“COMENTARIO DE TEXTO SOBRE UNO TRABAJADO” ASYNCHRONOUS ASSESSED

ASSIGNMENT (1ºB) (40% of total mark)

1ST PARTICIPANT’S:
SURNAME AND NAME:
ID number (DNI or Passport number
GROUP: 1º B1

2ND PARTICIPANT’S:
SURNAME AND NAME:
ID number (DNI or Passport number):
GROUP: 1º B1

Important aspects:

a) BOTH PARTICIPANTS HAVE TO SEND THIS SAME FILE THROUGH THE

CORRESPONDENT LINK IN THE CAMPUS VIRTUAL.
b) You have to use THIS FILE in Word format (not PDF).
c) Use Times New Roman 12, simple spacing between lines, margins as they are already settled in
this file.
d) You have to demonstrate that you have read the short story that the questions refer to by giving
precise names and details taken from the story.
e) You have to apply the theory that you have learned in this course to the particular aspects that you
are going to comment on. So, you also have to use precise terminology and correct spelling.
f) You have to follow the instructions in the “Guide for the Literary Commentary” that we have used
in this course.
g) You have to justify your answers with quotes taken from the excerpt that you are analysing.
(include line numbers).
h) You have to use correct English and academic writing.
i) Don’t use bold letters, underlining, different colours, etc.

Excerpt for the literary commentary

And then she stayed motionless as though frozen to stone. She had heard the creak of the
gate into the road. Her husband had returned.

For a moment Alix stayed as though petrified, then she crept on tiptoe to the window,
looking out from behind the shelter of the curtain.

Yes, it was her husband. He was smiling to himself and humming a little tune. In his hand
he held an object which almost made the terrified girl's heart stop beating. It was a brand
new spade.

Alix leaped to a knowledge born of instinct. It was to be tonight...

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This literary excerpt is taken from the short story titled “Philomel Cottage”, which was written by
the most widely read English author after Shakespeare, Agatha Christie (1890-1976). This short
story was first published in a magazine called “Grand Magazine'' in 1924. However it was
moreover published in 1934 in a compilation titled “The Listerdale Mystery” and in a book called
“The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories” (1948) in the United States. It was very
common to first publish individual short stories in magazines and then in collections. Agatha Miller,
better known as Agatha Christie, was born in the Devon area in Torquay in 1890 to a wealthy
family. Agatha is one of the most important British authors of the Golden Age of detective fiction.
She started writing stories and poetry at an early age. She wrote more than 60 novels, plays and 15
volumes of short stories. All of her work has been translated into over a hundred different languages
and has sold out millions of copies. Her work was so successful that there are even countless films
and television adaptations. Nevertheless, her popularity has overshadowed its high critical
reputation; her plotting is very repetitive, her characterisation is wooden and her narrow point of
view.

The historical and cultural context in which Agatha Christie wrote “Philomel Cottage '' was
Modernism, the Golden Age of detective fiction more specifically. As we should know, detective
fiction is one of the subgenres of Modernism, which is defined by the mystery at the middle of the
story that is finally solved by a character who is normally a detective, by observation and deduction.
Modernism is a movement that appeared during the 19th and 20th centuries. This movement was a
search for new forms of expression. Some of the characteristics of modernist literature are:
individualism, where the individual is more interesting than the society and the world is presented
as a challenge for the characters; experimentation, because writers broke with old techniques and
tried to experiment with new ones; symbolism, which was not something new but the way
modernists used it was an innovation; and formalism, because writers saw writing as something
more serious, like a craft. The Golden Age of detective fiction refers to detective fiction produced
between the two World Wars. The most important British authors of this Golden Age were Dorothy
L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Anthony Berkeley and obviously, Agatha Christie.
These writers tend to focus on clever and intriguing plots. In their novels, there are multiple
suspects. Their characters are frequently members of upper middle-class society. Events usually
take place in rural or village settings.

The excerpt given before belongs to the short story called Philomel Cottage. This short story is
about Alix, a woman in her mid-thirties, who met Gerald in a friend’s party. A week after they met,
they were engaged to get married. However, before they met, she had received unexpected news;
her distant cousin had died, leaving all her money to Alix. Dick, a man from her past who was in
love with her, began sending threats to Gerald. One day, Alix found her husband's diary. After
looking through the diary, she could not find the name of any other woman than her own. From then
on, she began to obsess about the fact that he had another woman. In the middle of that obsession,
she searched for a drawer her husband kept locked and found some newspaper clippings that talked
about a serial killer named Charles LeMaitre. After reading the documents and looking at the
photos, Alix began to see similarities between Gerald and the murderer. This caused her to become
obsessed and she believed that he wanted to kill her in order to take her money. She became very
paranoid and at the end of the story, thinking that he wanted to kill her, she went ahead saying that
he had poisoned her coffee, which is the reason why it was so bitter. Finally he died of a very bad
fright according to police reports.

