THE MAGAZINE FOR ADVANCED LEVEL ENGLISH

ISSUE 88 APRIL 2020 ENGLISH AND MEDIA CENTRE

Two emagazine competitions Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, The Tempest The Language of Brexit Peter Grimes and Crime Attitudes to Accent Nineteen Eighty-Four Communication and Schemata Contents

This magazine is not 04 emagazine 24 ‘The Only Education Worth photocopiable. Why not Competitions 2020 Having’ – The History Boys subscribe to our web package Close Reading Competition 2020 and Stephen Dilley explores the presentation of which includes a downloadable Forward/emagazine Creative Critics 2020 teachers and teaching in Alan Bennett’s play about a fi ctional boys’ grammar school in and printable PDF of the the 1980s. current issue? The Games Poets Play – Tel 020 7359 8080 for details. 07 Subverting the Conventions of English Love Poetry About us Judy Simons explores the paradoxes in love poetry, including the ways in which emagazine is published by the English it operates within conventional constraints and Media Centre, a non-profi t making and tears up the rule book. She takes her organisation. The Centre publishes a examples from the AQA A Literature pre- wide range of classroom materials and nineteenth-century anthology. runs courses for teachers. If you’re studying Media or Film Studies at A 27 Schemata – Making Level, look out for MediaMagazine also 10 The Gaslighting of Sense of the Messages We Hear published by EMC. Katherina – The Taming of and Read the Shrew David Hann introduces the idea that The English and Media Centre Simon Bubb applies communication is not just a simple matter of 18 Compton Terrace, London, N1 2UN a very modern transmission and decoding – audiences and Telephone: 020 7359 8080 concept to a very old readers also bring a great deal to the process. Fax: 020 7354 0133 play, arguing that for a contemporary Subscription enquiries: audience the way The Duke in Measure for Maria Pettersson in which Petruchio 30 [email protected] subdues Katherina Measure – An Exploration of Website: www.englishandmedia.co.uk creates as much Authority and Power discomfort as comedy. Philip Smithers charts twentieth and Co-editors: Barbara Bleiman twenty-fi rst century interpretations of the & Lucy Webster Duke. Design: Sam Sullivan, Newington Design 14 Interrogating the Other – Stoker, Brontë and Shelley Print: S&G Group John Hathaway 34 Crime, Punishment and Issn:1464-3324 explores the way in Moral Codes – Peter Grimes Established in 1998 by Simon Powell. which three seminal In this article, Andrew Green considers Gothic texts – Dracula, the ways in which Crabbe’s poem explores Cover: Poster for 1931 Universal fi lm adaptation of Wuthering Heights and issues connected to crime. Frankenstein with Boris Karloff Pictorial Press Ltd/ Frankenstein make use Alamy Stock Photo of the dangerous or different character, either to reinforce 38 The Individual and Society or to unsettle the – The Age of Innocence How to subscribe binaries of good and bad, human and Four issues a year, published September, monster, them and us. December, late February and late April. We now offer fi ve subscription packages for UK schools: • Web & 1 x print copy of the magazine, 19 Mocking a Scouse Accent – four times a year (£110) an Analysis of an Article for AQA • Web & 2 x print copies of the English Language magazine, four times a year (£130) Sick of being criticised for her accent, Jess Kate Life explores the complex, and ultimately tragic, ways in which the • Web & 5 x print copies of the Evans she wrote an article about it. Dan characters struggle to square their own magazine, four times a year (£180) Clayton analyses the article, then suggests how you can draw on articles like this for happiness with the tight rules and • Print only – 1 copy of the magazine, your own opinion piece in Question 4. expectations of a society that is on the cusp four times a year (£45) of change. • Print only x 2 copies of the magazine, four times a year (£70)

2 emagazine April 2020 40 The Integrity of the Duchess of Malfi Sean McEvoy draws on ideas current at the time when Webster was writing to call into question a reading of the play that is highly critical of the Duchess and deeply misogynistic about women.

44 Letting Texts Talk – Developing an Analytical Mindset In this article, Nikolai emagplus Luck uses a perfume 57 The Language of Brexit – advert from the early Heroes, Whingers and Traitors twentieth century • Judy Simons on the art of the essay. A Level English Language teacher, Jacky to demonstrate how Glancey, looks at the ways in which • Barbara Bleiman analyses the linguistic analysis language and rhetoric framed the public creativity of conversation. and an attentiveness discussions around Brexit. to what is both • George Perrett on the poetry of strange and familiar Carol Ann Duffy. in a text can lead to a • Tom Church writes about The sophisticated reading 60 Handmaid’s Tale. of a popular genre. The Tragedy of Self-Defi nition Catherine Hartley 48 Let Me Introduce Myself – looks at ‘I am’ emag web archive Thinking about How Poems Work statements from Greek tragedy, emagazine co-editor, Barbara Bleiman, offers Look out for the links to through Othello and an unusual way of starting to get to grips recommended articles in the archive, Hamlet, to the plays of with a poem, using the openings of six of listed at the bottom of each article. the poems in the Edexcel Poems of the Decade Arthur Miller, to fl ag anthology to exemplify her approach. up the protagonists’ • You can access these articles by struggle to defi ne themselves, in relation to logging onto the subscriber site of the God and in an uncertain, hostile world. emagazine website, if your school or 51 Narrative college subscribes. Structure and Feminine Remember, the login details can be Point of View in 64 used by any student or member of Gospels staff, both in the institution and Nineteen Eighty- Poet and English from home. Four teacher, Jonathan See www.englishandmedia.co.uk/e- It’s easy to think Edwards, looks at magazine for tips on getting the most of Orwell’s novel Carol Ann Duffy’s from the new and improved website. as a simple third- poems ‘The Diet’ person narrative but, and ‘Beautiful’, as Rebecca Loxton showing how they reveals, there is a lot more complexity to explore ideas about Orwell’s use of voice and point of view. the female body and identity, offering a powerful view of the ways that societies, now and in the past, have objectifi ed women 54 ‘Is there and distorted their own view of themselves. more toil?’ Work and the promise of retirement in 66 The Science and The Tempest Storytelling of Language Gareth Calway argues David Adger offers an historical perspective that hard labour is on the ways human beings have sought to at the heart of all the understand language and, in so doing, shows characters’ journeys, not least of all Prospero how linguistics combines narrative with himself. sociology and science.

April 2020 emagazine 3 emagazine COMPETITIONS 2020 emagazine COMPETITIONS 2020 e COMPETITIONS 2020 emagazine COMPETITIONS 2020 emagazine C 2020 emagazine COMPETITIONS 2020 emagazine COMPETITIONS 2 COMPETITIONS 2020 emagazine COMPETITIONS 2020 emagazine C

ENTER Close Reading NOW! Competition 2020 Competition open from 1st April to 15th May

Full details of the competition, including the extract to download, are available at https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/e-magazine

Entering the Competition • Write a 500-word close reading of the passage from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. TO J. HALFORD, ESQ. • Complete your details and submit your entry at Dear Halford, www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/emagCR2020 When we were together last, you gave me a very particular and interesting account of Timeframe the most remarkable occurrences of your early life, previous to our acquaintance; and • Competition launches: 1st April 2020 then you requested a return of confi dence from me. Not being in a story-telling humour • Close of competition: 5pm Friday 15th May at the time, I declined, under the plea of having nothing to tell, and the like shuffl ing (We will not be able to accept entries received excuses, which were regarded as wholly inadmissible by you; for though you instantly after 5pm on Friday 15th May, so don’t leave it turned the conversation, it was with the air of an uncomplaining, but deeply injured man, and your face was overshadowed with a cloud which darkened it to the end of to the last minute!) our interview, and, for what I know, darkens it still; for your letters have, ever since, • Results announced online and by email: been distinguished by a certain dignifi ed, semi-melancholy stiffness and reserve, that Wednesday 17th June would have been very affecting, if my conscience had accused me of deserving it. • Results and winning entry will be published in the September issue of emagazine Are you not ashamed, old boy—at your age, and when we have known each other so intimately and so long, and when I have already given you so many proofs of frankness Prizes and confi dence, and never resented your comparative closeness and taciturnity?—But • Winner: £200 and publication in emagazine there it is, I suppose; you are not naturally communicative, and you thought you had • Two runners-up: £50 and publication on the done great things, and given an unparalleled proof of friendly confi dence on that memorable occasion—which, doubtless, you have sworn shall be the last of the kind,— emagazine website and you deemed that the smallest return I could make for so mighty a favour, would be Judges to follow your example without a moment’s hesitation.— • emagazine editors and Professor Peter Barry Well!—I did not take up my pen to reproach you, nor to defend myself, nor to The Extract apologize for past offences, but, if possible, to atone for them. This is an extract taken from the very beginning of It is a soaking, rainy day, the family are absent on a visit, I am alone in my library, and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. It appears have been looking over certain musty old letters and papers, and musing on past times; before Chapter 1. so that I am now in a very proper frame of mind for amusing you with an old world story;—and, having withdrawn my well-roasted feet from the hobs, wheeled round NOTE: We had hoped to use a contemporary novel to the table, and indited the above lines to my crusty old friend, I am about to give extract this year and applied for permission to use an him a sketch—no not a sketch,—a full and faithful account of certain circumstances extract from Yaa Gyasi’s brilliant novel Homegoing. connected with the most important event of my life—previous to my acquaintance with After months of waiting this has not come through so Jack Halford at least;—and when you have read it, charge me with ingratitude and we have chosen an out of copyright text instead. We unfriendly reserve if you can. hope to use it for the 2021 competition. I know you like a long story, and are as great a stickler for particularities and circumstantial details as my grandmother, so I will not spare you: my own patience and leisure shall be my only limits. emag web archive Among the letters and papers I spoke of, there is a certain faded old journal of mine, which I mention by way of assurance that I have not my memory alone—tenacious as • Read the winning entries from it is—to depend upon; in order that your credulity may not be too severely taxed in previous years (search ‘close reading’) following me through the minute details of my narrative.—To begin then, at once, with • Barbara Bleiman: Using Chapter fi rst,—for it shall be a tale of many chapters.— Terminology (or Not) to Write Anne Brontë: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) About Texts, emagplus for emagazine 85, September 2019

4 emagazine April 2020 20 emagazine COMPETITIONS 2020 emagazine COMPETITIONS 202 e COMPETITIONS 2020 emagazine COMPETITIONS 2020 emagazine S 2020 emagazine COMPETITIONS 2020 emagazine COMPETITION e COMPETITIONS 2020 emagazine COMPETITIONS 2020 emagazine

ADVANCE NOTICE! Forward/emagazine CREATIVE CRITICS 2020

Competition open from 14th June to 30th September

Full details of the competition, including the poems to download will be available from 14th June at https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/e-magazine

The Competition

What to do once the competition launches on 14th June 2019

• Download the poems. • Read and think about them. • Choose one of the poems and write a creative response to it in the form of a poem (maximum 30 lines), along with a refl ective commentary (maximum 300 words). • Complete your details and submit your entry at www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/ emagCreativeCritics2020 Timeframe • Competition launches: 14th June 2020 • Close of competition: 5pm Wednesday 30th September (We will not be able to accept entries received after 5pm on Wednesday 30th September, so don’t leave it to the last minute!) • Winners contacted: 14th October • Results announced online: 25th October • The Forward Prizes for Poetry Ceremony: 25th October Prizes • Winner: £200 and two tickets to the Forward Prize Ceremony on 25th October • Two runners-up: £50 and two tickets to the Forward Prize Ceremony on 25th October • The winning entry will be published in the February 2021 issue of emagazine Judges • emagazine editors and poet Julia Copus Who can enter emagazine competitions?

emagazine competitions are open to all 16-19 year olds currently in full-time education. This means emag web archive that students sitting their A Levels (or equivalent examinations such as IB, BTEC and Pre-U) in • Read the winning entries Summer 2020 are eligible to enter. from previous years

April 2020 emagazine 5 emagplushighlights

Here are tasters from two emagplus articles on the emagazine website. There are also articles on The Handmaid’s Tale and Carol Ann Duffy. Verbal Play in Conversation The Art of the Essay Barbara Bleiman explores the creativity of In this extract from The Literature Reader, talk, looking closely at a speech transcript. Judy Simons explores the essay in the digital age – and provides some practical tips. In recent years linguists, like Ronald Carter, Deborah Tannen and David Crystal have explored the idea that it’s possible to over- The critical essay does not conform to a single format which has emphasise the differences between speech and writing. [...] to be rigidly adhered to. Like other literary genres, it is a fl exible medium, a creative space in which academics, students, authors Looking at transcripts of conversational speech, one can be and general readers can share opinions. Literary experience is not surprised by the extent of the patterning and verbal inventiveness constant but changes over time, and modern essays are generous in that are often more associated with literary language. Yet students, acknowledging the diversity of readers and their backgrounds. […] exploring conversational texts for exam essays, sometimes focus on the obvious features of speech that distinguish it from writing, ‘The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,’ wrote George rather than the ways in which it uses language in more artful ways, Orwell. ‘When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared that are similar to writing. Ellipses in speech can be interpreted aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted differently and are part of what makes ephemeral conversation so idioms, like a cuttlefi sh squirting ink’. Orwell’s Inside the Whale interesting to examine – what, for instance, did someone mean (1940) is both a classic example and a clear-sighted assessment of by that statement that trailed off? Interruptions and extended the art of writing critical essays. Wide-ranging in scope, beautifully contributions to a conversation can say much about power. But structured, eschewing jargon or complicated terminology, it the elements of speech that are artfully constructed, playfully addresses its central subject head on. Its insistence on clarity and patterned and almost ‘literary’ in their crafting, can be just as honesty is sound advice. Believe in what you are saying and do not interesting to look at. try to dress up your ideas in highbrow language or rely on clichés.

6 emagazine April 2020 The Games P ets Play

Subverting the Conventions of English Love Poetry

Judy Simons explores the paradoxes in love poetry – the tensions between the personal and the public, the formal and the uncontrolled, the ways in which it operates within conventional constraints and tears up the rule book. She takes her examples from the AQA A Literature pre- nineteenth century anthology.

Love poetry is rooted in paradox. It is and form, between sincerity and artifi ce, both intensely personal and unashamedly and how poets also question the literary public. It deals with emotion too powerful inheritance on which they draw. Indeed, it to be uttered and then proceeds to express is part of the paradox that they challenge it in highly eloquent terms. It conveys an the legitimacy of poetic conventions at experience that is unique to each individual the exact moment they exploit them. yet at the same time is universal. By its Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 116’ is a particularly very nature, romantic passion is wild and dazzling example of this, a poem which uncontrolled, while the poetics of love brilliantly manipulates a standard paradigm contains and formalises feeling. It is these to expose the incongruities at its heart. contradictions that make love poetry so intriguing a subject for study. ‘Whoso list to Hunt’ and ‘Sonnet 116’ Thomas Hardy described poetry as The fourteen-line sonnet, thought to emotion put into measure. The emotion must originate in thirteenth-century Sicily, was a come by nature but the measure must be acquired by art. staple of Renaissance verse, and it is ironic that its strict rhyming and metrical schema, This article considers how love poetry built around the iambic pentameter line, embodies this tension between content became a vehicle for conveying emotional

April 2020 emagazine 7 union and its converse. Is ‘the marriage of true minds’ really a condition we can or indeed wish to aspire to? If so, then why is the poem so littered with negatives? Note how many times ‘not’, ‘no’, ‘nor’ and ‘never’ are used in this short text, words which cumulatively undermine the platonic ideal. Throughout the poem, the fl awless exemplar is contrasted with what happens in reality, when a relationship is inevitably subject to change. Passion does alter with circumstances, whether they be physical distance or the process of ageing or a change in the appearance of a loved one. Rather than a poem of straightforward celebration, it could just as easily be argued that this sonnet is about mutability and the impossibility of sustaining desire over time. This, after all, is what it means to be human.

The sonnet is part of a series by Shakespeare addressed to a young man and circulated privately. Is this why the focus of the opening is on the marriage of two minds, removing love to an asexual plane and contrasting it with the temporality of heterosexual passion? As so often in Shakespeare’s work, a profound irony runs through this sophisticated poem, its additional levels of resonance emerging through a heightened awareness of the context in which it was written © Linda Combi, 2020 and in which it was read. Consider the fi nal couplet,

If this be error and upon me proved I never writ nor no man ever loved.

What exactly is Shakespeare telling his reader? Is it that if he is proved wrong, then no man ever understood love? Or is he saying that if his statement is shown to be false, then he has never loved a man? excess. These imposed limits made the escape capture. Both the lady’s purity and Given the attention he draws to his position sonnet less a medium for an outpouring of her elusiveness were central tenets of the as author in ‘I never writ’, then logically it passion and more of an intellectual exercise, sonnet tradition, as is the case in this poem, should be the latter. and in the sixteenth and seventeenth supposedly written about Anne Boleyn, her centuries, poets took pride in presenting collar ‘graven with diamonds’ and already Lovelace – A Modern highly-wrought verse to a privileged group promised to King Henry VIII. To a modern Sensibility? of readers as a puzzle to be decoded. Its reader this phrase takes on a particular contrived imagery, tight logical structure poignancy, ‘graven’, carrying not just its Richard Lovelace’s ‘The Scrutiny’ shares and witty fi nale were transformed into tools meanings of ‘engraved’ and ‘weighty’ but Shakespeare’s scepticism about love’s for the display of authorial virtuosity. also a tragic foreshadowing of the grave to permanence from a very different which the fatal royal union would lead her. perspective. At fi rst sight, this can be quite Not only is the structure of the sonnet a diffi cult poem for twenty-fi rst century predetermined but its subject obeys the ‘Sonnet 116’ challenges many of the readers, given the misogynistic posturing of conventions of courtly love literature in assumptions that underlie Wyatt’s work. its self-absorbed, macho protagonist, who which a young man adores from afar an It is often read at weddings as a tribute to delights in gendered power play. Written aristocratic lady who is forever out of reach, the bridal pair, and the terms ‘marriage’ nearly a century after Shakespeare, ‘The usually because she belongs to another. and ‘impediment’ consciously recall the Scrutiny’ emerges from a tradition of witty Thomas Wyatt’s ‘Whoso list to hunt’ plays phraseology of the Christian wedding seduction poetry, of which Donne’s ‘The on this trope through its central conceit service. Yet the opening also casts doubts on Flea’, and Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ of the male hunter and the female ‘hind’ the authenticity of the romantic archetype are marked examples. All three of these (a double pun), the prey who is trying to by incorporating the dual idea of a perfect dramatic monologues comment on the

8 emagazine April 2020 relationship between love and desire sexual exchange depicted here. Instead, the and between the disparate worlds and poem forms a satiric comment on high- emag web archive expectations of men and women. On minded, bourgeois Victorian morality in a the other hand, both technically and in society where for the female underclass the • John Sutherland: Victorian Poetry arguing a case for sexual equality, they sex trade was one of the only escape routes – A Whistlestop Tour, emagazine could be considered to refl ect a very from grinding poverty. 19, February 2003 modern sensibility. • Ailsa Grant Ferguson: Shakespeare Hardy’s poem is remarkable for the and the Lover’s Blazon, emagazine ‘The Scrutiny’ provides a counterpart bitterness that underlies the comic façade 50, December 2010 to courtly love poetry, which invoked and for the way in which it subverts the • David Kinder: Shakespeare’s Sonnets a mistress whose appeal lay in her traditional literary version of pastoral – Poet-playwright, Playwright-poet, inaccessibility, and which made a virtue through its vivid recall of physical detail. emagazine 19, February 2003 out of sexual abstinence, a proposition The tattered clothing and bare feet of the • Adrian Barlow: What is a Sonnet?, completely overturned by the style and rural poor, their worn fl esh and ‘hands emagazine 40, April 2008 ethos of ‘The Scrutiny’. Lovelace’s work like paws’, and the ‘hag-ridden dream’ of • Jane Ogborn: I Am Yours For Ever takes its inspiration from the classical a home-life stand in stark opposition to – Love Through the Ages, emagazine philosophy of ‘carpe diem’ (seize the the idyllic country cottage of the poetic 45, September 2009 day) to focus on the present moment. imagination. Yet neither is the town • Jane Ogborn: Love Through the Ages It justifi es and values the here and now life of the fallen woman a sustainable Text Tree, emagplus for emagazine and the pursuit of pleasure, in part for its alternative. The extravagant dress, a 45, September 2009 very evanescence. In mimicking a normal caricature of gentility so admired by the conversational tone, the poem is the innocent country girl, will be as transient antithesis of the intricate, introspective as the prostitute’s youth and beauty, and poetry that preceded it. Yet its playfulness ‘ruin’, both physical and material, is almost conceals a serious message about the certainly her unavoidable fate. Both women temporality of human existence. When seen are victims in this supposedly principled but in the political climate of the time, it forms uncaring society. not just a renunciation of the romantic model but a fundamental challenge to a ‘The Ruined Maid’ perfectly illustrates the Puritan ethical code that outlawed extra- ‘measure’ that Hardy sees as central to marital sex and believed that sexual poetry, the artistic control that converts continence would claim its heavenly reward raw feeling into art, even if the feelings in the after-life. here are anger and pity rather than love. The rhyming couplets parody the colloquial The poem is almost certainly written for dialect of the naïve country bumpkin and a private coterie of male readers, and the refi ned speech of the urban sophisticate, consequently designed, not so much as while the return to ‘ruined’ at the end of a genuine picture of a relationship but each stanza gathers increasing levels of as technical bravura, where the metrical irony. This skilful handling of a seemingly discipline is used to give the impression artless lyric carries a dark message as of natural speech. Its fi rst lines plunge Hardy’s re-evaluation of feminine purity the reader into the midst of a lovers’ tiff transmutes the love poem into fi erce as the young man humorously berates social commentary. his mistress for accusing him of infi delity, when only the previous night he had Judy Simons is a Research Fellow at the University of London and Emeritus Professor of English sworn everlasting love, presumably to get at de Montfort. her into bed. The reader is invited both to admire the poet’s technical dexterity and to embrace his values.

Radical Moves in ‘The Ruined Maid’

Two hundred years later, Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Ruined Maid’ restores a voice to those women who are voiceless in earlier, male-dominated writing. It is a radical move in a poetic tradition that categorised and stereotyped femininity, and its equally radical focus on impoverished, uneducated young women relegates the iconic status of female chastity to a realistic environment. Romance never enters the equation of

April 2020 emagazine 9 THE GASLIGHTING Stephen Boxer as Petruchio, Michelle Gomez as Katherina in The Taming Of The Shrew, Of The Shrew, Gomez as Katherina in The Taming Michelle as Petruchio, Boxer Stephen Lewis/Alamy RSC, d. Conall Morrison, 2009; Geraint

10 emagazine April 2020 OF KATHERINA

The Taming of the Shrew

Simon Bubb applies a very modern concept to a very old play, arguing that for a contemporary audience the way in which Petruchio subdues Katherina creates as much discomfort as comedy, causing us to feel troubled by what seems to be misogynist male behaviour in an abusive relationship.

