Zenobia Fenrick, an English major with a concentration in language and literature, attends Bowie State University. She is an avid reader, thinker, and aspiring critic of film, plays, and various content. While attending Bowie State University, she managed to make the Dean’s List and was involved with various student organizations such as the Gay-Straight Alliance (Secretary from 2018 to 2019; President from 2019 to 2020) and Raíces Latino Students Association (Secretary from 2018 to 2020). During her presidency, she was able to vouch for the reopening of the LGBTQIA and Gender Resource Center on campus. She has a passion for analyzing classic cartoons during the Golden Age of Hollywood animation and learning about world history. Her favorite subjects while attending university were English classes. She plans to graduate in the spring of 2021 and publish her works on leitmotifs in classic Hollywood animation.
Understanding Plot:
Plot can be understood as the action of the story; similar to the summary of a story but different in that plot has multiple components. We will discuss some of these components here using Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy as a guide.
What Makes Up Plot?:
A standard plot consists of the following elements:
Exposition:
The ground level of any story; exposition introduces us to characters, and background information, familiarizing the reader with what they need to know before getting further into the novel.
In A Mercy, the exposition is a little unclear. Morrison layers her novel in a way that enables the reader to gather new information as the chapters progress. The first chapter in the novel begins with Florens, our main protagonist. Morrison herself has mentioned that A Mercy is Florens’ story. Therefore, we experience things from her perspective when they happen. An example of exposition would be when Florens explains that she’s on a journey to find “you” (a character that is later explained in the novel). The exposition also gives us a look into the setting. For example, in the first chapter we arrive at the line “Florens, she says, it’s 1690. Who else these days has the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady?” (Morrison 4) This illuminates that the story is taking place in somewhere in the 17th century.
Conflict and Rising Action:
The conflict of a story is defined as the “interaction of plot and character or the opposition of two forces”. This can either be a character vs another character; a character vs nature; a character vs society or a character vs themselves. The rising action is what leads up to the main conflict of the story. These events are usually significant and play a major role in the story.
The main character is Florens. Thus, the conflict of the story is centered around her. Florens must find “you” (the blacksmith) so she can feel what it’s like to be loved and alive. This could be a character vs self situation. The end of the novel involves her recognizing her flaws and overcoming them. In essence, she is so infatuated with the blacksmith and wrapped up in her feelings that she can’t see what’s going on around her.
One of the characters in A Mercy whose story helps with the rising action is the story of Jakob Vaark. He is a slave trader and the owner of a large property. When he suddenly gets ill and dies of smallpox, he leaves his wife and their servants in a state of disarray. His wife, Rebekka, contracts smallpox and has to rely on Florens to bring the blacksmith (whom Jakob hired to build his new house). In essence, Jakob’s death leads up to Florens’ story: the main conflict of the novel.
Climax:
The climax is the most intense part of the story, or rather, when the rising action reaches a boiling point. This is the most important part of the story.
Since we know A Mercy is Florens’s story, the climax would be Florens having an altercation with the blacksmith after she finds him and he returns from the Varrks’ estate. Tensions rise and the tone [hyperlink the word “tone” to the lib guide page on tone, theme, and style] of the story changes.
Falling Action:
The falling action is how the conflict of a story begins to be resolved.
When Florens realizes she should never give herself physically, emotionally, or mentally to another person, she begins to resolve her own problems. The other characters notice that she has changed in response to this.
Resolution/Denouement:
This is the overall resolution and (sometimes) epilogue of the story. The conflict may or may not have been resolved and the story has reached its end.
The resolution of A Mercy comes from a more or less absent character. The last chapter of A Mercy is from Florens’s mother. She explains that she sold Florens (something that contributed to Florens’s dependence on someone for love) so she could be protected from their abusive master, D’Ortega. Though Florens does not know this, she learns the lesson her mother hoped she would learn: “to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.” (Morrison 167)