Learning Paths » 5C Interacting
Structural analysis of Penelope by James Joyce
by - (2012-02-08)
Up to 5C - Modernist fiction. V. Woolf and J. Joyce
Title
The title refers to the mainy character of this extract taken from Ulysses. The impression elicit by the title is that text's theme will be probably a description of a short piece of female life: to do the housework, to buy flowers, to cure her physical appearence.
Characters
The main character is Penelope as the title suggests. We don't know her physical appearence, but only her social position: she's a middle-class woman, she imitates rich women (she has hanged up wallpaper on her walls), she has to buy flowers, tea and sweets for a young man's visit to her house. Penelope is presented as a sensual woman, attracted by other men and not loyal to her husband as a wife should be.
Space and time
The exctract begins refering to different people, in different spaces but at the same time of the day: the early awakening in the morning. Joyce compares a Chineese woman, some nuns and parrots and the next door resident. The first is combing out her pigtails, nuns and parrots are singing angelus and the last one is awaking after the alarm's ring. The second part focuses on main character's space and time: the narrator tells what Penelope is doing at every time of the morning, her thoughts.
Structure
It's difficult to find a precise structure. The reason is that James Joyce uses the narrative technique called "stream of consciousness", which abolishes punctuation. As a consequence, we can't localize singular paragraphs with different functions each of them. So the structure is linear, the text has not got any visible layout elements to suggest to reader a particular structure.
Language
The language is a medium register language. Its semplicity is in relation with Penelope's social position in that both belongs to a medium level. Stream of consciuosness makes the language runs fluently as a flood. Reader is confused and some times he needs to read again the whole line to separate the text and give it meaning. The language used is a transcription of oral English: there are many words that appeare as a singular, for instance "theyre" or "wouldnt". To add, there are many repetitions through the whole exctract, for instance "yes I said yes I will yes".
The title refers to the mainy character of this extract taken from Ulysses. The impression elicit by the title is that text's theme will be probably a description of a short piece of female life: to do the housework, to buy flowers, to cure her physical appearence.
Characters
The main character is Penelope as the title suggests. We don't know her physical appearence, but only her social position: she's a middle-class woman, she imitates rich women (she has hanged up wallpaper on her walls), she has to buy flowers, tea and sweets for a young man's visit to her house. Penelope is presented as a sensual woman, attracted by other men and not loyal to her husband as a wife should be.
Space and time
The exctract begins refering to different people, in different spaces but at the same time of the day: the early awakening in the morning. Joyce compares a Chineese woman, some nuns and parrots and the next door resident. The first is combing out her pigtails, nuns and parrots are singing angelus and the last one is awaking after the alarm's ring. The second part focuses on main character's space and time: the narrator tells what Penelope is doing at every time of the morning, her thoughts.
Structure
It's difficult to find a precise structure. The reason is that James Joyce uses the narrative technique called "stream of consciousness", which abolishes punctuation. As a consequence, we can't localize singular paragraphs with different functions each of them. So the structure is linear, the text has not got any visible layout elements to suggest to reader a particular structure.
Language
The language is a medium register language. Its semplicity is in relation with Penelope's social position in that both belongs to a medium level. Stream of consciuosness makes the language runs fluently as a flood. Reader is confused and some times he needs to read again the whole line to separate the text and give it meaning. The language used is a transcription of oral English: there are many words that appeare as a singular, for instance "theyre" or "wouldnt". To add, there are many repetitions through the whole exctract, for instance "yes I said yes I will yes".