Maria response question 2

When reading the first part of Maria I thought that it was narrated in the third person as one would find in may fictitious novels.  The reader is introduced to the characters and the setting in which they are found.  Maria is imprisoned in a mad house with only one person looking to care for her named Jemima.  Jemima becomes a friend and tells her stories of others in the institution.  The author is setting the scene to the reader as the dull chamber, the dying garden, and Maria’s deepened pain from the separation of her child is described in detail.

It feels as if we are the audience looking at a movie following each character and absorbing the situation in which this woman is thrust into.  We don’t know why she is there, until later, but the central characters are deepened when they share their own life’s story, being assistant narrators of sorts.  Maria is allowed to befriend a man named Darnford first through correspondence than in meetings outside the chambers.  We hear of Darnford and his twisted life.  We get a sense of him being a player as he was “taught to love by a creature I am ashamed to mention; and the other women with whom I afterwards became intimate, were a class of which you can have no knowledge.”   His morality comes into play later in the story.  His story is brief and Jemima begins to discuss her life in details that parallel Maria’s.

Jemima shares her story and the book seems to turn from Maria and further into the hardships Jemima endures.  I believe this is where the narration from third person is slowly switched to first person as the reader is getting closer to the character.  It’s like telling of a story by a friend of someone whom you are not intimate with.  It may be an exciting story but lacks the closeness one feels when hearing it directly from the person themselves.  Jemima tells of her story with such reverence, detail, and emotion that I forgot the story was about Maria!

I believe the author used third person to set the scene to describe the general feeling of the story.  I then feel she wanted us to become intimate with the characters and when Maria was describing her own tormented life the author used “I” and “my” more frequently to draw us closer.  This is why I feel Darnfords story is kept shorter whereas Jemima and Maria lives were told in detail, being first person, to allow the reader to know their characters and compare their similarities more closely.

Maria shares with us “an idea of the petty cares which obscured the morning of my life; continual restraint in the most trivial matters; unconditional submission to orders, which, as a mere child, I soon discovered to be unreasonable, because inconsistent and contradictory.  Thus are we destined to experience a mixture of bitterness, with the recollection of our most innocent enjoyments.” (pg 76)  Jemima had a similar statement in her story as she stated “ I was, in fact, born a slave, and chained by infamy to slavery during the whole of existence, without having any companions to alleviate it by sympathy, or teach me how to rise above it by their example…….. he (her master) contrived to be alone in the house with me, and by blows-yes; blows and menaces, compelled me to submit to his ferocious desire”