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THE MAGAZINE FOR ADVANCED LEVEL ENGLISH
ISSUE 66 DECEMBER 2014 ENGLISH AND MEDIA CENTRE
The Malcontent
Grammar and Change
Writing Memoir
Dialogue in Narrative Texts
Genre-bending Drama – Jerusalem
The Language of Football
Contents
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04
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Cover: Atonement
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2 emagazine December 2014
The Wife of Bath – Individual or
Stereotype?
07
The Wife of Bath is one
of the most memorable
pilgrims, remembered
for her individual voice
and outspoken views.
Yet, as Nigel Wheale
argues, in creating her
Chaucer both draws
on and challenges
literary texts, generic
conventions and social
norms.
Weaving the Web of Fiction –
From Family History to Debut
Novel
Barbara Bleiman
reflects on the process
of a writing a first novel
inspired by family
stories and considers
the narrative and
stylistic choices open to
any writer drawing on
personal experiences.
About us
emagazine is published by the English
and Media Centre, a non-profit making
organisation. The Centre publishes a
wide range of classroom materials and
runs courses for teachers. If you’re
studying Media or Film Studies at A
Level, look out for MediaMagazine also
published by EMC.
23
10
A Question of Dialogue
Nicolas Tredell discusses the role dialogue
plays in novels, analysing three short passages
as examples.
13
From Gutted to Chuffed –
Unpicking the Language of
Football
Joel Sharples looks behind the tired clichés of
football pundits to ask whether the language
of football reveals anything more serious
about our attitudes to nationality, race and
gender.
26
Blake in the East – India and
Colonialism in ‘The Tyger’ and
‘London’
By reading ‘The Tyger’ and ‘London’ in the
context of Britain’s burgeoning imperial
ambitions, Kurt Johnson provides a fresh
perspective on two poems at the heart of
Blake’s ‘Experience’.
29
A Culture of Madness – the
‘Madwoman’ in Fiction
Emma Kirby asks what connection the
representation of female ‘madness’ in
literature has to language, the telling of stories
– and their reception as characters in the real
world.
16
‘Tragedy, Comedy, History,
Pastoral…’? Jez Butterworth’s
Genre-bending Drama
Tony Cavender argues that a critical
appreciation of dramatic genres illuminates
the theatrical masterpiece that is Jerusalem.
20
Modern Marking – a Challenge to
Gender Neutral Marking
Suzanne Williams explores an apparent return
to gender marked terms in everyday discourse
and asks whether it is just a bit of fun, a
playful attitude towards language, or evidence
of something more serious?
32
Delving into the emag Archives –
Language Change
In the second of an occasional series, Dan
Clayton goes back through the emagazine
archive to identify articles that are relevant
to students following the current A Level
English Language specifications. In this issue
he looks at Language Change.
35
Happily Ever After? Interrogating
As You Like It
A Level student Ellie
Markham investigates
whether the final scene
of As You Like It can be
called a ‘happy ending’.
51
Mischief and Melancholic Hares
– Malcontents in Early Modern
Drama
Dr Liam McNamara introduces the character
of the malcontent in early modern drama,
drawing on the social context of the period to
further his analysis.
39
55
Prescriptivism v descriptivism? Sometimes the
argument goes along quite crude, simplistic
lines. Gill Francis takes a more subtly nuanced
stance, making distinctions according to the
nature of the shifts and what they are doing
grammatically.
Ruth Ferguson’s reading of two poems by Billy
Collins shows how apt his travel metaphor is
to describe his whole approach to structuring
a poem.
Grammar and Change – Is
‘Correct’ Grammar a Myth?
42
The Progress of a Poem –
Travelling with Billy Collins
58
Aestheticism – A Rough Guide
Post-Pastoral and Pre-Romantic
– The Placing of Georgian
Countryside Poetry
Dr Katherine Limmer’s
overview of poetry
by Gray, Goldsmith
and Collins suggests
that it forms a bridge
between the early
eighteenth-century
pastoral traditions and
Romanticism.
45
Howards End – ‘Who will inherit
England?’
Harriet Hinze sees Howards End as an
expression of Forster’s environmentalism,
characterised by the tension between the
spiritual values of the countryside and the
encroaching city.
48
Novice Writers – Cognitive and
Practical Processes
Understanding the cognitive processes
involved in writing might give us a greater
understanding of how children write, argues
Ben Eve.
Rebekah Owens explores the rise and
reception of a new movement in the late
nineteenth century that threatened many
values of Victorian society.
61
The Governess and Miles – A
Psychoanalytic Reading of The
Turn of the Screw
English teacher Lesley Drew offers a
psychoanalytic reading of Henry James’s fin de
siècle ghost story.
64
Getting your Language Muscles
in Shape – The UK Linguistics
Olympiad
Teacher and Olympiad
Committee Member Ian
Cushing, explains what
it is and why you should
consider taking part.
66
Atonement and Postmemory
Dr Natasha Alden, lecturer at the University of
Aberystwyth, writes about the way in which
the concept of the ‘postmemory’ text can help
us understand both the ideas and narrative
choices of Ian McEwan’s novel about the 2nd
World War.
emagplus
Developing the Writer’s Muscle –
Barbara Bleiman’s Exercises for Fiction
Writing
Alice Jahanpour on Song and Music in
Jerusalem
Juliet Harrison on ‘The Significance of
the Picture in the Picture of Dorian Gray’
Child Language Acquisition: Writing – a
Collection of Resources
emag web archive
Look out for the links to
recommended articles in the archive,
listed at the bottom of each article.
You can access these articles by
logging onto the subscriber site of the
emagazine website, if your school or
college subscribes.
Remember, the login details can be
used by any student or member of
staff, both in the institution and from
home.
December 2014 emagazine 3
emagazine
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changes ahead!
EnglishOutThere
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trying to ‘stem the tide of semantic drift’
is futile. Can’t we move on to a richer
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language?
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frowned-upon words cannot follow the same path
at some point in the future.
Poetry and Memory
Last year poet Kate Tempest made history
by becoming the first person under 40 to
win the Ted Hughes award for innovation
in poetry. Now the 28-year-old is bridging
the gap between the literary and music
worlds, having been nominated for the
Mercury Music Prize for her debut album
Everybody Down. Cultivating the common
ground between William Blake and the WuTang Clan, the album showcases her talent
for authentic street storytelling through
12 ‘chapters’ about London life. She was
also recently selected by the Poetry Book
Society as one of their 20 Next Generation
Poets, showing that the boundaries between
music, spoken word and published poetry
are more blurred than ever.
OMG – the Language is
Changing
Debates over language in the media tend
to be framed around whether a particular
word or phrase is ‘correct’ English or
not, with prescriptivists seeking to freeze
language in time and descriptivists
taking a more laissez-faire approach that
acknowledges the evolution of language
over the years. Language scholar Ammon
Shea has waded into the debate recently
with a book called Bad English that
challenges the pedantry of those who
want to halt the growth and mutation of
language.
By delving into history he shows that words
in common use today such as ‘gender’,
‘awful’ and ‘talented’ provoked uproar
when they first came into usage. As he says,
If these once-censured words can assimilate into
the accepted vocabulary of English then there
is no reason that OMG, irregardless, and other
Cambridge University has launched a
survey which is seeking to discover which
poems we know by heart and what they
mean to us. For the nationwide Poetry and
Memory Survey they are asking people
to submit a poem that they can recite
from memory, along with an explanation
of why the poem has stayed with them.
Memorisation and recitation of poetry
used to be a requirement of the school
curriculum until 1944, but now we are
much more likely to remember poems
because they hold a particular significance,
have helped us through a difficult time or
contain an element of truth, humour or
wisdom that we like to share with others.
The researchers are seeking to find out
what is distinctive about this type of
relationship with poems, and say that they
are particularly interested in
how they might act as an emotional resource,
contribute to a sense of identity, assist in the
development of an ear for language, engender a
sense of community, play a role in memories of a
personal or communal past.
If you have a poem that has stuck with you
for whatever reason, you can share it by
visiting poetryandmemory.com.
Joel Sharples is a freelance writer and editor of the
blog Football Beyond Borders.
emagazine
Close Reading Competition 2015
Judged by Professor John Mullan and emag editors
Once again, we’re challenging A Level
students to do a close reading, this year
of an extract from John le Carré’s The
Constant Gardener, in just 500 words.
The extract is reprinted below and on
the website.
We’re delighted that this year Professor
John Mullan has agreed to judge the
competition.
£150
prize
for the
winne
r!
What to do
Prizes
Write a 500-word close reading.
Email your entry to
[email protected]
by 5pm on 31st January 2014,
including the following information on
your entry and in your email: name;
telephone number; school and teacher.
Winner: £150 and
publication in emagazine.
Two runners-up: £50 and publication
on the emagazine website.
The winner will be announced online
and via email on 27th February 2014
and in the April issue of emagazine.
The Constant
Gardener
The news hit the British High Commission
in Nairobi at nine-thirty on a Monday
morning. Sandy Woodrow took it like a
bullet, jaw rigid, chest out, smack through
his divided English heart. He was standing.
That much he afterwards remembered. He
was standing and the internal phone was
piping. He was reaching for something, he
heard the piping so he checked himself in
order to stretch down and fish the receiver
off the desk and say, ‘Woodrow.’ Or maybe,
‘Woodrow here.’ And he certainly barked his
name a bit, he had that memory for sure:
of his voice sounding like someone else’s,
and sounding stroppy: ‘Woodrow here,’ his
own perfectly decent name, but without
the softening of his nickname Sandy, and
snapped out as if he hated it, because the
High Commissioner’s usual prayer meeting
was slated to start in thirty minutes prompt,
with Woodrow, as Head of Chancery,
playing in-house moderator to a bunch
of special-interest prima donnas, each of
whom wanted sole possession of the High
Commissioner’s heart and mind.
In short, just another bloody Monday in
late January, the hottest time in the Nairobi
year, a time of dust and water shortages and
brown grass and sore eyes and heat ripping
off the city pavements; and the jacarandas,
like everybody else, waiting for the long
rains.
Exactly why he was standing was a question
he never resolved. By rights he should have
been crouched behind his desk, fingering
his keyboard, anxiously reviewing guidance
material from London and incomings from
neighbouring African Missions. Instead of
which he was standing in front of his desk
and performing some unidentified vital act
– such as straightening the photograph of
his wife Gloria and two small sons, perhaps,
taken last summer while the family was on
home leave. The High Commission stood on
a slope, and its continuing subsidence was
enough to tilt pictures out of true after a
weekend on their own.
A different Woodrow now, hackles up,
nerves extended. Tessa. ‘What about her?’
he said. His tone deliberately incurious, his
mind racing in all directions. Oh Tessa. Oh
Christ. What have you done now?
Or perhaps he had been squirting mosquito
spray at some Kenyan insect from which
even diplomats are not immune. There had
been a plague of ‘Nairobi eye’ a few months
back, flies that when squidged and rubbed
accidentally on the skin could give you
boils and blisters, and even send you blind.
He had been spraying, he heard his phone
ring, he put the can down on his desk and
grabbed the receiver: also possible, because
somewhere in his later memory there was a
colour-slide of a red tin of insecticide sitting
in the out-tray on his desk. So, ‘Woodrow
here,’ and the telephone jammed to his ear.
‘Utter nonsense,’ Woodrow snapped back
before he had given himself time to think.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Where? When?’
‘Oh, Sandy, it’s Mike Mildren. Good
morning. You alone by any chance?’
Shiny, overweight, twenty-four year-old
Mildren, High Commissioner’s private
secretary, Essex accent, fresh out from
England on his first overseas posting – and
known to the junior staff, predictably, as
Mildred.
Yes, Woodrow conceded, he was alone.
Why?
‘Something’s come up, I’m afraid, Sandy. I
wondered if I might pop down a moment
actually.’
‘Can’t it wait till after the meeting?’
‘Well, I don’t think it can really – no it
can’t,’ Mildren replied, gathering conviction
as he spoke. ‘It’s Tessa Quayle, Sandy.’
‘The Nairobi police say she’s been killed,’
Mildren said, as if he said it every day.
‘At Lake Turkana. The eastern shore. This
weekend. They’re being diplomatic about
the details. In her car. An unfortunate
accident, according to them,’ he added
apologetically. ‘I had a sense that they were
trying to spare our feelings.’
‘Whose car?’ Woodrow demanded wildly
– fighting now, rejecting the whole mad
concept – who, how, where and his other
thoughts and senses forced down, down,
down, and all his secret memories of her
furiously edited out, to be replaced by the
baked moonscape of Turkana as he recalled
it from a field trip six months ago in the
unimpeachable company of the military
attaché. ‘Stay where you are, I’m coming
up. And don’t talk to anyone else, d’you
hear?’
Moving by numbers now, Woodrow
replaced the receiver, walked round his
desk, picked up his jacket from the back of
the chair and pulled it on, sleeve by sleeve.
He would not customarily have put on
a jacket to go upstairs. Jackets were not
mandatory for Monday meetings, let alone
for going to the private office for a chat with
chubby Mildren. But the professional in
Woodrow was telling him he was facing a
long journey.
Reprinted by kind permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd,
London on behalf of David Cornwell
Copyright © David Cornwell 2001
6 emagazine April 2014
Weaving the
web of fiction
From family history to debut novel
Barbara Bleiman reflects
on the process of writing
a first novel inspired
by family stories and
considers the narrative
and stylistic choices
open to any writer
drawing on personal
experiences.
In July Off the
Voortrekker Road,
a novel that I’ve
been working on for
several years, was
published on Amazon
as an ebook. I’ve had
a few short stories
published, done a
Creative Writing MA
and seen myself in print as editor of emag,
or writing about education, but there’s been
nothing quite like having a novel out there
in the world – it is both very, very exciting
and also terrifying!
All A Level students are writers, being
required to write in non-fiction essay
modes, but many are also writers of fiction,
poetry, life-writing or drama as well. And
now, with the emergence of a Creative
Writing A Level, some have the chance
to actually study creative writing and be
accredited for it in an exam. I wondered
whether anything that I’ve discovered
about the process might be helpful to all of
you writers out there. One learns so many
different things about writing by writing,
that choosing a focus has been difficult,
like picking the best sweets from a whole,
preposterously well-stocked shop! I’ve
forced myself to choose only one angle –
I’m going to unwrap just one rather gooey
and very delicious sweet.
Using Personal Experiences
I think it’s worth saying something about
using personal material to write fiction. My
book is based on the many stories my father
told me about his life in South Africa, both
growing up as the child in the 1930s (the
son of Lithuanian immigrants who came to
Cape Town), and then working as a radical
barrister in the early years of Apartheid,
where being radical put you at personal
risk. Some close friends and colleagues of
my father’s were imprisoned, or fled the
country, to escape imprisonment. So I had
lots of good stuff to write about – political,
passionate, stirring stuff, from a very
different time and place, but full of personal
significance to me and my family.
and rarely kind.
And I suppose that the saddest thing for me,
thinking about the cover version that is Oranges,
is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other
one was too painful. I could not survive that.
If Oranges is the ‘cover version’, her new
book deals more directly with the actual
life experiences and, as the quotation above
suggests, involves much more reflective,
personal, first-person thinking and
exploration about what those experiences
have meant to her and about the very
nature of writing autobiographically.
If you’re very close to the material –
emotionally connected and clear about
your own idea of what really happened
or what is ‘true’ – it can be quite difficult
to write about it for an external audience.
Certainly for me the question of ‘did that
really happen, in that way?’ became a
stumbling block, as did the fact that I found
myself trying to recreate a real person,
my father, and do justice to him as a man,
rather than creating an engaging and
readable experience for a reader who didn’t
know him. Pretty quickly I realised that
fictionalising the real stories would make
a much better ‘narrative’ than sticking to
some notion of what was ‘true’ by writing a
purely factual account of my father’s life. I
decided to be true to the spirit of his life but
weave a fiction around it.
One Life – Two Approaches
A very good example of the difference
between straight memoir and the
fictionalising of life experience is the two
books written by Jeanette Winterson,
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and her much
more recent memoir, Why Be Happy When
You Could Be Normal?. Both books deal with
her childhood, being adopted and brought
up in a fundamentalist Christian family, by
a zealous, highly controlling and punitive
mother. While Oranges draws very heavily
on this childhood experience, it remains a
fiction. Winterson’s adoptive mother could
clearly recognise herself in the novel, and
was outraged by it, but there are many
elements that are imagined – characters,
incidents and details. By contrast,
Winterson’s new book takes exactly the
same material but writes it as non-fiction.
She reflects very interestingly on the
differences, particularly in the first chapter,
where she says of Oranges:
I told my version – faithful and invented, accurate
and misremembered, shuffled in time. I told
myself as hero like any shipwreck story. It was
a shipwreck, and me thrown on the coastline of
humankind, and finding it not altogether human,
Faithful and Invented
I thought long and hard about these same
issues when working on my book and
definitely went down the Oranges route
rather than the Normal route. Around the
‘real’ characters – the little boy Jack, his
parents, Ma and Pa, Jack’s wife, Jack’s
brother, his old Jewish grandparents,
Ouma and Oupa, his best friend Terence – I
invented a cast of other characters, some
of whom became favourites of mine, who
took on a life of their own. I grew very
fond of Ada, the poor white hired girl who
worked for Ma and Pa and who, with her
own troubled childhood, seemed able to
identify with Jackie’s struggles in a way
that his own parents didn’t. I also liked
the character of Mr Choudhary, Pa’s
accomplice in a shocking insurance scam.
But I particularly enjoyed writing a whole
new plot about an Apartheid-era trial, in
which the young barrister, Jack, defends
a white man accused of sexual indecency
with a ‘non-white’ woman. Reverend
Johannes van Heerden’s story became as
real to me as the stories that were founded
in truth and ended up taking up half the
book!
I grabbed at the chance to be ‘faithful and
invented, accurate and misremembered,
shuffled in time’, as Winterson so
beautifully puts it.
The Handyhouse
Here is a little bit of ‘invented and faithful’
background about the hardware store,
the ‘Handyhouse’ where Jack lived with
his parents. It’s taken from early on in the
novel.
On one side of the store was Irene’s, the women’s
outfitters. It sold corsets and brassieres, blouses,
suits and bright cotton frocks, the most glamorous
of which appeared on two smiling, painted
mannequins in the window. On the other side
stood Krapotkin’s butcher’s shop, its large plateglass window filled with pallid sausages, mounds
of worm-like minced beef and lean joints of
lamb hanging from silver hooks. A sticky yellow
paper in the front of the shop was always black
and buzzing with flies. Krapotkin was a large,
pink-faced man, with hands as red and raw as
the meat he handled and a voice loud enough to
wake the cockerel himself. He was in the shop,
from early morning till late at night, heaving
dripping carcasses and slapping bloody joints
of meat onto wooden boards, slicing, chopping,
grinding, sawing through flesh and bone, all the
while singing, laughing and swearing so loudly
that my mother said that Krapotkin and his
butcher’s shop would be the death of her.
The hardware store had a sign painted on the
front with, ‘Neuberger’s Handyhouse’, in a
clear, unfussy style. It stood a little apart from
its neighbours, its whitewashed walls yellowed
with age, its sloping tiled roof in some need of
repair. On one side of the door stood rolls of
carpet, stepladders and brooms. On the other
were baskets filled with dishcloths and dusters,
bars of waxy household soap and boxes of
washing suds. A notice in the window
said, ‘Everything you need, from
soap and rice to chicken feed!’
and ‘10% off for bulk
bargain buys!’ A faded
red-and-
white striped awning was pulled down every
morning to provide shade from the hot midday
sun and wound back up every evening when the
store was closed.
My father, Sam, had bought the store six years
earlier, just before his marriage to my mother
and I was born a year later. He worked all hours,
either out the front or in the back yard, cutting
wood or linoleum, measuring string, counting
nails and screws, cutting strips of biltong or
weighing biscuits from the big jars that lined the
counter. The hired girl, Ada, helped out while my
mother moved between the kitchen, the back yard
and the shop front, cleaning and cooking, talking
to customers, and keeping an occasional eye on
me.
Where could I be found, on a typical day in 1939,
four-and-a half years of age and living in the
Handyhouse with my ma and pa? Occupying
myself with toys? Splashing about in a tin tub
of water to keep me cool in the blistering heat
of the day? Playing a game of five stones with a
little friend, or sharing a tasty slice of homemade
melktert? No. I would be sitting in the corner of
the store, on my sack of beans. The sack was high
enough up for me not to attempt to climb down
but not so high that I would do myself serious
damage if I did. Little Jackie, aged four, knockkneed, wide-eyed, dressed in shabby grey shorts
and a grubby cotton shirt, stick legs swinging
against the rough hessian of the bulging sack,
sitting watching and saying nothing.
The Handyhouse really existed – it was
called ‘Bleiman’s Handyhouse’ and it was
my grandfather’s store – but its re-creation
in the novel and its setting among other
shops, Irene’s women’s outfitters and
Krapotkin’s butcher’s shop, is pure fiction.
What isn’t pure fiction, however, is the
depiction of Jackie sitting on a sack of
beans. That image of him comes directly
from the story my father told us of how
he sat on that sack day in, day out and
how one day he stuck a bean right up his
nose, so that it was firmly lodged there.
It was only finally removed by calling out
the doctor, who put him on the kitchen
table, climbed on top of him and prised it
out with a sharp implement, damaging his
abdomen in the process. The ‘bean in
the nose’ story was in an early
draft but never made
it into the final
novel. But the boy
sitting silently on the sack of beans was too
important an image to lose!
The Path of Memoir
I chose to go down the fictionalising
route, the Oranges route. But it may
be that if you’re writing from your
own experience, or about people
you know, you decide to choose the
other path, of writing straight memoir,
or autobiography – that’s a perfectly
valid thing to do. Many people, including
Jeanette Winterson, do it brilliantly. But
it’s worth being aware that even if you do
go down that route, all the embellishments
and stylistic effects and poetic licence of
the novelist remain open to you. Just
because you can’t remember every word
of a conversation you had a year ago, for
instance, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t
try imaginatively to re-create it. No-one
is going to accuse you of getting it wrong
and the reader will understand what
you’re up to, if you’re broadly true to your
subject matter. You won’t be inventing
incidents that didn’t happen, or characters
that don’t exist, but you can still take a
few liberties to breathe life into the events
you describe. You could do worse than to
read Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You
Could Be Normal? to see how brilliantly
that can be done and to recognise that the
boundaries between truth and invention,
accuracy, memory and mismemory are
more creatively and excitingly blurred than
you might at first imagine.
Barbara Bleiman is co-editor of emagazine.
Off the Voortrekker Road is available now from
Amazon.co.uk: http://goo.gl/ybEybq
emagplus
Developing the Writer’s Muscle –
Exercises for Fiction Writing
emag web archive
• Julie Taylor: Self-centred – Writing
Autobiographically
emagazine 63, February 2014
• Blake Morrison: Tips for Writing
Autobiography
A Question of
Dialogue
Nicolas Tredell discusses the role dialogue plays in novels, analysing three
short passages as examples and beginning with a list of questions to focus
your own close analysis.
Most novels (and short stories) mix, in
varying amounts, direct-speech dialogue
with the narrative prose in which first- or
third-person narrators tell the tale. We can
ask a range of questions about any piece of
dialogue in fiction.
• Who are the speakers?
• How many people are speaking?
• What is the relative share of each in the
output of words?
• What might their words – and their
pauses, silences and incomplete sentences
and phrases – tell us about their situation,
their relationship to one another, and the
character of each of them?
• What is the idiolect – that is, the kind of
language, perhaps marked by particular
features of vocabulary, grammar and
pronunciation – of each speaker?
• How formal or colloquial is the language
used?
• Does it include what we might call dialect
or slang?
• Is it in the declarative, exclamatory,
or interrogative mode – that is, are
statements or exclamations being made,
or questions being asked?
• What of the ‘subtext’, the elements
beneath the surface meanings of the
words which are not stated explicitly but
implied in the dialogue?
• How far does the dialogue stand alone
and how far is narrative prose added to
indicate the speakers, their tone of voice,
and their actions and thoughts as they
speak?
• How far does a specific piece of dialogue
disgrace him in the eyes of everybody?’
‘Lady Catherine, I have nothing further to say. You
know my sentiments.’
‘You are then resolved to have him?’
‘I have said no such thing. I am only resolved to
act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion,
constitute my happiness, without reference to
you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with
me.’
relate more generally to the narrative
prose, plot, action and overall themes of
the story?
