Jessica and the House
A house is of huge significance to the story. When settling in to read the novel, be prepared to get to know this Victorian house well. One of the interesting aspects is how a building can be viewed so distinctly differently according to perception. Also of interest: how smoothly the building leads into imagery describing the viewer:
“Jessica stood in the middle of a lawn still covered with the woody debris of the winter and a windy spring, and critically surveyed the house. To her it was gloomy and detestable like England. She was the same age as Molly and looked twenty years younger, being lean and brown and seeming to glisten with sun oil even when her skin was without it. Her hair was yellow and short and shiny and her clothes bright. She dug the heels of jade-green shoes in the lawn and look at her husband, James.”
Nicknaming
The effect of bestowing nicknames upon others is explored through imagery that also requires the perceptual context to clarify perspective. The perspectives of the person who bestows the nicknames, the recipient of them, and the status of outsider looking in are all explored through imagery constructed primarily through the connotation of the names themselves:
“She knew he had become a pet or a mascot for this group of young men. They treated him roughly, it seemed to Harriet, even unkindly, calling him Dopey, Dwarfey, Alien Two, Hobbit, and Gremlin. ‘Hey, Dopey, you’re in my way.’ ‘Go and fetch me a cigarette from Jack, Hobbit.’ But he was happy. In the mornings, he was at the window waiting for one of them to come and fetch him; if they failed him, rang up to say they couldn’t make it that day, he was full of rage and deprivation, and stamped bellowing about the house.”
Perception Above All
The novel is obsessed with the intricate relationship between perception, perspective and the truth. What is being discussed here is a kind of happiness that on the surface sounds like joyous bliss. Read within the context of what the reader actually knows about David and Harriett, however, and this imagery becomes a discussion about lower-level satisfaction and a desire for little more than that the status quo continue indefinitely:
“Happiness. A happy family. The Lovatts were a happy family. It was what they had chosen and what they deserved. Often, when David and Harriet lay face to face, it seemed that doors in their breasts flew open, and what poured out was an intensity of relief, of thankfulness, that still astonished them both…it had been hard preserving their belief in themselves when the spirit of the times, the greedy and selfish sixties, had been so ready to condemn them, to isolate, to diminish their best selves.”
Repression
A character telling a story within the story is often an effective way to introduce imagery that comments upon the actual story in a referential way. A dark bedtime fairy tale becomes a way for David to openly express his hostility toward his wife in front of the kids. It is a portrait of repressed emotions rising to the surface of conscious expression though only Harriet seems to recognize it as such:
“She sat there by the pool. Soon it would be dark. She bent over the pool to see if there was a fish who could tell her the way out of the forest, but she saw something she didn’t expect. It was a girl’s face, and she was looking straight up at her. It was a face she had never seen in her whole life. This strange girl was smiling, but it was a nasty smile, not friendly, and the little girl thought this other girl was going to reach up out of the water and pull her down into it...”
