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How novelists create characters and develop relationships is fundamental to the representation of love in prose fiction. Character is not a person but a construction — an effect produced by narrative method, and the central insight for A-Level is that we never "meet" Tess, Gatsby or Catherine; we meet a set of techniques (narration, speech, action, appearance, the reactions of others, imagery) that a novelist deploys to make us feel we know them. This lesson examines those techniques and analyses how the anchor texts build, complicate and sometimes destroy the relationships at their centres — and how a novel's gradual, accreted characterisation compares with the swift, single-stroke characterisation of a beloved in a love poem.
Spec Mapping — Paper 1, Section C: prose (Love Through the Ages comparison). The dominant AO is AO2 (analysis of the methods of characterisation — direct and indirect, interiority and its restriction). AO1 supplies the terminology (direct/indirect characterisation, interiority, the Byronic hero, foil, idealisation). AO3 locates character types in their period (the "fallen woman," the self-made man, the Byronic lover); AO4 compares the construction of a lover in prose with the construction of a beloved in poetry; AO5 brings named critics to bear on how we judge these figures.
The narrator or another character explicitly tells us what a person is like. Hardy's narrator introduces Angel Clare directly, and revealingly through retrospective framing:
"Angel Clare rises out of the past not altogether as a distinct figure, but as an appreciative voice, a long regard of fixed, abstracted eyes, and a mobility of mouth somewhat too small and delicately lined for a man's." (Tess, Phase the Third, Ch. 18)
Direct characterisation is never neutral, because its authority is the narrator's. Note that Angel is introduced as a memory ("rises out of the past") and as a set of refined, almost feminised parts — an "appreciative voice," "abstracted eyes," a mouth "too small and delicately lined for a man's." Hardy presents him as sensitive and aesthetic, yet the phrasing quietly seeds his failing: a man of "abstracted" vision, attuned to the ideal, who will prove unable to see the real Tess. Direct characterisation thus sets up an ironic gap the rest of the novel exploits.
Character emerges through action, speech, appearance and others' reactions. Fitzgerald characterises Daisy almost entirely indirectly, and most devastatingly through sound. Gatsby's verdict on her voice, endorsed by Nick, is the novel's most efficient act of characterisation:
"'Her voice is full of money,' he said suddenly. That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money — that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it." (The Great Gatsby, Ch. 7)
The metaphor collapses person into wealth: what is "inexhaustible" in Daisy is not feeling but money, its "jingle" and "cymbals' song" the music of a class. The line characterises Daisy (charming, moneyed, finally unattainable) and Gatsby (a man in love with a symbol) in a single stroke — and it characterises Nick too, in the dawning "I'd never understood before." Earlier, Gatsby's own self-construction is given to us through Nick's narration in quasi-scriptural terms:
"He was a son of God — a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that — and he must be about His Father's Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty." (The Great Gatsby, Ch. 6)
The yoking of the sacred ("son of God") to the tawdry ("vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty") characterises Gatsby as a figure of magnificent self-invention founded on illusion — a man who has imagined himself into being.
Prose fiction's great advantage over drama is interiority — the capacity to render the inner life. How much access a novelist grants, and to whom, is a primary determinant of how love is represented.
We have full access to Nick's mind but only external views of Gatsby, Daisy and Tom. Gatsby's interior is a mystery the reader, like Nick, must infer:
"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, Ch. 9)
The modal "must have seemed" marks this as Nick's speculation, not report — and that restriction is generative: by never explaining Gatsby from within, Fitzgerald keeps his love mythic, larger than psychology. We feel its grandeur precisely because we cannot reduce it to motive.
In Wuthering Heights, the lovers' inner lives reach us only through other voices — Nelly's narration, Lockwood's frame, embedded letters. Even Catherine's most absolute avowal of identity with Heathcliff —
"Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being." (Wuthering Heights, Ch. 9)
— is a reported confession, framed by a listener who dismisses it. Brontë withholds unmediated access on principle: the love is so far beyond social comprehension that it can only be transmitted second-hand, which is why it generates contradiction rather than coherence.
Hardy's narrator can enter Tess's consciousness but characteristically renders her from a tender, observing distance, so that she is felt as a victim of forces — fate, society, men — as much as an agent. This is why the question of Tess's agency is so contested (see AO5), and it is a direct consequence of how Hardy distributes interiority.
One of the most radical techniques in the anchor texts is the characterisation of lovers not as two separate people but as a single divided self — a method that makes the relationship constitutive of identity. Brontë's Catherine articulates it with startling directness, choosing Heathcliff over Edgar not on grounds of attraction but of being:
"...and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." (Wuthering Heights, Ch. 9)
The comparative "more myself than I am" detonates ordinary characterisation: Heathcliff is not Catherine's complement but her substance, more essentially her than she is. This is why Brontë cannot characterise the two independently — to describe Catherine is already to describe Heathcliff, because the novel posits them as one identity in two bodies. The technique has profound consequences for how we read the love: it cannot be a matter of preference or compatibility (the stuff of the conventional courtship plot) because it is a matter of ontology. When Heathcliff later cries "I cannot live without my soul!" (Ch. 16), he is not using hyperbole but stating the novel's literal premise. Compare this with Fitzgerald's opposite method: Gatsby and Daisy are characterised as radically separate — he a self-invented "son of God," she a voice "full of money" — so that their love is precisely a failure of fusion, a man in love with a symbol who can never become one with it. Brontë characterises love as identity; Fitzgerald characterises it as unbridgeable distance. The contrast is a gift for comparative thinking.