We will consider three passages in the light
of such questions.
The Red Pulse of Rage –
Conflict in Dialogue
The first passage, like the second, relies on
dialogue alone and has no narrative prose.
You may recognise their sources, but we
will treat them initially as unseen passages,
with no details of author, text or date.
‘You have no regard, then, for the honour and
credit of my nephew! Unfeeling, selfish girl! Do
you not consider that a connection with you, must
Even without knowing where this comes
from, we can infer key elements of the
situation: Lady Catherine does not wish
the other speaker to marry her nephew,
because she feels such a match would
disgrace him socially; the other speaker,
however, is determined to put her own
happiness first if it will not affect those
close to her. It is a situation of conflict in
which dialogue articulates the clash of two
powerful wills. Lady Catherine sometimes
employs an exclamatory mode, indicated by
exclamation marks – ‘Unfeeling, selfish girl!’
– but what drives the conversation forward
is her use of the interrogative mode, her
aggressive questioning of the other speaker:
‘You are then resolved to have him?’
The second speaker makes statements,
the first of which is intended to end the
dialogue but fails to do so, since Lady
Catherine puts a further question, forcing
the other speaker to continue and indeed to
state clearly her own position.
Regulated Hatred – Analysing
the Grammar
Both speakers employ a formal,
grammatically precise English in which the
punctuation denotes the pauses that we feel
would occur if such a conversation had ever
actually taken place: for instance, when the
second speaker interpolates a subordinate
clause into a main clause and then, within
the subordinate clause, inserts a phrase,
commas mark the start and end of each
interpolation:
‘I am only resolved to act in that manner, which
will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness.’
Beneath this formal surface, however, the
red pulse of rage throbs on both sides: this
is an example of what one of this novelist’s
critics, D.W. Harding, called ‘regulated
hatred’.
Autonomy Asserted
The novelist in question is Jane Austen and
the dialogue is from Chapter 56 of Pride and
Prejudice (1813) in which Lady Catherine
de Bourgh confronts Elizabeth Bennet
and tries to bully her into renouncing any
matrimonial intentions towards Mr Darcy.
Elizabeth firmly resists this. Her desire
to act in a way that will ‘constitute [her]
happiness’ echoes the phrase in the 1776
American Declaration of Independence
affirming ‘the pursuit of happiness’ as a
human right. Elizabeth is no radical: she
recognises the claims of ‘duty’, ‘honour’
and ‘gratitude’ that Lady Catherine soon
afterwards invokes; but she affirms that
they are irrelevant to her own case. It is
a striking assertion of individual female
autonomy.
Verbal Fencing – the
Interrogative Mode
Here is the second example of dialogue
without narrative prose:
‘Did he teach you nothing?’
‘A little Hindustani.’
‘Rivers taught you Hindustani?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And his sisters also?’
‘No.’
‘Only you?’
‘Only me.’
‘Did you ask to learn?’
‘No.’
‘He wished to teach you?’
‘Yes.’
Here, the dialogue is in the interrogative
The Function in Narrative
Prose
Hearing the Subtext
The subtext in this dialogue is, in fact, the
same as the explicit text in the Austen
passage: marriage. The dialogue is from
Chapter 37 of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
(1847) and the speakers are Mr Rochester
and Jane, who is visiting him after her
sojourn with St John Rivers and his sisters.
Rochester’s ‘cross-examination’ – Jane
herself, in her role as the novel’s narrator,
uses the term shortly before this dialogue
starts – probes into the nature and extent of
Jane’s relationship with Rivers. Rochester
is jealous and, in the dialogue, Jane plays
a little with that jealousy, because, she
has claimed earlier, it helps to relieve his
melancholy. This jealousy gives emotional
force to a dialogue which culminates,
shortly after the passage quoted, in the
revelation that Rivers was teaching Jane
Hindustani because he wanted her to marry
him and go with him to do missionary work
in India.
The Employment of Narrative
Prose
Each of the two earlier dialogues involved
only two people and had no narrative
prose. Our next example, however, does
employ narrative prose, and has three major
players.
‘Oh, you want too much!’ she cried to Gatsby. ‘I
love you now – isn’t that enough? I can’t help
what’s past.’ She began to sob helplessly. ‘I did
love him once – but I loved you too.’
Gatsby’s eyes opened and closed.
‘You loved me too?’ he repeated.
‘Even that’s a lie,’ said Tom savagely. ‘She didn’t
know you were alive. Why, – there’re things
between Daisy and me that you’ll never know,
things that neither of us can ever forget.’
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
‘I want to speak to Daisy alone,’ he insisted. ‘She’s
all excited now –‘
‘Even alone I can’t say I never loved Tom,’ she
admitted in a pitiful voice. ‘It wouldn’t be true.’
The names in this extract show that it is
from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
(1925) – from the Plaza Hotel scene in
Chapter 7. As in our previous extracts,
the issue is marriage – in this case, both
an existing match (Tom and Daisy) and
a fantasised one (Gatsby and Daisy). We
could strip out the narrative prose and
leave dialogue that would work forcefully
by itself. One key element of this dialogue,
which needs no narrator to explain its
significance, is Gatsby’s echo of Daisy’s
words with a key change of emphasis,
marked by italics – ‘You loved me too’. That
final, stressed adverb, ‘too’, deals a lethal
blow to Gatsby’s dream of a love that would
be exclusively his. Then there is Gatsby’s
unfinished sentence,
‘She’s all excited now –’
which Daisy interrupts to reassert that she
could not say she never loved Tom.
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
This metaphor, in which words sprout teeth
and inflict the emotional equivalent of bodily
wounds, brings home the power of spoken
language, and its importance in fiction as in
life. Dialogue, combined to a greater or lesser
extent with narrative prose, is a key feature
in a novelist’s repertoire and analysing it,
in the ways suggested above, deepens our
understanding of how fiction works.
Nicolas Tredell is Consultant Editor of the Palgrave
Macmillan Readers’ Guides to Essential Criticism
series.
emag web archive
• Dr Simon Lavery: Dialogue in
Dubliners – Impoliteness in Literature
emagazine 45, September 2009
• Professor John Mullan: Narrative Uses
of Dialogue
emagazine 62, December 2013
• Rob Worrall: Truths Universally
Acknowledged – An Approach to
Reading Jane Austen
• Professor John Mullan: Voice in Pride
and Prejudice
• Nicolas Tredell: Narrative Structure
and Voice in The Great Gatsby
On emagclips
• Nicolas Tredell: Nick as Narrator
• Professor John Mullan: Aspects of
Narrative in Dialogue
Images: Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice
mode, with one person asking and the other
answering questions. The questions are
short, most of the answers even more so,
and all but five words are of one syllable.
The questions have an insistent quality
and the replies are determinedly minimal,
despite the deferential note in the phrase
‘Yes, sir’. The two speakers, interrogator and
interrogated, are fencing with each other.
But whereas in the Jane Austen passage,
it is clear, even if we do not know Pride
and Prejudice, what is at stake – whether
or not the second speaker has a right to
marry Lady Catherine’s nephew – it is less
obvious here. From this dialogue alone, we
might not quite decipher the subtext that
gives urgency to the issue of teaching and
learning Hindustani.
The narrative prose does, however, enhance
the effect of the dialogue on the page: Daisy
starting to sob, Gatsby’s eyes opening and
closing, Tom’s savage and Gatsby’s insistent
tone, Daisy’s admission ‘in a pitiful voice’.
Above all, there is Nick’s observation on the
effect of Tom’s claim that his relationship
with Daisy has intensities forever forbidden
to Gatsby:
From Gutted
to Chuffed
Unpicking the
Language of
Football
Joel Sharples looks
behind the tired clichés
of football pundits to ask
whether the language of
football reveals anything
more serious about our
attitudes to nationality,
race and gender.
Football doesn’t have the
best reputation when it
comes to language. Postmatch player interviews
often run the gamut of
emotions from ‘chuffed’ to
‘gutted’. Commentators are
renowned for their mixed
metaphors and platitudes –
‘when Ramires makes those runs
his legs are so essential’. And fans
are known more for abuse and
obscenity than linguistic dexterity.
However, the language of football
also provides a rich seam for textual
analysis, as well as a powerful tool in
shaping our perceptions of identity.
Germany’s Intelligent
Engineering
The World Cup always brings out the
best and worst in football pundits, and
the 2014 tournament in Brazil was no
different. Germany’s superb performances
on the road to victory prompted many
of the usual tired tropes, as well as
some more fashionable clichés.
Explanations of Germany’s success
tend to follow two well-trodden
narrative arcs: either we are
told that their success is due
to their militaristic efficiency
and discipline, or they are
compared to a finelycalibrated German
automobile – a triumph
of technique and
engineering.
In an article reflecting on Germany’s 7-1
shellacking of Brazil, Professor Simon
Chadwick of Coventry University used the
words ‘efficiency’ or ‘efficient’ three times,
twice coupled with the word ‘ruthless’.
The Audi slogan ‘Vorsprung Durch
Technik’ and its U.S. equivalent ‘Truth in
Engineering’ also cropped up no less than
four times. Writing in The Guardian, Barney
Ronay used phrases such as ‘intelligently
geared’, ‘perfectly calibrated’ and ‘superbly
engineered’ to compare the German team
to a luxury car. Even Germany’s exemplary
youth academy system which nurtured
the current squad over the past ten years
couldn’t escape from being compared to a
‘production line’ or a ‘conveyor belt of top
class talents’, in an article on Goal.com.
In addition, by
constructing the victors
as the powerful man, and
the losers as the weak and
helpless woman, this type of
gendered language serves to reinforce
traditional gender binaries.
What’s interesting is how little these
descriptive tropes have changed over the
years, even while the German team’s
playing style has changed so dramatically.
Barney Ronay might have thought he’d
come up with a clever metaphor, but way
back during Euro 96 The Times was writing
that the German team ‘typically looks as if it
was manufactured in a factory by Porsche’.
They were described as ‘a tournament
machine’ whose ‘traditional efficiency
should win them the title’.
Banal Nationalism
Apart from being a bit boring to see the
same clichés recycled over and over, does
it really matter if journalists can’t find any
original ways to describe national teams? In
their book Football, Europe and the Press, Liz
Crolley and David Hand argue that this type
of language constitutes what is often known
as ‘banal nationalism’: the subtle and
quotidian forms of language and culture
that separate ‘us’ from ‘them’ as distinct
national groupings. Crolley and Hand
suggest that football writing often
contributes to the preservation of the notion of
a Europe of nations, with each state separated
from its neighbours not only by geopolitical
frontiers but also by recognisable psychological
characteristics.
In an age when stereotypes about lazy and
inefficient southern Europeans as compared
with hardworking Germans are deployed
to justify the imposition of brutal austerity
measures by the EU, IMF and European
Central Bank, perhaps the perpetuation of
banal nationalism matters more than one
might think.
Germany’s aforementioned 7-1 victory over
Brazil was also notable for the response
it provoked on social media. Alongside
a torrent of crass Nazi references, the
widespread use of gendered language
showed how football is still a site of
dominant masculinity. In the aftermath
of the match Al Jazeera writer Belen
Fernandez noted that:
terminology related to sexual violence has
institutionalised itself in the football vernacular.
On Twitter, the most common analogy for
the result was that of Germany ‘raping’
Brazil, suggesting that the humiliation
of suffering a heavy defeat in a national
football match was akin to the psychological
trauma experienced by survivors of
sexual assault. The necessary corollary of
comparing a resounding victory to rape
is that sexual violence is something to be
celebrated as a manifestation of one group’s
power over another, in the same way
that Germany’s victory was a display of
dominance over the weaker Brazilians. As
writer Samar Esapzai put it in a blog for the
Pakistan Tribune,
Since when did rape become a referral to
something good? Something positive?
Insidious Racism –
Intelligence v Physicality
The language of football is also a subtly
powerful tool when it comes to race.
It has been noted that whereas white
footballers are often praised for their
tactical awareness, reading of the game or
intelligent use of space, when it comes to
their black counterparts we are only told
about their pace, power and physicality.
The Times’ comparison of Chelsea’s two
central defenders during the 1998 season is
revealing – Michael Duberry’s ‘intimidating
bulk’ was contrasted with Frank Leboeuf’s
‘composed distribution’. As a more recent
example, take Yaya Toure, perhaps the
most talented all-round midfield player in
the Premier League. He is one of the best
passers of the ball around, and his clever
movement both on and off the ball expertly
creates space for other players to exploit.
And yet pundits still struggle to find any
words other than ‘strong’, ‘powerful’ and
‘pacy’ to describe him.
Black players are often also described in
dehumanising terms that you will rarely
see applied to white players. Didier Drogba
has been described by journalists as ‘a sheer
brute’, ‘a force of nature’ and ‘a beast’.
Likewise, Toure is often referred to as a
‘colossus’ or a ‘monster’. While not overtly
racist, these descriptive modes reinforce
the stereotype of the powerful, aggressive
and intimidating black male whilst denying
black players’ intellectual capabilities.
When black players are so routinely
dehumanised and denied intellectual
agency, is it any wonder that they find it so
hard to rise up the ranks of coaching and
management once their playing careers
have ended? At the time of writing, out of
the 92 clubs in the football league there are
only two non-white managers in charge,
despite 30% of all footballers in the UK
being of African or Afro-Caribbean heritage.
Surely this is not unrelated to the media’s
persistent focus on black players’ physical
attributes over their tactical and intellectual
abilities.
A New Language of Football?
The mainstream language of football
clearly both reflects and is constitutive of
broader discourses around race, gender
and nationality. However, there are also
many writers and commentators out there
who seek to find new and original ways
of discussing football that challenge the
status quo: bloggers such as Shireen Ahmed
(Tales From A Hijabi Footballer) and Elliot
Ross (Football is a Country); podcasts such
as The Offside Rule and The Football Ramble;
and journalists such as Dave Zirin and
Musa Okwonga. They all recognise that
language is a powerful tool that can be
used either to challenge or reinforce the
dominant narratives of our society – and
are effectively using their work to do the
former.
Joel Sharples is a freelance writer and editor of the
Football Beyond Borders blog.
emag web archive
• Ben Farndon: Combat on the Pitch –
The Language of Football in the Media
• Ben Farndon: Language Patterns in
Football Language
emagazine 26 December 2004
• Alison Ross: Kill is Not a Four Letter
Word
• Roshan Doug: Where’s the Offence in
Language?
‘Tragedy,
comedy, history,
pastoral…’?
Jez Butterworth’s genre-bending drama
Tony Cavender argues that a critical appreciation of dramatic genres
illuminates the theatrical masterpiece that is Jerusalem.
In Act 2 Scene 2 of Hamlet Polonius
introduces the Players and praises their
versatility in all kinds of drama:
tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoralcomical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
tragical-comical-historical pastoral…
The list is intended to be absurd but
indicates that genre-bending in drama is not
a new thing and that categorising a play as
a tragedy, a history or a comedy (as in the
first folio edition of Shakespeare’s works)
is actually highly problematic. And so it is
with Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem.
Revelling in (Meta)
Theatricality
Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Butterworth’s
Jerusalem is a play that is highly conscious
of dramatic and theatrical history and
tradition. It is a metatheatrical play which
references Ancient Greek tragedy and
Shakespearean comedy explicitly in the
names of some of its characters – Phaedra
and Troy, Tanya and Pea (reductions – in
more ways than one – of Titania and
Peaseblossom in A Midsummer’s Night’s
Dream). Theatricality is foregrounded by
Butterworth’s specification of a proscenium
arch stage setting for the Prologue (in itself
a feature that is a throwback to earlier
dramatic conventions). A particularly
English theatrical tradition is referenced by
the name of ‘The English Stage Company’
displayed ‘across the beam’, that of the
Royal Court Theatre which staged the
first production of Jerusalem in 2009. The
English Stage Company was founded in
1956 to produce plays by ‘hard-hitting,
uncompromising writers’ who
challenged the artistic, social and political
orthodoxy of the day.
Royal Court Theatre website
‘Tragical’ – Johnny, a Fallen
Hero?
Jerusalem can be seen to follow the ‘rules’
set out for tragic drama in Aristotle’s
Poetics. It takes place over one day in a
single setting. It has a hero, Johnny Byron,
who has a fatal flaw (hubris), or rather
several – refusal to accept he’s beaten/
alcohol dependency/delusions of possessing
magical powers; who makes a mistake
(hamartia) – defies the council; and suffers a
reversal of fortune (peripeteia) – is deserted
by his followers (apart from Ginger). Like
Macbeth he is left to face his enemies
alone. As with Macbeth, we have to take
the word of another character for Johnny’s
heroic credentials. Ginger tells the younger
followers,
Twenty years back, Johnny Byron was the Flintock
Fair.
He was a ‘daredevil’, ‘local celebrity’ and,
on one occasion, cheated death – as Lee
says,
that deserves a statue…What did King Arthur
ever do to top that?
However, there are hints from the start that
Johnny is, as Davey puts it later, ‘drinking
in the last-chance saloon’. His heroic
status has already been diminished by the
council’s ban on daredevilling. It is clear
that he is often so drunk that he doesn’t
know what he’s doing (or what’s being done
to him). Over the course of the play’s three
acts his weaknesses become more and more
obvious – he can’t sustain a relationship,
he’s a neglectful father, his stories and his
powers are increasingly questioned by his
followers who have committed a shocking
act of disrespect towards him, as revealed
by Troy:
They undone their flies and they pissed on you …
All overs you. On your face. In your hair. In your
mouth. Took photos with their phones. Sent it to
everyone.
The council’s eviction order hangs over
him from the beginning of Act One and he
repeatedly ignores or makes light of it and
of the other characters’ warnings.
‘Comical’ - Satirical,
Transgressive and Subversive
There are no ‘rules’ for comedy as there
are for tragedy but there are features
and conventions of dramatic comedy
that have developed over the centuries
since its origins in Ancient Greece. Greek
‘Old Comedy’ with its satirical disrespect
for authority, its crude and scatological
humour, seems an obvious reference point
for Jerusalem. Johnny Byron’s treatment of
the council officials illustrates this clearly:
This is Rooster Byron’s dog, Shep, informing
Kennet and Avon Council to go fuck itself.
The verbal humour is exhilaratingly
transgressive and subversive in the views
it expresses and its employment of ‘taboo’
words, liberating the audience from its
inhibitions and illustrating all the main
theories of laughter: superiority, relief and
incongruity. The council is mocked, a rude
word is used and the word is incongruous
with the declamatory, town-crier-like
register that Johnny adopts. These theories
are illustrated by the whole interaction
between Johnny and the council officials
at the beginning of Act One: the council
officials employ a bureaucratic register, full
of numbers and dates, and are scrupulously
polite; Johnny responds by barking like a
dog and is scrupulously obscene:
tell Bren Glewstone, and Ros Taylor, and her twat
son, and all those sorry cunts on the New Estate,
Rooster Byron ain’t going nowhere.
Verbal and visual incongruities are major
sources of humour in the play, along with
a strong vein of absurdity, as in Johnny’s
extravagant tales of sexual entrapment by
the members of Girls Aloud and kidnapping
and imprisonment by a group of Nigerian
traffic wardens and Ginger’s surreal
conversation with the Professor:
PROFESSOR. …It’s Maureen, isn’t it?
GINGER. That’s right, mate. Maureen.
PROFESSOR. Maureen Pringle.
GINGER. Doctor Maureen Pringle. How do you do?
‘Historical’, not History
Jerusalem isn’t a ‘history’ play as such, in
terms of being about a particular historical
figure or event but it is a play that is
pervaded by a sense of England’s history,
particularly its wars and conflicts. A ‘faded
Cross of St George’ is on the curtain at the
beginning of the play. ‘The old Wessex flag’
flies over Johnny’s trailer. An ‘old rusted
metal railway sign’ references both Britain’s
lost railway heritage and its most famous
military victory, ‘Waterloo’. The Second
World War is a particular reference point
– there’s an air-raid siren, a submarine
klaxon and a Spitfire repeatedly flies
overhead during Act Three. Johnny calls
his opponents ‘You Puritans!’, recalling the
political and ideological divisions of the
Civil War; there may even be an allusion
to Britain’s colonial past in the pith helmet
that Ginger enters wearing at the beginning
of Act Three and which he feels like ‘this
incredibly heavy hundred-pound weight
on my head’ (the ‘white man’s burden’ of
Kipling’s poem?).
Butterworth’s use of these historical
references suggests a country that has a
history of struggle against oppression but a
history that is in danger of being forgotten
or devalued.
‘Pastoral’ – Celebrated and
Subverted
Butterworth draws on the ‘New Comedy’ of
Ancient Greece and on Shakespeare’s ‘green
world’ plays and late romances. The pastoral
is first evoked by the opening proscenium
imagery of ‘cherubs and woodland scenes’,
by the words of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’
(‘mountains green’, ‘pleasant pastures’)
and the folk song ‘The Merry Morning of
May’. In the play itself the Professor is the
main voice for this vision of England (‘wild
garlic’, ‘bracken and bluebells’) but there’s a
sense that this pastoral world is vanishing or
at least being noticed only occasionally and
only dimly appreciated. Toward the end of
the play Davey stops Lee mid-conversation
and tells him, ‘Smell that. Smell the air’:
LEE. What am I smelling?
DAVEY. That. Smell that.
Beat
BOTH. What is it?
Johnny Byron is a Falstaff-like ‘Lord of
Misrule’ but Falstaff in Henry IV Part Two is
a tragic figure, rejected by his former friend,
Prince Hal – now King Henry V – as Johnny
is deserted by his own followers:
KING. I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
In the end, the play refuses the audience
the consolations of comedy and pastoral
romance and leaves no clear answer to
Blake’s question:
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic…
LEE. That’s beautiful.
DAVEY. Right there. That’s it.
LEE. That’s just what I’m talking about.
It’s a magical moment undercut by their
inability to put a name to what ‘that’ is.
Even the Professor has to be informed
by Johnny Byron that what he’s been
‘breathing all day’ is ‘Wild garlic and the
May blossom’ and admits,
Images: various productions of Jerusalem
It’s been there all day, and I’ve only just noticed.
Butterworth employs a number of tropes
associated with romances and ‘green world’
plays, but subverts them. The relationship
between Lee and Tanya is an inversion of
that of the lovelorn shepherd and the coy
shepherdess exemplified by such characters
as Silvius and Phebe in As You Like It, Lee
politely and repeatedly refusing Tanya’s
offers:
LEE. It’s not that I don’t appreciate it, Tanya.
TANYA. Bollocks, Piper. If you’re not going to eat
my peaches don’t shake my tree.
LEE. Tanya, I’ve listened to the offer. I respect the
offer. I do not want to eat your peaches.
Tony Cavender is English Literature Course
Manager at South Downs College.
The prospect of a pastoral romance-type
ending is raised and dashed several times.
What has been lost is not recovered – the
Professor’s dog (?) Mary. The ‘lovers’ –
Johnny and Phaedra? – are not united.
There is a dance, but it is disrupted by
violence. Like Prospero in The Tempest,
Johnny is left alone at the end of the play;
he, too, has been a magician but he has
no mundane dukedom to return to and so
destroys the one he has created.
‘Tragical, Comical, Historical,
Pastoral’
Jerusalem is all of the above, and a dramatic
masterpiece because of it. Approaching the
play through a study of genre reveals how
richly and diversely significant the play is.
[It’s a] wild, blissfully funny, drugs-and-booze
fuelled comedy, and a tragedy about a deeply
flawed but mesmerising hero
Charles Spencer, The Telegraph, February 2010
emagplus
Alice Jahanpour on Song and Music in
Jerusalem
emag web archive
• Dr Sean McEvoy: Jez Butterworth’s
Jerusalem
emagplus 50, December 2010
• Diane Crimp: Carnival and Comedy –
Subversion in Jerusalem
emagazine 59 February 2013
• George Norton: Unused to Happy
Endings – Closure in Contemporary
Drama
Modern
Marking
A Challenge to Gender Neutral Marking
Suzanne Williams explores an apparent return to gender marked terms in
everyday discourse and asks whether it is just a bit of fun, a playful attitude
towards language, or evidence of something more serious.
Lady doctor, actress, male nurse, actor
– nowadays gender marked terms such
as these are often avoided in public and
official discourse as they make assumptions
about gender which can be discriminatory.
