Witches' Loafes, by O. Henry

Video (an amateur film)

Summary and analysis

Analysis

Themes

SUMMARY, by Aurora Ledesma

The story is about Miss Martha. She is a single middle-aged lady who runs her own bakery. She has a good heart and she sympathizes with one of her customers, a man with a German accent, who only buys two loaves of stale bread, two or three times a week.

Miss Martha finds him attractive. The man, Blumberger, doesn’t seem rich in any way. His clothes are mended in some places. Despite that, he looks neat and is very polite. She is sure that he is an artist, and very poor, because once she saw a red and brown stain on his fingers.

Miss Martha imagines the artist sitting in the middle of his empty room, having the stale bread and water for his meals. She falls in love with the idea of helping him and maybe creating a relationship.

One day, Miss Martha changes her old apron for a blue-dotted silk one, and behind the counter, she looks more beautiful. She also prepares a mixture of seeds and borax for her complexion, to make her more attractive to him. Then the customer arrives for his stale bread, and while he is distracted by a fire-engine outside, Miss Martha puts some fresh butter inside the stale loaves and gives them to him without him noticing. She imagines how he will enjoy the surprise of finding the fresh butter after his painting work. 

A few hours later, the outside bell rings. Two men are standing there. One is a young man smoking a pipe, the other is her favourite customer. He is upset and very angry. He is shouting, accusing her of mocking him, and insults her with German words. 

Poor Miss Martha! She feels ashamed and guilty… She removes her apron replacing it with the old one and throws the mixture out of the window. The romantic bubble has burst.

Some reflections

Some people have a tendency to make assumptions based on appearances, and there is a danger of acting on those assumptions without fully understanding a person’s situation. Miss Martha’s sympathetic heart and her desire to help the artist are admirable, but her actions are wrong and hurtful. 

The story’s title “Witches’ loaves” gives the association between women and evil enchantment. Perhaps the title suggests that Martha has attempted to “bewitch” Blumberger with butter in order to try to win him as her husband.

QUESTIONS
How can you recognize a genius?
Are pictures an exact representation of reality? (Think about Canaletto and his Venetian pictures, or about Stubbs and his running horses.)

Do you believe in first impressions? When, or how, can you decide you know a person? Imagine you go to a blind date and you meet someone new: When and why do you decide to go on with the meeting, or to stop it?

On your view, what are the essencial qualities a shopkeeper must have?

Why being single was a shame (mostly for a woman) in older times?

 

VOCABULARY

sympathetic, darned, stale, garret, chops, showcase, Sally Luns, quince, complexion, nickel, dairyman, fluttering, edibles, dwelt, easel, viciously

  

October and June, by O. Henry

SUMMARY, by J. Guiteras

The captain, who had kept his uniform worn out by time and service in a closet, was enchanted by the sweet and smiling lips of a woman.

He received a letter from this woman telling him that she would not marry him because of the age difference between them.

The captain, who was rich and handsome, did not resign himself to this refusal and took a train to see her so that she could reconsider.

She stood firm in her decision, arguing that within a few years one of them would want to be quiet at home and the other would be crazy about going out to parties.

The captain was sad because he had lost the battle and returned home.

The next day he reflected and came to the conclusion that Theo, the woman, was right, since one of them was 28 years old and the other was only 19 years old.

 

Reflection: I feel sorry for them because a younger person can always learn a lot from another one who is older and with experience and has a lot to teach to a youngster.

 

QUESTIONS

-Why was the age gap very important in the past, and now isn’t so?

-Do you think we’ll be able to overcome all the clichés? Are prejudices good or bad for daily life?

-In your opinion, what is the relation of the title with the story?

 

VOCABULARY

gloomily, rugged, squared, ‘Pon

BIOGRAPHY, by Begoña Devis

William Sydney Porter was born in North Carolina in 1862 and died in New York in 1910. He was a great writer known as O. Henry after a cat he lived with for a time. He is considered one of the masters of the short story. His admirable treatment of surprise narrative endings popularized in English the expression "an O. Henry ending".

