Friday Fiction Dissection
Back by dope demand… or, erm, because I said we would last week…
This week: Backstory, Setting and Characterisation.
You may be wondering why these three nuggets aren’t discussed as separate items, but in the case of GWaPE it’s worth talking about them as almost the same entity.
Chevalier masterfully characterises the young maid and her master through a variety of ways, but what I find interesting is how she brings Delft alive with her magic by using it to characterise the protagonist. When Griet sets off for her first day, Chevalier uses the setting to serve us some backstory and the backstory to make the town breath between the pages. The three story elements are cleverly intertwined so that you could almost paint the picture on the front cover yourself (if you have that print version of the book).
Another author may have chosen to have Griet walk to her new home and describe the buildings and the smells and run the risk of pedestrianizing the experience, but this author chose to have Griet’s childhood memories light up the streets for us, making us run down them right alongside her and her siblings. However, not only is the author invoking Griet’s home town through the use of memory, she is also characterising the girl by showing that, although she is no longer a child, she has not long left her childhood behind. This is further compounded by the scene of her arriving at the star in the town’s centre, while also coming back to symbolism. It is a metaphor for her quite literally leaving her childhood, the star symbolising the point of confusion felt by anyone sitting on that threshold – which direction will my life take now that I am no longer at home?
The star also gives us a geographical sense of both the size of Delft and the class and religious divides through Griet’s memories of childhood games, and by how her house and Vermeer’s are so close to that star and yet Griet has never once passed his corner of her home town. By using this detail we know not only the town’s divides, but also that Griet is protestant and not Catholic (and notice how she never actually names herself as protestant; it all filters through in the memories and descriptions).
Another factor that contributes to a sense of dimensions is how her father has never walked to The Hague – just a couple of hours away by foot. In our modern day of taking transport for granted, this small detail really hits home the period and circumstances of the day, that the average Joe couldn’t just hop on a train to visit a neighbouring town. This shows that Chevalier leaves nothing for granted; she doesn’t assume that the reader would come to her story with inbuilt historical knowledge, and succeeds in pushing us that bit deeper into the character’s point of view. It also characterises Griet’s family, that they were never rich, even if they were higher in the hierarchy than servants.
And of course you couldn’t write a book set in Holland and not mention the canals. But Griet doesn’t just pass them by. Chevalier makes sure she interacts with this part of the setting so that it really comes to life and writes a whole scene around it — a scene that sets up a point of conflict that resurfaces periodically throughout the book (Cornelia). And this is key, I think, to creating setting. It’s not about describing a backdrop, it’s about your character — and thus your reader, by proxy —living the experience.
So, a little bit more on characterisation. So far we’ve covered how setting can reflect character almost unnoticeably. But Chevalier also achieves this by using the people around Griet to mirror her deeper characteristics that wouldn’t fit into the style of the narrative if they were threaded in more directly. Tanneke is the most obvious example. In order for us to understand just how different Griet is from a normal maid, she is put in direct comparison to what is deemed a typical maid. By giving us an understanding of Tenneke and what she considers untenable for a servant girl, it charts exactly how daring Griet’s actions become. But also, Tenneke represents Griet’s possible future. The older maid is what Griet should be, and what she will become if she doesn’t marry or return to her previous status. This is characterisation of the most subtle kind. Most of us don’t even realise the effect of using this technique in our own writing; that every character has a sense of what they want to be, what they don’t want to be, and what they fear they will become. So much writing advice out there dictates that we must all know ‘what the character wants’, but how about knowing what they don’t want? There is power in that, too.
A little digression, but one that is relevant when talking about characterisation. Several months back I was listening to BBC Radio4 and a lady was talking about people, what we hoard, and why. She called it ‘dormant items’ — items that we keep in our houses but never use — and it struck me as interesting in relation to writing. Basically, she said that everyone has an item or items at home that they keep as an ideal of what they one day might be, even if they don’t use that item. She cited one example from her studies of a woman who bought a pair of Jimmy Choos, but has never worn them. She doesn’t throw them out because she doesn’t want to relinquish the idea of what she could be.
I could relate; I’d recently been to the UK and bought an immaculate pair of heels from a charity shop for four quid! — my version of Jimmy Choos. What I mean is, these shoes I would NEVER wear where I live, for I live in gumboot country and even in the summer it just wouldn’t feel right. These are my ‘when I go and meet my agent in London’ shoes. And let’s be realistic here; they may never be worn. It might be that by the time I get an agent, I’ll be too old for heels anyway, or agents will be replaced by androids who wouldn’t even care if you turned up with a flowerpot on your head. And these days, everything is done by phone, or Skype. But will I chuck them out? Don’t be daft.
Another example the Radio4 lady cited was the keeping of letters (which must relate to the older generation, as who’s written any correspondence of that kind after the 1990s?). This dormant item means holding onto a sense of what you once were. Again, I can relate; this is how my novel LovedUP came into being. It’s a portrayal of life in London at the time the rave scene rose to its height, and a time of my life I never want to forget, even though I’m not that person any longer. It’s kind of a correspondence with my old self.
Although Chevalier doesn’t employ dormant items in her box of tricks in GWaPE, she certainly does make present various representations of Griet’s what I could be, what I used to be, and what I don’t want to relinquish. Griet’s modelling of certain items of clothing from Mdm. Vermeer’s wardrobe does not say that she wants to be covered in furs and live a rich lifestyle, but it does characterise that she is not yet prepared to relinquish her ideal of return to status. It shows that she still has hope and some fight left in her.
So, have you got any tricks or insights to share relating to any of the above? How do you tackle characterisation?
