grand
opening of the station doors.

309
Chapter 3 On the road

Reading 3.5 Concepts of home

Extract 1

Source: Tallack, M. (2016) 60 Degrees North: Around the World in

Search of Home. Edinburgh: Polygon, p. 214.

The American writer Harry W. Paige said that ‘home is not a place
only, but a condition of the heart’. That is to say not that home can be
anywhere at all, but that the relationship between person and place is
an emotional one. Like being married, being at home is not a passive
state. It is a process, in which the heart must be engaged. That is as
true for the reindeer herders of Siberia, whose home may be hundreds
of square miles, as it is for the inhabitants of a tiny village on a tiny
island.
For many people this is not so. Home for them is nowhere in
particular. It is the house in which their belongings are kept and in
which they go to sleep at night. It extends no further than that. This is
the condition of our time. It is a marriage without love, a relationship
without commitment. And it is, surely, a kind of homelessness.

Extract 2

Source: Guo, X. (2017) Once Upon a Time in the East. London:

Chatto & Windus, p. 303.

Even though I still continue to travel and live in different places across
Europe and America, I have really spent the last decade in London.
This is where I have made myself a home. It seems to me that people
decide to settle somewhere not because they love the place, but
because they value and cherish what they have invested in it. I often
imagine myself as a fern, growing in a cool climate under the filtered
sunlight. Most of the time there is deep shade and plenty of heavy
raindrops falling from the sky onto my leaves. These are conditions for
flourishing – perfect conditions for ferns, and how they have lived for
millions of years. Perhaps I could learn something from them.

310
 Readings

Extract 3

Source: Morrissey, S. (1996) There Was Fire in Vancouver.

Manchester: Carcanet, p. 34.

It’s this leaving of villages,

One after the other –
The repeated conclusion
It’s not here either –
Beauty, home, whatever –
That leaves you where you are –
Side-stepping yourself, side-
Stepping the days you find no sense in,
And facing the road.

From scarecrows to gantries,

A skyline of signatures,
Cranes that defy
The skies they’re built in.
And cities,
And the back ends
Of cities. No place to walk through,
No space to hold. Your books and your spoons
In a walled up room,
Somewhere you can’t get back to.

311
Block 4 Resources
 Resource 4.1 Creative Writing revision checklist

Resource 4.1
Creative Writing revision checklist
1 Reading aloud
One of the easiest ways to start revising is to read your work aloud to
yourself (or have it read aloud to you). You’ll often notice incorrect or
clumsy phrasing immediately when reading aloud, as opposed to the
way your eyes skim past it on the page or screen. This is because
reading aloud, or being read to, slows down the reading process and
forces you to pay closer attention to the text, enabling you to catch
mistakes and infelicities. (This technique works just as well for revising
academic essays, too.)
If you find yourself stumbling over your words as you read them
aloud, it might be because your sentences are too dense, convoluted or
rambling; or that your meaning and phrasing are unclear. If you can
find a willing friend, listening to someone else read your piece aloud
will likewise make you acutely aware of where the writing is awkward
or confusing. If you’re D/deaf and use sign language or can lip-read,
then signing your piece or having someone read it to you may work as
an alternative. If you’re visually impaired, text-to-speech or screen-
reading software may be useful for this.

2 Showing emotions effectively

Read through your piece and focus on any mention of your characters’
emotions or feelings. (This includes your own emotions, if you’re
writing an autobiographical piece.) Underline or highlight any emotion-
related words that appear in what your characters say or think, or in
your descriptions of their feelings and thoughts. Now check whether
you’ve ‘shown’ these emotions instead of merely ‘telling’ them.
For instance, if all you have written is ‘I was frustrated and angry’, you
haven’t recreated the experience of being frustrated for the reader. But
if you include a few details or physical actions like, ‘My eyes narrowed’
or ‘I grabbed the paper out of his hands’, the scene becomes more
believable and fully rounded, instead of vague and flat.

315
Block 4 Resources

In Chapter 1, we look at how author Iain Banks shows us that the

character Ash feels concerned for Prentice. Instead of writing ‘Ash was
concerned for me’, Banks depicts Ash ‘put[ting] her hand on my
shoulder, patting it’. Consider how you can do the same sort of thing
in your draft.

3 Where, when, who, what and why?

Read through your piece slowly (you may find it helpful to look at a
hard copy version), asking the questions ‘Where’, ‘When’, ‘Who’,
‘What’ and ‘Why’. (In journalism, these are known as the ‘5 Ws’.)
In other words:
. Where and when is the setting of this piece?
. Who are the people being portrayed, and what are they like?
. What events are taking place here?
. Why are these people involved in these events? Why are these
events happening?

Mark or highlight passages to indicate where you’ve answered these

questions in the text, or where you haven’t.
If the answer to any of these questions is unclear, you may need to
add or redraft material. As a writer, it’s easy to forget that the reader
doesn’t have access to the story in your mind; the words you put on
the page need to convey your story fully enough to be understood. If
basic information is missing, the reader will be left confused. Of
course, the answers to these questions don’t have to be explicitly
stated; they can be implicit in the language and descriptions you
employ. Instead of telling us ‘This story takes place in the Welsh
Valleys in 1951’, you need to show us the world of the Welsh Valleys in
this time period, and its people, in your piece.

316
 Resource 4.1 Creative Writing revision checklist

4 Reducing superfluous details

Read through your piece and underline all the phrases where you’ve
described people, places and things. Although Chapter 1 stresses the
importance of well-chosen details, there needs to be a balance between
evocative descriptions and plot (i.e. the events you’re recounting that
make up your narrative). As you can imagine, if every single object in a
scene is depicted at length, or every detail of a character’s appearance
enumerated, the reader will grow weary.
Check that the details you include serve their purpose:
. to convey a mood
. portray a character convincingly
. make a scene clearer or more vivid.