He had an eventful life. His mother died when he was three, and he and his father moved to his paternal grandmother's house. As a child he was a good student, and a great reader. He graduated from his aunt's school, who continued teaching him until he was 15. He then began working in his uncle's pharmacy and finally graduated as a pharmacist.

In 1882 he went to Texas, hoping that a change of scenery would improve his persistent cough. There he worked there as a ranch hand, as a cook and as a nanny. When his health improved, he went to Austin, where he worked as a pharmacist and where he began writing short stories. He was popular in the social life in Austin for his storytelling and musical talent. At this time, his problems with alcohol abuse began. In 1887, he eloped with the young Athol Estes, daughter of a wealthy family. In 1888 they have a child, who died. In 1889, a new daughter, Margaret, was born.

In 1894, Porter founded a humorous weekly magazine called The Rolling Stone.  Then that magazine collapsed, and he moved to Houston, where he was a journalist at the Houston Post.

The most transcendental event occurred in 1895, when he was accused by the First National Bank of appropriating money that he had under his responsibility. On the eve of the trial he sailed for Honduras, where he lived for seven months, and where he wrote several stories, many of which appear in the book Cabbages and Kings, in which he coined the term «banana republic», phrase subsequently used to describe a small, unstable tropical nation in Latin America.

In 1897 he returned to Austin when he knew that his wife was dying, and after a few months he was arrested and convicted, spending three years in the Columbus (Ohio) prison. There he continued writing short stories to support his daughter. When he was released from prison, he changed his name to O. Henry and moved to New York, where he lived until his death.

In New York, the city the writer loved and the setting for many of his stories, O. Henry gained public recognition, but he had a deep problem with his alcoholism. Indeed, there is an anecdote that his most famous story, "The Gift of the Magi", was written under the pressure of a deadline, in just three hours and accompanied by a whole bottle of whiskey.

From December 1903 to January 1906, he wrote a story a week for the New York World, his most prolific period. He remarried in 1907 to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Lindsey Colem, who left him in 1909.

O. Henry died on June 5, 1910 of cirrhosis of the liver. His funeral was held in New York and he was buried in Asheville, North Carolina. His daughter, Margaret Worth Porter, died in 1927 and was buried next to her father.

In the United States, the O. Henry Award for short stories, one of the most important in the world, was created in his memory. Among other writers, it has been awarded to William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, Saul Bellow and Woody Allen.

Philomela, by Emma Tennant

Literary biography

BIOGRAPHY

Emma Tennant was born in London in 1937, from an aristocratic family. She spent the Blitz in a fake gothic house in a Scottish glen. Then she came back to London; after her school time in London, she went to study in Oxford for some years. When she was older, he lived for some years in Corfu, where her parents had built a house, and she wrote a book about it.

She got married four times, the last one when she was 71 to a man of 33. She also had an affair with Ted Hughes.

Although she descended from the nobility, she was a staunch supporter of the Labour Party.

She died at 80 from a form of Alzheimer.

She worked as a travel writer for a magazine and was the editor of Vogue.

She wrote her first novel when she was 26, The Colour of Rain, and submitted it to the Formentor Prix. The chairman of the jury, Alberto Moravia, said it was a horrible novel, and Emma Tennant suffered a writer’s block for ten years. A curious detail is that she wrote it under a pseudonym, composed with the Ouija. Later, she used again this device as a help to write her novels.

After these ten years, she started writing again and she published a lot. Her books are usually versions of classical stories or prequels and sequels of famous books. For example The French Daughter’s Bastard, about the daughter of Mr Rochester (the protagonist of Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë), Pemberley, a version of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, or Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde. Sometimes, in her versions, she changes the masculine characters for feminine ones and vice versa, and she adds magic and feminism to the original narratives.

