Glass and Water: Symbolic Imagery in "Oscar and Lucinda" and "Waterland"/title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <link href="style1.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="whole-page"> <div id="head"> <h2>Glass and Water: Symbolic Imagery in Oscar and Lucinda and Waterland</h2> <h4>Barnali Tahbildar '97, English 27 (1997)</h4> <img src="../../icons/austop.gif"/> <p class="bc"> [<a href ="../../index.html">Postcolonial Literature and Culture Site Home</a> —> <a href ="../../misc/australov.html">Australia</a> —> <a href ="careyov.html">Peter Carey</a> —> <a href ="lq.html">Leading Questions</a>]</p></div> <div id="main"> <br/><br/> <p class="lq">A bottle. A beer bottle. A bottle of thick dark brown glass, but not a sort of bottle that is seen any more around the Fens...I take the bottle and carry it along the river-bank...from where it will float down to the Ouse, and even, perhaps, in time, to the sea. An old fashioned, but quite unmuddied, beer bottle, with round the base, embossed in the glass, the words: Atkinson Gildsey. (<span class="lqbook">Waterland</span> 39-40) </p> <p class="one">In Graham Swift's <span class="book">Waterland</span>, the scene in which Tom Crick discovers a glass beer bottle floating down the river serves as one of the most pivotal scenes in the novel, a symbolic image of the Atkinsons ("beer people") and Cricks ("water people") and, more importantly, a piece of the puzzle in the Freddie Parr murder mystery. The meeting of glass and water also plays an important role in the course of Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda. When the reader of <span class="book">Oscar and Lucinda</span> first encounters an image of glass, it is in the form of the Prince Rupert drop, a piece of glass shaped like a drop of water [It is also important to note that the narrator is physically holding this symbol of glass and water as he writes his family story - "I hold it in the palm of my left hand while the right hand moves to and fro across the page" (108)]. The final scene of <span class="book">Oscar and Lucinda</span>, in which the glass church is destroyed and consumed by water, functions as another important encounter between water and glass. In both Waterland and Oscar and Lucinda, images of glass are conflated with images of water and the reader is left to wonder "What is the connection between the two?" This set of interlinked essays explore the connection between glass and water imagery in <span class="book">Oscar and Lucinda</span> and <span class="book">Waterland</span> and show how they are associated with </p> <UL TYPE=DISC> <li><a href="btcreate.html">creation and destruction</a> <li><a href="btlove.html">love and sexuality</a> and <li><a href="btempire.html">progress and the power or weakness of empire</a> . </ul> <p>Before examining their power as symbolic images, let us examine the physical characteristics of glass and water:</p> <p class="lq">Glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid, that an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at the top, and that even while it is as frail as the ice on a Paramatta puddle, it is stronger under compression than Sydney sandstone. (<span class="book">Oscar and Lucinda</span> 111)</BLOCKQUOTE></p> <p class="aq">The comparison between glass and "ice on a Paramatta puddle" in <span class="book">Oscar and Lucinda</span> illustrates the dual nature of both glass and water, substances which are simultaneously liquid and solid. As a liquid capable of freezing into ice and as a solid whose origins derive from a liquid state, water and glass lend themselves well to the idea of duality and function appropriately as literary symbols in Swift's <span class="book">Waterland</span> and Carey's novel.</p> <hr> <a href ="occarov.html"><img src="../../icons/oscar2.gif" alt="Oscar and Lucinda"></a> <a href ="../../uk/gswift/wl/wlov.html"><img src="../../uk/icons/wl2.gif"></a> <a href ="../../misc/australov.html"><img src="../../icons/australia2.gif" alt="Lit of Australia & NZ"></a> <a href ="../../index.html"><img src="../../icons/indpost2.gif" alt="Overview"></a> </div></div> </body> </html>