Climax of Action: Gordon tells the men that the wife is dead and is buried farther down the line; he whistles “to let her know he’s safe.”
Presentation. “It made a neat little story,” Mr. Kline says of the engineer’s reclamation and present custom of signaling. But without the supporting band of workmen to throw it into relief it would hardly stand alone. The group becomes, then, an integral part of the 1,500 word narrative which is given to the reader.
Characterization. The girl, whose name is not even mentioned, is the most potent character—or, perhaps, love as expressed through her makes her, symbolically, dominant. The engineer is the most important, by virtue of his active rôle; the workmen are the background characters, as they come under the influence of the simple demonstration of affection; they are the foreground characters, as the story is presented. What traits are manifest in various individuals of the group? How do these traits sharpen the dénouement?
Setting. Why is Virginia chosen?
Details. What contribution is made by the choice of “Annie Laurie”? On what thought does the final bar end? Did you, as you read, notice this sinister clue? Why not?
LITTLE SELVES
Starting Point and Structural Processes. “You were right,” Miss Lerner says, “about my knowing ‘the prototype of old Margaret.’ And every one of her storied recollections is a real one, told for the most part in her own words. She still insists so stoutly on the reality of the ‘little old man with the high hat,’ the bewitched churn, the fairies’ chairs and tables, that one ends by believing in them, too. So you see the material came ready to my hand. All I had to do was to vivify it, and cast it in the most dramatic form possible.
“Old Margaret is not dead, however. She reads and re-reads ‘Little Selves,’ and says she can smell the peat fire and hear the kettle humming on the hob. It was an old friend of hers who died—of cancer, as the story ran; and Margaret used to spend many an hour talking with her those last days. Their reminiscences, however, were of the time of their young womanhood; they did not meet in the old country.
“All this cherished material had long lain in my mind. Its greatest appeal to me perhaps depended on the fact that I, too, had always been an inveterate ponderer of moments of my extreme childhood. Even at eight or ten, I used to re-live isolated moments of particular interest from my ‘past,’ which even then seemed bathed in a ‘livelier light.’
“The final impulse came one day on hearing Stevenson’s phrase, ‘Nothing matters much that happens to a boy after he is seven.’ At once I saw the whole story. Margaret must die, of course, and dying revisit the scenes of her childhood. That bit of manipulation would heighten and intensify the whole tale. She must be a single woman, too, instead of a wife and the devoted mother of a difficult but promising daughter. She must be considerably older. She must retain her skill with the needle, and her piety. So I simply jotted down half a dozen words to name the several incidents of her dream, then began to write, visualizing the opening scene as I went. It was like transcribing at some one else’s dictation matter already an intimate part of one’s spiritual life. Isn’t that the way one’s best things come? I wrote only one rough draft, then the final copy. Hardly a word was changed. The title, oddly apt, I think, came to me when I wrote the line, ‘She recreated her earlier selves and passed them on, happy in the thought that she was saving them from oblivion.’”