658349328743289

Chapter 7: Conveying Characters’ Thoughts in Style
83
Another example is in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1887), when Anna and
her husband, Karenin, go to the races. Vronsky and his horse fall at the last
fence and Anna ‘began fluttering like a caged bird, at one moment getting
up to go, at the next turning to Betsy’. Her distress reveals to Karenin that
Vronsky is his wife’s lover.
Revealing hidden emotions with subtlety
One advantage of using body language to convey feelings is that you don’t
need to spell out the emotions to your readers, because they’re able to pick
up what’s going on themselves. If you say ‘she was upset’, readers aren’t
likely to feel upset, whereas if you describe the character’s body language,
they’re more likely to feel the effect in their own bodies and thus experience
the emotion directly.
Here’s a passage that subtly conveys a character’s feelings through unconscious
actions, in this case fiddling with an object:
‘Mrs. Robert Ferrars!’ – was repeated by Marianne and her mother, in an
accent of the utmost amazement; – and though Elinor could not speak,
even her eyes were fixed on him [Edward Ferrars] with the same impatient
wonder. He rose from his seat and walked to the window, apparently
from not knowing what to do; took up a pair of scissors that lay there,
and while spoiling both them and their sheath by cutting the latter to
pieces as he spoke, said, in a hurried voice,
‘Perhaps you do not know – you may not have heard that my brother is
lately married to – to the youngest – to Miss Lucy Steele.’
—Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility, Penguin, 1969,
first published 1811)
In this passage near the end of the novel, Elinor discovers that Lucy Steele is
married not to Edward, as she feared, but to his brother Robert. This leaves
Edward free to declare his love for Elinor. This act of cutting up the sheath
that holds the scissors shows how distracted Edward is and the difficulty he
experiences in expressing his feelings. It also could be seen symbolically as
showing that he no longer needs to conceal his passion (Freud would certainly
have had something to say about this!).
In the following pivotal scene from The Remains of the Day, Miss Kenton tries
to take a book from Mr Stevens’s grasp:
She reached forward and began gently to release the volume from my
grasp. I judged it best to look away while she did so, but with her person
positioned so closely, this could only be achieved by my twisting my
head away at a somewhat unnatural angle.
—Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day, Faber and Faber, 1989)