The Fall of the Idol, by Richmal Crompton

 

Richmal Crompton at the Wikipedia

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RICHMAL CROMPTON, by Josep Guiteres

BIOGRAPHY

She was born in Bury, Lancashire in 1890, and died in 1969. She was an English writer, specialized in children’s books and horror stories.

She was the second child of Edward John Sewell, a protestant pastor and parochial school teacher, and his wife Clara; her older brother John Battersby was also a writer under the pseudonym John Lambourne.

Richmal Crompton attended St Elphin’s school and won a scholarship to classical studies at Royal Holloway College London, where she graduated Bachelor of Arts, and, in 1914, returned to teach classical authors at St. Elphin’s until 1917. Then, when she was 27 years old, went to Bromley High School in South London, teaching the same subject until 1923. Having contracted polio, she lost the use of her right leg. In 1923 and from then on, she spent her free time to write.

In 1924, she created her famous character William Brown, the protagonist of thirty-eight books of children’s stories in the naughty William saga that she wrote until her death.

She is also the author of a collection of stories about ghosts, the horror novel Dread Dwelling, in 1926, and Bruma, in 1928. As a writer of horror stories, she is eminent.

She never married and had no children; she was an aunt and a great-aunt.

 

THE FALL OF THE IDOL

The Fall of the Idol corresponds to chapter 4 of Just William with her famous eleven-years-old character William Brown.

In this chapter the writer tells us the adventures of William narrating his falling in love with his teacher, Miss Drew.

William, as a good student, sat in the back row. Being in love, he changed his seat to one in the front row. While the teacher explains the lesson, William has his fantasies with the teacher, but she constantly asks him questions about what she explains, and so he is forced to study.

Every day the teacher arrived at class, she used to find some small detail on the table of some admirer, but that morning the table and the chair were full of greenhouse flowers, evidently left by the lover. When William got home, he found his sister and two policemen who were looking for the flower thief.

The next day, Miss Drew was talking to another teacher. William, who was nearby, understood that Miss Drew liked lilacs; so, William got lilacs by stealing them from the window of a house with the subsequent uproar of the owner.

When Miss Drew entered the classroom, she said: “William, I hate lilacs”. Disappointed, his love vanished, and, as a good student, he sat again in the background.

My opinion: I liked this story because it is simple, short, entertaining and written with the fabulous typical English humour.

QUESTIONS 

Talk about your school days: were they happy or boring?

What is your opinion of this saying: “Teach anything at school and, funny it may be, at once it becomes boring”? (Remember the example of sexual education in the film by Monty Phyton “The Meaning of Life”.)

William caught a lizard and kept it in his pocket during the class. Do you have an anecdote to explain about your school days?

What happened to William’s lizard?

Who is the “malicious blind god”?

William starts giving presents to his teacher. What is your opinion about giving presents to your teacher… or to anybody?

What things you don’t do by halves? Do you always finish the book you are reading or the film you are watching?

Could William be married by the Pope? Why?

What do you think of helping your children with their homework?

“He hugged his chains”: what does it mean? Can you give more examples?

What do you imagine William wanted to do with the pipe in the garden?

Can you describe a “guelder rose” and a syringe”?

Explain the adventure of the syringe.

What is the meaning of “the idol has feet of clay”?

What do you think William felt like at the end: angry, happy, or disappointed?

 

VOCABULARY

figures, mug, 3 ½ d, mouth organ, putty, obliging, blood-curdling, outshine, hothouse, riot, soulfully, nonplussed, hubbub, conservatory, week’s mending, babbling, leading article, beaming, ole, ornery, rent, jarred, literal

My First Fee, by Isaac Babel

Isaac Babel at the Wikipedia

Reading Isaac Babel

Life and stories

ISAAC Babel, by Glòria Torner

Isaac Babel is the first major Russian Jewish writer of the first part of 20^th century. He was a master of the short story, and also a playwright, a journalist and did reports and film scripts. His fame is based on his stories about the Jews in Odessa.

The author has two leitmotivs in his life:

If the world could write by itself, it would be like Tolstoy.”

“I felt that it was pointless to write worse than Tolstoy.”

