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Transformation - the need to process experiences and seismic shifts of understanding and memory that occur
- An Abduction:
- “She said she was heading inside to find her Jokari set.”
- “She was aware uninhibitedly of her young body beneath the dress, in its knickers and bra…”
- Deeds not Words:
- “They called themselves ‘irregulars’ and barricaded themselves in the dormitories, threatening to jump out of the windows.”
- Flight:
- “[inside] Nothing was the same… unfamiliar [coats]… unfamiliar [coat hooks] …”
- Under the sign of the moon:
- "...showed on the surface somehow, barring her definitively from the world of sexual attraction. That part of her life was over.”
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Experience - While some situations might be considered 'everyday' they are shown to be significantly formative, shaping identities or facilitating transitions from innocence to experience
- An abduction:
- “With the half-timbering that Jane didn’t yet know was a badge of inauthenticity…” (highlights her inexperience and lack of knowledge)
- “She had never stolen anything before; the possibility hadn’t crossed her mind.”
- “…astonishing because she was so virgin in contacts…”
- “It had never occurred to her until now that the masculine – a suspect real… - could be so intimately important, in relation to herself; it seemed as improbable as two planets colliding.”
- “… because her self-discoveries were very new…”
- "...grown-up insight seemed to come not through gradual accretion but all at once.”
- “If Jane had been older, she might have taken the opportunity to parade her femininity in the kitchen, but it didn’t occur to her.”
- “Jane was suffused with a sensation that was mingled ecstasy and shame.”
- “It was an entrance, glowering with darkness, into the cave of things unknown to her.”
- “…her own new knowledge filled her up…”
- “…presiding over the mystery of her changed life…”
- “Her own footprints from the day before intact in the dust, the Jokari paddle left where she had dropped it.”
- “As if she were on the wrong side of a barrier, cutting her off from the real life she was meant to be living.”
- The Stain:
- “Marina knew that she was unsophisticated, that her life must seem tame and timid to him. Sometimes it seemed timid to her; she chafed against its limits.”
- Deeds not Words:
- “…humiliatingly… certainly of what she shyly called ‘intimate relations’.”
- “Changed her life as drastically as if she found footprints on an island where she’d been beginning to believe she was alone.”
- “…she was unchaste, she had forfeited the white flower of a blameless life, she wasn’t the woman a man would go to war for.”
- One Saturday Morning:
- “Yet as soon as he stepped across the threshold into the dim interior, she felt how inadequate she was to entertain him.”
- “…but left alone with them she had nothing to offer.”
- “…obliterating her reflection and surveying the place…”
- “…her cowardice was crucifying…”
- “Carrie was in awe of Dom Smith’s adult competence, so rich in understanding; she couldn’t imagine attaining it in any lifetime.”
- “If only she hadn’t let Dom Smith into the house.”
- “…it was something more selfish and self-protective. She wished fiercely she’d never learned about Helen’s death.”
- “…Dom was turned into a figure of dread by what had happened to him.”
- “…to where Carrie watched, unseen, from the open window in her parents’ bedroom on the floor above.”
- "Some meanings were hidden in these mute things Carrie touched..."
- “Their happiness in that moment was almost too much – its precariousness squeezed Carrie’s chest like a tight band.”
- “…a vision of what consolation might be – something headlong and reckless and sweet, unavailable to children.”
- Experience:
- “Or if they were watching, they thought I was something I was not, so it didn’t matter.”
- “…looked like rubbish when I spread them out in Hana’s room… this was nowhere where I was nobody.”
- “…including things I’d never tasted before…” (lack of experience)
- “… each outfit a performance in itself…”
- “I feel ashamed of this now, needless to say. I think that because I was nobody, my slipping inside Hana’s privacy wouldn’t count as a real intrusion.”
- “But this stuff was ordinary, wasn’t it?... What was the matter with me that I didn’t take it for granted, that my heart beat stickily, as if the little sex kit had somehow made a fool of me?”
