Jane eyre movie review new york times12/11/2022 ![]() ![]() Inconspicuous minor characters in 19th-century novels and the functional, banal words they speak can help us understand why encounters with strangers might somehow be, for middle-class subjects, both enervating and pleasurable.Īnonymous interactions in the 19th-century novel typically occur when a known, named character is participating in the transactional public sphere, and thus has to speak to someone they do not know. But they make visible the interactions between strangers that are not only possible but prevalent in abstract, industrial society. Readers learn very little about them (sometimes nothing other than the words they utter), and they rarely have any significance for the novels’ plots. These unnamed marginal characters – ostlers, bakers, porters, milliners, waiters, policemen, shopkeepers, bank tellers – appear, at first, totally inconsequential. These interactions offer a glimpse of the alienation and estrangement that is characteristic of life in the modern public sphere In Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), for example, 20 of the 66 speaking characters are unnamed in Oliver Twist (1838) by Dickens, 42 speaking characters are named and 45 remain unnamed of 105 characters who speak in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), 38 are never named. This is a widespread phenomenon – anonymous interactions occur in works by authors including Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Arthur Conan Doyle. These are often quick financial transactions (think of, for example, speaking to a cashier at a supermarket as you pay for your groceries) or brief encounters between strangers who exchange nothing but words (like talking to someone on the street after you both witness an accident). Most of these unnamed characters appear as participants in anonymous interactions – that is, fleeting and terminal verbal exchanges between two characters who are unknown to each other and unconnected by any enduring relation. These anonymous men and women typically speak a sentence or two and then disappear, never to be seen or heard from again. But these novels are also full of forgettable, unnamed characters who speak a few, forgettable words. Instead, most dialogue in novels of the period portrays complex personal relationships (familial, social, romantic, professional) between characters who know each other. You might even remember their most distinctive lines: Oliver Twist’s plaintive ‘Please, sir, I want some more’ Darcy’s contemptuous ‘She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me’ or Cathy’s impassioned ‘I am Heathcliff!’ Although these distinctive characters and their memorable utterances take up most of our attention, they in fact make up only a small fraction of the population of 19th-century novels. When you think of 19th-century novels, who do you remember? Most likely, you recall Jane Austen’s quick-witted heroines Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s moody heroes Rochester and Heathcliff, or Charles Dickens’s eccentrics Miss Havisham and Ebenezer Scrooge.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |