CLAY
I'm intrigued by this title choice. Clay would seem to evoke malleability or life & death, but, after reading the story, these do not really seem to be the main themes. I wonder if 'clay' might be intended to signify something else, perhaps about blindness (which, along with eyes, is a motif throughout Dubliners) or omission more generally (as nowhere does Joyce refer to the clay as clay)...I would love to hear others' thoughts about this!
But no one tried to show her her mistake
I wouldn't have understood this line without having read the Norton Critical Edition of the text. Maria's "mistake" is that she omitted the second verse of the song, which features love and marriage (note 6, p. 89). This is an interesting piece of information for Joyce to withhold from readers, as Maria's omission seems directly related to previous references to marriage (and Maria's lack thereof) in the story.
For those interested, I'm copying the verse Maria omitted here: "I dreamt that suitors sought my hand,/ That knights, upon bended knee,/ And with vows no maiden heart could withstand,/ They pledg'd their faith to me./ And I dreamt that one of that noble host,/ Came forth my heart to claim,/ But I also dreamt, which charm'd me most,/ That you lov'd me still the same."
She felt a soft wet substance with her fingers and was surprised that nobody spoke or took off her bandage.
As several others have already mentioned, yes, this is apparently an allusion to clay. Some quick research has informed me that choosing clay in this Hallow Eve's game is prophetic of an early death! Some families even banned clay from figuring in the game for this very reason. Given this information, I wonder if Joyce intends "Clay" to act as a bridge between narratives about middle age and narratives about old age or death.
….
Here and at the end of the previous paragraph we have two ellipses. Interestingly, they follow two of Mr. Doran's mental digressions over the reasons why he should marry Mrs. Mooney's daughter. They therefore seem to be connected to the 'irrational' but 'passionate' reasonings behind Mr. Doran's musings. Do all instances of ellipses in Dubliners relate to the passions or irrationality (or, instead, to undecidedness and inaction in general)? It's not certain... but computational analysis would probably help us find out !
a mist gathered on his glasses so that he had to take them off and polish them with his pocket-handkerchief.
Once again, Joyce's narration focuses on a description of characters' eyes. Here the emphasis is on Mr. Doran's glasses rather than on his physical eyes, but the motif remains. Are we to gather that the inability to see (whether due to physical blindness or, as in this example, mist-covered glasses) is somehow opposed to the bright, "queer" eyes of previous characters we've met (like the strange man in 'An Encounter)?
Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.
This sentence reminds me of Mansfield's short story "Her first Ball", in which the main female protagonist also becomes incapable of "recognizing" her older male dance partner after she extracts herself from his unsolicited digression on old age. Perhaps computational text analysis could help us chart scenes of "un-recognition" taking place after important character awakening moments in 20th-c literature.
she
Striking pronoun use here. Others have already commented on the lack of name (so far) for the narrator's love interest, but the description in the previous paragraph almost made me lose track of who 'she' was. I wonder what Joyce's intention might have been in disrupting the flow of "she" pronouns by inserting the paragraph "One evening I went back [...]". As it is, there seems to be some sort of connection between the dead priest, blindness (or blinds in general), and "she".
I met the gaze of a pair of bottle-green eyes
The Norton Critical Edition of Dubliners points out that "In Joyce's day green might have been a code for homosexuality" (p. 16, note 5). Though the claim is merely speculative, this would seem to make sense, given the strange man's change in thought from (creepily) talking about the beauty of girls to obsessing over his desire to whip young boys....of course, the portrait Joyce is painting of a homosexual here (if this is the case) is problematic, and I wonder if there will be other depictions of deviant sexualities in Dubliners. I also wonder if a computational text analysis of "green eyes" in Dubliners could help us gain a fuller understanding of the validity of the Norton Edition's claim?
paralysis
This is a really interesting word to focus in on. It would seem that Joyce/the narrator is trying to highlight some connection between paralysis (meaning both the loss of the ability to move in a medical sense, and the inability to act in a more metaphorical sense) and death. Here, we have the impression that the word is intended to relate to Father Flynn's illness/stroke, but I wonder if paralysis in its non-medical sense will become a theme of the story. Will the narrator become unable to act in some way following Father Flynn's death?
