This is perhaps consumerism’s most pernicious legacy: the bottle will certainly outlive the consumer. I purposefully portray the brands as a malicious force that is arrogant and harmful; it is easy to see this in the “tall”, imposing speakers. Furthermore, by outliving the consumer they have a degrading and corrupting effect on the environment. By buying into a brand we not only cheapen ourselves but also destroy the environment around us. This ties in with ‘Second Best’ again. Here, contemporary anxieties are reflected about the industrialisation of rural landscapes in 1914. When Frances and Anne are conversing in the field the environment is described as being populated by “blonde-headed thistles” and “brown- husked gorse”.These plants are wilder than cultivated crops; they effectively symbolise the natural rural environment. Conversely there is the “immense pattern of agriculture” with its “squares”, “stripes” and “chequering”; this landscape is becoming ordered, cultivated and thus ruined for the author. Later on in the story I use a very significant example of le non dit . I use le non dit to create an ellipsis around the sexual encounters that precede the violent episode of the destruction of the bra. The bra is a metonym for the unnamed woman and a symbol of sexuality and of sexual relationships. A sense of violence and lust is created with words such as “dripping”, “tear” and “shred”, with their hard consonant sounds. Repetition of words such as “clipping” also creates a sense of obsession. The frequent and broken punctuation induces a mood of unpredictability. This atmosphere of irrational, nervous behaviour is echoed in ‘Second Best’ where Frances plucks at her “goose-grass buttons” in a desperate attempt to achieve sexual liberation. In ‘The Boy And His Dog’, the narrator tears the bra apart “shred by shred”, “fibre by fibre,” showing the anger, resentment and perhaps regret that he feels towards this woman. It is left to the reader to consider why he feels so passionately like this.This is in many ways similar to the letter received by Mrs. Kathleen Drover in ‘The Demon
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