Table of Content
A. Brief summary of the story of "The Threshing Floor"
B. Analysing the formation of the character of Hannah Claremont
1. How does Hannah Claremont want to be seen by the other characters
2. Characterisation of Hannah by her interaction with others
3. To what extend does the narrator take part in the characterisation
4. How does the reader finally see Hannah Claremont
C. Classifying the genre of the text
Bibliography
A. Brief summary of the story of "The Threshing Floor"
"The Threshing Floor" by Barbara Burford tells the story of a black lesbian woman, who's lover just died and how she struggles to cope with her grief and to get her life back to normal again.
Hanna Claremont, the main character of the story, has been in love and living together with her lover Jenny for twelve years. After her last radiotherapy they know that Jenny does not have very much time to live and Hanna decides to stay away from work and with her to take care of her. Soon after this Jenny dies and with her death Hanna's world falls apart. That's where the story of "The Threshing Floor" begins.
Hanna has to get over her grief, at least get back into normal life again. So she decides to go back to her job again and work in the glassblowing business she started together with some friends of hers. Now she is confronted with her friends, whom she neglected during Jenny's illness and did not allow to be there for her. When she starts to work again, she also starts to get better and slightly forgets about her grief over Jenny's death. She soon is fully involved in the business again and gets back some of her self-confidence. After some weeks Caro, the second black woman at Cantii Glass introduces her to Marah, who used to baby-sit for Caro. The two women at once feel attracted by each other and finally fall in love.
B. Analysing the formation of the character of Ha nnah Claremont
Every short story, novella or novel has different figures in it. They act and interact with each other, sometimes express their thoughts and show certain characteristics. These figures may be flat figures, that is represent stereotypes, or turn out to have a personality, just like a real human being. In any case the characters in a story are one of the main points that are responsible for a story to be accepted by the reader as worth reading, liked by the reader or even making so strong an impression on the reader that he really is moved by what happens to the characters.
In the following work I want to analyse how the character of Hannah Claremont is built up throughout the story by having a look at what information the reader gets about Hannah Claremont. First of all by the way she behaves, talks and thinks about herself, second trough her interaction with other characters and what they say about her and third, if the narrator takes part in the characterisation and if so, to what extent.
1. How does Hanna Claremont want to be seen by the other characters
The reader gets a very good impression of the two main characteristics of the protagonist, Hannah. One is, that she not very seldom has to make up her mind, whether to act according to her feelings or her ratio. The second, that she always wants to be seen in a slightly different way by everyone, than she really is: she pretends to be the strong, black woman who can deal with all problems, all her sorrow herself. The reasons for her building this wall around her and getting into this inner conflict between mind and emotion lies back in her childhood and is explained to the reader in several flash-backs. There are many passages in this text where she wants to proof to herself and everybody else, how strong she is. During the first few weeks after Jenny's death she does not want to see her friends, even though they would like to be there for her, to help her trough this hard time. Caro, the other black woman at Cantii Glass and a very good friend of Hannah said to her, after she came back to work in the studio again: "I kept hoping you'd reach out ..." (p.124), but Hannah admits: "I don't know why ... I needed you. But, I couldn't ask." (p.125). And also when Heather, a close friend of he rs, comes up to see her at her house, it is not the case that Hannah lets Heather take care of her, but Hannah, who is instantly by her side to hold her "[w]ith the strength gained from the practise of her craft" (p.93), as Heather is about to fall unconscious after she confessed to Hannah: "I've always been so jealous of her (Jenny)!" (p.93), because she fell in love with Hanna as well, though not being a lesbian. So Hannah is undoubtedly a very strong woman in a physical sense, the fact of Heather being pregnant at that moment even putting more emphasis on this characteristic of hers, but emotionally she always tries to hide her feelings from other people and keep her emotions perfectly under control. She admits to Heather that she feels like she had to "[e]xplode all over the landscape" (p.98), and in the next second she already feels "wary and a little ashamed at the abrupt exposure of a small part of her pain" (p.98).
