Transcript Literature P5 Mock Exam 2012

Literature P5 Mock Exam 2012
Portrayal of Women in Literature:
Women in Narrative Prose Fiction;
Drama; and Poetry
Section A Unseen Prose
Comment closely on the following passage which comes from
the novel Sweet Tooth (2012)
by the British writer Ian McEwan.
Discuss the ways in which it presents
the character of Serena Frome,
a woman who in the opening chapter looks back on her youth
in late 1960s early 70s Great Britain,
and relate it more generally to your reading on
the theme of women in literature.
Answering the question
Writing the introductory paragraph for the ‘Unseen’
• Provide a central framework of your insights / ideas;
• A synoptic overview of her character, that is insightfully
connected to central critically significant concerns (also
concerns of Paper 5 Women in Literature)
• Her cleverness; intelligence; (mathematics & chess)
• Time; Setting; Class, Education: grammar school,
university; Relationships; Patriarchy; feminism and
sexism
• And methods of presentation
through choice and form of language;
Narrative point of view
• Creation and presentation of character; How?
• Personal self-portrait; first person narration
• Giving the reader direct access to her interior
psychological and emotional states;
• Class and Education; background comfortable and
stable in first eighteen years;
• Narrative voice in relation to time and culture
• Educational opportunity and achievement amidst
discrimination, prejudice, in a word, sexism
• Interest in character: ‘a freak of nature – a girl who
happened to have a talent for mathematics.’
Narrative Voice; Antithesis; Irony;
Symbolism
• Narrative Voice?
• Formal yet loose, conversational style; restrained;
touched with melancholy; its quietness hinting at
something darker; ‘Her certainty frightened me.’
• So I abandoned my ambition to read English at
Durham… where I am sure I would have been happy…’
• ‘You must exercise some historical imagination to
understand what it meant for a girl in those times to
travel to a neighbouring school and knock from his
perch some condescending;
• Irony; ironic juxtaposition, paradox; Symbolism;
• Not much imagery ‘the little seed of a feminist’;
Advantages / benefits of
Free Indirect Discourse
• This narrative technique convincingly conveys
part of the character’s internal world
– Thoughts, emotions, inner experiences –
• That are hidden from the world
• And sometimes even they are hidden from
the characters themselves;
Note shifts in narrator’s perspective;
angle of narration
She promoted him, served him, eased his way at every
turn. From boxed socks and ironed surplice hanging in the
wardrobe, to his dustless study, to the profoundest
Saturday silence in the house when he wrote his sermon.
All she demanded in return – my guess, of course, –
was that he love her, or at least, never leave her.
But what I hadn’t understood about my mother was that
buried deep beneath this conventional exterior was the
hardy little seed of a feminist. I’m sure that word never
passed her lips, but it made no difference. Her certainty
frightened me.
Indirect and Free Indirect Discourse;
Note shift in angle of narration
She told me she would not permit me to waste my talent.
I was to excel and become extraordinary. I must have
a proper career in science or engineering or economics.
She allowed herself the world oyster cliché. It would
compound the injustice if I failed to aim high. I didn’t
follow the logic of this, but I said nothing.
My mother told me she never would forgive me and she
would never forgive herself if I went off to read English
and became no more than a slightly better educated
housewife than she was. I was in danger of
wasting my life. Those were her words, and they
represented an admission. This was the only time she
expressed or implied dissatisfaction with her lot.
Section B
Comparison of Texts
Compare the ways in which two texts you have
studied present females as
empowered individuals.
Or
With detailed reference to any two texts you
have studied, compare the means by which they
present class and education in women’s lives.
Empowerment of Women Superficial or Substantial?
The extent to which women are invested with
power, authority, autonomy to shape, direct,
determine the conduct of their own lives;
• Individual empowerment of women at the
domestic level;
• Through Custom / Culture / Religion, and Society?
• Empowerment through Education?
• In the workplace / the office
• Roles: as individuals; daughters; suitors; wives;
mothers; workers; bosses;
Women and Education in Drama Texts
Re Education: Ways / means of dramatic
presentation:
• Through Classical Literary Allusion—
• The Latin poetry of Ovid’s ‘Ars Armatoria’ in
Taming of the Shrew
• The philosophical poem ‘De Rereum Natura’
of ancient Roman poet, Lucretius, in Top Girls
Q6 (a) Hardy’s Tess
“There be very few women’s lives that are not –
tremulous.” [Chapter XXIX] p183
• Discuss Tess’s comment with particular
reference to the novel’s portrayal
of female experience.