 

SUMMARY

Philomela was originally published in 1975 in the literary magazine Bananas, whose editor she was.

It tells the classical myth of Philomel, or Philomela, that appears in The Metamorphoses, by Ovid. The narrator is Procne, Philomela’s sister. She tells how she married Tereus, from Thrace, and thus had to move out of Athens leaving her loving sister there. Procne wasn’t very happy in her marriage; after a while she had a son called Itylus, but she continued feeling sad. So her sister offered to go and live with her in Thrace, but, in the end, she didn’t go. Tereus, a man who only liked war, decided to go to Athens to fetch her sister’s wife. But he came back with the bad news that Philomela was dead. Procne was sadder and sadder; she had another child, but the children weren’t a comfort to her. Her only entertainment was to take care of her garden: she would have liked to show it to her sister…

After a time, a foreign slave went to see her and gave her a cloth. The cloth was a kind of tapestry which depicted how Tereus raped her sister, cut her tongue and locked her up in a castle.

But Procne didn’t tell anything about it to her husband and sent two loyal slaves of hers to rescue Philomela. They got her and came back to Thrace secretly.

When Tereus saw Philomela he was astonished, but he plucked up courage and said that he had committed a mistake and that he was very sorry for it, that he really believed Philomela was dead. Philomela didn’t reproach him anything.

In Tereus palace, everyone respected and feared Philomela because she was dumb, because in that time, someone who had a peculiarity was revered by the rest.

Although Procne and Philomela behave as if nothing had happened to the latter, they were planning their revenge. Itylus was an exact replica of his father, and thus he was to be the object of their retaliation.

When Tereus came from the war, and while he was celebrating his victories, the sisters killed Itylus, boiled him, made a pie with his body and gave it to Tereus in a banquet. The sisters were satisfied, but we don’t know what happened to them once Tereus knew about his heir.

 

 

QUESTIONS

-Choose a Greek myth and tell us the story. (A list)

-Do you know any other story or tale where somebody eats human flesh?

-Imagine you are in a dire strait and the only way to survive is eating human flesh; would you do it?

-Sometimes the psychoanalysis recurs to the myths and legends to explain the human behaviour. Remember the Oedipus complex. What kind of complex could be Philomela complex? I mean: if the Oedipus complex tries to explain the child’s jealousy towards his dad, what kind of problem could Philomela’s story reflect?

-In the cave, the sisters said there was a dead monster. How do you imagine this monster?

-Sometimes, when somebody has a flaw (dumbness, blindness…), people think they have magic powers. What can be the origin of this belief?

-Do you know more examples of love / loyalty between sisters, or brothers?

-What are the differences between the original myth and the story by Tennant?

Myth audiobook

VOCABULARY

bearable, moped, palling, lurked, hangings, listlessly, advanced on, groves, importantly, drifwood, boulder, shift, seeped, limpets, wince

The Fishing-boat Picture, by Alan Sillitoe

BIOGRAPHY

Alan Sillitoe was born in Nottingham in 1928 to a working-class family. His father was an illiterate, couldn’t keep a job for long, and was usually violent. His mother worked in factories and, for a short time, as a prostitute. They had, besides Alan, four more children. They often moved house because they couldn’t pay the rent.
Alan left school at fourteen because he failed the entrance exam for the grammar school (the secondary school at the time). He worked in the factories of the county for four years, and then he joined the RAF, although he didn’t serve in the WWII because he was too young. But he did serve as a wireless operator in the war against the rebel communists in Malaya.
When he got back, he discovered he had TB. While in the hospital, he read a lot, but with no judgement nor model, and decided he wanted to be a writer.  He got together with the poet Ruth Fainlight (whom she married ten years later). Then, with a pension from the government, he travelled to France and Spain to try to get over his disease. When he lived in Majorca, he met Robert Graves, who helped him in his career as a writer. Thus, he started writing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in 1958. The novel is about the Saturday night-life of a factory worker who gets involved in a booze competition and in a love affair with is mate’s wife, and then, the next morning, the hangover shows him the reality of life.
His other famous novel is The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, published in 1959. It's about the life in a Borstal, a youth detention centre.
In 1968, he was invited to visit the USSR as a working-class writer, but there he denounced the human rights abuses in the communist system, surprising this way the soviet authorities. But, on the other hand, he always supported Israel in front of Palestinian movements.
He belongs, although he doesn’t like being classified like this, to the “angry young men” of the 50s in the UK, a group of artists and intellectual people who rejected the middle-class morals of the post-war Great Britain. He avoided all literary awards, although he accepted honorary doctorates from some universities.
He had two children from his wife.
Alan Sillitoe died in 2010 in London, of cancer. He was 82.
 
