Respond to the following quote of Trevor's:
“As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.”
― William Trevor
1. Discuss Freewrite.
2. The Dressmaker's Child: Activity: With a parner, craft a plot line.
Is there a climax? How does this affect Cahal?
3. Identify an excerpt to read to the class. Explain the literary significance of it as it reltates to the respective narrative elements of the story.
4. Activity: With a partner, consider the "symbolism" in this story. Give examples.
5. Discussion: Exploration of religious tension.
6. Analyze the narration of the passage below. Consider if there are any thematic correlations.
"The Dressmaker's Child"
Thirteen years ago, the then bishop and two parish priests had put an end to the cult of the wayside statue at Pouldearg. None of those three men, and no priest or nun who had ever visited the crossroads at Pouldearg, had sensed anything special about the statue; none had witnessed the tears that were said to slip out of the downcast eyes when pardon for sins was beseeched by penitents. The statue became the subject of attention in pulpits and in religious publications, the claims made for it fulminated against as a foolishness. And then a curate of that time demonstrated that what had been noticed by two or three local people who regularly passed by the statue—a certain dampness beneath the eyes—was no more than raindrops trapped in two overdefined hollows. There the matter ended. Those who had so certainly believed in what they had never actually seen, those who had not noticed the drenched leaves of overhanging boughs high above the statue, felt as foolish as their spiritual masters had predicted they one day would. Almost overnight the Weeping Virgin of Pouldearg became again the painted image it had always been. Our Lady of the Wayside, it had been called for a while.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/10/04/041004fi_fiction
