33 pages • 1 hour read
Elizabeth GaskellThe Old Nurse's Story
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1852A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Frame Narrative
A frame narrative is a story with a separate setting, and sometimes separate characters, that surrounds the main narrative of a story. Frame narratives usually contextualize the main story (which is usually a first-person narrative) and introduce key themes and characterization. Hester addresses her audience of children, whose mother she was also nurse to. The frame allows Gaskell to establish Hester’s reliability before she begins the ghost story that the nurse knows the children want to hear. Because this story first appeared as part of the Christmas narrative in Household Words, Gaskell’s frame for Hester’s tale is a “frame-within-a-frame.” Dickens has already set up a loose narrative connection between the stories he commissioned by having the first story in the collection come from a host who has asked everyone gathered around on Christmas Eve offer a story to entertain the group. The deliberate mimicry in print of this traditional Christmas pastime augments the resonance of the layers of storytelling and fosters a sense of community and oral culture.
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a device which hints at what will come in a story. Gaskell uses foreshadowing repeatedly to create horror and suspense in her story. Most regularly, Hester notices details around Furnivall Manor as if she is simply describing her new home with Rosamond, but those details become increasingly significant in the mysterious plot of the “spectre child” and her phantom family. The house is neglected and “overshadowed.” For instance, when Hester and Rosamond are having a healthy romp in the cold, Hester describes the “gnarled holly-trees” that they find (15). Similarly, when Hester mentions the music she hears to Mrs. Stark, Miss Furnivall makes the mysteriously ominous comment that there will be a wild and strange winter.
Foil
A foil is a character with a contrasting personality or role in a text. In “The Old Nurse’s Story,” Gaskell uses a complex version of the device when she uses the older quartet of upper-class females as foils for the virtue, affection, and productivity of the circle of three servants and child who live at Furnivall Hall in different time periods. Hester, Dorothy, Agnes, and Rosamond relate to each other in similar roles to those played by Miss Grace, Miss Maude, Mrs. Stark, and Maude’s daughter. While the servants in the narrative support each other, enjoy genuine emotional bonds, and share in productive labor, the titled women and their companion and child live in constant jealous conflict or deceit, never producing anything useful.
Diction
Diction means word choice, especially choices that sets language apart from the standard written or spoken English of the author’s period. Gaskell uses working-class northern English dialect at several points in Hester’s narrative (as when she calls a child a “bairn”). Gaskell uses these notable moments in Hester’s diction to establish her as a working-class character, distinct from the titled members of the Furnivall family. At this early point in her career, Gaskell provides just enough verbal clues to suggest her origins outside of a London literary circle. Later in her literary career, Gaskell grew more proficient with working-class diction, using it in novels like Mary Barton and North and South with a skill that few other successful middle-class novelists demonstrate.
Related Titles
By Elizabeth Gaskell