BIOGRAPHY

Isaac Babel was born in the Jewish ghetto of Odessa, Ukraine, in 1894.

Babel’s childhood was relatively comfortable, though he witnessed pogroms in Southern Russia in 1905. However, his family was untouched. His father was a successful businessman who installed his family in one of the best streets in Odessa.

In his teens, Babel wanted to get into the preparatory class at the Nicholas I Odessa Commercial School, but he couldn’t. As a result, he was schooled at home by private tutors. Between 1905 and 1911, he studied the Talmud, violin, German, French, besides of Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish.

He began writing short stories at the age of fifteen in imitation of Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert. His first stories were written in French. He entered the Kyiv Institute of Finances and Business Studies, and he graduated in 1915.  

In 1916, he moved to St. Petersburg where he met Maxim Gorky, his literary hero, who published some of Babel’s stories in his literary magazine Letopis. In 1917, he worked for a short time as a translator for the Cheka and as a reporter for Gorky’s newspaper Novaya Zhizin.

During the Russian Civil War, he returned to Odessa where he was an editor for a small publishing house, and, after the Civil War, he became a reporter for The Dawn of the Orient, a Russian newspaper published in Tbilisi. He married Yevgenia Borisovna Gronfein in 1919; their union produced a daughter, but his marriage was broken by the husband’s infidelities.

In 1923, he published The Tales of Odessa, a collection of short stories set in the Odessan ghetto. The stories describe the life of Jewish gangsters before and after the October Revolution.  He moved to Moscow and, in 1926, he published The Red Cavalry, thirty-four short stories about the brutal realities of war with horrific violence. During these years, a number of Babel’s family emigrated to Paris, including his mother, sister and, finally, his wife. In 1928, he wrote his first play, Sunset. His next play, Marya, described political corruption, prosecution of the innocent and black market in the Soviet society. This play was intended to be performed in 1935, but was cancelled and was not performed in Russia until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

All the short stories of Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories, filled only two small volumes and were published in 2002.

Babel was arrested by the N.K.V.D., a precursor of the K.G.B. in May 1939 at his cottage in Peredelkino, a writer’s colony. The secret police confiscated nine folders from the dacha and fifteen from his Moscow’s apartment. Under interrogation and probable torture at Lubyanka, Babel confessed a long association with Trotskyists and an engagement in anti-Soviet activity, including being recruited into a spy network. He was held in Buturka Prison, and, on January 27, 1940, he was shot on Stalin’s orders for espionage. Babel’s last words were “I’m innocent, I have never been a spy... I’m asking only for one thing, let me finish my work.”

MY FIRST FEE

This story was written in the 1920s, and it’s apparently an expansion of an earlier piece called Answer to an Inquiry. Both are variants of the same story: an adolescent boy tells a forlorn, indecent and wholly imaginary tale about himself to a tender-hearted prostitute. It went unpublished during Babel’s lifetime for sexual prudery, not appearing in print until the early 60s, when it was published in New York, first in Russian, then in an English translation.

The story begins with a long description in first person. The springtime has arrived in the town, Tiflis (Tbilisi), where the narrator (perhaps an alter ego of the author), a twenty-years-old young man, is living. He is working as a proof-reader for the printing press of the Caucasus Military.

He describes the room that he has rented from a Georgian couple and the sensual atmosphere of their neighbours. But the most important is that the narrator, who feels lonely, decides to look for love, runs out of the house and walks along the Kura River at night. Tortured by lust, he decides to solicit a prostitute, called Vera, whom he is infatuated with.

Now the story goes on, sometimes in direct dialogue in third person between the writer and the prostitute, and also with narrative and descriptive writing. Before Vera sleeps with him, she asks him for the money he has, and the writer gives her ten rubbles. They decide to go to Borzhom, and he has to accompany her as she makes her rounds and spends his money. Later, they go up to Vera’s room. There, in the prostitute’s bed, Vera prepares to get laid with the narrator, and he tells her that he has never been with a woman. Then he invents a tale.

