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Abstract: Richard Jefferies’ The Acorn-Gatherer unfolds a picture of the miserable life of an illegitimate boy in an old-fashioned village. Without any interference in the story, the author succeeds in arousing strong sympathy in the readers’ heart. The paper intends to explore how the infectious effect is achieved by means of the author’s tactful application of three pairs of contrasts.
Key words: The Acorn-Gatherer, infectious effect, contrasts
Richard Jefferies remains one of the most thoughtful and most lyrical writers on the English countryside. He is noted for his depiction of English rural life in essays, books of natural history, and novels. In the 19th century, Britain was going through a series of radical changes followed by fierce social conflicts. Showing little interest in the dramatic changes occurring in the urban areas, Richard Jefferies, an admirer of nature, however, chooses to focus his eyes on the agricultural issues of his day and explores the whole rural society in some of his stories. He tends to depict the misery of human life in sharp contrast to the beautiful nature. The Acorn-Gatherer is typically a story of this kind.
The story is set in a backward village where the orthodox moral values prevail and any behavior violating the so-called “right code of behavior” is doomed to be despised and get punished. It is just in such a rigid and conservative village that a tragedy inevitably happens. An illegitimate boy leads a wretched life and results in a tragic death. While reading the last scene of his death, the readers would be strongly stirred, with the poor boy’s silent cry echoing in their ears. There is no doubt that this infectious effect has been achieved by the author’s witty writing skills, such as the deliberate use of symbols, the adoption of narrative point of view and other rhetorical devices as well. But through the second thought, we may note that the effect also stems from the author’s skillfulness in forming contrasts. This essay attempts to explore the strikingly infectious effect achieved by the meticulous adoption of several pairs of contrasts by the author, through which the readers are propelled to make their own judgments.
1.The Boy’s Misery in Sharp Contrast to the Beautiful Lavishness of Nature
At the very beginning of the story, both the rooks and the boy are mentioned, which actually implies the possible connection between them. The boy is depicted like this: “In his slumber his forehead frowned…the set angry frown was the only distinguishing mark.” His frown is compared to grooves in a tree, hard to be smoothed. The readers may get shocked and wonder: what is it that deprives him of happiness a teenager should otherwise have enjoyed?
By comparison, the rooks at the acorns are the happiest creatures in the world. “the fluttering up there and hopping from branch to branch…the inward chuckling when a friend lets his acorn drop tip-tap from bough to bough…they cannot quarrel or fight, having no cause of battle. ” The happy shouting of the rooks is a striking contrast with the iron set frown on the boy’s brow. Happy rooks are described vividly to indicate that the boy’s fate is even much worse than that of rooks. As we can see, the wretched little boy has neither friends nor parents who should have otherwise offered him their affection. Nothing, nothing in the world belongs to him, but the hatred and maltreatment from his grandmother and apathy from the villagers. How sharp is the contrast formed here and how saddening is the fact the readers have found!
When the boy’s grandmother notices the boy sleeping under the tree, she beats the boy with the ash stick, “heavily enough to bare broken his bones.” One more time, the rooks appear. They shout “caw” and then fly away while the boy only darts “straight for the gap in the corner” without even a cry. The rooks have the instinct to shout out, but the boy just keeps silent and run away just like “a piece of machinery suddenly let loose, without a second of dubious awakening.” Upon reading these lines, the readers’ sympathy begin to wax: he must have been beaten cruelly like this for so many times that it has become a habit for him to run away in no time without uttering a word. After all, it may turn out to be useless for him to beg for his grandmother’s forgiveness. Compared with the shouting of the rooks, the silence of the boy again arouses the readers’ sorrow for him, leading them to seek for the answer to the doubts on their minds: how can a grandmother abuse her grandson like this? What is the hidden truth? In the latter part of the story, the readers’ doubts begin to be dispelled. He is the son of her indecent daughter, an illegitimate. The boy is just a“scarlet letter”, keeping reminding her of the disgrace her daughter brought to the family. No wonder the old woman beats so severely the boy, because of whom she is looked down upon by others in the village. The description of the scene contrasts the rooks’ shouting with the boy’s silence, succeeding in presenting the boy’s wretched life.