SUMMARY

This is a working-class story: the characters are working people, simple, with poor entertainment and poor ambitions, and it typically ends sadly.
Our hero is Harry, a postman who takes his life easily and doesn’t get emotional for anything. His only hobby is reading, mostly books about geography. When he gets a steady position in the post office, he says yes to get married to Kathy, a girl four years older than he.
For six years, they live happily together, although with a lot of rows, sometimes a bit violent. Then, after these six years, they had a silly argument: Kathy throws his book to the fire, he hits her, and she goes away for good. But afterwards he discovers that she had been cheating on him, at least for a year, with a housepainter across the street.
He isn’t sad or angry with Kathy’s departure, and he gets used to living alone, and feels, if not happier, more comfortable. He goes on doing his rounds and reading his books without any of the usually ups and downs of the life.
After six years more, his wife appears again out of the blue. She says she was around there and thought it was worth paying him a visit. Nevertheless, neither of them is excited about this sudden meeting; perhaps they only feel a bit of nostalgia. They sit and have a chat, all the time keeping the distance, but without any resentment. Kathy shows some interest in a picture of a fishing boat hanging on the wall, the last of a collection of pictures her brother gave them as a wedding present, and Harry decides to give her the picture, although at the beginning she declines the offer. They used to say the picture was the last of the fleet.

Some days later, he sees the picture in a pawnshop window; a bit surprised, he buys it and hangs it at the same place, again with any kind of rancour.
Kathy keeps paying him short visits, and all the time their meetings are cold and distant. Initially, neither of them mentions again the picture. Now and then, the postman gives her money and cigarettes, although he only smokes a pipe.
Asked about the housepainter, Kathy tells him he died a long time ago of lead-poisoning. Now, she says, she lives alone in a small flat and has different jobs.
In the end, she asks again for the fishing-boat picture, and he gives it to her again. Afterwards, he finds it again in the window of the same pawnshop, but this time he doesn’t rebuy it.
One day, a lorry runs over her, killing her. The postman goes to the hospital, and there they give him her belongings, and with them there is the fishing-boat picture, broken and dirty with blood. In the cemetery, besides her relatives, there comes a stranger. Harry finds him again in her place, collecting his things: he had been living with Kathy all these six years.
At home again, he thinks he could have kept their pictures and also kept Kathy, and feels that his life had been a waste of time.
At the end, he wonders about the meaning of life, of his life: is it worth living one’s life?
 
QUESTIONS

-What is your advice for a dating couple in order to know each other better and help them to decide on living (or not) together?
-What is better for a couple: a lot of love, or a lot of peace?
-Why do you think the protagonist liked living alone after his wife ran away?
-According to your opinion, why the wife didn’t ask him money?
-What does the picture symbolize for the couple along the story?
-Do you think that, for some people, unhappiness is a kind of happiness?

