Cloudstreet Oriel and Dolly similar free essay sample

Tim Winton’s novel Cloudstreet presents two seemingly dissimilar families that are forced to live together in the same house. This piece of fiction contrasts many characters with diverse morals and behaviours, in particular the two mothers of the families, Dolly Pickles and Oriel Lamb. Beneath the surface, these women have more in common than they realise, especially when it concerns gaining power, suffering trauma, their partners, experiencing loss and their home. The characters Dolly and Oriel both display the need for power in their separate lives. Dolly and Oriel are alike in that they both crave power over people. Oriel is in charge of her entire family and controls them with discipline, while Dolly uses her body to gain power over men in her life. â€Å"Oriel Lamb mouthed off a lot about work and stickability until you felt like sticking a bloody bility right up her drawers. † Oriel has an excessive work ethic and pushes herself and her family to work for everything, so much so that Dolly complains about her constant display of ‘stickability’. Oriel’s controlling manner over her family and that she enforces labour upon them exhibits her need for dominance. Dolly shares this hunger for power and this is evident when her husband is in need of money due to a gambling issue and Lester offers to pay the debt. To guarantee the money and flaunt the control she has over people, she seduces Lester, who ordinarily would not have been unfaithful to his wife, â€Å"Dolly pulled her legs down off his shoulders with a wince. I spose not. More a deposit on a hundred quid. † This similarity of these characters may be due to the fact they have each experienced pain in their lives. Dolly and Oriel have each faced trauma in their pasts. These two mothers have very strong personalities in the novel and this may be due to the fact they both experienced suffering in their childhood. Oriel endures the pain of losing her family to a bushfire when she is six years old, this ordeal shapes her character and shows that she is someone that copes by staying resilient and moving forward, â€Å"Hell is when you’re dragged out past the black bones and belt buckles that are the others who never came down. † Dolly is also dealt hardship when she is young as she is treated horribly by her older sister, who ends up being her biological mother. She was lied to by her whole family and this affects Dolly’s character in that it leads to trust issues and a negative coping mechanism of alcoholism and promiscuity, â€Å"The second oldest sister, the one who made me feel like rubbish all my life, that one was my mother. † The way both of these women have been shaped by the trauma they each underwent influences how they perceive people. Each of these characters struggle with the personalities and habits of their partners. Oriel’s husband, Lester, has an inability to strive for anything, he procrastinates and would not do anything if it was not for Oriel, â€Å"she loved Lester, but a lot of loving him was making up for him, compensating. He was never quite up to anything. † Oriel grapples with Lester’s personality because he is so unalike her. Dolly shares the predicament of not harmonising with her husband, Sam. Dolly sees Sam as weak because of his lost hand and addiction to gambling, they also have different views about their children, â€Å"don’t you touch her, Dolly. Don’t you put a finger on her, or – or what, you weak mongrel? † Dolly refers to Sam as a weak mongrel, which is indication of the indifference she has to him. Through the course of the narrative, Dolly and Oriel share the loss of a son. Oriel’s son Fish nearly drowns in the beginning of the text, and because of this he suffers damage to his brain and from then on does not recognise his mother, â€Å"Mrs Lamb crying. Rose saw her fall against the gate, grabbing at Fish who didn’t move, who just looked across the road where no one was, straight as a board with his mother’s arms around him. † Oriel struggles with this as if it is a loss of her son, and in the conclusion of the novel Fish actually dies by drowning. Dolly shares this loss of a son with Oriel as she loses the child she loved most, Ted, after he dies from weight problems leading to a heart attack, â€Å"they killed my baby! Him, he was the one I loved †¦Ã¢â‚¬  It is impossible to say that these two characters have nothing in common when they have both lost a son that they love. In the end of the novel, the house on Cloudstreet is what brings these two supposedly opposite women together and shows the reader their connection. Oriel confronts Sam about the idea of selling the house on Cloudstreet and expresses her fondness for the property, to which Dolly says, â€Å"She’s right. Yer right. She muttered, unable to look Oriel in the eye. The bloody place has got to us. † Dolly and Oriel have an aversion to each other throughout the novel because they seem so opposed, but in the conclusion of the novel they surrender to their differences, which in actuality are their resemblances, â€Å"The little boxy woman and the big blowsy woman folded end to end till the tent was a parcel that they hefted to their shoulders across the greensmelling grass, and then they went inside the big old house †¦Ã¢â‚¬  Dolly and Oriel come together and them packing up Oriel’s tent for her to move back in symbolises that they finally belong together in the house. In conclusion, it is distinct that Dolly Pickles and Oriel Lamb share a lot of similarities and it would be hopeless to argue otherwise. Throughout this novel these two characters experience twenty years of their lives in the same house and the reader learns their idiosyncrasies and personalities thoroughly, and with that the reader discovers that even though they are contrasting characters in many ways, they are more connected than they are aware of.