Reaction Paper on Geraldine Brookss The Year of Wonders - Essay Example

173988  Fortify the healthy, not cure the afflicted -- Offer the balms of comfort to the dying. Geraldine Brook’s Year of Wonders was about those unfortunate years of Black Death, believed to be ‘God’s Wrath’ in those days of insufficient scientific advancement, even though Seventeenth century was the dawn of modern medicine, Age of Enlightenment all over Europe, restoration of monarchy and relief from Cromwell’s Puritanism. In that rapidly changing world of 1665, where focus was shifting from God to man, Eyam, an English remote village of lead miners, cobblers, weavers and shepherds, became the victim of the bubonic plague, and the radical town minister Michael Mompellion compelled the villagers that they should quarantine themselves in the ‘wide green prison’ and meet their end or survival. The novel brings out the desperation, poignancy, guilt of evoking God’s ire. It also brings out the noblest nature in ministering the sick, worst by showing a gravedigger profiteering from the dead. It is gripping with ultimate grief mingled with fear and narrator is the eighteen year old widowed heroine Anna Frith. Vicar’s housemaid and her attempts to find the origin of plague make her an unlikely heroine because of her class and gender. Facing the loss of family, disintegration of community that had launched on murderous witch-hunting, Anna emerges above the fear and fanaticism. Here science grapples with the religion, hate with love, and selflessness with cruel self-gratification. “It begins with the scent of rotting apples and a flush that looks like rose petals blooming beneath the skin. Then the yellow-purple pustule appears, swelling to the size of a newly born piglet. Eventually it bursts, like a pea-pod splitting open, spewing pestilential pus flecked with spots of rotten skin”. Alfred Hickling says in Guardian. The terrifying, yet noble tale of Plague Village is a historical fact. “In 1842, William Wood, a descendent of one of the few surviving families, observed in his history of the village that: "The immortal victors of Thermopylae and Marathon have no stronger claim to the admiration of succeeding generations than the villagers of Eyam; who in a sublime, unparalleled resolution gave up their lives - yea: doomed themselves to pestilential death to save the surrounding country". http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,521255,00.html This virulent outbreak of Black Death killed four fifth of population in approximately 260 villages. Readers see through Anna’s eyes, and the simple relationships form the emotional core of the novel. Even though the real rector of the time was a saintly person, Brooks’ rector was slightly perverse and had a personal war against religion/God. Anna loses her children, her people, and she witnesses the community vanishing through painful death and reader sees how the dreaded disease destroys not just the body but the mind too and how people could becomes saints and sinners with irreversible consequences, faced by hopeless and daunting situations including the child mortality fear in rural communities (Lib Hancock: “It is folly and ill fortune to love a child until it walks and is well grown.”). It also celebrates the indomitable human spirit against fear and hopelessness despite the changing psychology of villagers faced by agony and death ("Sometimes, if I walked the main street of the village in the evening, I felt the press of their ghosts. I realized then that I had to step small and carry myself all hunched, keeping my arms at my sides and my elbows tucked, as if to leave room for them."). The usual conventionality, gentleness, chivalry, affection all go through an unrecognisable change. “While this book is successful both in its historical description of the time and events, as well as in its multi-layered and expressive characterizations, it is perhaps the way in which the author sets up certain expectations on the part of the reader, only to ultimately dismantle and destroy them in the end, that this narrative stands out as more than just another well written and historically accurate fiction.” says one of the reviews, http://www.sfsite.com/06b/yw130.htm Some of the opening lines are so clearly 17th century rural England: “The wood stacked by the door, the tang of its sap still speaking of the forest. The hay made, all golden in the low afternoon light. The rumble of the apples tumbling into the cellar bins. Smells and sights and sounds that said this year it would be all right: there’d be food and warmth for the babies by the time the snows came” The village, in an act of extraordinary altruism and vision to save others at the cost of subjecting themselves to near-sure suffering and death after the plague reached through a journeyman tailor coming from London, who describes London as “The city is like a corpulent man trying to fit himself into the jerkin he wore as a boy”. Anna, who escaped her abusive father by marrying a rather good-hearted, but uncouth minor from whom she had two sons and the marriage ends with his death in a cave-in. Mem Gowdie and Anys , who were almost homeopaths, were of a different thought level and Anys is ahead of her times and believes in free love. (“sometimes a woman needs a draught of nettle beer to wake her up, and sometimes she needs a dish of valerian tea to calm her down. Why cultivate a garden with only one plant in it?) The characters are rather absolute black and stark white in the novel, like Anna’s father while the rector family hangs in between good and bad. Panic, greed, resignation to fate, rage, and murderous fanaticism are all part of the novel. Period language dialogue is not particularly impressive (‘you ignorant slattern’, ‘rake-shamed drunken fanfaroon’). Though they all look like perfect citizens, when the circumstances change they are merely human with the dominant character taking possession and Anna’s statement stands out: "Perhaps the Plague was neither of God nor the Devil, but simply a thing in Nature, as the stone on which we stub a toe" She has more wisdom, imagination, creative thinking than many of her betters (Anna creating stories to her kids: A line of fungus marching up a fallen branch might become, in our tale, the stairway to a faery’s bower, while an acorn cup might be the cup left behind by a party of feasting wood mice.) If mother/daughter pair of healers who were also herbalists, and these medicines, even though they have no scientific basis, were still able to remedy much of suffering. These two become scapegoats for non-conformity. Plague is described by every character in a different way. Dr. Reiux treats it as a sickness while father Paneloux, a Jesuit priest, thought it was punishment for sins committed. Rector convinced the villagers to limit themselves within the boundary stone limit and strive for salvation because it is useless to go away. The contaminated articles and clothes of the tailor were not initially destroyed because of lack scientific knowledge. Eleanor and Michael reveal marriage secretes to Anna. Bradford family faces Momphellion’s wrath because they ran away, as they had the means to do so like any other noble family. Rector’s secret shadows fall on the nobility of his work. Anna goes through a mental and spiritual unravelling and almost attains a rebirth. All female characters, Lib, Anna, Gowdies, Eleanor, Anna’s stepmother all show enormous strength of character. Those were the days when antibiotics have not been invented, though science was receiving royal patronage. Methods of disinfection were not well-known even in London and this fear of infection drove Londoners to inhuman methods during plague. Fear and superstition and survival made them merciless. Other than burning the infected material, there were hardly any alternatives of infection. Written in modern and fluid style, not dull or tedious, book maintains uncanny optimism despite the prevailing grimness, ‘how fear drove ordinary people first into superstition and then into primeval brutality’. It also shows that human nature does not change while knowledge does. The village is in stark contrast with the treatment London gave to its sick, locking them up with the healthy in their houses, sealing the houses without water or food, and according to Samuel Pepys, ‘making us cruel as dogs to one another’. London was gripped by the fear of unknown. Ultimately Anna confesses: "I cannot say that I have faith anymore. Hope, perhaps. We have agreed that it will do for now."  BIBLIOGRAPHY: 1. Brooks, Geraldine (2001), Year of Wonders, Penguin group, London. 2. ONLINE SOURCES: 1. http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,521255,00.html 2. http://www.sfsite.com/06b/yw130.htm 3. Read More