This second story is about a boy living with an older Armenian man called Stepan Ivanovich, in Baku for four years when he was fifteen years old. Stepan Ivanovich’s friends ruined him because he gave them bronze promissory notes, and their friends cashed them and left promissory notes unbacked. Then the writer left him and decided to live with a rich church warden. He finishes the story arriving at a convincing ending with the death of his old man and his own arrival in Tbilisi now with twenty rubbles.

Returning to the first story, he spends the rest of the night making love with the thirty years old prostitute Vera, who tutors the young man in the erotic arts. Vera is moved by the other story and come to consider the narrator as a “sister” prostitute rather than a man. In the next morning, Vera insists on returning the narrator’s money. From his perspective, this money is the first fee he has earned for writing a story. Vera is his “first reader.”

At the end of the story, the author explains the relation and the meaning between the story and the title.

 

Themes

There are two stories and two different themes explained together in the story, one inside the other one, as the Russian doll called matryoshka.

1.    Babel walks up through the steps of crafting a plot. The writer who wants to be known telling a frankly sexual fiction for sex to a prostitute, perhaps a fictitious tale about his life.

2.  The loneliness of a man looking for love and sex. He “experienced a love you will never experience.” To be a writer, does one need to look for love?

Conclusion

Sometimes difficult to understand his prose, with long descriptions with sexual allusions just to explain a strange, sharp and unrealistic story. My First Fee it’s a story about how to write a story.

QUESTIONS

Tell us about the characters

The narrator

Vera

Stepan Ivanovich

Fedosya Mavrikevna

Where is Tiflis? What do you know about its country (language, religion, history…)

The narrator feels the spring in his skin. How do you feel the spring? What qualities of spring affect you the most?

What do you know about Tolstoy?

“I was a dreamer and didn’t have the knack for the thoughtless art of happiness”. That is, a dreamer cannot be happy: do you agree? Why?

Why did the narrator ask Vera is she was going to Palestine?

What is Borzhom (Borjomi)?

What information do you have about Golovin and the boyars?

“A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life”. What is your opinion?

What do you think Vera’s preparations to get laid with the narrator were for?

What does the image “like a toad on a stone” suggest?

Where is Kherson? And Baku?

Why does he say he’s a bitch, a whore?

What is the relation between the title and the story?

 

VOCABULARY

murky, part, whisking, shrews, babbling, hanks, sapping, sultriness, burrowing, dauntless, gruelling, raiment, apish, tenner, wilted, hightail, dough, banged, lackluster, potbellied, dogged, throes, drab, took after, promissory note, auctioned, squeezed, taproom, quaked, cavorting, braying

A Bit of Singing and Dancing, by Susan Hill

Susan Hill at the Wikipedia

Susan Hill at the British Council

Susan Hill's website

A Bit of Singing and Dancing, analysis

A Bit of Singing and Dancing, summary

The Woman in Black, film

BIOGRAPHY

She was born in 1942 in Scarborough, a tourist resort on the East coast in the North of England, where we have to suppose our story is situated. When she was sixteen, her family moved to Coventry, where her father worked in a car factory.

He got a degree of English at the King's College in London.

She got married; her husband died, and she got married again, and they went to live in Stratford-upon-Avon. She had two daughters. Later, she left him and went to live with a Barbara Machin.

She founded her own publishing company.

She wrote mainly ghost stories, as The Woman in Black, (adapted as a play and still on the stage in London) and crime novels, but also stories like the one we’re reading, or, for example, a novel set in the WWI, Strange Meeting, or Mrs de Winter (1999), a sequel to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. She explores the childhood cruelty in the short story The Badness Within Him, and in the novel The King of the Castle (it won the Somerset Maughan Award). She has edited several anthologies of short stories, including two volumes of The Penguin Book of Modern Women's Short Stories.

Hill's prose flirts at times with a romantic image of an aristocratic England and a sentimental vision of the country before (or during) the war and imperial decline.

SUMMARY

Esme is a 5o year old woman who, as an only daughter, has had to take care during eleven years of her bedridden mother. Now her mother is dead, and a free future, open to all sort of possibilities, lays open in front of her. Nevertheless, her mother’s voice recurrently goes on admonishing her inside her head. But one day, a curious stranger comes to her door looking for a room to rent, although she had not even though about it. Of a sudden, she decides to rent him her mother’s room. Are they going to get on well? Would he be a trustworthy guest?