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, a The Wooing couple of years ago I discovered a phrase on social media with which I wasn’t familiar: We can lay some of these charges against ‘gaslighting’. It’s defi ned by Wikipedia as Petruchio in his fi rst meeting with Katherina. On the surface his courtship of A form of psychological manipulation in which a her here in Act 2 Scene 1 is characterised person seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted by him plying her with compliments (‘the individual, making them question their own prettiest Kate in Christendom’, 2.1.87) memory, perception, and sanity. but the audience already knows that this Reading the text of Shakespeare’s The is merely part of his plan to disorientate Taming of the Shrew, it struck me that her, revealed to us in his soliloquy a gaslighting seems like a good description of few lines earlier: Petruchio’s behaviour towards his new wife Say that she rail, why then I’ll tell her plain Katherina. Shakespeare wouldn’t have been She sings as sweetly as a nightingale. familiar with the phrase itself – it comes Say that she frown, I’ll say she looks as clear from the 1938 play Gas Light by Patrick As morning roses newly wash’d with dew Hamilton – but nonetheless let’s examine Act 2 Scene 1 l. 170-4 the evidence and see if Petruchio has a case to answer. So we might say that from the fi rst he is withholding information from her (see Wikipedia quotes Patricia Evans’s list warning sign 1) by entering into the of seven ‘warning signs’ of gaslighting conversation with an agenda that he has behaviour by an abuser: revealed to us, but not to her. In his fi rst 1. Withholding information from the victim words to her he trivialises her (#6) by using 2. Countering information to fi t the the diminutive form of her name (‘Good abuser’s perspective morrow, Kate, for that’s your name I hear’, 3. Discounting information 2.1.182). Then upon being corrected (‘They 4. Using verbal abuse, usually in call me Katherine’, 2.1.184) he fl atly the form of jokes contradicts her (warning sign 2): ‘You lie, 5. Blocking and diverting the victim’s in faith, for you are call’d plain [simply] attention from outside sources Kate’ (2.1.185). He then subtly insults her 6. Trivialising (‘minimising’) (warning sign 4) by telling her what others the victim’s worth supposedly call her behind her back (‘Kate 7. Undermining the victim by the curst’), before praising her himself. Is gradually weakening them and their this an example of what some controversial thought processes. modern pick-up artists call ‘negging’?

April 2020 emagazine 11 Michelle Gomez as Katherina, Peter Shorey as Gremio, as Gremio, Shorey Gomez as Katherina, Peter Michelle Of The Shrew, in The Taming Sean Kearns as Hortensio Lewis/Alamy RSC, d. Conall Morrison, 2009. Geraint

An act of emotional manipulation whereby an act ‘bargain’d twixt us twain’ (2.1.297), She is my goods, my chattels, she is my house, a person makes a deliberate backhanded and invents his own version of events: My household stuff, my fi eld, my barn, compliment or otherwise fl irtatious remark to My horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing She hung about my neck, and kiss on kiss another person to undermine their confi dence and Act 3 Scene 2 l. 228-30 She vied so fast increase their need of the manipulator’s approval. Act 2 Scene 1 l. 301-2 Wikipedia The Marriage

There are further examples in this In the patriarchal society in which the play Why is Petruchio so keen to take Katherina encounter of what could be termed verbal takes place, he knows that his version will away ‘before night come’ (l.188)? The abuse (‘Come, come, you wasp’, 2.1.209), be believed over hers. answer may be found in warning sign but it should be acknowledged that 5 – ‘Blocking and diverting the victim’s Katherina gives as good as she gets (‘Asses The Wedding attention from outside sources’. He justifi es his actions with the cryptic explanation are made to bear, and so are you’, 2.1.199). On the wedding day Petruchio continues He threatens her with physical violence (‘I his campaign to trivialise Katherina’s worth If you knew my business, swear I’ll cuff you’, 2.1218), but only after (warning sign 6). First he keeps her waiting, You would entreat me rather go than stay she has actually struck him. and then he fi nally arrives having failed to Act 3 Scene 2 l. 189-90 dress for the occasion, to Baptista’s dismay: Might this in fact be nothing more than Subsequent events reveal his ‘business’ First were we sad, fearing you would not come, spirited mutual fl irting? It seems not if we to be the complete erosion of Katherina’s Now sadder that you come so unprovided go by Katherina’s version of events to her sense of self, a process more easily achieved Act 3 Scene 2 l. 96-7 father Baptista, upbraiding him in front of once he has isolated her in Verona, Petruchio for proposing to marry her off to many miles from her family and familiar Petruchio then proceeds to behave surroundings in Padua. one half lunatic; sacrilegiously in the wedding ceremony, A madcap ruffi an blaspheming, abusing the priest and In fact Katherina’s debasement begins Act 2 Scene 1. l.280-1 carousing with wine. When he announces before she even gets to her new home. In his intention to travel home rather than the next scene we learn from Petruchio’s Petruchio, however, immediately and join the wedding feast, his new wife refuses servant, Grumio, that on the journey she completely discounts her opinion (#3): to go with him: fell under her horse in the mud, yet rather If she be curst it is for policy, For me, I’ll not be gone till I please myself than come to her aid her new husband ‘left For she’s not froward, but modest as the dove Act 3 Scene 2 l. 210 her with the horse upon her’ (4.2.67-8). Act 2 Scene 1 l.285-6

Petruchio’s response to this is unequivocal. What follows is a sustained (and successful) announcing their plans to marry on Sunday, He makes it clear that she has no choice in attempt by Petruchio to crush Katherina’s plans which Katherina had no say in. He the matter by publicly reminding her that spirit, announced to the audience in then reframes her stated opinion of him she is now a mere object in his possession another soliloquy in which he vows to ‘curb (warning sign 2), insisting it was all part of (warning sign 6): her mad and headstrong humour’ (4.1.

12 emagazine April 2020 196). He weakens her physically (warning greet the old man Vincentio as if he were sign 7) by denying her proper food and a young woman, then publicly mocks emag web archive keeping her awake at night, leaving her to her for doing so: complain that she is Why, how now, Kate, I hope thou art not mad. • Emma Smith: Shakespeare’s Comedies starv’d for meat, giddy for lack of sleep, Act 4 Scene 5 l. 41 – Conservative or Transgressive? With oaths kept waking, and with brawling fed emagazine 57, September 2012 Act 4 Scene 1 l. 9-10 Petruchio’s victory is confi rmed for all to • Pamela Bickley: Cruel Comedy? see in the fi nal scene, when the now-tamed The Taming of the Shrew, Yet it is not the physical abuse that disturbs Katherina chastises the other wives for their emagazine 68, April 2015 her the most, rather the psychological disobedience, enjoining them to ‘place your • Barbara Bleiman: Fathers and manipulation, whereby she is led to hands below your husband’s foot’ (5.2.178). Daughters in Shakespeare, emagazine believe it is all done for her own good So the abuser has won. 21, September 2003 (warning sign 2): • George Norton: A Holiday Humour And that which spites me more than all these And yet... that is almost certainly not how – Shakespeare’s Comedies and wants, the play’s original audience would have Bakhtin’s Carnival, emagazine He does it under name of perfect love, seen it. This would probably have been 58, December 2012 As who should say, if I should sleep or eat, received as a happy ending, in which a ‘Twere deadly sickness or else present death monstrously unfeminine woman is restored Act 4 Scene 2 l. 11-14 to her ‘natural’ compliant state. Critics will continue to debate whether this is a emagClips Petruchio’s chief tactic, repeatedly play in which Shakespeare celebrates or employed, is to consistently make Katherina critiques misogyny (framed as it is as a • Andrew Dickson on Shakespeare doubt the evidence of her own senses play-within-a-play), but modern audiences • Emma Smith on Women (warning sign 7). He sends away perfectly are likely to continue to be troubled by its in Shakespeare good meat as being ‘burnt and dried away’ comic presentation of what today would be (4.1.157); he commissions a tailor to make recognised as an abusive relationship. her a cap and gown which she fi nds very ‘pleasing’ (4.3.102) but then he declares Simon Bubb is an actor with a fi rst class degree in English. He has performed at the RSC, the National the opposite opinion and ignores her Theatre, the Old Vic and Shakespeare’s Globe. protestations; he falsifi es the time of day and contradicts her correction, insisting

It shall be what o’clock I say it is Act 4 Scene 3 l. 192 repeating the trick on the road back to Padua by calling the sun the moon and again asserting that

It shall be moon, or star, or what I list Act 4 Scene 7 l. 7

This last seems to be the tipping point for Katherina. Either her sense of reality has been truly upended, or she simply gives up the fi ght:

What you will have it nam’d, even that it is, And so it shall be so for Katherine Act 4 Scene 3 l. 21-2

Not content with this, Petruchio adds the further humiliation of making her

April 2020 emagazine 13

14 emagazine April2020

Poster for 1931 Universal fi lm adaptation of Frankenstein with Boris Karloff Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo INTERROGATING STOKER, THE OTHER BRONTË and SHELLEY

John Hathaway explores the way in which three seminal Gothic texts – Dracula, Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein make use of the dangerous or different character, either to reinforce or to unsettle the binaries of good and bad, human and monster, them and us.

One universal aspect of Gothic texts is towards him. His description emphasises his the way that they operate by ‘othering’ abhuman and supernatural qualities. He is a particular person or group of people by described as ‘this terrible monster’ whose presenting them as in some way worse than ‘eyes fl amed red with devilish passion.’ He the characters who perceive themselves to is variously compared to a ‘fi lthy leech’, a be ‘good’ and civilised. Yet the very process ‘lizard’, a ‘basilisk’ and a ‘wild beast’ whose of othering itself is incredibly problematic. teeth ‘champed together.’ The description Gothic texts in many ways problematise of Dracula as a ‘fi lthy leech’ in particular is such simple distinctions as ‘good’ and ‘evil’, key to his othering: he is not only an evil suggesting that these binary oppositions monster, but one who feeds off others, a are not as simple and clear cut as we parasite that grows younger and stronger would like to think. as it sucks the blood of others, something that is disturbingly paralleled in the text Dracula – ‘wipe this brute by Jonathan Harker’s premature aging and from the face of creation’ greying of his hair.

The eponymous vampire in Dracula, The narrative voice of this text presents published in 1897, is a classic case of Dracula as an uncomplicated example of othering. He is perceived as the evil, foreign the other: he is a source of wickedness and aggressor who is presented as a threat to immorality who is repeatedly likened to the civilised English society, and particularly its devil and hell. The characters themselves women. From his very fi rst introduction interpret their battle against Dracula as one in the novel, he is almost universally that is spiritual: Van Helsing labels himself condemned by all of the characters, except and the vampire hunters as ‘ministers of for one section where Mina feels pity God’s own wish’ whose religious duty it is

April 2020 emagazine 15 lm Dracula starring Bela Lugosi, a 1931 vampire-horror fi Bela Lugosi, a 1931 vampire-horror starring Dracula Photo / Alamy Stock Archive History World

to annihilate Dracula and not only eradicate Heathcliff – ‘Would that Whereas Stoker presents us with a rather the threat he presents but also save Dracula he could be blotted out of simplistic dichotomy in his text, Brontë is himself from the living hell he is forced to far more nuanced. Whilst Heathcliff as a inhabit as a vampire. Thus it is that by the creation’ character is certainly othered throughout end of the text, we are meant to celebrate Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, the text, one feature of the narrative is the with the vampire hunters Dracula’s death. features an othered character who bears recurring questions concerning his status. We are expected to rejoice in the restoration many similarities to Dracula. Heathcliff is Isabella asks at one stage ‘Is Mr Heathcliff of Mina’s purity as the mark on her a Byronic hero who is often described by a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a forehead (symbolising her ‘unclean’ status those around him as monstrous: he has devil?’ Nelly Dean likewise questions if he after her vampire baptism) is removed. ‘basilisk eyes’ and is ‘not a human being’, is a ‘ghoul or a vampire’ as she muses on rather behaving like an ‘incarnate goblin’, Heathcliff’s life and actions. Mr Earnshaw’s However, from a modern day perspective, according to Isabella. He is presented in description of Heathcliff as ‘from the devil’ it is very diffi cult to accept at face value terms that link him to hell and the devil. is balanced by his presentation of him as such othering, and we are far more likely His eyes are metaphorically presented as a ‘gift of god’, and Nelly’s assurance that to position ourselves outside the world ‘clouded windows of hell’ and from the Heathcliff has ‘a heart and nerves the same of the text and question the identity of outset, the colour of his skin causes Mr as your brother men’ is matched against both Dracula and his opponents. Dracula Earnshaw to state that he is Isabella’s description of his inhumanity. has been read in a multitude of ways, and Catherine’s passionate feelings for Heathcliff ‘dark almost as if he came from the devil.’ he has become something of a cipher for, also clearly position him very differently variously, the fear of immigrants, concerns In her forward to her sister’s work, from a character like Dracula, who has about the voracious spread of STDs, worries Charlotte Brontë herself supports this view no-one on his side, least of all the heroine about the decline of the British Empire as of Heathcliff, portraying him as a ‘man’s of the novel, and the stories of his early the end of the century loomed and also shape animated by a demon life – a ghoul life and rescuing also put him more in questions relating to changing gender roles, – an afreet’ who ‘stands unredeemed’ the position of victim than of aggressor. to name but a few. Modern day readers are because of his evil actions and how he plays Equally, in the scales of right and wrong, far more likely to probe such statements as the role of a ‘cuckoo’, entering a family his impoverished background and lack of ‘We must hunt out his lairs and sterilise them’ as an outsider only to usurp the rightful power, counterposed against the Linton’s place of fi rstborn. comfortable wealth, cause some sympathy seeing in such language uncanny and in readers. Brontë seems to want her troubling similarities to, for example, the However, we might question whether this readers to, at the very least, question the treatment of Jews by the Nazis. was Emily Brontë’s intention. Fundamental othering of Heathcliff and resist the easy to the narrative is the identity of Heathcliff. dichotomy that we fi nd in Dracula. In the

16 emagazine April 2020 light of this, Charlotte Brontë’s foreword might suggest her anticipation of a shocked and outraged response to Heathcliff and an attempt to defuse this.

Arguably, key to this presentation of Heathcliff is also Nelly Dean’s description of him as he mourns the death of Catherine Earnshaw. Nelly states that he

‘howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast getting goaded to death with knives and spears.’

This simile is worthy of attention because it both dehumanises Heathcliff as a ‘savage beast’ but also presents a justifi able reason for his behaviour by comparing him to an animal who is cruelly tortured. This introduces a psychological interpretation of Heathcliff’s behaviour that moves beyond a simple supernatural view of his identity. Rather than simply labelling him as ‘a lying fi end, a monster, and not a human being’,

Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo Ltd / Alamy Stock Press Pictorial Brontë wants the reader to fi nd it diffi cult to answer the questions that are posed about his identity. He undeniably transgresses lm adaptation of Frankenstein with Boris Karloff of Frankenstein lm adaptation accepted codes of behaviour, but at the same time he is an orphaned, abused and ostracised individual. As critic James Twitchell declares, he is both

parasite and host, oppressor and victim, vampire and vampirised.

Poster for 1931 Universal fi 1931 Universal for Poster Frankenstein – ‘I will devote myself to his destruction’

The creature in Frankenstein – interestingly only ever referred to as the ‘monster’ by his creator, Victor Frankenstein – is systematically othered by Victor: he is compared to a ‘vile insect’ and repeatedly called a ‘fi lthy mass’ of ‘unearthly ugliness’. He is described in terms that present him as abhuman, with his ‘yellow eye’ and ‘shrivelled complexion’. He, like Heathcliff and Dracula, is called a ‘devil’ and a ‘cursed and hellish monster’ of ‘unparalleled barbarity’. This allows Frankenstein to view his task of ‘extinction’ as ‘assigned to [him] by heaven’, seeing himself much as Van Helsing frames the identity of the vampire hunters: righteous agents of God pitted against unspeakable evil.

Where this text differs from both Dracula and Wuthering Heights is that the creature himself is given a sustained voice to defend himself and rail against his mistreatment. The narrative structure of Frankenstein places the creature’s account at the centre of the text, emphasising its importance. The creature explicitly addresses his othering, howling against the injustice of how he has

April 2020 emagazine 17 lm adaptation of Wuthering Heights starring Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier and David Niven Laurence Oberon, Merle of Wuthering Heights starring lm adaptation 1939 fi Photo / Alamy Stock Archive History World

been treated and questioning the supposed ‘A fatal prejudice clouds [our] emag web archive humanity of humans: eyes’ Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all • Bethany Sims: Byronic Hero in 19th- An exploration of othering in Gothic fi ction human kind sinned against me? Why do you not century Fiction: Wuthering Heights and reveals an undeniable tension between hate Felix, who drove his friend from his door Frankenstein, emagazine 34 what we can safely call human and what with contumely? Why do you not execrate the • Judy Simons: The Women rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his is undeniably monstrous. Although some of Wuthering Heights, child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate texts, like Dracula, lend themselves to a emagazine 56, April 2012 beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, rather simplistic view of the other as an evil • Merja Makinen: Learning a New Song am an abortion, to be spurned at, kicked, and creature deserving of its fate, it is perhaps – The Bloody Chamber and the Gothic, trampled on. more accurate to recognise the profound emagazine 45, September 2009 ambiguity that othering should induce Shelley, by privileging the voice of the • Andrew Green: The Bloody in us as readers of the Gothic. Arguably, creature and allowing him to directly Chamber – Barriers and Boundaries the true lesson of othering is to expose in confront his treatment, profoundly unsettles in Gothic Literature, emagazine us the same tendency that the creature the reader. It is interesting to note that 65, September 2014 in Frankenstein makes explicit: so often the creature himself admits that he has • Charlotte Unsworth-Hughes: Angela othering allows us to label ‘others’ as evil moved from the status of a ‘fallen angel’ to Carter and the Abhuman, emagplus whilst safely blinding ourselves to any a ‘malignant devil’: he makes no defence for emagazine 83, February 2019 moral culpability. of his heinous crimes and abhorrent deeds. • Kieran O’Kelly: The Kingdom of Yet, surely, we as readers are meant to feel John Hathaway is Head of English at the Unimaginable – Gothic Writing the heat of his wrath as he sarcastically Glenalmond College. in Dracula and The Bloody Chamber, points out our double standards in viewing emagazine 51, February 2011 Felix and the peasant as ‘virtuous and immaculate beings’ rather than fellow ‘criminals’ like him. In a similar vein to Reference Wuthering Heights, Shelley confronts her Twitchell, James. 2004. ‘Heathcliff as emagClips audience with the disturbing possibility Vampire.’ In Gothic: Nineteenth-Century that the creature was not born evil but Gothic: At Home with the Vampire,edited by • David Punter on the Gothic made evil by his mistreatment at the Fred Botting and Dale Townshend, 80-87. hands of humans. London: Routledge.

18 emagazine April 2020 Mocking A Scouse Accent An Analysis of an Article for AQA English Language

Jess Evans’ article, ‘Time to Break the Jess Evans was sick of Getting Started – What’s It Class Ceiling: why mocking regional About? being derided for her accents is a form of snobbery’ (pages 22-23) is a really good example of the Let’s start with a quick introduction to the accent, so she wrote kind of text you might be faced with in text itself and then move on to the ideas an article about it. Dan Question 3 of Paper 2 of the AQA English presented by the writer. Jess Evans makes Language A Level. It’s a piece about her subject matter clear early on when Clayton analyses the language attitudes written for a wide and she identifi es the accent she has and how article, demonstrating non-specialist audience by someone who’s it has been judged. She writes the piece not an academic linguist but has strong from a personal perspective and offers the kind of approach and deeply-held views about language. many examples of incidents where she has you might take for AQA It’s delivered from a personal perspective been mocked and ridiculed for her accent. about an aspect of language discrimination She links these incidents to a wider sense Paper 2, Question 3, that she herself has suffered. of class discrimination against people as well as commenting who have supposedly lower prestige The approach I’d like to offer here accents and gives others a voice with on how to draw on is designed to help you answer both some accounts of the ‘accentism’ they have articles like this for your Question 3 and also provide ideas to experienced too. respond to in Question 4 where you are own opinion piece in asked to write your own opinion piece. A good starting point with the article is to Question 4. The article The idea is not to do your analysis for ask the question ‘What’s it about?’ and we you but to suggest ways in which you can can see that broadly speaking it’s about itself is on pages 22-23. analyse and explore the text which you UK accents and attitudes to them, but if can then apply to other similar texts. You’ll we dig a bit further we can see a few other need to read the article itself carefully and areas that could be useful to explore. It’s then start to follow the steps below. also about class and occupation, about the relative prestige of different UK The rise of ‘accennt ssoftening’:g accents, about personal identity and the whyy more and moore ppeople are pressure to avoid social stereotyping and even about government policy towards changing their voicese discrimination.

Love Islaannd: audience Identifying these ideas and fi nding the reactionn sshows deepp most relevant parts of the text to talk snobbery ababout accents about when addressing them, is all part of gathering material for both questions. For Question 3, you’ll need to think very carefully about how these ideas are presented to the reader and how the writer offers an argument and makes a case. For Question 4 you will need to take these I’m pprouudd to ideas as starting points and relate them to speak YorYorkshire your understanding of language concepts, research and theory.

Remember in Question 4, it’s not enough James McAAvvoyy slams theatre to just write broadly about the wider topic of accents: it’s asking you to ‘assess the reviewer forr ccallingg accents of ideas and issues raised’ in the text (or two Scottisshh aactors ‘whining’ texts in the exam).

