The Romantic Young Lady Maugham Analysis
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The Romantic Young Lady Maugham Analysis
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1. Define the following words and expressions and reproduce the situations in which they are used.
2*. Find English equivalents of the words and word-combinations in the text.
Неизбежная катастрофа; потерять надежду; процветающий город; черепашьим шагом; показной; стала известна правда; невозможно взгляд оторвать от чего-либо; спасти от позора; уладить проблему; переминаться с ноги на ногу.
3. Answer the following questions (using your active vocabulary).
a)Who did the narrator come across in Seville? Why did he have difficulty in placing her?
b)What was Marquesa de San Esteban's life story? Speak about her background, her youth, her romance.
c) What was the biggest obstacle to the young couple's happiness? What was the duchess's reaction to her daughter's infatuation? What course of action did the mother take?
d) What was the outcome of the love affair? What made Jose Leon change his mind? Can his choice be justified?
e) Which of these do you think should come first: love and happiness or career and money? Why?
4. Comment on the following: “... when you least expected it, it is handed to you on a platter”.
1. Define the following words and expressions and reproduce the situations in which they are used.
2. Answer the following questions (using your active vocabulary)
a) What did the narrator think of long-standing engagements? Why did he look upon them as a gloomy menace?
b) What did you learn about Thomas Warton's career and achievements?
c) What was Mary Warton like? Why was she a welcome guest at many parties?
d) What were the relations between Mr and Mrs Warton like? Was it a happy marriage?
e) Dwell upon Mrs Warton and Gerrard Manson's love affair. Why did it stand no chance of success?
f) How did Mary Warton take the shocking news of Manson's death? Do you find her reaction and behaviour outrageous? Should people reveal or conceal their feeling and emotions in public?
g) What is the general tone of the story? What is your attitude to the main characters and the events described?
3. Comment on the title of the story.
1. Define the following words and expressions and reproduce the situations in which they are used.
to have sb eating out of one's hand
2*. Fill in prepositions and particles.
To be crowded … painters; to make … one's mind to do sth; his eyes rested … me; to arrive … the hotel; knowledge … painting; to come … the conclusion; to make a point … doing sth; to catch sight … sth; a doctor … profession; to be crazy … sb; to happen … sb; to transform sb/ sth … sth; to make a fool … sb; to be proud … sb; passion … sth; to be obliged … sb.
3. Answer the following questions (using your active vocabulary)
a) What was Positano like? Why did it attract the narrator?
b) Whom did the narrator meet there? Can you describe the other guest? What brought the narrator and the American together?
c) Why was the American's name familiar to the narrator? What did he tell about a lady named Barnaby and her husband?
d) What discovery did the narrator make about his companion one day?
f) What was Mrs Barnaby's real life story? What induced her to invent stories?
g) What was Mr Barnaby's role in that humbug? How did he take it? Comment on the following: “London may have gained a wonderful hostess but I'm beginning to think that I have lost a perfectly good wife”.
h) What do you think of Mrs Barnaby's stories? Do you look upon her as a liar or an excellent story-teller?
1. Define the following words and expressions and reproduce the situations in which they are used.
2*. Define the idioms from the text and find their Russian equivalents
a) What was Henry Garnet like? What was strange about his behaviour on the day described in the story?
b) Speak about Nicky Garnet: his appearance, disposition, achievements.
c) What kind of suggestion involving his son did Henry Garnet receive one day? Why did he dismiss it?
d) What made Henry Garnet change his mind?
e) What advice did Henry Garment give to his son before his departure?
f) Was Nicky a success at the tournament in Monte Carlo? Was he as good as his word when he came to a casino afterwards? What excuse did Nicky find for his disobedience?
g) Dwell upon Nicky's adventure with a pretty young woman. What opened his eyes to the girl's deceitful behaviour?
h) How did he get his money back? What surprise did he receive with his money?
I) Why was Henry Garnet distressed by his son's experience in Monte Carlo?
4. Comment on the title of the story. What are facts of life?
1. Define the following words and expressions and reproduce the situations in which they are used.
2*. Find similar expressions in the text .
In my opinion; to read attentively; to disappear; to look similar; to decide; to do duties; to settle difficulties; unbelievable; to love sb a lot.
3. Answer the following questions (using your active vocabulary)
a) How did the narrator get acquainted with the Dutchmen?
c) Why did their friendship come to an end?
e) What do you think of friendship? Is it as fragile as love?
f) Do you believe in true friendship? What are true friends like?
1. Find the information about the author of the story and present it to the group.
2. Define the words and word-combinations and restore the situations in which they are used in the text.
to look with a critical eye upon sth
3. Read aloud and translate in written form the following extract:
“At night, when she ordered them one and all to bed… without being rocked and sung to.”
a) What image of Mamzelle Aurélie is portrayed at the beginning of the story? What are the key words and phrases that help you understand her personality, her mode of life?
b) In what way does Mamzelle treat children at first? What does she compare them with?
c) What indicates that Mamzelle’s attitude to the children is gradually changing?
d) What does the main character feel when the children are gone? How does the author of the story manage to convey such atmosphere?
e) Comment upon the last two sentences of the story.
f) What is Kate Chopin advocating for in this story?
1. Find the information about the author of the story and present it to the class.
3. Define the following expressions and reproduce the situations in which they are used in the story.
4. Read aloud and translate in written form the following extract:
“He pressed the bell… if you see what I mean.”
a) To what genre does the story belong?
c) What do we learn about the main character of the story?
d) Speak on how Billy was inexplicably drawn to the boarding house.
e) Which lines in the story make the readers alert and expect something sinister to happen?
f) What is the climax of the story?
g) Why do you think the tea “tasted faintly of bitter almonds”?
h) What is your response to the story?