QUESTIONS

Do a bit of research and tell us what kind of TV programmes were “Morecombe and Wise” and “Black and White minstrels”. And who was Doctor Crippen (10, 11)?

What TV programmes used to see the old generation. And the new? Do young people watch TV?

How long are people in mourning? What do people do to show they are mourning (e.g. clothes)?

“An argument sharpen the mind”. What does this saying imply? Who were the sophists?

Talking about the will: what is your opinion about the government’s taxes on properties given in a will?

We usually see British or American funerals in movies. What are the differences between these and the funerals we celebrate here?

“You will feel the real shock later.” What do you think is the reason for this?

Esme tends to do the same things her mother did, although she hated these things in  her mother. Did you find yourself in a similar situation, and if you did, what do you think it’s the cause?

Why “Park Close could be a “comfortable” address?

In the story, there is a blatant ellipsis: the moment before Mr Curry holds a pickle with his fork. Can you explain what happened in this ellipsis?

“To stay young, you have to be constantly surprised.” How can one be constantly surprised?

Where is Mr Curry from? How do you know?

What is the meaning of “sound of wind and limb”?

“I am the kind of person who needs to give service.” Is an altruist person better than an egoist one? Don’t they do what they do for their own pleasure? What do you think about this?

“One is never old to learn, Mr Curry” What can people learn when they are old?

The story has an ending, but I think it could go on. Can you imagine a new ending?

VOCABULARY

shingle, banked-up, pipes, gale, sleet, pinched, scones, indulge, news items, bedridden, gulls, outing, will, extravagance, giddy, twilight, crawling, crooners, jabbed, runner, hoard, ruthlessly, cuff links, spruce, darn, rash, untapped, bulky, trimmed, loft, thatch, sinewy, bereaved, seances, curtailed, gave... away, bring-and-busy sales, coffee morning, dearth, carnation, dapper, boater, charabancs, putting green, despise

Paste, by Henry James

Henry James at the Wikipedia

Paste at the Wikipedia

The Necklace, by Guy de Maupassant

La parure, film (in French)

Paste: audio presentation and audiobook

Henry James, by Carme Sanz

BIOGRAPHY

Henry James has been called the first of the great psychological realists in our time. Honoured as one of the greatest artists of the novel, he is also regarded as one of America's most influential critics and literary theorists. During the fifty years of his literary career, which spanned the period from the end of the American Civil War to the beginning of World War I, James produced a body of tales and novels that fills thirty-six volumes and an almost equal number of volumes of non-fiction prose, including travel books, autobiography, books of criticism, letters, and literary notebooks.
Henry James was born in New York City on April 15, 1843, into an affluent and socially prominent family. His father, Henry James, Sr., moved among a wide circle of intellectual leaders of the time and exposed his children to the cultural advantages of New England and, more especially, Europe; before he reached his eighteenth birthday, the younger James had lived abroad for extended periods on three separate occasions.
In 1861, he suffered an "obscure hurt", an injury to his spine that kept James from service in the Civil War; for reasons perhaps related to this injury, James never married. At the age of thirty-three, he took up residence in Europe, living first for a year in Paris and then permanently in England. He became a British subject in 1915, a year before his death.
In 1869, at the age of twenty-six, he travelled for the second time to Europe, entered the mainstream of London intellectual life, and formed friendships with leading literary figures of the time. He returned to America in 1870, went abroad again in 1872 for two more years, spent the winter of 1874-75 in New York, and finally left America in 1875, this time for good. In Europe, James could best deal with his dominant theme: the illumination of the present by "the sense of the past," the American present illuminated by the sense of the European past.
Among his most famous books we can find: The Europeans, Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady or The Bostonians.

PASTE

After the death of her aunt, the protagonist Charlotte and her cousin, her aunt’s stepson Arthur Prime, find a tin of imitation jewellery which includes a string of pearls. Charlotte is immediately fascinated with the pearls, and wonders if they could be a gift from when her aunt was an actress. Arthur disputes this and feels insulted at the thought of some gentleman other than his father giving his stepmother such a gift. Charlotte quickly apologizes and agrees that the pearls could be nothing more than paste. With Arthur’s enthusiastic approval, she keeps the jewellery in memory of her aunt.