April 2020 emagazine 19 Finding the Accent In terms of content, an approach you Elocution leesssons: might want to take here is to look for and Stopopp thinkingg highlight all the references to ‘accent’ in Who wants to speakp the piece and explore the ways in which the Queen’ss EEnglish? I’m sttupidpj just it is described (I’ve included ‘Scouse’ here bbecause I too because it’s the name of an accent). have a In doing this, you are fi nding examples to analyse later and starting to identify Midlands patterns in the text. accent • People have always poked fun at my Scouse accent • People mimicking my accent Does a regionag nal • I was often discriminated against for my accent accent hold youy u back? ‘Accentism’ • Your accent isn’t professional enough Academic claaimms similar to • An editor would manyy workerrs have racism,, continually mock my accent • Softening my accent to ‘poshpp up’ howo suggestgg ts new • An Essex accent theyy sound to aavoid researchh • Told by various bosses to discriminationdiscrimination change my accent • I don’t speak posh • West Country accent • My regional accent • My regional accent was seen by but a quick skim through this text reveals • A posh London accent others as an issue a lot that you could look at. • The limitations and constraints that my • A posh London accent is still considered background and accent have brought me ‘the proper way to speak’ Think about the personal, anecdotal style used by Evans (for example, ‘From a A way of using these is to consider how By looking at the phrasing and very young age, I became used to people ‘accent’ as a concept is being treated. In implications of some of these examples, mimicking my accent’) and how she some cases, it’s linking an accent to a you might be able to build up a better shifts from a fi rst-person singular to a place, in others it’s about ownership and picture of the kind of antipathy towards fi rst-person plural when discussing a personal identity (shown through the regional accents in the text. One particular shared Scouse experience (‘Most Scousers possessive determiner ‘my’), in some it’s pattern here is the ways in which a actually enjoy a joke at their own expense; ascribing an evaluative description to it, ‘correctness discourse’ is advanced through we don’t take ourselves too seriously.’). but in a few cases it’s being affected by the criticisms of regional accents. The use Later in the piece, Evans allows others a verbs such as ‘mimicked’, ‘mocked’ and of terms such as on-brand and professional voice – perhaps helping to universalise the ‘discriminated’ which reveals a different along with proper and properly tends issue – and they recount their accentism picture of negative forces acting on the to suggest that there is a standard and experiences in the fi rst person. By the end writer’s accent. accepted way to speak and all other ways of the article, a different stance is taken, fall short of this, in terms of prestige and where the ‘we’ seems to be extended You can spread the net more widely appropriateness. to offer a campaigning tone to the piece too. Every time the writer mentions and suggesting a shared endeavour to voice, accent and speech – even without This becomes apparent too in the wider change the law and prevent the kind of specifi cally referring to those terms – a focus that the writer uses when she relates discrimination that has been shared. view of some kind is offered: her experience of accent discrimination to prejudices based on social class and • Crude impressions, largely consisting region. Here, accent becomes part of a Addressing the Issues of sing-song noises like ‘dey do bigger set of issues and the discourses A third approach is to identify the specifi c doe, don’t dey doe’ around language start to intermingle with issues addressed in the article and start to • Your Scouse voice … isn’t those currents from wider society. link them to what you’ve studied about professional enough accents on your course. Once you have • I wasn’t ‘on-brand’… Identifying Positions done this, you will have a set of core because I was Scouse ideas to base your own opinion piece • I reluctantly changed the way I spoke A key aspect of your work on a text like around in Question 4. • The way I pronounced certain this should also be looking at the ways words grated on him in which the author adopts a position Let’s take a few of these to start off with. • He would prefer it if I changed my tone towards the subject matter and convinces One key focus is that certain UK regional on the phone to clients us of their views. In an article in accents are viewed less favourably than • I was rejected as … I didn’t talk emagazine 60, I looked at more detailed others. There’s plenty of evidence that – ‘properly’ and I didn’t pronounce words ways to explore stance and positioning, however unfair this might be – it’s true. like ‘Wiltshire’ properly

20 emagazine April 2020 primary schools that ‘children used dialect piece, there are some useful lessons to be forms that lack status within the dominant learnt about how you might want to style BBC won’t employe py sociolinguistic economy in order to assert and structure your own article. ‘posh’p voiceess any status in local interactional use’, showing that while certain forms of language Final Points more might not be seen as prestigious or ‘professional’ (returning to Evans’ article) In the real exam, you’ll have two texts they convey other desirable and socially to read, analyse and respond to, so important qualities. you’ll need to think carefully about how to structure your answer. Which texts And what about Evans’ point about how would go well with this piece? Well, the discrimination she suffered made that’s another task for you which could her change her accent? Again, there’s really help you revise. Try searching for plenty of evidence that we all converge to other pieces about accent discrimination, linguistic norms in certain situations (we accent reduction or (more broadly) about Rise inn elocution generally want to sound closer to those non-standard varieties being restricted in lessonss: Let’s not we like or want to get along with) – it’s schools, the media and/or the workplace. called Communication Accommodation conffusse what it Theory – but is it right that people feel Dan Clayton is a consultant at the English and Media Centre. means pressured to converge?

Importantly too, we can see from a range of linguistic research that accents are a key part in people’s sense of their own identity. In the case of Scouse, Watson Numerous studies suggest there is an (2010) notes that some of the phonemic accent hierarchy in the UK and that variants that people associate with Scouse Scouse is one of those that fares badly. are viewed by Scousers as emag web archive Whose work can you cite to support this? a marker of association, a badge of identity Perhaps the classic studies were those which distinguishes them from other people. It is • Graeme Trousdale: Accent and by Howard Giles and various associates this kind of association, the positive evaluation Dialect – Northern English, emagazine from the late 60s and early 70s. You’ll of a feature, which can encourage speakers to 35, February 2007 undoubtedly have come across these so I maintain it • Kevin Watson: More or Less Scouse won’t go into them here. More recently, and he notes that in his research, younger – Language change on Merseyside, a 2007 study by Coupland and Bishop Scousers are sounding more Scouse. emagazine 48, April 2010 found that little had changed: Scouse • Suzanne Williams: Accent and and Brummie came out with very low So, what can you do with these ideas? Phonological Change, emagazine ratings once again. Most recently, linguists You can consider how they might offer 58, December 2012 at Queen Mary’s University London some linguistic support for the ideas • Shaun Austin and Paul Kerswill: (Erez Levon et al, 2019) have observed in the text itself. Evans argues that her ‘She’s Proper Good Innit’ – Why that while the gap between the most Scouse accent has been looked down upon Dialect Discrimination is Unwise, positively and negatively viewed accents by (often southern) employers: there’s emagazine 61, September 2013 has narrowed over time, the hierarchy has good linguistic evidence that she’s not • Erin Carrie: Stereotypes and Stigma, changed very little. So far so bad! wrong. Evans notes that other regional Pride and Prejudice – The Social Side accents suffer from a similar prejudice: of Accents, emagazine 84, April 2019 But there’s also evidence that while there’s research evidence of an accent • Ben Farndon: Rural Voices – the associations of certain accents tend hierarchy. And if you want to challenge Attitudes to Language Variety, to suggest a certain social status, some the discrimination highlighted in the emagazine 52, April 2011 accents also signal other qualities – article, you can take the research and offer • William Barras: Accentuate and the most prestigious ones are not some clear arguments as to why certain the Positive? Media Attitudes necessarily the most ‘pleasant’. Coupland accents and dialects might have a lot more to Accent Variation, emagazine and Bishop found that the gender, age and to offer than the rather dubious social 65, September 2014 regional accent of the respondent played a stereotypes that have been directed at the part in people’s judgements, with younger author and others. You can even argue respondents tending to view what was that – in the face of discrimination and termed a ‘standard’ English accent less stigma – Scousers are proud to sound more emagClips favourably than older people. Research like themselves. by Stewart, Ryan and Giles (1985) found • Graeme Trousdale on Key that non-standard accents tended to be Part of what you are doing here is to Aspects of Language rated more highly for solidarity than for provide the AO2 content for your own • Kevin Watson on Language status, and Snell (2018) concluded in opinion piece, but if you then look back at – Sociophonetics her study of the Teesside dialect in two the way Jess Evans has written her whole

April 2020 emagazine 21 Time to Break the Class Ceiling

Why Mocking Regional Accents Is a Form of Snobbery

Outside of Liverpool, people have always poked fun at my Scouse accent. From a very young age, I became used to people mimicking my accent. Although it was slightly annoying and predictable, I didn’t mind when people asked me to say ‘chicken and chips’, reeled out their tired jokes about me ‘stealing their wallet’ or spoke of how much I supposedly loved fake tan and walked to the shops in broad daylight wearing nothing but my hair rollers and pjs. Most Scousers actually enjoy a joke at their own expense; we don’t take ourselves too seriously. But when I moved to London to work as a journalist at 21, my treatment for being a Scouser was anything but harmless. In the workplace, I was often discriminated against for my accent and my northern, working class tendencies. As I didn’t go to private school, it felt like I was viewed as ‘less educated’ and therefore ‘less able’ by some London editors. I also came from a very ordinary upbringing where no one else in my family was connected to the media, let alone a journalist, so it often felt like I was on the side-lines of this elitist cool club who wanted to lock common people, like me, out of it. Starting out in journalism, I worked at a celebrity news agency, and my editor at the time asked if anyone could do the voiceover for the red carpet. When no one else on the desk put themselves forward, I volunteered. When I did, he responded with, ‘Oh god no, we can’t have your Scouse voice on the voiceover. Your accent isn’t professional enough for the tape.’ He wasn’t joking either. I not only felt embarrassed in front of my colleagues but ashamed of my background and the way I spoke. I didn’t know it at the time, but this small incident, was just the tip of what was to come. I wasn’t quite prepared for the string of classist incidents that followed me throughout my career – like a black smoke lingering above me that could never seem to dissolve. The experiences that were the most discouraging were the casual, everyday classism. While working on a culture reporting desk, a colleague questioned what I could possibly know about culture, being from Liverpool. She often made cutting remarks indicating how surprised she was that I’d ‘ended up’ on this desk as a Liverpudlian. Another time, while working as a reporter at a newspaper, an editor would continually mock my accent every single time I spoke up in meetings, making crude impressions, largely consisting of sing- song noises like ‘dey do doe, don’t dey doe’. It made me feel painfully self- aware. In a previous role at a high fashion magazine, I was told I wasn’t ‘on-brand’. Not because of my work, ideas or how I was with my peers in the offi ce, but because I was Scouse and essentially, didn’t lead a certain lifestyle the brand promoted. Not being taken seriously at work often made me feel like I was always on the back foot, fi ghting twice as hard for my place in journalism as my southern peers.

22 emagazine April 2020 So it felt like a lot of the time, I didn’t have a choice but to ‘Londonise’ myself. It felt like I was selling out, but I reluctantly changed the way I spoke, softening my accent just to make sure it wasn’t a barrier, in hopes that it would stop people from stereotyping and pigeonholing me. I’m not alone in experiencing this prejudice either. Katie, 31, shared a similar experience. ‘I have an Essex accent and when I began a career in sports journalism on TV and radio, I was – and still am to this day – told by various bosses to change my accent. I’m also constantly trolled online too with my radio show listeners telling me, ‘you don’t speak properly’. What they mean is – I don’t speak posh.’ And there are many more. Caroline, 42, told me, ‘I am from Grimsby originally and moved down south 17 years ago. I worked for an agency in Hertfordshire and was dragged into the boardroom by the MD one day to be told that the way I pronounced certain words grated on him and that he would prefer it if I changed my tone on the phone to clients.’ Fiona, 30, had a similar experience, ‘I have a West Country accent and when I began a career in TV, I was rejected as an ‘on screen’ person. One of the reasons for this was that fact I didn’t talk ‘properly’ and I didn’t pronounce words like ‘Wiltshire’ properly. ‘What I did was pronounce these words as a person who lives in the West Country would pronounce them. It was the fi rst time I was fully aware that my regional accent was seen by others as an issue. ‘It’s horrible to think that something I cannot help actually prevented me from following my chosen path. I had to pick myself up and choose another route.’ Whether it’s in politics, media or the establishment, it’s reinforced that a posh, London accent is still considered ‘the proper way to speak’, and that you don’t sound as intelligent without one. We’ve still got a long way to go before these mindsets are shifted, but perhaps creating a new law specifi cally against classist discrimination, could be a good milestone to head towards. Then fi nally, society may start understanding the damaging and long-lasting eff ects classism carries. UK law has already taken account of sexism in the workplace. Perhaps, it’s time to start taking the class ceiling as seriously as the glass ceiling, seeing as people from working class backgrounds earn 16% less on average than those from privileged backgrounds when in a similar fi eld, which is almost twice the gender pay gap. We have to start looking at class as an equality issue rather than just a social mobility issue, so it could be helpful if the UK law made social class a protected characteristic under the Equality Act, just like race, gender, disability and sexual orientation. If something like this was successful, the limitations and constraints that my background and accent have brought in the past would be lifted, and I’d be free from these classist chains that have held me back for so long. It would be liberating to not worry about whether my social class is a problem in progressing my career. The government needs to catch up and put something strong in place, so future generations don’t have to endure or fi ght any longer against this everyday casual classism too.

April 2020 emagazine 23 ‘THE

EDUCATIONONLY WORTH The HAVING’History Boys

Stephen Dilley explores the presentation of teachers and teaching in Alan Bennett’s play about a fi ctional boys’ grammar school in the 1980s.

In his introduction to The History Boys, and Dead Poets Society. Bennett dramatises you’ve force-fed us the facts; now we’re in the Bennett locates the inspiration for the not only the complexities of his teachers process of running around acquiring fl avour. play partly in a moment from his own but also of teaching itself, and in so doing Rudge’s unfl attering comparison between schooldays when the French master put his asks questions about knowledge, truth and Mrs Lintott’s teaching and battery chickens head down on the desk and wailed, power, many of which seem even more might remind the audience of Thomas topical a decade and a half after the play’s Why am I wasting my life in this god-forsaken Gradgrind who opens Dickens’s 1854 satire fi rst performance. school? on the Victorian utilitarian movement, Hard Times, by stating, this being Bennett’s fi rst consideration of ‘Stick to the Facts, sir’ the idea that ‘masters had inner lives (or ‘Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and lives at all)’. Bennett’s attention to the Facts and the uses to which they are put girls nothing but Facts.’ complexities not just of Hector (who is are at the heart of the play’s exploration of While Dickens sees this quasi-religious given a similar outburst by Bennett) but education, whether these are afforded the devotion to facts as destructive and to all of the play’s teachers, contrasts with sacred status of ‘knowledge’ by Hector, or imagination-sapping, Bennett presents many portrayals of teachers, who are often simply viewed as useful ‘gobbets’ by Irwin. Mrs Lintott’s adherence to historical truth used as ciphers defi ned primarily by their The teacher who is most closely associated primarily as a marker of her integrity. impact on their pupils. Consequently, with the words ‘facts’, however, is Mrs Although marginalised by the play’s they are often demonised, like many of Lintott: this is foregrounded early in the characters and viewed dismissively as ‘a safe the grotesque tyrants created by Charles play by the Headmaster’s reference to her pair of hands’, her acerbic comments on her Dickens and Roald Dahl, or idealised, as in ensuring that her pupils are ‘factually tip- male colleagues establish her as the play’s novels and fi lms such as Goodbye, Mr Chips top’ and reinforced by Rudge’s claim that

24 emagazine April 2020 most insightful voice, and her impassioned ‘statesman’ shows the danger of Irwin’s and, furthermore, that for the boys to use denunciation of ‘the various and continuing ‘game’ of ‘turning facts on their head’. the knowledge that he has imparted to incapabilities of men’ – both in history them in an examination would be a form and, we might infer, in the play’s present Irwin’s fi rst appearance in the play advising of desecration. – perhaps teaches the boys their most a group of MPs on how to ‘abolish the valuable lesson in the entire play. presumption of innocence’ draws a further This intrinsic value of knowledge is most parallel between the showmanship and movingly shown in Hector’s lesson with Instead, it is arguably the Headmaster and fl air Irwin encourages his pupils to exhibit Posner at the end of Act One studying Irwin who most clearly refl ect the utilitarian in their answers and the use of political Hardy’s poem ‘Drummer Hodge’ through to values which Dickens was seeking to ‘spin’ to mislead the public and obscure Hector’s moving description of how reading critique and which are equally topical to the the truth. To Bennett’s original 2004 about ‘a thought, a feeling’ can feel like play’s 1980s Thatcherite setting. In different audience, this scene would instantly have a hand has come out and taken yours. ways, the Headmaster and Irwin seek to use recalled the controversial fi gure of Alastair and exploit facts for personal gain. Bennett Campbell, who had recently resigned as What Hector teaches here is less concrete uses the Headmaster’s staccato declaratives Tony Blair’s Director of Communications, a or ‘quantifi able’ than the Headmaster to lampoon both his philistinism and resemblance which Bennett acknowledges would wish, but has a far greater resonance his preoccupation with league tables, in his introduction. In today’s ‘post-truth’ than anything that Irwin imparts. Hector exposing his view of education as solely a world of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’, and Posner’s dialogue in many ways means to an end: the ease with which Irwin manipulates acts as a counterpoint to the two scenes knowledge in the service of deliberately between Irwin and Dakin in Act Two, But they need polish. Edge. Your job. We are but while the latter become increasingly low in the league. I want to see us up there with contrarian arguments seems all the more Manchester Grammar School, Haberdasher’s sinister and timely. sexually charged, the former is touchingly Aske’s. Leighton Park. Or is that an open prison? innocent. This same innocence characterises No matter. ‘Never such innocence again’ the play’s musical interludes (all the more so when one realises that Bennett While the Headmaster’s role in the play is Bennett uses the ‘larger than life’ maverick, originally wanted Posner to sing with an largely a comic one, Bennett’s depiction Hector, as a foil to the instrumentalism unbroken voice), the reenactments of of Irwin allows for a more thoughtful of Irwin’s approach. Hector represents fi lm scenes, and even the French brothel exploration of the ways in which facts the sort of teacher Bennett didn’t have scene, a gleeful and uproarious display and knowledge can be commodifi ed and and only began to imagine after leaving of ‘sheer calculated silliness’ in contrast co-opted to serve a particular agenda. school: teachers to the hard-edged cynicism of the boys’ Irwin’s name recalls that of noted revisionist whose teaching had been memorable and about interactions with Irwin. historian and Holocaust denier David Irving. whom they told anecdotes, and whose sayings While Irwin is undoubtedly successful in they remembered. Both Bennett and Hector seem to view helping his pupils to think laterally and Hector as the guardian of the boys’ At the heart of Hector’s philosophy is A.E. creatively, the scene in which Dakin and innocence against corruption by the Housman’s claim that Lockwood argue that the Holocaust should ruthlessness of the outside world which be seen ‘in proportion’ and Hitler as a all human knowledge is precious whether or not it the Headmaster and Irwin embody. As the serves the slightest human use lm adaptation adaptation lm Dominic Cooper as Dakin, Sacha Dhawan as Akhtar, James Corden as Timms, James Corden Dominic Cooper as Dakin, Sacha Dhawan Akhtar, in the fi as Crowther Samuel Anderson Knott as Lockwood, Andrew of The History Boys, d. N. Hytner (2006); AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo © Free © Free Photo / Alamy Stock d. N. Hytner (2006); AF archive Boys, of The History Range Films – BBC DNA

April 2020 emagazine 25 d. N. Boys, of The History lm adaptation Hytner (2006); AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo © Free Range Films – BBC DNA © Free Photo / Alamy Stock Hytner (2006); AF archive Dominic Cooper as Dakin, Sacha Dhawan as Akhtar, James Corden as Timms, Andrew Knott as Timms, Andrew James Corden Dominic Cooper as Dakin, Sacha Dhawan Akhtar, in the fi as Crowther Samuel Anderson as Lockwood, boys jokingly – but perceptively – observe, recapture his lost youth by ‘warm[ing] Hector’s classroom door is ‘locked against myself on the vitality of the boys’, presenting emag web archive the Forces of Progress’ and ‘the spectre of him as an almost tragic fi gure and the play’s Modernity’. However, Bennett seems to central victim. Nonetheless, audiences • James Middleditch: Playing with suggest that such an aim may be noble but watching the play in 2020 after the #MeToo Time – The History Boys, emagazine naïve. This is particularly shown in the play’s movement and the proliferation of child 46, December 2009 epilogue through the fate of Posner, the ‘only sex abuse scandals (which were only just • Louisa Mellor: The History Boys – one who truly took everything to heart’, as beginning in 2004) are likely to feel less Fighting for their Lives, emagazine Mrs Lintott movingly describes his ‘periodic ambivalent than Bennett towards this aspect 51, February 2011 breakdowns’ and his ‘host of friends... of Hector’s character, one which undermines • Rachel McIntyre: The History Boys – A though only on the internet’: despite his idealistic claims about his teaching: he is Dramatic Counterpoint, emagazine Hector’s best efforts, the ‘antidote’ he offers in reality as much a corrupter as a protector 58, December 2012 is insuffi cient against life’s hardships. These of the boys’ innocence. • Kate Life: The History Boys – criticisms are articulated in the play by both Women on the Margins, emagazine Ultimately, however, Hector’s fl aws are as Mrs Lintott and the Headmaster, who claims 82, December 2018 important as Irwin’s to the play’s nuanced that Hector’s teaching is ‘selfi sh’ and has • Sean McEvoy: Looking Back consideration of education. In a climate less to do with the interests of the boys than some in Nostalgia – Twenty-First in which debates around education can cockeyed notions about culture. Century British Drama, emagazine feel increasingly binary, Bennett avoids 74, December 2016 More troublingly, this charge of self- advocating one approach over the other; • Sean McEvoy: Dramatic Comedy indulgence extends to Hector’s groping of after all, the boys’ places at Oxford and – An Overview, emagazine the boys, which is arguably the play’s most Cambridge cannot be attributed to any 57, September 2012 problematic aspect; Bennett’s apparent one of their teachers, as the ‘presentation’ reluctance to criticise Hector’s actions, even they are taught by Irwin is entirely reliant though the boys’ consent is presented as on the knowledge imparted by Hector begrudging at best. The main condemnation and Mrs Lintott. Rather than offering pat of Hector’s actions is allotted to the play’s answers about the purpose of education, least sympathetic voice, the Headmaster, who Bennett instead seeks to celebrate the views this mainly as an opportune excuse to beauty of knowledge, the energy and rid himself of a troublesome teacher, while vitality of the classroom, and the lasting Mrs Lintott’s description of Hector as ‘a impact that teachers can have, neither twerp’ suggests that she views this a foible idealised nor demonised, but profoundly and or a peccadillo rather than a serious moral imperfectly human. failing and abuse of power. Hector’s mealy- mouthed excuses are rightly dismissed as Stephen Dilley is Head of English at Headington School, Oxford. ‘colossal balls’ by Mrs Lintott, but Bennett nonetheless seeks to build pathos for Hector through his description of his efforts to

26 emagazine April 2020 SCHEMATA relies on the receiver to make sense of the Making story by using their pre-existing knowledge. The receiver fi lls in the gaps with their sense own generic expectations of the sequence of events which typically happen in, for of the instance, a restaurant: the customer orders a meal from a menu, a member of the waiting messages staff takes the order to the kitchen, and so we hear on. This subconscious gap-fi lling process is the focus of this article. and read Schemata

It was in the 1930s that the British psychologist, Frederic Bartlett, posited that memory was constructive in nature rather than a passive receptacle for experience. He noted that, in a simple experiment where people were told Native American folktales and attempted to recall them, they would often include inaccuracies. These inaccuracies were mostly generated by their own pre-existing assumptions of story events. This shows that we do not come to an experience with a blank slate but make sense of it through our expectations.

© Linda Combi, 2020 These expectations of people, places, things and events which help us make sense of the world are what Bartlett called David Hann introduces the idea that schemata (plural of schema). You might communication is not just a simple matter of think of these as packages of knowledge of the world that we accumulate through transmission and decoding – audiences and readers experience. As Bartlett’s experiments bring a great deal to the process, drawing on show, these packages of knowledge are largely determined by cultural factors. The ‘packages of knowledge’ that come from all their fact that the folktales in his research were previous experiences. Native American in origin meant that the audience’s expectations of such tales did not The Audience’s Active Role in a few simple comprehension questions just necessarily correspond to the structure and content of the tales themselves, hence the Communication to ensure that you have grasped its meaning. Try to answer these from memory: diffi culties the listeners encountered in trying It is tempting to see communication as to recall them. • Where did John go? simply the transference of meaning from • What did he eat? a speaker or writer to a recipient. This Think of travelling abroad to a country • Who did he pay? transference is accomplished by the writer you’ve never visited before. Leaving aside or speaker encoding into language what Here are the answers: potential linguistic challenges, there is an they want to communicate. This language is additional hurdle that being in another • John went to the restaurant – we then decoded into meaning by the receiver. country presents: they do things differently are told as much. However, such a model fails to take account there. For example, would the restaurant • We presume he ate a hamburger but we of an important aspect of how we manage schema that you subconsciously used to are not explicitly told this. We only know to exchange such things as ideas and make sense of the story at the beginning that he ordered one. information. To demonstrate the inadequacy of this article still hold true in the country • We presume he paid the waitress but we of a transmission model of communication, you’re visiting? For instance, what are local don’t know this. He left someone a tip let’s take a short story: attitudes towards tipping? Is it allowed, (all we know is that the recipient of the encouraged or frowned upon? Being abroad John went to the restaurant. He ordered a tip was female). makes us aware of our embedded schemata hamburger and a coke. Afterwards, when he got because we realise that we may need to the bill, he left the woman a generous tip. In fact, this exercise shows us that communication does not simply rely on the adjust them to our new circumstances. And, A simple and mundane story, you’ll probably transfer of meaning via language from the of course, the more ‘foreign’ the culture is agree. In fact, it barely qualifi es as a story at speaker or writer to the receiver but that the to us, the more radical those adjustments all. There are no plot twists, no discernible receiver is inevitably an active participant need to be. The ability or willingness to make character development and nothing out of in the meaning-making process. I say such adjustments is, in large part, what being the ordinary happens! Nevertheless, here are ‘inevitably’ because the speaker or writer open to other cultures entails.