To present all the events, the writer does not follow a chronological order. Many flashbacks can be
observed, one of the most outstanding examples is on page 26, line 24: "’Isn't it a very fanciful
name?’ she had said to Gerald once before they were married. He had laughed. ‘You little
Cockney,’ he had said, affectionately. ‘I don't believe you have ever heard a nightingale. I'm glad
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you haven't. Nightingales should sing only for lovers. We'll hear them together on a summer's
evening outside our own home.’" It is a conversation between Alix and her husband before the
narrator tells us about the day they discovered Philomel Cottage and how and why it was bought.
They were remembering their lives before going there.

In this short story we can observe that there are two major characters: Alix Martin and Gerald
Martin. Reading the story from the basic interpretation: Gerald is the antagonist; he is who wants to
murder her wife, and Alix is the protagonist. Moreover, there are three minor characters: George,
Dick Windyford and the policeman. It is interesting to say that Dick is, in addition, a confidant
character because he is the one who Alix calls to rescue her.

This excerpt given appears in the middle of the story, near the end, at the beginning of line 13 on
page 38. In this excerpt, Gerald had just returned from town after Alix had told him that they
needed several things from the village to take with them for the weekend, but instead she saw him
appear with a new spade. Besides, she wanted to escape before his arrival. The reason was that
when he went to look for those things, she was still obsessed with the idea that he had another lover.
And as she hadn’t found anything in his diary, she decided to look in his drawers. In one of the
locked drawers she found newspaper clippings which led her to think that her husband was a
murderer and that he was planning to kill her that afternoon. In addition, this is also the reason why
Alix accuses Gerald in the excerpt given: “Alix leaped to a knowledge born of instinct”.

In relation to the type of ending, it is necessary to mention that most literary critics consider that
this short story has a closed ending because they believe that Gerald is Charles LeMaitre; the serial
killer, bigamist and fraudster man, and when he dies everyone is out of danger. This is the most
basic interpretation because all the plot difficulties are solved with Gerald Martin’s death. In
addition, everything during the story points out that Gerald is LeMaitre. One example of it can be
found on page 37, line 11: “Certain dates, it seemed, had been entered in the accused's pocket-book,
and it was contended that these were dates when he had done away with his victims. Then a woman
gave evidence and identified the prisoner positively by the fact that he had a mole on his left wrist,
just below the palm of the left hand.
Alix dropped the papers from a nerveless hand, and swayed as she stood. On his left wrist, just
below the palm, Gerald had a small scar …” In this quote, Alix begins to analyse the coincidences
between both Gerald and Charles LeMaitre: the pocketbook and the mole. Gerald had a diary where
he wrote down absolutely everything: dates, times, appointments... And she observed that there was
an entry that had no information beyond the date and time. Furthermore, he had a scar on his left
wrist, which made Alix think that Gerald may have removed the mole with surgery in order not to
be identified by Charles LeMaitre, whether it was his real identity or not. These two coincidences
and more (the amount of money that the house cost, the lie he told to the gardener, his personality,
the physical appearance similar to Charles...) made Alix come to the idea that her husband was this
serial killer, cheater and bigamist.

On the contrary, the truth is that the narrator gives some clues to indicate that Alix is not so
innocent and which leaves the story open. One of them is when Gerald makes a comment about the
coffee he has taken: “‘I didn't think much of that coffee you gave me,’ complained Gerald. ‘It tasted
very bitter.’ ‘It's a new kind I was trying. We won't have it again if you don't like it, dear.’” (Page
42, line 16). At this point of the story, Alix thought Gerald was Charles LeMaitre. Nevertheless, it is
later when he discovers the story about her past; she had killed her previous husband and she knew
a lot of information about poisons: “‘During the war I worked for a time in a Hospital Dispensary.
There I had the handling of all kinds of rare drugs and poisons. Yes, poisons’” (page 44, line 19).
This fragment can support the idea that maybe she was not inventing the story about poison and
maybe she has actually killed her previous husband. Moreover, there are coincidences that can
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support it and that we readers can not ignore them. For example, in the beginning of the short story
she had inherited a lot of money from a “distant” cousin who had died... We do not know a lot of
information about her past and the narrator neither confirms nor denies anything because he tells the
story from Alix's point of view. There are more examples that bring us to the question whether there
exists the possibility that she is not mentally balanced: her jealousy, her obsession with the
existence of another lover even when there is not and her behaviour as she reacts very immediately
and instinctively to everything.

