1 Apart from ethical import, the covert progression can, of course, generate other kinds of thematic significance, but this book would like to focus on the ethical. With the thriving development of ethical criticism after its revival by J. Hillis Miller (1987), Wayne C. Booth (1988), and Martha Nussbaum (1990), among others, over two decades ago, there is nowadays little resistance to the connection between art and ethics in the investigation of narrative fiction. For surveys of the ethical turn, see Altes 2005 and Buell 1999.
2 When investigating a more local aspect of a narrative, such as the function of a minor character, attention is often paid to textual elements that appear to be digressive or peripheral to the main line of action, but in investigating the narrative progression of a whole text, attention is usually focused on the main line of action.
3 As pointed out by Booth, a serious ethical criticism cannot be divorced from political criticism since when “we talk about changing persons we are also talking about changing societies” (1988: 12; see also Diamond 1983: 163–64). Indeed, concepts of moral philosophy such as “right” and “wrong,” “good” and “evil,” “justice” and “injustice” are applicable both to individuals and to societies.
4 Although summaries of the plot of this narrative usually take for granted Désirée’s committing suicide, Ellen Peel (1990: 233–34), from a poststructuralist perspective, casts doubt on the certainty of Désirée’s death, but the interaction of the relevant textual details do strongly imply that Désirée has committed suicide (see Chapter 3 for a detailed discussion).
5 See Shen 2005b for a comparison between Narrative Discourse by Genette and Style in Fiction by Leech and Short, which also shows that narratology’s “discourse” and stylistics’ “style” respectively cover part of the techniques on the level of presentation.
6 In contrast with Chatman, some narratologists like Monika Fludernik (1996, 2003) and David Herman (2002) brought with them into the narratological camp their remarkable expertise in stylistics or linguistics, which is still evident in their narratological works.
7 This point is highlighted by being printed on the front and back flaps of the book. However, Phelan offers a critique in this book of Elder Olson’s attack on William Empson, and in part two of the book, Phelan shows that works like Lolita depend primarily on the authors’ stylistic virtuosity for success. As editors, Phelan and Rabinowitz fully endorsed my essay published in A Companion to Narrative Theory (2005), an essay that calls for paying attention to both “style” (verbal/language techniques) and “discourse” (structural techniques) in investigating the formal aspect of narrative. In Living to Tell about It (2005) and Experiencing Fiction (2007), Phelan at least theoretically pays more attention to style/language since he mentions “style” (or words, language) together with “narrative discourse,” which forms a contrast with his earlier works such as Narrative as Rhetoric (1996) where he mentions “narrative discourse” alone (see, for instance, p.19). But in the two more recent books, Phelan still has not made style or language a central element in practical analysis.
8 Cognitive criticism is often concerned with what I call “generic audience” (see Shen 2005c: 155–57). In terms of the large genre of narrative, the “generic audience” share interpretation through sharing the same narrative conventions as typically embodied by stereotypic assumptions, expectations, frames, scripts, plans, schemata, or mental models in narrative comprehension.
9 In “Tom Jones: The Form in History,” Rader criticizes R. S. Crane and Sheldon Sacks for neglecting the historical context of Tom Jones, which leads to a partial understanding of the form of the text (see also Phelan and Richter 2011). Apart from drawing attention to cultural history, Rader has directed much attention to the relation between character’s experiences and the historical author’s experiences, focusing on various autobiographical elements in the text (see Rader 1978/79, 1984). It should also be mentioned that, in recent years, James Phelan has become increasingly receptive to the consideration of context and real-author influences (see, for instance, Phelan 2011).
10 The term “real author” is potentially misleading, since the person in daily life outside the writing process is referred to as “author.” To avoid ambiguity or misconception, it is better to use “the historical person” or “the flesh-and-flood person” (meaning without role-playing). In his recent essay “The Resurrection of the Implied Author” (2005), Booth consistently uses “the flesh-and-flood person” (“the FBP”), instead of “the real author.”
11 Rader (1978/79, 1984) has paid much attention to how characters’ experiences resemble those of the real author’s. But as indicated by “Désirée’s Baby” analyzed in Chapter 3, the autobiographical influences may function in a contrastive way. For instance, while in real life Kate Chopin’s father-in-law was a harsh slave owner, Désirée’s is described as very benevolent towards his slaves. Underlying this contrast are the historical Chopin’s racist experiences which constitute a motivating factor in her mythologization of the Southern slave system (see Chapter 3).