VOCABULARY

mash-lad, cheeky-daft, ruffled, down payment, hire purchase, prising, rammel, duck, allus, daft, nowt, bleddy dead ‘ead, clocked, skipped off, confined, on the dole, knocking on, clubfoot, rounds, draughts, fag-end, aerials, scooting, in the clock of the walk way, sarky, rouge, wireless, bob, hit it off, in the lurch, dresser, fag, five-packet, dished, wry, triplet, out of pop, doddering skinflint, mildewed, feyther, chinning, measly, scuttle, nippy, got the sack, mystified, blackout, shrapnel, picture house, bloke, sexton, potty, booze, pitted, knight

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (film)

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (film)

Obituary in The Guardian

Hotel des Boobs, by David Lodge

BIOGRAPHY AND SUMMARY, by Nora Carranza

David Lodge (January 28, 1935, London, England) is an English novelist, literary critic, playwright, and editor renowned for his satiric novels about academic life.
Lodge was educated at University College, London, where he got his degree in Literature and where he is an Honorary Fellow.
He travelled to the United States, where he taught, and received his doctorate at the University of Birmingham, where he was professor of Modern English Literature from 1960 to 1987.
He left this university to dedicate entirely to writing.
Lodge is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has received numerous honours, including Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in France.
His early novels and fiction works go back to 1960, continuing with novels in which the writer satirizes academic life.
Lodge co-authored different plays and moreover produced works dealing in literary theory, essays written for The Washington Post and The Independent, and other books containing essays, lectures, reviews, and a diary.

 

Mentioning some of David Lodge literary works:

The Picturegoers (1960)

Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962)

The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965)

Out of the Shelter (1970)

How Far Can You Go? (1980)

Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975)

Small World: An Academic Romance (1984)

Nice Work (1988)

Paradise News (1991)

Therapy (1995)

Thinks… (2001)

Deaf Sentence (2008)

Author, Author (2004) and A Man of Parts (2011) are based on the lives of writers Henry James and H.G. Wells, respectively.

The prolific writer David Lodge lives in Birmingham.

SUMMARY

This story takes place in some French Riviera hotel; Hotel des Pins seems to be its real name.

But some habits there make Harry, one of the guests, propose a different name: Hotel des Boobs.

Harry and Brenda are a British couple on holidays. They have always gone to spend the summer at Brenda’s parents, in Guernsey, with their children. 

This year, the children have already grown independent, and the couple is well off; thus they consider new options, and finally they end up going to a little hotel with swimming pool near St Raphael.

As Harry’s friends have mentioned, and Harry knows somehow, in some areas of the Mediterranean, at that time, women had started to practice topless. But what Harry finds and experiences there is beyond his previous suppositions.

First of all, there is Harry’s strong personal attraction for women’s breasts, since he’s always spending time and thoughts about this part of the female figure.

Already at the hotel, Harry can observe and enjoy more or less discreetly all the women by the swimming pool.

For instance, Harry remains peeping through the window in the couple room, getting Brenda so angry that she sends him down to the pool “to have an inspection” directly there.

Harry begins to characterize all the women at the hotel swimming pool, according to their nationalities, companions and activities while they sunbathe, but manly according to the shape, size, movement or aspect of their breasts. 

Harry carries a book, that in fact he doesn’t read, and a pair of dark sunglasses, the elements he considers useful to disguise his curiosity over topless women, who only avoid using the upper part of their bikinis by the swimming pool, and immediately cover themselves when moving to other areas of the hotel.

Harry entertains various ideas centred in nakedness, for example, what the other men there could feel, that the women would imagine their topless could arouse those other men... At the end, he gets enthusiastic and excited with the idea that Brenda, who has good boobs, should go topless before the holidays ended. The other men could look, but only he would be allowed to touch. Following this strong desire, Harry offers to buy Brenda some beautiful and expensive dress they saw in St Raphael, if she agrees to take her top off.

 

At this point of the story, there is a sudden change: in fact, there is a writer by the swimming pool, under an umbrella, and he is writing about the created couple Harry and Brenda, and about all the others there, the women in topless, the other guests, the waiter, all of them reflected in a pile of written pages.

