Read the short story
“Mother Sauvage”
by Guy de Maupassant before answering this three-part request:
1. Identify THREE of these literary elements in the story, and explain how you recognize them:
o
Plot
o
Character
o
Setting
o
Diction
o
Theme
2. Of the three you described above, choose ONE literary element, and list ten keywords in the story that relate to that element.
3. Annotate a section of the story that elucidates the literary element. For example, highlight any of the keywords you identified. Also, add your own comments in the margins. Take a screenshot (or a picture if you’re using a print version) of your annotated section of the story. Save it as a PDF, and attach it.
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Ch. Morel, illustration from La Mere Sauvage, 1900
Mother Sauvage
by Guy de Maupassant
She would ask every day, the Prussian soldiers she billeted, “”Do you know where the French
marching regiment, No. 23, was sent? My boy is in it.” Then she got the news.
Fifteen years had passed
since I was at Virelogne. I
returned there in the
autumn to shoot with my
friend Serval, who had at
last rebuilt his chateau,
which the Prussians had
destroyed.
I loved that district. It is
one of those delightful
spots which have a
sensuous charm for the
eyes. You love it with a
physical love. We, whom
the country enchants, keep
tender memories of certain
springs, certain woods,
certain pools, certain hills
seen very often which
have stirred us like joyful
events. Sometimes our
thoughts turn back to a
corner in a forest, or the
end of a bank, or an
orchard filled with flowers, seen but a single time on some bright day, yet remaining in our
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Ch. Morel, illustration from La Mere Sauvage, 1900
hearts like the image of
certain women met in the
street on a spring morning
in their light, gauzy
dresses, leaving in soul
and body an unsatisfied
desire which is not to be
forgotten, a feeling that
you have just passed by
happiness.
At Virelogne I loved the
whole countryside, dotted
with little woods and
crossed by brooks which
sparkled in the sun and
looked like veins carrying
blood to the earth. You
fished in them for crawfish,
trout and eels. Divine
happiness! You could
bathe in places and you
often found snipe among
the high grass which grew
along the borders of these
small water courses.
I was stepping along light as a goat, watching my two dogs running ahead of me, Serval, a
hundred metres to my right, was beating a field of lucerne. I turned round by the thicket
which forms the boundary of the wood of Sandres and I saw a cottage in ruins.
Suddenly I remembered it as I had seen it the last time, in 1869, neat, covered with vines,
with chickens before the door. What is sadder than a dead house, with its skeleton
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standing bare and sinister?
I also recalled that inside its doors, after a very tiring day,
the good woman had given me a glass of wine to drink
and that Serval had told me the history of its people. The
father, an old poacher, had been killed by the gendarmes.
The son, whom I had once seen, was a tall, dry fellow who
also passed for a fierce slayer of game. People called
them “Les Sauvage.”
Was that a name or a nickname?
I called to Serval. He came up with his long strides like a
crane.
I asked him:
“What’s become of those people?”
This was his story:
When war was declared the son Sauvage, who was then thirty-three years old, enlisted,
leaving his mother alone in the house. People did not pity the old woman very much
because she had money; they knew it.
She remained entirely alone in that isolated dwelling, so far from the village, on the edge of
the wood. She was not afraid, however, being of the same strain as the men folk–a hardy
old woman, tall and thin, who seldom laughed and with whom one never jested. The
women of the fields laugh but little in any case, that is men’s business. But they
themselves have sad and narrowed hearts, leading a melancholy, gloomy life. The
peasants imbibe a little noisy merriment at the tavern, but their helpmates always have
grave, stern countenances. The muscles of their faces have never learned the motions of
laughter.
Mother Sauvage continued her ordinary existence in her cottage, which was soon covered
by the snows. She came to the village once a week to get bread and a little meat. Then
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she returned to her house. As there was talk of wolves, she went out with a gun upon her
shoulder–her son’s gun, rusty and with the butt worn by the rubbing of the hand–and she
was a strange sight, the tall “Sauvage,” a little bent, going with slow strides over the snow,
the muzzle of the piece extending beyond the black headdress, which confined her head
and imprisoned her white hair, which no one had ever seen.
One day a Prussian force arrived. It was billeted upon the inhabitants, according to the
property and resources of each. Four were allotted to the old woman, who was known to
be rich.