Hannah building up a wall around her and not letting anyone get close to her real, deepest feelings is the product of her unhappy childhood. Her mother did not want her, so she gave her away and Hanna had to grow up in a children's home in South London. The Hendersons, a young couple who used to take her home with them for the weekend wanted to adopt her, when they moved away from London, but has to learn the her real mother had not set her free for adoption. One day Hanna tells Jenny about her childhood: "Up until that moment, I'd balanced my disappointment about losing the Hendersons, especially Nina, with the thought that she, my mother, must love me if she didn't want anyone else to have me. But when I found out that she masqueraded as one of those bloody visitors to observe me ... that really blew my fuse. Jenny, it used to be awful! They made us feel as if we wee in a zoo." (p.160). Considering a child to be treated in this way, it is no wonder at all that Hannah keeps back her emotions from other people to protect herself from being hurt again. She just trusts the one she loves: Jenny. This is already proved by telling her about her experiences.
2. Characterisation of Hannah by her interaction with others
Hannah is not as strong or untouchable, as she pretends. She is very capable of having strong emotions. For her it is hard to understand and accept that Jenny is dead, and gone for ever. She searches the room in which Jenny wrote her books, Jenny called the room her "Threshing Floor" (p.88), over and over again for some last words of Jenny, because she is "unable to believe that Jenny had left her no word. No final message." (p.89). And even after weeks she still wakes up in the middle of a rainy night and, realising that Jenny does not any longer sleep next to her, "Hannah cries out" (p. 86).
On page 101 there is another example for Hannah really needing the help of her friends and at the same time not accepting that her dead lover is not still with her in a certain way. After she gave Heather a lift to her house, she feels unable to drive back home again: " "I can't go home," she whispered finally to Jenny, "I can't." Feeling ashamed and guilty at her reluctance to risk ending her life in a pile-up on the motorway." . So she calls her friend Elaine, who takes her home with her. When Hannah starts excusing for her call, Elaine says: "Hannah, when are you going to admit that you're not superwoman?" (p.102). Elaine was Hanna's roommate at collage and knows her very well. She can see through her masquerade she builds up for the rest of the people.
Hannah on the one hand builds this wall around her to protect her feelings, which might to the reader show a very selfish and harsh person, but on the other hand Hannah is always there for her friends and takes care of them when they need her. This characteristic of hers just stands back during her time of grief. She used to baby-sit Zhora, Caro's daughter and also support the idea of Caro only working during school hours, because she had to run her household and take care of Zorah as well.
Nikki, who works at Cantii Glass as an apprentice probably earns not as much money as the women who founded Cantii Glass and work professionally. Hannah used to pick her up on her way to work, so she could save the bus fares. When Jenny needed Hannah to stay at home and help her with her work, she was a writer, and with the household, Hannah gave Nikki the money for her bus tickets, pretending it came from a petty cash. So as Nikki asks the others for her money out of the petty cash, as Hannah is not there to take care of it, it turns out that there is no petty cash for this cases. Nikki is embarrassed and angry about Hannah to bring her in this position, not even realising that Hannah had paid the money from her own pocket and when Hannah finally comes back to work everybody is happy except for Nikki.
But this is the smaller reason for the quarrel that comes up between Hannah and Nikki. Hannah tends to be a very attractive person, which might be based on her outer appearance, her big, muscular body and her wild hair, but surely to the bigger part comes from her friendly, joyful character and the hearty way she deals with people. Unfortunately she attracts some of her friends in so strong a way, that they fall in love with her. So Hannah, if she recognises at all, prefers to ignore that fact: " ´(...) You never even noticed that I loved you ...´ `Yes I did,´ Hannah said quietly, sitting back against the edge of the desk. `But you decided to ignore it: Like you ignore anything that you don't want to see.- Ignore it, and it will go away.` " (p.123). And first it seems really to be a characteristic of Hannah, because Caro also accuses her: "You're very good at making people feel that they are important to you, but you're also too bloody good at ignoring them when something else comes up. You're so damned singleminded, Hannah, and so downright mean-spirited, you wouldn't even share your grief with us, with me!" (p.136). But since this refers to the way Hannah tried to get over her sorrow, Caro also tells her that after having thought about it, she changed her mind: "You had a right to your feelings, and how you coped.(...) Oh, I think you were wrong [not accepting our help], but it's not your problem how we've reacted to it." (p.137).
3. To what extend does the narrator take part in the characterisation
Most of Ha nnah's character is build up by her own actions and reactions, by what she says and how she interacts with her friends. But still this are just the most obvious things about the character of Hannah Claremont. What is even more is the work the narrator fulfils: he brings the character so close to the reader, that he gets the impression of knowing the character very well, to fully understand how Hannah feels. He might even be able to identify with the actually virtual, just invented protagonist. So how is it possible to bring a rather one dimensional character, or better figure, constructed only by a certain lining up of words so close to the reader, that he might be able to understand his feelings or even identify with him.