When Charlotte returns to her governess job, her friend, Mrs. Guy, asks her if she has anything to add colour to her dress for an upcoming party. When Charlotte shows Mrs Guy the jewellery, she too becomes fascinated with the string of pearls, insisting that they are genuine. Mrs Guy wears the string to the party; and when Charlotte finds out that everyone believed that they were real, she insists that they must be returned to her cousin. Mrs Guy claims that it was Arthur's foolishness to have given away the necklace, and that Charlotte should feel no guilt in keeping it.

However, Charlotte decides to return the pearls to her cousin, who still refuses to consider the pearls real. A month later, Mrs Guy shows her a wonderful string of pearls, telling Charlotte that they are the same ones that Charlotte had inherited from her aunt. Charlotte is surprised because Arthur claimed he had shattered them, when in fact he had sold them to the store where Mrs Guy bought them.

QUESTIONS

What is the meaning of the title?

Talk about the characters:

Arthur Prime

His father (Mr Prime)

His stepmother (Mrs Prime, née Miss Bradshaw)

Charlotte

Mrs Guy

Who can be “Mrs Jarvey”? 

What’s Ivanhoe, and who was Rowena?

The necklace comes alive when Mrs Guy wears it. Do you think people can give life to things? What is your opinion of “influencers”?

The necklace was “a present from an admirer capable of going such lengths”. What is the meaning of this sentence? What does it imply?

Can you imagine how Mrs Prime got the necklace? Did she have an affair?

What do you know about the Victorian morals / puritanism?

Mrs Guy without the necklace “looked naked and plain”. To what extent do you think the way we dress make us plainer or more attractive?

According to Mrs Guy, those peals were “things of love”, “they had the white glow of it”. How can things get a soul for you / for everybody?

What is the end of the story: Mrs Guy bought the necklace in Bond Street, or she got it from Arthur? Why? How?

VOCABULARY

shrewd, brood, snubbed, shimmered, pit, hortatory, twaddle, gewgaws,
penwiper, pinchbeck, odds and ends, swelled, flaxen, filberts, pert, interment,
counted on to spice, wire, tableaux vivants, muster, garish, trappings, "rum",
give her away, revels, screw down, sickly

A Horse and Two Goats, by R. K. Narayan

R. K. Narayan at the Wikipedia

A Horse and Two Goats at enciclopedia.com

A Horse and two Goats, cartoon

 

R. K. NARAYAN, by Begoña Devis

BIOGRAPHY

R. K. Narayan was an Indian writer born on October 10th, 1906 in Madras (now Chennai), British India, into a Hindu family. He was one of eight children, six sons and two daughters. His father was a school headmaster, and Narayan did some of his studies at his father’s school. As his father’s job entailed frequent transfers, Narayan spent part of childhood under the care of his maternal grandmother, Pavarti. During this time, his best friends were a peacock and a mischievous monkey.
When he was twelve years old, Narayan participated in a pro-independence march, for which he was reprimanded by his uncle, as the family was apolitical and considered all governments wicked.
Narayan moved to Mysore when his father was transferred to the Maharajas’s College High School. The well-stocked library at the school, and his father’s own, fed his reading habit, and he started writing as well. After completing high school, Narayan failed the university entrance examination and spent a year at home reading and writing.
After a brief job as a school teacher, Narayan realized that the only career for him was in writing, and he decided to stay at home and write novels.
While vacationing at his sister’s house in Coimbatore, in 1933, Narayan met and fell in love with Rajam, a 15-year-old girl who lived nearby, and married her. After that, Narayan became a reporter for a Madras paper called The Justice, dedicated to the rights of non-Brahmins. The job brought him in contact with a variety of people.
Narayan sent the manuscript of Swami and Friend (his first novel) to a friend in Oxford, and the friend showed it to Graham Green, who recommended the book to his publisher, and it was finally published in 1935.
R. K. Narayan developed his literary career in the English language and is considered one of the most important Indian storytellers of the 20th century.
Graham Greene considered himself a friend for life and decreed success in the Anglo-Saxon world, where Narayan was for a long time, before Salman Rushdie, perhaps the best-known storyteller of Indian origin.
He wrote about situations in a provincial society in which shopkeepers, beggars, businessmen and a greedy petty bourgeoisie live bustling side by side with the old and static world of the peasants and saints. His novels are set in the imaginary city of Malgudi, especially in the streets and popular settings, a microcosm of South India that still reflects the values and customs of the rural and archaic Indian world, but at the same time also the encounter/disagreement with the modernization that advances inexorably.
However, what stands out in Narayan is his use of irony, the acute observation of the changes that are taking place, rather than social or political denunciation. It also highlights how his characters and their environments continuously refer to the literary and religious heritage of India (sacred books, traditions and Hindu rites), a heritage that the author particularly loves and studies. This makes Narayan the singer of a world that, although not closed to the modern, continues to be deeply proud of its identity and cultural heritage.
Narayan received various awards and honours, such as the Padma Bhusham or the Sahita Akademi, India's second and third highest civilian awards.
R. K. Narayan died on May 13, 2001 in his hometown of Chennai.