In a sharp contrast to the cruel, dark and hell-like human society, nature is such a beautiful and pleasant paradise everyone is longing for.
“This was going on above while the boy slept below. A thrush looked out from the hedge… The sunshine gleamed on the rooks’ black feather overhead.” Wise readers are likely to detect a pair of antonyms here. “Above” may refer to the paradise whereas “below” may imply the hell. All the living beings, like rooks, bees as well as the lotus, are enjoying their sunshine. However, the harmonious picture is soon torn into pieces by the following sudden beating of the boy by the old woman. The contrast serves to strike shock into the readers’ heart: how can a tragedy take place in the village with so beautiful surroundings?
2.Narrator’s Biased Discourse in Contrast to the Author’s Unbiased Discourse
It is obvious that there are two totally different voices in the story. One is the narrator’s while another is the author’s, which stand for two different values.
The former holds a value which occupies the dominant position in the villages. It is characterized by its morality-orientation, narrow mind and decisiveness. People with this belief draw a clear line between right and wrong, which, in their eyes, cannot coexist in one person. In the story, when the old woman beats the boy with the ash stick, the narrator seems to take pleasure in the beating. “The faggot… enabled her, you see, to get two good chances at him”. And then, the narrator jumps to the conclusion that, “A wicked boy never lived.” No other boys are more wicked than this one. The narrator’s prejudice virtually represents that of the grandma, of the villagers and of the rural conventions in the latter period of Victorian time. Why is the boy a reprobate in their eyes? After all, his father is a drunkard and his mother is indecent. Naturally, how can you expect such a boy to be a good one? After the boy dies, he has “been talked to, and held up as a scarecrow all his life.” From the narrator’s perspective, his death may serve to confirm the belief that a bad boy will be destined to get punished and deserves death.
By contrast, the author’s tone is more tolerant and sympathetic. His illegitimate identity is not expected to be used as a criterion to judge that he is absolutely a wicked boy. Although he maybe is disobedient at times, he is not wicked enough to deserve death. After all, he is nothing but a boy between ten and eleven years old. Moreover, he is surrounded by the unsympathetic and rigid villagers who are hostile to the boy. Consequently, the boy’s disobedience is somewhat understandable and forgivable.
The contrast between the two voices is also embodied in their different views on the grandmother. From the narrator’s point of view, the old woman is unrespectable. Though she herself doesn’t commit any mistakes, she has an indecent daughter and an illegitimate grandson, inevitably contributing to her being looked down upon by the biased villagers. As a result, she tries every means to win back their respect for her. She holds a pray meeting in her cottage twice instead of one a week and forces the boy to “look at” the Bible since he cannot read. Nevertheless, no matter how hard she tries, she ends up in failure to change others’ prejudice against her. But the writer seems to be neutral and more humanistic. In his eyes, on the one hand, the poor boy’s death can be partly attributed to the grandmother’s cruelness and coldness. However, the author doesn’t go to the extremes. He also makes it clear that the grandmother is not supposed to bear all the blame and criticism. She is given a treatment as unfair as the boy is. Her abusing the boy stems, to a great extent, from her own despair, which therefore is partly worth understanding and sympathy. Therefore, instead of blaming the woman severely, the writer is more tolerant by iterating that she just does what she considers right. The writer’s humanistic value forms a sharp contrast to the narrator’s conventional religious value.
3.The Boy’s Silence in Contrast to Others’ Utterance
In this novel, the boy is deprived of voicing while other characters keep protesting and criticizing, which may serve to magnify the effect of contrast: an illegitimate child is doomed to end in tragedy, who, after all, is too humble to make any sound and draw other’s attention in that old-fashioned and pretentious society.
On one occasion, the readers find the boy sitting in the window “with granny’s Bible open before him.” Just as before, the boy keeps silent. The grandma’s utterance is presented: “he won’t read, but I make him look at his book”. Why does the old woman compel the child to look at the Bible? The grandma is an old-fashioned woman, eager to excel her own class whether in appearance or in religion. She is “well dressed for a laboring woman…superior in some scarcely defined way to most of her class.” But it is somewhat ironic that she has an indecent daughter who leaves her with an illegitimate child. She has to stand others’ contemptuous stares and vicious whispers. To win back others’ respect for her, she has to hold a pray meeting at home twice a week and forces her grandson to “look at” the Bible since he is illiterate.