April 2020 emagazine 27 28 emagazine April2020

© Linda Combi, 2020 Triggering Schemata for • Which schemata from beyond the check-up and the exchanges which take Dramatic Effect immediate circumstances being described place in such a scenario. Its comedy lies in does Vonnegut draw upon in this extract? thwarting those existing expectations of what Given that schemata are so important to our • Can you pinpoint the words and phrases the doctor might say on such occasions. It is understanding of the spoken and written which he uses to trigger these schemata? interesting to note that comedy is often said messages that we hear and see, it is hardly • How does the language of the piece add to not to travel well. One possible reason for surprising that message senders will exploit the sense of shock when we are told about this may lie in the fact that it often exploits their audience’s schemata for their own ends. the origin of the candles and the soap? the cultural conditioning embedded in our Indeed, if you look back at the restaurant schemata and, for that reason, may not work Schemata are, by their nature, culturally story, you’ll notice that the writer has taken with another audience whose expectations determined and so to some degree personal. advantage of your expectations by using are rather different. Don’t be surprised, therefore, if your own the defi nite article ‘the’ when mentioning analysis of the extract differs to some the woman. This use of the defi nite article Being Aware of Your Own degree from mine. On fi rst reading it, two suggests that she is part of the restaurant of my existing schemata were triggered Schemata schema and so must be a member of the simultaneously. One is a world of cosy Schemata are crucial in helping us to waiting staff. Think of the difference in effect comfort verging on luxury where teapots understand the world around us. if ‘the woman’ is replaced by ‘a woman’ in the boil and tables are ‘set for a banquet’. The original narrative. exactitude, neatness and comparative luxury We come to situations with pre-existing ideas of what will happen in them. Life would Let us take an example from an extract from a of the goods set out on the table speak of be impossible to manage if we had to learn novel to show how writers often exploit their comfort and may even conjure up images of afresh every time we encountered a new readership’s schemata for their own dramatic domesticity – teapots, soup and warm milk. situation. Indeed, this seems to hold true not ends. Below is a very short excerpt from Kurt At the same time, even before the horrible only for humans but artifi cial intelligence Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. revelation at the end of the extract, a sense too. It has been found that programming of unease is seeded by the use of particular Before reading it, here is a brief bit of mobile robots to learn about and navigate words. The description is framed as a fairy background about the novel and the extract: a new space is most effectively done if the tale with ‘a witches’ cauldron’ and ‘primeval Vonnegut was an American soldier during robots are pre-programmed to have certain bubbles’. Also, the place has no people in the Second World War and was captured expectations of that space which they can it despite the fact that the water is boiling, by the Germans. The novel is a semi- modify as they encounter its dimensions and the soup is bubbling and the milk is warm. autobiographical account of his experiences. the obstacles within it. This conjures up scenes from ‘Goldilocks’ But it is also an intriguing combination of but also horror movies where frightened Schemata, then, are vitally important in allegory and science fi ction. In this section, protagonists stumble into empty rooms where communication and, indeed, in life. However, the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, having been there might be half-eaten food, glowing fi res they need to be fl exible and adaptable, captured by the Germans and transported or chairs that seem to be gently rocking of otherwise they can hinder rather than help. to an internment camp, wanders into a hut their own volition. Notice the play on the Indeed, crucial to keeping them fl exible is reserved for British Prisoners Of War. word ‘fairies’ at the end which maintains an awareness of their existence. Such an Read through the extract: the folktale schema but also refers to the awareness can also help us to understand real-world gassing of homosexuals by the when others exploit them for their own ends. Now he was indoors, next to an iron cookstove that Nazis. It seems to me that it is primarily the was glowing cherry red. Dozens of teapots were exciting of two contrasting schemata related David Hann is a lecturer in English Language and boiling there. Some of them had whistles. And there Applied Linguistics at the Open University. was a witches’ cauldron that was full of golden to cosy domesticity and horror-fi lled fairy soup. The soup was thick. Primeval bubbles surfaced tales from childhood which makes the passage with lethargic majesty as Billy Pilgrim stared. so unsettling. There were long tables set for a banquet. At each place was a bowl made from a can that had once Triggering Schemata for Comic contained powdered milk. A smaller can was a Effect emag web archive cup. A taller, more slender can was a tumbler. Each tumbler was fi lled with warm milk. The triggering of schemata is not the preserve • Beth Kemp: Flexible Frameworks At each place was a safety razor, a washcloth, a of novelists. One of the main tools that comics – One Text, Many Approaches, package of razor blades, a chocolate bar, two cigars, use to generate laughter is to play with our a bar of soap, ten cigarettes, a book of matches, a existing schemata by undermining them. emagazine 62, December 2013 pencil, and a candle. Below is just one such example: • David Hyatt: Beneath the Surface Only the candles and the soap were of German of Language – The Critical A man is sitting on the edge of a bed, either in a origin. They had a ghostly, opalescent similarity. The Analysis of Discourse, emagazine doctor’s surgery or a hospital ward. He is stripped to British had no way of knowing it, but the candles 42, December 2008 his underwear and is clearly overweight and out of and the soap were made from the fat of rendered shape. The doctor is standing over him with a chart • Billy Clark: Exploring Inferences Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and in her hand which shows a graph with an ominously in Literary Texts, emagazine other enemies of the State. erratic line on it. She is looking concerned and says, 43, February 2009 So it goes. ‘Mr Smith, is there any history of physical activity in • Marcello Giovanelli: Seeing and Slaughterhouse Five, p.69. Kurt your family?’ Showing the World – Representation, Vonnegut (1969) Vintage Books: London Perspective and Discourse, emagazine The scene clearly exploits our schema for Now look over the extract again and answer 70, December 2015 what happens when we have a health the following questions:

April 2020 emagazine 29 30 emagazine April2020

Richard Dormer as Angelo, Andrea Riseborough as Isabella in Measure For Measure by William Shakespeare, d. Sir Peter Hall, Theatre Royal Bath; Geraint Lewis The Duke inMeasure for Measure

An Exploration of Authority and Power

Philip Smithers charts twentieth- and twenty-fi rst-century interpretations of the Duke, beginning with ‘old’ historicist readings of him as a benevolent ruler, as well as more sceptical readings of him as a representative of an authoritarian state trying to contain and manage subversion.

A Good Duke? as New Historicism and Cultural restricts personal agency and rules with Materialism. These movements, which absolute authority over his subjects. Rather The Duke conforms to Renaissance ideals in coincided with and were a response to than oppressive violence, much more loving his subjects; he is a wise and noble model Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism in Britain sophisticated methods of control were prince trying to teach and lead his people through and a rise in authoritarianism in America deployed. These critical movements posed his experiment in government. during the same period, were particularly a question: how feasible is it to successfully interested in the deployment of power and subvert and resist such authority? Such views about the Duke, while not authority and applied these interests to the universal, were not uncommon prior to the texts of early modern dramatists, especially Everywhere Present – 1970 and 80s where the parallels between Shakespeare. One key issue explored by Nowhere Visible the Duke and James I were often noted. It both movements was whether it is possible was assumed that Shakespeare wished to to resist ‘the demigod Authority’ (1.3.5) One view is that the Duke is representative fl atter the King and so he depicted a benign or whether the state merely produced of the methods of surveillance that a state and god-like ruler who, through legitimate transgression just so it could contain it and uses to keep its subjects in subjection; subterfuge, brings about positive change so further reinforce its power. A text ripe his donning of priestly robes is a cunning in his subjects. for exploring this issue and which proved strategy to fi nd out the innermost secrets of to be a key battleground for these critics his people. Lucio refers to him as the ‘duke Containment and Subversion was Measure for Measure, particularly the of dark corners’ (4.4.143) and his priestly disguise allows him to probe the deepest Such a view of the play became open to character of the Duke. He was seen an recesses of people’s minds. Richard Wilson sceptical analysis partly due to the rise emblem of the modern surveillance state sees in the play a power that has learned of two new critical movements known who, through manipulation and duplicity, strategies of modernity: the quality of mercy

April 2020 emagazine 31 Richard Dormer as Angelo, Andrea Riseborough as Isabella in Measure For Measure Measure For as Isabella in Measure Riseborough Andrea Dormer as Angelo, Richard Lewis Bath; Geraint Royal Hall, Theatre d. Sir Peter by William Shakespeare,

can subjugate more completely than the axe buttressing authoritarian rule. In his reading purpose of this, Greenblatt argues, was for or the lash1. The Duke’s ambiguous motives of the play, the disorder that ensues when James to avoid accusations of injustice and for putting Angelo in power turn out to the duke abdicates his power shows that despotism and instead show he can also be be unambiguous manipulative statecraft. an authoritarian fi gure is needed to restore merciful; as a result potential anger gives The Duke knows already that Angelo social order and that the fi nal scene aims way to obedience, loyalty and admiration. has previously reneged on his promised at inspiring awe in its subjects3. That things By fi rst arousing anxiety and then engagement to Mariana and his desire to were so rosy prior to the Duke’s absence transforming it through pardon, Greenblatt see if ‘power will change’ (1.5.57) Angelo certainly seems open to debate in my view sees direct parallels and motivations for the provokes a suspicion that it inevitably will. and is not considered by Tennenhouse. Duke’s actions.4 This would explain why By putting someone in power he knows will the Duke allows Isabella to believe her fail the Duke is creating a scenario that is Manipulating Anxiety brother is dead so that she will be grateful avoidable. This strategy will allow the Duke and obedient when it is revealed that her Stephen Greenblatt, founder of new to express his sorrow, at the denouement, brother is actually alive thanks to the Duke historicism, sees in the play parallels that Angelo should ‘slip so grossly’ (5.1.496) (and also, even more sinisterly, so that she between James I and the Duke’s technique and grant him mercy. This will show that might be more amenable to his marriage of arousing and manipulating anxiety. In he is not a tyrannical despot but a merciful proposal). This reading is even more looking for an explanation for the much- ruler which legitimates his control and convincing when read in conjunction with vexed question as to why the Duke, quite authority. Transgression is created so it can the Duke’s decision to ‘(ac)quit’ Claudio, callously, allows Isabella to believe her be contained and further embeds the ruler’s Barnardine and Angelo after having brother is dead, Greenblatt sees a method power more than if it never existed in attempted to arouse anxiety in them with of control which is analogous to James’s the fi rst place. the threat of death (5.1.508). This strategy actions at the time. Greenblatt recounts is then applied to Lucio whom he fi rst an occurrence on James’s accession to the A Question Worth Asking instructs ‘be whipped fi rst [...] and hanged throne where James staged an elaborate after’ (5.1.531) and then a few lines later An important issue is whether the play display of anxiety: a week after two alleged transforms this death sentence to a marriage is suggesting that it is impossible to resist conspirators were horribly tortured and proposal. Whether the Duke is successful authority or whether it is demystifying the their dismembered bodies stuck on the in arousing such anxiety is another methods rulers use to instil obedience. Is it city gates a further three suspects called question and Greenblatt acknowledges that possible, in other words, to view the play as Grey, Cobham and Markham were also due Barnardine and Lucio seem unperturbed by revealing the ‘behind the scenes’ actions of to be executed on a public scaffold. But, threat of death. Lucio would rather actually a ruler ‘frantically pulling levers to project at the last moment, in a stage-managed die than be married ‘to a whore’ (5.1.538). the mightier image of himself’2? Leonard moment of theatrical chutzpah, James sent Does this count as resistance on Lucio’s part Tennenhouse disagrees, and sees the play as a messenger granting them pardon. The

32 emagazine April 2020 or has the Duke successfully nullifi ed the arbitrary and manipulative, thus providing anarchic threat he poses? an audience, then and now, with the ability References to scrutinise the methods used by those in 1. Wilson, R. 1993. Will Power: Essays on Barnardine – Contained or power. The theatre, more than any other, is Shakespearean Authority. a dialectical medium in that it needs confl ict Not? 2. Bernthal, Craig, A. 1992. ‘Staging and opposing positions to create drama. As a Justice: James I and the Trial Scenes of Steven Mullaney goes a step further with result it is very diffi cult, perhaps impossible, Measure for Measure’. In Studies in English this reading and argues that Barnardine to establish the ideological position of a text, Literature 1500-1900 (1992) represents the limits of the Duke’s power whether authoritarian or anti-authoritarian. to control and contain; Barnardine, in his When it comes to the question of whether 3. Bernthal, Craig, A. 1992. ‘Staging wonderful refusal to kowtow to authority Shakespeare’s plays, Measure for Measure Justice: James I and the Trial Scenes of and his refusal to ‘consent to die’ (4.3.38), included, show power as either contained Measure for Measure’. In Studies in English poses a threat to the Duke’s authority and or subverted,perhaps it is better to insist on Literature 1500-1900 (1992) the only reason he pardons him is because a more nuanced approach that allows for 4. Greenblatt, S. 1988. Shakespearean he cannot control him.5 Is this a successful both containment and subversion. Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy resistance to authority or just another in Renaissance England. successful authoritarian manoeuvre to assert Philip Smithers is a teacher of A Level English and is currently doing an MA in Shakespeare a pretence of control over something that 5. Mullaney, S, 1988. The Place of Studies at Kings. could potentially elude power’s grasp? The the Stage: License, Play and Power in play seems to me to invite such questions, Renaissance England. even if the answers prove elusive. 6. Marcus, L. 1988. Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Readings and Its Discontents. Double-Written

Leah Marcus has a useful phrase that is useful to keep in mind when contemplating emag web archive this and many other questions in Shakespeare’s plays. She writes that Measure for Measure is ‘double-written’6 in a way that • Sean McEvoy: Measure for Measure – allows for other meanings. So while it is Sex as Expression or Oppression?, possible that the play is simple propaganda emagazine 15, February 2002 for the state, it is equally possible to read • Richard Lees: Moral Degeneracy it as portraying the Duke’s decisions as in Measure for Measure, emagazine 30, December 2005 • James Middleditch: Angels and Devils – Measure for Measure, emagazine 41, September 2008 • Nigel Wheale: Measure for Measure: Political Realities, emagazine 36, April 2007 • Nigel Wheale: Sex and the City, 1604 – Measure for Measure, emagazine 58, December 2012 • Elizabeth Huang: Shakespeare’s Law – Audience Judgement in the Theatre of Justice, emagazine 83, February 2019 • Liam McNamara: Money and Exploitation in Measure for Measure, emagazine 71, February 2016 • Nigel Wheale: Shakespeare’s Dynamics – Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, emagplus for emagazine 37, September 2007 James Laurenson as The Duke, Richard Dormer as Angelo, Caitlin Mottram as Mariana in Measure For For as Mariana in Measure Caitlin Mottram Dormer as Angelo, Richard as The Duke, James Laurenson Lewis Bath; Geraint Royal Hall, Theatre d. Sir Peter by William Shakespeare, Measure

April 2020 emagazine 33 Crime, Punishment and Moral philosophers such as Burke, Rousseau and Swedenborg) relates interestingly to crime writing. By elevating the importance of Codes individual experience, personal ethics and moral choices, the relationship between the individual and society at large (in relation to crime as well as to other factors) was Peter Grimes subject to challenge.

Peter Grimes explores both the personal George Crabbe’s poem is one part of a long series and the social consequences of crime. The of poems entitled ‘The Borough’, based on life in eponymous ‘hero’, Grimes, is accused of abusing and killing a number of apprentices, the Suffolk town of Aldeburgh and its environs. one after the other. Crabbe’s narrative In this article, Andrew Green considers the provides a fascinating psychological profi le of a criminal outsider whose anti-social ways in which Crabbe’s poem explores issues (and therefore criminal?) tendencies were connected to crime. evident even from childhood. Grimes divides himself from his father and sets himself at odds with society. Crabbe tells social and cultural codes that assume shared Introduction us how he ‘reviled’ his father and failed to understanding and mutual respect. In this pay ‘the duty’ of a child to his parents (thus The idea of what constitutes crime might on context, any action that breaks mutual breaking the fi fth commandment – ‘Honour fi rst consideration seem self-evident, but in trust within society and that contravenes your father and your mother, so that you fact the notion of crime is quite complex. ‘normal’ or ‘acceptable’ behaviour may be may live long in the land the Lord your Different social and religious systems have seen as criminal. different ways of understanding what God is giving you’). In so doing, he sows constitutes crime and how to deal with Romanticism and Crime the seeds for Grimes’ later contempt of the it. There are also signifi cant differences law. This is refl ected in the young Peter’s between what is legally criminal and what George Crabbe (1754-1832) was a talented rejection of formal religion: he reacts ‘in might be considered socially criminal. man – a clergyman and a surgeon as well contempt and anger’ to the reading of the Legally, crime can be defi ned as acts that as an accomplished poet, writing within the Bible, and his language is also sacrilegious contravene the law of the land. In social context of nineteenth-century Romanticism. – he speaks with ‘oath and furious speech’ terms, however, crime is harder to pin The Romantics’ emphasis on individual and ‘impious rage’. When Grimes rejects his down. Defi nitions are based on unwritten liberty (especially under the infl uence of earthly father (who he curses and strikes),

34 emagazine April 2020 Crabbe paves the way for his rejection of No lesser crime than murder will suffi ce. Three This is connected closely to his rejection of God (his heavenly father) as well. Grimes is hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime conventional religious belief: a brutal and unrestrained fi gure determined other than murder. How, when the Father in his Bible read, ‘To prove his freedom and assert the man’. Van Dine goes on to cite ‘the righteous He in contempt and anger left the shed: enthusiasm’ of the reader, and in so doing ‘It is the Word of Life,’ the Parent cried; The three epigraphs for the poem Crabbe highlights that fact that at bottom, crime - ‘This is the Life itself,’ the Boy replied. selects all relate to murder. Murder has long writing is often a strongly moral form. been the focus of criminal narratives. The Peter rejects what he sees as the meaningless abstractions of Christian theology, preferring fi rst literary crime narrative (in the book The Morality of Crime Writing of Genesis) recounts a case of fratricide, instead the immediacy of lived experience, Beowulf tells of the murder Hrothgar’s It is evident from early in the poem and it is this that leads him into his life men by the beast Grendel, Shakespeare’s that Grimes lacks a fi rm moral base and of crime. His frustration is evident, for Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello all deal with self-control. He rejects his father’s care example, when he murder, and murder has continued to be and instruction: could not his Cards attend, But must acquire the Money he would spend. the most enduring focus of crime writing. But soon the stubborn Boy from care broke loose, As the famous crime fi ction writer S.S. At fi rst refused, then added his abuse: And he freely rejects legality: Van Dine wrote, His Father’s Love he scorned, his Power defi ed He knew not Justice, and he laughed at Law.

His insistence on individuality distances him from society and its functions and reveals his nature – what Crabbe calls ‘his cruel Soul’.

The poem does not only deal with an individual’s story, however. It points to the existence (shockingly familiar from current- day stories about paedophile rings and people traffi cking) of criminal networks and broader societal criminal behaviours:

Peter had heard there were in London then, - Still have they being? – Workhouse-clearing Men, Who, undisturbed by Feelings just or kind, Would Parish-Boys to needy Tradesmen bind: They in their want a trifl ing Sum would take, And toiling Slaves of piteous Orphans make.

April 2020 emagazine 35 Crabbe uses the watery and brooding Grimes descends into a cycle whereby Suffolk landscape as an extended example his craving for human companionship of the pathetic fallacy to represent the cannot be assuaged: nature of Grimes’ criminality and state And though he felt forsaken, grieved at heart, of mind. Towards the end of the poem To think he lived from all Mankind apart; when Peter’s deterioration becomes more Yet, if a Man approached, in terrors he would rapid, Crabbe describes how the waters in start. the ‘hot slimy Channel slowly glide’ – the As his depredation deepens, Grimes’ water seems to coagulate as if clogged with isolation turns to darker forms of guilt the weight of guilt. The movement of the and punishment: wildlife at the waters’ edge also helps create a sense of unease: the mussels left behind Cold nervous Tremblings shook his sturdy Frame, by the retreating tide ‘Slope their slow And strange Disease – he couldn’t say the name; passage to the fallen Flood’, while the crabs Wild were his Dreams, and oft he rose in fright, ‘scrawl’d their crooked race’. All of this Waked by his view of Horrors in the Night, – In indulging in such criminal activity, takes place to the threatening ‘bellowing Horrors that would the sternest Minds amaze, Horrors that Demons might be proud to raise: Grimes becomes increasingly alienated Boom’ of the Bittern. The unnerving from his fellow men. Crabbe makes clear landscape Crabbe creates provides a He comes to realise that he is being haunted the psychological and societal impact of suitably sinister backdrop for Grimes’ and punished by some greater power. It Peter’s actions: actions and also symbolises the darkness of is important to note, however, that his the criminal mind. And as these Wrongs to greater numbers rose, awareness of guilt brings the possibility for The more he looked on all Men as his foes. refl ection upon the error of his ways: Guilt and Punishment, Peter’s own community also has to take some Power had chained him for a time, Penitence and Insanity To feel a Curse or meditate on Crime its share of the blame, however, as it turns a blind eye to his crimes and as such Crabbe is not interested only in crime. As In its turn, this meditation opens the connives with him. Faced with one of the has already been suggested, much crime possibility of penitence – a message very boys Peter has apprenticed – a boy who is writing maintains a strong sense of moral suitable from Crabbe, the clergyman-poet. physically and psychologically marked – purpose. Dorothy L. Sayers, one of the Some of the town residents ask Grimes, we are told that so-called Golden Age Queens of Crime, Wretch, dost thou repent? none inquired how Peter used the Rope, argued that detective novels were literary The possibility of redemption – although Or what that Bruise, that made the Stripling cousins of the medieval morality plays. stoop. It is not, therefore, surprising that Peter it is rarely taken up – is a common feature Grimes deals with the corollaries of crime. of crime writing and accentuates its moral Initially shunned by the rest of the town, framework. Peter becomes an object lesson

36 emagazine April 2020 for the neighbourhood of the consequences Peter’s fi nal appeal to the vision of his of crime and the wracking effects of guilt: father for mercy is in vain and instead he emag web archive receives only the veiled indication that he His Crimes they could not from their Memories blot, should commit suicide as the personifi ed • Will Burn: Browning’s Monologues But they were grieved and trembled at his Lot. waters of the river urge Grimes to ‘leap – The Drama of Criminal Minds, and join them’. emagazine 85, September 2019 Insanity is another common feature of writing • Andrew Green: A Study in Guilt about crime. Often criminal acts are presented Conclusion – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as acts of madness. To couch crime in this way emagazine 72, April 2016 comfortingly distances it from the behaviour The poem ends with a crescendo of guilt. • Rory Drummond: A Very Odd Thing of ‘rational’ and ‘normal’ people. Equally Grimes, face to face with a cohort of – The Madness of Maud, emagazine common is the criminal who, unable to cope Demons has ‘hot-red Liquor’ composed 71, February 2016 with the guilt they feel for their behaviour, of blood and fl ames thrown into his face. • Simon Mold: Uncomfortable slips into insanity. This is Peter’s lot. Initially These demons and the horrifi c liquor are Uncertainties – Tennyson’s ‘Maud’, we witness his bemused ranting as he relives metonymic for the realities of his past emagazine 82, December 2018 the abuse and murder of his apprentice: crimes. Grimes, in a visionary moment of • John Sutherland: Victorian Poetry damnation, is forced The Priest attending, found he spoke at times – A Whistlestop Tour, emagazine As one alluding to his Fears and Crimes: to behold 19, February 2003 ‘It was the fall,’ he muttered, ‘I can show A place of Horrors The manner how – I never struck a blow:’ – And then aloud – ‘Unhand me, free my Chain; all too evidently Hell. His actions and On Oath, he fell – it struck him to the Brain:… his inability to repent have brought him to a place of eternal torment where his This strain of madness becomes more rejection of the Word of God comes back to pronounced towards the poem’s conclusion punish him. He faces now the reality of his where Grimes is haunted by a vision of his eternal future: dead father and his account becomes ‘A ‘All Days alike! For ever!’ did they say, Madman’s Tale’. Interesting to note here are ‘And unremitted Torments every Day.’ allusions to Macbeth – from which one of the poem’s epigraphs is drawn. Peter’s fi nal mad Grimes eventually has to submit to ‘the rantings echo those of Macbeth in the famous strong Foe’ – the Devil himself. All images by kind banquet scene, confl ating the ghost of Peter’s permission of Anthony Davies; Anthony Davies father with Banquo’s ghost: Andrew Green is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Brunel University. is represented by Fathers should pity – but this old Man shook Gilberd Marriott Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand His hoary Locks and froze me by a Look.