They were four great fellows with fair complexion, blond beards and blue eyes, who had
not grown thin in spite of the fatigue which they had endured already and who also, though
in a conquered country, had remained kind and gentle. Alone with this aged woman, they
showed themselves full of consideration, sparing her, as much as they could, all expense
and fatigue. They could be seen, all four of them, making their toilet at the well in their
shirt-sleeves in the gray dawn, splashing with great swishes of water their pink-white
northern skin, while La Mere Sauvage went and came, preparing their soup. They would
be seen cleaning the kitchen, rubbing the tiles, splitting wood, peeling potatoes, doing up
all the housework like four good sons around their mother.
But the old woman thought always of her own son, so tall and thin, with his hooked nose
and his brown eyes and his heavy mustache which made a roll of black hair upon his lip.
She asked every day of each of the soldiers who were installed beside her hearth: “Do you
know where the French marching regiment, No. 23, was sent? My boy is in it.”
They invariably answered, “No, we don’t know, don’t know a thing at all.” And,
understanding her pain and her uneasiness–they who had mothers, too, there at home–
they rendered her a thousand little services. She loved them well, moreover, her four
enemies, since the peasantry have no patriotic hatred; that belongs to the upper class
alone. The humble, those who pay the most because they are poor and because every
new burden crushes them down; those who are killed in masses, who make the true
cannon’s prey because they are so many; those, in fine, who suffer most cruelly the
atrocious miseries of war because they are the feeblest and offer least resistance–they
hardly understand at all those bellicose ardors, that excitable sense of honor or those
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pretended political combinations which in six months exhaust two nations, the conqueror
with the conquered.
They said in the district, in speaking of the Germans of La Mere Sauvage:
“There are four who have found a soft place.”
Now, one morning, when the old woman was alone in the house, she observed, far off on
the plain, a man coming toward her dwelling. Soon she recognized him; it was the
postman to distribute the letters. He gave her a folded paper and she drew out of her case
the spectacles which she used for sewing. Then she read:
MADAME SAUVAGE: This letter is to tell you sad news. Your boy Victor
was killed yesterday by a shell which almost cut him in two. I was near by,
as we stood next each other in the company, and he told me about you and
asked me to let you know on the same day if anything happened to him.
I took his watch, which was in his pocket, to bring it back to you when the war is
done.
CESAIRE RIVOT,
Soldier of the 2d class, March. Reg. No. 23.
The letter was dated three weeks back.
She did not cry at all. She remained motionless, so overcome and stupefied that she did
not even suffer as yet. She thought: “There’s Victor killed now.” Then little by little the tears
came to her eyes and the sorrow filled her heart. Her thoughts came, one by one, dreadful,
torturing. She would never kiss him again, her child, her big boy, never again! The
gendarmes had killed the father, the Prussians had killed the son. He had been cut in two
by a cannon-ball. She seemed to see the thing, the horrible thing: the head falling, the
eyes open, while he chewed the corner of his big mustache as he always did in moments
of anger.
What had they done with his body afterward? If they had only let her have her boy back as
they had brought back her husband–with the bullet in the middle of the forehead!
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But she heard a noise of voices. It was the Prussians returning from the village. She hid
her letter very quickly in her pocket, and she received them quietly, with her ordinary face,
having had time to wipe her eyes.
They were laughing, all four, delighted, for they brought with them a fine rabbit–stolen,
doubtless–and they made signs to the old woman that there was to be something good to
east.
She set herself to work at once to prepare breakfast, but when it came to killing the rabbit,
her heart failed her. And yet it was not the first. One of the soldiers struck it down with a
blow of his fist behind the ears.
The beast once dead, she skinned the red body, but the sight of the blood which she was
touching, and which covered her hands, and which she felt cooling and coagulating, made
her tremble from head to foot, and she kept seeing her big boy cut in two, bloody, like this
still palpitating animal.
She sat down at table with the Prussians, but she could not eat, not even a mouthful. They
devoured the rabbit without bothering themselves about her. She looked at them sideways,
without speaking, her face so impassive that they perceived nothing.
All of a sudden she said: “I don’t even know your names, and here’s a whole month that
we’ve been together.” They understood, not without difficulty, what she wanted, and told
their names.
That was not sufficient; she had them written for her on a paper, with the addresses of their
families, and, resting her spectacles on her great nose, she contemplated that strange
handwriting, then folded the sheet and put it in her pocket, on top of the letter which told
her of the death of her son.
When the meal was ended she said to the men:
“I am going to work for you.”
And she began to carry up hay into the loft where they slept.
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They were astonished at her taking all this trouble; she explained to them that thus they
would not be so cold; and they helped her. They heaped the stacks of hay as high as the
straw roof, and in that manner they made a sort of great chamber with four walls of fodder,
warm and perfumed, where they should sleep splendidly.