In respect of the plot we can distinguish four parts: exposition, complication, climax and resolution.
Considering that the exposition gives us the most important information to follow the narrative
content, we can say that the exposition ends at the beginning of page 36. Alix and Gerald have
already been introduced, and the narrator has placed us where the story takes place: the cottage.
Added to that, the conflict has already begun; Alix, after finding her husband's pocketbook, is
convinced that he has another lover. To confirm her belief, she begins to rummage through Gerald's
drawers searching for information. Focusing on the complication, it begins when Alix opens one of
the locked drawers: "Her breath coming unevenly, Alix untied the tape. Then a deep burning blush
overspread her face, and she dropped the letters back into the drawer, closing and relocking it".
From this fragment the suspense begins to build. A little later, Alix finds some newspapers about
the notorious swindler and bigamist Charles LeMaitre. From that moment on, she becomes
suspicious of everything Gerald does. She believed he wanted to kill her; thus, she became obsessed
with everything including some of the information given by the gardener. In this way the narrator
manages to create an atmosphere of intrigue and suspense, which he manages to maintain until the
climax: the moment when we realise or think that Gerald has been poisoned. It shocks us because
although during the story we tend to think that he is going to be the killer, at the end he is the one
who is in danger. We readers do not expect the villain to be turned into a victim. “‘The coffee - my
God! the coffee!’ She stared at him. ‘I understand now why it was bitter. You devil! You've been up
to your tricks again.’ His hands gripped the arms of his chair. He was ready to spring upon her.
‘You've poisoned me.’” (Page 46, line 11). And finally, if we have the basic interpretation of this
short story, we can say that the conflict is solved because the police came and classified Gerald's
death as "a bad fright". However, if we consider that Philomel Cottage has an open ending; thus the
resolution does not exist.

The main theme of “Philomel Cottage” is the two faces of people. Everyone has secrets and we
actually cannot know anyone that well. In this short story, Alix married a man who had met a week
ago. There wasn’t enough time in only just a week to meet a person so well to get married. We also
didn’t have information about the background of Alix, we only knew her at the time where the story
was being told. They were two totally strangers who were going to spend the rest of their lives
together.

This type of novels and short stories (detective fiction) usually prefers settings that are isolated and
beautiful houses. Many of them were inspired in Agatha Christie’s houses because people at that
time were journing the glorious British past before the World Wars. The setting is connected to the
subgenre, particularly the Golden Age of detective fiction, following all the characteristics we have
explained before. The place where Alix and Gerald live was perfect. Philomel Cottage is a house in
the countryside and it has the isolation and quietness that is required from a house where a crime is
going to be committed. Its isolation and the quietness is highlighted from the very beginning of the
story on page 26: “He had found the very spot for them - unique - a gem - the chance of a lifetime.
And when Alix had seen it, she too was captivated. It was true that the situation was rather lonely -
they were two miles from the nearest village - but the cottage itself was so exquisite with its Old
World appearance, and its solid comfort of bathrooms, hot water system, electric light and
telephone, that she fell a victim to its charm immediately”.
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In Philomel Cottage there is a heterodiegetic narrator because he is not a character in the story,
nevertheless may know a lot about it. It can be demonstrated with an example on page 24, line 9:
“She met Gerald Martin at a friend’s house. He fell violently in love with her and within a week
they were engaged.” Here, the narrator is using a third person to describe the characters (Alix
Martin and Gerald Martin) and how they have met. Added to that, he never participates in the story
and makes his opinion known; he is a covert narrator. Furthermore, the narrator is not reliable
because he makes many comments throughout the story, which led the readers to believe that
Gerald is Charles LeMaitre, a villain. The readers have not got all the information and, from the
implied description of Alix and her behaviour, they are left with the impression that Gerald was not
innocent. It can be observed in the example given after: “ In the afternoon Alix suggested that she
should go for them whilst Gerald remained in the garden; but somewhat to her surprise he opposed
this plan vehemently, and insisted on going himself whilst she remained at home. Alix was forced
to give way to him, but his insistence surprised and alarmed her. Why was he so anxious to prevent
her going to the village?” (page 35, line 7). 