April 2020 emagazine 37 THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY Winona Ryder as May Welland and Daniel Day Lewis as Newland Archer in The Age of Archer as Newland and Daniel Day Lewis Winona Ryder as May Welland Photo / Alamy Stock Pictures (1993); Entertainment d. Martin Scorsese Innocence

The Age of Innocence Kate Life examines how Edith Wharton’s novel looks back to a New York society that is on the cusp of change. She explores the complex, and ultimately tragic, ways in which the characters struggle to square their own happiness with the tight rules and expectations of their world.

Wharton sets up the novel so that we can was beginning to dread’ are proposing the dark blue velvet gown rather theatrically caught see that wealthy old New York of the 1870s erection of a new Opera House, and Mrs up under her bosom is a closely knit, highly stratifi ed set. It Lemuel Struthers, whose fortune is based and, showing is a ‘tight little citadel’ which binds itself on shoe polish, has returned from Europe to through devotion to ‘family’, as represented ‘lay siege’ on New York’s most elite group. a little more shoulder and bosom than New York by Mr Sillerton Jackson, and ‘form’, which Such changes cause Mrs Archer, and other was accustomed to seeing. is expressed by Lawrence Lefferts, whose elders of the community, annually to Something about her ‘shocked and authority on the question of pumps versus patent- trace each new crack in New York’s surface, and troubled’ Archer. Archer is very much a leather ‘Oxfords’ had never been disputed. all the strange weeds pushing up between the child of his world: he knows ordered rows of social vegetables. This is a society full of rules and codes and the duty of using two silver-backed brushes with these regulate behaviour and, to some Rule-abiding Safety or Risky his monogram in blue enamel to part his hair, and of never appearing in society without a fl ower extent, feeling. In the opening scene, at Freedom? (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole. the Opera, Wharton shows us that this world is highly codifi ed. Newland arrives Ellen Olenska is, although she does not Importantly, however, he aspires to late, because it know it and does not intend it, part of the something less ‘hidebound’ and shows attack on New York society. In this fi rst his potential as a free thinker when he was ‘not the thing’ to arrive early at the opera. scene she is contrasted with May Welland, is repulsed by society’s response to the It is a sacred tenet that no one speaks during who has just become engaged to Newland. Countess Olenska’s marital woes. In this the Daisy Song and ‘it invariably happened’ May, a true daughter of her society, is way, Wharton sets up the dynamic where that Mrs Julius Beaufort holds her annual dressed in white, blushing, but unknowing, Archer will feel torn between these women. ball on an Opera night, in part so she can at ‘the Daisy Song’, with a May represents rule-abiding safety, (a ‘emphasise her complete superiority to modest tulle tucker fastened with a single choice authorised by his world), while Ellen household cares’. This is truly a world that gardenia stands for integrity of self and freedom runs on very well-established tracks, but from rules. Although Ellen’s actions are shielding ‘the slope of her young breast’, Wharton also shows that it is a world that is unconventional, they are not done for lilies-of-the-valley on her knee. Her cousin, not entirely free from attack by the outside unconventionality’s sake. world; the ‘new people’ whom New York on the other hand, is in a

38 emagazine April 2020 Stasis and Change ‘I couldn’t have my happiness made out of a A Vanished World wrong – an unfairness – to somebody else.’ New York’s initial reception of Ellen Olenska When she wrote The Age of Innocence, This principle has its effect on Ellen too; is mixed. Wharton creates a sense of the Wharton was writing about a world which her time in New York and her relationship ripple of shock and distaste that piques had already vanished. The world of The with Newland leads her to see that the the Club box at the opera, with Sillerton Age of Innocence is, as many critics note, value of New York life, what makes its way Jackson and Lawrence Lefferts passing the world of her childhood, which she of conducing itself ‘so fi ne and sensitive binoculars between them and assessing the approaches with a curious blend of irony and delicate’, is that it promotes the sight of ‘poor Ellen’ whose reputation has and nostalgia. At the novel’s end, three idea that it is been sullied by an unfortunate European decades after the fi rst scene at the Opera, marriage and an escape from it thanks worthwhile to have given up, to have missed we see that New York has changed and, to her husband’s secretary. However, no things, so that others may be saved from although certain codes are consistent matter how racy and therefore undesirable disillusionment and misery. (the ‘Grace Church wedding’ remained to New York society the Countess may be, In other words, she has been taught the an unchanged institution), this is a world a rejection of her would be a rejection of lesson of self-sacrifi ce. The tragedy for Ellen of greater opportunity. It is possible for one of their own because she is indubitably and Newland is that, as he has taught her Newland to ‘roll his sleeves up and get part of New York. When an invitation from the virtue of acting communally, she has down into the muck’ through active the Lovell Mingotts ‘to meet the Countess inspired him with ideas of freedom and service in the State Assembly, his sons have Oenska’ is unanimously declined, Mrs liberty and made him see that, wider employment opportunities and his Archer invokes not only an established rule daughter, Mary, who is ‘We’re a damnably dull. We’ve no character, no ‘As long as a member of a well-known family is colour, no variety.’ no less conventional, and no more intelligent backed up by that family it should be considered [than her mother], led a larger life and held more – fi nal’ In Boston they reach a peaceful tolerant views. understanding, in part because he knows but also the Van Der Luydens. The Van Der As Wharton notes, referring to the Luydens exist at the apex of the ‘small and he should never again feel quite alone literal and fi gurative effects of corsetry, slippery pyramid’ of old New York society. but, more signifi cantly because they reach May’s ‘life had been as closely girt as her They are the ‘arbiters of fashion, the Court fi gure’. This seems a world less concerned the perfect balance […] between their loyalty to of last Appeal’ and Wharton presents them with rules, and better for it. As for the others and their honesty to themselves. as both ‘sovereign’ and dynamic between the individual and society, we see Newland is concerned with faded [...] rather gruesomely preserved in the This equilibrium is based on her ‘European’ airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable instinct towards freedom (their honesty to community, living his life ‘decently’ and existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for one another) and his ‘American’ principle philanthropically. However, what we may years a rosy life-in-death. of loyalty to others even to the point of feel is that only a world as tight-knit as self-sacrifi ce. old New York as presented in the body of As they stand for ‘Society’, Wharton’s the novel can exact from its members a presentation suggests that, although they Cast Out from the Tribe commitment to society which is so powerful are principled and wield their power that it suppresses personal desire. moderately, they, and by extension old New This moment does not endure and York over which they rule, is static, frozen. circumstances mean that, with Ellen a Kate Life teaches English at Bruton School. By not allowing change and evolution to physical presence in his life following breathe life into either themselves or this Catherine Manson Mingott’s stroke, the world, both it and they have become relics. balance goes perilously out of kilter.

Ellen comes to pose a risk to the Archer Self-sacrifi ce for the family, as those around Newland suspect Communal Good – unbeknown to him – that they are emag web archive conducting an affair. Hence she is ejected So, Wharton presents an old New York at from old New York. Too late, he recognises • Rob Worrall: Edith Wharton and the a point of change, a New York which is that his wife’s fi rst big dinner to bid farewell Critical Loss of Innocence, emagazine under attack, but the rules of this world to Ellen really functions as 42, December 2008 still exert control over the characters in the the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be • Malcolm Hebron: In the Beginning – novel, so that, in the end, Newland gives eliminated from the tribe. The Opening of The Age of Innocence, up ‘the thing [he] most wanted’, sacrifi ces emagazine 77, September 2017 ‘the fl ower of life’ to it. The reason for this May, in telling her cousin before she ‘was • Georgina Quach: Survival of is partly that Newland is of this world but really sure’, that she is pregnant, has played the Fittest – Edith Wharton’s more signifi cantly because the fundamental her trump card: family. As such, the most The Age of Innocence, emagazine principle of his world is a decent one. In powerful of the two New York deities 82, December 2018 the garden of the Spanish Mission in St prevails and it is notable that the principle Augustine, May Welland is presented at invoked is one that places value on acting her most noble, and this nobility is part for others over acting for oneself. of the code of conduct of old New York. emagClips Suspecting there is another woman in her fi ancé’s life, she is prepared to sacrifi ce her • Nicolas Tredell on American Literature own feelings because

April 2020 emagazine 39 The Integrity of the Duchess of Malfi

Sean McEvoy draws on ideas current at the time when Webster was writing to call into question a reading of the play that is highly critical of the Duchess and deeply misogynistic about women. He argues that, more than anything, it is her society that Webster blames.

40 emagazine April 2020 , d. Dominic Dromgoole, Sam Wanamaker Sam Wanamaker , d. Dominic Dromgoole, Gemma Arterton as the Duchess of Malfi as the Duchess Gemma Arterton Photo / Alamy Stock Lewis Geraint Theatre; Playhouse, Globe

‘The view of The Duchess of Malfi as a is a young aristocratic widow in renaissance It’s a warm, charming scene which makes cautionary tale about widows, gluttony and Italy. She falls for her middle-class steward, Ferdinand’s subsequent interruption all lust’, wrote the critic Linda Woodbridge Antonio, but must keep their marriage the more harsh, but it does convey the in 2002, ‘founders’ upon ‘a stubborn fact: secret from her malign and murderous two contemporary Protestant ‘companionate’ Webster cast this sexy, desiring widow as brothers, her twin Duke Ferdinand and her ideal of a husband and a wife equally a tragic hero.’ It’s much too easy – and elder brother the Cardinal. But through the worthy of salvation in the sight of God, simplistically reductive – constantly to fi nd machinations of the spy Bosola the secret equal in their respect for each other and misogynistic intentions in seventeenth- marriage is eventually discovered and the seeing a contented sexual relationship as century playwrights. It’s a mistake to expect Duchess is murdered. Antonio meets his a gift from God, not as a sinful activity them always to write dramas which keep end in the multiple pile-up of corpses that to be restrained. women in their place (‘a cautionary tale’), conventionally concluded revenge tragedies, and which set out to show the inherent and the Duchess’s young son is left to rule Love – In Body and Soul sinfulness of women and their lustful the dukedom at the play’s close. It’s also an example of the contemporary nature. Early modern tragedy is rarely view of the human being as a body so reactionary. Even if Antonio is initially shy when the Duchess approaches him, his marriage to integrated with a soul, with the true The Idea of ‘Companionate’ the Duchess is shown to be emotionally expression of love requiring the involvement of both (‘else a great prince in Marriage close, and to be happy and sexually fulfi lled despite the difference in social rank. The prison lies’, as Webster’s contemporary John It’s a view of women which fl ies in the face, fi rst part of Act 3 Scene 2 shows the married Donne put it in his poem ‘The Ecstasy’). The for instance, of the idea of ‘companionate’ couple jesting about sex with Cariola, play makes much of the sexy physicality marriage which was held at the time by the Duchess’s maid (‘Alas, what pleasure of the Duchess’s body as a positive force, urban Protestants such as John Webster, can two lovers fi nd in sleep?’, 3.2.10), in the teeth of the misogynistic rhetoric of the author of The Duchess of Malfi (probably and praising married love with examples the play’s villains, Ferdinand and Bosola. fi rst staged in 1613-14). Webster’s heroine from mythology and poetry (3.2.27-31). Woodbridge points out that the play begins with the Duchess telling Antonio that

April 2020 emagazine 41 she is ‘fl esh and blood’ (1.1.453), and her hands. Her protestation at this moment doomed mistress Julia surprisingly woos actions bear this out. She gives birth to four that ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’ (4.2.137) Bosola (5.2) echoes clumsily both the children, suffers from morning sickness, is powerful in performance, and she shows scene when Antonio enters with a pistol ‘pukes’, ‘waxes fat i’ th’ fl ank’ (2.1.67-9), not only a courageous stoicism which many after Ferdinand has surprised the Duchess ‘vulturously’ devours apricots (2.1.138, male heroes of revenge tragedy – such as (3.2.139), and the Duchess’s own wooing of 2.2.2), screams during childbirth (2.3.1), Shakespeare’s Hamlet – can only dream of Antonio (1.2.271ff.) sprawls all over the bed when she sleeps (Hamlet, 3.2.63-73), but she forgives her (3.2.13), worries about grey hairs (3.2.58), killers, Christ-like (4.2.200), and movingly Integrity – Wholeness and and enjoys sex (3.2.10). thinks of her children’s needs to the very Morality last (4.2.196-8). Her dying speech expresses Bosola’s View – And How it a simple political metaphor that exposes the The sententia (memorable saying) which Changes excesses of Bosola’s baroque conceits: ends the play proclaims that ‘integrity of life is fame’s [good reputation’s] best heaven gates are not so highly arched It is strange that some critics have chosen friend’ (5.5.118), which, as Woodbridge As princes’ palaces; they that enter there to fi nd Webster’s depiction of the Duchess’s points out, can apply both to the Duchess’s Must go upon their knees. (Kneels [to pray].) healthy and fertile physicality as tinged Act 4 Scene 2 l. 224-6 moral integrity but also to her integrity with disgust, taking, it seems, the side of the of body and soul, the physical and the disturbed and misogynistic Bosola in their In the face of her virtuous heroism Bosola spiritual combined fully in one being. attitude to the play’s heroine. Bosola may sees the reality of his own damnation What’s remarkable about her disturbed twin be entertaining in his adolescent-like desire (4.2.345-8) and vows to the audience that brother is his association with unintegrated to shock with the provocative language he will avenge her: body parts. The obvious example is the he uses about women’s bodies. Here he is severed hand which he uses to frighten somewhat I will speedily enact ridiculing a woman who tried to improve her, claiming it to be Antonio’s (4.1.42-4). Worth my dejection. her appearance after suffering smallpox: But the way he thinks about his sister’s Act 4 Scene 2 l. 363-4 imagined lovers reduces them and her to before she looked like a nutmeg grater, after she a series of body parts: the strong thighs resembled an abortive hedgehog The act ends on a half-line and without a of a bargeman (2.5.43), the arms of a Act 2 Scene 1 l. 33-4 rhyme: the scene’s action is incomplete, for hammer-wielder (2.5.43-4) or even ‘her the Duchess has not gone from the play. own privy lodgings’ (2.5.45). Women, he But his striking imagery, often bringing to Like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, after lubriciously claims, bear startlingly left-fi eld comparisons, only her murder she continues to dominate ever serves to express old clichés, cynicism it. The echo which Antonio hears in the like that part which … dressed up as wisdom. Here he’s drawing ‘ruin of an ancient abbey’ (5.3.2) is clearly Hath ne’er a bone in it. on the silly ancient misogynist trope that her voice (5.3.26) offering advice and Act 1 Scene 2 l. 251-2 regards all use of cosmetics by women as a warning. In modern productions, such deliberate falsehood, since it is disguising as that at the indoor Sam Wanamaker He even sees his relationship with his what God has created – as if men never visit Theatre at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2014, sister as the presence of part of him – his the barber or wear clothes. the actor playing the Duchess (in this case blood – being in her body (4.1.119-20). Gemma Arterton) returned to the stage in He also delights in the waxwork show of What cures Bosola of his cynicism is the this scene. The rest of the play’s action is corpses which he puts on to terrify her into heroism and humanity which the Duchess very much in the shadow of the fi rst four thinking her husband and children are dead shows in the face of her psychological acts which the Duchess has dominated. (4.1.53-4, s.d.): torture and imminent execution at his Even the scene where the Cardinal’s

42 emagazine April 2020 emag web archive

• Lucy Webster: Bosola – Villain, Victim or Symbol of his Age? emagazine 16, April 2002 • Sarah Stokes: Webster’s Theatrical Imagination – The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, emagazine 22, December 2003 • Nigel Wheale: Webster’s Women – The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, emagazine 38, December 2007 • Peter Morrison: A Radical Re-telling of History – The Duchess of Malfi , emagazine 73, September 2016 • Nigel Wheale: The Italian Job – Jacobean Obsessions in The Duchess of Malfi ,emagazine 70, December 2015 • Jeannette Weatherall: The Duchess of Malfi – A Box Offi ce Hit, emagazine 54, December 2011 , d. Dominic Dromgoole, Sam Wanamaker Sam Wanamaker , d. Dominic Dromgoole,

emagClips

• Lisa Hopkins on Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedy Gemma Arterton as the Duchess of Malfi as the Duchess Gemma Arterton Photo / Alamy Stock Bettina Strenske Theatre; Playhouse, Globe

Excellent! […] she takes them Society’s Flaws, Not Those of values: what is characteristic about early For true substantial bodies. the Duchess modern tragedy is the way it so often points Act 4 Scene 1 l. 109, 112-3 away from the tragic protagonist to the The tragedy of The Duchess of Malfi is circumstances which produce the tragedy. He enjoys the art which produces the yet another clear statement of the In the publicity video for the production appearance of the body without a soul. inappropriateness of applying Aristotle’s of the play at London’s Almeida Theatre at Integrity of body and integrity of the ideas about tragedy to early modern plays. time of writing, Lydia Wilson, who plays human being are as far from his desires and The Duchess lacks the moral weakness the Duchess, says the play is about the thinking as moral integrity, and Ferdinand’s which the Greek philosopher had claimed ‘tangled web woven trying to control female strange lycanthropy – characteristically he the tragic protagonist must possess. She is sexuality’. Webster, in the characteristic is seen near a churchyard holding a severed brave, intelligent and vivacious, embracing mode of early modern tragedy, works to leg (5.2.14-15) – marks his total inability to physical love and desire in a fulfi lled and help us see how that web can be untangled. become an integrated human: he descends healthy way. She loves, lives and thinks into the bestial, thinking himself a ‘broken- with both body and soul. Her tragedy is the Sean McEvoy teaches at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. winded’ horse (5.5.63). fault of those who run the society around her and assert its distorted and incoherent

April 2020 emagazine 43 Letting Texts Talk

Developing an Analytical Mindset In this article, Nikolai Luck uses a perfume advert from the early twentieth century to demonstrate how linguistic analysis and an attentiveness to what is both strange and familiar in a text can lead to a sophisticated reading of a popular genre.