At dinner one of them was worried to see that La Mere Sauvage still ate nothing. She told
him that she had pains in her stomach. Then she kindled a good fire to warm herself, and
the four Germans ascended to their lodging-place by the ladder which served them every
night for this purpose.
As soon as they closed the trapdoor the old woman removed the ladder, then opened the
outside door noiselessly and went back to look for more bundles of straw, with which she
filled her kitchen. She went barefoot in the snow, so softly that no sound was heard. From
time to time she listened to the sonorous and unequal snoring of the four soldiers who
were fast asleep.
When she judged her preparations to be sufficient, she threw one of the bundles into the
fireplace, and when it was alight she scattered it over all the others. Then she went outside
again and looked.
In a few seconds the whole interior of the cottage was illumined with a brilliant light and
became a frightful brasier, a gigantic fiery furnace, whose glare streamed out of the narrow
window and threw a glittering beam upon the snow.
Then a great cry issued from the top of the house; it was a clamor of men shouting
heartrending calls of anguish and of terror. Finally the trapdoor having given way, a
whirlwind of fire shot up into the loft, pierced the straw roof, rose to the sky like the
immense flame of a torch, and all the cottage flared.
Nothing more was heard therein but the crackling of the fire, the cracking of the walls, the
falling of the rafters. Suddenly the roof fell in and the burning carcass of the dwelling hurled
a great plume of sparks into the air, amid a cloud of smoke.
The country, all white, lit up by the fire, shone like a cloth of silver tinted with red.
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A bell, far off, began to toll.
The old “Sauvage” stood before her ruined dwelling, armed with her gun, her son’s gun, for
fear one of those men might escape.
When she saw that it was ended, she threw her weapon into the brasier. A loud report
followed.
People were coming, the peasants, the Prussians.
They found the woman seated on the trunk of a tree, calm and satisfied.
A German officer, but speaking French like a son of France, demanded:
“Where are your soldiers?”
She reached her bony arm toward the red heap of fire which was almost out and answered
with a strong voice:
“There!”
They crowded round her. The Prussian asked:
“How did it take fire?”
“It was I who set it on fire.”
They did not believe her, they thought that the sudden disaster had made her crazy. While
all pressed round and listened, she told the story from beginning to end, from the arrival of
the letter to the last shriek of the men who were burned with her house, and never omitted
a detail.
When she had finished, she drew two pieces of paper from her pocket, and, in order to
distinguish them by the last gleams of the fire, she again adjusted her spectacles. Then
she said, showing one:
“That, that is the death of Victor.” Showing the other, she added, indicating the red ruins
with a bend of the head: “Here are their names, so that you can write home.” She quietly
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held a sheet of paper out to the officer, who held her by the shoulders, and she continued:
“You must write how it happened, and you must say to their mothers that it was I who did
that, Victoire Simon, la Sauvage! Do not forget.”
The officer shouted some orders in German. They seized her, they threw her against the
walls of her house, still hot. Then twelve men drew quickly up before her, at twenty paces.
She did not move. She had understood; she waited.
An order rang out, followed instantly by a long report. A belated shot went off by itself, after
the others.
The old woman did not fall. She sank as though they had cut off her legs.
The Prussian officer approached. She was almost cut in two, and in her withered hand she
held her letter bathed with blood.
My friend Serval added:
“It was by way of reprisal that the Germans destroyed the chateau of the district, which
belonged to me.”
I thought of the mothers of those four fine fellows burned in that house and of the horrible
heroism of that other mother shot against the wall.
And I picked up a little stone, still blackened by the flames.
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Reading the Short Story as a Literary Work
When we start reading the short story as a literary genre, we will be reading compact
pieces of literature that provide us insights into aspects of the human condition, such as
love, revenge, youth, death, and happiness as well as many others, as you will discover.
To review, here are key components of the short story to be familiar with as you start to
read and write about literature. Review these terms closely and be prepared to apply
them to your writing. See Literary Terms or The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.
Short Story
Plot
Character/Characterization
Setting
Diction
Theme
Short Story: A fictional prose tale of no specified length, but too short to be published
as a volume on its own, as novellas sometimes and novels usually are. A short story will
normally concentrate on a single event with only one or two characters, more
economically than a novel’s sustained exploration of social background. There are similar
fictional forms of greater antiquity—fables, laisse, folktales, parables, and the
French conte—but the short story as we know it flourished in the magazines of the 19th
and early 20th centuries, especially in the USA, which has a particularly strong tradition.
