To What Extent Do You Agree That Irene in a Lady of Letters Is a Tragic Character Whom Is Deserving of Pity from the Reader?

1231 Words5 Pages
To what extent do you agree that Irene in a Lady of Letters is a tragic character whom is deserving of pity from the reader? Alan Bennett’s Irene, in a Lady of Letters, is actually perhaps one of his most complex characters in terms of looking at tragedy. Unlike most of Alan Bennett’s other monologues, a Lady of Letters ends on a more uplifting note than it begins on, with the character actually finding true happiness. However, for the majority of the monologue, Irene is presented to us as a very lonely, isolated and fairly desperate individual, whose only form of communication to the outside world, is to send letters of complaint to people in her ‘community’. The letters that Irene sends are often full of misinterpreted information that often causes trouble, where it is none of her business. So I think as an audience we feel pity for her, as we see how lonely and devout of purpose she is, but also she is clearly a very bitter woman so perhaps we don’t feel too sorry for her. The first line of the monologue, ‘I can’t say the service was up to scratch’, sets the tone for the rest of a Lady of Letters, with Irene moving from one disappointment and source of complaint to the next at a rapid rate. Her only link to the community that she seems to mostly despise is the letters she writes; these letters are an outlet of her frustration and fear of a community she has been almost completely isolated from. Irene doesn’t realise this isolation as she thinks she has been sent a personal letter from an opticians, when in fact it is simply generated advertising. The reader gets a sense from this of how blind she seems to be to her situation. The reader therefore may have pity on her for this, but also she seems quite dim, not to realise what is really going on. She seems very unaware of her social situation in the sense that she doesn’t seem lonely,

More about To What Extent Do You Agree That Irene in a Lady of Letters Is a Tragic Character Whom Is Deserving of Pity from the Reader?

Open Document