Look again at how authors like Banks, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,

Sanjida Kay and Kevin Young artfully measure out their use of detail.
For example, consider the sentence ‘I got into my blue, ten-year-old
car and drove off ’. In this case, the description of the car comes
across as unnecessary. Do we need this information at this point in the
piece? ‘I got into my car and drove off ’ would work just fine.
Remember that details need to be significant to the scene they’re in, or
else they’ll seem extraneous.

One last tip

If you have time, set your piece aside for a week. When you look
at it again, you’ll usually be able to see it through fresh eyes, as if
reading a piece by a stranger. Sometimes when you work intently
on a piece, you become so close to it that you lose the ability to
view it objectively. Putting it aside and returning to it later is a
surprisingly effective method when revising your work. If you’re
really short on time, setting a draft aside for even a couple of
days while you work on something else can be helpful.

317
 Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources:

Block 3

Chapter 1
Shakespeare, W. in Warren, R. and Wells, S. (2008) Twelfth Night, or
What You Will. Oxford World's Classics. Copyright © Roger Warren
and Stanley Wells 1994.
Chapter 2
Shakespeare, W. in Warren, R. and Wells, S. (2008) Twelfth Night, or
What You Will. Oxford World's Classics. Copyright © Roger Warren
and Stanley Wells 1994.
Chapter 3
‘Bildungsroman (development novel)’, in Buchanan, I. (ed.) A
Dictionary of Critical Theory. 2nd edn. Oxford University Press.
Copyright © 2018 Oxford University Press.
‘Novel' from The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd edn. Guild
Publishing. Copyright © Guild Publishing 1988.
‘Plot’ from Baldick, C. (ed.) The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.
4th edn. Oxford University Press. Copyright © 2015 Oxford University
Press.
Chapter 4
‘Gothic fiction’, in Birch, D. (ed.) The Oxford Companion to English
Literature. 7 edn. Oxford University Press. Copyright © 2009 Oxford
University Press.
‘Insanity’ from The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edn, Guild
Publishing. Copyright © Guild Publishing 1988.

Block 4

Chapter 1
Adichie, C.N. (2009) The Thing Around Your Neck. Fourth Estate.
Copyright © Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2009.
Banks, I. (2012) The Crow Road. Abacus. Copyright © Iain Banks 1992.

319
Book 2 Cultures

BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott. Copyright © 1994, Anne Lamott,

used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited and
Canongate.
Extract from Most Way Home. Copyright © 1995 by Kevin Young.
Reprinted with permission from Steerforth Press.
Extract from The Stolen Child © Sanjida Kay, 2017 reproduced by the
permission of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Chapter 2
‘Act’ from Baldick, C. (ed.) The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.
3rd edn. Oxford University Press. Copyright © 2008 Oxford University
Press.
By the Bog of Cats premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1998
and is published by The Gallery Press in Ireland and by Faber & Faber
in the UK. All rights reserved and enquiries to The Agency (London)
Ltd 24 Pottery Lane, London W11 4LZ info@theagency.co.uk.
Reproduced by permission of The Agency (London) Ltd © Marina
Carr, 1998.
Extract from ‘The Impossible Planet’ by Philip K. Dick. Copyright ©
1953 by Philip K. Dick, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
Extract from ‘The Impossible Planet’ by Philip K. Dick, The Orion
Publishing Group, London. Copyright © The Estate of Philip K. Dick,
1987, 1953. Originally published in Imagination, Oct 1953.
Galton, D. (2013) 'Love songs in blue denim', first published in
Woman's Weekly 2013. Copyright © Della Galton. Used by permission.
Gay, R. (2018) 'The Dirt We Do Not Eat', taken from Ayiti, Corsair.
Copyright © 2011, 2018 by Roxane Gay.
‘Scene’ from Baldick, C. (ed.) The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.
3rd edn. Oxford University Press. Copyright © 2008 Oxford University
Press.
Chapter 3
de Botton, A. (2003) The Art of Travel. Penguin Books. Copyright ©
Alain de Botton, 2002.
Guo, X. (2010) 'Stateless', Lovers in the Age of Difference, Chatto &
Windus. Copyright © 2010 Xiaolu Guo.

320
 Acknowledgements

‘Nomad’ by Sinead Morrissey (There Was Fire in Vancouver, 1996) is

reprinted here by kind permission of Carcanet Press Limited,
Manchester, UK.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. If any have
been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make
the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

321
 Glossary

Glossary
act a complete section of a drama, made up of one or more scenes.
anthropological related to the study of human behaviour and culture.
In relation to literature, anthropological approaches are particularly
interested in past customs and practices, and the way they surface in
literary texts as important contexts.
Bildungsroman a subgenre of novel that focuses on the personal
development of the protagonist, usually from childhood through to
adulthood.
blank verse unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter, which is the
standard verse unit of Shakespeare’s plays.
climax the point where the consequences of previous actions take
effect.
comedy work that is meant to amuse, usually with a happy ending.
crisis the point when things change for the main character(s), and
from which there is no going back.
dialogue spoken exchanges between or among characters in a novel or
play.
drama a literary work that is performed by actors, usually on stage,
screen or radio.
dramatic arc the structure of a play, film, novel or short story. It can
be visualised as an arc that rises to the crisis and falls to the climax
and resolution.
ekphrasis the literary description of an often imaginary work of art;
Viola’s speech about ‘patience on a monument/Smiling at grief ’
(2.4.114–115) is an example.
empathy the ability to understand and share the feelings of another
person.
epilogue a short text at the end of a written work.
ethnicity the fact or state of belonging to a social group that has a
common national or cultural tradition. Such groups may also share
language, a homeland and/or ancestry.