But suddenly and unexpectedly, the local mistral wind starts to blow causing the written pages to fly all over, fall onto the water, disappear beyond the tall trees…, a true disaster for the writer, who feels violated.

Some of the presents manages to bring back a few pages to the author, and a lady sends her children to run and try and collect more papers.

The author (unknown name) doesn’t want the papers back and goes to his room to wait the return of his wife (unknown name) from St Raphael, where she has bought a nice, although not so expensive, dress.

The husband explains to his wife about the flying parts of the book, and wants to leave the hotel immediately, just in case someone could read what he has told in the lost pages.

His wife doesn’t consider it is a problem, but wants to know what the end of the story would be.

“Brenda accepts the bribe to go topless”, the author says. The wife doesn’t believe it would happen.

The writer then continues telling the end of the story: Brenda doesn’t go to bed with Harry, she disappears for two hours, gets from Antoine the bouquet-prize for the best breasts, goes to his room where they make love, and Brenda considers Antoine much better lover and much better equipped than Harry.

The author's wife says that is the worst ending.

But then the author goes on saying that Brenda has invented that story, that nothing has happened. But Harry remains disturbed thinking Brenda doesn’t appreciate his male attributes and, shaking his head, he gazes at the blue breastless margins of the pool.

Harry’s obsession about women breasts has changed to anxiety about his own body.

Finally, the writer’s wife asks him if he would like her to go topless, and he answers of course not, but he doesn’t sound really sure, or true. 

*

In this story, there are two couples and one story inside another.

Perhaps in some aspects, the writer uses Harry to express his own feelings or preferences.

Perhaps similarities or differences can be found between the four of them. 

The story gives the chance to think about what women breasts signify in different cultures or societies. From naturally exhibited, to denied or hidden. Female breasts as tender and essential for a baby, or charged with sexual attraction. 

At the beginning of topless time, many people considered it totally indecent and didn’t approve or follow the new style.

For some people, to go naked to the beach is an act of freedom and naturalism.

For others, it means discomfort and shame. 

As the psychoanalysts explain, sexuality is a big and unknown mystery for human beings. 

QUESTIONS

-What ideas do you have to stop the “binge tourism”?

-Do you consider disrespectful / offensive / sexist / anachronistic the beginning of the story?

-Do you think nakedness is sexy only according to the situation?

-“May a cat look at a king?” I mean, can a gaze / stare be bothering? Do you have to ask permission to look at someone / something?

-The writer is telling his wife the story he’s going to write, so what is the difference between a story casually told and a work of art?

 

 

VOCABULARY

Peeping Tom, squint, Geddit, Knockers, were... off, pricey, extravagant, filched, weaned, pore, snooty, tubby, lathe, belied, matey, foolscap, wont, Schadenfreude, longhand, mistral, Paperchase, hard-on

Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775-1817)

There’s no much information about Austen life, mostly because her sister Cassandra burnt or destroyed all her letters; she said Jane told so many personal things about their family and friends that it would be indecorous to know their content.

We do know she was born in the rural Hampshire (or Hants), a county in the south of England, that she was the sixth of seven children in a clergyman’s family with a big library, and that this library had a wide variety of books, even Tom Jones or Tristram Shandy, novels that in that period weren’t very appropriate for girls, and less for clergyman’s daughters.

She was educated mainly at home and only went to a boarding school for a year in Reading.

She started writing stories that she read for the family and plays that they perform at home.

When she was 26, they moved to Bath; then, five years later, they went to live in Southampton, and three years later to Chawton, also in the same county.

She never married, althought she had a relationship with a man who died young.

Her novels narrate “the rocky road to a young woman’s happy marriage”, and she said she needed only three or four families to develop their plot. So, what is there in her novels?

She published Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814) anonymously. In 1817, after her death, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published with the name of the author.

Jane Austen official web

Becoming Jane

Lost in Austen

 

MANSFIELD PARK

 

This is the story of Fanny Price, the eldest daughter of a very poor and crowded family. But she is nine years old when she is adopted by her rich uncle sir Thomas Bertram, of a well-to-do family, and her living prospects change radically.

