OR ... WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TONE AND MOOD?
WHAT IS TONE?
In a previous blog I gave a very detailed explanation of TONE, so let’s just summarise tone here by saying it comes from the author, is voiced through the narrator, and is the narrator’s attitude to what is happening in the story and to the characters and usually reflects the underlying theme of the book.
WHY IS MOOD DIFFERENT?
There are always two people in this cosy little reading relationship – the writer and the reader. TONE is what the author expresses consciously or unconsciously and usually wants you to hear: MOOD is across the divide; mood is what the reader feels when he or she reads the book. Mood is inspired by tone but can be quite different. The writer might deliver a bitter, angry tone and have set a mood of hilarity where the reader is (deliberately) amused by the narrator’s rantings.
To give a visual analogy… when the silent movie star or cartoon character cops a pie in the face or slips on a banana skin or gets dragged behind a car, that character’s distress is obvious … yet the audience laughs. Such distress at a rotten day, with everything going wrong, can be expressed well in a novel by snarky words, swearing, and grumpiness in the re-telling of events. The narrator’s TONE is angry. Nevertheless, there will be clues to the reader that we are not expected to feel sorry for the character or be similarly distressed, but should be amused by the character’s bitter response to bad fortune.
SATIRE – TONE SETTING THE MOOD
Satire usually works in reverse of the situation I described above. Satire, whether in writing or in a cartoon, will often laugh at a situation (TONE) but expect the reader to be damned mad or to at least reflect critically on society (MOOD). One of the earliest examples of satire in English came from Johnathan Swift. Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels, a book which certainly entertains and amuses; the eccentricities of many of the characters and countries that Gulliver visits are presented in an amusing way yet were designed to make ‘thinking’ people see how ludicrous many of the social conditions and arguments of their own society were.
For example, there are two groups with opposing views about boiled eggs. The Big-Endians cut the tops off their boiled eggs at the rounded end, even though the Lilliputian king required his subjects to eat eggs by cutting open the pointy end. Thus, the Big-endians were considered rebels. Swift’s readers no doubt saw how ridiculous this argument was that split Lilliputian society, and many would have understood that Swift was pointing to their own society where there was often deadly enmity between Catholics and Protestants, both proponents of the same 'peaceful' Christianity, as each new ruler imposed his or her version on the population.
What Swift concealed in satire here, he also said plainly elsewhere:
“We have just religion enough to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another”
JOHNATHAN SWIFT'S SATIRE
In another work, Swift used a serious academic tone, as the title will demonstrate:
“A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public.”
Ireland in 1729 saw women roaming the streets carrying children, begging for food, in a serious famine exacerbated by English trade rules and savage English landlords. The title of Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ would have grabbed the attention of those who felt the solution to the Irish problem did not lie with them. On reading the ‘proposal’, they would find that Swift was suggesting that the babies be sold to the rich as succulent morsels to be roasted. He suggested that eating children would provide a local industry and be a much better and fairer solution that taxing British landlords, having the Irish refuse to buy English goods…. In other words, the more logical solutions. Of course, those who did not understand political satire, were outraged by the suggestion; despite this, Swift’s satire largely failed and he was disillusioned by the lack of action to aid the poor.
WHEN TONE AND MOOD ARE CLOSER
My examples above, particularly that of satire, make tone and mood seem at opposites. However, for most writers, the tone of the narration more closely generates the mood and is not meant to lecture or alienate the reader. For example, the writer might use a sombre tone, using words that described a scene bleakly. One cliched example is of the person broken down on a wet night on a lonely road. Even the terms ‘wet night’ and ‘lonely road’ reflect the narrator’s tone and help create a mood for the reader. However, when the author goes on to describe the ramshackle dark old mansion looming above on the hill, the wind moaning through the trees, the hollow knock on the enormous front door, the limping footsteps coming down the hall, and the door creaking loudly as it slowly opens…. Well, our mood as reader is apprehensive; we have a sense of foreboding. Nevertheless, the narrator did not express that sense of foreboding in words, so we cannot say his TONE was foreboding… but the mood was.
AN EXERCISE FOR ASPIRING WRITERS
The next time you read a book that makes you experience a particular emotion… whether sadness, joy, apprehension or anger (the MOOD), go searching for the way the writer achieved that excellent result… what was the tone used in the narration, what was the choice of words, what revealed to you that the unsuspecting main character did not know.