323
A112 Book 2 Glossary

exterior settings this description of setting in a narrative relates to

locations for events that are outside, in the natural world or another
outdoor place.
feminist criticism criticism that seeks to do justice to female
experience, points of view, concerns and values, in response to the
basic understanding that Western civilisation is male-centred and
controlled.
first-person narrator a narrator who tells the story in a given
narrative using ‘I’, and therefore includes his or her own role in the
events described.
five-act structure an approach to dividing the dramatic arc into five
sections. Used by ancient Roman playwrights, Shakespeare and many
contemporary scriptwriters.
freewriting a creative writing technique involving writing as much as
possible within a set period of time.
gender whereas ‘sex’ is a biological category, with ‘female’ and ‘male’
being associated nouns, ‘gender’ refers to socially constructed and/or
accepted notions of associated behaviour, which vary across time and
space.
genre a conventional literary form with a series of understood norms
and expectations, such as comedy.
global changes involve making changes to the ‘bigger picture’ in your
writing, such as point of view, location or structure. See also local
changes.
Heroic Journey a story structure seen in many myths and legends,
involving the main character embarking on an adventurous journey or
quest.
iambic pentameter the main metrical verse form used in
Shakespeare’s plays, with an alternating stress pattern between
unstressed and stressed syllables, and around ten syllables per line.
ideology a set of assumptions about reality which may not have any
objective or factual basis.
idioms distinctive forms of expression.
inciting incident the event that first prompts a character to react.

324
 Glossary

interior settings this description of setting in a narrative refers to

locations for events that are inside a building or structure of some
kind: for example, a house or a school.
literature of place books that focus on evoking the spirit of a place.
These may include travel narratives and nature writing, but exclude
more general commercial travel books, brochures, etc., the aims of
which may be very different.
local changes involve making detailed changes to your writing (e.g. on
a sentence level or substituting/removing certain words). See also
global changes.
melodramatic work that is sensational, and where characters and their
emotions are exaggerated.
metaphor figurative language where one thing is described in terms of
another.
midpoint the point in a drama or story (often about halfway through)
where there’s a major turning point in the plot.
narrative persona the way in which a narrator creates a particular
impression through their writing, thereby creating a kind of alter ego
or ‘persona’.
narrative structure the way in which the events of a story or drama
are assembled.
narrator one who tells, or is assumed to be telling, the story in a given
narrative. The narrator can be a character in the work, or can be
outside of it.
novella a work of prose fiction that is longer than a short story but
shorter than a novel. Novellas tend to range from 20,000 to 40,000
words.
periphrasis a rhetorical figure of speech for saying something in a
roundabout way, using as many words as possible.
place of transit refers to a place through which one passes or stops
temporarily on the way to somewhere else. Such places might be
airports, railway stations, hallways, etc.
plot the pattern of events and situations in a narrative or dramatic
work.

325
A112 Book 2 Glossary

post-colonial criticism criticism that is interested in tracing the lasting

impact of colonial structures and practices on former colonies in texts.
pre-Raphaelite a nineteenth-century art movement in Britain that
aimed to return the visual arts in particular to medieval techniques and
approaches.
protagonist the leading character in a story, play or film.
pseudonym a fictitious name sometimes used by authors as an alias:
for example, Currer Bell (as used by Charlotte Brontë).
psychic geography the ways in which the organisation of the urban
environment can impact upon people’s emotions and behaviour.
realism a broad tendency in literature where the focus of a text is on
the observable and complex facts of life.
resolution the conclusion of the events of a piece, giving the reader a
better understanding of what has happened and why.
reversal a change in the fortunes of a character that often changes
their status relative to other characters (e.g. from rich to poor, or from
ignorance to knowledge).
romantic comedy a comedy where the plot revolves around the
romantic relationships of one or more characters.
scene a sequence, usually occurring in one place and time.
set-up the early part of a story where character, setting and
circumstances are established.
show, don’t tell a creative writing concept that involves using
descriptions, actions, dialogue, etc. to make a piece of writing vivid
and effective.
significant details details carefully chosen by the author to help
construct a convincing world within a piece of creative writing.
simile a metaphor that uses words such as ‘like’ and ‘as’ to underline
that a comparison is being made.
soliloquy a speech made by one character alone on stage, directed at
the audience.
third-person narrator a narrator who tells the story in a given
narrative without using ‘I’, but instead using ‘he’, ‘she’ or they’, and

326
 Glossary

thus from a position of greater distance from the events being

described than a first-person narrator.
tragedy a serious piece of work where the main character experiences
a calamity, or series of calamities, and the ending is unhappy.
turning point a moment of significant change. In drama, this often
comes at the end of an act.
writer’s notebook a notebook dedicated to creative writing purposes.