In "The Threshing Floor" the narrator is an undramatized one, this means he is not involved in the story. He also does have some qualities of an omniscient narrator, since he knows about Hannah's thoughts and feelings, but can not be called one because he does not know of those of the others. The reader might get the impression of the story being told by Hannah Claremont herself, because of the load of information the narrator has about Hanna's feelings and inner thoughts and also of the very exact defined extensions of her relations to the other characters in the story, even though there is no prove for this claim. What is for sure is that the character of Hannah is brought closer to the reader by the bits of almost hidden information the narrator provides.
For example Hannah's love to her work as a glass blower is expressed by the intense relation she has to some of her pieces, where "Hannah's body remembered making it." (p.89). The narrator speaks of "Hannah's body" remembering how she made the bowl, not just of "Hannah". For her the work as an artist is not just a mental thing, but something her whole body is fully involved in. She also digests her feelings, mainly positive ones, in her pieces, but could not work for a long while because she had to take care of Jenny, and obviously had not too much positivity in her to create a new piece. So when she starts to get over Jenny's death she also gets interested in her work again: "For a while she watched the clouds being herded westwards by the wind, idly considering ways of catching and holding the shapes, colour and movement in glass. Unaware that this was the first time for months that she was feeling the desire to work glass, she drifted off to sleep." (p.108). It is also the working as an artist and expressing ones feelings in this way that finally makes Hannah's interest in Marah turning into love, as Marah shows her her work: " `These are yours?´ It wasn't really a question. She knew. The vibrancy, the sense of colour, the sheer singing joy of them were the final pieces of the puzzle tha t this woman presented." (p.177). This are just a few examples out of the many the text contains. There are even more of the kind of extraordinary usage of descriptions of what Hannah experiences audiovisuslly, or senses, like the "smile in Marah's voice" (p.181).
It is also the narrator who gives the information of problems appearing to be solved for Hannah to the reader, just like after the conflict with Nikki: "Nikki began to laugh, the first natural laugh that Hannah had heard from her since she had come back, and suddenly everything slotted back into place for Hannah." (p.144).
4. How does the reader finally see Hannah Claremont
First of all I have to say that the figure of Hannah Claremont is not a flat character, no stereotype. What makes her a bit outstanding is, that she is a black lesbian artist, but considering her feelings and thoughts, the way how she deals with her grief, you can say that she is just a person like you can meet one everywhere in everyday life. But that is exactly what makes it difficult to lay out a one dimensional characteristic of her. The thoughts of human beings don't follow logical patterns all the time, they step left and right off the straight way. That is what makes a human being having a character and not only being a stereotype. Surely Hannah Claremont at the age of 36 is old enough to have developed a finished personality, she knows what she wants and where she wants to get to. But there are many different ways for a human being to get from point A to point B. There is always a struggle of reason against feeling inside. Your reason forbids you, what your emotions tells you to do. And you can't ask anybody for the right decision, because there is no right decision predefined.
So Hannah Claremont sees herself as the independent woman, who can deal with all her problems herself. She doesn't need anybody. Nobody except for the person she loves, probably. And this person is Jenny. But unfortunately Jenny just died and that is the cause of the problem she has to deal with now. The reader gets an impression why she wants to handle everything herself. She has been disappointed to often in life jet. That started when she found out, living in a children's house, that her mother gave her away, for what reason so ever, but still wants to see her, going to the children's house, pretending to be a visitor looking for a child to foster. Hannah in those days built up a friendship to a young couple, and when they had to move further away from the children's house, they wanted to foster her. But her mother did not give her permission. Not because she loves her daughter, this is for sure. In the text there is no further reason given. So if the reader does not understand it, how is a child supposed to understand it? Considering all the problems, Hannah had to deal with during her live, from being neglected as a child up to having to bury her lover at the age of about 36, her character turned out very well. She is a reliable friend, a very good and respected artist and still able to love, what might be the most important and satisfying thing in our world today.
