texte littéraire- 'je'suis en T
Message de jardin62 posté le 12-03-2005 à 13:59:09 (S | E | F | I)
Souhaitant attirer l'attention des lycéens ( post précédent: le commentaire de texte) sur les activités imposées au BAC, je me suis procurée un ouvrage de Terminale (L, ES, S) et j'en ai sorti un texte pour lequel il est demandé:
1- Une lecture/compréhension : read the text...
2- 'Analyze the relations between the characters in this extract from E. Wharton 's novel.
* Je vous propose le texte : si quelqu'un se sent concerné... je suis prête à corriger: a) la traduction d'une partie du texte ( elle sera en rouge) ou/ b) la réponse à la question posée (N°2 ci-dessus) ou/ c) la rédaction d'un résumé du texte ( à peu près 10 lignes -un résumé n'étant pas plus long que le texte à résumer!)FONT>............................................................
(Ethan is secretly in love with Mattie, his servant. Zeena, Ethan's wife, has just told him that she wants the girl to leave)
Ethan shut the door and turned back into the room. His wife 's attitude was unchanged, her face inexorable, and he was seized with the despairing sense of his helplessness.
' you ain't going to do it, Zeena?'
' Do what?' she emitted between flattened lips.
' Send Mattie away -like this?'
'I never bargained to take her for life!'
He continued with rising vehemence:
' You can't put her out of the house like a thief - a poor girl without friends or money. She's done her best for you and she's got no place to go to. You may forget she's your kin but everybody else'll remember it. If you do a thing like that what do you suppose folks'll say of you?'
Zeena waited a moment, as if giving him time to feel the full force of the contrast between his own excitement and her composure. Then she replied in the same smooth voice: ' I know well enough what they say of my having kep' her as long as I have.'
Ethan's hand dropped from the door-knob, which he had held clenched since he had drawn the door shut on Mattie. His wife's retort was like a knife-cut across the sinews and he felt suddenly weak and powerless. He had meant to humble himself, to argue that Mattie's keep didn't cost much, after all, that he could make out to buy a stove and fix up a place in the attic for the hired girl - but Zeena's words revealed the peril of such pleadings.
' You mean to tell her she's got to go - at once?' he faltered out, in terror of letting his wife complete her sentence.
As if trying to make him see reason she replied impartially: 'The girl will be over from Bettsbridge tomorrow, and I presume she's got to have somewheres to sleep.'
Ethan looked at her with loathing. She was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding. It was the sense of his helplessness that sharpened his antipathy. There had never been anything in her that one could appeal to; but as long as he could ignore and command he had remained indifferent. Now she had mastered him and he abhorred her. Mattie was her relation, not his: there were no means by which he could compell her to keep the girl under her roof. All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hard-ship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seem to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way. She had taken everything else from him; and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for all the others. For a moment such a flame of hate rose in him that it ran down his arm and clenched his fist against her. He took a wild step forward and then stopped.' Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)
*AIDE : pour la QUESTION 2, évoquer la jalousie secrète de Zeena, son insatisfaction cachée depuis de longues années, son besoin de revanche, la domination qu'elle exerce sur son mari, la peur de celui-ci et en conséquence sa haine. Essayer de dire aussi qu'elle affecte le plus grand calme en face d'un homme qui a du mal à dissimuler ses sentiments. Un jeu cruel se joue entre une victime devenue bourreau et celui qui est maintenant un jouet entre ses mains...
** Pour le RESUME: L'amour secret de Ethan, le renvoi voulu de celle qu'il aime, la détermination de Zeena, la haine féroce que Ethan voue à celle qu'il accuse de lui avoir tout pris.
*** Bon courage à tous ceux qui se lanceront...C'est un entraînement à l'examen...Ce genre d'épreuve demande de la préparation pour le championnat!