【短篇评论1："The Story of An Hour" by Kate Chopin (1894)】

(范老师范文，但setting+irony段落参考了国外批评) 阅读中注意研究学习1）如何引用或综述原文事实来支持抽象的评论， “思想—例证---评论”；2）动词和连词的变化。

(setting=symbols)First, in terms of setting, Kate Chopin reveals not only that the time is spring, but also that from a window in her room Mrs Mallard embraces “the new spring life”’, takes in “the delicious breath of rain”, enjoys “the notes of a distant song”, and saw “countless sparrows” “twittering in the eaves”. Therefore the primary setting(the central symbol) of springtime is given considerable emphasis by the authoress, which has been suggested largely through the heroine’s physical and spiritual interaction with “patches of blue sky” and “through the sounds, the scents, the color that fill[s] the air”. Furthermore, the writer has contrasted two aspects of setting, the season versus the place, springtime versus the closed room. The spring air is invading the room in which Mrs Mallard has locked herself most of time. At first she tries to resist the mysterious intrusion by “beat[ing] it back”. Here the trees, the swallows and the blue sky are signs of the spring and the spring symbolizes life, while the closed room is a place of mourning, of death. Gradually she learns to accept the new spring life by “drinking in the very elixir of life through that open window”. What is perfectly clear is that one aspect of the setting—springtime, a season full of fresh and intoxicating life torrents—is essential to convey to the reader a sense of the heroine’s new though tragically brief feelings in her great feminine awakening.

The plot of this story, focusing on a seemingly unusual death accident of Louise Mallard, can be divided into three parts. The first part lies in Richards’ occasional access of the sudden accident news of Brently Mallard and his contrived revealing of the news to Louise with the help of the latter’s sister Josephine. Here the author employs the devices of flashback at the very beginning of the story, the foreshadowing about the husband’s return with the hint of the unnecessarily accurate “telegram” and a suspense of the wife’s “grief of storm.” The second part is featured by the psychological waves of Louise, from instant grief to impulsive joy, from the unconscious repression to the clear knowledge of freedom right before the arrival of the crisis and climax of the whole story—the unexpected “survival” of Brently, indicated by his “latchkey” as it is also a crucial key to the cone-hour story. Finally, the self-intoxicated wife is shocked to die from the sight of her husband. And the denouement of the whole plot goes to the vague diagnosis by the doctors. 

For characters, Louise is the very heroine, being a round character who dies coincidentally of heart trouble, but actually dies from a psychological contrast of daily mental repression and unpredictable spiritual freedom. To a great degree she could be understood as a typical spokesman for modern feminism, the doctrine for social gender equality and female spiritual freedom or liberation. When she tastes the first delicious scent of “new spring life,” Louise feels really like “drinking in a very elixir of life”. This kind of sharp transformation of her intellectual experience has been a great irony against her later becoming the very victim of the institution of marriage and failed equal love. The other two important figures in the tale, Josephine and Richards, are in fact foil and flat characters to support the heroine. They may be considered also two good-willed busybodies, pushing the story forward and making the tale plausible. Both of them try to console the pitiable wife and prevent the news from endangering Louise’s life. However, they do not clearly perceive Louise’s inner world and ridiculously “predict” her final death. Furthermore, it is worthwhile to mention the contrastive function of Josephine with Louise. They are totally different: while Louise dies on the way to her pursuit of individuality, her sister still wanders without any consciousness of gender politics. Finally, although Brently, the husband, does turn up towards the end of the story, he might be viewed as an off-stage character. Instead of knowing his personality quite well, readers just can be convinced about his failure in communicating with his beloved and helping the wife’s values successfully realized in the family life. In that sense, he should be an indispensable figure for this satirical short story.   

Similarly, this superbly crafted story highlights the central theme of the feminist awakening of a woman’s significant identity with individuality, independence, freedom and self-reliance both domestically and socially. Through Louise’s ironic story of the short hour, the long-time underlined struggle, conflict and esp. great pain from female values and voices can be penetrated hard. Those symbolic images, namely, “open window”, “patches of blue sky,” “delicious breath of rain,” and “elixir of life”, all cast light on the ever-increasing repressed, inhibited family life and the unprecedented spiritual liberation. Additionally, Louise’s metamorphoses from “fear” and “terror” to “illumination” and “impulse” of “this procession of self-assertion”, is not only a mental pilgrimage for gender freedom, but even a psychological confession of the author’s ardor in confirming the great cause for the 19th-to-20th-centuries women.\\\As concerns the theme, it rests mainly on the criticism towards the institution of unequal marriage in which men have tried to gain the advantage of women in both body and soul. As Louise meditates, she sometimes loves the husband while the husband should bear the dead facial expression. But love has been lost somehow in the marriage. The greatness of this story, if any, should count on a general theme about the implied struggle for “power will” between human beings, not limited to both genders, which reminds readers of the contrastive images between “open window” and “close door”. Although finally Louise opens the door for Josephine, no true human understanding and communication have been achieved other than the shocking death of the former and the piercing cries of the latter. On the other hand, men in reality seldom really know the inner vision of women, for in the conclusion, the doctors and Brently and Richards must have all been convinced about the death cause of the heroine—“joy that kills”, which turns out to be one of the great ironies in the hour. 