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Home › Literary Criticism › Analysis of W. Somerset Maugham’s Stories
W. Somerset Maugham (25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) first claimed fame as a playwright and novelist, but he became best known in the 1920’s and 1930’s the world over as an international traveler and short-story writer. Appearing in popular magazines such as Nash’s, Collier’s, Hearst’s International, The Smart Set, and Cosmopolitan, his stories reached hundreds of thousands of readers who had never attended a play and had seldom read a novel. This new public demanded simple, lucid, fast-moving prose, and Maugham’s realistic, well-defined narratives, often set amid the exotic flora of Oceania or Indochina, were among the most popular of the day.
The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands collected six of these first “exotic stories” and assured Maugham fame as a short-story writer on equal footing with his established renown as novelist and dramatist. It was actually his second collection, coming twenty years after Orientations, whose title clearly bespeaks its purposes. Apparently, Maugham had found no suitable possibilities for short fiction in the meantime until, recuperating from a lung infection between World War I assignments for the British Secret Service, he took a vacation to Samoa and Hawaii:
I had always had a romantic notion of the South Seas. I had read of those magic islands in the books of Herman Melville, Pierre Loti, and Robert Louis Stevenson, but what I saw was very different from what I had read.
Although Maugham clearly differentiates life as he saw it in the South Seas from life as he had read about it in the writings of his “romantic” predecessors, his stories of British Colonials, of natives and half-castes in exotic environments, are reminiscent of these authors and also of Rudyard Kipling. Maugham’s assessment of Kipling, the only British short-story writer he thought comparable to such greats as Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov, neatly clarifies their similar subject, as well as their ultimate stylistic differences. Kipling, Maugham writes,
opened a new and fruitful field to writers. This is the story, the scene of which is set in some country little known to the majority of readers, and which deals with the reactions upon the white man of his sojourn in an alien land and the effect which contact with peoples of another race has upon him. Subsequent writers have treated this subject in their different ways, but . . . no one has invested it with more romantic glamour, no one has made it more exciting and no one has presented it so vividly and with such a wealth of colour.
Maugham’s first South Seas stories are essentially criticisms of the “romantic glamour” of Kipling and his predecessors, especially Stevenson, his most immediate literary forefather in terms of location. Rather than repeat their illusions, Maugham tries to see the “alien land” as it really is, without poetic frills. “Red,” which Maugham once chose as his best story, is a clear example of this process.
A worldly, gruff, and overweight skipper of a bedraggled seventy-ton schooner anchors off one of the Samoan Islands in order to trade with the local storekeeper. After rowing ashore to a small cove, the captain follows a tortuous path, eventually arriving at “a white man’s house” where he meets Neilson. Neilson seems a typical character out of Robert Louis Stevenson, a life deserter unable either to return to his homeland or to accommodate himself completely to his present situation. Twenty-five years ago he came to the island with tuberculosis, expecting to live only a year, but the mild climate has arrested his disease. He has married a native woman called Sally and built a European bungalow on the beautiful spot where a grass hut once stood. His walls are lined with books, which makes the skipper nervous but to which Neilson constantly and condescendingly alludes. Offering him whiskey and a cigar, Neilson decides to tell the skipper the story of Red.
Red was Neilson’s romantic predecessor, Sally’s previous lover, an ingenuous Apollo whom Neilson likes to imagine “had no more soul than the creatures of the woods and forests who made pipes from reeds and bathed in the mountain streams when the world was young.” It was Red who had lived with Sally in the native hut, “with its beehive roof and its pillars, overshadowed by a great tree with red flowers.” Glamorizing the young couple and the lush habitat, Neilson imagines them living on “delicious messes from coconuts,” by a sea “deep blue, wine-coloured at sundown, like the sea of Homeric Greece,” where “the hurrying fish were like butterflies,” and the “dawn crept in among the wooden pillars of the hut” so that the lovers woke each morning and “smiled to welcome another day.” After a year of bliss, Red was shanghaied by a British whaler while trying to trade green oranges for tobacco. Sally was crestfallen and mourned him for three years, but finally, somewhat reluctantly, she acceded to the amorous overtures of the newcomer Neilson:
And so the little wooden house was built in which he had now lived for many years, and Sally became his wife. But after the first few weeks of rapture, during which he was satisfied with what she gave him, he had known little happiness. She had yielded to him, through weariness, but she had only yielded what she set no store on. The soul which he had dimly glimpsed escaped him. He knew that she cared nothing for him. She still loved Red. . . .
Neilson, admittedly “a sentimentalist,” is imprisoned by history. His books, a source of anxiety to the skipper, are a symbol of what Maugham believes he must himself avoid: useless repetition of and bondage to his forebears. As creation, Neilson does repeat Stevenson, but as character, he shows the absolute futility of this repetition. The dead romance assumes priority from the living one, and priority is everything. For the sentimentalist Neilson, tropical paradise has become living hell and the greatest obstacle preventing his own present happiness, the fulfillment of his own history, is his creation of an insurmountable predecessor, one whose “romantic glamour” is purer and simpler than his own reality.
The final irony, that the skipper, now bloated and bleary-eyed, is in fact the magnificent Red of Neilson’s imagination and that when Sally and he meet they do not even recognize each other, snaps something in Neilson. The moment he had dreaded for twenty-five years has come and gone. His illusions disintegrate like gossamer; the “father” is not insurmountable:
He had been cheated. They had seen each other at last and had not known it. He began to laugh, mirthlessly, and his laughter grew till it become hysterical. The Gods had played him a cruel trick. And he was old now.
In “Red,” Neilson’s realization of failure and waste do prompt some action, possibly an escape from the cell of his past. Over dinner, he lies to Sally
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