C. Classifying the genre of the text
It is not very easy to classify this text. Some might say it is a short story, some might say it is a novella. Surely it is not a novel. The argument against the novel theory is simply the fact that on the one hand the text is to short to be a novel and on the other hand the story plays in a rather short period of time, which might be about two to three month at most. To mark off a novella, which I want to prove here "The Threshing Floor" to be, from a short story is a bit more difficult. Actually the novella is a kind of a longer short story and does not have an intention, that means does not want to teach a moral lesson, as we learn from Josef Kunz's "Novelle". The difference between a short story and a novella is the inner action that develops very much in a novella, but does not do so in the short story. Compared to the short story "Dreaming the sky down", where a girl retells the events of a night where she could fly, by the same author as "The Threshing Floor", where the story- time is about as long as the discourse time, in "The Threshing Floor" the story time, covering some months, is far longer. And just like in the characterisation of Hannah Claremont, also the arguing considering this point boils down to the inner feelings of the main character. Because the progress of the story is based on the change of Hannah's feelings from the beginning of the story, where she feels the grief over Jenny's death, over her coming back to her job and experiencing the joy to work glass again, to finally getting to know Marah and finding out about their similar love to work as an artist and falling in love with her.
The following graphic shows in a very simplified way how the Hannah's life changes throughout the story:
H's need and ability to work
Hannah's dependence on Jenny
H'S grief and sorrow over Jenny's death H's interest in Marah love H's love for Jenny (does not fully vanish)
Jenny's death H gets back H gets to H falls in to work know Marah in love with Marah
Bibliography
- Burford, Barbara, Dreaming the sky down in The Threshing Floor, Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books, 1987.
- Burford, Barbara, The Threshing Floor in The Threshing Floor, Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books, 1987.
Frequently asked questions
What is "The Threshing Floor" about?
"The Threshing Floor" by Barbara Burford is a story about Hanna Claremont, a black lesbian woman, coping with the grief after her lover, Jenny, dies. The story follows Hanna as she returns to work, reconnects with friends, and eventually finds new love.
Who is Hannah Claremont?
Hannah Claremont is the main character, a black lesbian woman and glassblower. She is portrayed as a strong, independent individual, but also struggles with grief and emotional vulnerability. She has difficulty accepting help and hides her feelings from others due to experiences in her childhood.
How is Hannah Claremont characterized in the story?
Hannah is characterized through her actions, interactions with other characters, and the narrator's descriptions of her thoughts and feelings. She is shown to be independent and strong, but also emotionally guarded and conflicted. Her interactions with friends reveal her tendency to hide her pain and difficulty in accepting support.
What is Hannah's relationship with Jenny?
Jenny was Hannah's lover of twelve years. Jenny's death profoundly impacts Hannah, causing her significant grief and affecting her ability to function. The story revolves around Hannah's journey to cope with this loss.
How does Hannah interact with her friends after Jenny's death?
Initially, Hannah isolates herself from her friends after Jenny's death, refusing their support. Later, she reconnects with them, although challenges arise due to her past behavior and emotional distance. Her friends, particularly Caro and Elaine, play a crucial role in helping her navigate her grief.
What role does the narrator play in developing Hannah's character?
The narrator, although not a character within the story, provides insight into Hannah's thoughts and emotions. This enables the reader to understand her motivations and struggles, creating a more intimate portrayal of her character.
What is Hannah's profession?
Hannah is a glassblower and runs a glassblowing business (Cantii Glass) with friends. Her work serves as both a creative outlet and a means of coping with her emotions.
What is Cantii Glass?
Cantii Glass is the glassblowing business that Hannah runs with friends. It's a significant part of her life and becomes a place where she can slowly return to normalcy after Jenny's death. It is also the place where she meets Marah.
Who is Marah?
Marah is a character introduced later in the story, a former babysitter for Caro. Hannah is attracted to her and they eventually fall in love. Marah's artistic nature and shared passion for art contribute to their connection.
How does Hannah and Marah's relationship develop?
Hannah and Marah are drawn to each other and quickly form a romantic relationship. Their shared passion for art deepens their bond and helps Hannah move forward after Jenny's death.
What is the genre of "The Threshing Floor"?
The text is classified as a novella, a longer short story that focuses on inner action and character development rather than teaching a moral lesson. The progress of the story is based on the changes in Hannah's feelings from the grief of Jenny's death to finding love with Marah.
- Quote paper
- Jörg Schneider (Author), 1998, The Characterization of Hannah Claremont in Barbara Burford`s "The Threshing Floor", Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.hausarbeiten.de/document/95545
