Analysis of an Extract from ‘The Singing Lesson’

Mansfield has used long sentences that suggest ongoing thoughts and emotions of the character Miss Meadows surrounded by a busy hecticenvironment. The subordinate clauses inject lots of extra information for the reader, and the power of three “hurried, skipped, fluttered” effectively portray imagery of an autumn morning. However, the past tense of the three verbs breaks the previous present tense imagery, suggesting that the narrator is clasping onto something from her past. “Hollow” and “drumming” imply drums and have connotations of emptiness, an element of Miss Meadowspersonalitythat has possibly been affected by her past.

The description of the bird links back to the imagery of the autumnal morning, and are an example of the modernistic movement about the thoughts in our subconscious. Another example of this is the last sentence “Someone had dropped her dumbbells” which is totally unrelated to anything in the first passage, but shows another thought forming in the character’s mind. It reminds us as the reader that it is a modernist piece of writing, with an abstract writing style which is more like ‘real-life’.