 A Horse and Two Goats 

This is the history of a misunderstanding between a poor Indian man, Muni, and a rich American tourist who is visiting the village.
Muni is a very poor man who only has two goats and lives in a thatched hut. One day, Muni wakes up with the craving for something more sumptuous than the balls of cooked milled and raw onion he eats for his daily meal, and asks his wife to make a curry for dinner. She agrees to make him a curry, provided he can go to the local shop and buy the necessary ingredients for it.
Muni goes to buy them, but the shopkeeper refuses to allow him to purchase the items on credit, as Muni has no money. Muni returns home to inform his wife of the bad news. She exasperatedly orders him out of the house to graze his two goats, which are all he has left of a once large and healthy herd of sheep and goats that was afflicted by a pestilence.
As Muni walks toward the highway with his two scraggly goats, he arrives at his favourite spot, an area beside the highway that is the site of an old and grandiose statue of a warrior and a horse. Suddenly, a foreigner in a yellow station wagon comes barrelling down the highway, only to stop abruptly in front of Muni. He reveals that he is interested in buying the statue from Muni, whom he assumes to be its owner.
They both talk for a long time, but they don't understand each other at all. Muni explains to the foreigner the miracles and wonderful deeds carried out by the warrior of the statue, while the American tells him about his life in New York and what he wants to do with the statue in his mansion. The foreigner offers him more and more money, thinking that Muni is haggling, and Muni believes that he wants to buy the goats, so he takes the money very happily.
After that, the American loads the statue in his vehicle and drives it away, thinking he has bought it.
Muni returns home triumphant, informing his wife that he has managed to sell his goats, that had proven to be a curse to him as a constant reminder of how far he had fallen in the world. His wife initially assumes that he must have robbed someone, as the sum of 100 rupees is a small fortune. However, Muni’s elation does not last long as, soon enough, he hears the bleating of his goats at his door, and his wife threatens to call the police.
For me, the most interesting thing about the story is
the detailed vision of life in India for poor peasants like Muni, and the huge
difference of cultures that is reflected between that type of life and that of
the foreigner. The sense of humour and irony that there is, transforms a hard
to believe story in a fun and interesting one.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters

Muni (age, job, daily routines…)

His wife

The shopman

The postman

The American

Tell us something about the postman’s relationship with Muni. And with the postman.

Say something about Muni’s village.

What kind of conversation do the American and Muni have? What do they talk about?

What do people usually do when they try to communicate to a foreigner?

Once upon a time, offering a cigarette was a way to break the ice to start a conversation. Do you think we now communicate less because we smoke less?

“At seventy-one didn’t run, but surrenders to whatever came.” Do you think there is an age when every one of us has to surrender?

The America got stuck in the Empire State Building’s lift for hours, and then he decided to travel. If you had undergone a big thread in your life, what would you do to make up for it?

What is the American going to do with the statue? How did he carry it?

What kind of souvenirs do you by when you travel?

What is an “avatar”? Do you know something about Hinduism?

What is really communication? Is it always necessary to say something that makes sense?

What did Muni dream to do if he had some money?

