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<title> Characterisation, Ellen Foster: The grandmother </title>
	I read the book Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons, a book interesting in several aspects. A character that fascinated me in this book was Ellen's grandmother, or as she is referred to in the book, "my mama's mama". She is a rather hard-to-figure character, with hidden feelings and hidden motives, and her actions are often not at all rational. This makes you wonder what lies beneath, what made her this way and why? Ellen Foster present's several more characters, but this is the one I found myself the most curious of. 
	The first time you encounter Ellen's mama's mama is on the funeral of Ellen's mother. Right then and there you get a picture of what kind of a woman she is, when the first thing she does is calling Ellen's father a bastard. After that follows a description of Ellen's view of her, and you get an especially good insight on the relations between Ellen's father and the grandmother. The grandmother, by the way, is on the maternal side.
	You find out that Ellen's mama's mama, who is never referred to by name, have probably hated Ellen's father from the beginning, at least I got that impression when it says in the book: "She calls him a nigger and trash so long and loud she gets hoarse. Just churning hate and nerve with forty years of my mama on fire under her.". And to point out it is also a fact that Ellen's Father has treated Ellen's mother very badly during the years.
	Ellen's mama's mama is rich, she is rather old, she is prejudice, she has two more daughters, and owns cotton fields. The story taking place in the United States, down south in, what I would guess, the sixties or seventies, she has black people working the land for her. When Ellen, after she runs away and lives with Julia and Roy, comes to live with her grandmother she is sent out on the fields to work as, what appears to be some kind of punishment, one of the black folks. This happening in chapter ten. 
	The grandmother is the whole time enormously cruel to Ellen. She is mean and conveys no sympathy at all, take for instance the passage on page 69, when she tells Ellen Ellen's father is dead. "Her hands shook right much though when she told me about my daddy dying. But she managed to slap me with one. She said your bastard of a daddy is dead and then she hit me in the face." You also find out that Ellen is slapped every time she cries. Ellen herself thinks about, on page 65, 66, looking up in a dictionary what is the grandmothers problem. However she doesn't know what word to look up and asks herself: "What would I look under? Meanness? Angry? Just crazy? then I figured it was a little bit of everything." In chapter eleven the grandmother dies, but up to her death the level of meanness never decreases. 
	The grandmother is definitely a static character in this novel. She never changes, she stays bitter and hateful to the whole world and especially Ellen. She even pays Ellen's uncles to dig up things on Ellen so she can beat her. What I believe lies behind all this is long-time abuse and mistreatment of Ellen's mother, her daughter, by Ellen's father. And the illness from which Ellen's mother dies is directly, or indirectly, due to the poor circumstances of their living environment and the father's negligence of the mother.
	I would say that the grandmother is a flat character on the surface, but her hatred goes deeper and gives her more nuances. This is what made her interesting in my eyes, and I get curious of what had to happen for her to drop the hatred. You see everything from Ellen's point of view, since the narration is in past time by Ellen herself. She is naturally a minor character in the story but with a great significance, lets look at my earlier remark on how Ellen wasn't allowed to cry or she'd get slapped. That is revealed in the ending and it's first there you see the full impact of Ellen's staying with her grandmother, page 121, "And there was a day last year when she (Ellen's new mama) said if I didn't cry sooner or later I would bust. That is something I am still working on. I think how good it would feel but there is always my mama's mama's voice telling me to cry so she can slap me."
	Obviously nobody would like a parent, or parent-figure, to be like that. When someone is so burned up by hatred, so empty inside that it gives them satisfaction harassing the innocent offspring of the cause of hatred it is so sad, so sad. All aspects aren't dealt with here but I have painted the picture I wanted to paint. To conclude I'll take the opportunity to say: I liked the book, it was warm, filled with anxiety, it made you feel pity, it made you happy and it made you sad. It was full of different faces, very human and very inhuman. All in all a good book.
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