In respect to the focalizer, this story has an internal one, who is Alix. Sometimes the  heterodiegetic
narrator adopts the limited point of view of one character, Alix, in the story and remains ignorant of
what happens outside this character's range of perception. In the following example we can
appreciate it: “Was it a warning – a warning against Dick Windyford? Had he some secret power
which he was trying to establish over her at a distance?” (page 25, line 16 to 18). In the fragment
given before, the narrator is trying to make sense of what she, Alix, has dreamed and he does it
using Alix’s point of view.

To start with the narrative mode, let’s remember that they are the kinds of utterance through which
a narrative is conveyed. In this short story, Agatha Christie uses the reported speech and the
description. An argument that support the first idea gaven can be find on page 35, line 7: “In the
afternoon Alix suggested that she should go for them whilst Gerald remained in the garden, but
somewhat to her surprise he opposed this plan vehemently, and insisted on going himself whilst she
remained at home”. We can observe that the narrator does not use quotation marks, he uses
reporting verbs (suggested) and the references to the first person are rendered in third person (“to
her surprise” instead of “for my surprise”). Added to that, the tense of the original utterance is
changed from the present into the past (“...he opposed this plan…” instead of “...he opposes this
plan…”). Before giving examples that demonstrate the description, I would be interested to say that
description is a narrative mode that represents objects in space, that is to say existents of the story,
things that can be seen, heard or felt in some way. During the story we can find description of
places on page 26: “It was Gerald who had found Philomel Cottage. [...] but the cottage itself was
so exquisite with its Old World appearance, and its solid comfort of bathrooms, hot-water system,
electric light and telephone, that she felt a victim to its charm immediately.” Furthermore, there is
also the character's description on page 23, in this case, Alix’s: “Alix Martin was not beautiful, nor
even, strictly speaking, pretty. But her face, the face of a woman no longer in her first youth, was
irradiated and softened until her former colleagues of the old office days would hardly have
recognized her.”

Mentioning the diction, Christie is polite and old-fashioned with remarkably little gore, and a
comforting sense of poetic justice. At the beginning of the short story, Agatha Christie uses a
complex syntax with long sentences which are subordinated. In the next quote we can observe what
was said: “Alix, who had always considered herself ‘not the falling-in-love kind’, was swept clean
off her feet.” However, it should be pointed out that at the top of the same page where the fragment
we are given is found (page 38), the syntax begins to change as the story progresses: "But what had
saved her? What could possibly have saved her? Had he relented at the minute? No- in a flash the
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answer came to her". We can observe that the sentences are shorter, there are many questions and
exclamations marks; even when the narrator talks using Alix’s point of view. It has aimed to create
more suspense.

With respect to style, it only remains to add that the excerpt has many rhetorical devices. First of
all, let us consider that there are two types of device: the rhetorical schemes and the rhetorical
tropes. The first type describes the arrangement of individual sounds, words, and sentence structure.
We can find alliteration in the second paragraph (“then she crept on tiptoe to the window”), the
letter “t” is repeated at the beginning of several words or in stressed syllables of words that are in
close proximity to each other. In the first and third paragraph (“Her husband had returned” and “In
his hand he held an object”); we can see a consonance because two or more consonants are
repeated, but the adjacent vowels differ. Moreover, there is an onomatopoeia in the second
sentence: “She had heard the creak of the gate”; the sound of the word “creak” imitates the sound of
the door. We can find two climaxes, the first one is “She had heard the creak of the gate into the
road. Her husband had returned”, and the second one is “In his hand he held an object which almost
made the terrified girl's heart stop beating. It was a brand new spade”. In both cases the arrangement
of words, phrases or clauses in an order of ascending power. Let’s now go on to consider the
rhetorical tropes; they are devices of figurative language. They represent a deviation from the
common significance of a word or phrase. We can find two examples of it; a simile and a
hyperbole. The simile is found in the first sentence: “she stayed motionless as though frozen to
stone”. Two things are openly compared; the “stayed motionless” with the “frozen to stone”,
introduced by ‘as’. And last but not least, there is an hyperbole in the sentence “an object which
almost made the terrified girl’s heart stop beating”, this is an exaggeration used to emphasize the
fact that Alix was very scared.

In conclusion, Agatha Christie was able to create that atmosphere of mystery which is common in
detective fiction, during the whole short story. The use of rhetorical devices such as climax, helped
to create mystery in the plot. The excerpt it’s an important part of the story. Alix suspects that her
husband is a murderer, and he has just arrived home with a spade. Although she tried to escape from
him, he didn't leave her alone. Personally, we both think that even though one story has a great plot
but its author doesn’t know how to handle his expression and transmit what he wants, it is not worth
it, and Agatha did such a great job with this.