Two Dickensian Features of Style
2010; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2374-6629
Autores Tópico(s)Literature Analysis and Criticism
Resumo1) personification: French Carlyle makes characteristic, and, one must add, caracteristique use of collective personifications (cf R S Edgecombe, Collective Personification in Carlyle's French Revolution, Victorian Newsletter 93 (1998): 26-27). Here is one example: In a squalid garret, on Monday morning, Maternity awakes, to hear her children weeping for bread. Maternity must forth into the streets (1:251-52) And here is another: But be this as it may, menaced Rascality, in whinnying scorn, is shaking all the Gates: the fastening of one (some write, it was a chain merely) gives way: Rascality is in the Grand Court, whinnying louder still (1:277). oddness (and fascination) of these versions of prosopopoeia is the way in which they compound a multitude of people into a monolith, suggesting that they have been galvanized and fused by mob energy to pursue a common purpose. Because this device trenches on the grotesque, and because it's so peculiar to Carlyle, there can be no doubt that Dickens had it in his sights when he wrote Junction. This Christmas story contains, inter alia, a whimsical attack on the refreshment booths at British stations (apparently a sore topic with Dickens, for he recurs to it in The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices). It's narrated by one of his irrepressible boys (not unlike the one in the service of Mr Trabb who mocks Pip on the eve of his expectations), and this is how he records the return of the proprietress of such a booth from an investigative tour of those in France: Our Missis returned. It got circulated among the young ladies, and it as might be penetrated to me through the crevices of the Room, that she had to reveal, if revelations so contemptible could be dignified with the name. Agitation become awakened. was up in the Expectation stood a-tiptoe. At length it was put forth that on our slackest time of that evening betwixt trains, Our Missis would give her views of Foreign Refreshmentin, in the Room. (519) A wry irony inheres in Dickens's hint of French Revolution at this point, for the Orrors reported from France proprietress aren't of guillotinings and massacres, but rather of delicious food, elegant service and customer care. women who staff the kiosk at Mugby Junction are a phlegmatic, contemptuous bunch, and, instead of serving their customers, endlessly apply a setting lotion to their hair (whence the name of the Bandolining Room). Only the rumour of a French revolutionary alternative to the service they offer can galvanize and unite them in the all-encompassing prosopoeia that Carlyle had used for the march on Versailles. Not only are they awakened, but they even turn into vigorous horsy hoydens: Excitement was up in the stirrups. 2) Sentence Fermata It became standard practice in the twentieth century to create a mid-sentence pause--a faux aposiopesis--so as to enhance an anti-climax waiting in the wings. Here is an example from Lytton Strachey's Portraits in Miniature: They are there neither to instruct us nor to exalt us, but simply to amuse us; and therefore the effects which would in reality follow from their conduct must not appear, If they did, the comedy would cease to exist: the jealous husband would become a tragic personage; the heavy father a Galsworthy character; the rake would be revealed as a pest, and the old bore as. …
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