327
 Index

Index
acts in narrative structures 217, 223–9 Old Testament 6
five-act structure 148, 224–7 Bildungsroman
using in your own writing 226–9 definition of 103
Addonizio, Kim 187–8 and Jane Eyre 100, 103–4, 111, 129
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 174, 317 Bingham, Hiram, Lost City of the Incas 145–6
‘The American Embassy’ 175–6, 196–8 Bishop, Nicholas 62
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 11 Blackwood’s Magazine 137
Aeschylus 21, 23 blank verse, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night 29–39,
‘All the Rules We Could Ask For’ (Richardson) 216 58
‘The American Embassy’ (Adichie) 175–6, 196–8 The Bloomsbury Group 11
‘An All-Night Café’ (Doloughan) 294, 307–9 ‘Blue Denim’ (Galton) 226, 261–3
anthropological approach to comedy, in Bonvin, François, Still Life with Two Books 9
Shakespeare’s plays 69 Bowie, David 53–4
Apollo (god) 21, 22, 23 Bradbury, Malcolm 143
Apollo and the Muses (Ghisi) 22 Brontë, Anne 80, 86, 95
Aristotle, Poetics 211, 235 Brontë, Branwell 81
Art and Design degree courses 143 Brontë, Charlotte 5, 9, 234
The Art of Travel (de Botton) 285–8, 305–6 family 81, 95
As You Like It (Shakespeare) 36, 50 in Poets’ Corner 7
Atkinson, Juliette 82, 112 The Professor 5, 81
Austen, Jane 10, 11 pseudonym (Currer Bell) 79–81, 86
autobiography schooldays 94–5
in creative writing 173 see also Jane Eyre (Brontë)
drawing on memories 176–7 Brontë, Emily 10, 11, 80, 95
and Jane Eyre 83, 84, 86, 101 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder, The Battle Between
and Moll Flanders 84–6 Carnival and Lent 69
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 137
Bainbridge, Beryl Burns, Anna, Milkman 281–2
An Awfully Big Adventure Butler, Octavia 190
beginning 212, 213, 242–3 By the Bog of Cats... (Carr) 218, 219, 220, 223, 245–7
ending 235, 236, 266
Baldick, C. 217, 223 Caldwell, June, ‘Natterbean’ 213, 237, 244, 268
BAME writers, and the literary canon 8 Caleb Williams (Godwin) 136
Banks, Iain 317 Cameron, Julia 161
The Crow Road 168–9, 170, 193–5, 316 Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Barber, C.L., Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy 69, 70–2 230, 231
Barker, J., The Brontës 81, 94–5 canonical writers 6–8, 9, 11
Barnett, Samuel, in Twelfth Night 38 reading 233–4
Beckett, Samuel 28 Carr, Marina 218
Bennett, Arnold 11 By the Bog of Cats... 218, 219, 220, 223, 245–7
Bible Changing Places (Lodge) 10
biblical metaphors in Jane Eyre 128 characters

329
Index

character in Jane Eyre 96–8, 129, 130, 132, 133 The Crow Road (Banks) 168–9, 170, 193–5, 316
Helen Burns and Jane Eyre 93–4, 97–8, 111, Crowe, Thomas 216
129 cultural capital, and literary classics 10
creating characters in place 290–4 cultural diversity, language and place 279–81
dialogue and characterisation 96 culture
Charles I, King 70 creation of cultural artefacts 165, 180
Chaucer, Geoffrey 21 narrative cultures and storytelling 292–4
Chevalier, Tracy 10, 11 Cymbeline (Shakespeare) 50, 54
childhood memories, writing about 177–9
children’s literature 4–5, 10, 11 David Copperfield (Dickens) 91, 103, 296
Christie, Agatha 4 Davies, Russell T. 4
A Christmas Carol (Dickens) 212, 231 ‘A day at the beach’ (Doloughan) 283–5
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (García Márquez) 212, De Botton, Alain, The Art of Travel 285–8, 305–6
235, 236, 267 death, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night 28
Church of England, Book of Common Prayer 26 Defoe, Daniel
Cisneros, Sandra, The House on Mango Street 279, Moll Flanders 84–6
280, 290, 303 Oxford World’s Classics edition 85
classic texts, teaching writing by copying 176 Delphi oracle 209
Classical Studies 3 details in creative writing 169–70, 190
and creative writing 180 physical details 168, 169
classics 3–5 significant details 173–80
defining 3–4 small but significant details 166
power of 9–11 see also sensory details, writing about
see also literary classics dialect
comedy language and place 280, 281
Elizabethan audiences and Twelfth Night 67–72 Northern Ireland 282–3
five-act structure 227–9 Shetland 278–9
The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare) 52 dialogue
comic dynamism, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night 29 and characterisation 96
Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, in Jane Eyre 128
definition of ‘Realism’ 91 language and place 284
Cowan, Andrew 162–3 and narrative structure 220
Cowan Bridge, Clergy Daughters’ School at 92, 94–5 Dick, Philip K., ‘The Impossible Planet’ 221–3, 225,
creative writing 250–60
as an academic discipline 141–2, 145 Dickens, Charles 10, 11
defining 143–4 at ‘The World Literary Giant Square’, Shanghai 6
genres 143 A Christmas Carol 212, 231
as a practice-based discipline 144 David Copperfield 91, 103, 296
revision checklist 315–17 as first-person narrator 91
study of 145–9 Oliver Twist 296
university courses in 143 ‘The Dirt We Do Not Eat’ (Gay) 231–2, 264–5
see also narrative journeys; places in creative Doloughan, Fiona
writing; the writer’s journey ‘A day at the beach’ 283–5
Creative Youth: Or How a School Environment Set ‘An All-Night Café’ 294, 307–9
Free the Creative Spirit (Mearns) 141 Dr Who 4
Crete, city street 171 Dracula (Stoker) 123, 124
critical study of literature 143 drama
Cromwell, Oliver 70 narrative structure of 211, 219–20