In the last scene, the boy yields to his destiny without even shouting for help before he is drowned. He chooses silence for the last time, which is the climax of his constant silence. Compared with the boy’s silence are the villagers’ direct or indirect remarks. A dealer thinks indeed that he sees something in the water, but he doesn’t want any trouble, nor does he know that someone is missing, “most likely a dog.” In his eyes, the boy’s death is no more important than buying a cow. But what renders the readers wordless is the steer woman’s words: “Gee-up” when she exactly knows that is a boy’s corpse. She just doesn’t want to make her barge dirty. The readers cannot keep silent any longer. The boy’s silence and others’ utterance trigger the readers to ponder: what kind of a society does the boy live in, a human society or just a hell? The skilled application of the contrast helps the readers obtain an acute sense of the author’s disguised sympathy with and deep sigh for all the illegitimate children in rural areas.
With the impressive application of the above-mentioned contrasts, the author succeeds in not interfering with the natural development of the story. However, it is just the seeming non-interference that urges the readers to reflect on the tragic story. The boy’s fate is even far worse than that of the rooks since the latter are entitled to happiness: freedom and the company of friends, to name just a few. Besides, he chooses to keep silent even though he is facing death, an indication of his yielding to his sad life. Death is probably, in his eyes, the best destination for him. How saddening it is for the readers when the thought occurs to their minds. Admittedly, sad stories like this can be seen more often than not in our real world. The so-called “right code of behavior”, social conventions and prejudice are still killing the innocent children, adults and the society in general, which remains to be eliminated with the progress of human society. The author successfully drives home the point with his tactful application of the contrasts.
References:
[1]杰弗里斯.捡橡果的孩子[A].虞建华译.杨自伍.英国散文名篇欣赏[C].上海:上海外语教育出版社.1995.
[2]聂薇.英国乡村社会转型期人的异化[J].浙江师范大学学报. 2007.
[3]Jinfeng Zhao.The Acorn-Gatherer-an Inevitable Tragedy[J].Science and Technology Information, 2007.
[4]Xiuying Lu. The Echoing Silence in Richard Jefferies’ The Acorn-Gatherer [J]. US-China Foreign Language, Sep.2006, Volume 4, No.9.
Key words: The Acorn-Gatherer, infectious effect, contrasts
Richard Jefferies remains one of the most thoughtful and most lyrical writers on the English countryside. He is noted for his depiction of English rural life in essays, books of natural history, and novels. In the 19th century, Britain was going through a series of radical changes followed by fierce social conflicts. Showing little interest in the dramatic changes occurring in the urban areas, Richard Jefferies, an admirer of nature, however, chooses to focus his eyes on the agricultural issues of his day and explores the whole rural society in some of his stories. He tends to depict the misery of human life in sharp contrast to the beautiful nature. The Acorn-Gatherer is typically a story of this kind.
The story is set in a backward village where the orthodox moral values prevail and any behavior violating the so-called “right code of behavior” is doomed to be despised and get punished. It is just in such a rigid and conservative village that a tragedy inevitably happens. An illegitimate boy leads a wretched life and results in a tragic death. While reading the last scene of his death, the readers would be strongly stirred, with the poor boy’s silent cry echoing in their ears. There is no doubt that this infectious effect has been achieved by the author’s witty writing skills, such as the deliberate use of symbols, the adoption of narrative point of view and other rhetorical devices as well. But through the second thought, we may note that the effect also stems from the author’s skillfulness in forming contrasts. This essay attempts to explore the strikingly infectious effect achieved by the meticulous adoption of several pairs of contrasts by the author, through which the readers are propelled to make their own judgments.
1.The Boy’s Misery in Sharp Contrast to the Beautiful Lavishness of Nature
At the very beginning of the story, both the rooks and the boy are mentioned, which actually implies the possible connection between them. The boy is depicted like this: “In his slumber his forehead frowned…the set angry frown was the only distinguishing mark.” His frown is compared to grooves in a tree, hard to be smoothed. The readers may get shocked and wonder: what is it that deprives him of happiness a teenager should otherwise have enjoyed?
