Joanna's And Jane's Lifestyles example essay topic

Joanna's and Jane's lifestyles. The Girls of Slender Means by M urial Spark is a novel about the girls who lived in the May of Teck Club during the year of 1945. There are many characters involved, but the one's who caught my attention the most are Jane Wright and Joanna Childe. They represent different aspects of ideas, lifestyles and, also, have different perspectives on the " World of Books. ' ; Joanna Childe was the daughter of a country rector. Shew as very intelligent, had '... strong obscure emotions'; (8), and '... religious strength'; (165).

She was very well build. 'Joanna Childe was large... ' ; (9), '... fair and healthy-looking... ' ; (22). She had light shiny hair, blue eyes and deep-pink cheeks. She never used a scrap of make-up because she didn't really care about her looks and she wasn't looking for a husband either.

Jane Wright, on the other hand, was very fat and felt miserable about it. She tried to blame her work for her appetite. '... [she] was miserable about her fatness and spent much of her time in eager dread of the next meal, and in making resolutions what to eat of it and what to leave, and in making counter-resolutions in view of the fact that her work at the publisher's was essentially mental, which meant that her brain had to be fed more than most people's'; (35-36). Unlike Joanna, Jane '... was on the look-out for a husband, ... ' ; (32) since she was only twenty two years old.

Joanna's and Jane's occupations evolved around the world of books. However, they had different perspectives about it. Jane worked for a publisher and Joanna attended a school of drama to be a teacher of elocution. Jane thought of the publishing business as '... essentially disinterest [ing]'; (39), while Joanna chose her profession because of her love for poetry. '... poetry, especially the declamatory sort, excited her and possessed her; she would pounce on the stuff, play with it quivering in her mind, and when she had got it by heart, she spoke it forth with devouring relish'; (8).

Joanna was highly thought of for it and Jane '... was considered to be brainy but somewhat below standard, socially, at the May of Teck'; (19). Both women were similar in that they did additional work besides the one's mentioned above. Joanna had students of her own whom she taught how to speak properly, with no accent. 'Joanna's method was to read each stanza herself first and make her pupil repeat it. ' ; (21). Jane had several kinds of '... brain-work'; (41).

'First and secretly, she wrote poetry of a strictly non-rational order, in which occurred, in about proportion of cherries in a cherry-cake, certain words that she described as 'of a smouldering nature', such as loins and lovers, the root, the rose, and the shroud. Secondly and secretly, she wrote letters of a friendly tone but with a business intention, under the auspices of the pale foreigner. Thirdly and more openly, she sometimes did a little work in her room which overlapped from her day's duties at the small publisher's office'; (41-42). Besides the work she had to do in the publisher's office, she was doing some detective work on new authors.

She was supposed to hang out with them, find their weak spots and report them to her boss, who would use this information to lower the price of the author's book. From how Joanna was described in the novel, we can see that she liked the past more than the present. She wanted to preserve the old traditions she grew up with. The example of that would be her love life.

When she fallen in love with the first curate, he didn't return her feeling and she '... had decided that this was to be the only love of her life'; (22). She didn't return the feelings of the second curate, who loved her, because she had '... the notion that a nice girl should only fall in love once in her life'; (23). Another example would be her ideas about the Prayer Book. Nancy Riddle, one of Joanna's students, mentioned that the Prayer Book was '... out of date'; (99) to which Joanna answered: 'The Prayer Book is wonderful. There was a new version got up in 1928, but Parliament put it out. Just a swell, as it happened'; (101).

It is obvious that she wanted to leave everything just as it was before. Probably that is the reason why Joanna died at the end of the book. After the bomb exploded, the fire workers we retrying to rescue girls, who were trapped in the club from the window at the roof. Joanna was the last to climb, but she '... stooped to pick up the tape-measure which was lying on the floor'; (100). Unfortunately, 'the house sank into its centre, a high heap of rubble, and Joanna went with it'; (161).

I think that, subconsciously, she didn't want to leave the club because she knew that everything would change afterwards. She didn't want to be a part of the future because she was afraid of changes. Jane, however, wanted to live, to survive. Despite her fatness, she wanted to be like everyone else. She wasn't afraid of her future.

She knew that she can survive in the harsh, modern world no matter what. And, in fact, she did survived and became a women columnist later. In my opinion, Jane Wright and Joanna Childe were the most interesting characters in the book. Although they lived in the same time (after the second world war) and in the same place, they had different lifestyles. The only similarity between them was that they were using books for their occupations.