Something Childish but very Natural, by Katherine Mansfield

SUMMARY

This is a love story between Henry (17) and Edna (16). They are very young, so we have to suppose very inexperienced about love, but also very pure and innocent.

Henry is a clerk in an architect office, and he thinks he’s great into books, although he hasn’t read many, and he doesn’t have many. Edna is a student in a training college; she wants to be a secretary.

One day, at Charing Cross station, Henry almost misses his train because, as it has a stop of ten minutes, leaving his hat and a portfolio in his carriage, he gets off to look at the books in the station bookstall and, when he is reading a poem from a book, he hears the station master announcing that the train is leaving, and Henry has to hurry up. He runs to the nearest carriage and dashes into it. But it’s not his, and he feels embarrassed because there is another passenger, a girl, and he has not his hat on. He notices the girl’s hair and falls in love with it. In the end, he gathers courage to say something, and they begin a bit of conversation. And when Edna points to the mark his hat has left on his forehead, he feels he’s definitely in love with her. He asks her to meet again, and she tells him that she takes the same train every day.

So they meet again, and they start a kind of love affair, they tell each other about their jobs, their families… He asks her to see her hair, and reluctantly she takes off her hat, but she doesn’t allow him to touch it.

And during their courtship, he can’t even go near her and, much less, kiss her. However, Henry isn’t angry with her, he is patient and understanding and can wait. Edna knows that he wants some more closeness and understands his desires, but, at the moment, she can’t bear being touched. She prefers keeping some distance between them, as if they were still children, and not already teenagers. But they both dream being together, living together, and they imagine having a house and behaving like husband and wife.

But after a time, Henry is a little tired of waiting for a kiss or a caress, he hungers for physical contact. One day, in an excursion, when they stop to have tea, the landlady offers them a cottage to rent. They go and see it, and they like it very much. They can figure it could be their home. Eventually, Edna lets him hold her, and tells him she has wanted all day to tell him that he could kiss her. They decide to rent the house.

But when Henry waits for Edna the day they have to begin to inhabit the cottage, she doesn’t come. Instead of her, there comes a little girl with a telegram for Henry. We don’t know what is there in the message, neither whose it is from, although we can imagine. He opens it, reads it, and the world around him gets wrapped in darkness.

 

QUESTIONS

-Why do you think the girl doesn’t want any physical contact?

-In your opinion, a romantic mood, is it only possible when you are young?

-Do you think love without sex is going to work? Or is this idea sexist?

-What can be the meaning of the Swiss cow-bell, the silver shoe and the fish hanging of Edna’s bangle?

-Why is hair so powerful a sexual symbol, according to your view?

-“Have you ever been in love before?” is a very unusual declaration of love. Do you know any other singular one? E.g., this one.

-Some people say love is a kind of illness that only lasts three years. What is your opinion?

-Can children be in love, or is love something you only find in teenagers and adults?

-When they are at the tea house in the country, and the woman offers to rent a cottage, do you think Henry has planned it previously? (remember he had been there often)

-And when the woman asked if they were brother and sister, why does Henry answer yes?

-When they are in the cottage, do they really kiss? Why do you think so?

-What does the telegram say? What is Henry going to do now?

 

VOCABULARY

soot, spangle, pap, clutched, marigold, wreath, utter, curb, training college, nests, loathsome, winding up, raked out, caretakers, heather, jonquils, Bags I

 

Something Childish, but very Natural, poem

Film (from minute 29:48)

AUDIOBOOK

ANALYSIS

VIDEO PRESENTATION

A Dill Pickle, by Katherine Mansfield

SUMMARY, by Elisa Sola Ramos

 A man and a woman meet after six years apart. The story is a conversation between them in a café, through which we know details of their relationship and their personality.

During the conversation, it’s revealed that Vera split up by letter, and he was very touched. We also know that their personalities are very different, quite opposite: fantasy is dominating in Vera’s mind, and he seems to be very practical and even stingy. The reader is behind Vera’s mind: we know her feelings, her name (Vera), but we don’t know the inner feelings of the man, who doesn’t have a name. He’s a flat character or an archetype: a white upper-class man, good-looking (in Vera’s words: “far better good-looking than he had been [in the past]”), with a lot of money that allows him to travel... He appears as a self-confident character: “he had the air of a man who has found his place in life”.