12 In contrast with reader-response, constructivist, and deconstructive approaches to fictional narrative, underlying the rhetorical critics’ efforts to arrive at authorial reading is the belief that different readers are willing or eager to accept the implied author’s invitation and will more or less succeed in entering the authorial audience, thus be able to share readings (see, for instance, Phelan 2007).
13 It is worth noting that linguistic meaning is not as indeterminable as many critics hold. Saussure’s theory of the sign has been widely taken as lending to the indeterminacy of meaning. But in effect Saussure puts emphasis on the conventional “union of meanings and sound-images” that is “the only essential thing” in “a system of signs” (Saussure 1960: 15), where “although both the signified and the signifier are purely differential and negative when considered separately, their combination is a positive fact” (ibid.: 120–21; italics added). In discussing linguistic value, Saussure stresses the conventional nature of the link between the signifier and the signified: “The arbitrary nature of the sign explains in turn why the social fact alone can create a linguistic system. The community is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by himself the individual is incapable of fixing a single value” (ibid.: 113). In the English language “community” (needless to say, any linguistic convention only obtains in relation to a given language community), “sun” (/sΛn/) can function as a sign not only because of its difference from other signs in sound or “sound-image,” but also because of the conventional union between the sound-image “sun” and the signified concept. Given, for instance, the following sound-images “lun”(/lΛn/), “sul” (/sΛl/) and “qun” (/kwΛn/), although each can be identified by its difference from the others, none of them can function as a sign, because there is no conventional link between the signifier and the signified.
1 In “The Poetic Principle” Poe makes it clear that he cherishes “as deep a reverence for the True as ever inspired the bosom of man,” but he would exclude it from the realm of poetry because Truth is incompatible with the “efflorescence” of the poetic language: “The demands of Truth are severe. She has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which is so indispensable in Song, is precisely all that with which she has nothing whatever to do. It is but making her a flaunting paradox to wreathe her in gems and flowers. In enforcing a truth, we need severity rather than efflorescence of language. We must be simple, precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, unimpassioned. In a word, we must be in that mood which, as nearly as possible, is the exact converse of the poetical. He must be blind, indeed, who does not perceive the radical and chasmal difference between the truthful and the poetical modes of inculcation. He must be theory-mad beyond redemption who, in spite of these differences, shall still persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth” (1984c: 76).
2 Another more obvious reason for this oversight is that critics soon associated Poe with the label “Art for Art’s sake” and have formed a permanent posthumous association of Poe with the late-nineteenth-century movement of “aestheticism” (see Polonsky 2002).
3 Cleman quotes from Poe’s “Poetic Principle” and 1842 review of Twice-Told Tale s.
4 The tale is in first-person narration and there is no explicit mentioning of the narrator’s sex, but the narrator consistently refers to himself as a “madman.” Gita Rajan argues that Poe’s narrator may be female (1988: 295), but the argument is far from persuasive. Poe describes the murdering act as follows: “With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room. [The old man] shrieked once—once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him” (558). Rajan unconvincingly interprets the scene in this way: “In that one moment of possession, she becomes the aggressor; she even assumes a male sexual posture, forcing the old man to receive her, almost raping him” (1988: 295).
5 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 555–59. All subsequent references are to this edition and only page numbers are given parenthetically in the text.
6 For the emphasis of the consistency in question, see in particular Poe, “Philosophy of Composition,” p.13, and Poe, 1842 review of Twice-Told Tales, p. 573.