Clearly the use of lady doctor involves
the pragmatic inference that the ‘norm’
is for a doctor to be male. Not only is this
perpetuating a sexist stereotype, it also no
longer reflects the reality of the world we
live in where most med school graduates
are now women.
Likewise police officer has replaced
policeman and woman and fireman has
been replaced with firefighter at least
officially, although I suspect that many
people in their everyday language would
favour the use of fireman as the default, as
most of this group is still male.
A Come-back for Gendered
Language?
Many journalistic style guides recommend
the use of gender neutral language to avoid
discrimination and lazy assumptions, and
to more truly reflect a changed world.
However, there is some evidence that there
is a push-back against this fairly recent
politically correct convention.
Only a few weeks ago I noticed that the
Radio 1 news reports about Victorino
Chua’s arrest on suspicion of poisoning
three patients at Stepping Hill hospital were
careful to refer to his occupation as ‘male
nurse’.
A Regressive Step or Playing
with Language?
And other, newer, colloquial marked terms
are becoming common linguistic currency:
man slag, man slut or man whore, man
bag, girl crush and man flu are just a few
popular examples. I even heard a (male)
acquaintance use the sarcastic marked term
‘lady logic’.
So, are these new modern marked terms
problematic? Do they signal a backward
step in terms of gender equality or are
they merely evidence of the ebb and flow
of language change and of our tendency
towards inventiveness and playfulness in
language? Let’s look at each instance.
Gender Marking – Male Nurse
What about the use of male nurse in
the specific context that relates to the
occupation of a suspect in a murder
investigation? Why is this marked term
being used? Why ‘male nurse’ and murder
suspect Victorino Chua rather than simply
‘nurse’ and murder suspect Victorino Chua?
The reason perhaps lies in our discomfort
with this story on two levels: the first being
the disquieting fact that it is a nurse who is
suspected of fatally poisoning three patients
and causing harm to over twenty others.
The established notion of who and what
a nurse should be clearly exists in sharp
juxtaposition to this story – someone who
is supposed to help and heal, rather than
hurt and harm. Following on from this
are the facts, that cannot be denied, that
most nurses are indeed female and that a
common stereotype of female behaviour
is one that still encompasses the idea of
women as more caring and nurturing than
men because of their traditional roles as
carers for children, families, the elderly
and sick people. Our disquiet at the idea
of a murderous nurse would perhaps
be intensified if the suspect was a female
nurse – because it seems to be a notion
that is doubly disturbing and unsettling.
By pre-modifying Chua’s occupation with
‘male’ perhaps one layer of this shock
and discomfort is removed. So, rather an
odd usage of a marked term, but perhaps
understandable in this specific context.
Modern Marked Terms
But what about the more modern colloquial
marked terms? Should they be sources of
concern?
‘Man slut’, ‘man whore’ and ‘man slag’
can all, on the one hand, be seen as merely
humorously dysphemistic, but they do of
course also suggest that the norm for sexual
promiscuity is female – that women are by
default sexually incontinent or mercenary:
likely to sleep around or sell sex. And
there certainly seems to be nothing
complimentary or humorous about the
terms when they are unmarked: as terms
for a sexually promiscuous woman ‘slag’,
‘slut’ and ‘whore’ are pejorative, connoting
dirt and filth. ‘Slut’ comes from the word
slattern which meant a slovenly, lazy and
dirty woman, while ‘slag’ is linked to the
term slag heap – the refuse or rubbish that
is left over from industrial processes such
as iron smelting or coal mining. The origin
of ‘whore’ may go far back to a base word
meaning desire, however etymonline
suggests the semantic shift to the meaning
prostitute may have come about because of
© Linda Combi, 2014
the phonological similarity between ‘whore’
and ‘hore’ – hore meaning ‘physical filth
and slime’ in Middle English. In contrast to
this, the terms for a sexually promiscuous
man are admiring, often suggesting
strength and virility: ‘stag’, ‘dog’, ‘wolf’.
Interestingly, when pre-modified with the
word ‘man’, ‘slut’, ‘slag’ and ‘whore’ lose
some of their pejorative power and seem
more jokey than insulting. So perhaps these
new marked terms are indeed disturbing as
they seem to indicate that the sexual double
standard is alive and kicking in the twentyfirst century, despite 100 years of feminism.
Girl Crush
What about ‘girl crush’ then? Is this
compound acceptable? The term tends to
be used colloquially by women wanting
to express admiration for other women’s
attractiveness or abilities. The assumption
is that when ‘crush’ is pre-modified
with ‘girl’, it indicates that the speaker
is ‘actually’ heterosexual, and so allows
the speaker both to present themselves as
perhaps titillatingly free-spirited and open
to experimentation with their sexuality,
but also to reassure themselves and others
of their true ‘straight’ and ‘normal’ sexual
identity. Not very flattering for lesbians then
that this marked term implicitly suggests
that ‘crush’ is by default heterosexual,
and that therefore ‘girl crush’ is somehow
abnormal.
Lighthearted Fun – or Serious
Undertones
‘Man flu’ is another fairly recent compound
that does the rounds every winter and
of course suggests that this kind of flu is
not really flu at all but merely a bad cold,
and the men who are laid low by it have
failed to ‘man-up’ (in another marked
term). I do have a problem with this one
because I think, again, it reflects something
rather retrograde and unhealthy in our
society, albeit in a supposedly humorous
way. It can be seen as reflecting the ideas
that boys shouldn’t cry, men shouldn’t
show weakness, ‘real’ men don’t get ill or
take time off work, all of which seem to
me to be rather limiting and oppressive
notions of masculinity. Furthermore, it also
is part of a rather sinister public discourse
which portrays men as somehow weaker,
more hapless, less capable and less hard
working than women (http://www.
dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1290144/
Why-DOES-TV-love-portray-menidle-feckless-idiots.html). Many adverts
and sitcoms are predicated upon this
view of men: as incapable of cleaning an
oven, looking after children, soldiering
on in the face of a cold, or ‘multi-tasking’.
Check out this blog to see some examples
of ‘stupid man commercials’: http://
stupidmancommercials.blogspot.ch/
of scenarios being discussed as familiar to
British TV also: http://www.dailykos.
com/story/2012/08/14/1119939/-SellingStupid-Men-Advertising-and-theMyth-of-the-Incompetent-Male#
Gendered Language,
Gendered Expectations
As for ‘man bag’, well, it could be taken
to indicate there is something effete and
wrong about a man carrying what is
essentially an item usually closely associated
with a female identity. However, again, the
phonological effect of the assonance and
the fact that the phrase is a play on words
(handbag/man bag) takes away its power
to denigrate and insult and makes it seem,
perhaps, purely a playful reflection on
changing fashions and gender norms.
This ‘stupid man’ trope, as typified by the
phrase ‘man-flu’, is all-pervasive once
you spot it and, I think, damaging to both
men and women. It’s perhaps damaging
to men as it means children are being
conditioned to have low expectations of
the men in their lives and boys particularly
are not being presented with positive
and inspirational images of masculinity
in popular culture. It is damaging for
women as it presents them as somehow
naturally, innately, more able than men
to carry out the unpaid and, let’s face it,
still often regarded as low status, work of
the household. The message to girls and
women seems to be that they must accept
the role of multi-tasker of the home: look
after the children, clean the oven, find the
best home insurance deal before rustling
up a nutritious dinner and answering work
emails from their home office. It has to be
this way, the sitcoms and adverts tell us,
because men just cannot do it all. This
may seem flattering to women but
actually it’s rather an anti-feminist
and insidious message. The
article below goes into the
subject in more depth,
and although many
of the examples
cited are from
American
television, you
will recognise
the types
Sometimes it Really is Just a
Joke
And so finally what about ‘man bag’ and
‘lady logic’? Well, I feel as if I should find
myself up in arms about the ‘lady logic’
one, suggesting as it does that logic is an
exclusively male quality and that the idea
of ‘lady logic’ is not just abnormal and
weird, but actually so funny as to be an
impossibility. However, the idea that women
are incapable of logical thought seems to me
to be so far-fetched and extreme that it is
difficult to take this term as truly pejorative.
Sometimes things really are just a joke and
I think this is one of those times, perhaps
intensified by the phrase’s jaunty alliterative
quality.
Suzanne Williams teaches English at the City of
Bristol Academy.
emag web archive
• Professor Deborah Cameron:
Genre: Stereotyping in Language of
Advertising
emagazine 53 September 2011
• Beth Kemp: Gender, Culture and
Language
• Dan Clayton: Language and Gender –
Opening up the emag Archive
emagazine 64 April 2014
• Cherry Muckle: Gendered
Personification
On emagclips
• Professor Deborah Cameron:
Language and Gender (selection of
clips)
The
Wife
of
Bath:
Individual or Stereotype?
The Wife of Bath is one of the most memorable of Chaucer’s pilgrims,
remembered for her individual voice and outspoken views. Yet as Nigel
Wheale argues, in creating her, Chaucer both draws on and challenges
literary texts, generic conventions and social norms.
Reading Chaucer’s General Prologue to the
Canterbury Tales can seem like riding along
with a gang of extraordinarily vivid and
eccentric individuals. The greasy, repellent
Pardoner, a simpering Prioress, the quietly
sinister Knight, and then Alison of Bath,
who frankly jumps down from her ambling
horse and off the page. Alison got more
reaction from medieval readers than
any other pilgrim, as we know from the
number of text ‘tweets’ that she provoked –
comments (mostly attacks) scribbled in the
margins of contemporary manuscript copies
of the Tales.
Reading the Pilgrims as
Individuals...
To read the General Prologue as if it were a
realistic documentary, full of psychological
truths, was also the established critical
response until quite recently. Scholars even
spent long hours searching in the historical
record for actual individuals who could
have been Chaucer’s inspiration – there
were apparently lots of cloth weavers called
Alison in St Michael’s parish, Bath. Chaucer
may have been inspired by the example of
Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy to create
such individualistic portraits, though Dante
had also included recent, well-known
historical figures in his poem, which was a
startling innovation that Chaucer did not
follow.
... or as Allegorical Types
But this kind of reading ignored the
fact that all other medieval texts tend to
represent people as types, as examples
or allegorical figures that stood for more
general ideas. Jill Mann’s Chaucer and
Medieval Estates Satire (1973) was a highly
influential study that demonstrated how
consistently Chaucer drew on existing
conventions of representation to create
the classes of people making their way to
Canterbury. Criticism in recent years has
therefore moved away from an emphasis
on the apparent psychological realism of
Chaucer’s characters, to focus on the ways
in which the author constructed his pilgrims
out of a huge variety of fourteenth-century
texts. This perspective argues that Chaucer
adapted genres and conventions with such
originality that his creations appear to be
much more individualised, ‘characterful’
in ways that can seem post-medieval, even
modern. Chaucer’s genius was to ‘make
new meanings out of traditional norms’1.
This is particularly true of the Wife of Bath
because scholarship has shown that the
portrait of Alison is, paradoxically, created
out of many details from the long tradition
of antifeminist writing in Christian theology
and commentary. The Wife of Bath (as
fictional persona) is well aware of the
weight of these conventions that bore down
on herself and every woman in fourteenthcentury society, but she finesses the ancient
prejudices, and turns them to her own
advantage:
the Wife becomes recognisably human when she
interacts with the models that Chaucer has used
to construct her2
And la Vielle in the Roman de la Rose
recommends that a woman
should go often to the principal church and go
visiting, to weddings, on trips […] and round
dances, for in such places the God and Goddess of
Love keep their schools.4
This advice is as cynical as anything that
the Wife says; you should attend church
often, but to worship quite another God
(and Goddess) than the Christian Lord.
There is also an echo of the final detail in
her General Prologue portrait, the innuendo
implied by ‘la ronde’, the endless dance of
love and romance,
so Alison simultaneously ‘reflects and
reflects upon’ the antifeminist tradition.
For she koude of that art the olde daunce
Creating the Character
Elements
The Prologue – a Naturalistic
Illusion
As for nearly all of Chaucer’s pilgrims on
their way to Canterbury, we have three
different elements that contribute to the
Wife of Bath’s portrait – her sketch in
the General Prologue, her own (prolix)
Prologue, and the Tale that she contributes.
Each of these draws on different genres
and conventions in order to construct the
‘character-effect’ that is the figure of the
Wife.
The Wife of Bath’s own Prologue is
remarkable in several ways; it is the longest
of all the tale prologues, and seems to have
been written and revised over several years.
Her introduction reads as if spoken by a
garrulous, scatty, opinionated woman, and
can be difficult to follow, at first reading,
for that reason. In other words, even in its
form, the Prologue appears to be highly
naturalistic – we surely all know ‘gossibs’
(of either gender) who talk exactly like this.
But again, the Prologue depends heavily on
previous texts, the Roman de la Rose and
three works at least from the antifeminist
tradition. As an unlettered woman, Alison
also often cites proverbial knowledge
and sayings. Other critics have read her
Prologue as the parody of a sermon, just
as the Pardoner is stung to say, ‘Ye been a
noble prechour in this cas’ (165), and the
Friar warns her not to trespass on (male)
‘scole-matere’5 –
The strikingly vivid portrait of Alison in
the General Prologue is based on an old
woman, herself a type in the ‘elderly
bawd’ tradition, from a French romance,
the Roman de la Rose. This poem influenced
Chaucer more than any other literary text,
and its style of naturalistic observation
is very similar to Chaucer’s own3. So, for
example, the Prologue informs us that,
In al the parisshe wif ne was ther noon
That to the offrynge bifore hire sholde goon
449-50
476
lete auctoritees, on Goddes name,
To prechyng and to scoles of clergye
1272, 1276-7
Challenging ‘Auctoritee’
The Wife’s brazen, shameless adoption of
the most virulent attacks on women from
the antifeminist literature is most striking
when she defends the nature of her desire:
I ne loved nevere by no discrecioun,
But evere folwede myn appetite …
I took no kep, so that he liked me,
How poore he was, ne eek of what degree.
622-26
This kind of amoral promiscuity was among
the bitterest criticisms made of ‘woman’ as
such by the antifeminist tradition, yet in
the context of Alison’s Prologue and the
Tale that she goes on to tell, there is a kind
of humane aspect to the behaviour she
describes. To accept anyone so generously
and without regard to rank or degree recalls
the spiritual openness preached in the
Gospels. It is also consistent in some way
with the definition of true ‘gentillese’ in her
Tale, given by the knight’s ‘olde wyf’, before
her transformation,
that genterye
Is nat annexed to possessioun
1146–7
The Wife of Bath’s most flagrant behaviour
can be seen as an allegory of true gentility
of the spirit.
Making the Tale His (Her) Own
The Wife’s choice of tale can also be read as
a strategic variation on established literary
forms that is made to add further qualities
to her ‘character’. Textual evidence suggests
that what is now the Shipman’s Tale was
originally intended for the Wife, and it is
interesting to read that story, and think why
Chaucer may have changed his mind. The
Wife’s narration combines two traditional
tale types, the ‘converted knight’ and the
‘loathly lady’, within the ambience of the
Arthurian romances. All these conventions
might be thought to be appropriate and
acceptable material for a modest female
reader/listener of the time. But the Wife
adds several discordant or troubling details
to these seemingly inoffensive narratives,
which all combine to establish her own
perspective.
The opening of her tale is deceptively
charming and innocent, a ‘once upon a
time’ scenario of the ‘olde dayes of the
Kyng Arthour’, and the ‘elf-queene, with
hir joly compaignye’ (857, 860). But the
Wife dismisses this naïve landscape with a
host of mendicant friars that have driven
away ancient ‘fayerye’ – an insult obviously
directed at her fellow pilgrim Friar.
Most troubling of all, this is a plague of
wandering priests who are sexual predators,
In every bussh or under every tree.
879
This dark undertone of sexual violence
continues with the ‘lusty’ young knight’s
violent rape of the ‘mayde’ he happened to
meet. ‘Lusty’ in the late fourteenth century
was beginning to change meanings, from
primarily ‘merry, lively, pleasing’, to ‘lustful’
in our sense of the word. Significantly, this
troubling detail is not found in any of the
sources that Chaucer might have drawn on.
Literary Innovation and Social
Challenge
There are two other key differences that
the Wife/Chaucer introduces. Only in his
version does the repentant young knight
cede sovereignty to his loathly wife before
(rather than after) she is miraculously
transformed. This would seem to give even
more emphasis to the woman’s power over
her man. And perhaps more subtly, the kind
of choice offered to the knight is also an
innovation. The choice in the ‘loathly lady’
genre was usually between ‘fair by night
and foul by day’, or vice versa (the usual
choice being the first!). Chaucer’s Wife
makes a much more complex offer: foul, old
but faithful unto death, or else
… ye wol han me yong and fair
And take youre aventure of the repair
That shal be to youre hous by cause of me,
Or in som oother place, may wel be.
1223-26
The knight must accept marriage on his
lovely wife’s terms, her beauty drawing
company to their house (or to somewhere
else, quite possibly), and he must earn her
love and fidelity, come what may. Alison
surely made a shrewd bargain.
Complicating Conventional
Assumptions
Women in the medieval period were
sometimes classed as the ‘fourth estate’,
following on from the clergy, the nobility
and commoners. There are only two
significant female pilgrims making the
journey to Canterbury, the Prioress and
the Wife of Bath. They can be thought
of as a contrastive pair, standing for the
conventional notions of woman that were
all-pervasive. Yet Chaucer’s text complicates
these assumptions.
The oldest stereotype applied to woman in
the Christian tradition is that of Eva/Ave
– Earth Mother or Heavenly Mother, Eve
or Mary. The Prioress appears to represent
‘Ave’ (‘Ave Maria’ – praise Mary), so pure,
so pious, but she tells one of the most
troubling and vicious of all the Tales, a
Miracle of the Virgin Mary that depends on
murderous anti-semitism. The Wife of Bath
is modelled from antifeminist texts, and
can be read as the fallen Eva, all too earthy
(though she appears to have no children).
Yet, as we have seen, Chaucer’s textual
construction of the Wife allows contrary
readings of the dominant attitudes toward
the female, posing questions about Eve, just
as the Prioress does about Ave.
Nigel Wheale is a poet and writer living in the
Orkneys.
Notes
1&2
This argument is based on Mark David
Rasmussen’s Introduction to, Jill Mann, Life in
Words. Essays on Chaucer, the ‘Gawain’-Poet, and
Malory (Toronto UP, 2014). Available at Google Books,
preview search. And see my article, ‘“Allas! Allas! That
evere love was synne!” Debating The Wife of Bath’,
emagazine 55 (February 2012).
3
Excerpts at the excellent Harvard ‘Chaucer Page’,
http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/canttales/
wbpro/rom-duen.html
4
‘Advice of La Vielle’, quoted in Robert P. Miller (ed.),
Chaucer, Sources and Backgrounds (Oxford, 1977),
470. This poem is based, in its turn, on Ovid; see Ovid,
The Erotic Poems, trans. Peter Green (Penguin, 1982).
5 Details in Larry D. Benson (ed.), The Riverside
Chaucer (Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 864 ff.
emag web archive
• Professor John Sutherland: Puzzle me
This
• Malcolm Hebron: Wife of Bath in
Context
emagplus 48, April 2010
• Nigel Wheale: ‘Allas, Allas’ – The
Debate about the Wife of Bath
• Kathleen McPhilemy: Chaucer – an
Early Genre Critic
• Kate Ashdown: The Miller’s Tale –
Estates Satire
• Dr Malcolm Hebron: Reading the Wife
of Bath – Feminist Freedom Fighter or
Hypocritical Harridan?
emagazine 48, April 2010
Blake
East
in the
India and
Colonialism in
‘The Tyger’ and
‘London’
For many teachers and students, William
Blake’s Songs of Experience (1794) is a staple
text in the English classroom. However,
being a staple, teachers can often find
it difficult to offer new areas of critical
exploration. I see many A Level students
roll their eyes in annoyance when we come
to read ‘The Tyger’…ah-gain.
Nonetheless, I’ve found that contextualising
Experience – particularly the stalwart poems
‘The Tyger’ and ‘London’ – within the
framework of Britain’s colonisation of India
provides students with a fresh perspective
that can engage their understanding of
Britain’s colonial history, as well as modernday concepts of geopolitics, global capitalism
and multiculturalism.
India and the effects of colonialism are
found throughout Blake’s poetry and prose
– and ‘The Tyger’ and ‘London’ enable us to
explore these topics in critical detail.
‘The Tyger’ and Colonialism
By reading ‘The Tyger’ and ‘London’ in the
context of Britain’s burgeoning imperial ambitions,
Kurt Johnson provides a fresh perspective on two
poems at the heart of Blake’s ‘Experience’.
Blake’s most obvious poetic engagement
with India is probably the one poem most
familiar to us: ‘The Tyger’ (1794). Tigers are,
after all, indigenous to India, and India was
increasingly colonised and controlled by
Britain throughout Blake’s lifetime (17571827). This control was established through
the expansion of the East India Company
– a trading corporation that wielded
substantial economic and military power.
However, it’s easy to understand why
traditional interpretations of its mechanics
and themes fail to identify ‘The Tyger’ as an
‘Indian’ poem. The industrial rhythm of its
metre, along with its metallurgic imagery,
speak more to the ‘dark Satanic mills’ of
the burgeoning Industrial Revolution and
its encroachment on England’s ‘green and
pleasant land’ than to the significance
of foreign fauna half-a-world away (it
was a six-month sail to India for Britons
courageous enough to risk it; and if they
survived the trip, most colonials lasted
only two summers before the malarial
climate claimed them). Moreover, Blake’s
theological framing of his poetic subject
as the ominous counterpart to the goodly
‘Lamb’ confers upon his ‘Tyger’ a symbolic
significance that seems immediately to
elevate the beast from the jungles of Bengal
to the empyreal realms of God’s armoury.
Yet, once you put the poem back into
its historical and colonial context, the
obviousness of the connection between
the poem and the place seems all the more
profound for its having been overlooked.
father was busy hunting a ‘Tiger’ of his
own: Tipu Sultan, ‘The Tiger of Mysore’
(the namesake of the above-mentioned
toy). The ruler of the Mysore Kingdom
– in the south-western corner of India –
Tipu Sultan led a sustained and spirited
rebellion during the 1780s and 90s against
General Munro and the British East India
Company’s holdings in the region, resulting
in a number of embarrassing defeats and
treaties on Britain’s part. Already engaged
in a war with France on the European front
– with fears rampant of a French invasion
on British soil at any point – the costs of
further fighting in India only heightened
Britain’s imperial anxiety. As a result, the
tiger came to symbolise a growing public
fear and unease.
Thanks to Britain’s colonisation of India,
the 1780s and 90s was a period when many
scholarly articles on Indian culture, religion
and geography were at the forefront of
religious, political and aesthetic debates,
serving as something of a prototype for the
multiculturalism we know and experience
today. So when Blake published ‘The Tyger’
in 1794, those who read the poem may well
have viewed it through the spectrum of a
wider interest in, even infatuation with,
India, rather than immediately considering
its religious connotations as we are wont to
do today.
The Munro Mauling
Moreover, they would probably have read
the poem through the lens of newspaper
sensationalism. Salacious tales of tiger
attacks on British colonialists regularly
made the news in London – with one attack
in particular making all the headlines.
In 1792, Hugh Munro, the son of British
general Sir Hector Munro, was mauled by
a tiger while out in India visiting his father.
Munro’s death became such an affair it is
thought to have inspired the children’s toy
‘Tipu’s Tiger’. The toy first became available
in 1795 and featured a tiger mangling a
red-coated British solider. Many even had
mechanisms inside to simulate growling
and mauling noises – bringing some of the
sensory dangers of India into the homes of
affluent Britons.
The Munro mauling had a level of irony
to it Blake seems to harness in his own
‘Tyger’; as fate would have it, Munro’s
So when Blake published ‘The Tyger’ at
the height of this geopolitical maelstrom,
tigers were both a literal danger to Britons
abroad, and a figurative danger at home. In
this sense, the poem can be interpreted as
an omen not only for the natural hazards
native to the subcontinent, but also for the
geopolitical perils of colonisation.
Critiquing Britain’s Imperial
Ambitions
I’m not arguing that ‘The Tyger’ is about
India in the sense that Blake thought it
represented some ungodly monstrosity
that threatened the religious purity of
the meek British ‘Lamb’ (although many
Britons did think this of India and Indian
culture at the time). However, I think that
‘The Tyger’ is about India in the sense of
Britain now being an unapologetic imperial
power. Ever the anti-imperialist at heart
– ‘Empire is no more’ Blake proclaims at
the end of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(1790) and ‘America: A Prophecy’ (1795)
– Blake invokes the ‘Tyger’ to represent the
dark side of Britain’s imperial ambitions.
