Eva Trout (novel)

Part I-Genesis The novel opens with Eva's excursion to a lake in the neighbourhood of Larkins where she is staying as a paying guest since her father's death.

The first school, owned by her father Willy Trout and administered by Constantine's lover Kenneth, is one of the rare places where Eva feels at home but it also has a traumatic effect on her insofar as Eva's roommate Elsinore attempts to take her own life by drowning herself in the lake.

As Eva approaches her 25th birthday after which she will be able to access the fortune her father left behind, both the Arbles and her legal guardian Constantine Ormeau question her capacity to take care of herself and her wealth.

In a conversation with Iseult at Cathay, Eva tells her that she is to give birth to her baby and flees to America where she would purchase a child to make up for her lie.

She is a 24-year-old, socially awkward woman looking forward to her 25th birthday after which she will be entitled to access the fortune her father bequeathed.

Although her guardians have not much confidence in her ability to take care of herself, she is a very independent person making her decisions without paying much attention to what people expect of her.

Despite his poor parenting influence, he bequeaths his daughter a fortune that helps Eva be the independent woman she is.

She is a very successful teacher pedagogically, but as an intellectual and a wanna-be author of her own novel and an amateur translator, she is rather "an artist manqué", "a façade of erudition.

For Iseult, the main reason for this unhappy marriage is Eva Trout whom they have to take care of or think about all the time.

As the warm and friendly atmosphere of the house fascinates Eva, she spends most of her time with the four children of the Dancey's household.

In fact, Willy Trout buys the castle and wants Kenneth to be in administration with the aim of keeping Constantine away from him.

Gerard Bonnard-a French doctor to whom Eva takes Jeremy with the aim of improving his son's communication skills.

In the second moment of Eva's privileging superficiality, she is commenting on the artworks exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery.

"[6] The novel's main character, Eva, style of conversation is described as being "outlandish, cement-like" that was "set" by the time she was sixteen years old and her English teacher, Iseult, met her.

Dancey is another character who has trouble communicating due to his constant sneezing and hay fever which renders his speech uncomfortable for him and those who hear him as: his anxiety was his voice, which had taken into varying in volume as uncontrollably as though a poltergeist were fiddling with the controls, sometimes coming out of the sudden boom or roar, sometimes fading till off the air.

[7] Eric Arble and Iseult have problems communication as their conversations are either interrupted by the arrival of Eva or by each other's overwhelmingly emotional reaction to what the other had said.

Bowen expresses a sense of ambivalence towards the "garlands of affection" that the characters bestow upon one another, as language can easily be used to guise, misguide and confuse individuals or hold clandestine meanings.

Eva, whose linguistic skills are lacking due to being raised by non-native speakers of English, asks about the meaning of the words that she does not understand and this manner, she unmasks the artificiality lurking behind language.

As Elsinore has to spend all her time in the room as part of her recovery treatment, the bond between them gets even stronger because of the close proximity they find themselves in.

After buying a big castle by the lake, he asks his lover Constantine's friend Kenneth to be the administrator.

In fact, the school itself closes shortly after Elsinor's departure due to a series of unfortunate incidents including theft, poisoning and arson.

Eva's mother also fails as a parent when she leaves her husband and daughter behind upon discovering the truth about Willy's homosexuality and his relationship with Constantine.

Constantine, the prototype of the evil stepfather, ignores Eva completely until she is to inherit Willy's wealth.

"[21] So it stands to reason that Mr. and Mrs. Arble's interest in having Eva stay at their house was because they didn't have a child as well as they needed her money and this tension results in their sterility and not being able to make her happy.

Eva's renunciation of appearances, the intricate web of relations between people who affect one another's life drastically, the play of chanciness and necessity constitute the main existentialist motifs of the novel.

"[22] Eva's last words before she gets shot dead by her son, "What is concatenation?,"[23] also points at the accumulation of events and their determining effect on one's life.

This question adds to many of the other moments, especially in the second part of the novel, in which Eva shows the signs of addressing the constraints of the situations that she finds herself in rather than dismissing them right away.

Elsinore, Eva's roommate at her first school, the fairy-like little near-albino, whose "washed-out beauty gave her an air of age," is named after the castle in Hamlet and she is referred to by the boy who saved her life as 'Ophelia' illegit.

When Constantine says to Eva that she's making an "Eden" out of life for Jeremy and that it is time to "cast him out," the biblical theme of falling is invoked.

In this play written by Henrik Ibsen, Hedda hands in a gun to another character to assist him in committing suicide.