Novelists characterise not only directly but relationally — through foils (characters who contrast to illuminate) and love-triangles (which force a defining choice). Catherine is characterised by the choice between Heathcliff (the Heights, passion, her "self") and Edgar Linton (the Grange, civilisation, security); Edgar exists largely to throw Catherine's wildness into relief, "as different as a moonbeam from lightning." Tess is caught between Alec d'Urberville (predatory sexuality, false aristocracy) and Angel Clare (idealising spirituality, real gentility) — two men who between them represent the body and the spirit, both of which destroy her, so that the triangle characterises Tess as a woman crushed between incompatible male demands. Gatsby's triangle with Daisy and Tom characterises all three: Tom's brutal physicality ("a cruel body," Ch. 1) foils Gatsby's romantic idealism, and Daisy is characterised precisely by her inability to choose decisively between them. Analysing characterisation through structure — who is set against whom, and what the contrast reveals — is a more sophisticated move than describing characters in isolation, and it connects characterisation directly to the love plot.
AO3 — Context: The technique of the self-dividing lover ("he's more myself than I am") draws on Romantic conceptions of the soul and of elective affinity — the idea, current in Brontë's intellectual moment, that two beings might share a single essential nature. Fitzgerald's characterisation of love-as-distance, by contrast, is distinctively modern: Gatsby's beloved is mediated by money, class and self-invention, so that desire is entangled with social aspiration in a way that would be unthinkable in Brontë's metaphysical frame. To compare the two methods of characterisation is therefore also to compare two historical theories of what a self, and a love, fundamentally is.
Relationships in the novel are processes — they have shapes (courtship, crisis, resolution) that themselves carry meaning. Across the anchor texts the patterns differ instructively:
| Text | Courtship | Crisis | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tess | Angel idealises Tess in the Talbothays pastoral, ignorant of her past | Tess's wedding-night confession; Angel cannot forgive (Phase the Fifth, Ch. 35) | She murders Alec, is arrested at Stonehenge and executed |
| The Great Gatsby | A repetition: Gatsby tries to recreate his 1917 love and "fix everything just the way it was" | The Plaza confrontation; Daisy cannot say she never loved Tom (Ch. 7) | Gatsby is murdered; Daisy retreats into her marriage and class |
| Wuthering Heights | A childhood bond on the moor, never socially sanctioned | Catherine's marriage to Edgar; her death (Ch. 16) | Heathcliff's grief becomes vengeance across two generations |
The shapes are arguments. Hardy's arc bends a pastoral courtship toward sacrificial death to indict the double standard; Fitzgerald's circular, backward-reaching "courtship" embodies the impossibility of repeating the past; Brontë's love survives death only to deform into destruction. When Heathcliff learns of Catherine's death, the relationship does not end but mutates:
"I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!" (Wuthering Heights, Ch. 16)
The chiasmus-like repetition ("my life... my soul") makes the beloved constitutive of the self — and so her death does not release him but unmoors him, transforming love into the engine of revenge that drives the second half of the novel.
Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights) is the supreme Byronic hero — dark, passionate, morally ambiguous, an outsider whose intensity is inseparable from his cruelty. The type, named for Lord Byron, supplies a lover defined by excess, possessiveness and contempt for convention.
AO3 — Context: The Byronic hero descends from Byron's verse tales and scandalous public persona; Emily Brontë, steeped in Romanticism, reworks the type in Heathcliff but refuses its usual redemptive arc. Unlike many Byronic lovers, Heathcliff is not reformed by love; his passion fuels tyranny. Recognising the convention lets you measure Brontë's deviation from it — the analytical, not merely descriptive, use of context.
The idealised, passive feminine ideal — the "Angel in the House," after Coventry Patmore's 1854 poem — is a type the anchor texts deploy and dismantle. Angel Clare loves an ideal of Tess ("a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature") rather than the woman herself, and that idealisation is precisely what destroys her when reality intrudes. Daisy appears to embody feminine grace, yet beneath the charm Fitzgerald exposes carelessness and moral vacancy — Nick's late judgement that Tom and Daisy "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money" (Ch. 9) is the anti-blazon that demystifies the ideal.
AO5 — Critical Interpretations: Penny Boumelha argues that Tess is constructed as much by the narrator's and Angel's gaze as by her own actions — she is idealised into vulnerability. On Gatsby, Marius Bewley ("Scott Fitzgerald's Criticism of America," 1954) argues that Gatsby's love for Daisy is inseparable from a corrupted "American dream," so that the beloved is less a person than the focus of a vast, doomed aspiration. Both critics treat the idealised beloved as a symptom — of patriarchy, of a national myth — rather than a portrait, which is a powerful lens for characterisation analysis.
A technique easily overlooked, but central to the anchor texts, is characterisation through names — the names a novelist gives, withholds, or lets a character invent for themselves. Fitzgerald's protagonist is the supreme instance: the man born James Gatz of North Dakota renames himself "Jay Gatsby," and Nick's narration treats this self-naming as the founding act of the character. The new name is the verbal sign of the "Platonic conception of himself" from which, Nick tells us, "Jay Gatsby... sprang"; to change one's name is to claim the American right of self-invention, to declare that one is the author of one's own identity rather than the product of one's birth. The discarded name "Gatz" carries the immigrant, lower-class origin that Gatsby spends the novel trying to erase, and the gap between "Gatz" and "Gatsby" is the gap between the real man and the dream he has willed into being. When Nick calls him "the man who gives his name to this book" and yet a man he "disapproved of... from beginning to end," the very title — The Great Gatsby — becomes ironic: "Great" is the epithet of a self-made legend, applied to a bootlegger, so that the novel's name participates in the same mythologising self-naming as its hero. Characterisation here is inseparable from nomenclature: to analyse "Gatsby" the name is to analyse Gatsby the construction.
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