The ‘Tyger’ embodies the foreboding
machinations of war – the ‘stars’ throwing
down ‘their spears’ – forged by the same
hubristic desire of conquest that preceded
Lucifer’s downfall. When Blake asks ‘Did
he who made the Lamb make thee?’, his
question reverberated as much in the
political halls of Westminster Palace where
colonial policy was made, as it did in the
hallowed halls of Westminster Abbey. In
other words, Blake questions how a country
as supposedly politically-enlightened as
Britain ‘Dare its deadly terror clasp’ around
such ethically-dubious ambition; when did
Britain, he seems to ask, become such an
instrument of ‘dread’?
By likening the rise of imperial power to
Lucifer’s fall from grace, Blake constructs
‘The Tyger’ as a fiery premonition to Britain
of the politically and morally corrupting
dangers of colonialism.
‘London’ – The Colonial Centre
‘The Tyger’ isn’t the only poem to warn
of imperial excess; ‘London’ similarly
proclaims Blake’s anti-imperial desires.
In ‘London’, Blake laments the ‘charter’d
street[s]’ and ‘Thames’; the ‘cr[ies]’ of
‘Man’, ‘Harlot’ and ‘Infant’; and ‘the hapless
Soldiers sigh’ as it ‘Runs in blood down
Palace walls.’ According to Saree Makdisi in
Romantic Imperialism, ‘London’ is a symbol of
imperial corruption, where Blake
is mapping the emerging space-time of
modernisation, of capital, of empire.
In other words, as the centre of the Empire
(and thus the emerging modern world
as we now know it), Blake’s ‘London’
symbolises the devastating consequences of
imperialism at home.
The ‘Mind-forg’d Manacles’ of
Empire
It’s perhaps not insignificant that in
1793 the East India Company renewed
its charter for another 20 years – an act
which gave the Company governing
control over British-held Indian territory.
Blake’s ‘charter’d street[s]’ and ‘charter’d
Thames’ seem to reflect the extent to which
London’s physical geography acquiesced to
and served the purposes of empire-building
thanks to this new charter. After all, it was
the Thames through which Indian produce,
wears, ornaments and literature came to
be placed onto and consumed in London
streets – the capital goods of empire that
remain with us today in the form of such
quintessentially British phenomena as
afternoon tea and the Friday-night curry.
Moreover, thanks to the battles against
Revolutionary France and Tipu Tiger
Sultan, Britain was desperately in need of
soldiers. As a result, they often resorted
to impressment – that is, the abduction
of men off the streets without notice and
their immediate enlistment in the military
(often against their will). In this sense, the
‘ban’ (which has connotations of military
summons) Blake hears in stanza two eerily
echoes in the ‘hapless Soldier’s sigh’ in
stanza four – thereby portending to include,
if not be, the exclusive whimper of those
poor souls dying in India to protect and
enlarge Britain’s imperial territory.
Here, in ‘London’, Blake demonstrates the
devastating extent to which the ‘mindforg’d manacles’ of empire clasped their
ethereal iron around all aspects of British
life – from the ‘new-born Infants tears’ to
‘Marriage’… and ultimately, to the ‘hearse’.
‘Empire is No More’
One reason it’s illuminating to consider
these poems’ engagement with colonial
India is because they offer us a real-time
glimpse of the historic events which fuelled
Blake’s desire poetically to declare again
and again that ‘Empire is no more’. ‘The
Tyger’ and ‘London’ are great reminders of
Blake being not only a radically theological
and aesthetic poet, but also a radically (geo)
political poet as well.
Kurt Johnson teaches English at Silcoates School,
Wakefield.
emag web archive
• Dr Andrew Green: Blake, Revolution
and Social Reform
• George Norton: The Mind-forg’d
Manacles – William Blake and
Ideology
On emagclips
• Owen Sheers: William Blake’s
‘London’
• Professor David Punter: Blake’s
Historical Background
A Culture of Madness
the ‘madwoman’ in fiction
From Bertha in Jane
Eyre to the wife in ‘The
Yellow Wallpaper’,
from Esther in The
Bell Jar to Blanche in
Streetcar, the female
character declared mad
by society has long been
of interest to the writer.
What connection does
the representation of
their ‘madness’ have
to language, the telling
of stories – and their
reception as characters
in the real world, asks
Emma Kirby.
the author’s suppressed ‘anxiety and rage’.
Bertha Mason is mad...she came of a mad
family…
This pioneering analysis does more than
spotlight nineteenth-century society’s
repression of women evidenced in women’s
writing, but suggests that madness is
essentially cultural, a venting of all that
is socially unacceptable. Crucially, these
critics drew a distinct link between
madness and women. Historical evidence
seems to support this. Even nineteenthcentury notions of madness confirmed
that the reality of the situation was highly
gendered. Women who had children out
of wedlock or were adulterers could be
considered ‘dangerous’ and ‘mad’. In
other words, the diagnosis of madness was
implemented to control and prevent women
from subverting the bounds of expected
femininity.
Brontë presents us with a writhing beast
that is literally locked up. Critics Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar produced a
groundbreaking essay back in the late 1970s
which claimed that Bertha was Jane Eyre’s
double, still further, Brontë’s double. This
feminist perspective contended that the
madness Brontë depicts was a metaphor for
More than just a metaphor for imposed
social limits on women, madness was
quite literally used to restrain those who
threatened to transgress these limits. Bertha
certainly transgresses the expectations of
a stereotypical nineteenth-century wife.
She is a ‘maniac’ with ‘grizzled hair’ – a
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre presents us
with one of literature’s most famous mad
women; Rochester’s estranged wife, Bertha.
This woman’s back-story is barely included,
with Rochester disclosing only the thinnest
account of her history:
‘clothed hyena’. Just as Rochester binds
Bertha’s hands to a chair to prevent her
from literally escaping, his claim that she
is a ‘mad…maniac’ envelops her in terms
that debase and restrict her. For Brontë,
perhaps Bertha was a vehicle to explore
these limits on her own sex, a ‘wild animal’
symbolic of female expression, shackled by
patriarchal expectation. Although it might
assume too much to suggest that Brontë did
this deliberately, even subconsciously, as
modern readers we may well read Bertha’s
character as such. As Jane herself puts it,
they [women] suffer from too rigid a restraint.
However, as Bertha’s case testifies, if ‘they’
attempt to break away from such restraint,
that way ‘madness’ lies.
Madwomen in Attics
Incarcerating women suspected of insanity
was not uncommon in the nineteenth
century and often it was the woman’s
husband who prompted this. One such
example in literature is the American writer
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, ‘The
Yellow Wallpaper’, where the narrator is
shut up in a room in the country by her
husband who insists she needs a ‘rest cure’.
The ‘rest cure’ was a treatment designed
specifically for women who were believed
to be over stretching their brain capacity, a
‘treatment’ Gilman had experienced herself.
Shut up in the house, the unnamed
narrator’s husband, John, breaks down the
door only to faint at what he sees. The sight
is never described. Instead, the narrator
screams that she’s ‘got out at last…in spite
of you and Jane…’. No Jane has been
mentioned thus far, so who is this character
that the narrator refers to that never
appears? The name could be a reference to
herself – the narrator remains anonymous
throughout. Some critics contend that it
is an allusion to Jane Eyre, a novel Gilman
would have been familiar with. By this
logic, the narrator aligns herself with
Bertha, another madwoman in the attic.
Arguably, both claims share the same
implications. References either to Brontë’s
heroine or herself suggest that the narrator
has ‘escaped’ the restrictions imposed upon
her by her husband (she has been forbidden
to read, write or leave the house), but she
Gilman leaves us with the picture of
a couple in social collapse, unable or
unwilling to play their parts as the stable
man and wife any longer; it is a scene of
domestic insanity. But, troubling as this
may have been to a nineteenth-century
readership with its firm belief in the
importance of a happy marriage, Gilman’s
story asks still more troubling questions
about madness itself, particularly to a
contemporary readership more accustomed
to, and accepting of, marriage breakdowns.
We are left questioning: is the narrator
simply insane or has she just stopped
playing the role expected of her, that of the
contented wife?
The Restraint of Madness and
the Madness of Restraint
If sanity is dependent on fitting in and
adhering to the social roles expected of us,
then it is impossible to overlook the fact
that the roles that have been available to
women in the past have been limiting.
One of the most famous novels to explore
the dangerous relationship between
New York, Esther feels at odds with her
environment. Knowing she should feel
inspired by her surroundings, she cannot
help but perceive her world as ‘mirage-gray’
and details how
the hot streets wavered in the sun… and the dry,
cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my
throat.
Plath creates a hot, alien landscape
littered with images of dryness, evoking
an environment that is sterile and acrid.
Despite finding some small, early success as
a writer, Esther cannot let go of the feeling
that she should take a more conventional
route by marrying. For her and many
women in 1950s America, working and
having a family were seen as mutually
exclusive. It is these limitations that
precipitate Esther’s mental breakdown,
enshrined in the metaphor of the fig tree
as Esther imagines picking one fruit only to
watch the others wither; to choose one role
inevitably signals the death of the other.
For Esther, New York is ‘a stage backcloth’,
– not a backdrop for creativity but for
stagnant, derivative performances.
Keeping up Appearances
is now able to ‘creep over him’ and finally
leave her prison. No longer the young bride
and mother he recognises, what John sees
is sufficient to make him faint; Gilman
presents a neat gender reversal where the
superficiality of the passive ‘female’ is gone,
exposing the equally superficial nature of
the stalwart ‘man’.
social expectations of women and female
identity per se is Sylvia’s Plath’s The Bell
Jar. During the American 50s when the
novel is set, social control was intensified
by a widespread fear of McCarthyism
and consequently social conformity was
demanded. Plath’s protagonist Esther
struggles with this from the outset. Having
won a writing competition and come to
Another famous character who is caught
between her innermost ‘desires’ and
how she feels she must appear to others
is Tennessee Williams’ character in A
Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche Dubois.
Desperate to keep her sexual past and
desires hidden, Blanche dresses in white
and indulges in romantic stories about
her past in an attempt to be perceived
as a chaste, traditional Southern Belle.
However, her performance is systematically
broken down by her brutish brother in-law,
Stanley. From the outset, Stanley attempts
to destroy Blanche’s carefully constructed
persona. He tears at her ‘costume jewelry,’
snatches her love letters ‘yellowing with
antiquity’, unveils her promiscuous past
until finally raping her in scene ten,
resulting in Blanche being committed to
a mental institution while Stanley goes
unpunished. Like Esther, Blanche attempts
to ‘put on’ a façade, dressing in a ‘white
satin evening gown’ and ‘silver slippers’.
However, the gown is ‘crumpled’, the
slippers ‘scuffed’, symbolising the fragile
nature of her performance. Where Blanche
takes refuge in costume in the hope it will
lend her performance authenticity, Esther
acts otherwise, throwing her expensive
clothes off the roof. By such an act, she
tries to purge society’s codifications which
work by designating particular roles. She
discards the very thing Blanche clings to,
metaphorically rejecting the gendered roles
available to her. However, rather than
liberating her, Esther finds herself unable
to act any more, retreating to her room and
eventually under her bed. Both protagonists
find themselves bereft of performance and
as such, their very sanity seems to be under
threat; the only role left available for them
to play is that of the mad woman in need of
psychiatric help.
A Failure of Language
On the brink of breakdown, Blanche, Esther
and Gilman’s unnamed narrator all turn to
language to express what is happening to
them. However, each character struggles
with this in different ways. In The Yellow
Wallpaper, the narrator is banned from
keeping her journal and is therefore
denied the self-expression and liberty she
craves. In Streetcar, Blanche takes refuge
in words. Indeed, much of the dialogue is
dominated by her long, whimsical speeches
which contrast sharply with Stanley’s
blunt, brusque prose. Her sanity becomes
dependent on sustaining her stories but
Stanley’s physical power overpowers
her speech until she can no longer utter
coherent words and ‘inhuman noises’ fill
the stage. Similarly, Esther, a character
clearly in control of language having won
a writing competition, fails to articulate
her personal experiences. In an attempt to
write how she really feels, words fail her
so she is left making ‘big, jerky’ letters she
cannot recognise. Whilst she turns to words
as her potential salvation, they fail to serve
her. Indeed, how can language, by its very
nature a logical, shared system, be used
to express an experience so unique and
ineffable? Moreover, the fact that all the
protagonists who struggle to express their
experiences and be heard are female cannot
be overlooked. Arguably, the ‘madness’ of
these women is indicative of something
greater than individual instability – they
point to the lack of stories that have been
available to women, to a world of literature
dominated by patriarchal discourse. Perhaps
Esther’s writing fails her not simply because
she is on the brink of madness but because
she is a woman on the verge of breakdown
and a system inscribed with patriarchal
meaning simply cannot communicate what
she feels. Arguably female writers have
always had to contend with this dilemma.
Just as Bertha is never given a voice in Jane
Eyre and Gilman’s narrator is denied her
right to write, so too in the past, women’s
writing found few places in the literary
canon. In Streetcar, Blanche’s sister, Stella,
chooses to disbelieve the truth about
Blanche’s rape, admitting:
I couldn’t believe her [Blanche’s] story and go on
living with Stanley.
Once again, a patriarchal story triumphs.
All four texts imply that sanity may be
dependent on telling a story, the right story
that those around us want to hear and are
willing to verify. Esther may be ‘cured’,
with a ‘baby’ at her side, once again an
upstanding citizen, but only because she
has followed a conventional script she once
questioned. If sanity is telling the right
story, Esther can be considered sane in a
way Blanche, Bertha and Gilman’s narrator
cannot. Their stories fail to be heard or
believed by those around them. However,
as readers we are privy to the experiences
of these women and invited to listen where
possible and decide whether or not they are
in fact mad, or victims of a make-believe
world of patriarchal design. As Blanche so
aptly puts it, ‘it wouldn’t be make-believe if
you believed me…’.
Emma Kirby is an English teacher at The
Portsmouth Grammar School.
emag web archive
• Isabel Houston: Gender, Madness and
National Identity in The Wasp Factory
• Dr Sean McEvoy: Sex and Madness in
The Changeling
• Richard Griffiths: Wide Sargasso Sea
and Jane Eyre – Other Voices
• Mike Peters: A Different Approach to
Context – The Bell Jar
• Maureen Freely: Esther and the
Slippery Slope – Some Thoughts on
The Bell Jar
• Professor Judy Simons: Speech and
Silence in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’
• Victoria Leslie: A Woman’s Place
– Topography and Entrapment in
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The
Yellow Wallpaper’
• Richard Jacobs: Blanche’s Story.
Exploring Streetcar on Stage and Film
• Samuel Tapp: Gendered Language and
Cultural Identity
emag
archives
Delving in
to the
– languag
e change
In the second of an occasional series, Dan Clayton goes back through the
emagazine archive to identify articles that are relevant to students following
the current A Level English Language specifications. In this issue he looks at
Language Change.
Language changes all the time. Some have
argued that the pace of change has increased
rapidly over the last two decades with the
growth of online communication meaning
that new words (cronut, mansplain and
YOLO, for example) can spring up in one
place one minute and appear elsewhere in
the world in a matter of seconds. Others
have pointed out that underlying the
novelty value of new words and phrases,
well-established processes and patterns exist
and have done for centuries. In addition,
while the rate of change may well have
increased, the arguments about language
changing remain the same.
students) showing how to investigate the
continuing presence of Old English words
in modern English texts in ‘Not so fast!
The influence of Old English on everyday
language’ in emagazine 27 from February
2005, and Steph Jackson looking at Middle
English’s habit of borrowing foreign words
to enrich its ever-growing vocabulary
(emagazine 47 from February 2010).
The emagazine archive has a huge number
of articles on Language Change, which
reflects its status as one of the major topics
at A Level since the inception of the course.
These range from those which look at
specific time periods – Old English, Middle
English and Early Modern English – to those
which focus on changing social contexts,
taking in a wide variety of changing words,
meanings, grammatical structures and
language etiquette along the way.
Contemporary Language
Change
The Evolving Language
First off, the articles which cover specific
periods of the English Language are now
grouped under clear headings, so you can
find (among many other things) David
Crystal discussing Shakespeare’s ‘false
friends’ (words used by Shakespeare that
have changed meaning over time: rude,
silly, naughty, lover and ecstasy) in
articles from 2002-2004, Julie Blake (and
These articles are backed up with some of
Graeme Trousdale’s clips on the emagazine
website, especially his clips on ‘Evolving
English’, ‘Words Changing Meaning’ and
‘Changes in Grammar’.
Along with these articles, there’s a strong
focus on contemporary language change.
Changing conversational structures such
as quotatives (She said, she went, she
was all, she was like and this is her) are
covered in Sue Fox’s ‘I said, he said’ from
emagazine 45, September 2009 which draws
on the Linguistic Innovators project at
QMUL and its fascinating data of London’s
changing language. Margaret Coupe’s
‘The now and the new’ from emagplus in
December 2013 looks at new words from
2013 and charts their links to changing
social practices and trends. This makes a
good companion piece to the same writer’s
‘Blends and ends’ from emagazine 56,
April 2012 which focuses on popular and
productive word formation processes such as
blending and affixation: all great for students
studying A2 English Language and looking
for relatively recent examples of neologisms
in action.
Continuing to mine the vein of new words,
Michael Rosen’s article from emagazine
36, ‘Coining new words’ looks at words
entering English from other languages:
Sometimes, when one language has a gap,
someone borrows a word from another language
and imports it. If you’re studying literature, you
may well have come across the words ‘motif’
(German), ‘genre’ and ‘denouement’ (both French)
but everyday life uses the words ‘bungalow’
(Hindi), ‘gauze’ (Arab place-name, Gaza), ‘robot’
(Czech) and ‘nosh’ (Yiddish) without stopping to
wonder where these words came from and what
gaps they filled.
The Changing Meaning of a
Word
Elsewhere, Ray Cluley examines one word
and its passage through time. ‘Prostitutes,
hoodlums and anarchists – the changing
meaning of ‘punk’’ in emagazine 47,
February 2010 charts the etymology of this
versatile word (from prostitute to thug to
coward to rebellious teen subculture) and
observes:
Words change all the time, of course, and often
the reason behind the adapted or additional
meaning is quite clear. Take ‘sinister’, for example.
In the Old French, this word simply meant
left-handed. These days it has come to mean
‘darkly suspicious’ which is only logical when you
consider the once widespread belief in witchcraft;
one way of recognising a witch was by her lefthandedness. In this case, the change process is
known as pejoration, the word gaining negative
meaning. With ‘punk’ it’s perhaps less simple,
though some of the changes can be explained. It
doesn’t travel far from its prostitute meaning to
its function as a derogative term for homosexuals
when you consider the prevalent homophobia
that remains in our culture (just look at what such
bias has done to ‘gay’ these days). This may also
explain why punk came to mean ‘a despicable or
contemptible person’.
Language in Context
Taking a totally different tack, Adrian
Beard considers in ‘Think big for a change’
(emagazine 24, April 2004) how wider social
contexts (external aspects of language
change) can help students approach the
data of older texts in exams with a degree
of confidence. Instead of drilling deep into
single words, he argues that we can also
think of the bigger picture around older
texts, relating what we know about texts
now to what texts were like back then:
One way of looking at texts from the perspective
of language change is to think about genre.
The whole idea of genre labels relies upon
the fact that readers draw upon their past
experiences of reading/talking and find some
kind of similarity with a previous text they have
read/heard. At the same time, though, we are
likely to find some sort of difference, of a genre
being used in an unfamiliar way. This means
that studying language change is not the same
as studying language history: the change can
be contemporary, happening now, as well as
historical, happening in the past. Observing
how telephone use is altered as the technology
changes is an obvious example of contemporary
language change; looking at what people wrote
on postcards when they were first invented in
1869 is an historical example.
How Change Occurs
It’s not just the facts of change, the
processes or the social contexts that interest
English Language students, but also the
manner in which change can take place:
the focus for linguist Jean Aitchison in her
article ‘Tadpole or cuckoo? How language
changes’ from emagazine 19 in February
2003. Drawing on her work in the excellent
Language Change: Progress or Decay, Aitchison
describes how change occurs, with analogies
from the world of nature, looking at
tadpoles gradually transforming into frogs
and cuckoos replacing other birds in nests:
Sounds and words do not gradually ‘turn into’ one
another. Instead, a ‘young cuckoo’ situation exists.
A newer form or meaning develops alongside
an older one. The old and the new are typically
found side by side for a time, competing against
one another. Then the new form may win out and
replace the older one, like a young cuckoo getting
bigger and bigger, and eventually heaving the
original occupant out of the nest.
A ‘young cuckoo’ (replacement) view of change
has therefore taken over from the older ‘tadpole
to frog’ (slow alteration) idea. Competition,
rather than decay, is the key to language change.
But even the ‘young cuckoo’ view may be an
oversimplification. In some cases, several variant
forms or words compete. They may have been
around in the language for a long time, but may
not have been noticed. It may take years for one
to win out over the others.
Prescriptivists – Changing
Concerns
Not everyone embraces change. A major
area of discussion in many of the emagazine
articles on Language Change is the longestablished and continuing argument
between those who wish to arrest change
and those who accept and embrace it: put
simply, prescriptivists and descriptivists,
but developed into a slightly more nuanced
version in my article, ‘Prescriptivism and
descriptivism: beyond the caricatures’ in
emagazine 59, February 2013.
Henry Hitchings, author of the excellent
Language Wars, also explains in his interview
in emagazine 53, September 2011 that
while new concerns constantly crop up for
prescriptivists, they tap into a long line of
arguments about language:
At any moment, there’s always something that
is particularly exercising prescriptivists. So right
now, for instance, you could say it’s the use
and abuse of apostrophes and maybe also the
proliferation of tag questions such as ‘innit’. But
the fundamental issues haven’t changed much:
there have long been complaints about new
words, the ways punctuation is used, accents,
foreign influence on English, and the vagaries of
English spelling. And many prescriptivists have
tended to focus on very small concerns. Not on
how to make grammar easier to master, say, but
on the alleged odiousness of a certain word or
pronunciation.
A really good starting point for students of
this topic and the debates around it is Matt
Carmichael’s ‘Up with which I will not put’
from emagazine 26, December 2004. Here,
the writer explains the founding principles of
prescriptivism as he sees them: preservation,
standardisation and class. Thinking about the
third of these, Carmichael says:
For centuries ‘correct’ grammar and subtle semantic
distinctions have been a way for the middle
classes to demonstrate their education and imply
their status. Dr. Johnson thought that the word
‘knife’ ruined Shakespeare’s Macbeth because it
was a vulgar word used by common tradesmen.
Regular front page advertisements in broadsheet
newspapers testify to the enduring appeal of
being able to master the social grace of speaking
‘properly’.
But, as David Crystal points out in his recent
article for emagazine 61, September 2013,
this concern about class and people’s place in
society is understandable when you consider
the social context of many of the books
about grammar and language usage from Dr
Johnson’s time onwards:
All aspects of behaviour had to be dealt with
– how to bow, shake hands, wear a hat, hold
gloves, eat with a fork, pour tea, use a napkin, or
blow your nose in public. Also, what not to do:
no spitting, chewing with the mouth open, eating
with your hands. And how to speak and write so
as not to appear vulgar, not to offend, were critical
considerations.
Anything Goes?
So, is the alternative to prescriptivism an
anything goes, ‘just allow it, cuz’, laissez-faire
attitude? Not really. Many descriptivists still
point to the power that Standard English
confers upon its users and argue that we
should be able to switch between codes
or registers as appropriate. And you’d be
hard-pressed to find a linguist who didn’t
believe that clear communication is an
important skill. But many also note that
language has always changed and that those
changes have not always been for the worse.
Michael Rosen argues provocatively in ‘Not
interested? You should be…’ from emagazine
17, September 2002 that the increasing use
of should of for ‘should have’ or ‘should’ve’
is perhaps not the end of civilisation as we
know it, but just another way in which
language gradually changes and familiar
words and grammatical structures pick up
new meanings:
Does it really matter that more and more people
are saying and writing ‘I should of’? Might it not
happen, that over time, this will become just
another way of saying ‘I should have’? The word
‘of’ will come to mean ‘have’ as well as possession.
