ObjectiveCorrelative
Objective correlative is a fantastic technique used to create emotion in writing. It empowers writers to move away from abstraction (i.e. using direct words like angry, sad, or afraid, which are abstract to the reader) and color a character’s emotion with imagery, metaphor, and meaning.
Originally coined as a literary term by T.S. Eliot in his essay on Hamlet, Eliot explains that the objective correlative as:
“…a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that Particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience,are given, the emotion is immediately evoked” (qtd. in J. A. Cuddon’s Dictionary of LiteraryTerms, page 647).
In layman’s terms, say a character has experienced a loss and the author wants to evoke sadness and longing in the reader. Objective correlative is a technique where the character never tells the reader what she is feeling. Instead she evokes that feeling through sensory experiences and description of her environment.
Take a look at this example from Jacqueline Woodson’s novel Beneath a Meth Moon:
“I sat up front with Daddy, stared at the flat land as we drove. Big sky that I couldn’t look up into without thinking about M’lady and Mama. Green land moving fast toward us, then passing us by. Farms and fields. Whole stretches with nothing at all” (44).
The description of the flat land and the big sky gives a sense of being small. The fact that the narrator (Laurel) can’t look up into the sky adds an additional layer of feeling. She’s overwhelmed by something large. Additionally, that large object is invisible and everywhere. Laurel then links this image with M’lady and Mama. Do we know what happened to these two people in this passage? Not necessarily, but we can make a guess from the description of the landscape.
Objective Correlative in Ethan Frome
Wharton mentions winter, snow, and ice more than 100 times in this novella. “Too many winters,” the narrator says about Ethan Frome.
Find examples of objective correlative in the novella where the external environment symbolically reflects the inner nature of the characters.
Direct quote from the text, including page number / What the character(s) might be feeling as evoked by the sensory experiences/description of the environment