As for language style, the most distinctive one may be the employment of ironies hither and thither in the short story. The first one is the ironic contrast of Louise’s feelings for her husband’s death message. She originally expresses grief when she hears the news, but soon she finds joy in it. So Richard’s “sad message ” actually later becomes a happy message for her. Secondly, Richard has at the start hastens to bring the death message, which should be too early for Mrs Mallard, while finally he is “too late” to conceal Mr Mallard from Mrs Mallard. Yet another dramatic irony at the end of the story is the diagnosis of the doctors, who in fact totally misunderstand the joy that kills her: it is not joy at seeing her husband alive, but her realization that the great joy she experienced during the last hour is over. To crown it all, the central irony for the fiction should be concerned with gender and marriage. She loves her husband “sometimes”, but in a way she has been dead. Now his apparent death brings her new life and she is “free, free, free” –but only one hour until her husband walks through the doorway. The dramatic discrepancies between her expectation and reality push her to the stature of a tragic heroine of the age.\\\\\As for language style, The Story of an Hour is a brief story that exhibits Chopin’s complex control over tone. There are many ironies in it, which grow out of error, misunderstanding, incorrect expectation, and a certain degree of pride. In addition, the story raises an ironic question about the nature of marriage as an institution. For a situational irony, originally Louise Mallard is a faithful, loving and dedicated housewife and weeps convulsively at the death news of her husband; once alone, however, she experiences a unique and unsuspected feeling that with her sorrow she has become “free”. Thus she realizes that her marriage has put her in bondage. For the first time she recognizes gap between her life and her hidden hopes and expectation. The typical cosmic ironies in this story count on the three closest persons around the heroine: Richard and Josephine believe in vain that Louise will make herself ill with grief. With best intentions, especially, Richard brings quickly the wrong death message and it is Josephine who becomes the inadvertent\unconscious cause of escorting Louise to the front door to meet the death. Also, through the immediate transmission of the message by telegraph and the final return of Mr Mallard, the inaccuracy and unreliability of information brings about the blow of fate, which everybody tries to avoid for Louise. Another two dramatic ironies. None of other characters understands what the heroine feels truly upstairs. In effect, Louise des alone and lonely even though she is surrounded by the people who love her that much. Still, the story’s crowning situational irony is the discrepancy between normal and conventional ideas of marriage as an ideal and the reality of marriage as a fact. Effective words such as “powerful will” and “blind persistence” suggest that the story goes to the heart of the conflict between freedom and marital obligation. In that sense it has established an attitude of disapproval if not of protest, as concerns the central tenor of feminine awakening.

【短篇评论2：A Cup of Tea            (By Katherine Mansfield)】

范老师范文

For plot, the outline of the story can be analyzed into three episodes according to the shift of setting: the encounter between Rosemary Fell and Miss Smith; the promising women’s talk in the house; the final private talk between the couple in the library. The initiation of the story lies in Rosemary’s shopping in an antique shop when at the door she is asked by the little poor beggar-like girl for some money to buy a cup of tea. There arises the very connection between two women and the rising action develops until Rosemary’s impulse to bring the girl back to home for a decent treatment. The conflict of the story comes to the very point of crisis when Mr Fell intervenes in the women’s talk so that the temporary female friendship collapses into hostility and competition, with the whole story ending up in the surprising yet pathetic denouement of a woman’s return to man’s sordid world as well as the other woman’s return to her original lower class capacity.