Nothing will have been lost. All that will have
happened is that in our speech communities, the
sounds and page-markings that we use to indicate
meanings will have shifted slightly, innit?
…all of which should be a good starting
point for some discussion in your classes
about the changing nature of language and
how we feel about it.
Dan Clayton teaches A Level English Language
at Colchester Sixth Form College, is a senior
examiner and moderator and editor of the EMC’s
Language: A student handbook on key topics and
theories.
Happily
ever after?
Interrogating As You Like It
A Level Student Ellie Markham investigates whether the final scene of As
You Like It can be called a ‘happy ending’.
Often used by Shakespeare to distinguish
his comedies from his tragedies, the notion
of a ‘happy ending’ focuses on the idea
that all the issues confronted in a particular
work are resolved, in a way that benefits
the protagonists of the story. As a part of
the genre of pastoral comedy, As You Like It
can be expected to fit with this definition of
the conventional ‘happy ending’. However,
as can be said for much of Shakespeare, it’s
never just as simple as that. Every aspect of
the happy ending provided by Shakespeare
can be shown to be far less satisfactory than
at first appears.
Good Conquers Evil...
In the traditional sense, it can be hard
to deem the final scene of As You Like It
as anything but a ‘happy ending’, as the
play resolves in a way that illustrates the
success of the heroes of the story. The
idea often associated with ‘happy endings’
that good conquers evil can be seen in the
conclusion of the play, as the issues posed
by the villainous characters are satisfactorily
resolved. Duke Senior, usurped and exiled
by his brother Duke Frederick, has his
dukedom restored as his younger sibling
is ‘converted’ by a holy man, ‘his crown
bequeathing to his banished brother’. As
the balance of power is righted in favour of
the true Duke, this element of the plot is
neatly tidied away, and the tyrannous Duke
Frederick is no more.
... Or Just Too Convenient?
However, Shakespeare’s solution to the
problem faced by the rightful Duke could
be seen to have been handled in a rather
over-hasty manner, as the elder brother
of Orlando appears on stage for the first
time to deliver the news of the younger
Duke’s religious transformation. Some
audience members may find it almost too
coincidental that Duke Frederick has been
miraculously converted just in time for
the characters to return to the Court. This
arguably ill-concealed contrivance may lead
the audience to question the authenticity of
this part of the ‘happy ending’.
From Discord to Harmony
A second aspect of the apparently happy
ending is that the discord and confusion
of As You Like It seem to be resolved by its
ending, as the heroine Rosalind removes
her cross-dressing disguise of Ganymede,
and appears for the first time in the Forest
of Arden ‘undisguised’. As one of the key
sources of befuddlement in the play, this
may suggest that the final scene of the play
is a ‘happy ending’, laying to rest much of
the play’s disorder. In this way, the ending
of As You Like It marks a return to normalcy
and order, thus indicating the satisfactory
and conclusive nature of the play’s final
moments.
Rosalind’s true identity as a woman
provides welcome resolution of the issues
surrounding relationships in the Forest
of Arden. In particular, this solves the
problem of the love triangle in which
Phebe, in love with Ganymede, threatens
the relationship between Rosalind and
Orlando. By revealing the true identity of
Rosalind, Phebe is prevented from pursuing
a relationship with her love interest and she
proclaims that
If sight and shape be true
Why then, my love adieu.
As Phebe bids goodbye to any romantic
prospects with Ganymede, in a wellrounded couplet, the love of the central
romantic couple is left unobstructed. Thus,
the marriage of the protagonists concludes
the play and their relationship is granted its
well-deserved ‘happy ending’.
... or Submissive Surrender?
However, upon closer inspection of the
joyous unification of the heroes of As You
Like It, it may prove difficult to find the
final moments of Shakespeare’s pastoral
comedy satisfying. The matrimonial joining
at the ending of the play marks a complete
volte-face by Shakespeare on the radical
issues about women that he has spent the
last five acts discussing. The emancipation
of Rosalind, seen in her previous control
over her companions to whom she
announces ‘I have left you commands’, is
completely undermined in the final scene
of her marriage. Instead, this liberation is
replaced by a crushing surrender of self
by Shakespeare’s previously empowered
heroine. Rosalind becomes the stereotypical
submissive female character once more
as she tells her betrothed that ‘To you
I give myself, for I am yours’, with this
manipulation of personal pronouns
objectifying Rosalind. In this way, the
headstrong woman becomes the possession
of her husband, as Orlando addresses
her as ‘my Rosalind’. As Rosalind loses
her identity, it is hard not to feel that the
happiness of this conclusion has, in part,
been denied to her.
In the same way, the fiery character of
Phebe, who audaciously accused Rosalind
of being ‘not fair’ and ‘proud’, is subdued by
the end of As You Like It. Hymen, the god of
marriage ceremonies, orders Phebe that
You to his love must accord
Or have a woman to your lord.
From Challenge to
Conformism
In the play’s closing moments, Phebe is
forced to become contrite and obedient to
her new husband Sebastian, or risk sharing
him with a mistress. In this way, Phebe is
not only married off to the man whom she
has spent the majority of the play trying
to deny in favour of Ganymede, but she
must also lose her determined and spirited
nature in order to conform to the behaviour
expected of her as a women – to obey her
husband. Therefore, it can be seen that two
of the most unconventional characters of
the play, who challenge the stereotypical
portrayal of women in the dramatic genre
of comedy, in the final analysis submit to
the gender hierarchy that Shakespeare
neatly conclude the play on a cheerful note,
with the rhyming couplet that could be said
to give a sense of satisfying closure.
... or Return to an Oppressive
Social Structure
has seemingly been trying to subvert. The
melancholic air of Jaques, who at this
moment ‘sees no pastime’ in the revelries,
echoes the despair of the feminist reader.
A Satisfying Closure
The last moments of As You Like It can be
seen to give the play a ‘happy ending’
as the comedy finishes in contentment
and cheer. We begin to move away from
the ‘green world’ of the Forest of Arden,
which engenders disruption and chaos,
towards the structure of normal life once
more. This departure from the Forest of
Arden is marked by the ‘rustic revelry’, a
convention of the genre, as the marriages
are accompanied by ‘music and dance’.
Therefore, the traditionalist finish with the
marriage scene leads to the play ending in
pastoral celebration, which would imbue
a sense of delight upon the audience. The
final words of Duke Senior,
However, this seemingly neat ending of
As You Like It nonetheless marks a distinct
movement back to the oppressive social
structure of the Court, which in the earlier
acts of the play saw Rosalind threatened by
her uncle that if she is found
so near our public court as twenty miles,
Thou diest for it.
In this way, the ending of the play can be
seen to be far from a ‘happy ending’ as it
signals an abandonment of the freedom
of the Forest of Arden, wherein such
hierarchy is subverted in the equality of
Duke Senior to his ‘co-mates and brothers
in exile’. Likewise, in finishing the play
with the marriage scene and the presence
of Hymen, the social norms evaded in the
Forest are reinforced through the use of
heterosexual imagery. This undermines any
suggestion of unorthodox homosexuality
suggested by the frissons between Rosalind
and Orlando whilst she is still in role as
Ganymede, such as when the two male
characters hold a mock-marriage between
themselves. In rounding off the play with
the re-establishment of conventional
heterosexuality, there is an implication
that we are returning to the accepted social
identities and positions of the era. The
conventional ‘happy ending’ undermines all
sense of the play’s intriguing radicalism.
In conclusion, it can be argued that by
definition, the final scene of As You Like It
gives the pastoral comedy a quintessential
‘happy ending’, as the heroic characters
triumph, harmony is restored and we
conclude in the happy celebration of four
marriages. Yet, on closer inspection, the
audience may be disheartened by the
oppression of the female characters and
Shakespeare’s reluctance to follow through
in subverting social norms. The ending
may be a happy one but for twenty-first
century audiences, it is also an inherently
unsatisfactory ending to Shakespeare’s
otherwise humorous and mischievous
dramatic work.
Ellie Markham is an A Level student at Sir William
Perkins’s School.
emag web archive
• Chris Bond: Art and Artifice in As You
Like It
emagplus 33, September 2006
• Professor Catherine Belsey: As You Like
It – Patterns of Storytelling
• George Norton: A Holiday Humour –
Shakespeare’s comedies and Bakhtin’s
Carnival
• Rebecca Agar: Back to Nature – The
Tempest and As You Like It
Images: from various productions of As You Like It
Proceed, proceed! We’ll begin these rites
As we do trust they’ll end, in true delights
Grammar and Change
– is ‘correct’ Grammar a Myth?
Prescriptivism v descriptivism? Sometimes the argument goes along quite
crude, simplistic lines. Gill Francis takes a more subtly nuanced stance,
making distinctions according to the nature of the shifts and what they are
doing grammatically.
As language – spoken, heard, written, read
– flows over us and around us, myriads of
new words and expressions are becoming
current: totally new coinages as well as
new compounds based on prefixes, suffixes,
and the ever-handy hyphen. Some burst
onto the scene; some trickle. Some are on
everyone’s lips only to vanish without trace;
others take over so completely that we can
scarcely remember what it was we used to
say.
New ‘Lexical’ Words
Broadly speaking there are two main types
of word class: the so-called ‘open’ classes,
or ‘lexical’ words (verbs, nouns, adjectives,
adverbs) and the ‘closed’ classes, or
‘grammar’ words (prepositions, pronouns,
conjunctions, and determiners).
New or unusual members of the so-called
‘lexical’ classes, especially verbs and
nouns, are the ones that tend to attract our
attention. Sometimes words are coined to
name newly available objects or processes:
take selfie, onesie, jeggings, upcycling,
paywall, and fracking, which has clearly
been a source of inspiration to tabloid
newspapers, spawning predictable headlines
like ‘Not in my frack yard’ and ‘You fracking
hypocrite’.
Texting, too, is contributing to lexical
change, as the need for speed and brevity
inspires a multitude of short forms and
acronyms: obvs, apols, soz, btw, cba,
imho, roflol, yolo and the rest. The
acronyms are increasingly in lower case –
surely a sign of their becoming completely
integrated as fully fledged words.
On the whole, the inrush of new lexical
items is accepted as inevitable. People
complain about the more inelegant
clichés of ‘management speak’ like
going forward to mean ‘in the future’,
and key deliverables, which means
something like ‘important results’, but
sounds both vague and pompous. There
are objections to the ease and rapidity with
which nouns become verbs (e.g. what’s
trending?) and verbs become nouns (e.g.
a big disconnect, a tough ask). The
abbreviations and acronyms I mentioned
are popular amongst digital natives, but
tend to be less acceptable to many people
Google Ngrams
from pre-digital generations, who can often
be heard to assert that our language is
becoming incomprehensible, a playground
for iconoclasts and neologists.
As time goes on, however, the complaints
become less vociferous; these ‘dreadful’
new words are assimilated into our daily
language.
What about Changes in
Grammar?
The grammar words are the hundreds of
important little words that make sense of
everything else. You use them continuously
and effortlessly, and they are crucial in
the making of meanings. You wouldn’t
get far without using in, on, about, for,
ahead of (prepositions) or me, mine, she,
him, us, they (pronouns). Most grammar
words are very frequent, though there
are a few stragglers like whomsoever
and howsoever, which are going out of
fashion or being relegated to specific formal
contexts.
As ‘closed’ classes, grammar words are
naturally resistant to change. There are
few brand-new coinages, and new uses
of existing grammar words rarely gain
admittance to dictionaries or grammar
books, however widespread they become in
everyday use.
But the distinction between the ‘open’
and ‘closed’ classes is not absolute, just a
convenient generalisation. There are some
marginal cases: for example, the common
word way is hovering between lexical
meanings (‘method’, ‘manner’, ‘style’) and
purely ‘grammaticalised’ uses. Here, the
way has a grammatical function but no
independent meaning; it is used exactly like
‘that’ or ‘how’:
A wonderfully varied route. It was great the way
the luggage always arrived without a hitch.
It is in this fertile borderland between ‘lexis’
and ‘grammar’ that changes are happening,
slowly but surely. The class of preposition
is particularly fluid, with a large floating
population of marginal members. North
of and south of, for example, are not
normally listed as complex prepositions,
but they are increasingly used in the media
to mean over and under, especially with
sums of money or numbers:
We have a very successful paywall program
that has yielded north of 700,000 digital
subscribers…
Conjunctions, too, are taking on members
not traditionally listed by grammarians:
plus, for example, is becoming a regular
coordinating conjunction like and, if
slightly more emphatic:
We tend to eat more fruit and vegetables in
summer, plus we are likely to take more exercise
and drink more water.
These developments are usually
uncontroversial. The trouble starts when
one grammar word seems to be trespassing
on another’s territory.
Fed up with People Saying
‘Fed up of’?
The adjective fed up is generally followed
by with, as in ‘I’m fed up with junk mail’.
But the alternative, fed up of, is gaining
ground. It has not yet become respectable,
and is mentioned in learner’s dictionaries
with the caveat ‘some people think this use
is incorrect’. (Which people, one wonders,
and are they right in thinking it’s wrong?)
Some corpus examples of fed up of, from ukWaC via SKYLIGHT
1
but also prevents good drivers from becoming fed up of being grouped and targeted with the worst offenders. If
2
writing, and I think he’s a good person, but fed up of being left dangling. So, after the next issue of Amazing
3
might not mean a lot to most of you, but I’m fed up of dealing with wannabee Musicians. I play guitar and have
4
base, Square Cushion headboard: ‘If you are fed up of having a messy bedroom with clothes and magazines
5
6
7
from drowning. Everyone quickly becomes fed up of hearing Martin recounting his exploits. Episode 5
exciting world of penny shares. And I’m fed up of helping rich people make more money they can’t possibly
to make safer.’ He added: ‘Residents are fed up of living with the risks and mayhem this road creates, and
8
choosing your motorcycle clothing? Are you fed up of never being able to find anything to fit? Our made-to-
9
and UK. I am proud of being Sicilian, and I am fed up of silly jokes about mafia thank you. I graduated at sport
10
others and the community. ‘Communities are fed up fed up of the disruption caused by people who show no respect for
Looking at these and hundreds of other
lines, I noticed something that would not
have emerged without a large corpus to
hand. The concordance lines above reflect
the fact that fed up OF is followed by an
-ing form (being, dealing, having etc.) in
about 70 percent of lines, and a noun group
(silly jokes, the disruption) in only 30
percent. The figures for fed up WITH show
an almost perfect reversal of this: 30 and 70
percent respectively.
This is not a trivial point, because it
indicates that fed up of is acquiring its own
collocates, and hence the beginnings of a
distinct meaning – people are typically fed
up OF actions and processes, while they
are fed up WITH things or people. (Or
perhaps fed up of just ‘sounds better’ in
particular contexts – this is always a possible
explanation.)
The evidence shows that bored of is
becoming more frequent too. In the cutIn the ukWaC corpus (2007) there are about throat world of inter-brand rivalry, Volvo
1,200 hits for fed up of (0.6 instances per
recently challenged the public image of
million words) as compared with about
Mercedes, using an eye-catching advert to
5,000 for fed up with (2.5 ipmw). Here are head the campaign. It read simply ‘Bored of
just ten lines, chosen at random:
German Techno? Try Some Swedish Metal’.
By its sheer print size and ubiquity, this
advert has put another nail in the coffin of
bored with.
What are teachers to do with evidence like
this? Are they to go on insisting that only
fed up with and bored with are correct
while fed up of and bored of are wrong?
Or can we make our own choices about
this? Let’s first consider a different kind of
grammatical change.
I Was Sat, and That’s That
Sometimes it is not just the grammar words
that change, but the forms and patterns of
verbs and nouns. I was approached recently
by someone with a grammar whinge that
she’d long been harbouring. ‘Don’t you
think it’s awful that people say I was sat,’
she stated, expecting agreement, ‘when
they should say I was sitting!’
I don’t find was sat particularly
objectionable, but she is right about the
facts. Instead of the ‘past continuous’ was/
were sitting, people are tending to use the
verb be + sat, the past participle of sit. Thus
the past participle is treated as an adjective,
indicating a state of sitting rather than an
action. The verb stand sometimes behaves
in much the same way.
It was a sunny Saturday in June and I was sat in
my flat in Dundee enjoying a leisurely leaf through
the Guardian…
We were sat in the lounge filling in paper work,
when we heard a very loud booming noise…
She was almost at the front of the queue and I was
stood at the back.
Admittedly, be + sitting is still about five
times more frequent in the ukWaC corpus.
But be + sat, which originated in various
regional dialects of English, has raised its
profile and become widespread on the
BBC as well as on the internet and in social
media.
A few other verbs also have the form be
+ past participle, especially go, come, and
finish, but these are in a different category,
since the usual form would be with had, for
example, ‘They had gone’.
I looked to see where the two boats lay upon the
beach. They were gone!
The rustic-looking proprietor greeted me in Welsh,
and asked me if I was come to buy hogs.
It took me about 2 weeks to do all of the research,
and when I was finished I felt much better.
There may or may not be a clear meaning
distinction between they were gone and
they had gone, or between I was sat and I
was sitting. The increasing use of be + sat
is simply evidence that the adjectival use of
the past participle is a productive feature of
the verb system, and applies even to some
common intransitive verbs. This doesn’t
seem particularly controversial.
But attitudes towards language are tenacious
and close-fought: contributors to internet
forums complain that I was sat irritates
them, makes their blood boil, even. They
‘cringe’, ‘flinch’, ‘recoil in horror’, or start
‘screaming and throwing things’. It is, offers
one contributor, ‘a marker of a thicko’,
while someone else says ‘it just sounds so
uneducated!’
These extreme reactions seem out of
proportion to the supposed offence. Does
the choice of sat really matter? I’d say no, it
doesn’t – it seems to me that there is room
here for tolerance and acceptance. Was/
were sat, like fed up of, may well be ‘nonstandard’, but these forms are becoming
more widespread day by day. And they
aren’t posing any threat to how prepositions
construe relationships, or to the grammatical
functioning of the verb be. They are
harmless; we can let them be.
So Are There no Limits?
Yes, of course there are limits. To admit
that grammar is changing is not the same
as saying that anything goes. For example,
there are thousands of hits for ‘would of,
could of, must of etc. + past participle’ in
recent large corpora like ukWaC:
So many egg recipes, who would of thought you
could do so much with so little!
I suppose it could of been a trick to get more
money out of us.
Warm droplets of rain brought me back to my
senses. It must of been well past midnight.
These forms also come from regional dialects
of English, and you could argue that would
of corresponds more closely to what we
actually say than would have, and is a more
exact transcription than would’ve.
But the systematic use of of instead of have
can cause real confusion: it disrupts the
system of English verbs and the way they
work. Have is an auxiliary verb: it combines
with forms of auxiliary be and with modals
like would and could in the construction
of verbal meanings. It makes important
distinctions, and is an integral part of the
clause structure of English.
So there are variations like fed up of that
don’t matter, and mistakes like would of
that do matter. It is important not to confuse
the two kinds. The use of would of and its
ilk simply reveals an ignorance of one of the
real basics of English grammar, and is best
avoided.
important. If both teacher and students have
to puzzle and disagree about what’s right
and wrong, well, maybe there’s a choice,
and even a difference worth noticing. We all
hear and speak a creative, flexible, everchanging language, and this is something
to be celebrated, rather than frowned upon
and marginalised. And no living language
should ever be straitjacketed within the
tired, simplistic ‘Tick one box ONLY’ routines
typical of exam papers the world over.
Gill Francis is a corpus linguist, grammarian, and
language writer. Her current project is Skylight, an
easy-to-use corpus access tool for teachers and
learners. © Gill Francis 2014.
emag web archive
• Matt Carmichael: Prescriptivism in
Language
• Dan Clayton: Prescriptivism
and Descriptivism – Beyond the
Caricatures
• Michael Rosen: Not interested? You
Should Be… emagazine 17, September 2002
• David Marsh: Grammar and Style –
Different Rules for Different Occasions emagazine 63 February 2014
On emagclips
• Dr Graeme Trousdale on Language:
Changes in Grammar
Prescribe or Describe – How to
Decide?
The last paragraphs were my little
contribution to prescriptive zeal: I’d say
don’t use would of. Learn to recognise that
there are different magnitudes of error, and
keep away from the serious game-changing
ones – they won’t help you to make a good
impression on paper.
But there are wide areas where ‘correct’
or ‘standard’ grammar is just not that
Post-Pastoral
The Placing of Georgian Countryside Poetry
and
Pre-Romantic
Dr Katherine Limmer’s overview of eighteenthcentury pastoral poetry – including Gray,
Goldsmith and Collins – suggests that it forms
a bridge between the early eighteenth-century
pastoral traditions and Romanticism, in response
to significant changes in both literature and
society.
inhabited by more realistic ploughmen and
milkmaids. In this, these poets were clearly
following the eighteenth-century rationalist
model of literature in which the poet’s
direct experience was more important than
the imitation of classical models.
Genres are subject to change and
development over time; it is one of the
reasons they are so interesting to study.
Pastoral is no exception and the enormous
changes in content, form and style that can
be traced in pastoral poetry between 17001800 reveal how literature both reflects and
influences changes in culture and society.
The pastoral world of literature at the
start of the eighteenth century was still an
unashamedly artificial place, the ‘Golden
World’ of classical myth. As Alexander Pope
argued, poets,
are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at
this day really are, but as they may be conceived
then to have been.
By the end of the eighteenth century,
however, the Romantic poet William
Wordsworth was writing about the
countryside and its inhabitants with a new
and shocking realism. Between the neoclassical Pope and Romantic Wordsworth
came the poets we shall consider in this
article, William Collins, Thomas Gray and
Oliver Goldsmith. Their poetry forms a
bridge between these two extremes and
a close study of ‘Ode to Evening’, ‘Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard’ and ‘The
Deserted Village’ will illuminate how and
why pastoral poetry went through such
dramatic changes in this century.
Post-Pastoral Landscapes
These poems evoke more recognisably
British landscapes than those found in
previous English pastorals, ones which,
moreover, have been purged of classically
inspired features and inhabitants. The
presence of churches, heaths, hamlets,
and water mills, for example, ensure
that readers recognise contemporary
British settings. This naturalisation
extends to their descriptions of flora and
fauna which includes sedges, hawthorn,
bitterns, and lapwings. Rather than the
traditional shepherds, these landscapes are
The landscape description in these poems
was also influenced by developments
in painting, especially the work of
Claude Lorraine. The view depicted by
Collins in ‘Ode to Evening’, for example,
mimics Lorraine’s visual effects through
verbal description. The ordering of these
landscape details moves from foreground
to background, and they become gradually
dimmer and less distinct, just as in the new
landscape painting. The poet
Views Wilds and swelling Floods,
And Hamlets brown, and dim-discovered Spires
This new focus on more detailed and
realistic landscape description can also
be traced back to the influence of the
philosopher John Locke’s interest in the
importance of sight and the association
of ideas. This is evident in the movement
common to all the poems in which
particularised description creates an
association with a mood which then leads to
the poet’s reflections. So, in ‘Elegy Written
in a Country Churchyard’, the scene is
described in the opening four stanzas with
telling details
spiritual and moral values, as it led to the
ability to sympathise with others’ sufferings,
especially the less fortunate.
The influence of sensibility is clear in ‘Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard’ where
Gray evokes sympathy both for the rustic
dead, whose ‘frail memorials… Implore the
passing tribute of a sigh’ and for himself
who, ‘gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear.’
Goldsmith similarly ensures we feel the
plight of the one remaining inhabitant of
the deserted village, through depicting her
emotions, as much as her miserable living
conditions:
Forced, in age …
To pick her wintry faggot from the thorn,
To seek her nightly shed and weep till morn.
Although this unashamed appeal to
emotion may strike modern readers as
sentimental, it means these poems included
a stronger sense of social criticism than
previous pastorals. Gray is aware of how
poverty and a lack of education limit the
opportunities of the rural poor, ‘Chill
penury repressed their noble rage,’ and
Goldsmith explicitly criticises the greed that
led to the enclosure of common land,
The man of wealth and pride,
takes up a space that many poor supplied.
Pre-Romantic Poetry
Other developments in Georgian
countryside poetry are better understood
using the term ‘pre-Romantic’. These
This in turns creates a mood of ‘solemn
include the increasingly solitary and
stillness’ which leads on to Gray’s reflections
often alienated figure of the poet, the
on death and memory.
more sublime settings, and the centrality
of nature as a powerful moral force.
