Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Background Sylvia Plath was born in Massachusetts, USA. She was an excellent student and won many awards and prizes. During her High School years she had several of her poems and stories published in literary magazines. Plath's early poetry revealed an emotionally fragile personality.

Fragile personality She was obsessed, by the idea of perfection and put herself under enormous pressure which eventually led to a nervous breakdown and a suicide attempt.

Cambridge, Ted Hughes and marriage Following hospitalization and psychotherapy, she recovered, graduated High School 'summa cum laude' and won a scholarship to study at Cambridge, England where she met and married the poet Ted Hughes. The couple moved to the USA but, after just three years, returned to England where their daughter was born.

The Colossus In 1960 Sylvia Plath's first volume of poetry, The Colossus, was published and she began work on an autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. In 1962 she had a second child, The Colossus was published in the USA, her radio play, Three Women, was set to air on the BBC and she was at last gaining some recognition.

Suicide This period of relative happiness was interrupted when she discovered that her husband was having an affair. The couple divorced and six months later Sylvia Plath committed suicide at her home in London.

Themes Sylvia Plath, had not been well-known before her death, but the posthumous publication of The Bell Jai (1963) and Ariel (1965, the collection of thirty-five poems she had written in the last months of her life), brought her to the public's attention. While her early poems are mostly about death, her later work shows the complex personality of a woman in search of her own identity. Her concern for the condition of women, which emerges in both her poetry and her autobiography made her into a spokesperson for feminism. She was also deeply concerned with issues such as consumerism, the misuse of the mass-media and technology and the exploitation of man and the environment.

Style Sylvia Plath's poetry is highly personal and has often been defined as 'confessional'. Many of her poems are written in the dramatic monologue form. Surprising uses of sound and rhythm literary equivalents of cinematic techniques such as flashbacks and close-ups, shocking metaphors and highly personal symbols make her poetic style extremely distinctive.

In 1981 she was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

James Thurber (1894-1961)

After spending his boyhood and university days in Columbus, Ohio, Thurber worked as a reporter, serving for a time as a foreign correspondent in France. He was one of the young, talented writers— E. B. White was another—recruited when Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, a period recounted in Thurber's best-selling My Years with Ross (1959).

Thurber subsequently devoted full time to writing and illustrating some tvo dozen books of stories and essays. He collaborated with Elliott Nugent in writing a play, The Male Animal, which ran successfully in New York in 1940. Several of Thurber's stories and sketches were also presented on Broadway in Three by Thurber (1955) and A Thurber Carnival (1960). A number of his stories, including "The Unicorn in the Garden" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (with Walter played by Danny Kaye) have been produced as movies.

A representative selection of Thurber's short stories, fables, essays and cartoons is available in The Thurber Carnival (1945). His wide-eyed dogs, predatory women, and timid men have made him one of America's best-loved humorists.

Character

What do other people think? What emotions do they experience? How are they similar to or different from us?

Literature allows us to look into the lives of an endless collection of men and women and find answers to these questions. We can learn about people's hopes and fears, we can see them struggle through adverse circumstances, we can rejoice with them in moments of success and sympathise with them in moments of despair. In real life we have the opportunity of knowing intimately a relatively small number of people - family members, loved ones, close friends. Literature allows us to multiply that number by giving us access lo the private thoughts and lives of an endless assortment of fascinating and memorable people.

Defining characters

When we analyse characters in fiction we need to ask some key questions about:

• their relationship to the plot: do they play a major part in the events of the story or do they have a minor role?

• the degree to which they are developed: are they complex characters or are they one-dimensional?

• their growth in the course of story: do they remain the same throughout the story or do significant changes in their personalities take place?

 

In order to discuss these issues we need to know the following terms.

 

Protagonist and antagonist

The central character of the plot is called the protagonist. Without this character there would be no story. The character against whom the protagonist struggles is called the antagonist. In many novels, however, the antagonist is not a human being. It may, for example, be the natural environment in which the protagonist lives, or society, or illness, or even death.

The terms protagonist and antagonist do not have moral connotations and therefore should not be confused with 'hero' and 'villain'. Many protagonists are a mixture of good and evil elements. Other characters in a story may be referred to as major or minor characters, depending on the importance of their roles in developing the plot.

 

Round and flat characters

Round characters, like real people, have complex, multi-dimensional personalities. They show emotional and intellectual depth and are capable of growing and changing. Major characters in fiction are usually round.

Flat characters embody or represent a single characteristic. They are the miser, the bully, the jealous lover, the endless optimist. They may also be referred to as types or as caricatures when distorted for humorous purposes. Flat characters are usually minor characters. However, the term 'flat' should not be confused with 'insignificant' or 'badly drawn'. A flat character may in fact be the protagonist of the story, in particular when the writer wishes to focus on the characteristic he or she represents. Some highly memorable characters, particularly in satirical or humorous novels, can be defined as flat, for example the miser Scrooge in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.

 

Dynamic and static characters

Dynamic characters change as a result of the experiences they have. The most obvious examples can be found in initiation novels which tell stones of young people who grow into adults, for example Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. However, dynamic characters can be found in many other types of stories. Major characters in novels are usually dynamic.

Static characters remain untouched by the events of the story. They do not learn from their experiences and consequently they remain unchanged. Static characters are usually minor characters, but sometimes a writer makes a static character the protagonist of his story, because he wishes to analyse a particular type of personality. Static characters also play major roles in stories that show how forces in life, such as the social environment or the family, sometimes make it hard for people to grow and change. An example can be found in the short story Eveline by James Joyce: the unhappy central character Eveline feels suffocated by her family circumstances and lifestyle but cannot find the strength to break free from her situation and start a new life with her fiancé in South America.