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How novelists create characters and develop relationships is fundamental to the representation of love in prose fiction. This lesson examines the techniques of characterisation — direct and indirect, internal and external — and analyses how the set texts build, complicate, and sometimes destroy the relationships at their centres.
The narrator or another character explicitly tells us what a character is like.
Hardy's narrator introduces Angel Clare with direct characterisation:
"He was the first to feel the influence of the season. He was a young man of the type most easily beguiled by the suggestion of new impressions." (Tess, Chapter 18)
The narrator's authority — and its potential limitations — shape how we receive this information. Hardy's narrator presents Angel as sensitive and responsive to nature, but the phrase "easily beguiled" foreshadows his inability to see Tess clearly.
Character is revealed through action, speech, appearance, the reactions of others, and the character's own thoughts.
Speech: In Persuasion, Captain Wentworth's feelings for Anne are revealed not through direct statement but through overheard remarks:
"Anne Elliot — so altered he should not have known her again!" (Persuasion, Chapter 7)
The cruelty of this remark — reported to Anne through a third party — reveals Wentworth's unresolved anger. He is not indifferent to Anne; he is hurt, and his hurt expresses itself as rejection.
Action: In Jane Eyre, Rochester's love is revealed through actions that are simultaneously generous and controlling — he dresses Jane in expensive clothes she does not want, plans a lavish wedding she finds oppressive, and keeps the secret of Bertha Mason because he assumes Jane will not accept the truth. His love is genuine but shaped by patriarchal assumptions about his right to control.
Appearance: In The Great Gatsby, Daisy is characterised through voice:
"Her voice is full of money." (The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7)
Gatsby's observation is devastating in its precision. Daisy's charm, her attractiveness, her desirability — all are inseparable from her wealth. The metaphor collapses the distinction between the person and the social position, suggesting that what Gatsby loves in Daisy is not a person but a symbol.
One of prose fiction's greatest advantages over drama is its ability to represent interiority — the inner life of characters. How novelists grant or withhold access to characters' thoughts is central to how love is represented.
Jane Eyre's first-person narration gives us complete access to Jane's inner life. We experience her love for Rochester from within — her conflicting feelings of desire and self-respect, her refusal to accept a relationship on unequal terms:
"Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings?" (Jane Eyre, Chapter 23)
The rhetorical questions, the passionate directness, the assertion of her own emotional reality — these are made possible by the first-person voice that gives Jane authority over her own story.
The Great Gatsby gives us full access to Nick's thoughts but only external views of Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, and Jordan. Gatsby's inner life is a mystery that Nick — and the reader — can only infer from his actions and his obsessive devotion to the green light:
"He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it." (The Great Gatsby, Chapter 9)
Nick narrates Gatsby's feelings in the subjunctive — "must have seemed" — acknowledging that he is speculating, not reporting. This restricted access makes Gatsby's love seem larger than life, almost mythical, because it is never fully explained.
Wuthering Heights famously uses multiple narrators — Lockwood, Nelly Dean, and brief interpolations from Isabella, Zillah, and others — to create a fragmented, contested account of Heathcliff and Catherine's love. No single narrator has complete knowledge, and their combined accounts produce contradictions rather than coherence.
The Island of Missing Trees alternates between human narrators and the voice of a fig tree. This unusual narrative strategy places human love within a larger natural and historical framework — the tree has witnessed love, war, and displacement across generations, giving the love story a scope that no single human perspective could provide.
The courtship phase — how characters come together — reveals assumptions about love, gender, and social convention:
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