In ‘Working with a Text – From Initial First Impressions however, this image might have held Impressions to Tools for Analysis’ (emagazine some kind of exotic appeal (even now, 80, April 2018), Marcello Giovanelli An initial appraisal prompted by perfume ads draw on the unfamiliar introduced the concept of ‘unmotivated unmotivated looking engages with some and foreign as mysterious and alluring looking’, an open-minded and exploratory of the text’s defi ning features and provides qualities). It would probably have been approach to textual analysis that allows a sound basis for further exploration. So, in keeping too with colonial ideas of a texts to ‘talk’ to you by encouraging you what is immediately noticeable about this ‘natural’ order in which Britain reigned to think about what really stands out as ad from 1918? Perhaps the following: supreme over its imperial possessions. As worthy of comment. This method rewards • The image: a languorous white female such, it seeks to compliment the status of authentic curiosity about what texts might (representative of the ‘West’), rose in its British customer base and persuade its reveal about their sociocultural origins. hand, stands amidst fl owers, gazing target audience that the perfume itself is In this article, I want to look at a perfume down at the kneeling fi gure of a native to be regarded as an offering from East to advertisement from the early twentieth Ceylonese (representative of the ‘East’), West, one which will confer an ‘Eastern’ century from J. Grossmith & Son, a rose in hair, offering an immense bottle mystique on any Western consumer London-based perfume distillery. It was of perfume, not quite able to meet the who wants it. Just as Britain has taken published in the Illustrated London News. It’s other woman’s gaze. The image surely possession of Ceylon, British women can from a time, October 1918, when ‘the Great strikes a twenty-fi rst-century reader as take possession of its perfume. War’ was coming to an end and Britain’s positing a highly troubling notion of racial • The name of the product: ‘Wana-Ranee – Empire was at its height, controlling a vast and cultural difference; the European The Perfume of Ceylon’. The hyphenated global territory which included India and woman is represented as secure and proper noun ‘Wana-Ranee’ is an exotic- Ceylon (Sri Lanka was known as Ceylon serene in her superiority and the Asian sounding name and the perfume is throughout its time as a colony of the woman is represented as uncomplainingly designated ‘The Perfume of Ceylon’. British Empire between 1815 and 1948). subordinate and deferential. In 1918 Product here is synonymous with place –

44 emagazine April 2020 Wana- Ranee perfume – advertisement (1918. Made by J. Gorssmith & Son, London, UK. Bookman, Special Xmas Number 1918, Hodder & Stoughton. Back cover). Lebrecht History / Bridgeman Images April 2020 emagazine

45

that defi nite article ‘the’ is emphatic in its is in this ad, is a form of semantic change declaration that Wana-Ranee is the only known as narrowing or specialisation, perfume from Ceylon worth using. where a word narrows its meaning. • The emboldened text: ‘A Dream of Oriental Fragrance’. The noun phrase Genre Conventions pulls off the classic advertising alliance Identifying the conventions typical of the abstract promise (‘Dream’) with of the advertising genre can take the the concrete product (‘Fragrance’). analysis further: The descriptive adjective ‘Oriental’ foregrounds the exoticism of the perfume. • The text uses an image. Oriental is an oft-used catch-all term for • Minimal language aims for maximum anything vaguely Eastern, and is now impact – it’s always worth considering sometimes enclosed in speech marks what can be achieved by concise language to acknowledge its problematically when looking at adverts. overgeneralising nature. • The text fl atters its potential audience • The manufacturer’s stamp: ‘J. Grossmith through noun phrases which represent & Son – Distillers of Perfumes – Newgate the consumer in a positive light: ‘Lovers St. London’. The resolutely English of rare perfumes’ ‘the woman of taste’. brand J. Grossmith & Son prominently • The text personifi es the product announce the perfume’s provenance as through metaphor: ‘It has a personality much more local to a British audience entirely its own…’. than dreams of the far-fl ung Indian isle • The text uses positive promotional lexis of Ceylon would suggest – the agent from a range of word classes, including: noun ‘Distillers’ tells us that the product agent noun ‘Lovers’, abstract noun is actually manufactured in the Empire’s ‘Dream’, dynamic verb ‘welcome’, capital city, London. emotive adjective ‘exquisite’, degree Texts in Time adverb ‘perfectly’. • The text adheres to a standard This is a strange perfume ad by today’s advertising discourse structure, listing standards. It has clearly been shaped by its information about how much the specifi c historical moment. This estranging product costs and where it can be bought aspect of the text invites us to consider after the persuasive part of the text the value and purpose of a diachronic has done its work. approach to language study. (Diachronic Thinking about Structures and is looking at the historical development of language.) In English Historical Patterns Pragmatics (2013), Andreas H. Jucker and A closer consideration of the grammatical Irma Taavitsainen make the following structure of some of the language in the observation about the value of comparative ad can also reveal how the product is linguistic study across time: represented and how meaning is being Genres are cultural products conditioned by communicated. The opening simple their time and social setting and show different sentence pivots around the verb ‘welcome’. realisations in different periods […] By comparing The fl attery of the noun phrase that opens texts of a specifi c genre at different points of time the fi rst sentence ‘Lovers of rare perfume’ we can distinguish what is conventional and what coordinates with the image’s depiction is new and innovative at any point in time. of a ‘woman of taste’ and the description Aside from the image itself, the other of the perfume itself uses abstract nouns stand-out estranging feature in our ad is the ‘charm’ and ‘character’. The following noun ‘toilet’ in the noun phrase ‘a perfectly sentence is divided between two main harmonious toilet’, used here to refer to the clauses: a personifying metaphor for the process of attending to one’s appearance. perfume itself (‘It has a personality entirely This word has become taboo in modern its own’) and a guarantee of quality (‘and marketing of cosmetic products because is delightfully refreshing and wonderfully of its inescapable association with bodily lasting’). The pattern of adverb-adjective functions. You can pretty much guarantee combinations across the ad (‘distinctly that ‘toilet’ won’t be appearing on any Eastern’ and ‘delightfully refreshing’, for twenty-fi rst-century ads for perfume, high- example) makes use of the -ly suffi x on the end or otherwise. Likewise, the French ‘Eau adverbs and perhaps helps to exaggerate de Toilette’ seems to have been supplanted the quality of each of the adjectives being by ‘Eau de Parfum’ in the UK. ‘Toilet’ as modifi ed. The choice of adverbs might also taboo in modern cosmetic marketing, no reveal a peculiarly old-fashioned English longer commonly used now in the sense it

46 emagazine April 2020 register here: a point that might be explored Due to its propensity for short, high- if looking at more recent ads. impact copy, advertising is a genre which emag web archive can provide a great data set for language Speech Act Theory students. Try exploring a brand such as • Kirsten Taylor: Toy Shop Sexism – The Lush online (www.uk.lush.com) to see how Language of Children’s Advertising, It is to be expected that a brand will a twenty-fi rst-century cosmetic company emagazine 67, February 2015 go out of its way to use compliments uses language to market its products. At • Dan Clayton: Hello... Can You because – hey, we’re worth it! It keeps this particular sociocultural juncture, when Help Me? Analysing an NSPCC established customers loyal and attracts acute awareness of potential environmental Advertising Campaign, emagazine new ones. But why is this strategy so catastrophe and perceptive critiques of 63, February 2013 seemingly effective, and therefore such a the ravages of unfettered consumerism • Marcello Giovanelli: Working with a typical feature of advertising discourse? infl uence contemporary discourse, you’ll Text – From Initial Impressions to Tools J.L. Austin’s Speech Act Theory, a key gain an insight into changing social attitudes for Analysis, emagazine 80, April 2018 concept in Conversation Analysis, can and fi nd plenty of material on which to • David Hyatt: Beneath the Surface add another dimension to your ability to hone your analytical skills. of Language – The Critical really think about what is actually going Analysis of Discourse, emagazine on when a text is nice to its audience. Nikolai Luck teaches English at Colchester 42, December 2008 Applying the theory to just that concluding Sixth Form College. • Maria Cairney: A Linguistic Analysis compliment is revealing. In a three-stage of Magazine Problem Pages, emagazine formulation, Austin characterises utterances 50, December 2010 as consisting of • Graeme Trousdale: Obama – 1. A locutionary act ‘an act of uttering Interpreting an Election Poster, certain words’ – here, the words ‘the emagazine 46, December 2009 woman of taste’. • Dan Clayton: Critical Discourses for 2. An illocutionary act ‘an act of AQA A Level English Language, doing something’ – here, the act of emagazine 86, December 2019 complimenting. 3. A perlocutionary act ‘the intended or unintended effect on the addressee’ – here, the ultimate intended effect is to emagClips make potential consumers identify with, or aspire to be, ‘the woman of taste’, and • Deborah Cameron on therefore to buy Wana-Ranee. Language and Gender This was, presumably, an effective strategy back in 1918. But consider how a modern reader might respond. As Jucker and Taavitsainen contend,

The speaker may intend his or her utterance to have a specifi c effect on the hearer but the realisation of a specifi c perlocutionary act depends on whether the addressee is actually persuaded, convinced or enlightened.

The image means a modern reader is unlikely to feel complimented by this ad. In a post-imperial twenty-fi rst-century setting, the intended complimentary effect is lost.

Taking It Further

Working with unseen texts is a core aspect of A Level Language courses, and with good reason. It provides you, the student, with a real opportunity to apply the skills of linguistic analysis to a wide range of potential texts from the twenty- fi rst century and from earlier eras, using metalanguage as a basis for active, engaged reading. As such, effi cient, detailed and precise annotation of the text in front of you – to set up an evaluative response which engages with how meanings are made – is a strategy well worth practising.

April 2020 emagazine 47 Let Me Introduce Myself Thinking about How Poems Work emagazine co-editor, Barbara Bleiman, offers an unusual way of starting to get to grips with a poem, using the openings of six of the poems in the Edexcel ‘Poems of the Decade’ anthology to exemplify her approach.

Poems are like people. When you fi rst meet of them. They reveal hidden depths. You Here are the openings of some of the them, they make an instant impression on thought they were going to be brash and poems in the Poems of the Decade anthology. you. The clothes people wear, the way they rude and then it turns out that actually Let’s stick with the metaphor of meeting speak, their mannerisms and gestures tell they’re quite shy. Or their initial quietness someone for the fi rst time and think you a lot about who they are. Poems are reveals a passive-aggressive fury. Likewise about what kind of impression these the same. If you’re good at reading people, with poems. They might be exactly how openings create. you can often sum them up pretty quickly, they fi rst seemed, or they could surprise using all these clues. Sometimes the fi rst you with what they turn out to be like. impressions give way to a different view

ONE TWO THREE My mother was the hanky queen Once she is halfway up there, crouched in her After the fair, I’d still a light heart when hanky meant a thing of cloth, bikini And a heavy purse, he struck so cheap. not paper tissues bought in packs on the porch roof of her family’s house, trembling, And cattle doted on him: in his time from late-night garages and shops, she knows that the one thing she must not do is Mine only dropped heifers, fat as cream. to think Opening One is friendly. She’s reaching Three strikes you immediately as an old- of the narrow window sill, the sharp out to you in an unthreatening way, using drop of the stairwell; fashioned traditional kind of chap, who has a ordinary language (‘hanky’ for instance) way with words. He speaks beautifully, with a and talking about everyday things in simple You meet Opening Two as she’s in mid- lilt to his voice and a way of pulling you into ways –tissues, garages, shops. But One isn’t conversation with someone, telling them a something almost mystical and mysterious. ordinary in a dull and boring way. Even story about someone she knows. Who’s this But underneath that sweet-talking, warm in this fi rst meeting, she has a little touch ‘she’ that Opening Two is talking about? exterior, there may be something else. You’re of humour, in the juxtaposition of ‘hanky’ You’re struggling to catch up. Why’s ‘she’ enjoying his voice but suddenly aware of and ‘queen’ and the lilting rhythms and pat up on the roof in her bikini? Opening an edginess to it. There’s an awful lot of talk rhyme scheme. Is One poking fun at her Two is intriguing and a bit edgy. The story about money, with the juxtaposition between mother, laughing at the gap between her she’s telling is full of anxiety, fraught with the speaker’s ‘heavy purse’ and his ‘light world of ‘cloth’ hankies as compared with uncertainty, even danger. You know that heart’. Saving money seems to make him ours? One seems to like a good anecdote you’re in for a good, well-told story and happy. Is there something a bit troubling in and is going to be good at telling one. can sit back and listen, slightly on the edge the way he casually talks about what seems of your seat and wondering where this to have been the ‘buying’ of a man? Does the is all leading. man who was ‘so cheap’ make him as happy as getting him cheaply has? Perhaps not. Is there a bit of jealousy then creeping in when he says the cattle ‘doted’ on him. This is an opening that leaves you wondering, as much about what happened as about the man who’s telling us about it. At fi rst he seemed so very nice and now you’re left feeling a bit unsure.

48 emagazine April 2020 © Linda Combi, 2020

FOUR FIVE SIX Stowed in the sea to invade Bringing a gun into a house Today the alfresco lash of a diesel-breeze changes it. as we fl ew the kites ratcheting speed into the tide, brunt with – the sand spinning off in ribbons along the gobfuls of surf phlegmed by cushy come-and-go You lay it on the kitchen table, beach tourists prow’d on the cruisers, lording the stretched out like something dead and that gasoline smell from Leuchars gusting ministered waves. Itself: across the golf links; Four’s a bit of a character! Lively, wild, Five seems like a very self-confi dent, certain the tide far out quirky, intriguing. He has his own rather kind of person, at fi rst. She states things and quail-grey in the distance; unusual mannerisms that make him simply and defi nitely. There’s a power and people stand out from the crowd. He’s like a clarity to what she says. You have to sit up jogging, or stopping to watch magician, bringing stuff out of the hat quite and listen. There’s an edge to what she says, as the war planes cambered and turned unexpectedly, a performer holding your yet she’s so deadpan in the way she talks in the morning light – attention and leaving you wondering what about a gun in a domestic setting. You’re Six seems like a really refl ective, thoughtful on earth is going to happen next. He seems wondering whether this tough, matter- person. He’s not a chatterer. He takes his to like to show off to the crowd but you’re of-fact tone is what she’s really like. Is she time to explain and describe and you pause struggling to keep up, straining to catch really as cool as she at fi rst appears? to listen, enjoying the scene he’s creating what he’s saying. You’re impressed and a for you. He’s good at drawing you in to his little dazed. You think about his words long world but is he going anywhere with his after they’ve left his lips. detailed description? You’re just thinking, ‘Is he going to be one of those people who goes on and on telling you about something that happened to him that means a lot to him but not much to anyone else’, when he throws in the war planes. And then you wonder. Is there more to him than you fi rst thought?

April 2020 emagazine 49 Revising Your First She is relishing what the gun has brought emag web archive Impressions – The Gun – the killing, the fridge full of creatures, the cooking of them, the ‘feast’. If we were Reading beyond these openings and still in any doubts, the fi nal metaphor of • Barbara Bleiman: Rambling Around exploring each poem in its entirety, you the King of Death arriving with his mouth – Preparing for the Exam Task might start to see the poem very differently ‘sprouting golden crocuses’ seems to me to for Poems of the Decade, emagazine but that fi rst impression is worth holding clarify things. The gun, the deaths it brings, 82, December 2018 onto. Often, just as with people, your initial her role in it are not something that she • Malcolm Hebron: What Are Poems gut reaction is an important part of how rejects or abhors; they bring excitement About? What Do They Do For Us? you get to know them. and pleasure in a way that is surprising and emagazine 85, September 2019 shocking. The opening of the poem was • Jeremy Noel-Tod: Rope-skipping So, for instance, in reading and re-reading leading us somewhere else; the ending is and Running – How to Think and the whole of Vicki Feaver’s ‘The Gun’, a wonderful, thrilling questioning of easy, Talk about Poetic Form, emagazine my fi rst impression of cool, detached and crude ideas and moral judgements and the 75, February 2017 deadpan is borne out for much of the whole thing has been achieved without any poem. The gun is described in unemotional, trumpeted messages or loud proclamations. factual terms – what it looks like on the We come away with a much more complex table, as part of a domestic scene. In the set of thoughts and feelings than we emagClips second verse, practising using it is conveyed started out with. with equally neutral clarity and detail. The • Jeremy Noel-Tod on poetry description of the rabbit being ‘shot/clean You might want to look at one of the through the head’ is a bit shocking for its other poem openings explored in this lack of emotional freight. The voice of the article and do the same as I have with ‘The poem remains deadpan. And then, as the Gun’, in other words consider whether fridge fi lls with the cadavers of birds and the impressions created by the openings animals, still there is nothing to express any are sustained in the rest of the poem. And emotion but something else has crept in. if you found the idea of comparing fi rst There is a hint of disgust under the surface impressions of a poem with fi rst impressions in the choice of words, ‘reek’ and ‘trample’ of a person, perhaps you might like to try and ‘entrails’ which is almost a relief, but it with other kinds of comparisons? For then swiftly followed by something far instance, if you had to categorise all the more shocking. When feelings surface they poems in the Poems of the Decade collection are ones not of horror but of pleasure – ‘ a as types of building (terraced house, bedsit, spring in your step’, eyes that ‘gleam’ and shared fl at, apartment block, country house, the association of this killing with sex. skyscraper and so on), how would you do it and why? Or, how about comparing Now, that cool opening seems more cold poems with animals (a mouse, an elephant, and unfeeling than simply neutral and a tiger, a snake?). Which of these would detached. The narrator is shocking us with you choose for ‘The Gun’ and the other the discovery that the gun and the killing openings in this article? brings her excitement and pleasure. The ‘change’ in that fi rst line is not one that we Barbara Bleiman is a Consultant at the English and Media Centre and co-editor of emagazine. might have expected. The line, standing on its own, ‘A gun brings a house alive’ once again a strong, simple statement, gives us a sudden start. It is unexpected. Suddenly, death is counterposed with life and our certainties are turned on their heads. How can a gun and death bring life? In the fi nal stanza, with the fi rst mention of ‘I’, in ‘I join in’, and the use of the word ‘excited’, any uncertainties we had are banished.

50 emagazine April 2020 Narrative Structure and Point of View in Nineteen Eighty-Four

It’s easy to think of Orwell’s novel as a simple third-person narrative but, as Rebecca Loxton reveals, there is a lot more complexity to Orwell’s use of voice and point of view, with changes that gradually edge us away from the close identifi cation with Winston and his perspective.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is narrative true identity as a member of the Thought When Winston comes to write his diary, he predominantly from a third-person, limited Police is revealed. realises he isn’t sure, because point of view. Throughout the majority of it was never possible nowadays to pin down any the novel the reader experiences events Limited Access to Other date within a year or two. from Winston’s perspective and thus shares Viewpoints his fears, his hopes, and his doubts about So the very fi rst line he writes may be the reliability of information transmitted The limitations of this close third-person untrue. Orwell is telling the reader early on by the ruling Party, IngSoc. For example, narration means the reader is not granted that this is a book in which you can trust Winston spends much of the early part of access to the point of view of other nobody and nothing, not even the calendar. the novel considering the extent of the characters. For example, beyond what Party’s power. He muses that: she reveals to us in speech or gesture, the The effect of (almost) being in Winston’s reader never fi nds out what is going on head and trying to grope with him for the How often, or on what system, the Thought Police in Julia’s head and knows no more than truth within the haze of obfuscation is one plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. Winston about whether Julia can be trusted of constant bewilderment; form mirrors It was even conceivable that they watched content as the reader experiences through everybody all the time. before their fi rst meeting. The reader shares Winston’s rhetorical questions: Winston the effect on one’s sanity of life The reader shares Winston’s perplexity and in a totalitarian state. Were the third- Why was she watching him? Why did she keep knows only as much as he suspects about person narration omniscient rather than following him about? the Party’s ability to control its citizens. Part I, Chapter V limited, such a destabilising effect would not be created. Similarly, when Winston is comforted by The choice of close third-person narration the acquaintanceship he has struck with Mr reinforces the thematic concerns of the A Process of Narrative Charrington the reader too feels reassured novel: Nineteen Eighty-Four is about a world Detachment by this apparent human connection: of paranoia, the doubting of one’s own However, while the reader predominantly Privacy, he [Mr Charrington] said, was a very sanity, the suspicion of one’s colleagues, and views events through Winston’s eyes, a valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place where the limited third-person narration allows process of narrative detachment gradually they could be alone occasionally. And when they the reader to doubt, wonder, and question takes place over the course of the novel as had such a place, it was only common courtesy along with Winston. Both Winston and the in anyone else who knew of it to keep his the reader begins to grasp the stark reality reader doubt even the most fundamental knowledge to himself. of Winston’s slow mental disintegration, of facts, as Dorian Lynskey, the author of Part II, Chapter IV which Winston himself is only fl eetingly The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George aware. For example, in the fi nal section Orwell’s 1984, points out, in reference to the The reader does not foresee the plot twist at of the novel, the reader is unequivocally fact that neither Winston nor, therefore, the end of this section and is just as shocked informed as to how many fi ngers O’Brien the reader, know for certain whether the as Winston when friendly Mr Charrington’s year even is 1984:

April 2020 emagazine 51 52 emagazine April2020

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1956); AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo is holding up but Winston’s point of his crime of going to visit the prostitute in According to Margaret Atwood1, who used view is shaky: hasty, jerky sentences, all too aware he is a similar structure in her dystopian novel committing another crime in the process. It The Handmaid’s Tale, this narrative shift O’Brien held up the fi ngers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed. ‘There are fi ve fi ngers there. is far more effective for the diary to appear must also signify a change in the established Do you see fi ve fi ngers?’ ‘Yes’. And he did see in the novel word-for-word rather than political order and the novel ends on a them, for a fl eeting instant, before the scenery of for the third-person narration to recount note of optimism. Our previous guide to his mind changed. He saw fi ve fi ngers, and there Winston’s diary second-hand. The fi rst- the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four has been was no deformity. person narration is hesitant, broken. Four brainwashed out of existence, but a new Part III: Chapter II times Winston breaks off mid-sentence narrator has stepped in to take Winston’s when writing: ‘I -’ ‘She -’ ‘When I saw her place, implying that while the protagonist Instead of sharing Winston’s uncertainty in the light -’ ‘I -’ This is ostensibly due to may not have survived, hope has. about the world around him, the reader, Winston’s hesitation to face his crimes and from his position of relative certainty, now commit them to paper but also symbolises Rebecca Loxton teaches English Literature at the begins to pity him. Sections Internationales de Sèvres near Paris. the steady destruction of the self, of the Winston’s feelings of love for O’Brien also confi dence in one’s own expression. The exemplify this divergence of perspective third-person must step back in and take between reader and protagonist. In Part 2 over because Winston’s fear has chipped Chapter VIII, Winston submits to O’Brien’s away at his ability to fully narrate his own emag web archive power while the reader feels only revulsion: story. The duality of the narrative structure at this point therefore provides an insight A wave of admiration, almost of worship, fl owed into the effect of Big Brother on the minds • Lucy Webster: Touching Wood – out from Winston towards O’Brien. of even its most refl ective citizens. Reading Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2003, Part 2, Chapter VIII emagazine 21, September 2003 The detached narration at this point – not Goldstein’s Book and the • Will Howell: Dystopia and the quite third-person limited point of view nor Appendix Language of Nineteen Eighty- omniscient – means the reader observes Four, emagplus for emagazine rather than experiences Winston’s grip on Even when the novel is narrated in the 74, December 2016 objective reality slipping away. third person. it is not always from Winston’s • Phillip Smithers: Dystopian Dust – point of view. ‘The Theory and Practice of A Mote to Trouble the Mind’s Eye Furthermore, this narrative gap between Oligarchical Collectivism’ is an ostensibly (1984), emagazine 83, February 2019 the reader’s understanding and Winston’s factual account about the history and inner • Barbara Bleiman: What’s the Problem increasingly limited perception of events is workings of the Party, purportedly written With Nineteen Eighty-Four?, emagplus widened for any re-readers of the novel, as by Emmanuel Goldstein. For almost a for emagazine 75, February 2017 Brigid Rooney notes in her paper ‘Narrative whole chapter (Part II, Chapter IX), Orwell • Mike Peters: Trauma and Emotion – Viewpoint and the Representation of adopts the third-person omniscient point of Nineteen Eighty-Four as a Psychological Power’. By the end of the novel, we know view to transmit the information contained Novel, emagazine 80, April 2018 Julia to be trustworthy and O’Brien to be a in Goldstein’s book. The following is a • Charlotte Woolley: A Message- sinister fi gure. As Rooney points out: typical example: transmission System – Documents in Dystopian Fiction, emagazine The reader’s awareness that Winston is failing The splitting-up of the world into three great correctly to interpret, understand, or anticipate super-states was an event which could be and 85, September 2019 events produces a gap between what the reader indeed was foreseen before the middle of the • Mark Roberts: Ordinary, Average, knows and what Winston knows. Equipped with twentieth century. Cowardly? The Everyman Archetype the knowledge of the Party’s trap, the reader in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit Due to the apparently authoritative third- occupies a double position, both identifying with 451, The Handmaid’s Tale, emagazine person omniscient narration, Winston (and Winston (by re-experiencing his point of view) and 78, December 2017 by extension the reader) is led to believe the simultaneously observing from an ironic point the • Chris Joyce: Casting Shadows book is an objective account casting light limits of Winston’s view. Over Our Future – The Dystopian on the mysterious world of IngSoc (rather Novel, emagplus for emagazine First-person Shift – Winston’s than a fabricated account by a committee of 46, December 2009 Diary Inner Party members). • Robert Kidd: Dystopia – An Overview, It is important to remember that Nineteen emagazine 60, April 2013 The novel’s Appendix, ‘The Principles of Eighty-Four is not a novel narrated entirely Newspeak’, in which some of the workings in the third-person from Winston’s point of the presumably defunct society of IngSoc of view. In Part 1 Chapter VI, there is an are explained, is also recounted by an instance of dual narrative when the third- emagClips objective, third-person omniscient narrator. person narrator gives way to the fi rst as The very fact that an omniscient, third- Winston writes in his diary. Its effect is person narrator is recounting the world of • David Dwan on Nineteen Eighty-Four not so much to give us greater insight into Oceania in the past tense hints that the old Winston’s thought processes, as we already regime has been defeated: have a fairly privileged insight into these due to the limited third-person narration, Newspeak was the offi cial language of Oceania 1. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/q/blog/we-re-all- but to ensure the reader experiences and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of IngSoc, or English Socialism. reading-1984-wrong-according-to-margaret- Winston’s nervous tension as he recounts atwood-1.4105314

April 2020 emagazine 53 Is there more toil? Work and the promise of retirement in The Tempest Readings of this late play often suggest it is Shakespeare’s retirement play, a farewell to the theatre. But Gareth Calway argues that the drama is anything but about withdrawing from work. Hard labour is at the heart of all the characters’ journeys, not least of all Prospero himself.