Plot: The pattern of events and situations in a narrative or dramatic work, as selected
and arranged both to emphasize relationships—usually of cause and effect—between
incidents and to elicit a particular kind of interest in the reader or audience, such as
surprise or suspense. Although in a loose sense the term commonly refers to that
sequence of chief events which can be summarized from a story or play, modern criticism
often makes a stricter distinction between the plot of a work and its story: the plot is the
selected version of events as presented to the reader or audience in a certain order and
duration, whereas the story is the full sequence of events as we imagine them to have
taken place in their ‘natural’ order and duration. The story, then, is the hypothetical ‘raw
material’ of events which we reconstruct from the finished product of the plot. The
critical discussion of plots originates in Aristotle’s Poetics (4th century BCE), in which his
term mythos corresponds roughly with our ‘plot’. Aristotle saw plot as more than just the
arrangement of incidents: he assigned to plot the most important function in a drama, as
a governing principle of development and coherence to which other elements (including
character) must be subordinated. He insisted that a plot should have a beginning, a
middle, and an end, and that its events should form a coherent whole. Plots vary in form
from the fully integrated or ‘tightly knit’ to the loosely episodic. In general, though, most
plots will trace some process of change in which characters are caught up in a developing
conflict that is finally resolved.
Character/Characterization: Characterization is a literary device that is used step-by-
step in literature to highlight and explain the details about a character in a story. It is in
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the initial stage in which the writer introduces the character with noticeable emergence.
After introducing the character, the writer often talks about his behavior; then, as the
story progresses, the thought-processes of the character. The next stage involves the
character expressing his opinions and ideas, and getting into conversations with the rest
of the characters. The final part shows how others in the story respond to the character’s
personality.
Setting: An environment or surrounding in which an event or story takes place. It may
provide particular information about placement and timing, such as New York, America,
in the year 1820. Setting could be simply descriptive, like a lonely cottage on a
mountain. Social conditions, historical time, geographical locations, weather, immediate
surroundings, and timing are all different aspects of setting. There are three major
components to setting: social environment, place, and time. Moreover, setting could be
an actual region, or a city made larger than life, as James Joyce characterizes Dublin
in Ulysses. Or, it could be a work of the author’s imagination, such as Vladimir Nabokov’s
imaginative place, space-time continuum in Ada. The two main types of setting are
(1) Backdrop Setting, which emerges when it is not important for a story, and it could
happen in any setting. For instance, A. A. Milne’s story Winnie-the-Pooh could take place
in any type of setting, and (2) Integral Setting, in which the place and time
influence the theme, character, and action of a story. This type of setting controls the
characters. By confining a certain character to a particular setting, the writer defines the
character. Beatrix Potter’s short story “The Tail of Peter Rabbit” is an example of integral
setting: the behavior of Peter becomes an integral part of the setting. Another good
example of this type of setting can be seen in E. B. White’s novel Charlotte’s Web. Note:
this information is borrowed from Literary Devices
Diction – word choice that both conveys and emphasizes the meaning or theme of a
story, poem, or play through distinctions in sound, look, rhythm, syllable, letters, and
definition. How do the words influence the reader/listener/viewer to think and/or feel
certain ways about the material and its significance? Should some texts be banned
because they feature words that some readers/listeners/viewers may be offended by?
Theme: A salient abstract idea that emerges from a literary work’s treatment of its
subject matter; or a topic recurring in a number of literary works. While the subject of a
work is described concretely in terms of its action (e.g. ‘the adventures of a newcomer in
the big city’), its theme or themes will be described in more abstract terms (e.g. love,
war, revenge, betrayal, fate, etc.). The theme of a work may be announced explicitly, but
more often it emerges indirectly through the recurrence of motifs.
Recognition of literary elements is important, for it accomplishes at least two vital
strategies:
enables a reader to design a solid thesis
facilitates comprehension of the complex processes of the short story
From theme, for example, we can identify and analyze other elements such as structure,
characterization, and language.
Now that you are familiar with terms required to analyze literature, please read closely
the short story “Mother Sauvage” by Guy de Maupassant, in order to identify elements
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related to the terms: plot, setting, character, narrator, point of view, and theme. You will
be asked to comment in Week 1, Discussion 1 upon the story and some of its elements.
5/21/2020Week 1, Section 2. Keywords and Annotation – ENGL 102 6388 Composition and Literature (2205)
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Keywords and Annotation
Digital literacy is a skill that is essential in education and in the workplace. You are
increasing your digital literacy skills in part by taking this online class! How can we build
upon those skills to prepare you for further work, especially in reading and analyzing
digital texts? Information below shows you how to develop the skills of locating keywords
and annotating a written text.
