Lola Flashcards
Victim
‘Refugees from a bitter domestic civil war should have mattered more to Briony’ ch1, pg8
antagonist
‘Briony suspected that behind her older cousin’s perfect manners was a destructive intent’ ch3, pg34
Duplicity, appearance vs reality
‘She was advancing on him, her green eyes narrowed like a cat’s’ ch4,pg57 - zoomorphism, vilainous elements.
‘She seized him by an ear and put her face close to his’ ch5, pg57
Threatening
‘A tall nettle with a preening look, its head coyly drooping and its middle leaves turned outwards like hands protesting innocence - this was Lola… This was too satisfying to let go, and the next several nettles were Lola too; one leaning across to whisper in the ear of it’s neighbour, was cut down with an outrageous lie on her lips; here she was again, standing apart from the others, head cocked in poisonous scheming ch7p74
Stubborn and authoritative
‘She had green eyes and *sharp bones in her face, and hollow cheeks, and there was something brittle in her reticence that suggested strong will and a temper easily lost.’ ch1,pg10
In between a child and an adult
‘her nearly adult mind was elsewhere’ ch1, pg17
‘Lola had come to the nursery that morning in the guise of the adult she considered herself at heart to be’ ch3,pg34
‘like and apprentice mouthing the incantation of a magus’ ch5,pg59 - simile = playing adult/pretending
‘he had seen three children. Now he saw that the girl was almost a young woman’ ch5,pg60 Paul’s perspective shift
‘the womanly tang of Lola’s perfume could not conceal a childish whiff of Germolene’ ch10p117
Lola’s confides in Briony
Chapter 10:
she continued, ‘the twins have been torturing me’/ i was getting ready for the bath… they came bursting in and pounched on me. they got me down on the floor…’
Lola to Briony, saying that the twins have attacked her by pinning her down whilst she was in a vulnerable state in the bathroom- this line of story doesn’t quite add up, as ‘torturing’ is not an act associated with children playing- is this the first sign of abuse from Paul Marshall, but Lola is too scared to outwardly say anything? power dynamic.
‘worried that Lola’s crying could be heard downstairs, Briony got to her feet again and pushed the bedroom door closed’
closing of the door indicates Briony’s concealment of the truth- this small incident mirrors the wider events that take place in the play-silencing of Lola causes the tragic downfall of Robbie later in the play.
‘that a girl so brittle and domineering should be brought this low by a couple of nine-year old boys seemed wondrous to Briony’
‘she gently rubbed her cousin’s shoulder and reflected that Jackson and Pierrot alone could not be responsible for such grief’
Briony questions the situation with Lola and her brothers-it is illogical, however she concludes that living in the North with ‘streets of blackened mills, and grim men trudging to work with sandwiches in tin boxes’ is the source of her grief - shows industrialisation and issues of class.
Briony takes the role of care taker and mother-figure in this chapter, offering Lola ‘antiseptic’ for her ‘Chinese burns’.
This may contribute to Lola’s insistence that Robbie is a “maniac” or a “monster” displacing her feelings of guilt, blame and shame onto him.
Victim of the crime chapter 13
‘the body was bony and unyielding, wrapped tight about itself like a seashell. A winkle. Lola hugged herself and rocked’ (ch13,p165)
Simile: fragile, vulnerable, victim stance, trying to console herself.
‘weak, submissive voice’ (ch13p165)
‘How could we have let this happen to a child?’ (ch13,p168)
‘he came down… and picked her up as though she were a small child’ (ch13,p172)
“And what luck that was for Lola - barely more than a child, prised open and taken - to marry her rapist.”
The paragraph ends with the blunt statement that Lola was marrying her“rapist”(p324), revealing the true villain to the reader.
‘as lean and fit as a racing dog’, ‘there was an air of the health farm about her, and an indoor tan’, ‘she could have been Cruella De Vil’ (358)
“Nor did the bride appear to be a victim.” (325)
- in comparison to Marshall she’s younger, healthier: interesting how the age differential is still evident even at this stage of their lives
- she still has that ostentatious sense of self-image and maturity that she had in Part One: Briony hasn’t changed, but neither has she
- Briony compares her to a villain, which seems vastly unfair
- even though she’s probably lived a very comfortable life, one of the major themes of this novel is the fact that the true victims never get a voice (AO4 ‘The Reader’), and therefore we’ll never know what Lola thinks about anything
“That Paul Marshall, Lola Quincey and she, Briony Tallis, had conspired with silence and falsehoods to send an innocent man to jail? (325)
“There was our crime - Lola’s, Marshall’s, mine” (369)
Briony considered Lola’s silence part of the crime