But all his drowsing brain could think of was—too rich for him.
This is a curious opinion to hold - after all, it is thanks to Mr. Neave's own hard work that the family has been able to become wealthy. Now, he seems to regret having put so much effort into making money. The question is - what exactly does he wish for instead? His son is 'too' handsome and his family is 'too' rich...Mansfield seems to be showing that even the most 'ideal' families are not perfect.
AN IDEAL FAMILY.
Now that we've read several of Mansfield's short stories, it's become clear that her titles do not refer to easy-to-interpret subjects. Though we might expect to read a portrait of 'an ideal family' here, it would not be surprising if this 'ideal' is shown to be quite complicated - more of a commentary on social opinion v. reality than a real depiction of an ideal family.
She didn’t even recognise him again.
Is this merely denial, or has she really had an entire change in perspective during the dance?
Meg
The list of people in this sentence references characters we have seen in previous short stories by Mansfield. I find this surprising, as most short story authors I'm familiar with (e.g. Maupassant, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam) generally do not deal with characters who appear in multiple stories. Might the portrayal of certain characters in individual short stories differ from their portrayal across all of Mansfield's short stories combined? Maybe this is something computational text analysis could help us determine.
little
Once again, we see Mansfield's predilection for the adjective "little". Given our discussion of stylometry yesterday, I wonder why this would be considered a "content" word rather than a stylistic word. In my opinion, the frequent use of "little" must say something about Mansfield's style!
But I shall certainly write
The fact that this sentence (which begins with a coordinating conjunction and reads like a sentence fragment) is written separately from "Not now" gives us the impression that Isabel's claim to write William "later" is both an afterthought and quite doubtful.
William had a horrible vision of one of Isabel’s young poets lapping up a slice, for some reason, behind the nursery door.
Although it is only depicted as a "vision", William's opinion of Isabel's "new" friends is very clear. Taking gifts away from your own children is a terrible thing to charge your partner's friends with!
nowadays
"Nowadays" is operating here as "the new Isabel" (or "new" in general) and "in the new way" operate throughout this story. I would imagine that running word concordances for "now" or "new" would offer much insight on Mansfield's perspective on the "new", shallow fashions of the time period in this story.
I
Who is the I? It would be interesting to track the presence of "I" in Mansfield's other short stories to see where it pops up in her writing. Does the "I" refer to Mansfield herself or to a specific character from whose perspective she's writing?
as though Heaven had been full of casinos with snuffy old saints for croupiers and crowns to play with.
It would be fun to use computational text analysis to extract and compare words associated with Heaven and words associated with its counterpart here (the casino) in order to analyze the author's stereotypical description of each. It would really highlight Mansfield's depiction of the character's perspective on the casino.
And Cyril felt it was. “Yes, I shall send Cyril the watch,” said Josephine.
The implicit jump in time from the scene between Cyril and the grandfather and the 'present' moment of Josephine's deliberation over the watch would seem to be another instance of Mansfield's 'modern' writing style.
to think that she and Constantia had done this thing without asking his permission
It's as if the daughters seem to think that their father is still alive somehow - or haunting them?
a little Communion
What a strange way to speak of the Eucharist...we saw today that Mansfield has a particular predilection for using the adjective "little". It might be interesting to use n-grams to pull out all instances of this adjective, and then see how they operate throughout her short stories. Does "little" take on a different meaning when used by the narrator or put in the mouths of certain characters (of a specific social class, for example)?
“she had such a dainty little contrayvance for the buttah. It was a silvah Cupid balanced on the—on the bordah of a glass dish, holding a tayny fork. And when you wanted some buttah you simply pressed his foot and he bent down and speared you a piece. It was quite a gayme.”
