characters exchanging items

i always forget this is an option

i keep trying to write stories for y’all & not doing a super good job at it. sorry. but it has made novels more fun to read & movies more fun to watch & narratives in general more fun to consume¹ bc now i’m trying to notice stuff that the authors are doing that i am not doing & could do. & as i believe i have mentioned before, it almost never occurs to me to have my characters mediate their interaction/relationship with objects. but some of my favorite & most-reread/rewatched scenes are about characters giving & taking things

please expect spoilers

the two necklaces in mansfield park

i know a lot of people don’t like mansfield park because fanny is such a boring little goody-goody & her name is fanny which is silly. well i love boring little goody-goodies, sorry haters.

fanny is a poor girl, sent to live with her rich cousins. she grows up being bullied & condescended to. but then she gets hot…

she only has one single accessory, an amber (=on the cheap side, for my male readers) cross pendant that her brother got her while sailing the mediterranean in the british navy. but he couldn’t afford a chain. now he’s visiting & there will be a ball & she’s embarrassed to either go without wearing her cross, or to wear it on a cheap ribbon while the other girls are richly jeweled.

her two love interests both notice her dilemma, & each gets her a chain. one of them contrives with his own sister to trick her into accepting an expensive & elaborate necklace (the text doesn’t directly say this, but it’s implied to be a choker—very fashionable then). the other offers her a simpler, cheaper & longer (=less fashionable) chain, but he offers it politely & straightforwardly—she walks in on him writing her a little note about it.

in the end the cross can only attach to the simple chain. but the previously-ignored girl has two necklaces to wear layered to her ball.

the best thing here is how, when she locks away her necklaces in her jewelry box, she locks up the unfinished letter with them, like it’s just as precious…

the rose bouquet in brideshead revisited

charles ryder & his wife receive tons of going-away flowers from their friends when they set off on a transatlantic voyage; seeing a rose bouquet, charles removes the sender’s card, attaches his own card, & forwards the flowers to the woman with whom he’s about to begin an affair. when she smells the roses, they’re scentless

the lozenge-box is middlemarch

it’s easy to see will ladislaw as a fuckboy. what with the european travels, the abandoned artistic career, the general dilettante-ishness, the ladies who are after him. but he is not a fuckboy & you can tell because of how much he loves to give gifts—to everyone, not just powerful people or beautiful women, but people who can offer him nothing but friendship—& how much everyone loves his presents

dorothea is a beautiful, rich, but very weird young widow who loves justice & charity in general, & in particular has reason to think that much of her wealth, rightly belongs to will ladislaw—but she’s been prevented from righting that wrong. to make things worse she & will have just had a terrible misunderstanding in which he was made to look like even more of a fuckboy than usual.

not long afterwards, while dorothea is visiting her friend the parson, there’s a sudden commotion—the parson’s elderly aunt has lost her little tortoiseshell lozenge-box. when the parson hears that the box was a gift from will ladislaw, he takes finding it very seriously. he talks about will’s kindness to & friendship with this lady who is poor and old & basically has nothing to offer anyone who’s just a fuckboy. the parson doesn’t see how much it’s upsetting dorothea. but the contrast, between this proof of will’s sweetness & thoughtfulness, & the horrible thing that dorothea thinks she has seen him do, totally overwhelms her. she painfully admits to herself that she had been in love with him.

interesting to me: will is too poor to afford to give people much, but he’s totally free to spend what little he has on giving gifts to his friends, while dorothea’s use of her wealth is hemmed in & limited.

the money in jane eyre

the wedding-wardrobe shopping scene does not do it for me. the strings it’s playing are just too obvious. “noooo i don’t want all these fancy, beautiful clothes i’m being forced to purchase~” transparent wish fulfillment

what i really like (what everyone really likes, i’m sure) is the scene where mr. rochester pays jane’s wages.

when she tells him she needs to travel to visit a sick relative, he brings up (before she does, so you’ll know his weird behavior in the rest of the scene doesn’t stem from inconsiderateness) that she’ll need money to travel, asks how much she has. she pulls out her purse: about $30, life savings. he takes it from her hand; she lets him; for a minute this man, already orders-of-magnitude richer than she is, is holding everything she owns. sorry, but that’s good stuff

he offers her ludicrously more money than he owes her. she refuses it—she only wants the money that he owes her as her employer. but obviously,² since he wants to be more than her employer, the amount of money he owes her as an employer is the only amount he doesn't want to give her. he decides to give her less than he owes so she'll have to come back for the rest

the earrings in the idiot

parfyon rogozhin falls in love at first sight with nastassia philipovna, the kept woman of a high-ranking aristocrat. when rogozhin’s strict, close-fisted father asks him to sell a pair of government bonds, rogozhin spends all the money & more on a pair of earrings “with a diamond the size of a nut in each.” but he’s too shy to give her the earrings himself. he asks his taller, better-dressed, smoother friend to go with him. the friend does all the talking; nastassia opens the package, laughs, tells him to thank "his friend mr. rogozhin," & leaves, like accepting such a gift is nothing to her.³

obviously rogozhin’s father finds out, curses him out, locks him in his room, & then goes & grovels before nastassia trying to get the earrings back. realizing that the the gift wasn’t just expensive, but a huge dumb gallant risk, nastassia says the earrings are worth ten times more to her than they were before. she returns them, but even though she’s left without the earrings, she sends her thanks again—this time calling him by his first name………..

the handkerchief in bleak house

a woman at the top of the social pyramid who has lost her daughter receives that lost daughter’s handkerchief from a woman at the bottom of the social pyramid who’s also lost a child. (it occurs to me that it happens offscreen so you don’t see if, say, the rich woman pays the poor woman for it…or helps her out in any way…) they’re not just equalized by grief & loss, the poor woman is actually able to give something to the upper-class woman, that the upper class woman values more than the poor woman does

i’m seeing a pattern here

when i was making this list it didn’t occur to me that basically every example i would be able to think of, would be a man giving something to a woman he’s in love with. in retrospect though i guess i’m not surprised

1. is “consume” the right word here? what is it exactly that one does to a narrative when one experiences it? consume a narrative….use a narrative….play a narrative…..?

2. obvious to the reader, that is. jane is clueless

3. this is meaningful in two ways. the first is that she’s beautiful enough to be used to expensive presents; the second is that, back then, accepting expensive presents from men was a risk to a girl’s reputation. & even if she doesn’t have much of a public reputation, the man paying for her life would obviously not have liked it.