Sensibility
Although a mood of melancholy, brought
on by disappointed love, was traditional in
Focusing in this way on mood and its
pastoral poetry, as was a mournful tone in
consequent reflections leads to a much
pastoral elegies, the strength of personal
stronger emphasis on personal emotion
alienation and sense of isolation conveyed
than was evident in earlier pastorals. This
by the poet-speakers in these poems
can be linked to another major cultural
development in the later eighteenth century suggests a more profound change in poetic
mode.
sometimes called ‘the cult of sensibility’.
‘Sensibility’ referred to a particular kind of
Goldsmith’s subjective self is given voice in
acute and well-developed consciousness,
‘The Deserted Village’, for example, offering
which was signalled through bodily signs
a personal story that isn’t at once relevant
such as blushing, weeping, and sighing.
Sensibility in a person became invested with to the subject of the poem:
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight
In all my wanderings round this world of care
In all my griefs – and God has given my share.
The use of the hyphen suggests the poet’s
own voice breaking into the poem at this
point, emphasising the sincerity of the
admission. This autobiographical strain is
returned to in the poem’s final lines where
Goldsmith addresses ‘Poetry’,
Thou source of all my bliss, and all my woe,
That found’st me poor at first, and keeps’t me so.
The solitary nature of the poet’s existence is
also a key feature of his subjectivity, ‘here as
I take my solitary rounds.’ Gray’s subjective
stance is similarly isolated and alienated; the
poet speaker in his poem is described as,
drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,
Or craz’d with care, or cross’d in hopeless love.
Although it became the dominant mode
of address in Romantic poetry, these poets’
willingness to insert themselves into their
poems with the repeated use of ‘I’ was a
major innovation in the eighteenth century.
Even in the less overtly mournful ‘Ode
to Evening’ the poet needs to be solitary
in order to muse on evening more fully.
This isolation not only allows for a more
subjective voice to emerge, it is also linked
to another key feature of pre-Romanticism
as the figure of the lonely and alienated
poet allows for the development of sublime
moods and effects.
The Sublime
A taste for the sublime was evident
across British culture in the second half
of the eighteenth century and it led to a
preference for more extreme landscapes
than had previously featured in pastorals.
This is particularly evident in Collins’s ‘Ode
to Evening’ where the poet follows evening
to an almost Gothic scene, consisting of a
‘lone Heath’ with a ‘time-hallow’d Pile’, and
‘up-land Fallows grey.’ He also describes
a view consisting of ‘Mountains’, ‘Wilds’
and ‘swelling Floods’ all more likely to
inspire awe and terror than the farmscapes
and managed nature of typical pastoral.
Although Gray’s and Goldsmith’s more
typically pastoral settings initially lack these
extremes, they are nevertheless supplied
by the imagery of deserts and oceans both
poets resort to. Other sublime motifs can
be traced, in particular a preference for
obscurity, and silence. The very choice of
evening as the setting for both Collins’s and
Gray’s poems reflects a sublime preference
for darkness and silence, although ironically
this silence is signalled by the audibility of
beetles and owls.
The Value of Nature
The value placed on nature in these
poems is probably the most convincing
evidence for their status as precursors of the
Romantics. For Collins the ‘gentle influence’
of nature, in the form of evening, is
responsible for all the good things in his life,
‘Fancy, Friendship, Science, and rose-lipp’d
Health’. He also adopts the role of evening’s
devotee calling himself a pilgrim and her a
votress; in this he anticipates the Romantic
belief in the benign influence of nature,
and its almost divine ability to teach and
inspire. Similarly for Goldsmith, the rural
virtues include poetry, which is somehow
indistinguishable from a life lived close to
nature. As the century progressed, and cities
grew, these poets feared society was losing
contact with the true sources of feeling and
poetry – nature.
From Post-Pastoral to PreRomantic
These poets occupy a middle ground
between the classical certainties of the
Augustan period and the fully blown
radicalism of the Romantic Movement.
The changes that they experienced,
especially the enclosure of common land
and migration to the cities, changed their
attitude to and relationship with the
countryside, and their development of
pastoral conventions reflects this. They do
not give the rural poor the same central
role as Wordsworth, however, nor does
their language offer a dramatic break with
the poetic diction of their century. Collins’s
profusion of classical references, Goldsmith’s
balanced and ironic rhyming couplets and
Gray’s personified abstractions all fail to
speak the ‘real language of men’ which
Wordsworth sought to employ, nevertheless
their emphasis on feeling, their appeal to
personal experience and their recourse
to nature as a source of consolation and
inspiration justifies their placing as PreRomantic.
Dr Katherine Limmer is English Literature Course
Manager at Yeovil College.
emag web archive
• Dr Carol Atherton: An Introduction to
the Pastoral
• The Pastoral – Concept Cards and
Critical Comment
emagplus 63, February 2014
• Graham Elsdon: Larkin and the
Pastoral On emagclips
• Professor Terry Gifford: Aspects of the
Pastoral
Howards End ‘Who will
inherit
England?’
This article by Harriet Hinze sees Howards End
as an expression of Forster’s environmentalism,
characterised by the tension between the spiritual
values of the countryside and the encroaching city.
The beginning of Howards End feels
distinctly recognisable; opening in
the epistolary form we feel a sense of
familiarity. We expect it to evolve in country
houses and London salons where young
ladies look for husbands. However, what
unfolds is not simply a story of two sisters
and their romantic entanglements, but a
much broader political and philosophical
speculation on the question of ‘who will
inherit England’? In fact, David Lodge
would argue that Howards End is
a pastoral myth, which associates all that is most
valuable in human life with the country and all
that is most threatening and corrupting with the
city, and maintains that what looks like material
progress is actually a process of spiritual decline.
The tension between the ancient spiritual
values of the countryside and the
encroaching city forms the backbone of the
novel.
‘It isn’t going to be what we
expected’
The opening letter in Howards End seems a
perfect example of a well-trodden literary
trope, designed to create a strong sense of
realism. The tone of the letter is intensely
personal and exuberant. Written in the
sort of shorthand we save for people we
know very well, our interest is immediately
piqued by the gossipy opening sentence of
the letter as Helen tells ‘Dearest Meg’ that
‘It isn’t going to be what we expected’.
However, the opening sentence of the
novel is in fact, ‘One may as well begin
with Helen’s letter to her sister’, a much
more ambiguous line that suggests worldweariness, as if the reader expects a certain
kind of story, one that Forster is not
prepared to give us.
England’s Green and Pleasant
Land
Helen’s letter gives us great insight into
one of Forster’s preoccupations within
the novel – the English countryside. The
Schlegel sisters seem particularly sensitive
to its beauty, their German roots perhaps a
device to emphasise their uniquely unbiased
perspective, and the romance of the house
and grounds is extraordinarily idyllic.
Contrary to her expectation of ostentation,
Helen reports that the house is in fact,
‘old and little and altogether delightful’.
Tellingly, this is almost all we hear about the
house and the description lingers longer on
the beautiful garden. The house is also set
in discreet privacy, the farm being ‘the only
house near us’. This is later contrasted with
the appalling overcrowding of London.
The sense of the house being rooted very
firmly in the past is expressed symbolically
by the many trees that surround the
property, such as ‘elms, oaks, pear trees,
apple trees’, and the ‘very big wych-elm’, a
tree that has been allowed to grow to such
massive totemic proportions because it has
been undisturbed by the so called ‘progress’
of industrialisation. Ruth Wilcox explains
to Margaret that the tree also has folkloric
power to cure toothache because of the pig’s
teeth embedded in its bark.
However, within the honesty of Helen’s
letter, Forster appears to hint that he knows
this vision of England is under threat. Helen
admits that, ‘The dog-roses are too sweet’
and there is a self-consciousness in the
picture-perfect framing of the view through
the hedge of roses to the ‘ducks’ and ‘cow’
beyond. As if to acknowledge the tableaux,
the thin line between theatre and reality
is made explicit when Helen says she is no
longer able to distinguish between the two
as her view ‘really does seem not life but a
play’. To avoid sentimentality, Forster bring
us abruptly back to reality by prosaically
ringing the breakfast gong and descending
into very short sentences as Helen hurries
to finish her letter. This has a momentary
demystifying effect, but Howards End is
nevertheless now etched in our minds as a
bucolic idyll.
Rural Customs and Wisdom
Again, according to David Lodge, Forster
deplored the environmental damage caused by
‘progress’…regret[ing] the loss of traditional rural
customs, occupations and amenities caused by
spreading urbanisation and suburbanisation.
Mrs Avery and the woodcutter are
emblematic of traditional rural characters;
they possess an innate wisdom and natural
insight and their knowledge of rural
customs and folklore feels sacred. A good
example of this is when the woodcutter,
stuck in a tree he is pollarding when the
funeral cortege arrives at the churchyard,
witnesses Ruth Wilcox’s funeral. Upon
recounting it to his mother, he recalls
he ‘had almost slipped out of the tree,
he was so upset’. This scene is carefully
choreographed by Forster for theatrical
impact (he even alludes to Hamlet by
mentioning Ophelia and having a pair of
disapproving gravediggers) and the message
is clear: the woodcutter has shown deeper
emotion and sensitivity than the Wilcox
family. This is emphasised by immediately
juxtaposing this scene with the crass Wilcox
cover-up when they realise that Ruth
Wilcox has bequeathed Howards End to
Margaret. The woodcutter, in tune with the
natural world, ‘poised above the silence and
swaying rhythmically’, pays Ruth Wilcox
the greater tribute.
The Motor Car and Hay Fever
In contrast, the Wilcoxes seem to attach
no emotional value to either their homes,
(none of which they seem able to settle
into), or to the countryside, which they race
through in their motor cars causing damage
and destruction wherever they go. Charles’
astonishing arrogance is captured neatly by
Forster when he roars through the village of
Hilton creating a ‘cloud of dust’ behind him,
commenting only that the villagers ought to
‘learn wisdom and tar the roads’. To further
emphasise how out of tune with the natural
world Charles is, while at Oniton, Margaret
wryly observes Charles fussing over the
equipment for bathing in the early morning.
So preoccupied is he with the correct
paraphernalia, he misses the moment
entirely. In fact the Wilcoxes are actually
allergic to the countryside, plagued by hay
fever whenever they venture outside, all
except Ruth Wilcox, custodian of Howards
End, who strolls through her garden at first
light with a handful of hay.
Wickham Place and Leonard’s
Flat
In London, Wickham Place, the Schlegel
family home, is a ‘fairly quiet’ refuge away
from the hustle and bustle of London.
Forster uses the metaphor of ‘an estuary’
only ‘eight or nine meadows’ away from the
‘red rust’ of new brick houses.
All’s Well that Ends Well?
or ‘backwater’ to show that Wickham Place
is more sedate than the rest of London,
but this relative peace is under threat from
London’s unstoppable progress, whose
‘waves without were still beating’. It seems
only a matter of time before the walls
are breached, and we soon find out that
Wickham Place has been earmarked for
demolition, so that it can be turned into
soulless flats, ‘with cavernous entrance
halls, full of concierges and palms.’ These
flats are not homes, but merely places
where
humanity pile[s] itself higher and higher on the
precious soil of London.
However, Forster’s real pessimism is
reserved for Leonard’s flat on Camelia Road.
Instead of the open space of Howards End
and the relative quiet of Wickham Place, as
Leonard descends into the flat he
glance[s] suspiciously to right and left, like a
rabbit that is going to bolt into its hole.
There is a clear irony that Leonard is made
to appear paranoid and hunted like a rabbit
in such an urban setting. Inside Camelia
Road, Leonard’s pathetic attempts to make
the flat homely are exposed through
Forster’s bleak description and the flat,
‘constructed with extreme cheapness’, feels
unfit for human habitation. Leonard and
Jacky are trapped and dehumanised by the
experience of living in London – they have
lodgings but this is not a home. Poignantly,
when Leonard is driven into the ‘abyss’
after so tragically losing his position as a
clerk, Forster reminds us that Leonard’s
family were once farm labourers, with a
proud and purposeful connection to the
land.
Howards End as a Safe Haven
At this point Forster’s personal despair at
the change in London and his fear for the
future seems apparent. The unstoppable
march of demolition and rebuilding,
imagined in almost apocalyptic terms
where,
all the flats in either road might be pulled down,
and new buildings, of a vastness at present
unimaginable, might arise where they had fallen
Even if we realise early on that Howards
End is not going to be what we expected,
its conclusion still manages to take us by
surprise with its lack of a conventional
happy ending. Leonard, our potential hero,
does die by the sword, but it is an ignoble
and frankly absurd death. We are denied
the happy ending of a wedding between
Helen and Leonard and instead we are
asked to accept a very unconventional
‘family’ and an illegitimate heir for Howards
End. In addition, we cannot understand
why our heroine, Margaret, has settled
for someone who disappoints us so much.
The answer may be because what seems
most important to Forster is that Howards
End, a metaphor for England itself, is safely
restored to a worthy custodian. All seems
well with the world: Margaret presides over
Howards End, there is an heir apparent, the
‘field’s cut’, and it is ‘such a crop of hay as
never!’, but we cannot rest easy as we recall
the ‘red rust’ of progress that Helen can
now ‘see [...] from the Purbeck downs.’
Harriet Hinze teaches English at The Abbey School,
Reading.
emag web archive
• Shifrah E. Wolfish: Howards End
emagplus 36, April 2007
• Professor Judy Simons: ‘Only
Connect’ – Howards End
makes London life seem thoroughly
depressing and demoralising. In contrast,
Howards End is a safe haven, the very
antithesis of the city: beautiful, tranquil
and in harmony with nature. At the end of
the novel, Helen admits to Margaret that
she ‘hope[s]’ their move to Howards End
‘will be permanent’, her very statement,
of course, suggestive of underlying doubt.
There lingers a distinct fear that London,
and the progress of suburbia, threatens over
the brow; Helen observes that they are now
Novice
Writers
Cognitive and
Practical Processes
Understanding the
cognitive processes
involved in writing
might give us a greater
understanding of how
children write, argues
Ben Eve.
Let’s consider the act of writing this article.
As I write this piece, I have to engage in a
range of processes. Before putting words on
paper, I have to carefully research the topic
and develop my arguments about what I
want to say. Then when I type, I have to hit
the right keys on the keyboard, check the
right letter comes up and then decide what
word should come next. I have to think
hard about the grammar and punctuation.
Not only that, but I am also required to look
back and revise my work to make sure that
the whole text makes sense. I also have to
be very aware of what the overall ‘goal’ of
the text should be – in this case to argue
my case about an area of child literacy
acquisition.
These processes can be categorised
hierarchically from low-order skills such
as spelling and motor skills to high-order
skills such as planning, generating text and
reviewing. (Be aware, though, that the
relatively low order skills are hard enough
to master!)
For an experienced writer, each of these
processes will take up memory in the brain
that the writer has to regulate – not an easy
task by any means. The skills required to
‘execute’ these processes take time to form.
Therefore, young writers or novice writers
might not be able to carry out all of these
processes at once without a considerable
effort.
How do Novice Writers Tend to
Write?
When young children start to write, their
developing cognitive abilities allow them
to write only in certain restricted forms.
For example, novice writers will often
be linear writers. They tend to write in a
non-reflective form of writing, thinking
of a topic and writing all they can on the
subject. This process is called knowledgetelling and it is characterised by a limited
cohesion that exists at a sentence to
sentence level. There is very little overall
control in the whole discourse, except in
very obvious surface forms (such as a letter
format and traditional story openings/
closings). The writing will feature many of
the low order skills such as word formation
but less of the high order skills such as
planning and reviewing work. Early writers
tend not to set ‘goals’ and ‘sub-goals’ that
experienced writers might – but tend to
write on regardless.
An additional limitation of young writers
is that they lack the cognition to predict or
imagine how an intended reader might read
a text. This is a very high order skill and one
that might be acquired later on.
The Difficulty of Writing in the
Early Stages
Linda Flower and John Hayes proposed a
theory in The Dynamics of Composing: Making
Plans and Juggling Constraints that coherent
writing is based on ‘constraints’. You
cannot simply write what you want. You
have to follow rules and conventions. They
proposed that the three constraints were
knowledge, sentence formation and
goals. Firstly, the knowledge or ideas have
to be formed in your mind and translated
into a linear form (text-generation). If they
are not organised then the reader won’t be
able to follow the writing. Secondly, the
ideas have to be transformed into strings of
sentences where a writer must follow the
syntactical rules needed to convey their
ideas. Thirdly, the actual task in hand, be it
a story of a day at the zoo or an academic
essay to impress your teacher, has some
sort of success criteria. Each one of these
constraints imposes considerable demands
on the writer.
Flower and Hayes’ theory is about the
generation and production of ideas on
paper. Other theorists look at the actual
difficulties involved in the transcription
(physical writing) process.
Taffy Raphael in ‘Students meta-cognitive
knowledge about writing’ suggested that
in order to write, a student must draw
upon three ‘knowledges’ – declarative,
procedural and conditional. For example,
a novice writer might sometimes miss out
punctuation at the end of a sentence. It
would seem that the writer might know
what to do (declarative knowledge – knows
the rule about punctuation), knows how to
do it (procedural knowledge – knows how
to write the required punctuation mark)
but has not yet fully developed conditional
knowledge which guides a writer when to
use the punctuation (or other feature).
For the writer to spot the conditions when
something must be carried out seems
more difficult to acquire than the other
knowledges.
How do Children Begin to
Master these Skills?
first practised. Once they are mastered and
become routine, it takes up less memory
and space is freed up for other processes.
In the same way, young writers might find
that one process (such as recalling a letter
shape, the spelling of a frequent word or
when to use a full stop) might occupy the
majority of the memory available. This
leaves less room for anything else. The
writer becomes concerned only with the
immediate problem that they are facing
and are less able to juggle all the processes
they need. Then, a trade-off occurs and one
process is abandoned so that another can be
carried out.
However, as the young writer’s cognitive
ability develops, more and more skills can
become automatised which allows more
Young writers acquire skills through practice processes to run at once to produce more
and then they acquire automaticity. This
complex writing. In some ways, young
is when a process has become so rehearsed
writers carry out processes sequentially,
that it takes up very little room in the
whereas experienced writers can execute
working memory (the area where we hold
them simultaneously.
our ideas when undertaking a task). You
might like to consider a task that you have
Knowledge of Genre
automatised. Tying shoelaces or changing
Another process that has a major demand
gear when driving a car takes up huge
on the working memory is writing to a
amounts of your working memory when
particular form or genre. Once a writer
has experienced many types of texts and
is fully conversant with the conventions
of a certain text, he or she is free to
concentrate on other issues. For a novice
writer who does not know the conventions
of a text, not knowing how to start a text
with an appropriate sentence can be quite
a challenge. Subsequent decisions about
shaping and planning a whole text can be
quite overwhelming and novice writers
might therefore resort to simple knowledgetelling with little attention to the required
discourse features that distinguish one form
of text from another.
involved! When you next study an example
of children’s writing, it’s well worth bearing
in mind just how many processes have been
involved and how hard the child has had to
work to fulfil all of them.
Ben Eve teaches English at St Mary Redcliffe and
Temple Sixth Form Centre, Bristol.
emagplus
Child Language Acquisition: Writing – a
Collection of Resources
emag web archive
Protocols
Researchers have studied what writers of
all levels of experience think about as they
write. Writers are asked to think aloud
as they write and their comments are
recorded.
The comments are called protocols, which
are the rules and guidelines that a writer
is considering when producing a text.
For example, when writing an essay, you
might think hard about whether a choice of
word is appropriate, or whether you have
spent too much time on one subject at the
expense of another. From an expert writer,
the range of topics covered in a think-aloud
protocol is varied and highly evaluative.
However, the protocols for a novice writer
are quite different. The recorded protocol is
actually almost identical to the words that
are eventually written on the page. This
shows that at an early age the reflection and
decision making is not evident, suggesting
that the decisions taken in novice writing
are more impulsive than planned. It also
suggests that the novice writer’s working
memory is unable to juggle as wide a range
of thoughts as a more mature writer.
Conclusion
Comparing writing to juggling is an apt
and useful metaphor. The act of writing
involves juggling an awe-inspiring range
of processes. Even expert writers can be
overwhelmed by the process. The novice
writer, however, really seems to have it
hard. Even basic writing tasks require the
co-ordination of motor skills, cognition and
memory, and novice writers have the added
pressure of learning to automatise each set
of skills.
Yet young writers often love to write,
finding the creative aspect a fulfilling
part of school or home life. It seems
impossible – and wonderful – that it could
be so enjoyable with so much hard work
• Alison Ross: Technonanny – CLA in
Older Children
• Dr Marcello Giovanelli: ‘It’s Sleep
Time’ – Children’s Routines and the
Language of Bedtime emagazine 62, December 2013
• Dan Clayton: CLA – an Introduction
to the Main Theories
• Dan Clayton: CLA – Early Language
Development over 18 Months
• Dan Clayton: Child Language
Acquisition – Sentence Structure and
Pragmatics
• Alison Ross: Now Mathilda is 7! – CLA
With thanks to the following families for kindly
providing photos, pictures and writing to illustrate this
article: Hehir, Oliver-Clay, Rimington-McCallum and
Scambler (Sussex and Cambridge branches!).
Mischief and
Melancholic
Hares
Malcontents in
Early Modern
Drama
Dr Liam McNamara
introduces the character
of the malcontent in
early modern drama,
drawing on the social
context of the period to
further his analysis.
An Introduction to the
Malcontent
Malcontents are central to many early
modern plays, both tragedies and comedies.
Figures such as Jaques in As You Like
It, or Malvolio, in Twelfth Night, could
be regarded as malcontents, as could
characters from more uniformly dark plays
such as The White Devil or The Changeling.
So what exactly is a malcontent and what
role do they play in such diverse dramas as
these? Malcontent literally means ‘badly
contented’, in other words, unhappy.
According to the writer Julia Lacey Brooke,
a malcontent is a:
cynical commentator and judge of a society to
which he patently does not belong, as well as,
in some cases […] a rogue disruptor, one who
is not only prepared to question but to damage
anything and everything that comes within his
compass.
Characters like Jaques are laughed at for
their miserable attitude to the world and
for their melancholy. His speeches are full
of misery, as he himself recognises. He says,
I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel
sucks eggs
His self-analysis in Act 4 offers an
excellent overview of the different kinds
of melancholy that are possible but
interestingly ends with the thought that
Curtis explains that in the final instance
it was because ‘they prepared too many
men for too few places’. This lack of
opportunity resulted in discontent and
bitterness. According to Curtis, from 1603
to 1640 the universities had enrolled a little
under 25,000 students, with frustrated
intellectuals making up 15 to 20 per cent of
this amount; perhaps not a great number of
people, yet enough to spark popular fears
about their discontented stance towards
society at large.
Black Bile and Melancholic
Hares
it is something peculiar to the individual,
a melancholy disposition, that we would
normally associate with the malcontent as a
character-type.
I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which
is emulation; nor the musician’s, which is
fantastical; nor the courtier’s, which is proud;
nor the soldier’s, which is ambitious; nor the
lawyer’s, which is politic; nor the lady’s, which
is nice; nor the lover’s, which is all these; but it
is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of
many simples, extracted from many objects, and,
indeed, the sundry contemplation of my travels;
in which my often rumination wraps me in a most
humorous sadness.
David Gunby, in his introduction to John
Webster’s plays, suggests that malcontents
are the ‘mouthpieces’ for the satirical
concerns of the dramatists:
The malcontent is a man divided within himself.
On the one hand he is a blunt moralist, ruthlessly
exposing the vices and follies of mankind. On the
other he participates in the viciousness and selfseeking of the world he rails against.
‘Learning without Living’
Why were early modern dramatists so
interested in the idea of malcontents,
choosing them as key characters in their
plays? The writer Mark H. Curtis links the
dramatic malcontent to historical change,
namely that many aspiring young men were
involved in a kind of misery associated with
‘relative deprivation’ i.e. they were given
career and educational opportunities that
they were unable to realise. Curtis quotes
Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, who wrote in
1611 that:
I think that we have more need of better livings
for learned men than of more learned men for
these livings, for learning without living doth but
breed traitors.