Following our class discussion today, I've been trying to think of ways to analyze/play with dialect using computational text analysis. In Nurse Andrews's language, it appears (at least in this chapter) that long "i"'s become "ay", "er"'s become "ah", long "a"'s become "ay", and "hy" becomes "hey". I wonder if this will be consistent throughout the rest of the story. If so, maybe we could do fun things with computational analysis and change all the dialogue to her dialect!
That really was extravagant, for the little cottages were in a lane to themselves at the very bottom of a steep rise that led up to the house.
I am again intrigued by the narrative voice here and in the rest of this paragraph, especially given the judgmental nature of the statements ("they had no right", "little mean dwellings", "it was disgusting and sordid"). We can tell that the narrator is likely from the upperclass.
‘This life is Weary.’
A curiously depressing song title, given the joyous atmosphere of the garden party's preparations thus far.
And after all the weather was ideal.
Who is the narrator of this tale and what is the narrative voice doing by beginning with a conjunction? We have the impression that this story is an excerpt either of a larger document or perhaps of someone's thoughts. But whose?
Meg
This is an unusual way to introduce a character - there is extremely little context, in spite of the dialogue beginning a few lines prior.
shut up
Curious verb choice - why not "close" or "conclude" the story? It's as if the story were a person to be 'shut up'!
Epilogue
I am intrigued by Collins's decision to insert the epilogue here. Why not have written the epilogue to include all the narratives after the discovery of Mr. Ablewhite (as those narratives already serve a function different from that of Betteredge, Clack, Bruff, Blake, and Jennings's narratives)? I wonder if computational analysis would have anything to demonstrate with regard to when/why epilogues are included (in general).
I am also the person who is left behind
I find this a curious claim for Betteredge to make: what does he mean by "left behind"? Does he feel it is up to him to make a final statement because he considers himself a 'secondary' character in the story? Or does he have some sort of moral imperative to 'wrap it up'? In any case, his claim makes us question the status of The Moonstone as either a 'real' grouping of narratives, or, instead, as a fiction requiring a satisfying ending.
The only person present with a noticeably dark complexion was a tall man in a pilot coat
Here we have another instance of assumptions being made regarding a character's suspiciousness on the basis of his/her complexion. Perhaps a word concordance for complexion could help us determine what role skin color plays in The Moonstone.
What is the secret of the attraction that there is for me in this man? Does it only mean that I feel the contrast between the frankly kind manner in which he has allowed me to become acquainted with him, and the merciless dislike and distrust with which I am met by other people? Or is there really something in him which answers to the yearning that I have for a little human sympathy–the yearning, which has survived the solitude and persecution of many years; which seems to grow keener and keener, as the time comes nearer and nearer when I shall endure and feel no more? How useless to ask these questions! Mr. Blake has given me a new interest in life. Let that be enough, without seeking to know what the new interest is.
This paragraphs reads almost like a confession of love! I wonder if it would be possible to run some sort of sentiment analysis on Jennings's descriptions of and/or reactions to Franklin Blake in order to put words to (i.e. describe) the way he feels about him -- is it mere respect and gratitude, or something more akin to love?
The door opened, and there entered to us, quietly, the most remarkable-looking man that I had ever seen. Judging him by his figure and his movements, he was still young. Judging him by his face, and comparing him with Betteredge, he looked the elder of the two. His complexion was of a gipsy darkness; his fleshless cheeks had fallen into deep hollows, over which the bone projected like a pent-house. His nose presented the fine shape and modelling so often found among the ancient people of the East, so seldom visible among the newer races of the West. His forehead rose high and straight from the brow. His marks and wrinkles were innumerable. From this strange face, eyes, stranger still, of the softest brown–eyes dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits–looked out at you, and (in my case, at least) took your attention captive at their will. Add to this a quantity of thick closely-curling hair, which, by some freak of Nature, had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and capricious manner. Over the top of his head it was still of the deep black which was its natural colour. Round the sides of his head–without the slightest gradation of grey to break the force of the extraordinary contrast–it had turned completely white. The line between the two colours preserved no sort of regularity. At one place, the white hair ran up into the black; at another, the black hair ran down into the white. I looked at the man with a curiosity which, I am ashamed to say, I found it quite impossible to control. His soft brown eyes looked back at me gently; and he met my involuntary rudeness in staring at him, with an apology which I was conscious that I had not deserved.