7 At the dénouement of Poe’s “The Black Cat” (first published in 1843, the same year as “The Tell-Tale Heart”), the murderer, in a triumphant mood in front of the policemen for having walled up the corpse in a projection without leaving any trace, raps upon the very spot; there comes unexpectedly the informing cry of the black cat from within the wall, which leads to the murderer’s arrest and hanging (see Poe 1984e). This event is fantastic in the following ways: first, the murderer displaces the bricks in the projection in order to insert the corpse, and he very carefully walls the whole up again without being in the least aware of the cat’s being walled up together with the corpse; second, after having been walled up for three days by a plaster made of mortar, sand, and hair, the cat is not suffocated to death; and third, the cat keeps silent for three days and only cries out to inform the policemen of the murder. Equally fantastically, in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (first published in 1839), after having been buried for “seven or eight” days in a vault “at a great depth” underground with thin air and a metal door of “immense weight,” the female protagonist Madeline, who had been much weakened by malady and was almost laid up in bed before she was thought dead, rends the screwed coffin, breaks through the locked heavy metal door, and returns to the house, shocking her twin brother Roderick to death. Moreover, Roderick, whose senses are over-acute, can hear in the house his sister’s “feeble movements” in the coffin deep underground, and, more dramatically, Madeline in the vault deep underground can enact simultaneously what her brother’s friend is reading from the “Mad Trist” in the house (see Poe 1984f).
8 But he is not beyond self-pity: “I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart” (556). The expression “[I] pitied him” only shows the protagonist’s self-pity, since he is not really pitying the old man—“although I chuckled at heart.”
9 His nervousness greatly contributes to the horror effect at the killing scene: “It [the living old man’s heart beating] grew louder, I say, louder every moment!— do you mark me well I have told you that I am nervous: so I am. And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror” (557).
10 Poe takes a drastically different stance towards the protagonists’ dissemblance in “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) and “Hop-Frog” (1849), in which the protagonists take revenge for unbearable insults by murdering without being punished. In these tales the murderers’ dissemblance seems to be regarded by Poe as a laudable device. This change in stance has to do with Poe’s personal life—his desire for revenge upon his two literary enemies. See Demond 1954; Bonaparte 1949: 505–9; Quinn 1969: 501–6; Poe 1948: 318–20.
11 Bynum notes that, according to Rush, “the insane were ‘for the most part easily terrified, or composed, by the eye of a man who possessed his reason’” (1989: 146; Bynum quotes from Rush 1830: 173). But of course, Poe is very likely making use of the popular superstition of the “Evil Eye” to enhance the dramatic effect (see Bourguignon 1993). Mabbott argues that Poe may even be suggesting that it is the old man’s eye which drives the narrator-protagonist mad (1978: 789). Some analytical critics take the eye as the Symbolic Gaze of the Father, the sign of paternal surveillance or domination (see, for instance, Hoffman 1972: 222–26; Davis 1983; Rajan 1988). When the protagonist’s murder is perceived as a justifiable act of resistance or rebellion against paternal domination, the covert progression directing irony against the protagonist would naturally remain unseen.
12 Judge Tracy, Rex v. Arnold, 16 How. St. Tr. 695 (1724), quoted in Maeder 1985: 10–11.
13 Bynum quotes from “Baron Rolfe’s Charge to the Jury, in the case of the Boy Allnutt, who was tried at the Central Criminal Court, for the Murder of his Grandfather, on the 15th Dec., 1847,” Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology 1 (1848): 214.
1 See, for instance, Johnson 1963: 251; Gibson 1968: 94–96; Wolford 1989: 68–69; Schaefer 1996: 118–22; Wertheim 1997: 96–97. Some critics, however, take it as an impressionistic story (see, for instance, McCartney 1988; Nagel 1980: 101–2).
2 Crane, “An Episode of War,” Great Short Works of Stephen Crane (New York: Harper and Row, 1965) p. 268. All subsequent references to this story are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.
3 To reach a wider audience including literary critics, I try to avoid linguistic technicalities, but I sometimes use the more or less self-explanatory terms and models in functional grammar, such as “transitivity” (Halliday 2004).
4 The unpublished title appeared two years earlier in Crane’s 1897 inventory (Schaefer 1996: 114; Wertheim 1997: 96).
5 See, for instance, Berryman 1950: 256; Gibson 1968: 95–96; Holton 1972: 144; Swann 1981: 100; Beaver 1982: 192; Delbanco 1982: 49.
6 Shaw acknowledges here the influence of Gibson (1968: 9), who locates the point of view in the lieutenant’s comrades.
7 Mary Shaw puts the lieutenant on a par with the surgeon, taking it that both persons “dramatize the attitudes of traditional heroism” (1991: 26). But as analyzed above, the surgeon, acting as a dominating parent, actually functions to emasculate (even criminalize) the protagonist.