- “I’d never lived, I thought, as I knelt there, reading with my legs cramped beneath me, aware of the rain as if it were drumming on my skin. I’ve never lived: the words rang in my head.” (shame)
- “Life was garish and ruthless and exaggerated, and I’d never really had it…”
- “…but replete with new knowledge…” (talking about her face in the mirror)
- “I told myself that if he left without anything happening, then I had lost my chance and I would die.”
- “But liking people and even loving them seemed to me now like ways of keeping yourself safe, and I didn’t want to be safe.”
- “I wanted to cross the threshold and be initiated into real life. My innocence was a sign of something maimed or unfinished in me.”
- “I was uncomfortable under his scrutiny but gave myself up to it…”
- “…the passage over into the other place.”
- Bad Dreams:
- “For the first time, the child felt as if she were alone in her own home…”
- “The child was struck by a melancholy of this accumulation: sometimes she felt a pang of fear for her father, as if he were exposed and vulnerable.”
- “His disdain hurt her, like a bruise to the chest; she was more used to admiring him. But it was also exhilarating..."
- Flight:
- “…Susan used to be dead set against anything to do with the church.” “Maybe she used to be.”
- Under the sign of the moon:
- “But perhaps it was worse to be safe and dull.”
- Her share of sorrow:
- “She hadn’t had any idea that books could transport you like this – into something better.”
- “She was astonished when little William died. Children always got better in books, didn’t they?” (childlike innocence/inexperience)
- “At home in Crouch End it didn’t occur to her…that she couldn’t have got hold of Lady Audley easily enough…” (childlike inexperience)
- "coals spelled c-o-l-e-s.."
- “Ruby dropped tears onto her page for her dear family. Her heart was swollen with love and writerly triumph.”
- Silk brocade:
- “Her gestures seemed drawn from a different life to the one they’d had so far…” (past versus the present)
- “They hadn’t even sent a note – they couldn’t think what words to use, they were too young.”
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Secrets - the uncovering of secrets often as a result of revelatory experiences that uplift or burden an individual
- The Stain:
- “…had revealed a leering, repulsive side she’d never seen before.”
- "Felt burdened as if waking up from a clinging, unpleasant dream."
- Deeds not Words:
- “Edith could hardly believe that this French cupboard which had been so prosaically ordinary could transform itself into the scene of such revelation.”
- Experience:
- “She kept her eyes on me, and her watchfulness had respect and even fear in it, as if I were the one with secrets.”
- Bad Dreams:
- “At any rate, nothing – nothing – would ever make her tell them that she’d done it.”
- “…had lain in wait, gloating, while she suspected nothing.”
- “…only one explanation for the crazy scene in the front room: her imagination danced with affront and dismay.”
- “Her husband was moody, and she’d always known that he had anger buried in him… but… nothing so naked and outrageous.”
- “Nothing – nothing – would ever make her acknowledge what he’s done, or the message he’d left for her, although when he saw the room restored to tis rightful order, he would know that she knew.” (parallelism) (secrets)
- Under the sign of the moon:
- “You could feel the reality collapsing into the familiar safe phrases, becoming part of a routine, becoming myth…”
- “…they weren’t the real content of his thoughts, just as her own sceptical, condescending cleverness when she argued with him wasn’t the real content of her thoughts either.”
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Dissatisfaction/shame - characters experiencing a concomitant yearning for connection, whereby exhilaration is often tempered by disillusionment
- An Abduction:
- “It wasn’t acceptable in Jane’s kind of family to complain about good weather… they were remorselessly cheerful, while secretly they longed for rain.”
- Deeds not Words:
- “I might as well be dead, she thought walking across the school garden.”
- “Edith had no place in this sacred scene, contaminating it.”
- “Both of them were broken, Edith thought. In their shame, they could hardly bear to look at each other.”
- One Saturday Morning:
- “…and that piano wasn’t the answer she’d hoped for, to what was unsolved in herself.”
