She’s a very judgmental woman. She sends the boy straight away outside to do the manual work and leaves Sandra the light chores indoors. She makes conversation with the girl, but not with Kerry, thinking he’ll have nothing interesting to say. This is because she doesn’t think much of his ambitions, smiling falsely while he tells her that he wants to work as a car mechanic. She insults him, “well, I expect that’s good steady money if you’d nothing special in mind. Sugar?” then moves on quickly to a gesture of hospitality, trying to conceal the jibe aimed at Kerry. She’s patronizing too, with comments like “You’re a little dress maker, too,” and “Chocky?” She asks Sandra to offer Kerry a chocolate too, but has already forgotten his name “Take them out and see if what’s-‘s-name would like one?” showing his insignificance in her mind. One reason why she does this may be because she has no children of her own, so she goes on stereotypical ideas. She also makes the reader feel uneasy, “Mind your pretty skirt, pull it up a bit, there’s only me to see if you’re showing a bit of bum.” This provokes the thought that she has a slightly warped mind.
She starts to tell Sandra about her husband who was killed in the war. He died rite at the beginning, and she hasn’t formed any relationships since. This can make the reader feel a little bit sympathetic towards her. Penelope Lively lets us know what others think of Mrs. Rutter as Kerry builds a profile on her character when he talks with Sandra. He shows his dislike of the woman, “I don’t go much on her” and “I dunno. The way she talks and that.” Sandra encourages him to feel sorry for her by telling him of her tragedy, but he explains that “There’s lots of people done that” dismissing the excuse for her peculiar and disturbing behavior by implying that she wasn’t the only one to loose somebody in the war.
The way Mrs. Rutter always watches Sandra and “glinting from the cushions” gives an uneasy feel towards her. When Kerry returns inside Mrs. Rutter begins her anecdote. He asks if she saw the plane come down and she chuckles, seeming to delight in the idea. She explains how her and her sister went to investigate the scene and was only going to get help if it was an allied plane. This alarms Kerry. Her twisted side becomes more apparent when she says, “We cheered, I can tell you” as they realized it was German. Sandra is alarmed and quips how awful it was, but Mrs. Rutter, who disregards her discomfort, abruptly interrupts her she is so involved in telling the story.
She tries to soften what she is saying by ‘sugaring the pill’, for example friendly additives such as “my duck” to unsettling sentences. She refers to the injured man in the broken plane as “that site”. She mentions nothing about the man himself but just remarks how “it wasn’t a pretty site”. She is unmoved when the German was crying “mutter, mutter”. This shows she is a cold, heartless woman. She recollects easily how she left the man in pain because it was raining. This shows she has no feeling of mutual human kindness and doesn’t feel obliged to help. Again, she is not bothered with the fact he is in his late teens.
Mrs. Rutter is bitter and resentful because of the death of her husband. She delights in the German’s death, “I thought, oh no, you had this coming to you, mate, there’s a war on.” She seems surprised when Kerry and Sandra suddenly get up to leave, disgusted with her tale. She has no remorse and doesn’t realize there was anything wrong with what she did, her conscience still not activated all these years later.
Rite from the beginning there had been implicit clues to her nasty inner character, not just from the story she told which revealed it explicitly towards the end. Penelope Lively through other means, like metaphors reveals the character. Like her body, her personality is not clear-cut. The author suggests this when she explains “she seemed composed of circles”. Introduced as “a cottage loaf of a woman”, gives the misleading impression of a warm, traditional, safe, chunky, old woman. But following this, is another metaphor, “with a face below which chins collapsed one into another,” implicitly meaning she had different guises, was false and two- faced. Someone not to be trusted.
In addition there is high amount of symbolism inflicted on the story, this is first started from the title but you are questioned on how the title is symbolic. At first the darkness seems a simple metaphor for the unknown evil in Packer's End. But at the end of the story, the evil is now known. The darkness is not evil outside in the wood. It is “out there” in the world of human experience, “in your head for ever like lines from a song...it was a part of you and you would never be without it, ever”.
Within the two stories there are many contrasts and similarities one of which is that there is a shocking ending with each story. One similarity is that there is one character in each story that has mixed personalities. With mrs rutter in “the darkness out there” on the exterior she seems like a sweet old lady but actually she is much more and seems to have hidden a twisted secret inside. This also falls short with eveline from “when the wasps drowned” who is a child who craves the the charcteristics of a mature adult even though she is mentally not ready and jumps from a child to adult as a result of holding such a dark secret. A contrast is that in the darkness out there there is a lot of dialogue and the colloquial language used adds to the ordinariness of the setting in contrast to the horror of the story : on the other hand in when the wasps drowned the writing is sparse which contrasts with the harsh reality of the tragic event that takes place
In conclusion I think both writers have used a range of innovative techniques and language devices to make the stories more shocking to the reader. In ‘when the wasp drowned ‘the stark contrast of innocence being snatched from the children creates a chilling tone throughout the story along with the usage of first person of eveline looking back on her childhood. By having the whole language in a colloquial manner we have an incredible insight to sandra’s thoughts and feelings and I like the fairytale like setting in the story as it provides a greater difference between reality and a dream like world. As a result of these techniques I think an evident contrast in characterisation and tone is presented to the reader in a consistent manner
In ‘when the wasp drowned’ and ‘the darkness out there’ the concept of appearance and reality is presented within the charcters and the twisted storyline. A number of techniques such as symbolism, tone an narrative are used to portray these themes to the reader. In ‘when the wasps drowned’ eveline is portrayed as being mature and protective over her siblings and more importantly the truth of the ring. In ‘the darkness out there
