The Main Question
Essay Preview: The Main Question
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The main question, automatically, involves the last couple sentences. What has happened? What does this ending mean? Opinions run the gamut from very positive upbeat readings (usually the majority) to rather grim ones (often difficult to articulate). The way to sort this through is to break it down. (Theres often a rankling about dissecting literature, but unlike the science classes frogs, one can put the victim back together in English class and it lives again.)
Identify the point of view.
This is odder than it seems. Weve got third-person limited (vs. omniscient) narration here. But why wouldnt first-person be the better choice to make the experience more immediate to readers?
What is the term for this technique? “[A]way they bowled, past waltzing lampposts and fences and trees” (721); “A great quivering jet of gas lighted the ladies room. It couldnt wait; it was dancing already” (722).
More important than identifying the correct term and getting your four points on that junior high school English test is to see the purpose of these kinds of “personifications.” The animism and enchantment of the things around her serves to capture Leilas zeal. Its a kind of projection of her own uncontainable excitement.
So personification serves characterization, but what can be further said about the character Leila? Take, for example, the following: “She would remember for ever. It even gave her a pang to see her cousin Laurie throw away the wisps of tissue paper he pulled from the fastenings of his new gloves. She would like to have kept those wisps as a keepsake, as a remembrance” (721). Or: “In her excitement Leila felt that if there had been time, if it hadnt been impossible, she couldnt have helped crying because she was an only child, and no brother had ever said Twig? to her” (721).
This begins to answer the first question about point of view. Obviously Leila is naive, and Mansfield wants to create different levels of awareness between Leila and us — something not very easy with first-person narration where we are apt to experience things with the narrator, not view the events from a more privileged perspective. We see, but Leila cant, the absurdity of her over-romaticizings noted above. She is too charmed by it all to perceive, as we