330
 Index

By the Bog of Cats... (Carr) 218, 219, 220, 223, Doloughan’s ‘An All-Night Café’ 294, 307–8
245–7 writing about place 294, 307–8
one-act plays 223 first-person narration
see also Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) and Jane Eyre 89–90, 91, 102, 111
dramatic arc, in narrative structures 225 and journeys 148–9
Dream Days (Grahame) 5 in Wide Sargasso Sea 126
The Dream (Marc) 167 Fitzgerald, F. Scott
dreams, writing as the creation of a fictional dream The Great Gatsby 218, 248–9
167–8 beginning 212, 213, 242
Droeshout, Martin, Portrait of William Shakespeare ending 235, 236, 266
18–20, 21 five-act structures 148, 224–9, 292
climax 225, 228, 232, 233
‘Eddie Priest’s Barbershop & Notary’ (Young) 181– crisis 224–5, 226, 232
3, 203–4 and the Heroic Journey 232–3
ekphrasis, in Twelfth Night 59–62 inciting incidents 224, 226, 228, 232
Elam, Keir 32, 62 midpoint 224–5, 226, 232
Eliot, George, Middlemarch 238 redrafting or redefining writing 227–9, 233
Elizabeth I, Queen, second Great Seal 33 resolution 225, 228, 232
Embleton, Ron, ‘Humpty Dumpty on the Wall’ 210 reversals 219, 224, 228, 232, 235, 236
emotions, showing effectively 315–16 set-up 224, 232
empathy, in creative writing 176–7, 190–1 turning point 224, 228, 232
English language, writing in English 276 Flaubert, Gustave 306
English literature Florez, Hazel, Thought Bubble Brain 157
classics of 6–11 Flynn, Johnny, in Twelfth Night 38
university courses and creative writing 143 fractals, and narrative structure 216–17
English Revolution (1640s) 70 France, the Panthéon in Paris 7
ethnicity, racial politics and Jane Eyre 122, 125–6, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (Shelley)
127, 133 136–7
Euripides 21, 23 Fraser’s Magazine, on Jane Eyre 128
Medea 218 freewriting 147, 157–61, 186
explanatory notes 101 the child’s draft 158
exterior settings morning pages 161
in Gothic fiction 119 storytelling through place 184
Jane Eyre 121 Freud, Sigmund, repression 58
Fry, Stephen, in Twelfth Night 56
fairy tales, journeys in 183
‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (Poe) 137 Galton, Della, ‘Blue Denim’ 226, 261–3
The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English García Márquez, Gabriel, Chronicle of a Death
Culture (Showalter) 126–7 Foretold 212, 235, 236, 243, 267
feminist criticism, and Jane Eyre 122, 123, 126–7, Gardner, John, on writing as the creation of a
133 fictional dream 167–8
film adaptations Garner, Peggy Ann, in film of Jane Eyre 98
Dracula 116, 117 Gaskell, Elizabeth, Wives and Daughters 90–1
Jane Eyre 116–17, 131 Gay, Roxane, ‘The Dirt We Do Not Eat’ 231–2,
first drafts in creative writing 155, 157–8, 162, 186 264–5
beginnings 211 gender
the child’s draft 158 gender politics and Jane Eyre 122, 125–7, 133
depicting places 172 and the Heroic Journey 231

331
Index

and nineteenth-century women writers 79–81 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 137

in Twelfth Night, all-male productions 36–8, 63–4 ‘Here, Where We Live’ (Pokrass) 213, 214, 237, 244,
genre, of Twelfth Night (comedy) 49 268
Ghisi, Giorgio, Apollo and the Muses 22 The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Campbell) 230, 231
Gilbert, Sandra, and Gubar, Susan, The Madwoman “Heroes” (Bowie) 54
in the Attic 122, 126 the Heroic Journey 148, 230–4, 292
Girl with a Pearl Earring (Chevalier) 10 Hilliard, Nicholas, design of Elizabeth I’s second
global changes, to pieces of writing 294 Great Seal 33
Globe Theatre 27, 52 historical novels 137
Godwin, William, Caleb Williams 136 Hoba, Lawrence, ‘Tonde’s Return’ 213, 214, 236,
Goethe, J.W. 6 244, 269
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Hogan, Edward 216, 236
Apprenticeship) 103 Hogg, James, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of
Gogol, Nikolai 179 a Justified Sinner 137
Gohil, Dinita 62 home, concepts of, in creative writing 276, 277,
The Golden Age (Grahame) 5 295–300, 310–11
Góngora, Don Luis de, Velázquez’s portrait of 19– homelessness 296
20 Homer 10, 11
Gothic fiction homosexuality, and Twelfth Night 38–9
the Gothic in Jane Eyre 116–22, 131, 133 Hopper, Edward 306
Gothic romances 136 Railroad Sunset 287–8
in The Oxford Companion to English Literature The House on Mango Street (Cisneros) 279, 280, 290,
136–7 303
Grahame, Kenneth 4–5 ‘How It Is’ (Kumin) 173
Great Expectations (Dickens) 10, 91 ‘Humiliation’ parlour game 10
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) 219, 248–9 ‘Humpty Dumpty’ 209–10
beginning 212, 213, 242 The Hunger Games 230
ending 235, 236, 266
Greek antiquity iambic pentameter, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
classical gods compared with Shakespeare 21, 22, 29–31
23 ‘The Impossible Planet’ (Dick) 221–3, 225, 250–60
classics of 3–4 individual consciousness, in Jane Eyre 95
iambic metre in verse 29 Inganni (‘The Mistakes’) 52, 53
oracle narratives 293 Inns of Court, plays performed at 52
Greig, Noël 217, 223 interior settings, in Gothic fiction, Jane Eyre 119,
The Guardian newspaper, travel writing competition 120–1
146 Ireland
Gubar, Susan, and Gilbert, Sandra, The Madwoman Moll’s Gap in the Ring of Kerry 155
in the Attic 122, 126 Murphy’s A Place Apart in 280–1, 304
Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 11 see also Northern Ireland
Guo, Xiaolu The Italian (Radcliffe) 136
creating characters in place 290–2 Italy, Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence 7
Once Upon a Time in the East 298, 299, 300, 310 Ivanhoe (Scott) 7

Hamlet (Shakespeare) 10 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 4, 79–105, 111–37, 211