I find this description of Ezra Jennings fascinating - there appears to be something about him that is reminiscent of the Indians, though he does not appear to be Indian himself. I wonder if this description somehow reflects cultural prejudices of English people towards colonial peoples more generally at the time.
“Ezra Jennings.”
After reading through the rest of this narrative, I realized that "Ezra Jennings" is always written as first + last name (as in the case of Rosanna Spearman). Could it be that the more marginalized or alienated characters in the narratives of The Moonstone are always referred to by their first and last names? (But if so, then what would we make of Limping Lucy?)
He was sitting alone in a bare little room, which communicated by a glazed door with a surgery. Hideous coloured diagrams of the ravages of hideous diseases decorated the barren buff-coloured walls. A book-case filled with dingy medical works, and ornamented at the top with a skull, in place of the customary bust; a large deal table copiously splashed with ink; wooden chairs of the sort that are seen in kitchens and cottages; a threadbare drugget in the middle of the floor; a sink of water, with a basin and waste-pipe roughly let into the wall, horribly suggestive of its connection with surgical operations–comprised the entire furniture of the room. The bees were humming among a few flowers placed in pots outside the window; the birds were singing in the garden, and the faint intermittent jingle of a tuneless piano in some neighbouring house forced itself now and again on the ear. In any other place, these everyday sounds might have spoken pleasantly of the everyday world outside. Here, they came in as intruders on a silence which nothing but human suffering had the privilege to disturb. I looked at the mahogany instrument case, and at the huge roll of lint, occupying places of their own on the book-shelves, and shuddered inwardly as I thought of the sounds, familiar and appropriate to the everyday use of Ezra Jennings’ room.
This level of detailed description is relatively unusual in The Moonstone and has for effect on the reader much of what Blake describes as the effect on himself (i.e. it makes us impatient for the action to resume). I wonder if computational text analysis could help us point out the most descriptive passages in The Moonstone and inform us whether there is something contextually the passages have in common?
We have nothing whatever to do with clairvoyance, or with mesmerism, or with anything else that is hard of belief to a practical man, in the inquiry that we are now pursuing. My object in following the Indian plot, step by step, is to trace results back, by rational means, to natural causes.
Murthwaite is making a striking distinction here between Eastern and Western modes of knowledge. The Broadview edition of The Moonstone inserts a footnote at this point to explain that what Murthwaite says about his own "object" is representative of Collins's conception of detective fiction: ultimately, all events in the story can be explained logically and factually. I'd add that the suspenseful reading experience of this sort of detective fiction is made all the more enjoyable because of this reliance on logical causation. It would be too easy (and result in less enjoyable reading material) to attribute the disappearance of the moonstone to ghosts or gnomes or other fantastic causes.
Granted, my dear sir.
Once again, we have an interesting gender dynamic at play. Mr. Bruff assumes his reader to be male (and presumably upperclass). In this sense, it's possible he's explicitly writing for Franklin Blake. Curiously, however, I did not have the impression that either Betteredge or Clack were writing expressly for Blake, even if they both admit that he had requested their narratives. Is Mr. Bruff writing for Blake's eyes alone, or is "my dear sir" simply a rhetorical device? Is the purpose of his narrative different from Betteredge's or Clack's in some way?
And that wretch stands there, and tries to make me doubt that my mother, who was an angel on earth, is an angel in heaven now! Don’t stop to talk about it! Come away! It stifles me to breathe the same air with her! It frightens me to feel that we are in the same room together!
Ironically, Miss Clack's presence is shown here to take on a quasi-satanic vibe!
My aunt had died without opening one of the letters which I had addressed to her. I was so shocked at this, that it never occurred to me, until some days afterwards, that she had also died without giving me my little legacy.
