Local Color.
A. Setting: The locality is conveyed in the first sentence. Where is it repeated, and how? What contrasts do you find in the larger setting? What details, for example, contribute to the Oriental characteristics? Which to the American? Value of the opium? of the schooner of beer? of the ivory sticks? Why is the flat (page 5) described in detail as to furnishings? (Give two reasons, from two points of view.) What is the value of the contrast between indications of wealth and of the neighborhood features?
B. Customs: What customs testify to Captain Abdullah’s intimate acquaintance with the Chinese?
C. Speech: Compare the Oriental matter, manner, and meaning with the American matter, manner, and meaning.
D. Dress: What bearing on character have the accessories of dress? Yung Long’s bowler hat, his loose sleeves and fan, Fanny’s furs, the earrings of jade, and the bracelet—all serve what purpose?
Atmosphere: Captain Abdullah says (page 4) “the tale is of the Orient.” Note that he has secured the Oriental feel, or atmosphere, modified slightly by the American intrusion, through the harmonizing of character, speech, dress, customs,—above all, by emphasizing the things “which matter most to the Oriental.” Contrast to similar Occidental characteristics is subordinated to the intensification, and is, therefore, contributory to the larger impression.
As to the short-story, Captain Abdullah thinks that length has nothing to do with it. “It can be seven hundred words long, or seventy thousand. As to the latter length, I consider Frank Swinnerton’s Nocturne a short-story.” And he offers as a tentative definition this: “The short-story is a story grouped logically about the same character and characters, every bit of plot and action working together to affect, influence, and make a background for the same character and characters, eliminating, in contrast to a novel, all side issues.”...
THE SACRIFICIAL ALTAR
Germinal Idea. “It is so long since I wrote ‘The Sacrificial Altar’ that I am rather hazy. My impression is that I set out to draw a born artist hampered by certain disabilities, and one of these being a disinclination for life and utter absence of the love instinct, all the forces of his nature concentrated upon his art, until they reached the point of obsession. It was not until after he had written the last book that he reacted to the normal instincts he had inherited and which had been automatically developed by the most normal bourgeoisie on earth.”—Gertrude Atherton.
Analysis of Plot.