The story of Jack Dollop’s marriage
• Dairyman Crick:
‘But unluckily the poor woman gets the worst
o’t’.
• ‘And what do you say my dear? Asked the
dairyman of Tess. ‘I think she ought – to have told
him the true state of things – or else refused him
– I don’t know,’
replied Tess, the bread and butter choking her.
Note amplification of dialogue through the voice of
narrator commentary, such that the tone and mood
is conveyed
Chapter 29 p180
What was comedy to them was tragedy to her.
She could hardly bear their mirth. She soon rose
from the table, and with an impression that Clare
would follow her, went along a little wriggling path,
now stepping to one side of the irrigating channels,
and now to the other, till she stood by the main
stream of the Var.
Yes, there was the pain of it. This question of a
woman telling her story – the heaviest of crosses to
herself – seemed but amusement to others. It was
as if people should laugh at martyrdom.
‘Our tremulous lives are so different from theirs, are
they not?’ he musingly observed to her, as he
regarded the three figures tripping before him
through the frigid pallor of the opening day.
‘Not so very different, I think,’ she said.
‘Why do you think that.?’
‘There be very few women’s lives that are not –
tremulous,’ Tess replied, pausing over the new word
as if it impressed her. ‘There is more in those three
than you think.’
‘What is in them?’
‘Almost – either of ’em,’ she began,
‘would make – perhaps would make –
a properer wife than I.
And perhaps they love you as well as I – almost.’
Joan’s letter to Tess chapter 31
Dear Tess, … glad to hear…to be married soon. But
with respect to your question, Tess, J say between
ourselves, quite private but very strong, that on no
account do you say a word of your Bygone Trouble
to him. J did not tell everything to your Father,
he being so proud of his Respectability, which,
perhaps, your Intended is the same. Many a woman
– some of the Highest in the land – have had a
Trouble in their time; and why should you Trumpet
yours when others don’t Trumpet theirs?
No girl would be such a Fool, especially as it is so
long ago, and it is not your Fault at all.
‘O mother, mother!’ murmured Tess.
She was recognizing how light was the touch of
events the most oppressive upon Mrs. Durbeyfield’s
elastic spirit. Her mother did not see life as Tess saw
it. That haunting episode of bygone days was to her
mother but a passing accident. But perhaps her
mother was right as to the course to be followed,
whatever she might be in her reasons.
Silence seemed, on the face of it, best for her
adored one’s happiness: silence it should be.
Chapter 31 p199
‘You are all better than I!’
‘You are!’ she contradicted impetuously. And
suddenly tearing away from their clinging arms
she burst into a hysterical fit of tears, bowing
herself on the chest of drawers and repeating
incessantly, ‘O yes, yes, yes!’
Having once given way she could not stop her
weeping.
Chapter 32 p200
The penitential mood kept her from naming the
wedding-day.
Gnats, knowing nothing of their brief
glorification, wandered across the shimmer of
this pathway, irradiated as if they bore fire
within them, then passed out of its line, and
were quite extinct.
In the presence of these things he would remind
her that the date was still the question.
Meaning of “tremulous” in context
• Affected with / characterized by trembling;
timidity; fear; anxiety; dread; uncertainty under
psychological strain of circumstances; stress of
emotion in Victorian patriarchy;
• Women characters under stress of emotion speak
tremulously, and act or react tremulously
• Tess’s timidity, simplicity and innocence
• Her weakness – her attitude towards family;
• Dependency; the colour ‘red’ motif
Women’s lives as Tremulous;
Is this a discernible pattern?
Why?
Disempowered women in varying degrees
• Gender; and gender moods and concerns
• Class, being an underclass; their rusticity;
• Education
• Religion
• Victorian Morality and Marriage
• Patriarchy; patriarchal power
Methods of Portrayal of Female
Experience as Tremulous
• Narrator’s commentary; narrative voice
• Multiple narrative perspectives e.g. Tess’s
point of view; Dialogue; Letters
• Imagery; as in a bird caught in a trap
• Symbolism
• Antithesis
• Irony and Paradox
• Foreshadowing
Tremulous Moments / Scenes /
Episodes / Encounters
•
•
•
•
Tess’s fragility; vulnerability in Nature
The death of Prince
The night of the Chase
I am anxious to talk to you – I want to confess
all my faults and blunders! p211
Chapter 14 p93
tremulous moments
• In her misery she rocked herself upon the bed. The clock
struck the solemn hour of one, that hour when thought
stalks outside reason and malignant possibilities stand rockfirm as facts. She thought of the child consigned to the
nethermost corner of hell, as its double doom for lack of
baptism and lack of legitimacy; saw the arch-fiend tossing it
with his three-pronged fork, like the one they used for
heating the oven on baking days; to which pictures she
added many other quaint and curious details of torment
taught the young in this Christian country. The lurid
presentment so powerfully affected her imagination in the
silence of the sleeping house that her nightgown became
damp with perspiration, and the bedstead shook with each
throb of her heart.
Or Q6 (b) on Hardy’s Tess
Discuss how and
to what effect
Hardy uses allusions and symbols
to explore key themes in the novel.
Themes
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The novel as a plea for the ‘Fallen Woman’
Reason and Passion
Eros and Thanatos (Love and Death)
The Struggle for Existence,
the Ache of Modernism
Illusion (Illusory Hope) and Reality;
Free will, and Fatalism / Accidentalism / Chance
Victorian sexual morality and double standards
Symbolism and Symbols
• When something literal suggestively takes on added
significance;
• When some object, event, action, setting, season,
name e.g. Tess’s name for her child, Sorrow;
a descriptive detail such as Tess’s misplaced letter to
Angel disappearing under the carpet
thus symbolizing Chance / Luck
All of these are suggestively intended to mean
something more than just what they mean in ordinary,
realistic, literal terms;
• The sun, the moon, fog, spring, winter, the natural
landscapes, silences of Tess
Allusion as a Technique
• A figure of speech that makes reference to,
or a representation of
• people, events, literary work, myths, works of art
• Either directly, or by implication;
• It is left to the reader to make connections;
• Literary allusion puts the alluded text in a new
context
Allusion, Foreshadowing, and
Ironical Juxtaposition
• Allusion to popular ballads The Spotted Cow;
• Biblical allusions: allusion to the text of King Lemuel’s
lesson of chastity and temperance in Proverbs by Mrs
Richard Clare in ch 39 p263; allusions to the Garden of
Eden, and Adam and Eve; Eaten of the tree of
knowledge ch 16 Mary Magdalen: ‘He little thought
that the Magdalen might be at his side.’ ch 20 p130;
Tess as Temptress;
• Tess’s journeys as Pilgrimages; the pilgrimage as a
metaphor for the wandering journey that is Tess’s life
(and the intended irony); Allusion to John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress; chap 19 ref to Valley of Humiliation
Philosophical and scientific allusions
• To Voltaire and his Dictionaire Philosophique;
Thomas Henry Huxley’s Essays;
• Thomas Malthus;
• Pascal ch 18: ‘The more intelligent a man is,
the more likely he is to appreciate
distinctiveness in others. Ordinary people
discern no difference between men.’ p118
Allusion to J S Mill’s On Liberty
(19th century English philosopher)
This night the woman of his belittling deprecations was
thinking how great and good her husband was. But over
them both there hung a deeper shade than the shade
which Angel Clare perceived, namely the shade of his
own limitations. With all his attempted independence of
judgment this advanced man was yet the slave of custom
and conventionality when surprised back into his
teachings. No prophet had told him, and he was not
prophet enough to tell himself, that essentially this young
wife of his was as deserving of the praise of King Lemuel
as any other woman endowed with the same dislike of
evil, her moral value having to be reckoned not by
achievement but by tendency. Ch 39 p265
• The Darwinian subtext implicit throughout;
• Literary allusions to poets such as Wordsworth
as ‘if such be Nature’s holy plan’; also his
‘Intimations to Immortality: ‘for to Tess as
some millions of others, there was ghastly
satire in the poet’s lines ch 51 p357
Not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
Ch 51 p357
If she could believe what the children were singing;
if she were only sure, how different all would be;
how confidently she would leave them to
Providence and their future Kingdom! But in default
of that, it behoved her to do something; to be their
Providence.
To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of
degrading personal compulsion, whose
gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to
justify, and at best could only palliate.
Allusion to Fairy-tales and
Illusory Hope and Reality Theme
• Fairy-tale allusions and the novel’s ironical antiromantic thrust
• Even implicit in Joan Durbeyfield’s hope that Tess
would restore the family fortunes by marrying a
gentleman: ‘It would have been something like
a story to come back with.’
(Dream on Joan…!)
• Her Prince is Angel, and Tess’s willingness
conforms to the norms of the fairy-tale, but that
is as far as the parallel goes;