A room with a view

1
A room with a view

• Term 2 Lecture 3

2
REACHCAMBRIDGE

• Selection test tomorrow 0 period 7.35 8.35 am
  (1hour) Be early. We will start on time. LT3
• Only for students who have submitted their forms.
• Format Essay question on unseen poetry
  comparison question

3
LIT HIST EVENING 2011

• Friday 29 April at PAC. Be EARLY! Come at 5.30pm
  to register attendance.
• Theme BATTLE OF WILLS
• Special JC2 event - combining LIT and HIST. LIT
  creative interpretation and dramatization of
  texts through Drama and Art
• Special drama performance of Top Girls by our
  drama society
• Compulsory for all JC1 H2 students
• Dress code! Smart-casual
• Light dinner will be provided.
• Evening ends about 10.15 pm

4
Forster Aspects of the Novel

• Stress on Pattern Rhythm of a novel
• Novel as interconnected seamless whole
• ? Building layers of gradual discovery and
  understanding by reader

5
Forster Aspects of the Novel

• Pattern
• relates to plot
• once we have finished the novel, the plot
  departs but the pattern remains in our memory
• Pattern symmetry in plot
• Eg characters changing places Lucy Cecil vs
  Lucy George as love interest
• Eg Novel as a whole
• movement from Italy to England to Italy
• Pictorially geometric oval of a stylized eye
• Central theme captures the opening and maturing
  of Lucy as she widens her visual and mental
  horizons to learn the truth.

6

• In return to Italy, the same window is opened.
• Foster makes use of a simple and traditional
  framework of beginning and ending a story in the
  same setting with the same symbol and with the
  same underlying thought.
• That the lovers will grow as a couple just as
  Lucy grew as an individual.

7
Forster Aspects of the Novel

• Pattern
• Eg binaries in characterisation (representing
  opposing values / worlds freedom, truth, love,
  desire vs restraint, repression, falseness
  characters associated with symbolically different
  views
• Cecil, Charlotte with viewless drawing rooms
  George with open nature/sky
• Eg series of chapters on lying (Lying to George
  Lying to Cecil Lying to)

8
Rhythm of the novel

• From music relates to structure of novel
• Repetition plus variation of aspects / events /
  symbols
• Eg Chapters / events repeat, yet with variation
• Eg. alternating indoor vs outdoor chapters

9

• F (Foster) plays with 3 types of rhythm easy,
  difficult and linking.
• Rhythm in the easy sense gt consists of either
  fixed or expanding symbols.
• Created by the use of repeated sequences of notes
  / symbols.
• This repetition does not mean mere duplication.
• All symbols are used to enhance the rhythmic
  patterns but they do so in different ways.

10

• F makes extensive use of the repeated simple
  fixed symbol - the symbolic object that do not
  grow or diminish in meaning.
• He also uses the expanding symbol.
• This is a more complex emblem that grows as the
  reader learns more of it and applies to the new
  knowledge the memory of what has passed.

11

• The most pervasive simple fixed symbol is the
  view and its variations eg the window and seeing.
  
• The repetition of this symbol constantly woven
  into the story gives order to the novel
• From title, we know its impt.
• From the beginning it is good.
• This never changes and never grows. Only Mr
  Emerson has a transcendent knowledge the one
  perfect view is the view of the sky straight
  over our heads all other views are but bungled
  versions of it.

12

• For other characters, seeing the view is a
  metaphor for seeing life.
• However, appearances and reality are not the
  same. From opening, the pension tries to look
  like an English boarding house but it is not, the
  floors of red tiles in Lucys room look clean but
  they are not (chpt 1 2).
• Lucys challenge (and that of the others) is to
  perceive what is real and what is pretended.
• Eg her final break with Cecil, she says I must
  see clearly. I must speak she rejects the
  unreality that he represents for her.

13

• We are always reminded of the impt of seeing
  things honestly.
• At the very beginning all characters are defined
  by their desire to see or not to see. Eg closing
  windows Miss Alans tell L CB of the
  necessity of closing windows in Italy (chpt 1)
• Marks the diff btw Lucy and Charlotte.
• At end of novel, George strolls over to open the
  window. When lying to Cecil, Lusy tells him
  dont open the window and youd better draw
  the curtains too.
• The variations of this simple fixed symbol are
  due to the forms it takes such as views, windows,
  and seeing. And the 2 levels it is found on the
  interior or psychological and the exterior.

14

• In chpt 5, we see how Lucys perception of people
  begin to change as a result of the effect of
  Chpt 4
• P49 she doubted that Miss Lavish was a great
  artist they were tried by some new test and they
  were found wanting

15

• Another example of an unvarying symbol is the
  Baedeker gt A symbol related to viewing,
  NBUsed also in the other Italian novel where
  angels fear to tread. a linking symbol.
• It symbolizes the conventional gt those who read
  of life rather than live it. Those who peruse
  words and sentences rather than people and
  actions.
• Users of the Baedeker remove themselves from
  participation in a view. To show how undeveloped
  and unsophisticated Lucy is, she is seen
  memorizing the Baedeker in chpt 1.
• At the end when she decides to go to Greece gt
  her reversion back to conventionality is shown in
  her purchasing a Beadeker with her mother for
  Greece.

16

• Like the symbol of a view, the Baedekers meaning
  does not grow not diminish with repeated use.
• Through its recurrent appearances, it provides an
  internal harmony of rhythm in the easy manner
  that a repeated musical phrase does.