In an interesting parallel to our own
era, many young people were given
the opportunity to go to university, yet
when they graduated their expectations
were dashed as a desirable job did not
materialise; people were effectively ‘trained
up’ for a role that did not appear, and
therefore cynicism was the end result. The
seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas
Hobbes placed the blame firmly on the
universities of Oxford and Cambridge,
suggesting that they were responsible
for turning out seditious young people
consisting of ‘ambitious ministers and
ambitious gentlemen’. This is in part
due to the existence of Puritans at these
universities, and studying that led to the
exploration of other belief systems and
less oppressive forms of government, but
In John Webster’s play The White Devil
the text strongly suggests that to be a
malcontent is to be a social radical. The
historical phenomenon that produced Sir
Francis Bacon’s warning to James I that
through an overabundance of grammar
schools it had led to ‘there being more
scholars bred than the State can prefer
or employ’ is explored in the play. These
disgruntled educated young people began to
see their own status as almost fashionable, a
cynical identity that then fuelled widespread
and disproportionate fears about their
existence; Lacey Brooke explains that to be
the malcontent was to be part of
to undermine their symbolic power. In Act
3 Scene 3 the two malcontents, Flamineo
and Lodovico meet and begin to engage
in verbal sparring (i.e. ‘banter’) with each
other about their malcontented status, a
strange event that seems almost irrelevant
to the rest of the play.
a cult of the young, embodying disaffected
decadent youth, perceived by the majority as
undesirable misfits.
Webster’s Flamineo – and indeed,
Shakespeare’s Hamlet – would fit this
definition. Many establishment figures of
the early modern period saw this ‘youth
cult’ as a kind of posture, a good example
being the writer Thomas Nashe’s remark
that the
Malcontent […] eates not a good meales meat
in a week […] take(s) vppe […] melancholy in
his gate […] and talke(s) as though our common
welth were but a mockery of gouernment.
In other words, Nashe argues that this
youth cult involves the outward projection
of a kind of fake and pretentious identity
that is parasitic upon society at large. This
general alarm about the cynical lack of
substance in ‘angry young men’ is further
explored by the writer Thomas Lodge, who
stated that the ‘malcontent […] put(s) on
(a) habite’; the belief is the malcontent
offers an empty kind of challenge to society
that consists primarily of an affected attitude
lacking in any genuine critical perspective.
In The White Devil Webster challenges this
popular perception of the malcontent and,
in a curious, almost metatheatrical scene,
criticises the crude stereotyping that seeks
The characters are depicted as ironically
commenting on society’s understanding
of the malcontent, primarily through
the ancient medical thinking that there
was a link between the state of being
melancholy, an excess of ‘black bile’,
and malcontentedness. Briefly, medical
knowledge in the early modern period was
informed by the belief that in the body four
essential ‘humours’ (bodily fluids, black bile
being one of them) have to exist in balance,
with an alteration in this equilibrium
resulting in illness or a specific personality
trait. (For more detailed accounts of this
idea see ‘In Praise of Melancholy’ by
Malcolm Hebron and ‘Bodies on the Early
Modern Stage’ by Jenny Stevens in earlier
issues of emagazine and now available on the
website). This explains Flamineo’s reference
to Lodovico and himself sleeping all day like
a ‘melancholic hare’, supposedly a creature
much given to melancholy, and his call to
Lodovico that instead of a mirror he should
use ‘a saucer of a witch’s congealed blood’,
as witches suffered from melancholy due
to their cold blood, a quality believed to
be shared with hares. This last example is
particularly interesting due to its links with
witchcraft and evil.
Consider, for example, Lady Macbeth’s
call to the forces of darkness that they
‘make thick my blood’, which according
to Lacey Brooke is a physical characteristic
of melancholic blood. Clearly, in the early
modern period there was a tendency by
some people to link evil, malcontentedness,
and the ‘real world’ malcontent. The end
result of this attitude is a ‘moral panic’
about the potential threat of malcontents,
as a destabilising force that could challenge
society’s values. Through the confrontation
between Flamineo and Lodovico, Webster
seeks to challenge the misrepresentation
of oppositional elements of society by
depicting the two characters ridiculing
the popular perception of the malcontent.
Additionally, it allows Webster to indicate
the attributes of a genuine malcontent,
as once Lodovico is pardoned, Flamineo’s
integrity (‘Why do you laugh? There was
no such condition in our covenant’) is
contrasted to Lodovico’s disloyalty (‘Your
sister is a damnable whore…Look you; I
spake that laughing’). This event helps the
The Sexual Malcontent
A more unconventional malcontent
can be found in Thomas Middleton and
William Rowley’s The Changeling. Deflores
is a kind of character who explores the
paradoxical coexistence of opportunity and
discontent that leads to the formation of the
malcontent, though the authors carefully
shift the focus from occupation to sexuality.
Despite the fact that he was born noble
(’I tumbled into th’ world a gentleman’),
due to his ugliness Deflores is unable to
participate fully in the sexual marketplace
of his era, something he resents; his
lack of erotic opportunity is thus doubly
frustrating to him. However, Deflores is
depicted as incapable of overcoming his
social conditioning as he continues to invest
emotionally in this sexual system:
I’ll despair the less
Because there’s daily precedents of bad faces
Beloved beyond all reason: these foul chops
May come into favour one day ‘mongst his fellows.
Deflores could be argued to be a dramatic
caricature of the ‘real world’ malcontent;
through the combination of his ‘hard
fate’ and unpleasant physical appearance,
this character is shown as embittered and
cynical, a disruptive element that lacks
the sexual and financial means that he
feels his status should bestow upon him.
Arguably, in this play the critical and
historical foundations of the malcontent
recede before a more narrow definition
stemming from a ‘moral panic’ about what
Curtis calls ‘alienated intellectuals’; Deflores
is depicted as an ‘angry young man’ that
is a threat to the dominant social order,
less through a critical understanding of the
unfairness of his situation than through
his unreasonable demands of it. Rather
than showing the dangers of ‘learning
without living’, Middleton and Rowley
depict the malcontent as ‘desiring without
attractiveness’.
astute move. Through both its dramatic
exploration and historical stereotyping, the
malcontent on the early modern stage helps
us to understand the malcontent in future
eras, an identity that James R. Keller calls
the ‘masterless man’, who is ‘motivated by
need and not duty’.
Dr Liam McNamara teaches English at Wakefield
Girls’ High School.
Bibliography
Lacey Brooke, J., The Stoic, the Weal & the
Malcontent
Thornton Burnett, M., ‘Staging the
Malcontent in Early Modern England’ in
A Companion to Renaissance Drama (edited
by Arthur F. Kinney)
From the Malcontent to the
‘Punk’
Curtis, M.H., ‘The Alienated Intellectuals
of Early Stuart England’ in Crisis in Europe
1560-1660 (edited by Trevor Aston)
In a sense the malcontent never really went
away, despite its disappearance from the
English stage. Lacey Brooke draws a link to
twentieth-century developments such as the
‘Punk’ movement, which also had what she
calls ‘an ambiguously glamorous and vicious
reputation’ that appealed to some and
repelled others. According to Jackie Moore,
in the 1979 production of The White Devil by
The Acting Company, New York, Flamineo
was ‘dressed like a punk rocker sporting a
dog collar and spiked hair’. Depicting the
character in this manner was perhaps an
Lisa Hopkins and Matthew Steggle,
Renaissance Literature and Culture
Keller, J.R. Princes, Soldiers and Rogues: The
Political Malcontent of Renaissance Drama
emag web archive
• Dr Sean McEvoy: Sex and Madness in
The Changeling
• Lucy Webster: Bosola – Villain, Victim
or Reflection of his Age?
• Dr Sean McEvoy: Tragedy and Farce
in The Changeling
• Malcolm Hebron: In Praise of
Melancholy: Literature and Emotion
• Jenny Stevens: Bodies on the Early
Modern Stage
In spring 2015 English Touring Theatre, who provided
images for this article, are touring the RSC’s
acclaimed production of Middleton’s A Mad World
My Masters. For more details please visit www.ett.
org.uk. Education workshops are also available – for
more details please contact Kwaku Mills-Bampoe on
[email protected]
Images: Thanks to Long Beach Playhouse and the English Touring Theatre (Stephen Vaughan).
audience to distinguish the true political
malcontent from more stereotypical
depictions of this identity.
The Progress of a
Poem
Travelling with Billy Collins
Ruth Ferguson’s reading of two poems by Billy Collins shows how apt Collins’s
travel metaphor is to describe his whole approach to structuring a poem.
‘I think of poetry as a form of travel
writing,’ says Billy Collins.
We start out with some kind of orientation. One
way to mark the progress of the poem is that we
leave these known coordinates and move off into
some terra incognita, a place that is attracting our
desire to get disoriented, to get lost.
The desire to take the reader on a journey
of exploration can be clearly seen in the
structure of Collins’s poems. By introducing
us to a familiar world at the start of a poem
and then gradually leading us away from
what we know, Collins challenges us to
open ourselves up to new ideas and fresh
perspectives on life.
‘Books’ – Easily Imagined
Worlds
In ‘Books’, the first line takes us straight
into a world which we can easily imagine –
a ‘dark evacuated campus’. We can visualise
the ‘unlit, alphabetical’ shelves in the
deserted library. Immediately, however, we
realise that in this poem books are going
to be more than just objects on shelves
or in our hands. The verb ‘hear’ in the
clause ‘I can hear the library’ is unexpected
– libraries are usually silent places,
particularly at night. The personification
of the books as they hum and murmur
and together form a ‘chord’ is fanciful and
humorous, yet at the same time thoughtprovoking, suggesting that we consider
books not as inanimate objects, but as
having a life and power of their own.
Each stanza begins by sketching in an
easily recognisable scene, the ‘known
coordinates’ of Collins’s comment. In stanza
two he describes ‘a figure in the act of
reading/shoes on a desk’. In stanza three
he remembers ‘the voice of my mother
reading’. These are simple images, but there
is more in this comfortable, known place
than we might expect. The noun ‘figure’ in
the second stanza is deliberately vague – the
reader is significant only for the purpose
of ‘orientation’. More important are the
language and imagery that follow, which
continue to develop Collins’s ideas from
the previous stanza. The metaphor of the
figure’s head being ‘tilted into the wind of
a book’ conveys the force and impact of
the written word on a reader. He is ‘a man
in two worlds’, the imaginary world in his
book as real to him as the world around
him.
The final simile of the stanza compares
reading to a journey – the figure ‘moves
from paragraph to paragraph’ as if ‘touring
[…] endless, panelled rooms’.
In the third stanza it is not the visual scene
recalled so much as the memory of a sound
– ‘the voice of my mother reading to me’.
Typical children’s books are remembered,
about animals that are on ‘the brink of
speech’. But it is the phrase ‘inside her
voice’, where the preposition ‘inside’
is unexpected, that moves us beyond
the commonplace to something a little
deeper. As the narrator remembers her
voice reading, he also remembers his own
imaginative response, how he was a child
‘in two worlds’.
In the fourth stanza – by which time Collins
has distanced himself from his memories
somewhat and is watching ‘himself’ – a
more sombre note appears. The walls of
bookshelves become ‘walls within walls’.
Enclosure or entrapment is implied. In
the previous stanzas books have provided
imaginative freedom and pleasure, but here
a faintly negative tone is created, suggesting
that books may provide escape from reality.
of images which we recognise from old
photos or clips of old films we have seen.
Although it is not our world of today, it feels
familiar.
A Move into More Complex
Territory
Both language and syntax are used
effectively to create this world. Like the
first stanza, the fourth opens with a simple
declarative, ‘Hats were the law’. There is the
same humorous exaggeration here, but the
effect is the same – this is how life was in
the past and this is how you were expected
to behave. Further simple sentences in the
fourth stanza continue the factual tone of
certainty.
The real move to ‘terra incognita’ begins
in the fifth stanza, however. Suddenly we
become part of Collins’s picture as he sees
‘all of us’ reading. The opening words ‘I see’
sound prophetic, as if Collins is foretelling
the future. We read ‘ourselves away from
ourselves’. Unlike the instant images
created for us in previous stanzas, we have
to stop and think about the meaning of this.
We are no longer in the familiar territory
of the library or our bedroom, but appear
to be part of a metaphor about reading
which we have to follow much more slowly
and carefully if we are to make sense of
what we read. The greater concentration
required is reflected in the word ‘straining’
and the metaphor of us in a circle of light
yet requiring more light suggests we are
struggling to find our way. Words are now
‘a trail of crumbs’ – far more fragile and less
substantial than the words which in stanza
two were strong enough to force a man to
tilt his head to face them. Both ‘crumbs’ and
‘snow’ suggest impermanency.
Demanding Ideas
By the last stanza we appear to have
left reality altogether and entered an
imaginative world reminiscent of the story
of Hansel and Gretel. Life has become
bleaker and harder – evening is ‘shadowing’
the forest, birds ‘consume’ the crumbs,
we have to listen ‘hard’ and the voices are
‘receding’. There is a sense of loss. Perhaps
Collins is thinking of old age and how,
as we grow older, it is harder to respond
freely and imaginatively to what we read.
Certainly the progression of his poem –
from the easily imagined, accessible ideas
of the first stanzas, to the more puzzling,
demanding ideas of the final ones – reflects
that very process.
‘The Death of the Hat’
We see a similar structure in the poem
‘The Death of the Hat’, where we begin
in the solid world of reality. The opening
simple declarative is humorous in its
generalisation, and immediately creates a
picture of the past as a time of order and
stability, when people knew their place and
what was expected of them. Collins refers to
the ‘ashen newsreels’, and presents a series
Collins changes the perspective from time
to time – from the panoramic view of ‘the
avenues of cities’ which ‘are broad rivers
flowing with hats’, and the ballparks which
‘swelled/with thousands of hats’ to the
close-up of the individual wearing a hat
‘while you had a drink’ or putting your hat
on the office hat rack. In stanza nine we
focus specifically on his father, going to and
from work in his coat and hat ‘every day’.
Leaving Known Co-ordinates
In the tenth stanza, however, Collins moves
us abruptly from the cosy, orderly scene of
the past to a somewhat less secure present
with the use of the conjunction ‘But’ and a
change from the past to the present tense.
In spite of apparently re-entering our own,
familiar world, we get a sense of leaving
‘known coordinates’. The light, humorous
tone disappears not only through the use of
the conjunction, which pulls us back briskly
from nostalgic memories, but also through
Collins’s use of the adjective ‘bareheaded’,
with its connotations of vulnerability and
exposure. This is a world in which the
‘winter streets’ and the ‘frozen platforms’
offer no warmth and reassurance. It is only
in the natural world that hats are seen – the
‘cold white hats of snow’ on trees, and the
‘thin fur hats’ of mice. We are uncertain
where we are exactly – the significance of
the mice, for example, is unclear. This is
‘terra incognita’, where we must slow down
and take time to work out our bearings.
Our sense of uncertainty is exactly what
Collins intended. We have travelled from
the familiar to a place which forces us to
think and challenges us to consider life
differently. It becomes clear that although
the poem was ostensibly about hats, the
hat has been a metaphor for something else
entirely, the certainties and accepted codes
of behaviour of the past.
A Puzzling Ending
The ending is both poignant and puzzling.
The ‘hat of earth’ is solid, the previous
generation now dead and buried, and
with them the habits and values of their
time. But what is this ‘hat of wind’? Is he
suggesting that today we live a colder, less
secure existence, where the past, accepted
codes of behaviour have disappeared;
that now we are vulnerable and exposed
in a world which has become somewhat
capricious and unpredictable? This ‘terra
incognita’ contains familiar elements but
is not a place we instantly recognise. We
are challenged to think more deeply, to
explore carefully a landscape we don’t quite
understand.
The structure of Collins’s poems is
always important. Because he creates a
recognisable world in the early stanzas we
set out with him willingly. But in every
poem there is a point at which we realise
that the world which seemed so normal and
solid has become rather strange and less
familiar. He forces us to stop and consider
where we are. And it is at that point, as we
search for meaning and direction amongst
the words and lines, that we realise how far
we have travelled with him and how much
is to be gained from continuing the journey
on our own.
Until recently, Ruth Ferguson was the subject
leader for A Level English at Chelmsford College.
She is now a freelance writer.
emag web archive
• Barbara Bleiman: Avoiding the
Subject – the Poetry of Billy Collins
• Dr Margaret Reynolds: Billy Collins
and Emily Dickinson
• Ray Cluley: Two Poems by Billy
Collins and Ted Hughes
emagplus 65, September 2014
• Ray Cluley: Water-skiing with Billy
Collins – An Introduction to Writing
Poetry
emagazine 65 September 2014
Aestheticism:
A Rough Guide
Rebekah Owens
explores the rise and
reception of a new
movement in the late
nineteenth century that
threatened many values
of Victorian society.
In the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Patience
(1881) the central character of the story is
Reginald Bunthorne. He is described in the
list of Dramatis Personae as a ‘fleshly poet’.
This was a term used to describe someone
in the second half of the nineteenthcentury who was a follower of the Aesthetic
movement. They were called ‘aesthetes’,
and were known to be followers of Beauty,
given to posturing about Art in general and
writing heavily descriptive, sensual poetry.
The word ‘fleshly’ that is used to describe
Bunthorne is an interesting one. The
fact that it appears in a work in which
Bunthorne is a figure of fun, indicates
that it is an expression of ridicule; but this
use of the term is rather playful. In fact,
‘fleshly’ was used by a critic called Robert
Buchanan in 1871 in an article entitled
‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ as a term
of disparagement. It was applied to the
aesthetes, not as light-hearted mockery,
but as a way of discrediting everything they
stood for.
Oscar Wilde
What they stood for were the principles
expressed in the movement called
Aestheticism. The most well-known
proponent of Aestheticism, then and now,
was Oscar Wilde. He certainly epitomised
many of the features of an aesthete enacted
by Bunthorne in Patience. He had earned a
reputation while at Oxford as a practitioner
of Aestheticism by decorating his rooms
with objects of beauty, publishing a
volume of poetry and becoming known for
declaring that he wished he could live up to
by declaring that they were. In Patience,
Bunthorne confides to the audience that
he is an ‘aesthetic sham’. He does not
like wearing the olive-green costume and
imitating the manners of an aesthete.
What he really enjoys is the admiration he
gets when he does. This is reflected in the
spoof Aesthetic poem of his that he recites,
entitled ‘oh hollow, hollow, hollow!’
his exquisite blue china. Such recognition
meant that when the theatrical impresario
Richard D’Oyly Carte decided to take
Patience to America, a real-life Bunthorne
was required to go on a lecture tour of the
States as a way of prefacing the work. It was
Wilde who was chosen for this task.
The Influence of Walter Pater
Wilde did not resemble the effete, pallid
individual that is Bunthorne in the operetta.
Behind the talk of the ‘House Beautiful’ and
‘Decorative Art’ was a physically robust man
– with an equally robust intelligence. In the
early 1870s when Wilde was at Magdalen
College, he was drawn to the work of
Walter Pater. Pater provided the intellectual
foundations of Aestheticism in a work
called Studies in the History of the Renaissance,
published in 1873. In a famous essay on the
painting of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da
Vinci, Pater outlined a new way of looking
at art. For other contemporary art critics,
such as John Ruskin, the accepted function
of a work of art was to convey a message,
usually a moral instruction. Art appreciation
was in the reflection and discussion of those
messages. Pater went against this. For him,
the correct response to any work of art
was to disregard any hidden messages, any
moral instruction, or social commentary.
You simply had to appreciate it for what it
was.
Art for Art’s Sake
This proposal was the foundation of
Aestheticism. It was manifested in a phrase
used by the French poet Théophile Gautier
which became the rallying cry for the
movement – ‘Art for art’s sake’. This meant
that art, in all its forms – painting, poetry,
sculpture – should not be beholden to any
moral or social agenda.
This was a radical change from what had
gone before. In the early nineteenthcentury the Romantics had considered
that art, especially literature, should have
a purpose. It could be a medium for the
improvement of humanity. A poet was seen
as a ‘legislator’, someone whose writing
could lead to such a radical rethinking of
accepted moral and social mores that reform
would follow. This belief was overturned
by the followers of Aestheticism. Algernon
Charles Swinburne wrote:
It is not a poet’s business to redeem the age and
remould society.
It was not that poets such as Swinburne,
who considered themselves to be guided
by the principles of Aestheticism, thought
that poetry should have no function at
all. They emphasised that separating the
artistry of a poem from the imposition
of social or moral messages allowed the
work of art to be considered only for its
beauty. For them, the power of such beauty
and its contemplation would provide the
spiritual nourishment needed as an antidote
to the industrialisation and increasing
mechanisation that characterised the
nineteenth century.
Criticisms of Aestheticism
There were those, however, who did not
welcome such a radical view of art. Some
contemporary critics of the movement
mocked it as nothing more than affectation.
For them, Aestheticism was not about the
serious contemplation of art – it was simply
a version of showing off. This can be seen
in the way that much of the mockery of
Aestheticism in the contemporary press
centred upon the figure of the aesthete
him – or her – self, such as the cartoons by
George Du Maurier that appeared in Punch
magazine of which Wilde was sometimes
the subject. In these, aesthetes were
represented as self-seeking and narcissistic.
They were not, according to one of the
key criticisms, truly followers of Art. They
merely enjoyed the attention they got
Behind such facetious mockery,
however, were some serious objections
to the movement and its manifestation in
literature – that such shallow posturing was
symptomatic of the moral degeneracy of
the aesthete. This can be seen in the word
‘fleshly’ to describe Bunthorne.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Rossetti, who was one of the main
targets for Buchanan’s disapproval, has
been cited as one of the possible models
for Bunthorne. He certainly had all
the characteristics of an aesthete in his
preoccupation with art and his creation of a
manifesto for its function. In 1848, he was
one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood. They were notorious for
rebelling against the accepted methods of
painting epitomised by the Royal Academy
of Art, outlining their views in a periodical
called The Germ. Rossetti was also a poet
and sometimes inscribed his poetry onto his
paintings. In 1862, some of his unpublished
poems were buried with his wife, Elizabeth
Siddal. It was a decision he came to regret
and in 1869, he arranged for her body to
be exhumed and the manuscript of his
poems retrieved. They were published the
following year as a collection.
This is the volume under discussion in
Buchanan’s article criticising Rossetti: he
used his review of this book of poems to
express his disapproval of Aestheticism.
First, he highlighted the faults in Rossetti’s
work. From these, he extrapolated the
failings of Aestheticism itself. He achieved
this by drawing attention to what he saw as
one particular fault in Rossetti’s poetry – the
focus on the physical. In this way, he was
able to argue that poets such as Rossetti
were not concerned about their poetry
providing spiritual nourishment. Rather,
they saw it as a means for the indulgence of
physical desire.
Emphasising the Physical
Buchanan began by focusing on the sonnet
‘Nuptial Sleep’, which describes a pair of
lovers falling asleep after sex. He drew
attention to the language of physical feeling
in the poem, describing the mood Rossetti
created as one of ‘mere animal sensation’.
Buchanan then argued that this focus on
the physical was typical of Rossetti’s poetry
as a whole. Men and women in Rossetti’s
poems, he wrote,
bite, scratch, scream, bubble, munch, sweat,
writhe, twist, wriggle, foam.
This tendency of Rossetti’s to emphasis
the physical, Buchanan called the ‘fleshly
feeling’. This was a rather clever piece of
lexical misdirection on his part. The term
‘fleshly’ deliberately creates in the reader’s
mind an association with the bodily; but by
following it with the word ‘feeling’ it links
that with the voluptuous, even the erotic.
Thus, Buchanan has presented Rossetti’s
poem as being concerned with, not the
spiritual nourishment of love, but the
gratification of physical desires.
Buchanan argued that this ‘fleshly feeling’
in Rossetti’s poetry had been adopted by
those who admired and imitated his style of
poetry, such as Swinburne, William Morris
(now best known for his contribution to the
decorative arts) and Arthur O’Shaughnessy,
composer of the well-known lines,
We are the music makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams.
Buchanan likened their imitating of
Rossetti’s poetry to a disease. According
to Buchanan, any poet who aspired to
Rossetti’s aesthetic style was doing the
literary equivalent of catching an infection.
Buchanan’s insistence on this analogy of
Aestheticism with illness, reinforced his
thesis that the aim of the aesthete was
not to provide spiritual refreshment, but
to indulge sensuous, physical desires.
And the implication of venereal disease
in the analogy equated the aesthetes with
a concern for the fulfilment of a specific
physical appetite, namely sexual desire.
Rebekah Owens is a freelance writer with an M.A.
from the Shakespeare Institute.