8 The following description goes, “Sitting with his back against a tree a man with a face as gray as a new army blanket was serenely smoking a corncob pipe. The lieutenant wished to rush forward and inform him that he was dying.” While the adverb “serenely” seems to be commending the army man’s calmness, the following sentence, especially the verb “inform,” ironically indicates that the serenity arises out of ignorance rather than courage.
9 This is Poem 76 in Crane’s collection of poems War is Kind and Other Lines (p. 81) first published in 1899, accessed June 7, 2011, at http://theotherpages.org/poems/crane01.html (italics added).
10 See the copyright page of Crane, Great Short Works of Stephen Crane; also Stallman, 2002: 217; Solomon 1966: 124.
1 Summaries of the plot of the narrative usually take for granted Désirée’s suicide (see, for instance, the summaries given by Taylor and Seyersted below; see also Arner 1996: 140; Lundie 1994: 130–31; Erickson 1990: 61). Peel (1990: 233–34), from a poststructuralist perspective, casts doubt on the certainty of Désirée’s death and suggests that perhaps Désirée, instead of committing suicide, has escaped and “freed herself from those who once projected their desires on her.” But the relevant stylistic choices do strongly imply that Désirée committed suicide. When suspected of being colored, Désirée writes to her foster mother, “My mother, they tell me I am not white. Armand has told me I am not white. For God’s sake tell them it is not true. You must know it is not true. I shall die. I must die. I cannot be so unhappy, and live” (Chopin 1976: 176; all subsequent references to “Désirée’s Baby” are to the 1976 edition and are cited parenthetically in the text). When spurned by her husband for being colored, Désirée, without changing “the thin white garment nor the slippers which she wore … walked across a deserted field, where the stubble bruised her tender feet, so delicately shod, and tore her thin gown to shreds,” and she then “disappeared among the reeds and willows that grew thick along the banks of the deep, sluggish bayou; and she did not come back again” (177).
2 Such shift in critical focus may also have to do with historical changes. Lundie (1994: 130) observes that although “readers of the 1990s may see the tale’s primary theme as woman’s subordination to man, readers of the 1890s would have been concerned with the issue of miscegenation.”
3 Some critics pay more attention to the form and structure of the narrative. Erickson (1990), for instance, focuses on the fairytale features and the tension created by the use of these formal features in this realistic story.
4 To show the true racial picture of “Désirée’s Baby” produced at the end of the nineteenth century, I have kept some terms used in Chopin’s time such as “Negro (negro),” “Negress (negress),” “black blood,” and “slave” (as a noun), which are nowadays considered offensive.
5 For a discussion of the term “L’Abri” and the gothic imagery “the black cowl,” see Fitz 2000: 84–85.
6 Arner has offered a loveless Freudian reading of the transforming power: “Désirée is the superego, to put the case in Freudian terms, to Armand’s id. For a brief while she acts as the civilizing and humanizing consciousness for his primitive and animalistic unconscious…. During this brief period of marital felicity, significantly, Armand stops mistreating his slaves. But when he discovers, or thinks he discovers, that Désirée is tainted with the blackness that confirms in his mind her essential similarity to his inner sensual and aggressive self, she loses her efficacy for him as a means to grace. Marriage to her was not salvation but, in both racial and psychological terms, surrender to the self within and therefore damnation. Predictably, Armand reverts to his old ways; if anything, he is more cruel to his slaves than formerly, linking them to his “betrayal” by a woman but unaware that they are projections, literally and symbolically, of the darkness that lurks within him” (1996: 145, italics added). This reading not only blocks the racial issue from view but also unjustifiably puts the racial “blackness” on a par with the inner “darkness” of human beings. In commenting on the narrative, Cynthia Wolff (1978) also unwittingly submerges the racial issue with the psychological and the personal, as can be seen in her claims like “Chopin is clearly not primarily interested in dissecting the social problem of slavery (as Cable might be); rather, she limits herself almost entirely to the personal and the interior” (ibid.: 127, italics original and underlining added).
7 With a firm belief in the implied author’s antiracist stance, Peel (1990: 228) says, “An outsider observing Armand’s general harsh treatment of slaves might, however, see his baby’s darkness as another instance of poetic justice, the return of the oppressed.”