- “She pictured herself making a joke at breakfast the next day about her mother dancing on the balcony with Dom Smith, and then she knew she mustn’t, and grew hot with the memory of the rude letter, her wrong judgement of what was funny and what was shaming.”
- Experience:
- “When my marriage fell apart one summer… when I had been first happy and then sad.”
- “Don’t go, I cried. I seized him by the sleeves of his jacket, so that there could be no mistake about what I was offering.”
- “…intoxicating in the madness of the moment.”
- “I didn’t know whether I was going to die or not.”
- “…the whole humiliation. I was so exposed that I might as well have been skinned and turned inside out.”
- Bad Dreams:
- "...All details in the book had solidity of life, though it wasn’t her own life.”
- “His immobility then seemed a kind of comment, or a punishment, directed at her.”
- “…but now she resented the neighbours brooding ahead.”
- “…its tiny high window made it feel like a prison cell…”
- “She should have been a painter, she thought in a flash of anger, not a housewife and a dressmaker.”
- Flight:
- “Something made Claire uneasy… turning her into some kind of saint: worn down, put upon, patient and endlessly giving.”
- “But you could shed your skin over and over, Claire thought, and believe each time that you’d come to the end of shame, and it wasn’t true.”
- “She felt a moment’s stabbing sorrow for everything she’d lost and left behind. But she knew from past experience how to push that sorrow down and bury it.”
- Under the sign of the moon:
- “He condescended with amusement to Greta and Graham’s domestic tendencies.”
- Her share of sorrow:
- “-There’s nothing for me to do in this house!”
- “Fatalistically she accepted its loss, and her days were bitter with the flavour of exile from her whole self.”
- “…perhaps because no amount of it could ever match the power and importance Ruby felt when she was making things up.”
- Silk brocade:
- "For the saddest of reaons."
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Personal growth - often explores the bittersweet nature of change and gaining of experience
- Experience:
- “…not, to my surprise, on despair but on something else after all – hard, bleak, grey satisfactory freedom.”
- “…after my evening with Julian I knew I came across as older and more experienced. People seemed to take me more seriously – as if I’d been initiated into something after all, although nothing had happened.”
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Relationships - explores the different type of intimate relationships and resulting power dynamics/consequences
- One Saturday Morning:
- “Carrie saw that her mother didn’t really know Dom well and was uncertain whether she ought to approach him.”
- “Then her mother, with her hand flat on Dom’s chest, was pushing him away in the teasing, charming way she pushed away the other men. -I’m so sorry, she said. -I’m so sorry, Dom, but I can’t.”
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Power - the agency that is stripped from characters as well as the power they test and gain throughout the text
- An Abduction:
- “delightedly… as entertained as if they were feeding beer to a puppy…”
- The Stain:
- “He wasn’t incapacitated, but he wasn’t used to looking after himself.”
- “It was the old man’s choice, his obstinacy, to live in the house without renovating it.”
- “Marina imagined how hard it was for a man who must once have been so vigorous to accept this diminished life, using a cane to get around, with no one to command except her.”
- “She saw that he was depressed because he was bored.”
- “But he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
- “Marina was furious with herself for having accepted the lift against her better judgements.”
- “How dare he carry her off as if she didn’t count?”
- "Want[ed] to buy [her] a washing machine...."
- Deeds not Words:
- “But no matter how she saw through his condemnation, she couldn’t escape it: he had power over her, because of what had happened in the French cupboard.”
- Experience:
- “I found her intimidating…”
- “…Left over from a dinner party the night before…” (demonstrates Hana’s perceived flamboyant life)
- “I was twenty-eight, and she made me feel inexperienced, although I had been married for six years.”
- “When he had asked me to move out, I didn’t scream that I wouldn’t be able to bear my life without him, because I knew that I probably could bear it.”
