Early Twentieth-Century Fiction
English 358:358, Fall 2023
“I god, Ah can’t see what uh woman uh yo’ stability would want tuh be treasuring’ all dat gum-grease from folks dat don’t even own de house den sleep in… They’s jus’ some puny humans playin’ round de toes uh Time.'”
Hurston “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” 54.
This quote further exemplifies how Starks views himself as “king” or “god” of the town he is mayor of. His use of the term “puny humans” particularly illuminates his domineering view of the citizens he has authority over.
“‘I give her my word,’ Anse says. ‘It is sacred on me. I know you begrudge it, but she will bless you in heaven.'”
Faulkner, “As I Lay Dying,” 140.
Though he skimps on many expenses throughout the journey to bury his wife in Jefferson (such as refusing to purchase a new spade to dig the grave with), Anse believes his honor rests on fulfilling Addie’s wish. It is this belief that propels the family on the strenuous forty mile journey to Jefferson with her body. Faulkner conjures the absurd and darkly comical when he writes what Anse Bundren deems as respectable, honorable, and dignified.
“And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power, as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.”
Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway,” 47.
Woolf captures the human experience of being swept up in memory by sensory triggers. The experience of hearing Clarissa’s “tinkling” and “rustling,” sounds bring Walsh back to the days of his youth, when he spent time with Clarissa on the terrace in Bourton.
“Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learned them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the read world about him.”
Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” 52.
In chapter one of “Portrait,” we saw Stephen’s developing mind make sense of the world around him through the investigation of words (ex. when Stephen analyzes the different uses for the word “belt,” or when he meditates on the sound of the word “suck”) (Joyce 7, 8). In chapter two, as Stephen matures, we don’t receive the same associative childlike thinking as before, but can still recognize from the content that we are privy to the workings of Stephen’s mind.
“He lived once more into his story and was drawn down, as by a siren’s hand, to where, in the dim underworld of fiction, the great glazed tank of art, strange silent subjects float.”
James, “The Middle Years,” 337.
The murky diction (silent, float, dim) and fantastical imagery (siren, underworld) that James uses to describe Dencombe observing his literary work, implies a kind of transformation made possible through the consumption of art. The quote suggests that a work of art may transport the consumer to another world, another kind of thinking.