Cultural Contexts for Creative and Destructive Personalities

The ubiquity of performing hands on screen is a challenge when it comes to considering characterisation theoretically. Stage and screen actors have been known to complain about the same problem from a practical angle. When not put to the service of some action or gesturing, the dangling limbs can be an obsessive distraction. The literary artist draws attention to manual presence and activity by verbal invocation, working on the assumption that unless stated they are not absent to the character. As a result, when hands emerge in words from diegetic silence to mimetic denotation an intentional labour is required. This summoning imbues them with certain potency. Poignant examples from literature typically mark the dramatic intensity of given moments and some of these have found their way into screen adaptations of their sources. On-going references to the hands of characters who interact with the protagonist of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary include the old lady's ‘large hands with knotty joints’ (2001, 127); Rodolph's move to kiss Emma's hand following their ride in the country (ibidem, 136); or Charles’ hands as he performs surgeon's duties (ibidem, 148). When a ‘poor little seamstress’ has been condemned to the guillotine in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, she movingly asks that Sydney Carton, who is heroically suffering the same fate, to hold her hand to alleviate her terror as she is carried with him on the tumbril to their execution (1993, 398–421). Marcel, the young protagonist of Proust's In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower – the second novel of the writer's In Search of Lost Time – plays a romantically charged game of ‘ring on a string’ with his teenaged female friends (2003, 495–499).