On the contrary, Vera has not been able to travel because she is poor (she had to sell her piano), she’s completely alone, and she seems to be very unstable.

One thing that highlights the differences between them is that their memories about the same fact don’t match: he remembers one afternoon in a Chinese pagoda as a wonderful day, and she remembers the maniac behaviour of him “infuriated out of proportion about the wasps”. In another point of the story, when he recollects the night when he brought a little Christmas tree, he remembers how he could speak about his childhood, and she remembers how stingy he had been with a pot of caviare, which had cost seven and sixpence, and he compared eating caviare with eating money. Not to mention that he couldn’t remember his dog’s name, and she did.

In spite of all of that, she is willing to give up herself, to renounce her vision of the facts (“his [vision] was the truer”) in order to submit to a man, perhaps to be able to eat, perhaps for survival, perhaps for emotional submission (another kind of sexist violence), who knows!

There are many metaphors that help the author to create an atmosphere of sexual desire between the two former lovers or, at least, of Vera’s sexual desire for him.

The first one is the orange. The image of him peeling an orange with “his special way”, the smell and the colour, gives the image that Vera wants to be “eaten” by him.

The second symbol is the veil and the collar. In the beginning of the story, she “raised her veil and unbuttoned her high fur collar” as a sign of opening herself, emotionally or sexually, like a bride. The same image, but reversed, appears at the end of the story: when she decides to leave, “she had unbuttoned her collar again and drawn down her veil”. Thus, the author takes up the powerful image of the bride to close symbolically their relationship.

Another symbol is the glove. She explains that “she was that glove that he held in his fingers”.

The beast she has inside her is another image, a beast which was “hungry” and “pricked up its ears and began to purr...”. It’s like an inner force that contrasts with the self-possession of a woman of her class and time.

The last erotic symbol is the dill pickle, which is a trigger for Vera’s romantic imagination. She completes the explanation about the scene in the Volga with her own imagination: “She sucked in her cheeks; the dill pickle was terribly sour...” It’s a comic effect: juxtaposing the romantic scene in an exotic frame with this prosaic gift and her imagination.

Throughout the conversation, there are many details that describe a very asymmetrical relationship between the couple. She remembers how he used to interrupt her in the middle of what she was saying. (It has been studied that women are much more interrupted than men in large company meetings, and this trait is a sign of sexist behaviour.) Then, after silencing her, he says that he likes her voice -the sound-, but not the content of what she’s saying. It’s an irony. He’s playing with her. All the time, he flirts with her (he highlights the things that unit them) in order to hook her, because he knows her dreamy and romantic character. He’s getting his revenge.

The two characters are completely different. They live in different worlds. The man is Vera’s romantic opponent, and, in the end, we can have doubts as to his being a rich man because he doesn’t want to pay the small cream bill. He’s a liar, or he’s a stingy man.

On the other side, Vera doesn’t have either a very good position, because she is ready to give up herself in order to have a husband. Both characters aren’t very well treated by the author.

Some people say that A Dill Pickle is a feminist story by Katherine Mansfield, but I’m not sure about that. Despite the fact that the figure of the man is completely negative, ridiculous, maniac and cruel, the image of the woman is not better: shallow, unstable and unclear.

QUESTIONS

-What can be his special way to peel an orange? Do you know a singular case of doing something?

-To your view, what does the orange symbolize?

-Do you like being interrupted? What do you do when someone interrupts you?

-What do you know about Kew Gardens?

-What can you tell us about the Black Sea?

-Why did she know he had been mocking?

-What is the meaning of the dill pickle in the story?

-Why do you think the man has no name?

-According to you, why does she go away so suddenly?