Hardwick Hall 283 as an autobiography 83, 84, 86, 89, 101
Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure 103 Bildungsroman form in 100, 103–4, 111, 129, 131–
Harry Potter series (Rowling) 10, 11 2

332
 Index

character in 96–8, 129, 130, 132, 133 see also narrative journeys; places in creative
characters in place 290 writing; the writer’s journey
Helen Burns and Jane Eyre 93–4, 97–8, 111, Joyce, James 187
129 Jude the Obscure (Hardy) 103
classical status of 129, 132
and creative writing 180, 188 Kay, Sanjida 317
and the critics 122, 123–7 The Stolen Child 181, 182–3, 199–202
disguise in 114, 115, 119 King Lear (Shakespeare) 10
domestic space theme 87, 88 Kirimi, Kananu 37
film adaptation (Zeffirelli) 116–17, 131 Knausgaard, Karl Ove 293
first-person narration 89–90, 91, 102, 111 Kumin, Maxine, ‘How It Is’ 173
form in the opening of 87–91
the Gothic in 116–22, 131, 133 Lamott, Anne 157–8
and the Heroic Journey 231 language in creative writing 187–8
home in 296 and place 275–7, 278–89
importance of reading in 84, 89 building a sense of place through language
journeys in 128–32 281–5
making and remaking 8 Laux, Dorianne 187–8
marriage in 124, 128, 130, 131–2, 133–4, 236 le Carré, John, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 10, 11
mental disorder in 124–7 Le Guin, U.K. 209
personal address to readers 102 libraries, nineteenth-century circulating libraries 84–5
plot in 99–104, 129–32, 133 literary classics 4
protagonist 98 authors of 4–5
publication of 79–82 and cultural capital 10
realism in 91, 102, 103, 117, 133 and cultural inheritance 7–8, 9
and the Gothic 119, 120–1 hierarchies of 4, 11
Lowood School 92–5, 116, 121 the literary canon 6–8, 9, 11
move away from 105, 114–15 making and remaking 8
reputation as a literary classic 111 power of 9–11
reversals in 236 literary culture, and creative writing 142
reviews of 82 literary rates, and nineteenth-century novels 84
romance aspects of 116–17, 119 literary studies, and creative writing 141
set book 82, 112 literature of place 285
setting 113–15, 129, 133 local changes, to pieces of writing 294
as a ‘striking and exciting’ novel 81–2, 86, 89 Lodge, David 10, 235, 236
‘telling’ the story of 166 London
title page of first edition 79, 83, 84 Globe Theatre 27, 52
unhappy childhood theme 87, 88–9, 93, 111 Middle Temple (Inns of Court) 52, 53
Volume I and Volume II 111 Westminster Abbey, Poets’ Corner 7–8
Jaws (film) 284 London Review of Books 8
Johnson, Dr Samuel 32 Lost City of the Incas (Bingham) 145–6
Jonson, Ben Low (Bowie) 54
The Complete Poems 20 Lu Xun 6
‘To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Lugosi, Bela, in Dracula 123
Mr William Shakespeare’ 21–3, 24, 36, 42, 73 Luscombe, Christopher 62
journeys
in Jane Eyre 128–32 Machu Picchu, Peru 145–7
McKee, Iain 63, 64

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Index

The Madwoman in the Attic (Gilbert and Gubar) 122,

126 names, associations of
Mahabharata 230 character and place 290, 303
Manningham, John in different languages 279, 280
on the performance of Twelfth Night 52, 53, 56, in Northern Ireland 281–2
63 narrative cultures, and storytelling 292–4
the Malvolio plot 67–8 narrative journeys 148, 209–69
Marc, Franz, The Dream 167 beginnings 211–15, 236, 242–4
Marr, Andrew 23, 42 endings 235–8, 266–9
Mary, Queen of Scots 33 the Heroic Journey 148, 230–4
Masters in Fine Arts (MFA) award 143 narrative persona, writing about places of transit
Maturin, Charles, Melmoth the Wanderer 136 285–6
Mearns, William Hughes, Creative Youth: Or How a narrative structures 148, 209–10, 216–29
School Environment Set Free the Creative Spirit 141 acts 217, 223–9
Medea (Euripides) 218 five-act structures 148, 224–9, 232–3, 292
Media and Film degree courses 143 developing skills in 233–4
Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin) 136 and fractals 216–17
memories and creative writing heritage of 239
drawing on memories 176–80 scenes 217–23
memories of home 299 defining 217
mental illness, in Jane Eyre 124–7, 133 dramatic scenes 218, 219–20, 245–7
The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) 50 in novels 219
Mercury (god) 21, 22, 23 in short stories 220–3
metaphors narrators
biblical metaphors in Jane Eyre 128 first-person
in Twelfth Night 32–3, 58–9 The Great Gatsby 212
Middle Temple and Jane Eyre 89–90, 91, 102
Hall 53 and journeys 148
performance of Twelfth Night 52, 63 third-person 90–1
Middlemarch (Eliot) 238 ‘Natterbean’ (Caldwell) 213, 237, 244, 268
Middleton, Thomas, and Dekker, Thomas, The New, Chris 63, 64
Roaring Girle or Moll Cutpurse 51–2 New Monthly Magazine 137
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare) 23 Norman, Philip, No. 15 Waterloo Place 80
Milkman (Burns) 281–2 Northern Ireland, building a sense of place through
Miller, Lucasta 132 language 281–5
modernist fiction 11 notes
Moll Flanders (Defoe) 84–6 creative writing and note-taking 184, 186
morning pages 161, 162 writer’s notebooks 162–5, 190
Morrissey, S., There Was Fire in Vancouver 298, 299, novellas 211
300, 311 novels, narrative structure of 219
Mudie’s Select Library 84 beginnings 211–15, 236, 242–3
Mukherjee, Bharati 179 endings 235–6, 238
Munro, Alice 179 nursery rhymes, narrative structure in 209–10
Murphy, Dervla, A Place Apart 279, 280–1, 304
the Muses 21, 22, 23 Oates, Joyce Carol 137
music, ‘classic rock’ 4 observational skills, in creative writing 162, 163
The Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe) 136 The Odyssey (Homer) 10
myths, and the Heroic Journey 230 Oliver Twist (Dickens) 296

