Literary Clichés Part Three: More Tropes

Women in novels of the 30s-50s were praised for having “well-brushed hair”. Was it neat, flat and glossy, lacking “rats’ tails”, or “not set in a rigid perm”? Middle-class women under stress “drag a comb” through their hair.

When two people fancy each other but do not know it, their hands touch accidentally and "a tingle shoots up their arm". When two characters have a conversation, set it in a restaurant or, ideally, a tea shop, so that you can keep interrupting the narrative with references to their eating habits, e.g. "She took a bite of her scone and chewed thoughtfully." (JL)

Struck by how many novels echo the Brideshead theme - someone from humdrum family being entranced by more bohemian family. (@MsLupin)

A character finds him/herself back at a grand house, now decayed and shabby in the dystopian present. He remembers happy days in the gilded past. (Brideshead Revisited, Wind in the Willows).

The decaying grand house whose impoverished inhabitants are all variously eccentric, mad, living in the past or sliding down the class ladder.

The heroine is plain (sometimes she just doesn’t fit the tastes of the time, sometimes she really IS plain, and sometimes gets a bit of a makeover), but the hero (the right kind of man) can see her inner beauty. Because you’d want to appeal to someone who appreciates people for what’s on the inside, wouldn’t you? (PS: Anyone who tells you that life is really like this is a liar.)

Lucy Snowe, Jane Eyre and Lizzy Bennett: the plain or ordinary girl who gets the hero not by being “feminine”, as an older woman would no doubt advise her, but by being straight-talking, blunt, funny and feisty. (She is also “good”, and surrounded by some bad girls for contrast.) Sadly this approach doesn’t work in real life either.

A young, naive, plain, badly dressed girl gets a job with a suave, important middle-aged man. She frequently screws up and gets into embarrassing situations, thanks to her inexperience, honesty, naiveté, genuineness etc. Sometimes there is a corresponding older woman who is chic and sophisticated, and our heroine is always making a fool of herself in front of this female. Of course they get married.

Examples:
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
The Sound of Music

Elizabeth Taylor's The Wedding Group imagines what their married life would be like – hell.

MI6 was based in Broadway Buildings, opposite St James's Park Tube station. Outside a plaque read 'Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company', inside was a warren of back staircases, dingy corridors and pokey rooms. A secret passage ran to the Passport Office in Queen Anne's Gate while a bridge led to the flat of the 'Chief', Sir Dick White, whose office was on the fourth floor at the end of a spidery corridor... The interview took place at the agency's HQ in a Mayfair office building, Leconfield House, which had a large basement and a windowless ground floor. The interior was shabby, the windows were grimy and internal partitioning had left many rooms an awkward shape and ludicrously overcrowded. (DM)

Tube Alloys was the code name of the research and development programme authorised by the United Kingdom, with participation from Canada, to develop nuclear weapons during the Second World War. (Wikipedia) In Christie’s universe, the relevant offices are found behind a door marked MARINE BIOLOGY in what is obviously Foyle’s bookshop.

The boys and girls in their very ‘with-it’ clothes looked untidy and none too clean. The girls were pale and even sickly-looking. (Dodie Smith, It Ends with Revelations) Beatniks and hippies were always being accused of looking “dirty”. Agatha Christie denigrates fashionable young women circa 1960 – thick Sloppy Joe jerseys at dinner, and black stockings – so hot! Angela Carter wrote that Beatniks didn’t wear make-up, so their faces looked “dirty” to a society used to women in foundation and powder.

When asked how she could afford some luxury, a working-class character will say “Scrimped and syved, m’m, scrimped and syved.” (Paul Gallico’s Mrs 'Arris syved up for a Dior dress by cutting out tea and sugar. It would have taken her a couple of thousand years.)

The dreary society for international students aimed at encouraging brotherhood between nations and world peace which is a front for spies, anarchists or infiltrators. They meet in basements and there’s an enthusiastic grey-haired facilitator passing round the sherry. (Agatha Christie, They Came to Baghdad. A lot of them really were fronts.)

