Chapter 20 weather

Haffeld's nights these days have been long and dreary, and the weather has added to the melancholy.The cold storms began to set in, and all that was left of the July scene was the trees and bushes, which, too, were plundered by the storm; The sight was witnessed for a little longer. Jane Austen (1816) London.The Feast of Michael had just passed, and the Lord Chancellor sat in the lobby of the Lincoln Hotel.The weather in November is unforgiving.The streets were as muddy as a receding flood; it would not be a surprise to meet a Megalosaurus, about forty feet long, waddling like a gigantic lizard up Mount Holborn.The smoke hung low from the tops of the chimneys, like a black drizzle, with flakes of ash as big as snowflakes—those flakes, as you might imagine, mourning the death of the sun.The dogs were stuck in the mud, making it difficult to tell; the horses were not much better, with mud splattered on their blindfolds.Pedestrians jostled each other under umbrellas, grumpy, and slipped on corners; the number of slips and falls had been countless since daylight broke (if such a day dawned at all).The mud piled up thicker and thicker like a copy, sticking to the sidewalk and never letting go.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853) Apart from depictions of strange storms at sea, little attention was paid to the weather until the end of the eighteenth century.By the nineteenth century, novelists seemed to be talking about the weather.This is partly because of the growing and growing tendency to appreciate nature, beginning with Romantic poetry and painting; Feelings not only affect people's perception of the objective world, but also are affected by the objective world.As Coleridge said in his "Ode to the Waste": Oh lady!Giving and giving are connected, There is only nature in life.We all know that the weather affects people's moods, and a novelist can invent all kinds of weather conditions to suit a certain mood he or she creates.

Weather, therefore, is often an inducement to what John Ruskin calls the effect of misplacement of affection.The so-called misplacement of emotion refers to the projection of human emotion on various phenomena in nature.He writes: "Objective things make impressions on us, all strong emotions ... produce in our minds against these impressions a falsity, which I sum up as "misplacement of emotions. ’” As the name suggests, Ruskin saw this as a bad thing, a symptom of the degeneration of modern (compared with classical) art and literature, and indeed, that such a method of composition often An excuse for indulgence. But when used judiciously and carefully, it is also a rhetorical device, with a fluidity and infectious efficacy, without which a novel would be much impoverished.

Jane Austen, like Augustans, was skeptical of the romantic imagination, and the novel makes a lot of irony about it in the portrayal of Marianne.Marianne was very passionate about autumn, and said loudly: "Ah! How pleasant it is to watch these leaves falling under the blowing of the wind while walking! These leaves, the seasons, and the fresh air are so dreamy." Ah!" Her sister Eleanor commented honestly after hearing this: "Not everyone has feelings for dead leaves like you." In Jane Austen's novels, the weather is often a social influence on characters. Practical factors that have a significant impact on life, rather than metaphorical signs that reflect the inner world of the characters.The snow in Chapters 15 and 16 is an example of this.The first mention of snow was in the middle of Mr. Weston's pre-Christmas dinner, when Mr. John Nantley, who had not wished to attend, entered the parlour, and gleefully announced that "there's a snowstorm outside," thus rendering Emma sickly Mr. Woodhouse, the father of his father, trembled with fear.Afterwards, there was a lot of discussion, and the people present were talking all over the place, and nothing was realistic, but everyone's words reflected everyone's personality.In the end, it was Mr. George Nantley who checked the weather outside himself and made a reasonable report to everyone, which calmed everyone down.He and Emma decided that, since Mr. Woodhouse was restless, and could no longer be at peace, it was better to summon the carriages, and let them go home.Mr. Elton then took the opportunity to sit in Emma's carriage, be alone with Emma and propose to her.This was a great surprise to Emma, ​​and also embarrassed her, because she always thought that the other party was pursuing her protege, Harriet.Fortunately, the bad weather for the next few days created an excuse for her to avoid meeting either party:

The weather was in her favour...the ground was covered with snow, thawing, making it difficult to move around.Every morning it was either raining or snowing, and at night it was frost. In this way—for several days, she became a most honorable prisoner.The weather is described here because it is relevant to the story, but it is described without exaggeration. Still, Jane Austen occasionally and unabashedly employs the technique of emotional misplacement.When Emma's luck is at its lowest ebb as she discovers the truth about Jane Fairfax and is embarrassed by what she has done; she also realizes that she is deeply in love with Mr Nantley, But it was too late, for she had reason to believe that he was going to marry Harriet--all of which made that day her worst. "The weather adds to the melancholy," Ruskin would surely point out, that the weather must not produce such emotions.But the summer storm is a true analogy for the heroine's apprehension about the future, because her stable and prominent position in the small and closed social circle in the sea makes it possible for her to marry Harriet to Nantley. This "cruel scene" was witnessed "longer".However, something strange and unreasonable happened: the next day, the sun rose again, and George Nantley came to propose to her.

Jane Austen's use of the "misplacement of emotion" technique is subtle and subtle, while Dickens' use of it in the opening paragraph of "Bleak House" is blatant, like a blow to the head , let people epiphany. "The weather in November is not forgiving." It is a common colloquial phrase to anthropomorphize the weather and call it "intolerant"; The stories are closely related. "It's like a great flood receding", this sentence is reminiscent of both the description of God's creation in "Genesis" and the story of the Great Flood.The following mentions the ancient creature Megalosaurus and the exhaustion of the solar system from entropy. The author uses typical Victorian techniques to mix the biblical story with a more modern post-Darwinian cosmology, which produces a jaw-dropping defamiliarization effect.

In a sense, this is a portrayal of nineteenth-century London on a rainy day, a typical montage of simple but authentic details: thick smoke hangs low from the top of the chimney... the dog is stuck in the mud and it is difficult to tell ...horse blinders splattered with mud...crowded umbrellas.But Dickens's imagination is quite metaphorical. He transformed this ordinary scene into an apocalyptic hallucination, making people seem to see the proud cities of the British Empire reduced to primitive swamps; Life will eventually be extinct.This metaphorical shift from flakes of ashes to flakes of snow to mourning the death of the sun is especially amazing.

The kind of screenplay we'll come across often in science fiction hereafter (Megalosaurus waddling up Mount Holborn is reminiscent of dinosaurs scaling the Empire State Building; "Death of the Sun" is the equivalent of H.G. Wells' chilling ending, and postmodernists like Martin Amis predicting the end of the world, etc.).This excerpt presents and denounces the concept of a society that has been corrupted by greed and corruption and has lost its essential meaning.Dickens then discusses this with an intricate plot centered around a controversial estate.The city of London's mud is piling up in the form of reproduction. This sentence is very witty, reminiscent of the story in the Bible that denounced the dirty money.This paragraph begins with a description of the Chief Justice (using a series of concise declarative sentences, like the headlines in the "Ten O'clock News") presiding over the Great Court. It seems that this judge also presides over the weather matters in the heavenly court. Later, there was a clear statement: "The fog has never been so thick, and the mud and puddles have never been so deep. This is to match the style of the Supreme Court's judgments that have no laws and random things. The harm of this kind of court between heaven and earth today Sex is greater than sinners of all ages."