4.3–Key Components of Novellas

Many close reading strategies that apply to other literary forms also apply to novellas. For example, as with short stories, novels, drama, and film, you will want to identify and think about the novella’s major elements in order to prepare to dive deeper. You can begin to do this by annotating specific passages in the work. Think about these notes as the beginnings of a conversation with the literary text. Essentially, as you read, the work speaks to you; in making notes, you speak back to it, noting the things that strike you as curious, unusual, or just plain interesting. These annotations serve many purposes:

• They can help you discover significant patterns. For example, you may notice that Chopin repeats the word “solitude” seven times throughout The Awakening. How might this observation deepen your understanding of what Chopin is trying to convey about Edna and her world?
• They may guide your engagement with the scholarly conversation. During your research, you might discover that, in her notebook, Chopin added the words “A Solitary Soul” beneath the title.^[1] Once you know this, how does the repetition of the word “solitude” and its meaning to the story as a whole expand?
• Your notes can identify areas that you need to research, such as details about the setting, definitions of unfamiliar words, and translations of words in other languages. You might even jot down definitions or translations in the margins to help you when you are participating in classroom discussions and reexamining the section when writing your literary analysis essay.
• All of the above contribute to achieving a deeper understanding of the work as a whole. This will prepare you to engage in classroom dialogues and write your literary essay. (See Chapter 1 for a sample annotated page from one author’s own copy of The Awakening.)

When reading or working with digital texts, you can use free online tools like Hypothesis to make annotations.^[2] In Hypothesis, you can annotate a web page by yourself or with a group. Your annotations in Hypothesis can be made private (only you or people you select see your notes) or public (accessible to anyone using the tool). Your instructor may even use Hypothesis to facilitate a class or group annotated copy of an assigned text, so you can virtually read along with your classmates and instructor.

As with any short piece of literature, consider why each element is included. For example, why does Chopin use so many words to describe the locations in The Awakening? This is notable because this novella is so short that publishers often include a selection of Chopin’s short stories when releasing it in hardcopy or digital editions. Below, we will focus on specific literary elements of the novella, many of which are shared by other forms, with examples from The Awakening. When applicable, we will compare The Awakening with other literary texts mentioned in this textbook to illustrate the novella’s specificities.

Plot & Conflict

In addition to novellas often focusing on a singular character, you may also think about the intensity of novellas as produced by a limited plot. While their storylines likely involve the same plot elements (rising action, conflict, climax, falling action, and resolution or perhaps denouement) applicable to much conventional narrative fiction, novellas compress those elements, creating a form between the short story and the novel in its ability to focus intensely but develop more extensively. Similar to the short story, a novella concentrates on a singular plot but can explore it in more detail than the length of a short story allows; however, the novella’s plot is more restricted in length and scope than that of a novel.

For example, in The Awakening, the arc of the plot focuses entirely on Edna and the struggles that ensue for her. In terms of the length of time covered in the novella, Edna’s “awakening” spans only a few months, from summer to autumn. In comparison, a short story such as Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby” (1893) takes place over a shorter period of time (with only glimpses of action over the course of about two months), and a novel like Jane Eyre extends over Jane’s lifetime, from childhood to adulthood. Novels have more room and therefore a greater capacity for development of plot, whether over time or in terms of detail or both. In addition, Jane Eyre includes multiple subplots (like the mystery of the woman in the attic), whereas the storyline of The Awakening concentrates intensely and solely upon Edna’s internal conflict.

Conflict in any narrative fiction is usually the driving force of the plot. Generally, plots follow a typical trajectory, all the parts of which are related to the conflict:

1. The rising action provides the reader with the circumstances of the conflict;
2. The climax directly involves the conflict;
3. The resolution is the settling of the conflict, whether satisfactorily or not;
4. Finally, the falling action and/or denouement give us an idea of what happens after the conflict has been settled.

Conflict can be internal, external, or both, and these types of conflict are often very much intertwined with one another in novellas. For example, Edna attempts to express her internal conflict to Adèle when she states in Chapter XVI: “I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself. I can’t make it more clear; it’s only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.”^[3] Here, she begins to wrestle with the idea of what constitutes her essential self as opposed to her life, and this internal conflict is certainly tied to external conflicts over gender roles, perceptions of women’s sexuality, and expectations for mothers. While internalizing her conflict, she also struggles externally in her societal roles. The two types of conflict inform one another in telling ways as Edna finds that her inability to live authentically is a direct result of the ways in which she is viewed as a woman, a wife, and a mother in her time and place.

