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Task E - Semantic deviations
Our analysis of Lawrence Passage
It is in the Lawrence passage that we find quite a number of truly unusual
semantic deviations, which underlie some striking metaphors:
-
'Aunt Cissie's green flares of hellish hate' (S3) (hate is
being related to flames here)
-
'the vitriol would spurt in her veins' (S5) (veins contain
blood, not sulphuric acid)
-
'the vitriol would spurt in her veins' (S5) (liquids
only spurt under conditions of heavily contrasting pressure - so blood
could spurt out of an artery, if that artery was slashed, but hardly
inside a vein)
-
'She only seemed it.' (S8) (here 'seemed' appears to be an
intentional verb, meaning something like 'pretended', 'seemed on purpose')
-
'cunningly' (S8) ('cunningly' is not metaphorical if the above characterisation
of 'seemed' is accurate, but it is a fairly unusual adverb and it
would be semantically odd in relation to the more normal meaning of
'seemed', which it is difficult to forget completely)
-
'a cunning heart' (S10) (people are normally cunning, not
parts of them)
-
'the unfresh, stagnant men' (S11) (the concept of freshness
is normally applied to things we eat or drink - meat, fish, vegetables,
water etc)
-
'the unfresh, stagnant men' (S11) ('stagnant' is used specifically
to describe water)
-
'men she had bred' (we normally relate breeding to animals,
not people)
This high incidence (9 in 149 words) of more innovative metaphors is
typical of Lawrence's writing, and helps to show why this passage feels
more poetic than the other two, as well as being more complex than the
examination of sentence length and grammatical structure would suggest.
Note also how often more than one metaphor is packed into one phrase or
one clause. This, in addition to the overall incidence of innovative metaphor,
helps give the writing its intense feel. Moreover, these unusual metaphors
tell us things about the characters and the view of them we are being
given. Those applied to Aunt Cissie help stress her unpredictable and
intense nature, a woman who offends easily and is instinctively likely
to get her own back, even though she may regret her actions later. Those
related to Granny also capture her inner psychological drives, which all
indicate her desire (and so the strength of that desire) to control those
around her. The metaphors characterising her sons do not indicate psychological
drives, suggesting that the two women are more important characters in
the story than the men. The women are intense beings. The men are just
unpleasantly dull!
The Lawrence passage also contains a fair number of unexceptional, 'normal'
metaphors, but as the unusual metaphors are so dominant we will not discuss
them here.
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E
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