Declaring Effect in Ray Bradbury’s short story 'The Women'
An examination of Bradbury's nature writing and an experiment in prose to mimic the style.
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At six o'clock, the sun set somewhere behind black clouds. The rain rattled softly on the water a distant drum snare.
Under the sea, a moon of illuminate white.
The soft shape, the foam, the weed, the long strands of strange green hair lay in the shallows. Among the stirring glitter, deep under, was the man.
The frosted coral brain rang against the pebble with thought, as quickly lost as found. Man. Fragile. Like dolls, they break. Nothing. Nothing to them. A minute under water and they're sick and pay no attention and they vomit out and kick and then, suddenly, just lie there, doing nothing. Doing nothing at all. Strange. Disappointing, after all the days of waiting.
- (Ray Bradbury ‘The Women’)
Nestled into the close of an almost unremarkable story, this passage hits instantly as a classic Bradbury wallop of nature prose and emotional evocation meant to pull the reader down under the waves with the character, choking and fighting with the give and take rhythm of the declarative and fragmented structure of the 15 lines. Bradbury’s The Women is about a couple on vacation that believes they are being hunted by something in the water that they cannot see.
When encountering sentences like these, I wonder how can I as a writer reverse engineer this so that during pivotal scenes my words and sentences dig hooks into the reader reeling them in to their literary demise? I think the best place to start is with an interrogation of the lines and what they are doing here in this story. I’ll begin by answering six important questions to understanding how Bradbury works his magic in the passage above:
1. What are these sentences doing?
2. Where are these sentences in the life of the story?
3. What types of sentences make up this passage?
4. What types of words make up this passage?
5. How do the words and sentence types play into and build on the story’s theme?
6. If all of that is changed except for the structure and sentence type, will the effect remain?
One: The sentences are there to illicit a wonder-chill. A wonder-chill is a word I just invented to describe the specific emotion the lines are meant to bring about in the reader. A bit of elation, excitement, and fear. There is something dangerous in all the foam and ripples, but there is also something wonderful in the flow of the words: ‘behind black clouds,’ ‘rain rattled softly,’ ‘rang against the pebble,’ ‘Like dolls, they break.’ This passage is doing the work of killing a character slowly.
Two: These sentences appear toward the end of the short story. They come just after the man has sighted a woman in the waves of the ocean who appears to be drowning. He’s decided against the screams of his partner to swim out into the surf to save her. There are only a few more paragraphs after the passage, and they continue describing the man’s dead body in the water and the water’s contempt for him and returning his corpse to his wife on the shore.
Three: The passage is made up entirely of simple, compound, and complex declarative sentences, with some sentence fragments mixed throughout for rhythmic affect: “At six o'clock, the sun set somewhere behind black clouds…Under the sea, a moon of illuminate white…The soft shape, the foam, the weed, the long strands of strange green hair lay in the shallows…Man. Fragile… Doing nothing at all.”
Four: Descriptive words like ‘black cloud,’ ‘foam,’ ‘strange green,’ and sound words ‘rattled,’ ‘drum snare,’ ‘glittering,’ ‘bubbled’ make up the passage. They aren’t overly descriptive and don’t get in the way but together create a wonderous effect. And they are pieced together by prepositions.
Five: Together the words and sentences act in a chronological order to chart the descent of the man in a way that is rhythmic, repetitive like waves, and almost lulling. The theme of the story feels like it is about how men treat women like they are the ones who need to be protected but men are in just as much danger from nature as women are because nature doesn’t discriminate. In a man vs nature story like this one, these words are dominated by the natural world until the end when the man is shown as a fragile broken thing.
Now, with all that knowledge and interrogating out of the way, let’s play! Taking the structure and sentences, I will rewrite the passage as if it happens at the start of a story about how a mother learns to let her child go when they begin committing heinous acts in their teen years. The words will be in line with the theme of man vs man (or child vs parent) and will work to create a powerful descriptive passage of the child being born from the mother’s perspective:
At seven o’clock, your feet burst somewhere between bloody thighs. My screams die hard on hospital walls; our first argument.
Under skilled hands, a neonate in choking black.
Your soft shape, your toes, your head, your chubby parts against my chubby parts fighting for our lives. Among our splitting shrills, deep under, is my love.
My warm canal cunt ruptures around your bones with forced care, before suddenly ‘choked’ is ‘breathe.’ Women. Fragile. Like push-pops, they squeeze. Everything. Everything to it. A minute between pleasure and we’re sick and impregnated, birthing potential-disaster yet we hold on and kiss and cradle, always, just watching from the forever hospital bed, saying nothing. Being nothing at all. Naive. Hopeful, after all the months of waiting.
Now, I turn the interrogation to you, reader: does the above passage match the effect of Bradbury’s original? Are you forced into birthing a monster?