Narrator

As in other literary forms, identifying the point of view (the perspective of the storytelling) helps situate us as readers. To identify the point of view, it is helpful to describe the narrator, or who is telling the story. Literary scholars use the following terms to describe the narrator(s). A first-person narrator speaks from their own perspective, often using the pronoun “I.” Jane in Jane Eyre is the first-person narrator, and all thoughts, feelings, and actions come from her perspective. A second-person narrator directly addresses the reader(s) as “you,” pulling the reader in as a character in the story. A second-person narrator would say something like, “You walk down the street,” to indicate the action of the story. This narrative style is not common in fiction but does occasionally appear, such as in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996). Palahniuk’s narrator also serves as an excellent example of an unreliable narrator, a character in their own right and one whose perceptions and account are not to be taken at face value. A third-person narrator tells the plot without using “I” pronouns; the narrator in this style seems disembodied from the text because they are likely not a character. It is tempting to conflate a third-person narrator with the author, but remember that writing fiction is an imaginative act. Literature is not an exact replica of reality; it is also a way for authors to imagine scenarios and other perspectives. This means that the viewpoint of the narrator is not necessarily the same as that of the author.

One way to recognize the difference between the narrator and the author is when the narrator does not know everything that the creator of the novella’s world presumably would. Narrators can be omniscient, or all-seeing, which means that they know and can describe everything in the storyworld, including what all of the characters are thinking and what motivates each of them. In contrast, a limited narrator is restricted to a particular character; in this point of view, the author only writes what a specific character would know or feel. If the seemingly disembodied storyteller is only telling you things that a specific character would know, this is an example of a third-person limited narrator.

Remember from the chapter on the short story that narrators can be unreliable, which means that they may not be telling a credible story. To determine if a narrator is reliable or unreliable, practice fact-checking their statements with evidence from the text.

Characters

Due to its focused concentration, the novella generally has fewer characters in contrast to the novel, which has the textual space to include many characters (sometimes developing them and sometimes not). As you will see in Chapter 5, Jane Eyre focuses on the titular character but contains many other dynamic characters (characters that change significantly over the course of the story). In contrast, static characters do not change during the story. Characters can also be flat (undeveloped) or round (complex and well-developed).

Since novellas often focus on the protagonist (main character), the other characters are often flat and static. These characters often act as foils. The term “foil” originates in jewelry making, where a piece of foil was used to cover the back of a gemstone in its setting in order to make it shine and glitter more intensely. In the literary sense, the purpose of a foil is to provide a contrast to another character, often the protagonist. Character qualities are illuminated (or made to shine more intensely) through this comparison. In The Awakening, consider how the character of Adèle acts as a foil to Edna. What does comparing these two women illuminate about Edna?

When populating character lists, remember to look out for characters without names. The Awakening has several unnamed characters, such as the lady in black on Grand Isle. Characters who are (what we would now refer to as) Black Americans also appear, often not by name but by outdated terms that denoted race and class in post-Civil War Louisiana.

Setting

As mentioned in Chapter 3, “The Short Story,” setting includes both location and time. When reading a novella, you may easily skim over the details of time period and locale, but setting is integral to the development of the plot and conflict. Consider how different The Awakening would be if it was set in a landlocked U.S. state like Edna’s birthplace of Kentucky. How would the novella’s plot and theme develop differently without the ocean? As you will see in the sample essay at the end of this chapter, setting is very important for the plot of The Awakening.

Researching the time period or location, especially when you are unfamiliar with one or both, can illuminate your understanding of the text. Histories or geographies of a place can help you get a sense of what a novella’s setting might be like, and works of art can visually represent how places looked. You could explore the TAMU Libraries’ Quick Search for books and articles about nineteenth-century Louisiana or about the experiences of women in the South during this time period to help you better understand the subtleties of the text. There are also databases like Artstor where you can look up works of visual art like photographs and paintings that can help you envision the space inhabited by the characters.

Additionally, since The Awakening is a novella, the setting is limited to only two major locations: Grand Isle and New Orleans. Because there are only two, we may easily consider how those compare to one another and what meanings Chopin creates with that comparison. What major events take place in Grand Isle? What happens in New Orleans? Where does the novella begin and end? How does Chopin use these two particular settings to reveal important information about Edna’s experiences? The sample essay at the end of this chapter develops an interesting argument about these two settings and the ways in which Chopin employs them to contribute to the meaning of her work.

