Saturday 28 March 2009

The Go-Between Essay

Question -

Choose a novel which caused you to reconsider your views on an important human issue. Explain what the issue is and go on to discuss ow the writer made you reconsider your views.

Childhood innocence can often be manipulated and this can lead to drastic consequences. ‘The Go-Between’ by LP Hartley causes us to question our views as we follow the ‘corruption’ of 12-year-old Leo Colston. Leo is the unwitting ‘go-between’ for the lovers Ted and Marian; he keeps their affair alive by delivering letters under the guise of business notes. The terrible outcome of Leo’s actions has a profound effect on his own life and inadvertently leads to the suicide of Ted.

Hartley depicts Leo’s innocence in the opening chapters of the novel. In the summer of 1900 he stays at the house of his friend Marcus Maudsley and becomes infatuated with his sister, Marian: ‘My spiritual transformation took place in Norwich’. The use of religious language suggests that Leo is a somewhat naïve idealist as, in reality, Marian only takes him clothes shopping.

Although Leo’s idealism is touching, his feelings blind him from Marian’s deceitful nature and before long he is covering for her to Marcus. When questioned over whether she met anyone in Norwich, she replies: ‘We were hard at is all the time, weren’t we, Leo?’ Leo agrees due to his willingness to please her but he forgets the hour he spent alone in the cathedral. It is telling that he attends church while she meets Ted; it emphasizes that his mind is on spiritual things. However, at the same time, this makes him easy to manipulate.

Marian takes advantage of Leo’s ignorance as well as his feelings for her when she sends him off with the letters for Ted: ‘We sometimes write each other notes on business matters and you say you like taking them’. In this way, she uses his immaturity to tell him what his own feelings are.

Leo’s innocence becomes his downfall when he is plunged into the world of adult relationships. When Leo discovers the true content of Ted and Marian’s letters he is devastated: ‘Not Adam and Eve, after eating the apple, could have been more upset than I was’. The narrator’s use of religious language continues with this biblical reference. It suggests his frame of reference for the lovers is Adam and Eve from the bible, their ‘fall from grace’ when they discovered knowledge.

When he discovers the lovers together it causes him to suffer an emotional collapse: ‘The Virgin and the Water Carrier on the ground … two bodies moving like one’. The use of symbols from the Zodiac, as with the bible, show that Leo is unable to understand sexual relationships in a modern way.

In the novel, this discovery is in close proximity to Ted’s suicide. The result of this tragedy is that Leo spends the next fifty years of his life as an emotionally distant adult. We see Leo’s innocence through the nostalgia of his old age, as a first-person narrator. This made me feel pity for him due to his well-meaning idealism and the terrible experience he suffered at a young age.

‘The Go-Between’ explores the vulnerability of childhood innocence at the point when someone comes of age. In this way, it made me reconsider my views on an important human issue.

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