- “I liked feeling [the keys] weight against my leg, holding something back from him.” (power)
- “Disguised, I was able to perform: I could hear myself sounding carefree and flirtatious…I was escaping my marriage.”
- “…I exaggerated how dull he was; I made it sound as if I were the one who’d fallen out of love.”
- Bad Dreams:
- “…and she wanted in a sudden passion to break something, to disrupt the world of her home…”
- “…the room looked as if a hurricane had blown through it…”
- “…her whole body rejoiced in the chaos…”
- Flight:
- “Even as Claire explained in her reasonable calm voice, ripe with regret, she was aware of trying to win them over.”
- “She was ashamed to remember how she’d begun that evening by flirting with this man and teasing him, believing herself in charge of what could happen; now certain bloody, humiliating truths seemed indelible between them.”
- Under the sign of the moon:
- “When she confronted Ian, he asked if she thought she owned his body, just because she was married to him.” (juxtaposes his previous forcing of her to have public sex)
- “-I don’t want it, she said. -I hardly know you. -Please. I want you to have it. I know you’ll enjoy it.” (lack of agency)
- “Suddenly, he dropped his head into her lap, face down between her thighs.” (childlike) (maternal or sexual?)
- Silk brocade:
- “…she always made this assessment, when she first met men, of whether or not she could get round them if she chose to test her power.”
- “Sally was trying her power out on this boy; she shed tears of self-pity, until he put his arms around her and kissed her.”
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Social class/setting - ranges from contemporary to historical and lower class to upper class
- The Stain:
- "...People like her and her family, they hold it all together for the rest of us, in their spirit."
- “When she was a child, this house from the outside with its tall façade and many blind looking windows seemed to stand for all the grandeur and beauty she could imagine. In reality, inside it was dingy and half furnished and needed a coat of paint.”
- Deeds not Words:
- “…loving Miss Mulhouse became a kind of cult in the school, and no one dared not belong.”
- Experience:
- “There were no curtains on the windows of that house, not even in the bedrooms.” (exhibitionist)
- “This is how Hana lived her life – flamboyantly on display, careless of who might be watching.”
- Flight:
- “…probably believing she came from the British privileged class.”
- Silk brocade:
- “Kit said they should always switch over to the Third Programme when clients came – it was more sophisticated.” (illusion of class)
- “…know that the woman standing on the other side wasn’t sophisticated anyway. She was too bulky, standing there too stolidly, with an unassuming patience.”
- “…Kit said that if there were seen to be sewing for just anyone, they’d never get off the ground with the right people.”
- “Ann wondered whether Nola Higgins was impressed by the glamorous new style of life or simply accepted it, as calmly as she’d have accepted any place she’d walked into.”
- “Ann had an intuition that the flush ran thrillingly all over her body. Who’d have thought that Nola Higgins would be susceptible to that kind of thrill?”
- “The material in the bag smelled of mothballs, but it looked expensive – thick silk brocade, off-white, embroidered with cream flowers…”
- “She fingered the brocade uneasily, staring down at it. -it’s too much, isn’t it? I’ll look like a dog’s dinner, that’s what I said.” (anaphoric reference – quite informal – signals her class)
- “-But Nola Higgins is from Fishponds. We were at school together. -I don’t care who she is. She’s marrying a Perney, and they’ve owned Thwaite Park for centuries.” (class)
- “Fishponds meets Thwaite Park. -What do you know about Fishponds? Ann said sharply.”
- “Don’t be chippy, don’t get on your old socialist high horse, just because you’ve got a pash on Mr Misery Guts Donny Ross.”
- “There were other cars in the drive and in the car park, because the house and grounds were open to the public.”
- “Ann half expected a butler. Donny was stiff with disapproval of class privilege.”
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Family relationships - the different roles of individuals in the family unit, and the relationships positive and negative in seemingly pacified families
- An abduction:
- "Jane Allsop was abducted when she was fifteen, and nobody noticed."
- "...In the 1960s, when parents were more careless."