What did the American buy, and what did Muni sell?

What happened when Muni arrived home with the money?

VOCABULARY

dotting, bullock, faggots, millet, pen, tethered, drumstick tree, ails, imp, ledger, swarga, fast, cronies, hailed, affluence, fleecy, gawky, bhang, thrashed, barren, spurn, scythe, dhobi, scrounge, cheetah, mauled, Namaste!, gainsay, slanderers, undaunted, wary, ingratiatingly, backwater, pinioned, Pongal, Parangi, quip, pundit, bearish, lakh, puja, creeper, gunny sack, dhoti

The Birthmark, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne at the Wikipedia

The Birthmark at the Wikipedia

Audiobook

The Birthmark, film

Nathaniel Hawthorne, by Remedios Benéitez 

BIOGRAPHY 

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July the 4^th, 1804, Salem, Massachusetts, and died on May the 19^th, 1864, Plymouth, New Hampshire). He was an American dark romantic novelist and short-story writer. His works often focus on history, morality and religion.

An ancestor, William Hawthorne, was the first of his family to emigrate from England to America in 1630.

Nathaniel was the only son of Nathaniel and Elisabeth Clark Hawthorne. His father, a sea captain, died in 1808 of yellow fever. After that, her mother moved back into her parent’s house with her children.

With the help of relatives. Nathaniel entered Bowdoin College in 1821 and graduated in 1825.

He published his first work in 1828, the novel Fanshawe. He published several short stories in periodicals, which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales.

He worked at the Boston Custom House and joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, where he met his future wife, Sophia Peabody. They got married in 1842. The couple rented a home in Concord where they were neighbours with writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and the Alcott family.

The Hawthorns struggled with debt and a growing family, and eventually returned to Salem in 1845. There he worked a few years as Surveyor of the Port at the Salem Custom House.

Hawthorne published his most well-known work, The Scarlet Letter, shortly after, in 1850, bringing him fame and financial relief. He then began working on The House of Seven Gables, a novel based on an old family, the Pyncheons, in Salem.

He was appointed to the consulship in Liverpool, England, by his old college friend president Franklin Pierce (14^th USA president). While in Europe, he wrote The Marble Faun and Our Old Home before moving back to his house in Concord in 1860.

Hawthorne suffered from poor health in 1860, and died in his sleep during a trip to the White Mountains in 1864.

 

THE BIRTHMARK

Aylmer is a brilliant scientist and natural philosopher who has abandoned his experiments for a while to marry the beautiful Georgiana. One day, Aylmer asks his wife whether she has ever thought about removing the birthmark on her cheek. He thinks that her face is almost perfect, but he wants to remove it. She is angry at first, and then she weeps, asking how he can love her if she is shocking to him.

He obsesses about the birthmark. He can think of nothing else. For him, it symbolizes mortality and sin. He wants to remove it, even if it ends her life. Finally, she agrees for love.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters:

Aylmer

Georgiana

Aminadab

What is exactly “natural philosophy”? (27, 2)

“A spiritual affinity more attractive than any chemical one” (27, 3-4). Do you know what do people mean when they talk about “elective affinities”?

Is there any scientific explanation for a birthmark?

Can you describe Georgiana’s birthmark?

Why do you think Aylmer didn’t see it before marrying her, or why did it appear after getting married?

Why did Aylmer, and then Georgiana, want to erase her birthmark?

In the story, Aylmer has a dream.  Can you tell us this dream? For you, what are the meaning of dreams?

Do you know the myth of Pygmalion?

Can you find a similitude between this story and the legend of Faust?

The story tells us that a lot of Aylmer experiments are failures and there is a risk for Georgiana’s life if he tries to delete her birthmark. Why do they want to take risks so dangerous?

Do you think there’s any relation between the birthmark and the speck in the saying, “You can see the speck in your friend’s eye, but you don’t notice the log that is in your own eye"? What were Aylmer flaws in this case?

Do you know who were these people: Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus? And what was the Brazen Head?

What do you know about alchemy?

According to your opinion, what is the meaning of Georgiana’s birthmark? Remember that when Aylmer removes it, she dies.

 

VOCABULARY

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