Bronté’s more subtle approach to timeframes in her structure means that, although mysteries are created, they are less obvious and we as an audience are in a reversed position to when we looked at Arcadia – the characters are up to date but we are in the dark. En example of this is the names scratched into the paint in the room where Lockwood originally stays. The multiple surnames preceding the repeated forename, “Catherine”, causes us to wander how she has ended up with three different names attached to her own. This mystery however is revealed over the course of the whole novel rather than almost straight away, as is the style in Arcadia. The result of this is to create an ongoing plot devise that makes us want to keep reading as opposed to Arcadia’s use of comedy to do this.
Depending on the order of the scenes in Arcadia the effects can be reversed. What is meant by this is that if a regency scene comes before a modern scene we see the answers before the question, creating the comedy explained previously. On the other hand in some cases something stands out in the modern scenes that have not been tackled in the regency ones. One moment of the play that stood out as doing this was the mention of Thomasina’s death on the night before her seventeenth birthday, not long after the time of her life that we are looking at in the regency scenes, “she died?...the night before her seventeenth birthday.” The result of this revelation is to capture the audiences attention as Thomasina is one of the key characters at this point and to learn of such a persons death in such a fleeting conversation causes us to desire more information.
Throughout the play there are references to a hermit that, by only seeing one timeframe we would simply brush off as unimportant, however when you look at the play as a whole there are various clues that suggest that a hermit did exist and that it may have been the character Septimus in his later life. Although this a mystery which is never officially solved it is a brilliant plot device created by Stoppard as it allows the reader to carry on inventing further stories from what we have read. He makes use of both time periods to leave enough clues for us to speculate and enhance the experience of the play. This mystery links to the one relating to Thomasina’s death as it is apparent that Septimus had fallen in love with her before she died and it is concluded by many that the hermit, who spent his life trying to prove some huge theory and going mad in the process, was Septimus trying to complete Thomasina’s work. This is an example of how we would not have been able to piece together this speculation were it not for the combined information from the love story from the regency period; and the hermit information from the modern period.
The two authors use different styles of writing in this manner, for example Bronté talks in a variety of tenses (past, present and future) by talking through a range of mediums such as books, people and first person accounts. Stoppard on the other hand writes entirely in the present tense while physically changing the year that each scene is set in to make use of the timeframe technique. The effect of this in Bronté’s work is that we find ourselves questioning the reliability of the stories told, as the story tellers would no doubt not be entirely certain of the events themselves. In Arcadia however there are no such anxieties as the constant present tense and the fact that it is a play means that what we are seeing is uncorrupted and trustworthy – we can see it before our eyes.
Another Victorian style author who plays on timeframes to build effect is Daphne du Maurier in her book Rebecca. Almost the whole story is a recollection of events from the nameless main character. The book gradually goes from past tense until it eventually reaches the present. This method of multi timeframe means that we can see the whole story in a chronological order of events, meaning that; on the one hand it seems more reliable as it is spoken as if it were fact, while on the other we question her ability to remember so far back. While some may argue that this method is common and less interesting than the structural diversity of the other two literature pieces it does however mean that the mysteries involved unravel in the right order and pace, avoiding confusion. An example of this is the late Rebecca, who remains an ambiguous character throughout the novel, until near the end where she is revealed to be the exact opposite of what is originally thought by the nameless heroine.
Finally the structure used by the two authors has its similarities and differences. They are similar in that they both jump between the different periods involved, but are different in the ways in which they do this. In Arcadia there is far more structure to the way that this done, with each scene swapping between the two timeframes. In Wuthering Heights however the current timeframe depends on who or what is speaking at the time which remains inconsistent throughout the novel. How the structure has been set out is partially down to the fact that Stoppard has the advantage of hind sight, as he is not himself a Victorian writer, allowing him to pinpoint what he believes to be interesting from this era. Bronté however has the advantage of a first hand view making her writing seem more believable as a real story.
In conclusion I have seen that there are a number of ways in which this technique can be implemented into a text to produce a diverse array of positive outcomes. While all the authors I have looked at have many similarities in their respective works the final effect of what they produce is extraordinarily different. This tells us that the way an author utilizes a technique such as this can change the entire meaning or style of the work he or she is producing.
Patrick Ball
Word count - 1329