The extract we should analyze comes from the story The Bath by Janet Frame. It is a short story, describing the life of an old lady, who lives absolutely alone, as she is a widow -her husband has been dead for seventeen years. The author describes her day-to-day routine. She still grieves for her husband, constantly visiting his grave and taking care of it by planting flowers. She is constantly thinking about the sense of her life and her loneliness. The author is famous for her ability to reveal a grim aspect of human experience and describe the nature of life in an unusual way. In the Bath she creates the atmosphere of total loneliness and irrelevance. The main character does not even have her name, the author constantly calls her “she”. The reader knows more about her dead husband, whose name and the date of death are written on the grave. Leaving the main character nameless, the author underlines her total insignificance in the world. The first paragraphs of the story depict her preparations for another visit to her husbands grave.
The strange thoughts come to her mind. She feels so tired that she wants just to lie and fall asleep on the grass among the graves. This moment underlines the great tiredness of her body and, which is more important, of her soul. The next paragraph leads us to the extract we should analyze. It is the description of the main characters daily routine such as meal preparation and heating water for the bath as ”visits to the cemetery, doctor, and to relatives, to stay, always demanded a bath” (“Story of Ourselves” 68). The preparation for the bath takes a long time and has its own peculiarities “she found a big towel, laid it ready over a pair, arranged the chair so that should difficulty arise as it had last time she bathed she would have some way of rescuing herself” (“Story of Ourselves” 68). We can see from the procedure, it is rather difficult for the elderly woman to get out of the bath and, moreover, the author shows her remembrance of the troubles, connected with the last time, she took the bath “should difficulty arise as it had last time she bathed”(“Story of Ourselves” 68). Though, the author does not go into the details of the main characters previous problem. It is one of the main peculiarities of the extract and the text in the whole – it is told in indirect style, form the point of view of the elderly woman, using long sentences, imitating her thoughts. We can see that the woman has a fear for that procedure.
The view from the rim of the bath scares her, it “now seemed more like the edge of a cliff” (“Story of Ourselves” 69). Though, having decided to get in, she finds herself in the desperate state. She cannot get out. Showing the helplessness of an old lady, the author stresses the importance of the relations in human life. The main characters thought conveys her loneliness “if I shout for help, she thought, no one will hear me. No one in the world will hear me. No one will know I am in the bath and cant get out” (“Story of Ourselves” 70).The repetition of the pronoun “no one” helps the reader to understand it better. The total physical failure underlines the tortures of being alone in the age. Being trapped in the bath, she has no one to help her. Trying to get out, she has pulled the plug and the has the feeling that water try to “drag her down, down into the earth”(“Story of Ourselves” 70). This corresponds to the idea of the bath being the symbol of death, comparing it with the grave. The need of an old person in someone to be near can also be seen from the main characters thoughts about her husband “”if John were here, she thought, if we were sharing our old age, helping each other, this would never have happened” (“Story of Ourselves” 71). The episode under analysis ends with the main characters hysterics, caused by the realization of her poor state, “she panicked and began to cry and strike the sides of the bath; it made a hollow sound like a wild drum-beat”(“Story of Ourselves” 71). Rather childish, it was the reaction of an offended person on this cruel world.
The extract under analysis represents us the key point of the story. Including it in her work, the author manages to achieve a strong effect of the loneliness and physical weakness of the old woman, underlining the need of all old aged people in close people to solace them. Janet Frame creates the oppressing atmosphere of anility and irrelevance, using strong metaphors and similes in the description of the bath, so that the reader can understand the death motif of the story. This extract is one of the key points in creating the atmosphere – the mood of the story peaks in the scene with the bath. Being unable to get out of there, the old woman is buried alive in metaphorical sense – she has no interest for life and the bath is like a grave for her soul.
Works Cited
Story of Ourselves. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print.