The narrative starts telling us about the three sisters Ward. The eldest and more beautiful, although very apathetic, indolent and trivial, marries Sir Thomas Bertram and gets a comfortable position in the world.

The second sister marries a clergyman, reverend Norris, who has a benefit in Sir Thomas parish, the vicarage being very near the country house.

The youngest sister, Frances, fared worse, because she married for love to the poor navy lieutenant Mr Price, and so got estranged from her sisters; and, to make matters worse, he is been licensed because of an injury and spends most of his time at home or with his friends, but not working. The family Price, besides of being poor, is numerous. But when Mrs Price is about having her ninth child, she asks for help to her sisters. Mrs Norris, a busybody bossy childless woman, suggests that Sir Thomas could adopt a Prince’s child. So Fanny got to live with sir Thomas, her wife and their children, Tom, Edmund, Maria and Julia, all of them older than Fanny.

These children, although they have an excellent academic education, are spoiled because of the indulgence of their parents and their aunt Mrs Norris. Fanny, who is very shy and honest, feels a bit uncomfortable in this house, because Sir Thomas is so serious, Mrs Norris so bossy, Mrs Bertram and her daughters so indifferent; but in the end she gets used to the Bertram’s family ways. The only person who shows some sympathy to Fanny is Edmund, who wants to be a clergyman, and whom she would fall secretly in love with.

Some years pass without any novelty. Then, Mr Norris dies, and reverend Mr Grant and his wife comes to live in the vicarage.

Mr Bertram has to go to Antigua to manage his plantations because there have been some problems. While he’s away, a friend of Tom visits the Bertrams, full of enthusiasm about reforms in the countryside. He’s a very rich man, but not very clever. He falls in love with Maria.

More or less at the same time, there are two more visitors: Mary Crawford and Henry Crawford, Mrs Grant’s step-sister and brother. There are some flirtations between Henry and Julia, Henry and Maria (although they know she’s engaged to Mr Rushworth) and Edmund and Mary.

After some days, another guest arrives. It’s Mr Yates, with his head full of acting. He infects the group with the craving of acting and theatre. And after some debate, they decide to prepare a play to perform for all the family. But when they are rehearsing for the last time, Sir Thomas arrives from Antigua and all is cancelled.

Now the novel changes its tone. Until this moment, there has been a lot of action; now, it moves to a more psychological ground. Sir Thomas has changed: he understands and loves better Fanny, he sees he has indulged too much his daughters and his son Tom, and that he has given too much power to Mrs Norris over his family.

Maria marries Mr Rushworth, and the couple and Julia go to London.

Henry Crawford tries to break Fanny’s heart, but in the end it seems that he’s fallen in love with her. He approaches her, but she rejects all his advances, even when he helps her brother in a promotion.

Edmund is indecisive about proposing to Mary Crawford, because perhaps he thinks she wouldn’t be an ideal wife for a pastor: she is trivial and wouldn’t like to be married to a clergyman.

After her refusing Henry Crawford, Fanny is sent for a couple of months to visit her family, and Tom fells very ill, almost to the point of dying.

Henry Crawford, after visiting Fanny in Portsmouth with her family and showing one more time his love, goes to London to visit the married couple. 

But we’re not going to give away any spoiler.

So some questions can be:

Is Fanny going to stay with her family forever? Is she going to get married to Henry Crawford? Is she going to go back to Mansfield? Is Edmund going to get married to Mary Crawford? Is Tom going to recover from his illness?

Mansfield Park film, 2007

Mansfield Park film, 1999

 

Mansfield Park. Volume One. Chapter XVIII

SUMMARY

 

We are at the last chapter of the first volume, and Jane Austen is going to offer us a very dramatic ending after a very dramatic climax, so this way the readers will be anxious to follow reading the second volume.

