Ruth Flashcards
(5 cards)
Plot summary for Ruth
Jeanette works at funeral parlour and ice cream van. Elsie dies. Jeanette works at psychiatric hospital and returns home at Christmas.
Metanarrative for Ruth
Winnet and Sir Perceval stories. Winnet story recalls the life of Jeanette as a modern day fairy tale. Winnet’s practical, emotional and psychological preparation to leave home for a beautiful city is allegory for Jeanette’s similar departure. Winnet is never fully fluent in the new language she has to learn outside of Sorcerer’s kingdom – represents Jeanette’s more vague and abstract sense of alienation in the world outside of the church. In this story, it is the sorcerer’s inability to adapt his expectations and accept his daughter’s choices that leads to her exile. Here, the sorcerer is Winnet’s story is the mother, and shows that her mother’s inability to accept Jeanette will not become a missionary is the real cause of the rift between them.
When Jeanette returns home at Christmas, her feelings of danger, fear and longing are expressed through the characters of Winnet and Sir Perceval – feeling drawn into a magical sphere of enchantment.
Sir Perceval’s unease and limbo state in the woods reflects Jeanette’s emotional difficulties during her transition to break free. Jeanette, like Sir Perceval, longs for home but wishes also to fulfil the ‘quest’.
Key themes brought together via these meta-narratives: family, belonging, disruption, betrayal, exile and return, quest, estrangement, mourning for the past and the desire to return.
There is also a blurring of the realist and fantasy narratives at this point. Winnet, Perceval and Jeanette’s stories share similar elements:
The rough brown pebble
The raven (who lost the chance for happiness)
The thread that connects the parent and child figures – the powerful and compelling ‘pull for home’.
The thread – Jeanette and Sir Perceval both feel the ‘quest’ is futile and the lure for home is very strong. Sir Perceval dreams he is a spider dangling on a thread. The raven (a friend in the Winnet story) cuts the thread to liberate him. In real life, Jeanette does not do this.
The Winnet and Sir Perceval stories reframe Jeanette’s experience as the more traditional clash between parent and child, therefore shifting the focus away from sexuality as the problem.
Poems linked to Ruth
Death and the moon
The cord
Link to bible story in Ruth
Ruth is a Moabite woman, devoted to her mother in law, Naomi. After the death of her husband, Ruth remarries and has a son, whom Naomi treats as her own.
Key quotes for Ruth