As concerns characters in this short story, Rosemary Fell as the protagonist, and, Miss Smith and Mr Fell, two foil characters, deserve much analysis and review. Rosemary, first, is the very round character and the prototype of the woman’s image as a doll in the man-dominated world, esp. the vanity-fair, middle-class, modern society. “Fell”, her surname after the marriage, inaugurates her doomed fall or spiritual degeneration in her personality and female independence. From the first two paragraphs the reader may learn about her corruption and imprisonment in the man’s house and conventional family, as defined by Ibsen in his famous play A Doll’s House, which, critics say, cast great influence upon the author. Later, though, the young, innocent and inexperienced, empty-minded heroine meets with the happy chance to show her instinctive love and good-will for a peer of the same gender from the lower class. This positive change means great significance to her gender identity in the possible talk through a cup of tea although, finally, the meddling of the husband leads to her second change back to the original life situation of dullness, commercialization and man’s control. In contrast, Miss Smith, a household name for everybody in Britain, may stand for a pure, innocent, beautiful yet deleted self , i. e. the other self or ego in a woman’s independent mind of, if any, integrity. The descriptions in the story for her seem more like those for an apparition on the dark rainy day. Her presence serves to help bring out the hidden essential quality of virtue and self-determination on the materialized, brain-washed heroine. Meanwhile, the other static character, Mr Fell, is the typical husband of a patriarchal society and family. A symbolic figure for the middle class, he is unconsciously annoyed by the women’s communion talk in his world and managed to dictate the mind of his wife and thus he ruins the possible spiritual rebirth for the heroine.

As far as the central symbol is concerned, a cup of tea, as the title shows, may be the key image throughout the short fiction. On the surface, the cup of tea means a necessity of a decent life and represents both physical and spiritual warmth, care and comfort. So that’s the reason why Miss Smith pleads for the money for it, which, though, seems to Rosemary more like an opportunity of bestowing a gracious mercy or favor upon the lower class people. On the other hand, the cup of tea indicates, in a deeper sense, a rebellious approach against social patriarchy, in order for women to build up a direct and sincere communication and spiritual communion, as shown through the initial talk between Rosemary and Miss Smith. Meanwhile, the dark rainy winter day suggests the importance of the cup of tea for Rosemary as well as Miss Smith, in that only by communicating with one another can possibly the women obtain mutual understanding and individual gender identity, and can possibly the cross-class communication come into being. Finally, when the husband expects another woman to attend the couple’s “dinner” rather than give a chance for them even to have “a cup of tea”, the patriarchal collective unconscious here is quite obvious.

When it turns to irony in this fiction, three instances can be found throughout. The first one, also the biggest irony, is the clear gap between the reader’s expectation and the final reality for the heroine’s individual changes. For the first half of the story, in the reader’s mind’s eye, Rosemary may probably transform her own commercialized and corrupted life with the help of the tea talk with Miss Smith. By contrast, the finality of the story bespeaks her return to the original state of being in the man’s world. A second situational irony lies in the contrariness between the supposed hostility against the communal talk between the wife and another woman and, in actual fact, his wish to have the dinner with the outsider for her beauty. Last but not the least, the attitude towards Miss Smith by the heroine, jumping from touching sympathy and love to the sinister five notes to make her leave the house, also surprises the reader to a larger extent. All these ironies just testify to the following theme of feminist perspective.

So the very central theme of the short fiction may better count on the feminist perspective: the attitudinal transformation from being a doll like Nora in Ibesen’s play, through the spontaneous pity and love for her peer, and back to the starting fabric of life, typifies the very dilemma for a middle-class woman in the patriarchal social reality. Rosemary’s mental pilgrimage towards the recovery of her basic nature of being a virtuous and compassionate woman has been totally ruined by the powerful cruelty of the man’s moral codes. Hence, the possible women’s utopian love among their community is actually impossible as their cooperation usually goes to competition under the intrusion and disruption by the economically powerful male community. In the final analysis, the middle-class women only leave to themselves the physical indulgence into the vanity fair society of materialization, commercialization and commodification.

As for point of view of this novella, the author mainly employs the third person limited point of view, yet no without a short skillful use of first person point of view at the very beginning of the story. In the first two paragraphs the author seems to introduce briefly the social community or class where Rosemary lives through a man’s dramatic monologue or two men’s dialogue. With a careful observation, it can be found that Rosemary’s middle-class society is full of actually fashion-mongering, hypocritical and philistine dilettantes, both corrupted and corrupting. On the other hand, the special usage of this first person narration in the guise of men fairly discloses the shameful examination and commentary by men for their women like the consumptive objects in the man-dominated world. Apart from this, most of the short fiction is pervaded with Rosemary’s third person limited point of view, through which we know about some thoughts and reminiscences of hers, echoing her egoistic fluctuation between independence and depersonalization, between freedom of will and spiritual imprisonment and confinement for once and all.