 

VOCABULARY

daffodils, muff, meant to, loathe, sniggering, purr, ringers 

 

AUDIOBOOK

ANALYSIS

REVIEW

SYNOPSIS

SUMMARY

Mr and Mrs Dove, by Katherine Mansfield

SUMMARY, by Alícia Usart

 

England is where the plot of this story takes place. Reggie has to return to Rhodesia, an English colony, the next day. He’s the only son of a widowed woman, with a tough character. His uncle, at his death, left him a fruit farm there, from which he makes between 500 and 600 pounds annually. He is in love, crazy and desperately in love, with Anne, a girl from the neighbourhood. His love is of the kind we see in literature, a romantic love. He is only able to see the positive aspects of her. He believes that he has small chances to marry her, but anyway, he is determined to find out if she cares for him in the same way he does for her.

He set out for Anna’s house, and nothing could stop him, not even his mother. He found himself in the drawing room and, before the bell had stopped ringing, Anna entered the room and announced to him that her parents were out. At that time, he was only capable of stating that he would depart tomorrow.

Suddenly Anne burst into laughter, and that was not the first time it happened; she apologized, but it was an uncomfortable situation for both. Anne offered him a cigarette and took one for herself, and the conversation turned to his upcoming departure.

At the same time, the doves outside were cooing. Anne moved away from him and allowed him to enter the side veranda because she didn’t want to hear what he was trying to tell her. They were observing the doves’ behaviour, and it seemed to Anne that it was similar to their behaviour; but Reggie was only concentrating on what he was willing to say, and finally did: “Anne, do you think you could ever care for me?” He was released, but Anne replied that she could not. Anyway, he didn’t give up, trying to comprehend the reason why she was laughing at him.

In reality, Anne loved him and appreciated him; however, she believed that what she was feeling wasn’t true love: she thought true love was different, like the way she read in books.

 

PERSONAL OPINION

Their relationship would be as the doves’, one running forward and the other following, one was Mr Dove and the other Mrs Dove. Mrs Dove looking at Mr Dove and laughing, and he, keeping following her and bowing and bowing…, but isn’t the dove’s love a romantic kind of love? They are the symbol of love, they are faithful for life, the male takes long time to choose his partner, he courts her at length, and their bond ends only with the end of the two.

QUESTIONS

-What do you know about the mating habits of the doves?

-What can you tell us about Rhodesia in that time?

-According to your view, until what extent the family composition influences somebody’s personality? I mean: being the only child, the position among siblings, being the only boy or the only girl, single-parent families, etc.

-Do you think is it possible to love someone whom you laugh at?

-Reginald’s mother has two dogs and Anne shows Reginald two doves: can you find a parallelism between these two couples?

-What is Anne like? Is she a bad person because she makes a fool of Reginald?

-In your opinion, what is going to happen after Reggie comes back to Anne at the end of the story?

 

 

VOCABULARY

a ghost of / an earthly, preposterous, short of, screwed him up to it, jammed, out of the running, steep, jar, grit, top-hole, hollyhocks, pealing, bucked him up, hat-hunting, wan, french window, huskily, cut off

AUDIOBOOK

SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS

ANALYSIS

A FEMINIST ANALYSIS

The Lady with the Dog, by Anton Chekhov

 