- "...[she was to her brother] a visitant from his insipid past, when they'd been friends."
- The Stain:
- “[Wendy] knew how to show affection only to her dogs.”
- “Marina was embarrassed, jarred by some false, sentimental note… which seemed aimed challengingly at his family.”
- One Saturday Morning:
- “She looked like her father’s side… And not like her mother, who was opulently attractive: shapely, with wide hazel eyes and a full mouth.”
- “…hanging on to her mother’s arm… She was performing for him now that she was safe.”
- Bad Dreams:
- “She never feared the same way for her mother: her mother was capable; she was the whole world.”
- “[her parents] as individuals with their own unfathomable adult preoccupations… into a past that she could never enter.”
- “[the daughter’s] thin, freckled face was nothing like her mothers.” (more like her father, a representation of the anger? Of the chaos she felt she needed to ensue?)
- Flight:
- “…and she ought to see it….”
- “This quarrel shadowed all Claire’s relations with her family at home: it was time now to dispel the shadows.”
- “She didn’t let herself think beyond initial impulse, knowing how easy it would be to talk herself out of going.”
- “…any efforts at reconciliation had always come from her side.”
- “For an uncanny moment Claire seemed to hear her mother’s old sing-song voice, performing her old role.”
- Under the sign of the moon:
- “She anticipated with her whole body the instant when she would see Kate and they would be enfolded together…”
- “They weren’t the kind of mother and daughter who were always cuddling and touching, but surely they would embrace now, after everything that had happened.”
- “Kate would be about twenty minutes late – no hint of regret or apology.”
- “But the idea of her daughter’s waiting for her had seemed for a moment like a rich gif of the good luck she had got used to doing without. She had been trying so sedulously not to want anything too much.”
- “Kate always had an air of submitting to her mother’s kisses, rather than returning them.”
- Her share of sorrow:
- “…if she’d been… like her mother…”
- “But she was plump…”
- “She looked like a changeling in that family, other people thought…”
- “…bracing herself for conflict with Ruby, who couldn’t live without Wi-Fi and hated the sun.”
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Gender roles - the expectations placed upon women throughout the various settings
- An Abduction:
- "Now she belongs to us, Paddy said."
- "Jane knew from observing her mother that it was her role to fill awkward silences.”
- The Stain:
- "Should she go up to the house? Was that her duty?"
- Deeds not Words:
- “What good would it do to anyone, Edith thought, for a dolt like Ursula Smythe to have the vote? What would she vote for? Hadn’t she been one of the champions at automatic writing, filling whole exercise books with her nonsense?”
- “Whatever my opinions are, how can I stay at home teaching French to little girls, when other men are giving their lives out there?”
- One Saturday Morning:
- “Carrie’s mother talked about him in a cherishing tone that she reserved for certain people she admired, mostly men, mostly just out of reach on the margins of their acquaintance.”
- One Saturday Morning:
- “Carrie felt guiltily responsible for his restlessness.” (gender expectations)
- “It was strange that a grown man could be reduced to the listlessness of a child, waiting for something that didn’t come.”
- “Paul ran in from across the road… fairly oblivious of his family’s social life.” (gender roles)
- “It occurred to her that her mother was afraid of Dom Smith, too. She didn’t want to return downstairs, where he was waiting with his loss and hunger for consolation.”
- Experience:
- “I was ready to submit to it.”
- Bad Dreams:
- “All of them wanted to be Nancy Blackett, the strutting pirate girl, though they would settle for Titty Walker, sensitive and watchful.”
- “Susan was the dullest of the Swallows… cooking and housekeeping.”
- “…she’d been overawed by the fine arts students, who were mostly experienced grown men…”
- Under the sign of the moon:
- “How come your title doesn’t change, Greta said, - and mine does? You’re still man, but I’m wife? Why don’t you call yourself husband?”
- “Her feminism in those days consisted mostly of these niggling technicalities.”
- "Kate's father persuaded me to change it to Greta."
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