【短篇评论3：The Girls in Their Summer Dresses    (by Irwin Shaw)】

范老师范文

As far as setting is concerned, this story takes place on a busy street in 5th Avenue in Washington Square on a November Sunday morning in NYC. That is a place full of people to show the attraction of women in NYC, which is also the very baffling point for the couple named Michael and Frances, the names ordinary enough for every couple in the world. This urban setting, represented later by the bar and a variety of commercial titles of shops and brand names, serves significantly to highlight the metropolitan living conditions of commercialization, materialization and commodification. People, esp. the middle- class men and women such as the Loomis and the Stevensons, have to unconsciously live a non-spiritual life in which they find love and marriage an inexplicable riddle for them after all. Another important element of setting for this story lies in the battalions of girls in NYC. Here the author implicitly insinuates that it is the commercial beauty industry and mass communication propaganda that lead to the vanity and vampirism(勾引人的特质)the modern women or girls, according to the helpless complaints by Michael.

  As for style in this tale, the use of irony is very distinctive here. At least three cases of ironies can be found immediately. First of all, Sunday should be a day for relaxing and for fun. But it ends up differently for Michael and Frances. They get into an argument over the issue of men looking at women in the street. A second one lies in the contrast between the original plan for the wife and husband to have an intimate and private leisure time, yet finally winding up it in the banal trip with the Stevensons. Hence the spiritual emptiness and communicative failure are visibly doomed. A final typical situational irony in this fiction can be the subtle discrepancy between the couple’s expectations from each other: Michael wants to love only his wife but keep seeing other women for himself, whereas Frances hopes that he should love her sincerely in the devoted manner despite the finality when she compromises to wish his silence in talking about other women to her. Here the ironies of the modern familial life succeed in shedding light on the indescribable entanglements of love, marriage duty and individual freedom.

Concerning characters of this fiction, the couple entitled the Loomis, put altogether, may be the only two strong characters in the short story while the Stevensons are just another common couple as off-stage foils in the middle class urban life, not unlike this Loomis couple. Typically, the couple are the representatives of a pair of husband and wife in the modernized world---not caring for a decent life but spiritually living a commercialized and materialized way of life with futility, dullness, paralysis and triviality. In that sense, they stand for everybody in this spiritual wasteland world of the Western 20th century. Between them, in want of a constructive channel of communication for several years of marriage life, until this moment in the story, both of the protagonists confess to each other. Compared to the more innocent wife, Michael, the somewhat sophisticated and philosophical husband, can be considered as a round character, in that he is made into the dilemma of the disgraceful self-exposition to the wife. Before that confession, he takes it for granted as a private secret that he likes to watch NYC girls everywhere; however, now after this Sunday communication with his wife, he actually feels shamed, repressed yet benumbed at his defects and at a great loss at how to better the conjugal happiness. In actual fact, it turns out to be doomed to failure for both the couple. It is typically a modern short story in the sense that this round character does not really experience any dramatic change on the surface at least in his personality.

When it comes to the central theme of this modern novella, it is about the conjugal lives of a married couple, but different in their problems within their relationships, set against the general vanity and hypocrisy of the middle-class lifestyle and values. Michael has a problem of looking at other ladies and then telling his wife Frances what he likes about them. Frances gets frustrated and tells Michael that she doesn't like it when he looks at other women, but he tells she is the only one for him and he love her and only he, and that he shares his ups and downs with her. The only reason he looks at other woman is because he feels it is part of his nature. In this case, the story is stating that relationships are tough because even though Michael's wife told him she doesn't want him looking at other women he still does, but he knows that he has to sacrifice that to save his marriage. Their bar talk will not solve the problem in any way, only to intensify their conjugal difficulties and just ending up with returning to the usual policy involved with another middle-class man and woman to kill time with the commercialized visit to the countryside. \\\The story mainly tells of a young couple’s conflict with commitment and communication. Michael could not deny that he looks at other women, and for this he greatly upsets his wife. She asks for the truth and she can not handle it. He sees women everywhere and has normal thoughts about them. However, that does not mean he doesn’t love his wife or that he thinks she is not good enough for him any more, but that is the woman thought. The events unfold while Michael and Frances’ debate illustrates that this is not their first quarrel on the subject, and that this couple handles their problems with a little alcohol and a buffer zone of friends. So the story provokes this usual dilemma arising in the common conjugal life of this modern world filled with vanity, hypocrisy and corruption of soul and heart. In that sense the author seems to hint the fact that it would be impossible to gain the spiritual communion in this modern world prevalent with the middle class values, or specifically, the American Dream in America.【批评提示】the third person limited point of view: By letting Michael speak and revealing his action we can see the attitude of Michael towards women. He is the kind of the man who is bored with dull life and takes advantage of what NYC has to offer in terms of meeting different kind of women of different races.