Comparison of the description Rosa del Valle in Allende's 'The House Of Spirits' and Anna Karenin in Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenin'.
World Literature Assignment 1
Comparison of the description Rosa del Valle in Allende’s ‘The House Of Spirits’ and Anna Karenin in Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenin’.
By Solange Di Rocca
Marymount International School, London
Feb. 2004
The style of description of author varies from one to another like fingerprints that allow us to distinguish and gain different feels from them and perceive their work in different ways. A writer’s style of writing in fact influences the reader greatly when interpreting the novel or piece of writing, in prose like in poetry. These styles of writing are often used as tools by authors to create and develop a certain mood in their work.
Descriptions are important in all pieces of work as they allow us, the reader, to analyse the writers’ style. By taking two writers’ descriptions, one can compare the techniques used by the authors. I have decided to take two very different authors, Leo Tolstoy and Isabel Allende, and compare the first description of two characters, Rosa del Valle and Anna Karenin, both described as beautiful individuals in both novels.
I the first novel, ‘the House of spirits’ by Isabel Allende, Rosa del Valle’s description is the focus of the very first chapter. The narrator gives this particular description whilst the mother, Nívea, looks over her oldest daughter during a church ceremony. The words used by the narrator to describe Rosa are simple and familiar. Through this description we are taken back to her birth in order to explain the character’s unique beauty. The narrator in fact knows everything that the mother herself knows about her daughter in much detail, because of the nature of the narration we are quickly brought into the story. Rosa is portrayed as a creature out of this world ‘ this chills of hers seemed to have been made of a different material from the rest of the human race’ ‘ the tone of her skin, with its soft bluish lights, and of her hair, as well as her slow movements and silent character, all made one think of some inhabitant of the sea.’ With blue hair and golden eyes, like a mermaid, she is described as a beauty like no other on this earth and all this accentuated by the authors choice of words and comparisons, such as the mermaid and an angel, both supernatural creatures.