Character Developmrny
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The effectiveness of any narrative is dependent on the viability of its characters — that is, how tangible, or human they appear to the reader. Characters bring life to a story that cannot be effectively emulated by any other means. What entices the reader into the turning of each page is the relationship that he or she begins to develop with the characters whose lives, thoughts, and feelings they are experiencing through the telling of the story. Particularly in the short story, character development occurs very rapidly, such that the reader is often able to flip back but a single page and see the change that has already taken root. The devices employed by one writer will differ from that of another, thus allowing for a multiplicity of styles which appeal to a variety of audiences. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Guy de Maupassant, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s stories “Young Goodman Brown”, “The Necklace”, and “The Yellow Wallpaper”, respectively, all differ vastly in their subject matter. These stories, though dissimilar, share the commonality of their characters undergoing some dramatic transformation before the story’s end.
In the opening of “Young Goodman Brown”, Hawthorne tells of a man for whom the story is named, “And Faith, as the wife was aptly named.” (526) Through Faith, Hawthorne suggests to his reader that Brown is embarking on some unnamed, perilous errand. Brown refers to his wife as “My love and my Faith,” (526), and later as “a blessed angel on earth”, speaking of how “after this one night [he’ll] cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven.” (526) As he is progressing down the forest path, he hears the cries of his wife in the distance, discovering one of her hair ribbons falling toward the ground, causing him to cry out: “My Faith is gone! . . . There is no good on earth. And sin is but a name.” (531) Brown’s journey finds him in a suspiciously sinister clearing at the end of a forest path, filled with his fellow parishioners. “But, irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people . . . there were men of dissolute lies and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes.” (532) It is in this clearing that Goodman Brown reencounters the cloaked figure, who speaks to them all of the absoluteness of their sin, telling them that “Depending upon one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. . .” (534) That which transpired in the clearing served to dismantle the very foundations of Brown’s beliefs, such that “on the Sabbath day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear. . . Often, awaking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith. . .” (535)
Where Hawthorne illuminated his characters and thus the story primarily through dialogue, Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” contains very sparse dialogue, yet still illustrates a dynamic change in the character’s core values come the closing pages. How? In the stories opening paragraphs, the narrator discloses to the reader of a yet unnamed woman that “She was one of those pretty and charming girls who are sometimes, as if by a mistake of destiny, born in a family of clerks” and that “She dressed plainly because she could not dress well, but she was as unhappy as though she had really fallen from her proper station. . . ” (538) Maupassant’s use of language, such as his delay in identifying this woman as Mathilde for nearly two full pages, helps to impart a particular feeling upon the reader that correlates with the the events of the story as they unfold. As the narrative begins to draw to a close and Mathilde and her husband have after many years repaid their mass of debt, the reader is told that “Mme. Loisel looked old now. She had become the woman of impoverished households – strong, and hard, and rough. With frowsy hair, skirts askew . . . she talked loud while