Symbols & Motifs

As you read in Chapter 3, which discusses the short story, symbols work in literature in many ways, including as conventional symbols (items such as a wedding ring or a rose), characters who may function in part as symbols, symbolic settings, and symbolic acts. Symbols may be “universal,” a term intended to signal that these symbols are easily recognized by many people (although the concept of universality is a slippery one in our world where so many different cultures exist, with some symbols shared but many more that are culturally specific). In every way, however, symbols work to compress meaning into a very small space, using something to mean more than its dictionary definition. For example, according to its dictionary definition, a bird is “any of a class (Aves) of warm-blooded vertebrates distinguished by having the body more or less completely covered with feathers and the forelimbs modified as wings.”^[4] As mentioned in Chapter 3, however, birds are often identified as symbols of freedom and, when they are caged, as symbols of oppressed freedom. Take a look at the first few lines of The Awakening:

A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over:

“Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That’s all right!”

He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood, unless it was the mocking-bird that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty [sic] notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence.^[5]

A group of symbols that are akin to one another make up a motif. Motifs are, simply put, repeating and meaningful patterns. If you’ve studied music, you may be familiar with the term leitmotif, a particular strain of music that is repeated throughout the work to signal a certain character, location, or action. Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf is an excellent example of leitmotif, wherein not only particular strings of notes but also particular instruments signify specific characters. In literature, motifs are often achieved by the repetition of symbols. After you’ve read The Awakening in its entirety, you may want to consider how the accumulation of similar symbols (for example, the green and yellow parrot, the mockingbird, Mademoiselle Reisz’s definition of an artist, Edna’s “Pigeon House,” and the bird in the conclusion) all work together to create a motif in the novella. What do you think that motif may be, and why is it important to consider how all of these symbols work together as a motif in order to help us achieve a deeper understanding of Chopin’s work?

Looking ahead to Jane Eyre, you’ll notice that birds again play a symbolic role in the meaning of the novel. Similar to The Awakening, this novel uses these symbols to create a motif that adds to the reader’s understanding of Jane’s life and progress. Unlike the novella, however, where this motif is focused upon intensely in a very brief space, Jane Eyre interweaves these symbols at particularly significant points in her narrative. This is in part because the novel is an expanded form with many settings and characters, and so it has the time and room to develop the idea of the significance of birds more slowly and with much more information to go on in order to understand, over time, what they may signify. For the novella, however, where time and space are short, meaning(s) must be compressed, and symbols, packing together to make a motif, may be used more frequently in order to convey meaning(s) more effectively.

Word Choice

As with every piece of literature, you should pay particular attention to the earliest words the author gives you to read: the title of the work. You may not (and probably won’t) have a sound theory about the title’s meaning until you’ve finished the piece, but you can begin to consider why the author named their work in this way. Further, as you read, you’ll begin to formulate ideas and arguments about what the title might signify (keeping in mind that there may be many meanings in the work and thus many ways in which the title may function to point to those meanings). Authors may also include epigraphs, which are quotations from other works placed at the beginning of a text (the text as a whole or chapter divisions) that help to set the tone of the piece. This chapter, for example, includes an epigraph to immediately let our readers know that the novella is a difficult form to define.

As you consider the author’s diction, take time to look up unfamiliar words and translate non-English phrases. This will not only help broaden your vocabulary, but you may discover important meanings that may have been glossed over or misunderstood. The Awakening contains words that are not frequently used in modern-day English, and to glance quickly over these words means that you will miss things that are important to a deeper understanding of the novella. For instance, consider setting again: the action of The Awakening takes place in Louisiana among nineteenth-century upper-class families, many of them Creole, thus making the use of French words and phrases frequent and vital to understanding the characters. In order to illustrate this point, let us return to a quotation we examined above. The first sentence of the novella includes French (spoken by a parrot in a cage):

A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over:

“Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! [Go away! Go away! Good Heavens!] That’s all right!”^[6]

The bracketed phrase translates the French to English. These words—what they mean and the symbolism attached to who repetitively squawks them—immediately establishes an image of confinement and frustration before we are even introduced to Edna, herself.