Warming up
Objectives
1.
Understand the story: theme & character.
2.
• • •
Appreciate literature:
read between the lines; read the story from a particular perspective: feminism; interpret the symbols.
A Dill Pickle
Theme
Unit 3
Style
Character Analysis
Text Analysis
Detailed Analysis
Structure
Text Analysis
Theme
Questions for thinking: 1. 2. 3. Do you think the character of the two lovers plays an important role in their relationship? What do you think results in the failure of their love and communication? How would you describe the two characters’ relationship as presented in the story? Do you think this is a typical love story? If not, why does the writer choose to tell it this way? Or what is her real purpose in writing such a story?
3. Love counseling
Imagine that you are a relationship counselor and give advice to the two lovers on what goes wrong in their relationship and how they can make up, if possible.
• Marked the maturity of English short story; • Was often compared to Dickens and Chekhov.
Background
History
1. Women’s condition at the time: Women were advocated to cultivate such qualities as “tenderness of understanding, unworldliness and innocence, domestic affection, and above all, submissiveness in various degrees.” 2. “The Woman Question”: rising wave of feminist movement (late Victorian age to the early 20th century)
It was her “born duty to reckon everything subordinate to his comfort and pleasure, and to let him neither see nor feel anything coming from her, except what is agreeable to him.” —J. S.men
A Dill Pickle
Katherine Mansfield
A Dill Pickle
Unit 3
W arming up
B ackground
T ext Analysis R einforcement
A Dill Pickle
Unit 3
Questions/Activities Check-on Preview Objectives
Many of the images in the story are deliberately symbolic. For example, the flowers. Can you find out the implication of the flowers? Do they take on a second meaning in the story? Why is the story titled “A Dill Pickle”? How is it relevant to a love story? What might it represent symbolically, if it does?
Text Analysis
Theme
1. Man-Woman relationship:
sexual politics (ideas and activities that are concerned with how power is shared between men and women, and how this affects their relationships) 2. Feminist concern: What does a woman want?
5.
The woman’s desire to be heard and understood
Text Analysis
Style
1. Characteristics of modernist writing: • • • • 2. symbolic images fragmented plot trivial subjects psychological insight—internal monologues, “stream of consciousness”
3. Learn to describe a scene or object with accuracy: verbs.
A Dill Pickle
Author
Unit 3
Background
History
Background
Author
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) • rebellious, dangerously witty, and lonely
Text Analysis
Character Analysis
The man
Questions for thinking: 1. 2. 3. What is the man’s name? Why isn’t he given a name? Was the man still in love with Vera? If not, why did he seem so happy talking to her and ask her to stay? Why did he “let it go at that” when Vera told him she had sold her piano?
Warming up
Warming up
1. Retelling
Questions/Activities
Reconstruct the story by chronological order—how they fell in love and then broke up, what might have happened to each of them during the time before they met again. 2. Role play Dramatize the scene of their reencounter—pay attention to the subtlety of tone, look, and action.
lay tapped He ______down the orange and ______ on the table for the waitress.
lingered His thoughts ________over the last meeting between them. unfolded And his memory ________ as he listened to the familiar song.
Text Analysis
Theme
Sexual politics
1.
2. 3. 4.
The man talks while the woman listens.
The man controls the conversation, demanding attention. The man is tantalizing, offering hopes that he withdraws at wish. The woman’s reaction: contradiction compromise rebellion
Text Analysis
Character Analysis
Vera
5. What does the “strange beast” stand for? Why does the author describe it as a “strange beast”? Is this image conventionally associated with women? 6. How do you understand that Vera was “born out of her time”?
Her Life
Background
Author
• In a German Pension (1911)