Generations of previous readers and Hard Work for Everyone – and Ariel’s report of what he has to do to scholars have read lead his master’s would-be murderers astray The Tempest is actually more about work (Act 4 lines 170-83) sounds like a lot of toil. …this rough magic I here abjure… than retirement. The theme is introduced I’ll break my staff, immediately in the frenzied fi rst scene. Bury it certain fathoms in the earth Ariel – The Efforts of Servant Mariners labour against the odds to save And deeper than did ever plummet sound for Master I’ll drown my book the ship, running up and down ladders between the stage’s three levels, shouting This world-managing magician was once and the Epilogue over the rolling cannonballs, drums, the unworldly young scholar-duke Prospero Now my charms are all o’er thrown whistles, fi recrackers, shaken metal foil and (like that other renaissance prince Hamlet) And what strength I have’s my own… other theatrical noises off of the storm, and usurped by his worldly-scheming brother As you from crimes would pardon’d be, berating the interfering lords: Antonio (as Claudio usurped Old Hamlet). Let your indulgence set me free You mar our labour […] you do assist the storm Prospero now rules very differently as both as Shakespeare’s farewell to the theatre. Caliban and Ariel know to their cost. The and when Sebastian objects, the There are objections to this reading. The effort needed to master his magic is an Boatswain replies curtly speech is by a character: a duke returning enormous strain and he passes this strain to his day job. An epilogue was never an Work you then. on to his employees. ‘Is there more toil?’ author statement but a regular trope of asks Ariel having already paid back the full The audience learns Prospero’s art – his year of ‘worthy service’ he owed Prospero theatre companies where the star came mental labour – created the storm and back on stage soliciting applause and for freeing him (‘a spirit too delicate to that it is not only hard work both for him act her earthy and abhorr’d demands’) closure. And Shakespeare hadn’t retired and his ‘servant’ but that it is diffi cult to anyway. He wrote – or at least co-wrote from the imprisonment Sycorax infl icted control. This strain continues throughout. on him. Prospero brutally secures Ariel’s – one more play, Henry VIII, that much- During the Masque underrated contribution to a Tudor soap continued service by threatening him with opera we remain so absorbed in half a Prospero starts suddenly […] after which, to a a repeat of Sycorax’s torment. The work strange, hollow and confused noise, the (nymphs millennium later. Ariel does for Prospero joyously blasting all and reapers) heavily vanish over the cosmos on a level with Jove and

54 emagazine April 2020 Caliban – Service or Slavery?

Caliban’s service is still harder and his dispossession mirrors Prospero’s own fate in Milan.

This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother

he snarls at his usurper-overlord. Prospero confi nes him in a cell and refers to him, among other bitter insults, as his ‘slave’. Unlike Ariel, there is no promise of future emancipation driving his toil – nor the compensation of fulfi lment in the work or any share of satisfaction in the project – only the ‘stripes’ (from a whip) and the tortures (l. 371-2) Prospero infl icts to keep him under control.

In short, these are the labour relations of a slave plantation. The fact that Caliban speaks in verse, unlike the ‘low’ European characters of the play with whom he later revolts, heightens the sense – certainly felt by himself – that he is a noble soul condemned to a life of drudgery by a colonial tyrant, or even a tragic hero trapped in a comedy plot. His evocations of the wonders of the island – even his endless cursing – are some of the fi nest poetry in the play. This noble side is complicated, however, by a brutish one. He is the son of the devil and a foul witch (who was also a colonial tyrant), a monster who rewarded Prospero’s original welcome into his home by attempting to rape his child. The hell Prospero infl icts on him is a being extended beyond their contract. Only punishment for this. some very nasty threats and a promise of a discharge in another two days changes the Caliban’s fi rst speech is to reject Prospero’s mood back to shared enthusiasm for the order for more logs and his ‘burden of work, and Ariel’s tone to ‘Pardon, master’ wood’ is only borne under threat of torture. and a promise to ‘do my spiriting gently.’ He is completely – as Ariel is only partly – alienated from the labour, curses Prospero This ‘service’ is done under savage as he does it (for which he is immediately threat and on the ongoing promise of punished) and if there is any purgatorial emancipation. Ariel has to remind Prospero function in the toil as far as Prospero is of it again at the end of the play and even concerned Caliban certainly does not feel it. then, though this emancipation is part of the play’s curious present-future resolution The young noble Ferdinand hauls the same thousands of logs ‘escaped’ by Merrily merrily shall I live now Caliban – a task more menial than that Under the blossom that hangs on the bough of the Scene 1 mariners, from which the we never actually see it happen. nobles were so hopelessly remote. He like Caliban is Prospero’s ‘slave’ but unlike ‘Thou shalt be free’ (the play’s last word in Caliban he fi nds a physical fulfi lment in a every sense) is still only a future promise mental freedom from it. He is Miranda’s Neptune, as described in the fabulous lines from Prospero and the ‘master’ is still giving ‘patient log man’. 196-206, fulfi ls his free spirit but the lack Ariel work to do (‘calm seas, auspicious of self-determination and ‘liberty’ certainly gales’) in his last speech, Serving Stephano does not. Prospero’s ‘there’s more work…’ My Ariel, chick, Caliban remains a slave even when he changes the shared exhilaration of their That is thy charge. Then to the elements be free. escapes. He simply exchanges Prospero post-storm dialogue to the monthly ‘moody’ for the pettier more ignorant tyrant reminder from Ariel that his ‘pains’ are

April 2020 emagazine 55 Stephano, calling a drunken bully ‘a enlightened alliance of Milan and Naples wondrous man’. While Ferdinand’s free beckons. Alonso repents. The unrepentant mind is on his beloved even while he Antonio and Sebastian are cowed. As in slaves, Caliban’s ‘emancipation’ from all the late romances, Shakespeare’s happy and plot against Prospero enslaves him ending, his ‘brave new world’ is limited and to an oaf whose revolt will peter out in realistic (‘Tis new to thee’) but it prevails. a weakness for a frippery (identifi ed by some as a critique of James I’s court) which During his 12 years of exile Prospero’s long the ‘uncivilised’ (i.e. New World, non- labours have been to this Renaissance end: European) Caliban – the only effective to be a new kind of ruler who appeals to rebel – can see is ‘trash’. Washed onto this the ‘reason’ of his people, unlike mediaeval self-revealing island on a butt of wine, tyrants who assumed mankind was and legless throughout, the work-shy unredeemable. He forgives the corrupt Stephano couldn’t organise a rebellion ‘noble’ Antonio and the ultimately touched in a brewery and would never have the Sebastian (‘A most high miracle’) from a emag web archive application to run the free commonwealth position of strength: he can tell Alonso at he promises Caliban. Working for Prospero any time that they plotted to murder him. • David Kinder: Interpreting The (the play’s protagonist) – even if Caliban He puts the incorrigible European lowlife Tempest Theatrically, emagazine (the antagonist) only grasps the nobility of Stephano fi rmly in his place: 17 September 2002 the project at the end and fi nds some self- thou wouldst be king of the island, sirrah? • Neil Bowen: The Tempest – Authority expression in it (‘How fi ne my master is’) – and Leadership, emagazine He even says of Caliban was at least to work for an effi cient regime. 35, February 2007 This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine. • Angus Ledingham: Interpreting The Fruits of Prospero’s Toil Prospero, 43, February 2009 Prospero’s better-than-revenge project is • Richard Jacobs: Claribel’s Story, Prospero’s 12 years of hard work have complete but his work is only beginning. emagazine 28 April 2005 paid off. He is increasingly triumphant if The darker and more monstrous – but • Malcolm Hebron: Prospero – A (as Miranda notices) growing ever more still potentially noble? – side of humanity Renaissance Magus, emagazine tetchy under the strain: ‘My high charms which Caliban represents says, ‘How fi ne 51, February 2011 work […]/they are now in my power’ my master is […] I will seek to be wise • Roy Booth: Clothing in The Tempest, (Act 3 Scene 3) and ‘Now does my project hereafter’ (greater progress than Prospero emagazine 57, September 2012 gather to a head./My charms crack not;’ made with the old-world Antonio). He may • Sean McEvoy: Interpreting The (Act 5 Scene 1). be, but it will be hard work. Tempest, emagazine 65, September 2014 What is Prospero’s project? Not revenge Gareth Calway is a former Head of English. He • Fran Hill: The Tempest – Our Noble wrote the introduction and study notes for the Selves, Our Baser Instincts, emagazine (that pervasive Jacobean genre). In dealing 2017 Collins Alexander Shakespeare CSEC Edition 73, September 2016 with the ‘three men of sin’ who cheated of The Tempest. him of his kingdom he says • John Hathaway: Ariel in The Tempest – Servitude and Freedom, emagazine the rarer action is 79, February 2018 In virtue than in vengeance. • Adam Alcock: The Tempest and Time, Reason and learning, those great virtues of a emagazine 81, September 2018 Renaissance Prince, prevail. He has them in • Charlotte Unsworth-Hughes: The his power – in his prison – and ‘requires’ his Island Motif in The Tempest, emagazine dukedom of Antonio but also reveals that 87, February 2020 Alonso’s son is not only alive but pledged to his own daughter Miranda. His Renaissance heir Ferdinand has endured Prospero’s purgatorial slavery with patience and emagClips (unlike Caliban) controlled his passion for her until they are married. A new and more • Andrew Dickson on Shakespeare

56 emagazine April 2020 THE LANGUAGE OFTHE LANGUAGE BREHeroes, Whingers and Traitors X A Level English Language teacher, Jacky Glancey, BREGRET looks at the ways in which language and rhetoric REGREXIT framed the public discussions around Brexit BREXITANNIA and helped to cement the divisions between those who saw themselves as being on either BREXITING side of the debate. BREXITESQUE The use of rhetoric is arguably one of the created representations which fi rmly of leaving the EU as preferable to staying, most powerful tools for those involved place individuals within specifi c camps without ever really having to explain why. in politics, and metaphorical language in and feed the concept of an increasingly particular, can help politicians to frame the polarised society. The electorate voted ‘in’ or ‘out’, for all world in ways that galvanise support for kinds of reasons. What these sobriquets their own party, whilst encouraging mistrust In fashioning the proper noun ‘Brexiteers’, (nicknames) do is simplify these reasons of the opposition. those supporting the ‘out’ vote sought to into belonging to one of two tribes and, self-style their decision as bold, heroic and perhaps, unhelpfully, pit one group By looking closely at some of the language exciting, employing the suffi x ‘-eer’, the use against the other. Fine, if your goal choices made in the political discussions of which often denotes a person engaged is competing for political power, less surrounding Brexit, we can begin to in an activity. MP, Michael Gove was fi ne if you are concerned with social unpick how political language is carefully particularly pleased with the effect, stating cohesion and tolerance. constructed to create representations of that it brought to mind, highly complex ideas in ways that position Politicians and political commentators also buccaneer, pioneer, musketeer listeners to accept and support the ideas of represent immensely complex ideas about those vying for political power. and lent a how the UK could change its political, legal sense of panache and romance to the argument. and economic relationships with the EU Brexiteer or Remoaner? in ways that serve political ends by using All very ‘Boy’s Own’. A much less metaphorical language to simplify these In the run up to the public vote in June swashbuckling moniker, ‘Remoaner’ was ideas for the public. When summarising and 2016 on whether the UK should leave or created to goad those who voted ‘remain’. distilling such complexities, metaphorical remain in the European Union, a couple Here a pun based on phonological language can be a useful tool. So, we’ve got of linguistic gaps emerged. What should similarity helps create a representation of a very used to hearing phrases such as, ‘soft we call those who want to remain in whinging dullard, refusing to accept change. Brexit’, ‘hard Brexit’ and ‘the Irish backstop’ the EU and those who want to leave? Both of these lexical choices position the as a kind of short-hand for different options Several coinages followed, and continue text receiver to view the political choice and possible solutions. But in creating to be created, some of which have

April 2020 emagazine 57 BREXHAUSTION BREXTENSION BREXITEER REMOANER BRINO BREMAIN

metaphors a different layer of meaning is Brexit slogan, ‘Take Back Control’ uses linguist, Norman Fairclough considers in often added, a layer that is less factual and the imperative voice to directly address Language and Power (published in 1989). In Xprimarily designed to shapeIT perceptions. the audience and seeks to manufacture it he discusses how it makes perfect sense to And so the same reality of leaving with no the idea in the reader’s mind that control persuade people that what those in power deal can be presented as, ‘a clean break’ has somehow been lost (Of what? How? seek, is also what everyone wants. Creating which positions the audience to view the By whom? Yikes!), whilst simultaneously an illusion of ‘common sense’ surrounding proposed action as a swift and necessary offering a sense of hope that a Conservative your political aims is a smart way to get action that would leave the UK free to government will offer us, the public, the others on board. One tactic that politicians take control of its future or, in contrast, as, chance to regain some infl uence and have and commentators employ is using language ‘crashing out of Europe’ which is designed a say in how the country is governed. In that encourages the reader to establish to create a sense of panic in the audience, contrast, Labour’s ‘For the Many, not the connections between a political concept through the suggestion of something much Few’ uses an oppositional construction, (which may be complex and unfamiliar) more catastrophic and foolhardy. It’s always to suggest that currently, only a tiny and experiences that are more recognisable worth considering who is using these percentage of the electorate are benefi ting to them; something Fairclough describes as metaphors and what these people or the from political decisions, whilst the majority establishing, ‘a ‘fi t’ between text and world’. organisations they speak for have to gain are being ignored and disrespected. Labour We all know the story of the Titanic, the from the perceptions created, before buying then, seems to offer the possibility that this supposedly ‘unsinkable’ cruise liner that into the messages they convey. situation can be reversed through their struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage. governance. And then, there’s the Liberal And because we all know the story, it can Problem Sorted Democrats’ attention grabbing, ‘Bollocks to be used as a kind of shorthand to call to Brexit’, chucking in a slightly taboo term mind notions of avoidable and catastrophic In campaigning for support, political parties and offering the idea that Brexit itself is disasters caused by human vanity and over- create slogans that get plastered on every the problem and life would be so much confi dence. Fairclough termed such existing billboard in sight and fall regularly from better if we just forgot about the whole knowledge ‘member’s resources’. So, the lips of those engaged in speeches and thing and moved on. when Nigel Farage (once leader of UKIP and interviews. And it’s often here that language leader of the Brexit party) commented that, is carefully shaped to create the impression Illusions of Common Sense that the political party wanting our vote Europe is in one hell of a mess – thank goodness has fi gured out what the problem is with The ways in which politicians in the UK we got onto a lifeboat off the Titanic the UK and has come up with an ingenious seek to persuade people to embrace their solution. For example, the Conservative ideologies and political goals is something

58 emagazine April 2020 he conveyed the idea that exiting from in the case of Brexit, is that the ‘enemy’ for political discussions is nothing new, Europe is a lucky escape and we’d be foolish seems to keep shifting. Some politicians but recently politicians and the media as a nation not to take the opportunity. garnered support by representing the EU have been accused of deliberately using Unless the reader actively resists the as the clear enemy, with fi gures like Nigel ‘infl ammatory’ and ‘weaponised’ language implied meanings, leaving the EU seems Farage claiming on the eve of the EU for political gain. When three senior judges the sensible, ‘common sense’ way forward. referendum that, ruled that the British government did not Jonathan Charteris-Black, in Metaphors of have the authority to proceed with the Win or lose this battle, we will win this war, we Brexit – No Cherries on the Cake?, explains that will get this country back. UK’s exit from the EU without approval such an allegory, of parliament, the Daily Mail ran with the But apparently, it’s not just the EU that headline, ‘Enemies of the People’. Tory attains its cautionary purpose by generalising we should be fi ghting. Within Britain, from a specifi c case to other instances that are Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s response to battle language is used between ‘leavers’ claimed to be morally similar. the ruling in parliament was to accuse the and ‘remainers’ and even between those leader of the opposition of a If we choose to pause and dissect the who argued for a ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ Brexit. betrayal of the millions of people who voted allegory, we might conclude that the two When campaigners put forward a piece of leave. situations aren’t necessarily that similar and legislation to prevent Britain leaving the implying that staying within the EU will EU without a deal, Prime Minister Boris And it’s not just on one side of the automatically lead to catastrophe is merely Johnson dubbed it the ‘Surrender Act’ to debate. The TUC’s general secretary one of a range of possible predictions. But represent those whose ideas he disagreed Frances O’Grady recently described Boris often we do not pause and the skill of those with, including members of his own party, Johnson as a ‘coward’ and accused him seeking to sway and lead the voters is in as cowardly and lacking in loyalty to of ‘surrendering’ to the DUP and Brexit choosing the comparisons that will evoke the UK people. Before becoming PM he Party. The narrative constructed through strong intuitive reactions. The job of the complained that, language is one in which the UK is subject linguist is to draw attention to when and to hostile forces which reside within. Who The Bremainers think that they have bombed us how this happens. into submission. these hostile forces are depends on your position on Brexit. Language Is a Loaded Weapon The strength of framing political discussions in this way is that individuals are positioned The question of Brexit has divided the Opposing sides of the Brexit debate to see themselves as either on one side country, divided local communities and regularly compete in how to represent or another, reducing the complexities of even divided families. Language used by the ideas of leaving or staying within politics to a simple us and them. And in politicians and political commentators the EU and in doing so, in linguistic war, we have to choose a side. What’s so would often have us believe that we terms, they create frames or socially powerful about the use of vivid, combative can only belong in one camp and in the shared representations. Framing can be metaphorical language in politics is political ferment created it’s easy to start thought of as encouraging a particular that it allows the writer or speaker to viewing those with different political ideas bias in the way we think about a person, persuasively position the audience to accept as the enemy. If we pause to consider situation or concept. a representation of the world that is in line the language being used to present with a particular political stance using just a political ideas, it becomes more apparent Whilst every person who has opinions on few words. As Chris Hart notices, that these representations are carefully the future relationship of Britain with the constructed to position us exactly where EU is an individual, complete with their metaphors always involve suppression and distortion. And, moreover, readers are not politicians want us. own personal set of beliefs and attitudes, normally aware of when they are processing political language is often engineered to [one]. Jacky Glancey is an English Teacher and create collective identities and ways of Lead Practitioner at Macmillan Academy seeing political issues and encourages It does seem, however, that whilst much in Middlesbrough. individuals to align themselves with one metaphorical language use can go under camp or another. A particularly effective, if the radar, there is a tipping point for what well worn, frame for achieving this political is seen as acceptable language use in the goal is that of ‘war’. What’s interesting public domain. Using ‘war’ as a frame emag web archive

• Margaret Coupe: Neologisms, emagplus for emagazine 62, December 2013 • Kerry Maxwell: Brexit? Schmexit! The Portmanteau That Divided a Nation, emagazine 75, February 2017 • Michael Rosen: Expressing the Inexpressible, emagazine 24, April 2004 • Graeme Trousdale: The Scottish Independence Referendum – How Language has Shaped the Debate, emagazine 65, September 2014

April 2020 emagazine 59 T Wendell Pierce in Death of a Salesman (2019) in Death of a Salesman Pierce Wendell Photo / Alamy Stock News GMP Media / Alamy Live Gary Mitchell,

60 emagazine April 2020 TTragedyragedThe y of Self-Definition

Catherine Hartley looks at ‘I am’ statements from Greek tragedy, through Othello and Hamlet, to the plays of Arthur Miller, to fl ag up the protagonists’ struggle to defi ne themselves, in relation to God and in an uncertain, hostile world. God is given many names, but look in a The Desire to Defi ne Oneself is Dionysus himself who enacts vengeance. Bible and you’ll see that one of the most As Pentheus becomes more entrenched in frequently used is ‘Lord’: it appears nearly The tragic genre time and again sees his position, he is warned that, seven thousand times. On closer inspection, individuals coming into confl ict with this Dionysus […] who you deny is god, will call you unique privilege of God (or gods) to self- you’ll notice that some of these are written to account as ‘LORD’. When written like this, it means defi ne. Sometimes, this takes the form of more than just ‘person in charge’: LORD an attempt by a tragic hero to take on the nonetheless, he persists, leading to his is God’s self-referential name, which he role of God, assuming the right to self- ultimate death, ripped apart by the hands translates to Moses in ‘Exodus’ chapter 3 as defi nition with dire consequences from the of his own mother, whom Dionysus has play’s god-fi gure. Sometimes, self-defi nition bewitched into madness (along with all the I am who I am bleeds into world-defi nition, as a hero other women of Thebes). The cause and New International Version reimagines the world itself – again, with effect are simple: Pentheus insults a god; his We might read ‘I am who I am’ (or ‘I am tragic outcomes. Sometimes, the tragedy punishment is death. At the root, though, what I am’, as it is translated in the King comes not from an assertive self-defi nition, his crime is one of defi nition, articulated by James Bible) and think of the song made but from the uncertainty of a tragic hero Dionysus in the middle of the play: famous by Gloria Gaynor – ‘I am what I about where their identity comes from. a man, a man, and nothing more, yet he am’, she sings, ‘and what I am needs no Unlike God, humans must locate themselves presumed to wage war with a god. excuses’ – where the phrase really means within language and culture; unlike God, ‘take me or leave me’, ‘what you see is in tragedy, humans are often answerable to Pentheus’ real problem is that he does what you get’ or even ‘this is me, warts forces beyond themselves for the choices of not understand that he is ‘a man’, and and all’. When God says ‘I am who I am’, self-defi nition that they make. thinks that he gets to decide who is, and though, it’s different: God is God, and there is not, a ‘god’. is no way for human beings to understand Greek Tragedy – Wanting to or defi ne God outside of himself. We have Be a God Iago – ‘I am not what I am’ no language capable of describing God, In Euripides’ plays, Greek gods take to because God came before language; we In Greek tragedy, we often talk about the stage (indeed, Dionysus dominates have no simile or metaphor capable of hubris, usually translated as something The Bacchae), but by the time we get capturing God, because every comparison like ‘excessive pride’, but perhaps better to Shakespeare, the tragedy of self- we could make would fall short. When God understood as an act, or attitude, of defi nition as an act of hubris is far less calls himself LORD, he is reminding people behaving like a god, which must be literally punished by the gods. In fact, in that, unless he reveals himself, they have punished. Euripides’ play The Bacchae Shakespeare’s hands, self-defi nition can no way of guessing his character. In other provides a productive example of hubristic elude straightforward moral answers. It is words, God, uniquely, has the power to self- and world-defi nition leading to often signalled by ‘I am’ statements from defi ne himself. tragedy. When Pentheus, King of Thebes, characters at crucial moments in the plays. outlaws the worship of the god Dionysus, it

