Chapter 9: It's More Than Just Rain or Snow
Severe weather sucks. If it's bad enough, I could honestly say it terrifies me. However, in terms of literature, the worse it is, the more interested I become. I could not tell someone the last time I actually read the line "it was a dark and stormy night", but on the other hand, I know that when I do, I will immediately begin wondering how cheesy the piece of literature will be. It's a cliché sentence to use in a story, but as pointed out in this chapter, weather in literature plays a huge part in the setting of the story, the depth of a story, and a work's plot as a whole.
In The Beauty and the Beast, weather is a huge conducting factor in the beginning of the movie. Belle's father, after losing his horse and being chased by wolves, is stuck in a "dark and stormy night" when he decides to venture into the castle. This ended up turning his simple trip to show off his invention into a quest that dictated the entire plot of the movie- if he never went inside the castle, we would have never met the Beast. So, not only did the weather help create a more interesting adventure to begin the movie, it ultimately orchestrated the entire plot.
Now, as i've recently learned, rain does more than add detail and interest to a story. Weather in general is a part of our lives on a day to day basis, and we have been raised to accept the fact that we have absolutely no control over its actions. While seasons and weathermen (though not very good at it) provide some kind of predictor as to what the weather will be like, there is no way to truly control it. This unites humanity through the fact that a 45 year old man has no more control than a 3 year old girl. In the same sense, an American has no more control over it than someone who lives in Thailand. This brings an extreme sense of "we're all in this together" to society because truly if one suffers, all those around suffer. As far as I know, rain, sleet, snow, ect. are as old as our planet. When you think about that, you realize that what you are experiencing today has been felt by people of the past and will be experienced in the future. This is also seen with rainbows. They provide such a powerful promise of hope that began in biblical times and will continue to the year 3000 when we are all floating around in bubbles. There is no beginning or end to this kind of phenomenon, and that is such a cool thought to add into a story by simply writing in a thunderstorm.
At the end of the chapter, Forester writes a very brief paragraph about snow. I found this kind of amusing, but very representative of snow. Snow can literally mean so many things, i'm not even sure if a reader is supposed to be able to decipher its exact purpose. Actually, maybe that is the purpose: to overwhelm and confuse the reader so much that they don't exactly know what is going on...they continue reading anyway, so they can try to figure it out, eventually.
Weather, though an everyday occurrence, holds much more symbolic power when played around with in literature. It can provide so much depth to a work, depth that the average reader would not know to explore. There's this phrase I used to say when I was little, "Heather feather knows the weather", but honestly i'm not too sure about that anymore because weather sure does seem to possess a lot more meaning than I think I would have ever known.
Here's even more! http://thetouchtypist.hubpages.com/hub/rain-and-literature
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