Anton Chekhov at the Wikipedia

The Lady with the Dog at the Wikipedia

Dark Eyes, film adaptation

Dark Eyes, link to see it

Gurov and Anna, new adaptation

The Lady with the Dog, summary and analysis 

The Lady with the Dog audiobook

BIOGRAPHY

Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a city on the Sea of Azov, near the mouth of the river Don, and died in Badenweiler, a spa resort in south Germany, when he was 44 years old.
In 1861, Tsar Alexander II, a reformer, issued the emancipation of the serfs and in 1881 died because of a terrorist attack. Chekhov lived in a convulsed period, but he stayed apart of the political fights.
Chekhov’s grandfather was a serf who bought his freedom. His father had a grocery, but the business went bad and he had to flee to Moscow. He was a drunkard and abused his family. But Chekhov said once he got his talent from his father and his soul from his mother; he said she was an excellent storyteller.
He had two older brothers who were studying at the University of Moscow, and had to remain three years more in Taganrog finishing his studies and selling the house. He earned money doing private lessons, writing stories for the newspapers and catching and selling singing birds. When he was 19 he went to Moscow to study Medicine.
He had to work for his family because his brothers and his father had a lot of problems with their jobs and with alcohol.
Chekhov went on publishing sketches for Alexey Suvorin, who paid much more than his previous publishers and gave him more space in the magazines or newspapers.
He had a change in his literary prospects when Dmitri Grigorovich (a very famous author in his time) celebrated his writings. So he started to consider himself a writer more than a doctor, although he went on practising medicine all his life.
At 24, he started to notice the first symptoms of tuberculosis, but he always hoped for the best.
At 27, he was stressed by overwork and went on a journey trying to get some rest. This trip was the origin of his famous story The Steppe.
When he was 30, he decided to go on a long journey to visit the island of Sakhalin, on the Pacific coast, north of Japan. The island served as a prison, and he wanted to report the situation of the prisoners there. So he got depressed.
Then he went to live in Melikhovo, a place forty miles south of Moscow, in order to improve his health and to have more tranquillity to do his writings. Here he wrote his plays. Now they are splendid pieces of theatre, but in his moment he was very disappointed with the public reception, even as Stanislavsky (the famous theatre theorist) wanted to play them.
He got worse of his TB and went to live in Yalta, a touristic and spa resort in the Black Sea, where he bought a big house, the White Dacha.
At 41, he got married to Olga Knipper, a well-known actress that performed in his plays.
In Yalta, he wrote The Lady with the Dog.
He died in Badenweiler in 1904 after drinking champagne. His body was transported for the funeral in Moscow on a railway-car... meant for oysters, and that caused indignation among the people who loved him. And when the convoy got to Moscow, there was a band playing music, and, at first, they believed that was for Chekhov, but it wasn’t, it was music for a funeral of a general, so another disappointment. As you can imagine, Chekhov's death has been fictionalized a lot of times: his was a glamorous end with a farcical colophon.
 
When talking about narrative techniques, there’s a term often mentioned: Chekhov’s gun. This alludes to a necessary principle of all short stories: you have to remove all superfluous things in a story (or in a play): “If there’s a gun hanging from a nail on the wall in the first chapter, then this gun must absolutely be fired in the second chapter.”
A very important story by Chekhov is The Steppe, because, from the point of view of literature, it is his most accomplished story, for it contains all the poetical elements he developed in his narrative, although the most known is the romantic The Lady with the Dog.
His plays were also revolutionary, because they weren’t “plot” plays, but “mood” plays, so a lot of people of his time didn’t like them because “nothing” happened in the story.
The play The Three Sisters has inspired films as Interiors, by Woody Allen.

 The Lady with the Dog

This is the story of a romance between a womanizer and a younger lady married to a dull husband, in a spa resort in Yalta. The woman felt that this was only adultery and dishonourable, and he at first thought that this affair would be the same as the others, something temporary. But it happened the other way round; they discovered what love really was and they decided to go on with their relationship, so he forgot all other women, and she mastered (somehow) her guilty feelings. This is very different from Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina or Effi Briest, where the affair ends badly for the woman. In Chekhov there is hope for them both.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters:
Dmitri Gurov
Gurov’s wife
Anna Sergeyevna
Anna’s husband
What do you think is the function of the Pomeranian dog in the story? Would the story be possible without this dog? What kind of dog is a Pomeranian dog?
What can you say about:
Yalta
Oreanda
the Black Sea
How did Gurov classify women?
What were her/his feelings after making love? What is the meaning of the water-melon?
Why “Gurov got bored already, listening to her”?
What were their feelings after visiting Oreanda?
When she went away, there “was already a scent of autumn”. Why?
“The season brings back the days of one’s youth”. Personal question: do you think our memories are always false memories?
Why did winter, evening stillness, storms, make Gurov think about Anna?
He decided to confide his love to someone: Why? In the short story The Kiss something similar happens. Why is the reason for this need?
What decided him to go to S***?
Why did he want to go away from the “fence adorned with nails” outside Anna’s house?
What do you know about The Geisha?
Personal question: do you think all that is interesting in us rests on secrecy?
Describe the meetings of the two lovers in Moscow.
Do you think theirs would be an eternal love?
“Why did she love him so much”?

VOCABULARY

amiss, staid, in the long run, eager, gait, made up, coaxing, hue, groyne, scales, flunkey, grasshopper, lofty, taunt, fix, stoop, thaw, kernel