By comparison, the rooks at the acorns are the happiest creatures in the world. “the fluttering up there and hopping from branch to branch…the inward chuckling when a friend lets his acorn drop tip-tap from bough to bough…they cannot quarrel or fight, having no cause of battle. ” The happy shouting of the rooks is a striking contrast with the iron set frown on the boy’s brow. Happy rooks are described vividly to indicate that the boy’s fate is even much worse than that of rooks. As we can see, the wretched little boy has neither friends nor parents who should have otherwise offered him their affection. Nothing, nothing in the world belongs to him, but the hatred and maltreatment from his grandmother and apathy from the villagers. How sharp is the contrast formed here and how saddening is the fact the readers have found!
When the boy’s grandmother notices the boy sleeping under the tree, she beats the boy with the ash stick, “heavily enough to bare broken his bones.” One more time, the rooks appear. They shout “caw” and then fly away while the boy only darts “straight for the gap in the corner” without even a cry. The rooks have the instinct to shout out, but the boy just keeps silent and run away just like “a piece of machinery suddenly let loose, without a second of dubious awakening.” Upon reading these lines, the readers’ sympathy begin to wax: he must have been beaten cruelly like this for so many times that it has become a habit for him to run away in no time without uttering a word. After all, it may turn out to be useless for him to beg for his grandmother’s forgiveness. Compared with the shouting of the rooks, the silence of the boy again arouses the readers’ sorrow for him, leading them to seek for the answer to the doubts on their minds: how can a grandmother abuse her grandson like this? What is the hidden truth? In the latter part of the story, the readers’ doubts begin to be dispelled. He is the son of her indecent daughter, an illegitimate. The boy is just a“scarlet letter”, keeping reminding her of the disgrace her daughter brought to the family. No wonder the old woman beats so severely the boy, because of whom she is looked down upon by others in the village. The description of the scene contrasts the rooks’ shouting with the boy’s silence, succeeding in presenting the boy’s wretched life.
In a sharp contrast to the cruel, dark and hell-like human society, nature is such a beautiful and pleasant paradise everyone is longing for.
“This was going on above while the boy slept below. A thrush looked out from the hedge… The sunshine gleamed on the rooks’ black feather overhead.” Wise readers are likely to detect a pair of antonyms here. “Above” may refer to the paradise whereas “below” may imply the hell. All the living beings, like rooks, bees as well as the lotus, are enjoying their sunshine. However, the harmonious picture is soon torn into pieces by the following sudden beating of the boy by the old woman. The contrast serves to strike shock into the readers’ heart: how can a tragedy take place in the village with so beautiful surroundings?
2.Narrator’s Biased Discourse in Contrast to the Author’s Unbiased Discourse
It is obvious that there are two totally different voices in the story. One is the narrator’s while another is the author’s, which stand for two different values.
The former holds a value which occupies the dominant position in the villages. It is characterized by its morality-orientation, narrow mind and decisiveness. People with this belief draw a clear line between right and wrong, which, in their eyes, cannot coexist in one person. In the story, when the old woman beats the boy with the ash stick, the narrator seems to take pleasure in the beating. “The faggot… enabled her, you see, to get two good chances at him”. And then, the narrator jumps to the conclusion that, “A wicked boy never lived.” No other boys are more wicked than this one. The narrator’s prejudice virtually represents that of the grandma, of the villagers and of the rural conventions in the latter period of Victorian time. Why is the boy a reprobate in their eyes? After all, his father is a drunkard and his mother is indecent. Naturally, how can you expect such a boy to be a good one? After the boy dies, he has “been talked to, and held up as a scarecrow all his life.” From the narrator’s perspective, his death may serve to confirm the belief that a bad boy will be destined to get punished and deserves death.
By contrast, the author’s tone is more tolerant and sympathetic. His illegitimate identity is not expected to be used as a criterion to judge that he is absolutely a wicked boy. Although he maybe is disobedient at times, he is not wicked enough to deserve death. After all, he is nothing but a boy between ten and eleven years old. Moreover, he is surrounded by the unsympathetic and rigid villagers who are hostile to the boy. Consequently, the boy’s disobedience is somewhat understandable and forgivable.
