Deceptively Spacious

Deceptively Spacious

"Deceptively Spacious" is a short story by Patricia Ferguson. The story is about a thirtyish woman who is buying a house. She has a very low self-esteem and therefore she gets very jealous of others - especially of the owner of the house, Frances. Because of the action in this story, I think the main themes are self-esteem problems, low confidence and emptiness.

The story is told by a 1st person narrator and we get the story told from the main character's point of view. Therefore, we don't get all the details, which can make the story a bit unreliable, because we only see it from the main character's point of view. We are only told how she feels and thinks - and we pretty much only get a picture of how she sees the world. The story is chronological because we follow the action over time without any flashbacks or flash forwards - except one.

The story is told in the present tense and takes place in our day. We don't know where it takes place, but it seems like the story takes place in a normal environment, consisting of middleclass people. It makes the story more alive and real because it's easier to relate to ourselves.

In this short story we meet four persons, but the most important character is the main character. Frances, who is the woman who is selling her house to our main character, is also an important character. The last two persons we meet in this story are Jill (the main character's friend) and John, Frances' husband.

The main character is a thirtyish woman, who has a low self-esteem. She is not satisfied with her looks, and describes herself as fat - "She was very good-looking, this Frances. Though in some ways she looked a bit like me, same colouring, similar bone structure, same age. But she was slim. She was about six months pregnant as well." This quote describes how the main character sees and thinks about herself. "Of course I'd been jealous before. If you're fat you can hardly avoid it, you live with it every day the way some people live with volcanoes." Here we see a clear picture of how hard it is for her to be satisfied with herself because of her weight. She often gets jealous of people because she isn't happy about how she looks and therefore she has a very low self-esteem. "From the photograph on the mantelpiece they'd clearly been together ages. It seemed to me then a sort of generosity, to love so young, to risk marriage early; I'd been too scared to chance it when I was young, though it had felt like being free and independent at the time." Our main character is feeling sorry for herself - she regrets that she's just sitting there and doing nothing. She wishes that her life had turned out differently, and that she had got the life Frances has instead. She feels guilty about the way