We have a group of people wanting to do the rehearsal of three of the five acts of Lovers’s Vows has, so all of them are very excited, or very nervous.

Tom, the eldest of the Bertrams, who had given up his preference for a comedy and accepted playing a drama instead, would perform any character, doesn’t mind which, and is very impatient for the rehearsal.

Mr Rushworth, Maria’s fiancé, isn’t able to learn by heart any of his speeches, and all the time needs a prompter, and, moreover, he is very worried about his dress.

Maria is going to have a very equivocal scene with Henry Crawford, a scene that allows them to flirt even more: in the play, these two characters (mother and son) embrace each other. Mr Rushworth starts being jealous. Henry Crawford is the best actor: he can play all the characters, giving them the exact theatrical tone.

Julia, the youngest of the Bertrams, is not playing because Henry Crawford has showed his preference for Maria for her part, although he previously had been courting her. Another role has been offered to her, but she has rejected them all out of spite.

Mrs Grant, the vicar’s wife, also has a minor part.

Mr Yates, a friend of Tom, is the man who has come to the Bertram’s home with his head full of acting, and has persuaded the rest to pass the time preparing a play. He has the main character, Baron Wildenhaim.

Edmund didn’t approve the idea of acting while their father was absent faraway and perhaps in danger, but, as Tom threatened to look for actors and actresses out of the family circle, he decided to act himself. He is going to play the part of a clergyman (in the real life, he himself is going to be ordained).

Miss Crawford plays Amelia, the Baron’s daughter, a young woman who is in love with Anhalt, the clergyman her tutor. She is who declares her love to Anhalt and persuades him to marry her; and so there is another couple in a compromising situation.

Mrs Norris is very busy with the curtains and the players’ clothes.

Lady Bertram is a bit anxious to see something of the play talked about so much and which causes so much bustle.

Fanny is required by everybody: Mrs Norris needs her help with the equipment, and the players need her to prompt them, and as sparring to try their speeches. Even Mary Crawford and Edmund need her as an interlocutor, a prompter and a critic.

All is now ready for the dress rehearsal of the first three acts, and all are very impatient, but, at the last moment, Mr Grant feels ill, and Mrs Grant has to stay at the parsonage to take care of him, and so she won’t be able to act.

In the face of this problem, they entreat Fanny —the only person who has always objected to the whole acting because she thinks inappropriate being Sir Thomas away, being some very embarrassing scenes, and being, although she doesn’t want to admit, jealous of Mary Crawford— to take the part of Mrs Grant, or at least to read it. Fanny refuses because she feels it isn’t right, but then the rest label her egoist, and stubborn; even Edmund begs her.

In the end, she yields, but, just before they start, Julia makes an astonishing announcement.

QUESTIONS

Why theatre can be viewed as something immoral, or at least as something not very appropriate in some circumstances?
What qualities must you have to be a good actor?
Henry Crawford is a very good actor. Why can this talent can be a flaw in his character, according to Fanny’s point of view?
Mr Rushworth says that Henry Crawford can’t be a good actor because is too short. How do cinema and art impose us the shape of our appearances?
Sir Thomas and Mrs Norris were thinking about the possibility that Tom, or Edmund, fall in love with her cousin Fanny. Marriage between relatives used to want permission from the religious authorities, and, in most of cultures, is a taboo. Do you think this proscription it’s something biological, or cultural?
Edmund and Mary have very different points of view about religion. According to you: can a marriage between two people of so different opinions work?
In which ways do you think plays are better than films? And films better than plays?
Why is it important (or not) for an adopted child to know their biological parents?

VOCABULARY

fret, trifling, rant, prompter, to her eye, tameness, was at little pains, deferred, catchword, forwarder, seams, trice, festoons, entreat, grate, obliged, in the aggregate, surmise, stand the brunt, had little credit with, yield

Chapter XVIII (Project Gutenberg)

Lovers' Vows