The narrator's wife — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
The narrator's wife
Characters
What you need to know
How Wells presents The narrator's wife, and how the character develops across the text: the quiet, frightened wife whom the narrator leaves at Leatherhead, mourns as dead and finds again at the end, the figure of the home and love he struggles to return to.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I went for a walk with my wife', 'My wife pointed out to me the brightness of the red, green, and yellow signal lights', 'said my wife, knitting her brows and putting her hand on mine', 'They may come here', 'My dear wife’s sweet anxious face peering at me from under the pink lamp shade', 'But where are we to go?', 'seemed oppressed with forebodings of evil', 'Her face, I remember, was very white as we parted', 'It is a curious thing that I felt angry with my wife', 'I figured her at Leatherhead, terrified, in danger, mourning me already as a dead man', 'I found myself praying that the Heat-Ray might have suddenly and painlessly struck her out of being', 'I seemed a traitor to my wife and to my kind', 'the old life of hope and tender helpfulness that had ceased for ever', 'She put her hand to her throat—swayed', 'to hold my wife’s hand again'.
The wife as a symbol of home, comfort and the ordinary life the invasion destroys, and of the hope that keeps the narrator going.
Context: a comfortable middle-class Victorian household with a servant, and a husband who reassures his wife while her fears prove right.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