8 In the New Testament, Satan is closely associated with darkness as opposed to light (see, for instance, Acts 26:18 and Ephesians 6:12). Toth (1981: 206) observes that “Armand’s Satanic conduct associates him, as do his funereal surroundings, with the powers of darkness, in contrast with the whiteness of Désirée,” but her conclusion is that “white and black are thus signs of morality, not of race” (ibid.: 206). Wolff (1978: 129) refers to Armand’s being possessed by Satan as “by the only absolute darkness in the tale” but she likewise loses sight of the racial issue in treating Satan as representing the inner darkness of human beings. She concludes that the “lesser existence into which Armand sinks stems not from his Negroid parentage, but from a potential for personal evil that he shares with all fellow creatures” (ibid.). There is, however, little doubt that Armand’s Satanic inner darkness and outward conduct are not shared by the white characters in the narrative.
9 In Women on the Color Line, Elfenbein (1989: 129) has pointed out that the “imagery that surrounds [Désirée] as she takes the last walk to the bayou is reminiscent of depictions of saints and martyrs, for Désirée is enveloped in a nimbus of light playing golden gleams on her hair. Her tender feet and diaphanous white gown are torn by the stubble.”
10 Black blood may become invisible on the skin, as in the case of La Blanche, but it is unequivocally indicated by “dark” skin.
11 One may argue that, since Louisiana’s racial system forbad inter-racial marriage by law, Armand’s mother could not possibly return to Louisiana (Bauer 1996: 163–64). But we should also be aware that the rhetorical structure of this narrative in itself requires that the identity of Armand’s mother be kept in the dark for the sake of the surprise ending.
12 Arner (1996: 140) has a similar view: “[Armand] comes upon the fragment of a letter lodged in a drawer that ironically used to contain Désirée’s love letters to him. This letter, however, was written by his mother … and its final words are also the last words in the story.” Ziff (1966: 297) shares this view: “Armand, who is clearing the old bureau of all of Désirée’s belongings, happens upon an old letter in his mother’s handwriting.” In Erickson’s words (1990: 62), Armand during that moment “accidentally stumble[s] across a letter from his mother to his father indicating that she was of mixed race.”
13 Although Arner, Ziff, and Erickson (see note 12) have not mentioned Armand reading the letter, their argument invariably implies that upon accidentally discovering the letter in the drawer, Armand knows its content—a result of reading it of course. Wolff (1978: 129) thinks that Armand reads the remnant by the light of the bonfire. But notice that the narrator uses “took them” rather than “had taken them” to indicate that the action of “taking” and “reading” happened in the same spatiotemporal frame. Compare: “There was the remnant of one back in the drawer from which he had taken them [earlier in the room]…. He read it [later in the back yard].” On the other hand, it is not surprising that the narrator does not use the past perfect tense for “read.” Compare “There was the remnant of one back in the drawer from which he took them…. He had read it.” The inconsistency in tense would indicate that Armand had read that remnant before collecting the letters, which would alter the dynamics of the story and destroy to a significant extent the effect of the surprise ending. Besides, it is not surprising that the narrator does not use the past perfect both for “take” and “read” (“There was the remnant of one back in the drawer from which he had taken them … He had read it”) since it may involve an undesirable consequence—namely, indicating the anteriority of “read” over “take,” as in “from which he took them … He had read it.” Moreover, the original “he took them … He read it” is more economical and stylistically sounds better than “he had taken them … He had read it.”
14 As for the relation between Armand and his black mother, it is true that the text depicts the loving words of Armand’s mother in the letter rather than her satanic spirit. But since Armand’s “imperious and exacting nature” is “softened greatly” and his satanic spirit suppressed when he is in love with and close to the white Désirée, it is not surprising that Armand’s black mother bears no grudge against God for her black blood when she is in love with and close to her white husband. The letter shows her love for her son, but it is only a matter of a black mother’s loving her own black son—in the same case as the ‘white’ Armand’s loving his ‘white’ son. In the only other place where the mother is mentioned—the depiction of the house as analyzed above, the text implicitly establishes an essential similarity between the black mother and the black son: The mother is held responsible for the depressing condition of the house and the son’s bad “nature” is compared to that condition of the house.