Funny how, for a pious, altruistic Christian, Miss Clack's reflection on Lady Verinder's death centers entirely on herself!
And then I met my martyrdom, with the spirit of a primitive Christian.
...i.e. she nosily felt like eavesdropping... I would love to analyze Miss Clack's rhetoric with computational analysis! Could a computer really detect the nuances involved in so many of her claims to piety?
Here was a career of usefulness opened before me!
I wonder if computational text analysis could help us determine how many characters Miss Clack manages to alienate in her narrative (and in what contexts)...is her annoyance always due to her Evangelical Christianity, or is it equally due to her arrogance?
Here surely was a case for a clergyman, if ever there was one yet! Lady Verinder had thought it a case for a physician.
Miss Clack sounds like a caricature of an Evangelical Christian. (As a side note, I wonder if Wilkie Collins ever had a bad interaction with Evangelical Christians in his personal life that could have inspired the literary creation of Miss Clack.)
ADDED BY FRANKLIN BLAKE.
I find it strange that suddenly we are made to notice Franklin Blake's editorial presence... even if he claims he's done nothing to alter the narratives, this makes me more skeptical of the role he has to play in the novel. Has he been some sort of ghost editor the whole time? Is that why he seems less suspicious than someone like Godfrey Ablewhite?
She is the daughter of a heathen old man named Betteredge
It definitely looks like we have a biased narrator in Miss Clack. I wonder if she'll have the chance to witness Betteredge's devotion to Robinson Crusoe later on! In any case, it appears readers will not be able to trust her judgment of Betteredge (or his daughter) in this narrative.
into those regions of superior enlightenment in which I sit myself?
Does this mean that Betteredge already knows the outcome of the mystery? If so, I can't wait to figure out who is the guilty party, and then to re-read Betteredge's narrative looking for implicit clues as to who 'really' stole the Diamond.
“Murderer Franklin Blake would be a fitter name for him.”
Is this simply a statement of bias (this seems doubtful)? More intriguingly, I wonder if Limpling Lucy is correct about Rosanna's love for Mr. Franklin, or if there was something else going on between Rosanna & Mr. Franklin that people have simply been misinterpreting as love?
The Moonstone has served the Colonel’s vengeance, Betteredge, by means which the Colonel himself never dreamt of!”
Something tells me that the mystery is only going to get worse in the next several hundred pages, and that Franklin's assertion at this point in the story will seem silly in comparison! (But this is just a personal hunch.)
“Sergeant Cuff, I consider your last observation as an insult to my lady and her daughter!” “Mr. Betteredge, consider it as a warning to yourself, and you will be nearer the mark.”
It's possible that both Betteredge and Sergeant Cuff are biased in their own ways, yet the contrast between Betteredge's emotional outburst and Cuff's calm and confident demeanor definitely makes me interpret Cuff's hypothesis as the more reasonable one.
The Sergeant kindly lifted me up, and turned me away from the sight of the place where she had perished.
Are Sergeant Cuff and Betteredge jumping to conclusions here on Rosanna's death? If Betteredge's narrative were not an account of the Moonstone mystery after it had already been solved (which I believe is the case), I would have assumed that Rosanna's death was debatable. However, given that Betteredge is writing after the mystery is solved, I guess we have to assume he is correct in stating that she committed suicide (right?).
I suspected what was the matter readily enough. But it is a maxim of mine that men (being superior creatures) are bound to improve women–if they can. When a woman wants me to do anything (my daughter, or not, it doesn’t matter), I always insist on knowing why. The oftener you make them rummage their own minds for a reason, the more manageable you will find them in all the relations of life. It isn’t their fault (poor wretches!) that they act first and think afterwards; it’s the fault of the fools who humour them.
I previously commented on the troublesome status women seem to acquire in The Moonstone (given the emphasis on untrustworthy female servants in the initial aftermath of the Diamond's disappearance). Here, once again, do we have a troublesome gender comment! Is Collins putting his own views of women into Betteredge's narrative, or is this simply part of his literary attempt to create a very biased narrator?
