Revelatory Self-Description
Early on the first-person author, Susan Trinder reveals a little about her self-esteem by revealing a little about how she appears to others. What is interesting is that her self-description seems quite at odds with the treatment she received from her benefactress:
“She let me sleep beside her, in her own bed. She shined my hair with vinegar. You treat jewels like that. And I was not a jewel; nor even a pearl.”
Twisting Oliver
The performance of a play based on Dickens’ Oliver Twist makes quite an impact on the narrator. She refers back to the play several times over the course of her narrative with each reference revealing a deeper understanding until finally that understanding reaches the point of metaphor:
“And I remember seeing— what I had never seen before— how the world was made up: that it had bad Bill Sykeses in it, and good Mr Ibbses; and Nancys, that might go either way.”
Undressing Maud
The relationship between Susan and Maud begins as maid and employer. Or daughter of employer, at any rate. Susan’s description of helping Maud change from her day clothes into her night clothes hints at the changes to come:
“she was soft and smooth as butter…She was like a lobster without its shell…My gaze was nothing to her. I saw her bosom, her bottom, her feather and everything and— apart from the feather, which was brown as a duck's— she was as pale as a statue on a pillar in a park. So pale she was, she seemed to shine.”
Conveyance
The right metaphor at the right moment can be so profoundly suggestive that it carries more weight than if what is really going on emotionally were expressed more literally. The moment here is Maud’s big announcement made in the wake of tears mingling with rain. The metaphor is right because it conveys so much while being so understated:
“'Mr. Rivers has asked me to marry him, Sue.'
She said it in a flat voice, like a girl saying a lesson.”
The Kiss
The perspective has changed to Maud’s point of view. By this time, the reader learns some secrets about Maud that changes the perspective of this perspective. It is Maud describing the first kiss with Susan, not the other way around:
“Her tongue comes between them and touches mine.
And at that, I shudder, or quiver. For it is like the finding out of something raw, the troubling of a wound, a nerve.”