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omniscient narrators 90–1 Poe, Edgar Allan 137, 211

‘On the Road’ 148–9 Poetics (Aristotle) 211, 235
Once Upon a Time in the East (Guo) 298, 299, 300, poetry
310 ‘Eddie Priest’s Barbershop & Notary’ (Young)
Online Etymology Dictionary, definition of ‘classic’ 4 181–3, 203–4, 317
ordinary people, writing about 179–80 There Was Fire in Vancouver (Morrissey) 298, 299,
O’Reilly, Sally 163 300, 311
orphaned children, in nineteenth-century novels 296 Pokrass, Meg, ‘Here, Where We Live’ 213, 214, 237,
‘The Oval Portrait’ (Poe) 211 244, 268
Oxford Companion to English Literature, on Gothic Polidori, John, ‘The Vampyre’ 137
fiction 136–7 popular classics 4
Oxford Companion to Shakespeare 54 post-colonial criticism, and Jane Eyre 122, 123, 125–
Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory, definition of 6, 127, 133
Bildungsroman 103–4 Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 10
Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified
definition of an act 223 Sinner (Hogg) 137
definition of ‘Plot’ 99–100 The Professor (Brontë) 5, 81
definition of a scene 217 Prose, Francine 173–4
The Oxford Shakespeare: Twelfth Night (Warren and Protestant Reformation, Book of Common Prayer
Wells) 17, 25, 31 26
psychic geography 282
Patience on a Monument (Stanhope) 60–2 psychological distress, in Jane Eyre 122
patriarchal ideology, in Elizabethan society 34 psychological realism, in Jane Eyre 95
Patrick, Emily, Penguin Classics 3 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 11
periphrasis (circumlocution), in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Pushkin, Alexander 6
Night 26–8
Peru, Machu Picchu 145–7 Radcliffe, Ann 136
Pinter, Harold 28 Railroad Sunset (Hopper) 287–8
A Place Apart (Murphy) 279, 280–1, 304 Rajasthan collage work 191
places in creative writing 148–9, 275–310 Ramayana 230
change of place 276 reading aloud 315
concepts of home 276, 277, 295–300 ‘reading like/as a writer’ 176, 190
writing about home 296–300, 310–11 realism
creating characters in place 290–4 defining 91
creating a sense of place 149 in Jane Eyre 91, 92–5, 102, 117
depicting places to evoke a particular mood 170– religion, in Jane Eyre 128–30, 133–4
2 Rembrandt van Rijn 19
imagined journeys 148 reversals, in narrative structures 219, 224, 228, 232,
and language 275–7, 278–89 235, 236
the literature of place 285 revising writing activities 186–9
Machu Picchu, Peru 145–7 checklist 188
places of transit 277, 285–9, 290–1, 293–4, 305–9 Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea 125–6, 127
storytelling through place 181–5 Richardson, Heather
visiting places 183–5 ‘All the Rules We Could Ask For’ 216
Plautus, Menaechmi 52 ‘The Walled-In Room’ 215
plot Ripa, Cesare, ‘Patienza’ 60–2
definition of 99–100 The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust (Bowie) 54
in Jane Eyre 99–104, 129

335
Index

The Roaring Girle or Moll Cutpurse (Middleton and The Tempest 54

Dekker) 51–2 and ‘The World Literary Giant Square’, Shanghai
Robida, Albert, Air Taxis: La station d’aérocabs de la 6
Tour Saint-Jacques 160 see also Twelfth Night (Shakespeare)
Roman antiquity, classics of 3–4 Shanghai, ‘The World Literary Giant Square’ 6
The Romance of the Forest (Radcliffe) 136 Sheffield Peace Gardens 178
romantic comedies, narrative structures of 228–9 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, or The Modern
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter series 10, 11 Prometheus 136–7
Rowse, A.L. 19 Shelley, Paul, in Twelfth Night 67
Rylance, Mark, in Twelfth Night 38, 56 Shetland
language and place 275, 276–7, 278–9, 290
Sanskrit epics 230 Tallack on returning home 295–6, 299
Scandinavian storytelling culture 293 short stories
scenes in narratives 217–23 beginnings 211, 213–14, 244
novels 219 endings 236–7, 268–9
paragraph breaks 222 five-act structure in 225–6, 261–3
places of transit 288 of ordinary individuals 179
short stories 220–3, 250–60 scenes in 220–3
Schoenbaum, S. 19 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
Scott, Walter 7, 137 definition of a novel 84
self-expression, creative 142 nineteenth-century definition of insanity 125
self-reflection, in creative writing 164 show, don’t tell 166–72
sensory details, writing about 173, 175, 182, 190 creating a fictional dream 167–8
beginning a narrative 214 depicting places 170–2
childhood memories 178, 179 and narrative cultures 293
language and place 283, 284 using details 166, 168, 169–70
places of transit 286–7 Showalter, Elaine, The Female Malady: Women,
storytelling through place 182, 183 Madness and English Culture 126–7
Sexton, Anne 173 Sidney, Sir Philip 68
sexuality, Elizabethan society and Twelfth Night 38–9 significant details, in creative writing 173–80
Shakespeare, William 5, 9, 233–4 similes
As You Like It 36, 50 in Tew’s description of Machu Picchu 147
chronology of plays 54 in Twelfth Night 59–62
The Comedy of Errors 52 60 Degrees North (Tallack) 276, 277, 295–6, 298,
Cymbeline 50, 54 299, 300, 310
First Folio (1623) 19, 21 Smith, Elder & Co. 80, 86
Globe Theatre, London 27 publication of Jane Eyre 79, 81–2
Hamlet 10 Smith, George, and Jane Eyre 81–2
Jonson’s poem of praise for 22–3, 24, 36, 42, 73 Smith, Lisa 216
King Lear 10 Smith, Margaret 82, 112
language of 17 Sophocles 21
and the literary canon 6 Southey, Robert 7
making and remaking of plays 8 Spenser, Edmund 21
The Merchant of Venice 50 Spiders from Mars (Bowie) 54
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 23 spy fiction 10, 11
in Poets’ Corner 7 Stanhope, John Roddam Spencer, Patience on a
portrait of 18–20, 21 Monument 60–2
reputation 17–23 Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope 230