15 As for the association between Satan and fire in the Bible, see, for instance, Matthew 25:41, where Jesus mentions the eternal fire prepared for Satan and his angels. As regards literature, see, for instance, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which depicts Satan falling into the lake of fire and what happens afterwards.
16 Toth (1981: 207–8) sees Armand as a typical “Tragic Octoroon male”: “In the end Armand, not Désirée, is the tragic octoroon. The signs of Désirée’s whiteness that Armand rejects are the conventional ones … Désirée has the physical qualities of a Tragic Octoroon, but Armand has the more important psychological traits.”
17 As for the former narrative, see Stowe, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854), which presents the original facts and documents upon which the story is based.
18 It may be worth noting that St. Louis, the city where Kate Chopin grew up and returned in 1883, was racially very conservative, insisting on segregated schools and colleges even during Reconstruction despite various progressive measures relating to women (Taylor 1989: 143).
19 All subsequent references to “La Belle Zoraïde” are to the 1894 edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.
20 They are apparently “pet Negroes,” see Lundie 1994: 134.
21 To make the mistress’s kindness appear realistic, the implied author has used three devices: First, the story is narrated as a “true” one since the mistress “would hear none but those which were true” (281); second, frame narration is used to tell the reader how the old Negress is reminded of the “true” story by a lover’s lament sung by a man in a boat (281); and third, using the old Negress as the narrator adds much to the superficial credibility or objectivity of the narration.
22 All subsequent references to “A Dresden Lady in Dixie” are to the 1969 edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.
23 Actually “this letter from his mother to his father” is only a “remnant … back in the drawer,” apparently unintentionally left there by Armand’s father.
1 All the narratives by Mansfield analyzed in the second part of this book are from Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (London: Constable, 1945). All subsequent references are to this edition, and only page numbers are given parenthetically in the text.
2 Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was a pioneering feminist attempt, and it formed the basis for numerous later feminist discussions about “One is not born but rather becomes a woman” (see, for instance, Moi 2001).
3 The “revelations” seem to be both secular and religious. The title of the story “Revelations” echoes the title of the last book of the Bible and reminds one of the divine revelations of God. In the body of the narrative, just before George breaks the truth of his daughter’s death, Monica “saw herself looking at him in the white kimono like a nun” (195). In real life, Mansfield did not conform to Christianity, but just a few months before the publication of “Revelations,” Mansfield put down the following words in her journal: “I don’t want a God to praise or to entreat, but to share my vision with” (Murry 1954: 192; see also Alpers 1982: 312; Arvidson 1996: 211–12). Perhaps Mansfield was trying to borrow force from religion to make the revelations more powerful.
4 Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House, translated by Rolf Fjelde, in The Bedford Introduction to Drama, edited by Lee A. Jacobus, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 593. All subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.
5 It should have become clear that Mansfield’s “Revelations,” “Prelude,” and “The Singing Lesson” (see the next chapter), which polarize gender relations and which are based on the belief in the woman’s initial “real self” prior to patriarchal distortion, are more susceptible to a feminist than a postfeminist reading (for a discussion of the difference between feminism and postfeminism, see Looser and Kaplan 1997). However, it should be stressed that Mansfield’s conception of a woman’s “false self,” as discussed above, points to gender performativity “produced and compelled by the regulatory” cultural norms of the Western hegemonic society.
1 Bateson and Shahevitch (1962) point out that the episodes combine similitude with dissimilitude in a kind of extended metaphor, and they offer a detailed analysis of the parallelism among the three episodes.
2 This is a case of what I designate “context-determined irony”: Words that mean what they say or actions that are non-ironic become ironic in a given context (see Shen 2009).
3 If such details receive critical attention, they tend to be misread when assimilated to the theme of the plot development. For instance, Robert Wooster Stallman, who takes Woodifield to be a fly in the plot development, says: “his wife keeps him ‘boxed up in the house [like a fly] every day of the week except Tuesday.’ On Tuesday he is brushed off (like a fly) ‘and allowed to cut back to the City for the day’” (1945, original brackets). This interpretation of the textual details involved seems to be ill-grounded (do we ever “brush off” a fly?).