Lewis Watson
Question 7
Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s “Sunset Song” features the hugely successful main character Chris Guthrie. Chris is a successful as a character because she is convincing and believable. She effectively gains the sympathies, through her warm and vital personality and her development throughout the novel.
At the beginning of the novel Chris is a young girl. She is completely innocent and unaware in her attitude towards sex: “kissed her with kind, red lips…it was over in a moment, quick and shameful, fine for all that, tingling and strange”. She doesn’t fully understand the appeal of kissing but feels it. Chris sexual development is tracked from her innocent youth, through the confusion and experience of adolescence, until her sexual development ends with her marriage and sexual relationship with Ewan. During her development she seems to the reader to be reasonable and level headed. She is not affected by the “harvest madness” that causes a wave of sexual activity in Kinraddie and is completely comfortable with her sexuality. It makes her stand out from the rest of the community, her experiences are engaging but not always pleasant, and makes her sexual development realistic and interesting for the reader.