336
 Index

Stewart, Patrick, in Twelfth Night 67 Chichester Festival Theatre (2007) 67

Stoker, Bram 137 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) (2018) 62
Dracula 123, 124 Royal Shakespeare Theatre (2005) 37
The Stolen Child see Kay, Sanjida reversals in 236
superfluous details, reducing 317 set book see Warren, Roger, and Wells, Stanley
Swift, Jonathan 11 Shakespeare’s language in 24–41, 42
blank verse 29–39, 58
Tallack, Malachy 290, 299 Maria and Sir Toby 39–41, 42
60 Degrees North 276, 277, 295–6, 298, 299, 300, ‘pregnant enemy’ phrase 32
310 the Priest’s speech (Act 5, Scene 1) 24–31, 39,
The Valley at the Centre of the World 276, 279, 40–1, 42
280, 303 Viola’s soliloquy 31–9, 40, 42, 50
‘Shetland Glossary’ 278–9
Taylor, Elizabeth, in film of Jane Eyre 98 The Underground Railroad (Whitehead) 10, 11
television drama, and Shakespeare’s language 26–7 United Kingdom, University of East Anglia, Creative
The Tempest (Shakespeare) 54 Writing as a discipline 143
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Brontë) 80 universities, Creative Writing as a discipline 141, 143
Tew, Edward, on Machu Picchu 146–7
Thackeray, William Makepeace 86 The Valley at the Centre of the World (Tallack) 276,
There Was Fire in Vancouver (Morrissey) 298, 299, 279, 280, 303
300, 311 ‘Shetland Glossary’ 278–9
third-person narrators 90–1 ‘The Vampyre’ (Polidori) 137
Thomas, Eric 126 Velázquez, Diego, Portrait of Don Luis de Góngora
three-volume novels 83–4 19–20
Times Literary Supplement 8 visiting places, storytelling 183–5
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (le Carré) 10, 11 Vogler, Christopher, The Writer’s Journey 230, 231
To the Lighthouse (Woolf) 10
Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace 10 ‘The Walled-In Room’ (Richardson) 215
‘Tonde’s Return’ (Hoba) 213, 214, 236, 244, 269 War and Peace (Tolstoy) 10
Tookey, Helen 190–1 Warren, Roger, and Wells, Stanley
tragedy, narrative structure of 211 The Oxford Shakespeare: Twelfth Night 17, 25, 40,
travel writing 294 41, 49, 52, 53, 56, 59, 63
on Machu Picchu 146–7 on the Malvolio plot 68, 69, 70, 72
places of transit 285–9, 305–9 on Viola’s soliloquy 31, 32, 33, 39
Twain, Mark 11 Western literature, canon of 6
Twelfth Night, feast of 69 Westminster Abbey, Poets’ Corner 7–8
Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 3, 17, 23, 24–42, 49–73, where, when, who, what and why? (the ‘5 Ws’) 316
101 Whitehead, Colson, The Underground Railroad 10, 11
all-male performances 36–8 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys) 125–6, 127
concealment in 57–63 Wilde, Oscar 187
deception (gulling) of Malvolio 33, 49, 55, 65–73 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s
disguise in 31–2, 35, 36, 42, 50–7 Apprenticeship, Goethe) 103
mistaken identity 54–7 Williams, William Smith 81
and gender 36–8 The Wind in the Willows (Grahame) 4–5
genre of (comedy) 49 Womack, Peter 34, 37
narrative structure 223, 224 Woman’s Weekly magazine 226
productions women
Apollo Theatre, London (2012) 38, 56 classics and women readers 11

337
Index

and the literary canon 6, 7

and Twelfth Night
cultural misogyny 34
dialogue on love in men and women 57–63
female agency 32–3
male actors playing female roles 36–8, 63–4
Woolf, Virginia 10, 11, 187
World literature, canon of 6
writer’s block 157
the writer’s journey 147–8, 151–203
the creative process 155
drawing on memories 176–80
and empathy 190–1
first drafts 155, 157–8, 162, 172, 186, 211
freewriting 147, 157–61, 162
importance of practice 190
journeying away from home 183–5
keeping a writer’s notebook 162–5, 190
morning pages 161, 162
note-taking 155
‘reading like/as a writer’ 176, 190
revision 186–9
checklist 188
writer’s notebooks 162–5, 190
see also details in creative writing; places in
creative writing; show, don’t tell
The Writer’s Journey (Volger) 230, 231
Wuthering Heights (Brontë) 10, 80

Yorke, John 223–4

Young, Kevin 317
‘Eddie Priest’s Barbershop & Notary’ 181–2, 183,
203–4

Zeffirelli, Franco, film adaptation of Jane Eyre 116–

17, 131

338