The Accusation of Immorality
This argument that the aesthetes were
preoccupied with carnal matters and not
spiritual refreshment had a more significant
implication. If these authors were not
concerned with the spiritual, then they
were not interested in the soul. At that
time this was considered the aspect of being
human that was most closely connected
to God. If the aesthetes were not aiming
at writing poetry that nourished the soul,
then they were not creating literature that
encouraged the contemplation of the divine
in oneself.
In the late nineteenth-century, this was
more than just misguided or improper. It
was immoral. For critics of Aestheticism
such as Buchanan, it followed that, if poets
did not have a moral agenda in their work,
and declared it should not be interpreted
as such, then they must themselves be
immoral. That this was a lasting view of
literary Aestheticism can be seen in the
reviews of Wilde’s novel The Picture of
Dorian Gray. When it was published initially
in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890,
it was greeted with a storm of outrage.
Reviewers felt that Wilde had breached
contemporary moral standards. The Daily
Chronicle considered that, in its portrayal of
Dorian’s descent into depravity, symbolised
by the degenerating image of his portrait,
Wilde’s story epitomised ‘moral and spiritual
putrefaction’.
That the prevalent view of Aestheticism was
as immoral is seen in the rapid demise of
the movement after Wilde was arrested in
1895 and imprisoned for gross indecency.
Wilde’s downfall was, for many critics, a
proof that Aestheticism had not been about
Beauty and spirituality; it was merely an
excuse for immoral, anti-social activities.
However, these attempts to stigmatise the
movement were ultimately unsuccessful.
Even Buchanan withdrew many of his
arguments in later years. Yet the moral
horror of the critics serves as a reminder
that Aestheticism was about more than just
Bunthorne walking around holding a poppy
or a lily. It could incorporate the grotesque,
just as the Decadent movement did at
the turn of the twentieth century; and it
would include the monstrous, like Aubrey
Beardsley’s black and white illustration of
a moon-faced Wilde in his Salome (1894).
For all its emphasis on Beauty, whatever
Aestheticism might have been, it was not
pretty.
emagplus
Juliet Harrison on ‘The Significance of
the Picture in the Picture of Dorian Gray’
emag web archive
• Mike Haldenby: The Picture of Dorian
Gray – A Celebration or Critique of the
Aesthetic Life?
emagazine 58 December 2012
The
Governess
and
A Psychoanalytic
Reading of The Turn
of the Screw
English teacher Lesley
Drew uses Freudian
ideas to explore the
complex undercurrents
of Henry James’s fin de
siècle ghost story.
Speaking about his recent TV Gothic horror,
Penny Dreadful, the writer John Logan
pointed out that the last decade of the
nineteenth century produced a plethora of
novels
all expressing something about inner fear and
anxiety being manifested physically through
monstrousness.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian
Gray and Dracula, he argues, depict literary
monsters which represent the very darkest
fears, at the very time that
Freud was coming up with words to classify those
things.
The Turn of the Screw is surely also one of
these complex psychological expressions of
the workings of one woman’s mind.
Miles
Not Just a Story of Ghosts
There are, it is said, at least ‘57 Varieties’ of
critical interpretation of this novel, and few
of them support the simple ‘apparitionist’
view that it’s just a story about two ghosts.
Stanley Renner talks of the Governess’s
‘sexual hysteria’, which implies that the
virginal Governess has both fear and desire
combined in her attitude to the Master and
Quint, and that, in some way, Quint is a
‘projection’ of her ambivalent fascination
with the unattainable Master. Does this
reading overlook the obvious?
The male figure she spends most time with
is Miles, the ‘angelic’, ‘beautiful’, ‘young
gentleman’, who addresses her as ‘my dear’.
The Prologue introduces the Governess in
the words of another younger man, who
admires her from afar. He is the first person
she confides in about Miles’ death; James,
who never wastes a word (or a piece of
punctuation), is remarking on the attraction
between an older woman and a younger
man here too. The Governess certainly
seems uncertain about what role she should
play in relation to Miles. At varying times,
she describes herself as his Governess,
friend, nurse, ‘sister of mercy’, and, in the
most telling line of the book from the point
of view of this interpretation, when they
are finally left in the house with just the
servants, she orders the meal in the Dining
Room, rather than the nursery, where
Governesses and their charges normally eat.
They sit at each end of the grand table,
as some young couple, who, on their wedding
night at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the
waiter.
On their wedding night?
In this psychoanalytic reading, the
Governess’s suppressed, forbidden, taboo
desires for Miles are not feelings she can
admit to, even to herself. Hers has been a
‘small, smothered life’ in a vicarage. She
subconsciously desires him to be ever
near her, so her subconscious produces
a physical manifestation of danger from
which it is imperative she protects him, and
justifies the need to have ‘all but pinned
the boy to my shawl’. She has rejected the
truth – just as Dorian Gray rejects the truth
that he will grow old, by transferring the
ageing process to a picture of himself. The
Governess’s taboos have become personified
in the figures of a corrupting male who is
‘too free with my boy’ – exactly what she’d
like for herself – and a corrupted female,
who promiscuously gives herself freely –
‘she must have wished it too’ – and who
is punished for these sexual desires. These
‘monsters’ are trying to steal ‘her’ boy. It is
crucial that she becomes the heroine, the
captain in a ‘great drifting ship’ who takes
the ‘helm’ and refuses to let him out of her
sight.
If Quint and Jessel are simply ghosts who
need expelling from the house, why does
she never call on the services of a vicar? As
a vicar’s daughter herself, she knows they
can bless a house, and will have heard of
the powers of exorcism. In fact, the only
time the church is mentioned is when she
doesn’t take sanctuary in it, even when at
her most distraught. The first time she sees
Quint’s face is on the way out to church,
when she goes back to fetch her gloves, and
as a result, she tells Mrs Grose that she has
now to stay at home.
Images: various productions of The Turn of the Screw
Miles’ Approaching Adulthood
It is on the way to church, in Chapter
14, that Miles raises the suggestion that
he should go back to school: perfectly
logical for a wealthy boy of school age
in the nineteenth century. It is autumn
– a new school year is beginning – and
the Governess seems, in a rare moment
of self-knowledge, to see herself as a
‘goaler’, while his handsome, gentlemanly
appearance, courtesy of his ‘uncle’s tailor’,
incites hyperbolic adjectives of admiration:
‘magnificent’, ‘grand’. He suddenly seems
older than his years, and she is looking
at him as a young man. When he asks to
leave, she calls it a ‘revolution’, and stops,
abruptly,
as if one of the trees of the park had fallen across
the road.
Freudians would see this as an image with
strongly phallic associations, and might
even identify an echo of the poplar in
‘Mariana’, Tennyson’s poem of a woman’s
unrequited love. Disturbingly, she reacts not
only to the rejection of her as his ‘eternal’
teacher, but also as a woman. Suddenly she
is conscious of her personal inadequacies:
I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see in the
beautiful face […] how ugly and queer I looked.
Miles uses the third person, ‘for a fellow
to be with a lady always …’ as if to soften
the rejection – but it only draws attention
to the way this conversation reads more
like a ‘Dear John’ rejection letter than a
discussion about the starting date for Prep
School.
There is even a reference to a bedroom
scene between the two of them – ‘that one
night’ in Chapter 11. Miles has left the
house ‘to show how wicked he can be’, and
she visits him in his bedroom to confront
him. There is a moment of Gothic Horror
as the candle blows out in a gust of wind,
despite the window being firmly closed.
An apparitionist reader would say that this
becomes more disturbing still when Miles
claims to have done it. Those readers who
see the monsters within would point out
that this leaves them in the bedroom, in the
dark – just as she most desires.
In the bedroom, she needed to protect him
from Quint, who ‘hungrily hovered’ on
the stairs; in the graveyard, she ‘reflected
hungrily’ on the silent refuge of the church,
where Miles will be unable to speak words
of rejection. Before she can reach it, he
rejects her on the basis of her class: ‘I want
my own sort’. In a dramatic subversion of
the marriage vows, he declares, ‘I will’ and
‘marched off alone into Church’.
Smothered Desires
She can’t bear to move on, and sits, ghostlike, on a tomb. When she returns to the
house, to pack and leave, as a rejected lover
would do, she sees Miss Jessel, in the very
place that all Governesses sit, in the school
room, in the form of a rejected ‘sweetheart’
– ironically, the very role which we have
attributed to her. This is not a moment of
self-knowledge, however. Seeing a ghost, of
course, means that she can justify staying,
and take on the mantle once more of
chivalric knight, defending the weak and
helpless on her ‘quest’.
death? Perhaps because this ‘smothered’ girl
has smothered her own desires and created
a fictional monster to fight on his behalf.
Her own self-justifying language is full of
fabricating, fictional imagery. The house is
‘like a theatre after the performance’; she is
acting as an embroidered ‘screen’ to protect
the children; most darkly of all:
had I wished to mix a witch’s broth […] she
would have held out a large, clean saucepan.
She knows her love is forbidden, and that
it’s important to smother her desires. The
tighter she holds him, the more she is
protecting him from evil and corruption.
For her, they are outside the window,
whereas for us, they are inside her head.
Mrs Grose, that sound, sensible woman had
it right from the beginning. She asked the
Governess about her first impressions of
Miles: ‘afraid he’ll corrupt you, Miss?’ Her
sleepless nights have begun.
If one wished to, one might make
interesting use of biographical knowledge of
the author. James himself understood the
tangled web we weave when we practise to
deceive ourselves. In the 1890s, in the long
shadow cast by Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment
in 1895, he knew he had to suppress his
homosexual desires for Morton Fullerton,
whom he addressed in letters as ‘my
dearest boy’, and the relationship remained
unfulfilled. Equally, he held women who
loved him at arm’s length, not replying to
their letters, or requests for company. In
the case of both his dying sister, and the
novelist Constance Fennimore Woolson,
who committed suicide, alone, in 1894,
he blamed himself for destroying those he
loved most dearly. Perhaps this novel is an
‘atonement’, as the Governess tellingly says,
for his sins of omission as well as for hers.
Lesley Drew teaches English and Theatre Studies
at Shrewsbury School, Shropshire.
emag web archive
• Dr Andrew Green: Terror, Horror and
Obscurity in Henry James’s The Turn of
the Screw
• Dr Sean McEvoy: Fear of the Abyss:
Social Class in Henry James’s The Turn
of the Screw
• Neil Bowen: Henry James: Gothic and
The Turn of the Screw
Why, then, does she smother Miles to
Getting your Language
Muscles in Shape
The UK Linguistics Olympiad
Teacher and Olympiad Committee member Ian Cushing, explains what it is
and why you should consider taking part.
Are you interested in exotic glimpses of other
cultures? Do you see yourself as an armchair
Indiana Jones? Are you intrigued by how
different languages work? If the answer
to any of these questions is yes, then the
Linguistics Olympiad may be right up your
street. Let me explain with an example.
Here are some words in a braille writing
system called New York Point. They
represent (in no particular order) the
following names: Ashley, Barb, Carl, Dave,
Elena, Fred, Gerald, Heather, Ivan, Jack,
Kathy, and Lisa. Your job is to work out
which one is which.
Spoiler alert! Before reading on, try and
have a go for yourself…
How did you do? Hopefully you will have
been able to make a start, but don’t worry if
you were completely bamboozled: linguistics
puzzles get easier when you start to learn
some useful strategies. Let’s talk through one
way to begin to solve the problem.
A handy starting-point is looking for
common patterns in the data you are given.
Now, five of the English names have the
character <a> in second position. The braille
in a, d, e, j and l have the same two-dot
..
symbol ( ) in the second position too, so
..
we can guess that the character <a> = .
Although that’s a good start, it still doesn’t
allow us to match up any individual names.
However, just learning one letter opens up a
whole world of ways to solve the puzzle.
• Notice that d and j have the same braille
symbol after the <a>, which must
represent the <r> in Barb and Karl, as they
are the only two names which have the
same character after the <a>. But which is
which? We might expect the <b> symbol
to be the same, which would give us the
answer, but braille, just like any other
written language, needs to differentiate
between upper and lower case. Maybe you
can guess, perhaps looking at the upper
and lower case symbol for <b> in the
braille?
• Notice that two names, Elena and Lisa
both end in <a> so must be either b. or g.
Counting the number of letters and braille
symbols in each pair might now be a good
idea…
So after taking these initial steps, you should
be able to do a couple of things: (1) begin
to build a braille alphabet, (2) understand
some ways in which the braille system works
(capital letter marking, for example). And
this is how linguistics puzzles work!
But don’t relax just yet: as with any mystery,
finding out new things results in new
problems to solve. Can you, for instance,
work out the special way in which digraphs
(two letters that make one sound, such as
<th>, <sh> or <ng>) are represented in
braille? Would you be able to write words in
braille yourself? Have a go at writing your
own name, and if you need some symbols
that are not present in the original data,
would you be able to take a good guess at
what they might be?
A typical puzzle from the Linguistics
Olympiad would ask you to do just that –
and the chances are that the puzzle would
involve a language you have never heard of
before. It might be an endangered language
with only a few hundred speakers. It might
be a language that is no longer used. Or
it might even be a language that has been
artificially created, for a film or TV show. In
previous years, UKLO puzzles have drawn
on languages such as Turkish, Welsh, Dutch,
Bengali, Esperanto, Maori and Indonesian, to
name a few.
The fact is that every year thousands of
school students complete these kinds of
language puzzles in a competition that tests
their logical and problem-solving skills. In
2014, over 2,000 school and college students
from across the UK entered. And another
fact is that it’s extremely easy for you to have
a go yourself.
How it works
• Try having a go at some of the sample
puzzles on the UKLO website (http://
www.uklo.org/example-questions).
• Speak to your teacher about setting up
a ‘linguistics club’ in which you can try
some of the puzzles in groups.
• Try a range of different puzzles: they
are ranked on their difficulty, ranging
from ‘breakthrough’ to ‘advanced’. Start
with some easy ones and see how you
get on. The solutions and in many cases
an explanation are also on the website.
Incidentally, the braille puzzle above is an
extract from an advanced level question.
• Your teacher will need to register your
school or college if you want to take part
in the actual competition (which runs in
February of every year). Round 1 will take
place in your classroom.
• Those entering at the lower levels
can work as individuals or in groups.
Advanced level entries are solo
competitors only.
• This year, we’re introducing a new ‘light’
version of the competition, which can be
completed in a single lesson.
• The puzzles are either marked by your
teacher (at the lower levels) or by trained
markers from UKLO (advanced level).
• The overall national winners will then go
through to round 2.
• The highest scoring competitors from
round 2 will then get the chance to
represent Great Britain at the International
Linguistics Olympiad!
a good way’), it also has huge benefits for
the language analysis you do in English
Language. UKLO puzzles require a keen
eye, the ability to spot patterns and a knack
for inferring new things from unseen
data – all of which are required at A Level
English Language. And don’t worry if you
don’t speak another language – that is
certainly not a pre-requisite for enjoying and
succeeding in the puzzles. Oh, and did we
mention it’s completely free to both schools
and students?
Languages code the same message in very
different weird and wonderful ways, and
solving linguistics puzzles gives you some
insight into how this is done. Try it for
yourself, and we think you’ll be hooked.
For more information explore the UKLO
website here: http://www.uklo.org/
Ian Cushing is a teacher of English at Surbiton High
School, UK Linguistics Olympiad Committee
member and Education Committee member of the
Linguistics Association of Great Britain.
emag web archive
• David Adger: How on Earth Do They
Do It? An Extra-terrestrial View of
Syntax and Phonology
• Michael Rosen: Cohesion in Texts
Key dates for 2015
• January: deadline for Advanced level
entries.
• February 2-6: round 1 competition, in
schools and colleges.
• March 20-22: round 2 competition, at
Oxford University
Of course, as well as being fun (or as one
student put it: ‘it mashes yer head, but in
‘Always a destination I was heading [to]’
Atonement and postmemory
Dr Natasha Alden, lecturer at the University of Aberystwyth, writes
about the way in which the concept of the ‘postmemory’ text can help us
understand both the ideas and narrative choices of Ian McEwan’s novel
about the 2nd World War.
Reading Atonement as a postmemory
text – one engaged with trying to recover
a lost past – casts a useful light on the
beliefs about the relationship of fiction and
history that form the novel’s central theme.
It illuminates how, and why, McEwan
structures his novel around Briony, an
unreliable narrator with a serious ulterior
motive, and invites us to consider the ways
in which fiction can create connections
between the present and the past.
Postmemory is a fairly recent critical
term, coined by Holocaust scholar
Marianne Hirsch in the 1990s to describe
the experience of children of Holocaust
survivors, born after the war but deeply
affected by their parents’ experiences.
Hirsch explains:
Postmemory describes the relationship that the
‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective,
and cultural trauma of those who came before
to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means
of the stories, images, and behaviours among
which they grew up. But these experiences were
transmitted to them so deeply and affectively
as to seem to constitute memories in their own
right. Postmemory’s connection to the past
is thus actually mediated not by recall but by
imaginative investment, projection, and creation
… [the second generation are] shaped, however
indirectly, by traumatic fragments of events that
still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed
comprehension.
Hirsch, postmemory.net
In her second book on postmemory and
contemporary culture, The Generation
of Postmemory, Hirsch suggests that it’s
possible to use this model of transmission
to understand art and writing by other
‘second generations’ beyond the Holocaust
survivors’ community. Obviously, the order
and magnitude of the inherited trauma
of the Second World War for those born
after 1945 is very different than that of
the children of the survivors of genocide.
The experience of ‘coming after’ felt by the
children of British war veterans is related to
their sense of belatedness, of having been
born after the most significant, influential
moment of their era, rather than of their
having been born after an appalling attack
on their community. Having said that, there
are clear parallels between the way that
second-generation Holocaust survivors and
the children of British war veterans write
about their parents’ experiences, as we see
with Atonement.
Growing up with family stories that were
constantly told and retold – as McEwan was
– or, alternatively, with a knowledge of the
gaps left in the family through death, or of
silences around their parents’ generation’s
wartime experience, the events of the war
become the second generation’s
meaningful history, the history it is urgent to
know because it belongs to one’s life, because it
shapes ancestral fate and one’s own sensibility
as Eva Hoffman explained of being the child
of Holocaust survivors. The writer Andrew
Motion, who was born in 1952, writing on
the anniversary of D Day in 2004, explained
how he had been shaped by his fascination
with an experience he only knew in a
limited, second-hand way:
Like everyone else born shortly after 1945, I saw
the war flickering at the edge of my childhood.
My father stayed in the Territorials, my TV screen
was filled with soldiers, and so was my weekly
comic (The Victor). But for all that, the fighting felt
remote – and all the more so because my father
very rarely talked about it. I used to think that
this was his modesty and reserve – and so it was.
Now I realise that it was also because he didn’t
want the shadow of what he’d been through to
fall across my own life. I’ve always been grateful
to him for this, but I’ve also wanted to know his
story. It’s been one of the shaping paradoxes of
my life.
Later on, he continues that he had
always thought it would be a mistake, and
presumptuous, to try to possess that time in
my poems. It doesn’t belong to me, however
fascinating I might find it. But I’ve also wanted
to map its effect on my father – to sympathise
with him in my imagination, to measure the
distance between his life and mine, to perform my
own acts of remembrance. Perhaps some of my
contemporaries – Ian McEwan [is] a conspicuous
example… are driven by some of the same mixed
feelings. We want to feel our inheritance on our
pulses, and understand its power in our present.
A Second Generation Novel
Much of the criticism on Atonement has
looked at the experimental aspects of the
texts (such as McEwan’s use of intertextual
allusions), or the questions it raises about
time, narrative and history (Finney, 2004,
Hidalgo, 2005, Childs, 2005). It’s obviously
a metafictional piece – that is, it’s a novel
that deliberately makes us aware of its
own constructed, fictional nature; but its
treatment of the past – the central theme of
the book – is also shaped in significant part
by McEwan’s position as a member of the
‘second generation’.
Postmemory fictions, such as Art
Spiegelman’s Maus, or W.G. Sebald’s
Austerlitz, often focus on memory,
foregrounding issues of veracity and
the nature of narrative, as Eva Hoffman
explains:
[In] literature by children of survivors, intimate
history is not so much given as searched for; the
processes of overcoming amnesia and uncovering
family secrets, of reconstructing broken stories
or constructing one’s own identity, are often the
driving concerns and the predominant themes.
Hoffman, After Such Knowledge
McEwan does not simply want to record
his father’s experience, he also wants us to
realise that the ‘national myth’ of Dunkirk
leaves a lot out:
65,000 died there. Dunkirk is not simply the
miracle of the little boats. Before that there was a
war crime. The Germans bombed and shelled the
civilians packing the roads in order to block the
military traffic. It was a great atrocity.
Evening Standard
Thus his depiction of Dunkirk ends just
before the well-known moment of the
rescue begins, as Robbie falls asleep (or
dies).
Trying to Capture the Past
But of course, we realise at the end of the
novel that this apparently first-person
witnessing is nothing of the sort, but
rather Briony’s reimagining. This makes us
doubt the text: have we been taken in by a
Overcoming Amnesia
consoling lie? The whole of Atonement is a
In Atonement, the desire to ‘overcome
meditation on the desirability, and difficulty,
amnesia’ is evident on two levels. On a
of capturing the past. Not revealing Briony’s
broad scale, it suffuses the whole novel,
real role until the end of the novel focuses
providing its narrative drive. On a basic
our attention on this brilliantly: the text
level, we see it in McEwan’s presentation
had, until this point, seemed (mostly)
of the evacuation of Dunkirk, which his
realist, but its nature is now thrown into
father witnessed. McEwan grew up hearing doubt. To paraphrase Henry Tilney, in
his father’s often-repeated stories about the
Atonement’s epigraph, what have we been
retreat:
reading? Making Briony our (unreliable)
My father was at Dunkirk and he told many stories narrator places the reader in the same
questing role as Briony and McEwan
about it, God yes, especially in his dying years:
themselves, trying to piece together the
he had emphysema. He did this three-day walk
across the landscape there, although, actually,
fragments of information they have, but
not all of it was walking. He was a dispatch rider
horribly aware of their unreliability and
and he got his legs badly shot. He teamed up with incompleteness.
The quest for the past, and the difficulty of
knowing and representing it, is always key
for postmemory texts.
a guy who’d had his arms badly shot. Between
them they worked the controls of the bike.
Evening Standard, 26.9.01
(You might recognise these men from
Atonement, where McEwan Senior makes a
cameo appearance, riding past Robbie.)
Other narrative tropes contribute to the
novel’s meditation on how we know the
past: the narrative itself is fragmented,
and told from multiple, and sometimes
conflicting points of view (i.e. Robbie’s
misinterpretation of Briony’s motives for
accusing him, or his belief that Young
Hardman raped Lola). In Part One, we
are sometimes presented with moments
from the afternoon before Lola’s attack
from different viewpoints, though the
crucial ones – Lola’s and Marshall’s – are
necessarily missing. McEwan also uses
prolepsis, the sudden leap into a different
time, in Part One, to allow the elderly
Briony to comment, wryly, on her younger
self. On a second reading, the reader
recognises these clues that this is not a
realist text, and might also notice that Part
One bears a strong resemblance to Briony’s
first novel ‘Two Figures at a Fountain’, with
all the revisions suggested by Cyril Connolly
dutifully made. Knowing that Parts One,
Two and Three are ‘by’ Briony undercuts
our assumption of their reliability, merging
fiction and reality and undermining both.
Postmemory fictions aim to unsettle us
in just this way. They are a complex form
of mourning – for lost people (Robbie
and Cecilia, and also McEwan’s father, to
whom the book is a posthumous tribute),
but also for our inability to access the past
in anything other than this incomplete,
imaginative way.
Dr Natasha Alden is Lecturer in Contemporary
British Fiction at the University of Aberystwyth.
emag web archive
• Georgina Routen: A Close Reading
of Atonement – Extended Interior
Monologue
• Neil King: Atonement – Questioning
the Imagination
• Robert Kidd: Atonement
Getting confident with
‘unseen’ poetry
The Poetry By Heart timeline anthology is a
free web-based resource for learning about
the richness and variety in poetry.
+
200
+
200
poems by
poets from Beowolf to the present day.
Student-friendly
introductions to every poem and poet
written by teachers.
118
34
40
420
95
audio recordings of the poems
read by poets.
videos of students reciting
the poems we love from the
national finals.
filters to help you find poems
to enjoy.
word-links to the online
Oxford English Dictionary.
full biographical profiles from
the online Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography and
American National Biography.
www.poetrybyheart.org.uk

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