Every Woman Is A Novel A Jest

Every Woman Is A Novel :A Jest Of God Essay, Research Paper

Rachel often addresses her thoughts to God. How does she imagine Him (Her

or It). Does Rachel’s concept of God change during the course of the

Novel. Explain.

Rachel Cameron, the heroine of "A Jest of God", is not simply as an

individual literary character but as a psychological portrayal of women

of Rachel’s time and inclination. Even we can easily find someone who has

the same problem Rachel has in the friends of us, or maybe in an early

morning when we get up; stand at front of the mirror; we will suddenly

have a idea, "I am Rachel too."

She has a common Cameron heritage. She is a gawky, introverted spinster

schoolteacher who has returned home to Manawaka from university in

Winnipeg, upon the death of her alcoholic undertaker father Niall

Cameron, to care for her hypochondriac mother May. Nevertheless, the

family resemblance is obvious: their shared Scots Presbyterian ancestry,

which Laurence views as distinctively Canadian, provides an armour of

pride that imprisons her within their internal worlds, while providing a

defence against the external world. To overcome that barrier between

personalities, she must learn to understand and accept their heritage in

order to liberate her own identities and free herself for the future. She

must also learn to love herself before she can love others. Rachel

receive a sentimental education through a brief love affair: as a result

of learning to empathize with their lovers, she learn to love herself and

the people she lives with. Laurence’s emphasis is, as always, on the

importance of love in the sense of compassion, as each of her solipsistic

protagonists develops from claustrophobia to community.

The beginning of "A Jest of God" extends beyond its Canadian perimeters

in Rachel’s branching imagination, both into the fairytale dream world

which gives depth and pathos to the disappointment and despair of her

present and out into a wider world in time and space than the grey little

town of Manawaka. The first lines of the novel tell us everything basic

to Rachel’s mind, her temperament, and her situation.

The wind blows low, the wind blows high

The snow comes falling from the sky,

Rachel Cameron says she’ll die

For the want of the golden city.

She is handsome, she is pretty,

She is the queen of the golden city.

They are not actually chanting my name, of course, I only hear it that

way from where I am watching the classroom window, because I remember

myself skipping rope to that song when I was about the age of the little

girls out there now. Twenty-seven years ago… (p. 1)

The reader is engaged in sympathy with Rachel by the sadness of the gap

between her dream-self, "Queen of the Golden City," and her reality, shut

in behind her classroom window, looking out and worrying about becoming

an eccentric spinster, that stereotyped butt of cruel laughter. But we

are also engaged by the range and the quality of Rachel’s imagination –

and it is this, continuing through the book, that holds our sympathy, our

interest, and our increasing respect. The golden city is at first the

dream world of Rachel’s sexual fantasies where she and her prince live

happily ever after; later in the novel it becomes identified with the

golden city of Jerusalem reinterpreted as the growth of the spirit within

the individual, a new dispensation which makes it possible for her to go

on liveing, if not happily ever after, at least affirmatively.

Rachel makes a double journey. She is just thirty-four, a frustrated

spinster, outwardly in bondage to her marcelled, blue-rinsed, anxious,

and superficial mother, but actually in bondage was braking of proper

appearances as set up in her own mind by Manawaka and its expectations.

She is afraid of life and death hangs over her always, especially

symbolized by her dead father’s vocation, undertaking, and by the

presence underneath her home of the undertaking establishment that had

been her father’s. She makes a journey into her own mind and personality,

and finally she dares to act upon what she finds there. "A Jest of God"

is a record of a tortured but unremittingly honest journey of

self-analysis and self-therapy. (George Bowering, "That Fool of a Fear")

It is both complicated and daring, in terms of the novelist’s techniques.

The present, the past, the questionings and fantasies of Rachel are all

woven together instead of being completely separated and counterpointed

as in the former work. All the strands come together in the aftermath of

her affair with Nick Kazlik. Rachel is symbolically biblical in her

"mourning for her children," the children she has never had. Nick is real

to Rachel as a lover, and yet she needs him mor

Внимание, отключите Adblock

Вы посетили наш сайт со включенным блокировщиком рекламы!
Ссылка для скачивания станет доступной сразу после отключения Adblock!

Скачать