Topic 6 (session A) - Style and Style variation > Authorial and text style > Task D > Our analysis of Lawrence

Task D - Our analysis: Lawrence

Like the Austen passage, the Lawrence passage concentrates on social relations (though more narrowly, within a family: cf 'Granny' 'Aunt', 'Mater'). And also like the Austen, we are involved in the value-laden perceptions and attitudes of characters (and the narrator) to another character (though this time the lexis is much stronger emotionally, and as much psychological as to do with social (family) power: cf. 'hellish hate', 'vitriol', 'cunning', 'power'). These semantic fields can be seen in the lexical repetitions (again, different grammatical forms of the same lexical item are grouped together):

The repetitions in this passage are not quite as revealing as in the other two passages as some of the repetitions ('sometimes', 'thing') are not very specific, but nonetheless, the pattern of repetitions relate reasonably well to the dominant semantic fields we have already mentioned. Repetition is a well-known aspect of Lawrence's writing style, and when it is on more significant words it often leads critics to see him as an insistent, tub-thumping writer.

Lawrence, like Austen, goes in for elegant variation too, which helps to explain why his writing seems less simple than Steinbeck's even though his sentences are shorter:

'Granny' (S1) and 'Mater' S2)
'Aunt Cissie' (S2, S3) and 'poor thing' (S4)
'green flares of hellish hate would go up' (S3) and 'vitriol spurted in her veins' (S5)
'she prayed' and 'tried to obtain forgiveness from heaven (S4)
'unfresh' and 'stagnant' (S11)

Note that this elegant variation is less extensive and also less complex than that of Jane Austen, helping to confirm the intuition that the Austen passage is the most complex of the three. But it does not just show the viewpoints of different characters to one another. It is also used to bring out different aspects of the same thing (e.g. Aunt Cissie's prayers why she prayed). The syllable count for the words in this passage also suggests that the Lawrence passage is intermediate between the other two in terms of complexity:

Syllable count

We have coloured the 2-syllable words green, and the 3-syllable words red:

But Granny held her in her power.(1) And Aunt Cissie's one object in life was to look after the Mater.(2)
Aunt Cissie's green flares of hellish hate would go up against all young things, sometimes.(3) Poor thing, she prayed and tried to obtain forgiveness from heaven.(4) But what had been done to her, she could not forgive, and the vitriol would spurt in her veins sometimes.(5)
It was not as if Mater were a warm, kindly soul.(6) She wasn't.(7) She only seemed it, cunningly.(8) And the fact dawned gradually on the girls.(9) Under her old-fashioned lace cap, under her silver hair, this old woman had a cunning heart, seeking for ever her own female power.(10) And through the weakness of the unfresh, stagnant men she had bred, she kept her power, as the years rolled on, from seventy to eighty, and from eighty on the new lap, towards ninety.(11)

Syllable statistics:

We also provide the Austen and Steinbeck figures below for comparison.

Lawrence's proportion of single syllable words is intermediate between the other two writers. His proportion of two-syllable words is the same as for Austen, but the three-syllable proportion is nearer Steinbeck's, and like the Steinbeck passage, the Lawrence extract contains no words at all that are longer than three syllables.

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