-
Autumn Day by Mavis Gallant Analysis
“Autumn Day”, a short story by Mavis Gallant, is interesting for feminist reasons. Think of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique; think of Mad Men’s Betty Draper and compare the idle, childlike helplessness of Cissy, the first person narrator in “Autumn Day”. This is a post WW2 picture of American housewives. The men had just saved everyone’s…
-
A Day Like Any Other by Mavis Gallant Analysis
This story is interesting to me because of the year it was written. As a modern parent, I hear a lot about how ‘parents these days’ are overprotective of our children, interfering too much in their lives, stunting their emotional development. Yet this is a story of one such mother, and it dates from 1952. Have…
-
Shirley Jackson’s Louisa, Please Come Home Analysis
“Louisa, Please Come Home” is a short story by Shirley Jackson, first published in Ladies Home Journal, 1960.
-
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter Short Story Analysis
“The Bloody Chamber” is a feminist-leftie re-visioning of Bluebeard, written in the gothic tradition, set in a French castle with clear-cut goodies and baddies. The title story of The Bloody Chamber, first published in 1979, was directly inspired by Charles Perrault’s fairy tales of 1697: his “Barbebleue” (Bluebeard) shapes Angela Carter’s retelling, as she lingers…
-
Madeline’s Birthday by Mavis Gallant Analysis
Mavis Gallant died last year, but if she were still around she might not think much of my attempt to dissect her stories in order to learn from them: Gallant is dismissive of analysing or explaining her work, and distrustful of academic attempts to do so. The Guardian, 2009 The same Guardian article says of her…
-
Buildings As Characters In Fiction
Sometimes in literature you’ll hear a setting interpreted in the same way as a character. What does this mean? When should you do this? See: How can setting be a character? This article focuses specifically on buildings as character. Most stories: Setting affects character. In some stories: Setting interacts with the characters. IS HOUSE AS CHARACTER A…
-
Short Story Endings and Extrapolation
A key term in classical Chinese poetry is ju jue yi bujue (句絕意不絕) which means “lines that end but meaning that does not end.” This is a useful distinction, and a similar concept applies to many short stories. Staying in Asia, Japan also has a concept which applies to many types of short story endings:…
-
Stories About Female Friendships
I should like to have friends, I confess. I do not suppose I ever shall. But there have been moments when I have realized what friendship might be. Rare moments – but never forgotten. Friendship is a binding, as solemn as marriage. We take each other for life, through everything – forever. But it’s not…
-
About
I’ve disabled right-click and copy functionality on this blog after more than a decade without it. This was prompted by trackbacks from AI-powered paraphrasing sites. While it makes no difference to me personally if someone uses info on this site to get an essay written or whatever, these technologies can’t mean anything good for humanity…
-
John Brown, Rose and The Midnight Cat (1979) Picture Book Analysis
John Brown and the Midnight Cat is a classic Australian picture book by Wagner and Brooks. Children read a different story from adults.
-
What is narrated monologue?
There are many, many words and phrases used by different commentators to catalogue the many ways of narrating fiction. The terms overlap. Some have called the writing style of modernists such as Mansfield, Lawrence and Woolf ‘narrated monologue’. What is that, exactly? And what does it look like on the page? Narrated monologue presents the…
-
Story Structure: The Big Struggle
All complete narratives feature a big struggle scene. No, that doesn’t have to be a literal big struggle scene, Lord of the Rings style. In fact, we should be thinking outside that box altogether. One thing I love about Larry McMurtry’s anti-Western novels (especially Lonesome Dove) is that he condenses the gun big struggles and torture scenes in favour…