Genre
Drama
Language
English
Setting and Context
Sidley Park, an English country house in 1809 and the 1990s
Narrator and Point of View
Third-person limited
Tone and Mood
Witty, ironic, cerebral, breathless, curious, impassioned
Protagonist and Antagonist
Thomasina and Hannah (Protagonists); Bernard (Antagonist)
Major Conflict
Major conflicts include the following questions: Will Thomasina make any progress with her equations? Will Bernard find out the truth about Chater and Byron? Will Hannah find out information about her hermit? What will the relationships between the characters be?
Climax
After he finishes researching and speculating, Bernard publishes his theory that Byron killed Chater and then fled the country.
Foreshadowing
The discussion of "Et in Arcadia ego" foreshadows Thomasina's death. Chater dies from a monkey bite. Various clues point to Thomasina's death.
Understatement
Hannah says, "I've always been given credit for my unconcern" (53).
Allusions
Allusions include: Fermat's Last Theorem, a popular theorem in mathematics in which Fermat claimed to have discovered a proof that the Diophantine equation x^n+y^n=z^n has no integer solutions for n>2 and x,y,z!=0 (6); he poet Robert Southey and his epic poems "Thalaba" and "Madoc" (11); the lives and love of Byron and Caroline Lamb; Poussin's famous painting "Et in Arcadia ego" (16); Romantic novels by Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe (17); chaos theory, the Second Law of Thermodynamics; Thomasina laments the burning of the library at Alexandria (42); and Septimus references the poets Ovid and Virgil to lament Chater's claim to being a poet (46).
Imagery
See Imagery.
Paradox
It is a paradox that the world has natural laws but is also chaotic, and within that disorder is order.
Parallelism
N/A
Personification
Examples of personification include: "Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before" (Thomasina, p. 9) and "But now nature is having the last laugh" (Valentine, p. 49).
Use of Dramatic Devices
Characters are told where to stand, what objects to pick, and that they hear things offstage. There are few classical dramatic devices though (i.e., no choruses, no soliloquies, no asides).