I had got by this time, as nearly as might be, to hate the Sergeant. But truth compels me to acknowledge that, in respect of readiness of mind, he was a wonderful man.
Quite a strong sentiment to admit to in a narrative intended to by read by others! Yet, I think that Betteredge's confession of his hatred for Sergeant Cuff has the counter effect of allowing readers to put even more trust in Sergeant Cuff's character. Although Betteredge hates him, he cannot deny Cuff's merit. If anything, we are only made more aware of Betteredge's own biases as a narrator.
the additional misfortune of having one shoulder bigger than the other.
Physical appearance seems to play an important role in Collins's creation of characters. I wonder what role disability or freakish/monstrous physical traits play in his writing more generally, and in The Moonstone in particular. Up until Ch. XVI we have met two disabled characters (Rosanna and Limping Lucy) .
this strange girl
Here's another clue that would seem to point to Rosanna's innocence (at least in Betteredge's eyes) in the case of the diamond. Contrast this description of Rosanna as a "strange girl" (with girl serving as a sort of diminutive for "woman") with the description of the "wicked Colonel". Rosanna is presented as simply "odd" (with no moral/ethical judgment) and stripped of her profession (she is a mere "girl") as if to render her as insignificant or innocent as possible.
Rosanna
It was interesting for me to go back and re-read this introduction of Rosanna into Betteredge's narrative. The way she is presented here makes me think that she will ultimately play a less important role in the case of the diamond than what I have been assuming (having read up until the end of Ch. XV). Why else would Betteredge write as though Rosanna were (to a certain extent) a sort of stumbling block in his own narrative? Or, on the other hand, is this presentation of Rosanna merely intended to cover up/excuse the role she actually played in the case?
women servants
I've noticed that Betteredge repeatedly emphasizes female servants - why not male servants? Is there something about 19th-c English culture that makes women inherently more suspect than men? Or is it simply that Betteredge is the only male servant (which I doubt)? More generally, what is the status of male v. female in this novel?
“NOBODY HAS STOLEN THE DIAMOND,” answered Sergeant Cuff.
This sentence demonstrates how a 'simple' negation at the linguistic level does not necessarily equate to the same sort of negation at the literary/contextual level (i.e. if nobody has "stolen" the diamond, somebody still could have done something to the diamond to make it 'disappear'. How much text would a computer have to process in order to understand the full complexity of Cuff's statement? The sort of logic in Cuff's assertion also inspires me to ask whether a Python decision tree could help train a computer to solve mysteries.
No! it won’t do to set off yet. I am sorry again to detain you; but you really must hear the story of the sands, and the story of Rosanna–for this reason, that the matter of the Diamond touches them both nearly. How hard I try to get on with my statement without stopping by the way, and how badly I succeed! But, there!–Persons and Things do turn up so vexatiously in this life, and will in a manner insist on being noticed. Let us take it easy, and let us take it short; we shall be in the thick of the mystery soon, I promise you!
I love the use of narrative voice here! It really highlights the difficulty of reconciling the narrator's necessarily subjective point of view with the (desired) 'objective' perspective of the legal witness. This also makes me question this narrator's constant reliance on Robinson Crusoe throughout his narrative. Here, we see how subjective this narrator's account is, yet his reliance on Robinson Crusoe takes on a quasi-religious quality, as if to suggest that readers should have faith in his account because of his own devotion to certain aspects of RC (c.f. Chapter 1).
I turned my back on him; and we have not spoken since.
This is a great example of how brevity and simplicity in language can be used to create a heightened sense of suspense and drama in the minds of readers. I am skeptical about computational text analysis's ability to pick up on the dramatic undertones of such a phrase. Which words would enable a computer to recognize the emotional quality of these actions (turning one's back and no longer speaking to someone)? Doesn't linguistic context only go 'so far' when it comes to recognizing suspense/drama in a text? And isn't literature far more than just a string of words?