Does Auden Make Miss Gee a Sympathetic Character?

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Does Auden make Miss Gee a sympathetic character? Initially Auden is extremely sympathetic towards Miss Gee, yet in a harsh manner. “Now let me tell you a story about Little Miss Gee”. In this opening line, Auden immediately belittles her character and makes it sound like she belongs somewhere of far less merit, like a children’s book. Whereas in reality, this is actually a poem based entirely around the life of Miss Gee without any other main characters, to the extent that the poem is actually named after her. She is continually referred to as small, further lowering the impressions of the character to the reader. Auden establishes the setting of the poem in the introductory stanza, as would be done in a story “She lived in Clevedon Terrace/ At Number 83”. This is an ordinary address and place for the poem to be set it, this in turn establishes the normality and average attributes of Miss Gee showing her character as one of no complexity. This is turn makes Miss Gee seem anonymous, creating sympathy for her amongst the reader due to her being unable to distinguish herself in society. Throughout the poem Auden shows her to be an extremely lonely character. She is only referred to as “miss” suggesting that not even the narrator, who tells us her life story, knows her well enough to address her using a first name basis. This shows that the character of Miss Gee has not got anyone to be close to, to the point of which her life story must be told by a complete stranger. Also, in her dream, “she passed by the loving couples” suggesting that she herself has never been in a relationship with a man and that has all passed her by. Furthermore the fact that she is childlessness is symbolic of the fact that she could never find a sexual partner. The fact that she contracted cancer is tragic in the aspect that if she had been close to someone she might have avoided it.
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