Atmospherics in Austenesque Variations

Using the outside to help understand the inner discourse

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All sorts of questions bedevil authors.

Are my characters believable?

Is the plot believable?

Is the world in which my characters interact with the plot itself believable?

How often have we read a book with a compelling plot only to start wondering why the characters are responding to the cruxes as they are? In other words, if Lizzy Bennet (the feisty young woman exists as Elizabeth only in Darcy’s mind) is kidnapped, she fights her attacker every conscious moment. She does not sit primly like a young miss awaiting a dance at Almack’s. That would not be Elizabeth Bennet. Darcy, in his search for her, braves every conceivable trial. He does not hire the Bow Street Runners and then retire to Darcy House. While he is reserved and keeps his inner Colonel Fitzwilliam under strict regulation, the moment one of those he cares about is threatened, he becomes “a one-man army.”[i]

How often have we begged an author to ‘Just have them do something that reveals their inner discourse?’ This is different from the characters moving within the plot. Instead, it is regular behavior informing us of the character’s mindset. Thus, our Elizabeth tramps all over the countryside as she burns off her impertinent energy and shows her resistance to the social constraints bearing down upon women of her class. The oleaginous Collins bows and scrapes to all betters, especially those who control his next meal. We never need to hear a word from his mouth to understand his true nature.

However, even if characters act as they ought in response to the plot movers and show us their inner workings, the setting of the world in which they exist must accurately contribute to the reader’s comprehension of why they are shaped and move as they do.

Atmospherics are the one feature that brings the book’s realm into the reader’s world.

Western Civilization has developed a code over the nearly three thousand years since the Greeks. We use it to understand why people act as they do based on a complex interaction of factors forming a perception matrix.

Consider this…

The rain is pouring down outside of the drawing room. Lady Catherine is upon her “throne.” Suddenly, she begins to laugh. Is she happy, or is she insane?

Admittedly, it is Lady Catherine. But, a rainy day is not conducive to jolly behavior. Your conclusion that she plays with less than fifty-two cards would not be amiss.

Now consider how rain may be one atmospheric that sets a tone in this excerpt from Chapter Eight of The Exile: Kitty Bennet and the Belle Époque.

She rested her face against the rain-speckled glass that cooled her flushed cheek. The soft patter of the early afternoon shower washed away all of the noise worrying her thoughts and settled the troubled knot in her middle, an unwelcome and periodic companion since she peeked out of the Wardrobe in Henry’s room over four years ago.

Now twenty-one, Kitty is home from school on the night of Henry Fitzwilliam’s engagement ball. She is not sad, but rather wistful. The chapter develops from there.

The mood can be further darkened by forcing the mercury to drop. Consider this fragment from Chapter Twenty-seven, deep in Kitty’s troubles.

Peering out between the folds of dusty, worn cloth, Kitty had gazed over at the frost creeping down the tattered wallpaper that had been new when Napoleon III ruled. Her world had become so small, circumscribed by the walls of this tiny icebox. She could not find the energy to shift from the chair. Even if she did, where would she go? The tiny circuit of bed to commode to table to chair and back again already defined her life. No variation could be found that could relieve the boredom.

Ennui is certainly a curse, especially for those caught in an unending cycle of seeking and disappointment. Here, Henry Fitzwilliam battles the depressing feeling that nothing is going right…and he cannot concentrate on anything else in Chapter Twenty-nine.

He made a disgusted sound and pushed back from his desk, walking over to the sideboard to pour a dram of whiskey. Slipping on his dark glasses, he then gazed out a window into the barren garden behind the townhouse; for how long, he was unclear. These brown studies, a feature of his personality since 1883, had become more frequent as the absence of young Miss Bennet had lengthened. Staring out the window seemed as productive a use of his time as anything else. Little mattered to him.

There is but one word to describe the atmosphere created in the next excerpt from Chapter Thirty-six…and the French is more powerful than the English…paix.

Henry stepped out into that expanse seeking solitude beneath the drooping willows that cooled the manicured lawn surrounding their trunks. Spying a bench hidden behind an ancient tree, he settled onto the white-painted iron filigree and tipped his head back against the rough bark. He stared at, without really registering, the fragmented and refracted rays that were split by the foliage. A singular peace he had not experienced for nine years—plus thirty-odd—overtook him as the worry that had been his constant companion since July drained away.

To this point, weather and place have shaped the context within which characters establish themselves. There is one more element…perhaps the most powerful—light.

Two excerpts each use light to set the mood for two proposals.

The first is from The Maid and The Footman where Annie Reynolds has been sent to the Blue Parlor at Burghley House to await her love, Sergeant Henry Wilson. Here, the room is nearly monochromatic.

A cheery coal fire popped and sizzled in the grate, giving the room a distinctive reddish-brown cast. Annie dug into her memory, trying to recall where she had seen such a shade before, searching about for something that nagged at the edges of her conscious thought. …

‘Titian…that is the color named after the Venetian artist who portrayed many of his women subjects with auburn hair. I remember when young Mr. Darcy returned to Pemberley from his Grand Tour with one of the Master’s portraits of a young lady. Her hair was exactly the same hue!’[ii]

Curious, Annie wandered around the modest-sized room looking at the paintings gracing the walls. …one, obviously by Sir Thomas Lawrence, was clearly a copy of Lord Tom and Lady Mary’s wedding portrait. Lawrence had captured the image of love.

She studied the unusual composition of Lord Tom standing directly behind his seated wife, both hands on her shoulders. Lady Mary’s head was tipped slightly upwards and turned away from the painter—not enough to obscure her features but making it obvious that the focus of her attention was not the artist behind his easel, but rather her husband whose tender touch had stirred deep emotions. Her left hand, the jeweled wedding band clearly visible, reached up across her bodice to caress his right where it rested on her bare skin.

Would the portrait have set as profound a tone if the room had been awash in afternoon light? Perhaps…but dimness removes all the other influences that may have competed for Annie’s attention. And, we know what is to come.

And, we are equally prepared for the final denouement in Belle Époque when, in Chapter Forty, we come across this scene in Renoir’s studio. Consider the mention of Renoir’s wife and Kitty’s friend, Aline Charigot-Renoir, as emblematic of the tone leading to where we know the tableau will lead.

In the late afternoon, golds and oranges gave dimension to barren worktables. Yet the room was neither dead nor stripped of life. On the contrary, one could still feel the undercurrent of potential, as if the very walls had absorbed the surfeit of Renoir’s creative energies.

Kitty wandered through the studio, bathed in the remarkable light streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls. Given Renoir’s version of ‘freedom of the city,’ she opened cabinets filled with pigmented wonders…landscapes here, group scenes there. His portraits of Aline, a lifelong passion, some just studies, others completed except for varnish, were stored in a special place reserved for her alone.

She did not hear Henry enter, so entranced was she with the artist’s genius.

To Henry’s eyes, Kitty was a gilded statue come to life. Her white summer gown captured the golden hue. Her straw blonde hair was burnished and enriched by the late afternoon glow.

Writers have an exquisite toolbox when it comes to crafting a reader’s experience. The three elements of character, plot, and atmosphere set the stage for the transformation of common words into a river upon which the reader is borne to new worlds of understanding.

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[i] Arthur Jackson, WWII Medal of Honor recipient.

[ii] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titian_hair accessed 11/4/16.