Free English Literature Dissertations - Consequently, Cinthio’s Work Is Identifiable With English, Elizabethan
Consequently, Cinthio’s work is identifiable with English, Elizabethan literature such as The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost in the sense that it aims to present a typically Christian, clear-cut and comprehensive vision of human nature, as black and white, affording no place for moral ambiguity or middle ground man is destined to work toward or to work against God’s will. The voice of the narrator as it appears to us fleetingly in personal pronouns is the voice of Cinthio feigning the idiosyncratic role of storyteller; exaggerating the various characters and forces at work in the story and taking pains to impute the central message wherever possible. The author is playful with the conventions of his medium, summarising his tale with an affirmation of its purpose of extolling Christian justice and finally an explanation of whence it came as though ironically also affirming its truth ‘Thus did Heaven avenge the innocence of Disdemona; and all these events were narrated by the Ensign’s wife, who was privy to the whole, as I have told them here’.
Maupassant, like Cinthio, develops much of the plot through dialogue. However Maupassant’s story employs a much freer literary style. There is much less sense of a storyteller presence in Maupassant’s tale and less attention to the would-be conventions of the genre, (although the twist in the denouement, arguably borrows from the customs of the contemporary short story). The perspective, rather, is in close proximity with Mathilde Loisel’s own consciousness. Indeed sometimes Mathilde and the narrator seem to share each others thoughts and questions; ‘sometimes she thought of that gay evening of long ago what would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who Knows? Who Knows?’ The remaining characters are presented only in passing relation to herself. Perhaps the most interesting phenomenon of Maupassant’s language is the dexterity with which he switches from sumptuous descriptions and passages flowing with poetic imagination to terse and short statements of fact. For instance in the opening section, Mathilde dreams of ‘delicious dishes served on marvellous plates and of the whispered gallantries to which you listen with a sphinxlike smile while you are eating the pink meat of a trout or the wings of a quail’. In stark contrast, later in the story, the narrator will summarise great chunks of action in economical five word paragraphs ‘This life lasted ten years’. This juxtaposition in the text of course helps to make manifest the disparity between frugality and excess at the centre of the storyline. By seducing us with flowery language and by deceiving us with regard the real value of the diamond necklace, it is possible Maupassant was encouraging a fall in the reader as well as Mathilde. And of course, the didactic nature of his message is subtly inferred when we consider that the ball is hosted by the Minister of Public Instruction.
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