17

• Other leit-motifs which are just as rhythmically
  effective and fixed
• Charlottes consistent tone of false selflessness
  and the insistent use of the adjective clever
  in conjunction with Miss Lavish.
• Eg when CB 1st complains she says any nook will
  do.but it is hard that you shouldnt have a
  view.
• In chpt 6. it is you they really want. I am
  added for appearances.
• Then about the mackintosh without a moments
  doubt, Lucy, the ground will do for me. Really, I
  have not had rheumatism for years gt we can hear
  the whine of the false martyr each time she
  speaks.

18

• For Miss Lavish (Miss L), it is not what she
  speaks but what is said of her that gives us a
  constant and consistent note played at her
  entrance to a scene.
• Narrator consistently introduces her as the
  clever lady then said the clever lady broke
  in Miss Lavish was so original.
• Foster admits his leit-motifs are too obvious but
  becos they are presented with humour and they are
  incorporated in diff ways, eg in the tone of
  narrator and the words of other characters, they
  make interesting variations. They do not disrupt
  the rhythm but add to it.
• Creating a simple rhythm we can tap into.

19

• A more subtle rhythmic repetition is found in the
  recurrence of the same phrases, sometimes with
  variations and repeated by diff characters.
• This serves to add to the inner harmony and order
  of the novel but also each recurrence thickens
  the meaning of the phrase and shows without
  comment by the narrator how one character is like
  the other.
• Similarities are implied and subtle.

20

• Eg. In the beginning Miss Alan is introduced as
  a delicate pathos perfumed her disconnected
  remarks giving them an unexpected beauty, just as
  decaying autumn woods there sometimes rise odours
  reminiscent of spring. P33 chpt 3
• A similar version of these words are used when
  describing Lucy after she rejects G gt she was
  aware of autumn, summer was ending and the
  evening brought her odours of decay, the more
  pathetic because they were reminiscent of
  spring.
• As readers, we are expected to remember the
  earlier echo of words gt Lucy is in danger of
  being received into the night as Charlotte and
  the Miss Alans have been.

21

• The aesthetic effect of these repetitions is
  based on the readers use of memory to discern
  that which might have been shown by the novelist
  straight away only if he had shown it straight
  away, it would never have become beautiful.

22

• Same device is used in the depiction of Lucy and
  Cecils relationship.
• nature- the simplest of topics he thought- lay
  before them. P93 gt shows the ignorance of his
  dry and arid passionless personality.
• nature simplest of topics, she thought was
  around them. gt this is at odds with her
  passionate nature.
• Lucy too makes the mistake of thinking of nature
  as a safe and uncomplicated subject.
• This is Lucy trying to look at the world through
  Cecils eyes and speaks of it even to herself
  using his words.

23
Complex expanding symbols

• England and Italy seem at 1st like the fixed
  symbols.
• Their connotations expand during the course of
  the novel but there is a basic consistency to
  them.
• England is repression and convention. Italy is
  eternally in league with youth. Surrey is
  familiar and known, Italian country is full of
  dangerous pernicious charm. Chpt 2
• BUT There is also the danger and possibility of
  human connection in both places.
• In chpt 4 in Italy passion can led to violence
  and death, in Surrey, convention can be flouted
  in the bathing scene the joys of unrestrained
  youth and even the appreciation of maleness can
  connect.

24

• Violets 1st used in chpt 3 business of the
  violets. Connect them with the Emersons.
• Takes on other layers of meaning chpt 6 violets
  is associated with George and passion
• Also described as the primal source of beauty.
• Now associated with life and passion.
• Phaeton who saw George kiss Lucy had a violet
  between his teeth.
• It is a positive symbol
• When used by Ms Lavish in her crude novel, the
  symbol is charge with negative quality for Lucy.
• However, in reminding us of the symbol of the
  violets, We are also reminded of the positive
  melody of this repeated use of a symbol.

25
OTHER PATTERNS

• E. M. Forster in his Aspects of the Novel stated
  that "parody and adaptation have enormous
  advantages"
• an already existing book or literary tradition
  may inspire them - they may find high up in its
  cornices a pattern that will serve as a
  beginning, they may swing about in its rafters
  and gain strength."
• One such "pattern" is provided by classical
  mythology.

26

• the classical mythological characters of Phaethon
  and Persephone gtthe names of an Italian carriage
  driver and his lover.
• Their myths are also relevant to the plot of the
  novel to emphasize Lucy Honeychurch's and George
  Emerson's passionate awakenings.
• By reading the novel for this mythic structure,
  the reader can better appreciate the personae of
  Lucy and George and their actions as they relate
  to their classical analogues.

27

• Lucy Honeychurch, who breaks from the darkness of
  Victorian conventionality to experience the
  brightness of passion is like Persephone, who
  spends half of the year in the darkness of the
  underworld and half in the light of the surface.
• George Emerson, who forever contemplates the
  "everlasting Why" until the experience of passion
  leads him to an encounter with the physical is
  like Phaethon, whose brashness causes him
  literally to fall from heaven to earth.

28

• It is towards life that Lucy is being called, for
  she is shackled by Victorian conventionality,
  which deadens life by subverting passion beneath
  rationality.
• She must break free of this conventionality if
  she is to live.
• Like Persephone, she is trapped beneath the
  earth, beneath convention, and the driver and his
  lover turn to her to appeal to her trapped
  passions, to force her to release those passions
  and return to the earth's surface.

29

• Forster presents Lucys society as
  "depersonalized by materialism, philistinism,
  some of the more inhibiting forms of Puritanism
  and, most of all perhaps, by a blinding
  complacency engendered by a confident sense of
  its own entrenchment.
• It is a society which lacks "any firm sanctions
  for the imaginative life," thereby allowing a
  "rational, sceptical spirit" to gain a firm grip
  on the society.
• Lucy is trapped in this grasp, is trapped in its
  conventions and rational spirit.

30
(No Transcript)
31
(No Transcript)