The contrast between the two voices is also embodied in their different views on the grandmother. From the narrator’s point of view, the old woman is unrespectable. Though she herself doesn’t commit any mistakes, she has an indecent daughter and an illegitimate grandson, inevitably contributing to her being looked down upon by the biased villagers. As a result, she tries every means to win back their respect for her. She holds a pray meeting in her cottage twice instead of one a week and forces the boy to “look at” the Bible since he cannot read. Nevertheless, no matter how hard she tries, she ends up in failure to change others’ prejudice against her. But the writer seems to be neutral and more humanistic. In his eyes, on the one hand, the poor boy’s death can be partly attributed to the grandmother’s cruelness and coldness. However, the author doesn’t go to the extremes. He also makes it clear that the grandmother is not supposed to bear all the blame and criticism. She is given a treatment as unfair as the boy is. Her abusing the boy stems, to a great extent, from her own despair, which therefore is partly worth understanding and sympathy. Therefore, instead of blaming the woman severely, the writer is more tolerant by iterating that she just does what she considers right. The writer’s humanistic value forms a sharp contrast to the narrator’s conventional religious value.
3.The Boy’s Silence in Contrast to Others’ Utterance
In this novel, the boy is deprived of voicing while other characters keep protesting and criticizing, which may serve to magnify the effect of contrast: an illegitimate child is doomed to end in tragedy, who, after all, is too humble to make any sound and draw other’s attention in that old-fashioned and pretentious society.
On one occasion, the readers find the boy sitting in the window “with granny’s Bible open before him.” Just as before, the boy keeps silent. The grandma’s utterance is presented: “he won’t read, but I make him look at his book”. Why does the old woman compel the child to look at the Bible? The grandma is an old-fashioned woman, eager to excel her own class whether in appearance or in religion. She is “well dressed for a laboring woman…superior in some scarcely defined way to most of her class.” But it is somewhat ironic that she has an indecent daughter who leaves her with an illegitimate child. She has to stand others’ contemptuous stares and vicious whispers. To win back others’ respect for her, she has to hold a pray meeting at home twice a week and forces her grandson to “look at” the Bible since he is illiterate.
In the last scene, the boy yields to his destiny without even shouting for help before he is drowned. He chooses silence for the last time, which is the climax of his constant silence. Compared with the boy’s silence are the villagers’ direct or indirect remarks. A dealer thinks indeed that he sees something in the water, but he doesn’t want any trouble, nor does he know that someone is missing, “most likely a dog.” In his eyes, the boy’s death is no more important than buying a cow. But what renders the readers wordless is the steer woman’s words: “Gee-up” when she exactly knows that is a boy’s corpse. She just doesn’t want to make her barge dirty. The readers cannot keep silent any longer. The boy’s silence and others’ utterance trigger the readers to ponder: what kind of a society does the boy live in, a human society or just a hell? The skilled application of the contrast helps the readers obtain an acute sense of the author’s disguised sympathy with and deep sigh for all the illegitimate children in rural areas.
With the impressive application of the above-mentioned contrasts, the author succeeds in not interfering with the natural development of the story. However, it is just the seeming non-interference that urges the readers to reflect on the tragic story. The boy’s fate is even far worse than that of the rooks since the latter are entitled to happiness: freedom and the company of friends, to name just a few. Besides, he chooses to keep silent even though he is facing death, an indication of his yielding to his sad life. Death is probably, in his eyes, the best destination for him. How saddening it is for the readers when the thought occurs to their minds. Admittedly, sad stories like this can be seen more often than not in our real world. The so-called “right code of behavior”, social conventions and prejudice are still killing the innocent children, adults and the society in general, which remains to be eliminated with the progress of human society. The author successfully drives home the point with his tactful application of the contrasts.
References:
[1]杰弗里斯.捡橡果的孩子[A].虞建华译.杨自伍.英国散文名篇欣赏[C].上海:上海外语教育出版社.1995.
[2]聂薇.英国乡村社会转型期人的异化[J].浙江师范大学学报. 2007.
[3]Jinfeng Zhao.The Acorn-Gatherer-an Inevitable Tragedy[J].Science and Technology Information, 2007.
[4]Xiuying Lu. The Echoing Silence in Richard Jefferies’ The Acorn-Gatherer [J]. US-China Foreign Language, Sep.2006, Volume 4, No.9.