More here, and links to the rest.

Literary Clichés Part Two: Tropes

As a freelance editor can I just say that I have had enough of characters running their hands through their long dark hair on the first page of manuscripts. (@meandmybigmouth)

My pet peeve: The Woman Scorned Revenge Scene Trope – Please Don’t Write. (@jemartin)

Why does my dog look like she's explaining her master plan to the captured protagonist? (@SomeChrisTweets)

I see you, fiction-writers-who-signal-to-the-reader-that-a-character's-evil-via-their-immaculately-tidy-house. (@volewriter)

Another popular trope in Chinese literature of past two decades seems to be the accidental journalist who ends up fighting for the people. (@xuetingni)

Structuring trick that’s now de rigueur in modern crime fiction — Two Seemingly Independent Threads That Shockingly Turn Out to Be Linked. (Theinvisibleevent.com And not just modern crime fiction.)

Even Maugham, though, can't resist that favourite male author trope of the dress that looks simple but is not. Has anyone ever actually seen any such dress? (Clothes in Books)

Miss Durdon, nanny to generations of the family, is a wonderful creation – even though the figure of the devoted family retainer allowed her own licence is very much overdone in literature. (Moira Redmond)

The ancient doddery lawyer/factory owner is known as “Young Mr Smith”. (Are You Being Served)

Fainting ladies always land in a crumpled heap. (In the days of long skirts they probably did.)

Of an older woman “you could see she’d been pretty once”.

The pretentious shop (clothes, art, flowers) that has only one or two objects in the window.

The naughtiest girl in the school becomes a nun, and eventually Reverend Mother.

If anyone gets a telegram they “excitedly tear open the envelope”. Otherwise they “take in the situation at a glance”.

Common, vulgar characters wear too many rings (their hands are “beringed”).

Gay characters come singly.

Marvel comic-book heroes are all tragic, suffering, saviour figures.

In books by alcoholics characters drink all day but never get drunk. (See Kingsley Amis. And they never become unpleasant, abusive or incoherent, either.)

In Kingsley Amis novels, good women wear corduroy or denim suits.

Americans in 30s books by Brits are called Slingsbee.

If you are having an affair with a married man, and his wife is murdered, never say: “You killed her – for ME!"

An east wind shall come, the wind of the LORD shall come up from the wilderness, and his spring shall become dry, and his fountain shall be dried up. (Hosea 13:15  Quoted or referenced by Sherlock Holmes and John Jarndyce in Bleak House.)

The person who only thinks they are paralysed. Conversely, the wheelchair-bound character who walks about the house unobserved, or the “blind” person who can see.

Shadow takes on an independent existence and takes over its owner’s life. (Sometimes the shadow offers its original owner, now on his uppers, a job – as its shadow.)

The girl who is raised by her mother for a good marriage. The girl is beautiful – but in the style of the 1890s, and it’s now the 1920s. (Nancy Mitford, Love in a Cold Climate)

One of the members of an unlikely partnership explains “He/she is good for me.” (Helen Schlegel in Howard’s End talking about Monica, whom we never meet. And poor Monica gets left behind in Munich.)

Did we have to bring him? But Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, though cowardly and weak, turns out to have an ingenious mind and can usually think the gang out of their predicament. By the end of the story, they’re asking “What shall we do, Mr Baggins?”

A vulgar woman in E. Phillips Oppenheim’s Aaron Rodd, Diviner exposes “at least 12 inches of silk-clad limbs” and wears loudly squeaking patent shoes. Probably with too-high heels.

The spy or spies who are undetectable because they “live their part”. Also the spy who has such a nondescript face that he can play many roles. Plus “nobody looks at a postman/steward/maid/nurse”.

The stage lawyer “dresses in the costume of the last generation but seven”, says JK Jerome. “The youngest stage solicitor we ever remember to have seen looked about sixty—the oldest about a hundred and forty-five.” (See Ngaio Marsh’s elderly Mr Ratisbon, and Margery Allingham’s Mr Drudge who bucks the trend, being about 30.)

More here.