Literature P5 Epilogue

1. Literature P5 Epilogue

2. Representations of Women and Women’s Issues in Literature • Literary Subcultures - such as Black, Jewish, Asian literature, and Women’s literature / writing • Literary-Representations of women: Stereotypical? Atypical? • Damsel in distress; dependent; subordinate; much less powerful; powerless; passionate • Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter • Serena Froome (?) in Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth • Character of LisbethSalander in Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo; • Reader-response as a female student; as a male?

3. Reading and Analyzing the Question;and noting Key Concepts / Big Ideas • Key ideas words (concepts); and question focus; • Unpacking / analysis of / breaking down of key concepts in the question relevantly addressed in the context of your set texts; e.g. rebel; fallen woman; shrew; relationships; top girls / successful women; women’s situations; feminist concerns; women as victims; feminine experience; power; freedom; oppression; tough birds; attitudes to men; violence / suppressed violence; romanticism; sentimentality; patriarchy; independence etc.

4. For example, Concept of Feminine Experience Unpacking / Analyzing / Breaking down concept of ‘Feminine Experience’ suitably addressed in the context of set texts you have studied; • Breaking down the concept of feminine experience / female experience— Component parts of the concept such as • Daughterhood, love, wooing / courtship, marriage, motherhood, divorce, and sex etc from the point of view of women characters

5. Structure at the Paragraph Level;Topic of this paragraph is… • Proper topic sentence: begin by stating a relevant key point / insight / critical perspective; • Avoid beginning a main-body paragraph with mere narration from the text; • Avoid beginning with a quotation from the text; • Avoid beginning the paragraph with a statement about a technique such as the use of imagery; discussion of techniques should follow (not precede) your sentence stating the key critical insight (the topic for that paragraph);

6. Literature Paper 5 Section B, 2011 Cambridge ‘A’ level examination How far have the texts you have studied challengedassumptions and stereotypes about women? For example • Ask yourself, breaking down the concept of ‘stereotype’, stereotypes of women such as what? • Stereotypes of women such as women more soft than men; women as being more emotional; less sophisticated; less rational etc • And ask yourself how a particular sexist stereotype has been presented in dramatic terms (if a play-text)? For example, a technique such as imagery that compels an audience to look at women in a stereotypical manner;

7. To illustrate Right and Wrong • In Top Girls we can see Marlene aggressively belittling Mr Kidd, ‘He is a shit, Howard.’ This shows that there are women in the play who are not stereotypically women. Better way to proceed: • In both plays, there are women characters who are presented as being psychologically tough, tough in spirit, a characteristic that is more typically associated with men. Both Katherina and Marlene are presented as paradigm examples though in different ways. And although the choice of imagery at a basic level is typical (both compared with birds), yet it too is also atypical as Katherina is associated with the hawk, a tough bird of prey in nature, while in the case of Marlene, she is likened to a bird characterized very significantly by the adjective ‘tough’…

8. Revision: Comparison of Set Texts With close reference to any two texts, • compare the ways in which their writers present the relationships between women.

9. Comparison Question for Study and Revision ‘From the point of view of men, for a woman to be free, is always to be too free.’ • Compare the ways in which any two texts present women characters in the light of this statement.

10. Comparison Question for Study and Revision “Writers oversimplify women when they present only extremes of female experience.” • By comparing any two texts, consider how far you agree with this statement.

11. Hardy’s Tess • Is Tess presented as a victim of society, or of nature? Note examination format of questions; ‘presented’ is directing your attention to analytically engage with narrative techniques of presenting Tess in the novel; Note not - • Is Tess a victim of society or of nature?

12. Essay questions for Revision of Tess • Throughout the novel, Hardy stresses that Tess is damned, and damns herself. Comment • Tess is presented as a living demonstration of tragic ironies. Discuss. All questions require you analytically engage with techniques of presentation;

13. Points / Arguments to consider re- Tess as victim of Society or Nature • Throughout the novel Hardy’s narrator stresses that Tess is damned, and damns herself • According to man-made laws which are arbitrary as they are cruel; • Hardy’s narrator goes out of his way to show how Nature seems to disdain, or ignore or make a mockery of the laws which humans as social beings impose on themselves; • The obsession with chastity is a ludicrous aberration in a world which teems and spills with promiscuous and far-flung fertility every year.

14. cont • And the chastity prerequisite for women entering marriage is also a brutal caricature of human justice given that what is damned by society in the woman, was condoned in the man; • In symbolical terms, social laws hang Tess; • But Nature admits of no such laws; • However it is an important part of the novel that we come to feel that Nature itself is also turning against Tess, so that we register something approaching sadism of both the man-made laws and natural directed laws against her;

15. cont • If Tess is symbolically tortured by the man-made threshing machine; and the cold negating metal of Angel; • Tess is also crushed by the forge of the sun in Nature, and the cold negating metal of Angel is also to be found in nature’s ‘steely stars’; • The pangs of socially caused guilt which lacerate her are comparatively matched by the “glass splinters” of rain which penetrate her at Flintcomb-Ash;

16. (Cont) noting ironies and paradoxes • To understand this feeling of almost universal opposition to Tess • From Society and Nature • When Hardy’s narrator meditates on the imminent disappearance of the D‘Urberville family he says personifying Time - “so does Time ruthlessly destroy his own romances” • This suggests a universe of radical oppression paradoxically working to destroy what it works to create, crushing to death what it coaxes into life;

17. cont • Tess is the living demonstration of these tragic ironies; • The sun blasts what it blesses; (irony) • Why she who is physically beautiful feels guilt at “inhabiting the fleshly tabernacle with which Nature had endowed her” • Why Tess who is a fertile source of life comes to feel that birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to justify” Slides 13 to 19 adapted from commentary on the novel by literary critic, Paul AntonyTanner

18. Revision of Tess “A defense of the fallen woman as a victim of social prejudice.” • Do you find this a satisfactory summing up of Hardy’s portrayal of Tess in the novel?

19. Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew The following question provides a useful point to remember and consider in order to deepen one’s critical appreciation of the play’s dual plot structure: ‘Bianca and Lucentio are in fact seminal characters, instrumental in understanding Katherina and Petruchio.’ • How successful is the sub-plot in affirming the transformation of the main plot? The above question was assigned to you in J1;