Blood Wedding #3

Readers are attracted to moments of intensity in a writer's work. By what means and with what effect have writers in your study offered heightened emotional moments designed to arrest the reader's attention?

Blood Wedding

Blood Wedding offers minimal heightened emotional moments but the scarcity of these moments makes each one that does happen even more important. This is first evident when the Mother explains her losses to give readers and listeners a possible emotional connection and / or sympathy towards that character.

MOTHER: Anything that can cut into a man's body! A beautiful man, with life like a flower in his mouth, who goes out to the vineyards or to his own olive groves, because they are his, inherited...

BRIDEGROOM: (Lowering his head) Mother, be quiet!

MOTHER: ... and that man does not return. Or if he does, it's only to have a palm placed over him or a dish of rock salt, so his body won't float. I don't know how you dare to carry a knife on you! Or why I allow this serpent inside the cupboard!

BRIDEGROOM: Haven't you said enough?

MOTHER: If I lived a hundred years, I would talk of nothing else! First your father. To me he smelled like carnations, and I enjoyed him only three short years. Then your brother. Is it fair? How can it be that something as small as a pistol or a knife can destroy a man who is like a bull?

The Wild Duck

The Wild Duck uses a lot more heightened emotional moments to show the reader the strong connections between Hjalmar and his daughter, Hedvig, and the weak connection between Gregers and his father, Mr Werle.

(Hjalmar Ekdal, wearing an overcoat and a gray felt hat, enters from the right.)

GINA (dropping her sewing and getting up): Ah, Hjalmar, here you are!

HEDVIG (jumping up at the same time): At last you're home, Daddy!