April 2020 emagazine 61 In Othello, the villainous Iago’s much-cited only be defi ned by the identity that he has his own life. He is also posing existential ‘I am not what I am’, in Act 1 Scene 1. lost. His name now might be ‘not-Othello’, questions about whether in death he will 64, misquotes the God of ‘Exodus’. It is so or, at best, perhaps ‘was-Othello’. Macbeth, cease to ‘be’. What he wants is immunity to nearly ‘I am what I am’ that it is clearly a too, commits an atrocity by murdering ‘dreams’ (3.1.65), fearing his ‘conscience’ hubristic, self-defi ning statement; yet the King Duncan. In the aftermath, Macbeth (3.1.82) in the afterlife. Whether this ‘not’ in the centre seems also to set him up articulates a new lack of self-knowledge: ‘conscience’ means an awareness of the against God, as if he is claiming to be a kind good and evil he has committed, or an To know my deed, ‘twere best not know myself. of anti-God. More troublingly, Iago’s self- Act 2 Scene 2 l. 72 external judgement from God, it is clear defi nition seems to go unpunished. Having that what prevents Hamlet from committing destroyed the life of the protagonist, Iago’s His fi nal ‘I am’ statement is suicide is the fear that even in death he fi nal lines to Othello are, simply, I am sick at heart will continue to ‘be’ himself. He is defi ned by what has come before; he cannot begin what you know, you know. Act 5 Scene 3 l. 19 again with a new self-defi nition. From this time forth I never will speak a word. diseased at his very core by corruption, Act 5 Scene 2 l. 278-9 murder and fear. Both tragic heroes lose By Act 5, however, Hamlet’s ‘I am’ themselves to their sins. There is a sense Here, again, he seems to echo the self- statement demonstrates a new-found of unknowingness, of self being separated referential nature of the God of ‘Exodus’ acceptance of his identity: ‘This is I’, he from act. So far removed is Othello from his – there is a circularity to ‘what you know, declares on his return to Denmark, bent identity that in his fi nal line before suicide you know’ that frustrates any kind of on the justice of vengeance. ‘Hamlet the he refers to himself in the third person. Self- real understanding – and Othello dies Dane’ (5.1.2460). A play full of uncertainty defi nition for these once-noble characters deprived of answers. – from its opening line, ‘Who’s there?’ becomes completely impossible and this, (1.1.1), questions of identity have been at perhaps, is symptomatic of quite how far What Is – or Was – Othello? its core – Hamlet’s self-defi nition, just before they have distanced themselves from God. the action of the climax, is striking. He is Shakespeare’s ‘I am’ statements also not just ‘Hamlet’; he is ‘Hamlet the Dane’. signpost the undoing of identities after To Be or Not Be Hamlet He reclaims his identity, and also seems to heinous sins, which disrupt God’s natural subsume that of the whole nation: this is order, have been committed. Othello, taken It is in Hamlet that Shakespeare brings the self-defi nition of a king. After this, the in by Iago’s deceit, murders his innocent the question of self-defi nition into the death toll rises rapidly in just a few hundred wife, after which he is reduced to a state of foreground. Here, the protagonist debates lines as Hamlet enacts justice. His fi nal, undefi ned being: not only the question of who he is, but even the nature of being itself: ‘To be, or not to accepting ‘I am’ statement, ‘But let it be. I he that was Othello? Here I am. be’, he asks, ‘that is the question.’ (3.1.55) am dead’ (5.2.322), has a sense of peace, Act 5 Scene 2 l. 281 In this famous soliloquy about suicide, reiterated in Hamlet’s very last words, We might notice the past tense fi rst: he was Hamlet is not simply asking whether it is The rest is silence. Othello, and now he is someone who can right, or safe for his immortal soul, to take Act 5 Scene 2 l. 342 The Bacchae by Euripedes performed by Mid Powys Youth Theatre Youth by Mid Powys by Euripedes performed The Bacchae Photo Keith Morris / Alamy Stock

62 emagazine April 2020 Andrew Scott as Hamlet, Almeida Theatre (2017), d. Robert Icke Almeida Theatre as Hamlet, Scott Andrew of Emma Holland PR Image © Manuel Harlan, courtesy

Having reclaimed his identity as ‘Hamlet the A Heroic Search for a Place in emag web archive Dane’, just action against his foes follows, the World order is brought to Denmark and he no longer fears death. To return to ‘Exodus’, where we began: the • Ewan Bleiman: Fear and Pity – Horror, tragic hero’s ‘I am’ impulse is not simply Tragedy and Aristotle, emagazine Arthur Miller – Protagonists a hubristic effort to be like God, though 43, February 2009 in Search of Themselves it can be that. It is also a heroic effort to • Carol Atherton: Defi ning Tragedy create a place in the world. Tragedians have – Drama from the Classical to In Hamlet, then, self-defi nition is a used these echoes of God’s ‘I am’ statement the Modern Period, emagazine restoration of identity in a play full of to ask questions about what forms our 42, December 2008 questions about being, self and sanity. identities, what acts strip us of them, and • Nigel Wheale: Defi ning Renaissance Shakespeare uses Hamlet’s self-defi nition as how far we get to decide who we are. For Tragedy – Hamlet, Othello and King Lear, a method of elevation, returning him to his Pentheus, acting as the god of his own emagazine 41, September 2008 high status before he dies. In the twentieth world leads to his destruction; for Othello • Sean McEvoy: Tragic Theory – A Brief century, Arthur Miller’s characters attempt and Macbeth, it costs them their very selves. Overview, emagazine 75, February 2017 something similar: consider, for example, For Hamlet and his descendants, whom you • Sean McEvoy: Tragedy Then and Now, John Proctor’s desperation to keep the are likely to fi nd in more modern plays like emagazine 85, September 2019 integrity of his name in The Crucible, or the Miller’s, tragedy stems from the struggle • Nigel Wheale: Language of Insecure protagonist of Death of a Salesman declaring, to understand identity in tension with the Masculinity in Coriolanus, emagazine I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman. god-like forces that govern their worlds: 85, September 2019 sometimes with heroic defi ance, and • Alice Sharman: Othello: English Both utter their self-defi nition moments sometimes in bitterly ironic defeat. Literature’s fi rst black protagonist before their deaths, but the elevated emagplus for emagazine language jars with the futility of the Catherine Hartley is an English teacher in an 73, September 2016 protagonists’ demises; Loman’s, in Oxfordshire secondary school. She studied English Literature at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. • Sean McEvoy: The Narratives by particular, is a poignantly tragic ‘I am’ Which We Live – Love in Othello, statement that reveals his misunderstanding emagazine 82, December 2018 of how he fi ts into the capitalist world he inhabits. emagClips

• Critics discuss Othello

April 2020 emagazine 63 Feminine Gospels

Poet and English teacher, Jonathan Edwards, looks at Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘The Diet’ and ‘Beautiful’, showing how they explore ideas about the female body and identity, offering a powerful view of the ways that societies, now and in the past, have objectifi ed women and distorted their own view of themselves.

She knew where she was all right [...] The poem’s third section, focusing on By stanzas three inside the Fat Woman now, Monroe, is among its most powerful. The and four, it trying to get out. fi rst stanza tracks Monroe’s path to fame and becomes clear that Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘The Diet’ ends with her marriage to Joe DiMaggio. We are told the journey of a woman who has starved herself to the that the camera her life is tracked by the men point of surreal tininess being swallowed adored the waxy pouting of her mouth by a fat woman, introduced towards fetched up as if she were already a waxwork, as if the the end of each in a stomach [...] crouched appreciation of her beauty is part of the stanza: ‘an athlete’ in the lining same aesthetic taste which allows people to and ‘a poet’ in appreciate Diana’s beauty after her death, in stanzas one and two become ‘Mr President’ in literally trapped inside a body. It’s an the poem’s fourth section. Marilyn’s beauty is stanza three and, darkly, ‘The smoking cop’ in instructive moment because Feminine also described as helpless, childish: ‘her sleepy, stanza four. The fi nal stanza makes clear the Gospels offers us a series of poems in which startled gaze […] her little voice.’ Tellingly, repetitive routine of someone for whom being the relationship between self and body is They fi lmed her recorded – being objectifi ed – is the story explored. ‘Beautiful’ refl ects on the way famous, fi lmed her beautiful. of their life: in which all sorts of women have been quiet please, objectifi ed and defi ned by their bodies One way of reading this sentence is that they made her famous by fi lming her, they made action, cut, quiet please, action, cut, quiet please, through history, while ‘The Diet’ surreally action, cut explores the way that an eating disorder can her beautiful by fi lming her, they fi lmed her take over. Almost as a kind of rebellion against into beauty. With the rise of the mass media, Since her life is creating these moving the way in which women have been defi ned beauty is created by the act of fi lming it. images, and these images can be shown forever, Marilyn loses control of everything by their bodies and narrow perceptions of In stanza two, the fi lming becomes about her life: feminine beauty, other poems, such as ‘Tall’ a sexual act – and the second half of ‘The Woman Who she couldn’t die when she died. They fi lmed her harder, harder Shopped’ give us strange, imaginative bodies. Even after death she is objectifi ed, as we are These allow Duffy to explore other themes – and the way that Monroe is objectifi ed given the male gaze at her body: – the tragedy of 9/11, consumer culture – is represented by the imagery of gems and but the fact that the body is used as a way items of value, in a list of body parts which is, The smoking cop who watched to get to these other themes means that the ironically, reductive: as they zipped her into the body-bag noticed relationship between self and body, and the her hair her strong resemblance to herself, the dark roots way the female body is perceived by society, was platinum, her teeth gems, her eyes of her pubic hair. sapphires pressed by a banker’s thumb [...] remain central concerns. There is so much that is rich and ironic about her skin investors’ gold, this ending. ‘They zipped her’ reminds us her fi ngernails mother-of-pearl, her voice ‘Beautiful’ – Marilyn Monroe champagne to sip from her lips. of ‘they fi lmed her’ earlier in the poem, suggesting that the relentless focus of a world ‘Beautiful’ gives us the experience of four Tellingly, Marilyn is the object of the poem’s that has reduced her to her appearance has objectifi ed women, illustrating that society has verbs far more often than she is the subject, also reduced her to this. There is a disparity, it changed little in its attitudes to women across giving the sense that others are in control is suggested, between self and image, between time: the fate of Princess Diana at the hands of of her life: ‘The camera loved her’; ‘They the ‘real’ woman and the body which has the paparazzi is the same as the fate of Helen fi lmed her’; ‘dames copied her’. been fi lmed and re-fi lmed. But this difference of Troy; Cleopatra is as adept at using her is only ascertained by a man in the act of beauty to control as Marilyn Monroe seems The sense is that the objectifi cation of her by looking at the dead body, suggesting that controlled by it. the camera, the reduction of her to valuable Marilyn is defi ned, to the last, by her body. body parts and the control of her by others all go hand-in-hand.

64 emagazine April 2020 ‘The Diet’ – The Surreal and Similarly, one strategy for Marilyn Monroe An interesting development from The World’s The Satirical – perhaps because of the control of her body Wife to Feminine Gospels is the movement by the fi lm industry, perhaps because of her from fi rst to third person, with all of the If this is the story of a victim of an industry changing appearance, the fact that her face is poems, up to ‘Sub,’ nearly halfway through which is about men objectifying women, ‘puffy’ and there is a need for ‘the beauty’ to the collection, being written about characters ‘The Diet’ offers us a surreal, exaggerated be ‘painted…on’ – is ‘coffee, pills, booze.’ rather than inhabiting them; this changes narrative of an eating disorder, the the exploration of the relationship between imaginative lengths of the poem shocking us Once she has passed through her drinking self and body. Even when other poems in the into an understanding of the impact of eating days, the thing the character in ‘The collection stretch out to deal with different disorders in the real world. The linguistic Diet’ chooses to do is to be as intimate as themes – the treatment of consumerism in fl uency of the poem’s fi rst stanza, the use possible with bodies: ‘The Woman Who Shopped,’ the sudden, of listing and internal rhyme, creates a pace She stayed near people, concluding focus on the tragedy of 9/11 in which seems to enact the rapid process of the lay in the tent of a nostril like a germ, dwelled ‘Tall’ – they use shifts in the body to explore character’s dieting: in the caves of an ear. She lived in a tear, swam those themes, ensuring that the collection, clear, moved south to a mouth, kipped in the chap however expansive and varied it gets, keeps The diet worked like a dream. No sugar, of a lip. She loved fl esh and blood, wallowed revolving around this theme. There is no salt, dairy, fat, protein, starch or alcohol. in mud under fi ngernails, dossed in a fold of fat By the end of week one, she was half a stone on a waist. escape, these poems suggest, from the body or shy of ten and shrinking, skipping breakfast, an objectifying society. Even the annihilation lunch, dinner, thinner; a fortnight in, she was This intimacy with bodies reaches its ultimate, of the body in ‘The Diet’ leads to entrapment eight stone; by the end of the month, she was ironic conclusion with the character being in it. Even death does not provide escape skin swallowed by a ‘Fat Woman’ and being stuck from being looked at for Marilyn or, in the and bone. inside her ‘stomach’ as a procession of food concluding section of ‘Beautiful,’ for Princess At times, the use of rhyme almost injects a comes towards her: Diana. With the tragedy of Amy Winehouse, touch of humour, which is an interesting tone the avalanche munch of food, the impact on body image of social media, the to adopt when treating a subject like anorexia, then it was carrots, peas, courgettes, potatoes, poems of Feminine Gospels seem to accrue even and creates a contrast with the darkness in the gravy and meat. greater resonance as time passes. poem, as in these lines: Then it was sweet. Then it was stilton, The last apple Jonathan Edwards is a teacher and award-winning roquefort, weisslacker-käse, gex; it was smoked poet. His latest collection is Gen (2018). aged in the fruit bowl, untouched. The skimmed salmon milk with scrambled eggs, hot boiled ham, plum fl an, soured in the fridge, unsupped. Her skeleton frogs’ preened legs. under its tight fl esh dress. It’s not easy to know how to take these lines. The poem takes a turn for the surreal The internal rhyme, the chutzpah of rhyming emag web archive in stanza three: ‘gex’ with ‘eggs,’ images like ‘the avalanche One day, munch of food,’ create comedy. Part of • Kate Baty: Nostalgia and the (Un) the width of a stick, she started to grow smaller – this can be seen as laughing darkly at the reliability of Memory in Mean Time, child-sized, doll-sized, the height of a thimble. character: having tried to escape food and the She sat at her open window and the wind emagazine 86, December 2019 blew her away. demands of the body, she fi nds herself trapped • Roddy Lumsden: Reading Carol Ann here, inside a body, with more food coming Duffy – Three Critical Approaches In the new, tiny, ‘seed small’ form of her body, than ever. But in lists like ‘it was stilton,/ to Contemporary Poetry, emagazine the character fi nds a liberation: roquefort, weisslecker-käse, gex,’ there is a 17, September 2002 Minute, she could suit herself from here on in, go sense of appetite, a sense of joy in the naming • Barbara Bleiman: Critical Responses where she pleased. of the food, which almost makes us share in to Feminine Gospels, emagplus for the character’s triumph. Whichever way this emagazine 57, September 2012 She has been freed, perhaps, from the is read, the narrative of the poem tells us that, • Nigel Wheale: Carol Ann Duffy’s pressure of making her body fi t the even in the wildest fl ights of imagination, Dislocating Language, emagazine expectations the world has for it, freed there is no real escape from the body, and that 61, September 2013 from the fate of Marilyn Monroe. What’s everything leads back to that. • Barbara Bleiman: More Than a interesting is what she chooses to do with this Collection of Parts – Studying the freedom. One thing she does is get drunk: In the Context of Duffy’s Wider Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, emagazine An empty beer bottle rolled Work 70, December 2015 in the gutter. She crawled in, got drunk on the • Rachel Barker: The Theme of dregs, In the exploration of Marilyn Monroe in Displacement in Poems by Carol started to sing, down, out, nobody’s love. ‘Beautiful’ and in the darkly comic narrative Ann Duffy, emagplus for emagazine Similarly, in stanza fi ve, ‘she went to a hotel of ‘The Diet,’ then, Duffy explores the tragedy 65, September 2014 bar that she knew.’ This reaction of changes in of women in a society that objectifi es them. In the body leading to drunkenness is a recurring doing so, she continues an interest in the body theme in Feminine Gospels. In ‘Tall,’ the which has been there throughout her writing, emagClips character reacts to her changing body like this: from the voice she gives to the artist’s model in ‘Standing Female Nude’ to the surreal body She bowed herself into a bar, ordered a stiff drink. taken on by the speaker of ‘Queen Kong.’ • Jonathan Edwards on poetry

April 2020 emagazine 65 The Science and Storytelling of Language

David Adger offers an The Start of Scientifi c The Scientifi c Perspective Thinking Today historical perspective Around about 2500 years ago, in the Pãini was the fi rst known scientist of on the ways human ancient Gandhara region of the Indian language, and today, linguistics, the science beings have sought to subcontinent (roughly today’s north west of language, treads in those early footsteps, Pakistan and north east Afghanistan), but, as in many other areas of science, has understand language a scholar called Pãini took a different come much further. Today’s linguists still and, in so doing, view of language. Rather than passing on analyse particular languages, but we also stories about language from the myths and have developed an (imperfect but hopefully shows how linguistics legends of his day, Pãini closely observed improving!) understanding of how human combines narrative with how one of the most important languages language works in general. What is the spoken around him, Sanskrit, was used, same, though, is the scientifi c perspective sociology and science. and he developed a penetrating analysis fi rst developed in ancient Gandhara. of that language, which he then codifi ed Language is central to almost everything in an almost mathematical fashion as a Students usually encounter ideas from we do as human beings. It allows us to grammar of Sanskrit. linguistics while studying for English GCSE communicate incredibly complex ideas, and A Level. Perhaps they might fi nd helps us to think up new concepts, and Pãini was one of the fi rst people we out about stylistics or cultural theory in glues together our societies. No human know of to take a scientifi c, rather than a literature classes (Why does Shakespeare culture has ever been discovered without mythological, approach to language, and choose to rhyme in his plays when he language. Almost every member of his grammar, the Aṣṭãdhyãyì, was written does? How has culture changed from our species comes to control at least in a way that has no parallel in works when Beowulf was written and how is that one language as they grow up, and no surviving from other civilisations of the refl ected in the language of the poem?). other creature has ever been able to time, though it was clearly based on a Or perhaps students might encounter match that feat. long tradition of linguistic thought. In it, sociolinguistic ideas in English Language Stories to Explain Language he viewed Sanskrit as a complex, highly A-level (What kind of discourse markers intricate, but understandable system. His are used by men versus women? Why does It’s no wonder that thinking about grammar described how the sounds of the English spoken by Yorkshire teenagers language, what it is, how it works, how Sanskrit are made by actions of the mouth, sound so different from that spoken by it is used, is something that goes far back lungs and nose. It showed how these teenagers in London?). But linguistics is in human history. Human societies have sounds changed depending on where in full of questions that might as well appear always told stories about how language words they appeared, and on what other in a psychology, biology, computer science was created, about mythical times when sounds surrounded them. It also described or mathematics class too, such as the everyone spoke the same language and how those words themselves changed ones that follow. How do children’s brains about a disaster that created a new diversity depending on how they were used in change as they learn a language? How are of languages. Many cultures had gods who sentences, and how they came together to animal communication systems different gave humans the power of speech. Almost create new words. Pãini sought to answer from human language? Why is Google so all cultures have stories about animals that questions that, from today’s perspective, are good at translating webpages, but Alexa can talk. These myths and legends were straightforward scientifi c questions: what is so bad at understanding what you want? answers to questions that puzzled early the Sanskrit language? How does it work? What kind of mathematical equations societies: why do humans have language What are the basic components that it is tell us how sentences are structured? while other animals do not? Why are built out of, and how do they interact with Can we use mathematics to describe how there so many languages. Where does each other? These are questions that could languages change? language ultimately comes from? Like all just as well be asked about things in the myths, they are ways of using stories to world, like the shapes of rivers, the anatomy understand the world. of animals, or the structure of plants.

66 emagazine April 2020 Sociolinguistic research has provided a partial answer as to why there are so many languages. Social forces cause language change, and shape the directions that those changes take, causing sounds to split, or to merge with other sounds over time. Words and syntax similarly alter across time, with new patterns appearing and being lost. All of this means that languages rarely stay still: they alter over the centuries, and how they alter depends on who is speaking and what their social purposes are. This is why there are so many languages. Education and schooling has an effect of standardising changes, but it doesn’t stop them. Languages change, and new varieties of language are emerging all the time.

What about the question of where language ultimately comes from? How did it arise in our species? Was there some kind of proto- language, not fully fl edged as yet, but used by early humans? This question is far harder to answer. Unlike life forms, spoken language doesn’t fossilise, and the oldest examples of written language we have are the cuneiform and hieroglyphic scripts of North Africa and the Middle East, about 5000 years ago. Archaeologists have suggested using art, or even knot making, as clues as to when language may have appeared, but, at the moment, all of this is speculation. Perhaps some future understanding of neuroscience, and the analysis of fossilised skulls will yield

© Linda Combi, 2020 the answer in years to come, but for this question, right now, we’re still telling stories.

David Adger is Professor of Linguistics at Queen Mary, University of London.

Humanities, Social Science or language ultimately come from? Does the Science? new(ish) science of linguistics have anything to tell us about these? Linguistics touches on all of these different fi elds. In some ways it is a humanities subject, We are beginning to tease out some answers. emag web archive and it is often found in University Faculties of Certain aspects of our linguistic abilities Humanities, alongside History and Literature. are shared with other creatures, including In other ways it is a social science, in close some basic biological abilities to discriminate • Marcello Giovanelli: Becoming an A connection with Anthropology, Sociology sounds, and to detect patterns in the Level Language Student – A Quick and Geography. But it is also a natural sequences of sounds we hear. But it has also Guide emagazine 65 September 2014 science, like Biology or Neuroscience, and it become clear that other species don’t (and • David Adger: Constructing Languages, is a formal science like Maths or Computing. can’t) analyse these sequences as language. emagazine 82 December 2018 Because language is so central to human Humans automatically, and subconsciously, • Erika Darics: English Language and beings, it has been tackled from all of these group sounds and words together in a way Linguistics at A Level and Beyond, different perspectives. that other animals can’t. We use these emagazine 82 December 2018 groupings when we want to create our own • Maggie Tallerman: Where Does Answering the Big Questions sentences. Recent work in neuroscience, Language Come From emagazine involving scanning the brains of humans and 46, December 2009 So what of the questions that the myths other animals, suggests that human beings’ • Andrew Linn: English in Europe: sought to answer: why do humans have specialised brain anatomy is the reason we Rethinking International English, language while other animals do not? Why have language while other creatures do not. emagazine 68, April 2015 are there so many languages? Where does

April 2020 emagazine 67