What are keywords? Within a piece of writing, keywords provide a way for you to
locate key or main ideas in a piece of writing, whether informative, literary, or scholarly.
Writers will purposefully use and repeat words throughout their writing to add unity and
cohesion to the overall structure and organization. Repetition of a keyword may occur
through a synonym (a single word or a phrase), such as using “sightless” or “loss of
vision” for “blind.”
How can keywords help us to understand the theme or other literary element of
a short story, such as plot, character, setting, or diction? Writers will frequently
repeat words or use synonyms to underscore an important idea or concept. First off, if
you come across a word, and you are unsure of its meaning, then make sure you
highlight or flag it so you can look up its definition. Next, when reading for a theme or
other literary element, locate repeated keywords that signal the literary elements of the
short story. You should read closely and carefully, noting words or synonyms that
repeatedly draw the reader’s attention to features such as theme, plot, characterization
or character, and a type of diction. In identifying keywords in a print book, you may have
underlined or highlighted them. You may also have written notes to yourself in the
margins.
For a demonstration on annotating a literary passage, view this YouTube video:
Why should I annotate a text? The first time you read one of the short stories for
this class, you will be doing what is considered passive reading. In order to understand
and connect with the story more fully, you have to keep track of what you are reading,
and you will want to mark things that stood out to you, or that you need to come back to
later because you have questions. In short, by reading the story more than once and
annotating it, you are engaging in active reading, which will improve your experience
as a reader. You will comprehend more, remember more, react more, and possibly
visualize more. Therefore, the reason to annotate is to become an active reader.
How can I annotate a digital text? If the text is in PDF format, you can utilize the
highlight feature and the sticky note feature to add your comments. If you save a PDF to
your local hard drive, then you can use Microsoft Edge (Windows) or Preview (Mac) to
annotate the PDF.
For Windows, right-click on the PDF file in your file explorer, and select Open with >
Microsoft Edge. Highlight a portion of the text, and you will see the annotation menu
and options.
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For Mac, use the Preview app’s markup menu. Go to View > Show Markup Toolbar
To annotate an e-book, you can take advantage of the multiple features and tools
available in your e-book reader, whether Kindle, iBooks, or Google Play Books.
How do I develop a strategy for annotation? Regardless of whether you’re reading
in digital or print format, you will find it helpful to develop a strategy for annotations.
With some practice, you can become proficient in organizing your notes in ways that not
only help you understand the text but also in using evidence from the text in your own
writing about literature, as we will do in this class. Here is a suggested format to help
you locate keywords within a digital text:
Once you have identified a particular keyword, you can use the search feature to
locate all the areas where that word is used. You can then make further annotations,
such as highlighting or making a comment. In Adobe reader and in most browsers,
you can use the CTRL-F command to find words.
As you locate keywords, you can then annotate as needed. Highlighting provides a
quick visual for you to locate keywords if you are scanning the text later to locate
pertinent information. You will also want to record your own ideas and reactions to
the text, which you can do by making comments in the margin. To help you organize
your comments, you could use the strategy of designating the left and right side
margins for different purposes. For example:
Left side comments: Just the facts; present the summary. Chunk when
necessary, i.e., summarize two to three paragraphs that seem to belong together.
This strategy is particularly helpful to break down or unpack dense information.
Right side comments: Look back at your chunks that you noted on the left side.
What is happening in those chunks? Use an action verb to describe what is
happening. If you are reading for a purpose, such as answering a question based
on the text, you can also use sticky notes to add those comments. Use the right-
side comments for any additional questions or reactions to the text.
You could also devise a strategy that is color-coded, shape-oriented (circles, squares
around text), or the like — whichever makes the most sense to you and helps you
visually return to keywords and sections of the text.
How do I develop written material from my annotations and comments? When
you are reading critically, you will usually have a goal in mind, such as a response to a
question or the development of a larger piece of writing, like the paper assignment for
this class. You may find it helpful to summarize your comments so that you can transfer
those main ideas to your own writing.
You will also want to document your source material, so keep track of page numbers. We
will be looking at more formal MLA style documentation shortly, but for our purposes
now, you will be required only to note the page number(s) of the material you’re bringing
into your writing.
You can now move into using these skills to help you locate the keywords in a digital or
print document, annotate it, and summarize what you have done.
5/21/2020 Week 1, Section 2. Keywords and Annotation – ENGL 102 6388 Composition and Literature (2205)
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