Characterisation and Relationships

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.

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Techniques of Characterisation

Direct Characterisation

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.

Indirect Characterisation

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: