Literature P5 Mock Exam 2012

Portrayal of Women in Literature:Women in Narrative Prose Fiction;

Drama; and Poetry

Section A Unseen ProseComment 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 BComparison 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 p93tremulous 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 rock-firm 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 anti-romantic 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;