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Comparing endings (HT and Enduring Love)

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Comparing endings (HT and Enduring Love)

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Power and protest (comparison to Kite Runner)

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Power and protest (comparison to Kite Runner)

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First Person in Handmaid's Tale and The Great Gatsby

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First Person in Handmaid's Tale and The Great Gatsby

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Please use the resources on the Unseen Prose column to revise approaches to this task.

Timed Paper - The 2018 Paper is also on the column for you try. I will mark any that are sent to me and post the markscheme next week.

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Welcome Back, I hope you had a good Easter and are well.    You received an email from Clarissa Ford (Head of English) explaining how the government has decided to award grades this year. There will be an exam available to you in the Autumn if you choose to take it. Therefore, we will continue setting work until the official study leave date in preparation for this exam. At the moment we have no information about the structure of the exam, so we will continue to set work on all parts of the course.   Work set so far. I have asked you to complete the Unseen Prose essay on I am Charlotte Simmonds. The deadline for the Handmaid’s Tale essay on love is today. I set out a number of revision suggestions in my last email – keep referring to them to keep on top of steady revision.   Work for this week I posted a number of documents on the REVISION column to help with poetry revision. The Questions doc is up-dated with all specimen and past paper questions. You can select any of these titles to plan, or to write as timed essays (I Hour – or 1 hour 15 mins if you have extra time.) I will mark any work that is sent to me.  Remember – if you send an image – please scan your work as photos are not large enough to read and lose quality when enlarged. You can google how to scan in notes on an iphone, and you can get a scanning app for android phones.)

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Good morning – hope you are all well.

We are about to head into Easter, and so I won’t be setting work in the same way for the next 2 weeks.

Normally, this would be a period of intense revision as you would be heading into the last stage of your studies before the exams.

However, if you take an exam, it won’t be for quite some time yet, so you have to adjust your preparation accordingly, and pace yourself.

Therefore, I suggest you

complete the following

1. Send me the Unseen Prose essay on I am Charlotte Simmonds (thanks for those who have already sent it)

2.    Write an essay on The Handmaid’s Tale “Love is more remembered than practised.”  Examine the presentation of love in the The Handmaid’s Tale.

I have posted  a Power Point on this question on the Handmaid's column, but you will, of-course have your own ideas. When you write, treat it as a timed essay. Have only your copy of Handmaid’s available to you.

Send this to me on Monday 20/04/20

1. I have attached a doc to help you revision Offred’s life timeline, some notes on Structure, and there are more notes on Symbolism in Handmaid’s Tale on the Handmaid’s padlet – https://padlet.com/latusf/handmaid

password Atwood

and select from the following

REVISION Keep re-reading your texts – particularly second year texts you may feel less familiar with – and use padlet to keep revision ticking along but PACE YOURSELF.

Useful revision exercises for any text are

chapter/scene/poem summaries

Notes on characters, themes, structure, context, typical features of writer’s style.

reading articles or introductions to your texts (there are some excellent notes/commentary in your Othello text. (Look on my padlet and the Atwood padlet for other articles/links to notes)

finding quotations for character/themes

But at this stage you should be engaging with as many questions as you can (Don’t forget Unseen Prose [for me) and Poetry [for Jon) You have a unseen booklet)

Pick a question and write a detailed plan in 15 mins.

Stop for a break.

Come back to it with your notes/study guide/padlet resources.

Can you add anything to your plan? Do you have a strong answer to the question you can use in your introduction?

What are the main ideas you will use to develop and support your argument.

Where will you find evidence?

Which order will you use your ideas?

Save something to structure your conclusion around which addresses the argument again but avoids simple repetition.

I will set timed essays after Easter on Gatsby/Poetry – Unseen Prose – Handmaid’s Tale.

I wish you all a Happy and Healthy Easter

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1. If you have made changes to you NEA - send your new version to me today. Remember to include a word count and Bibliography please.
2. We have covered character and theme questions now. We have finished Structure and Language - see Handmaid's Column for scans from York Notes to consolidate this section.
3. Today, I'd like you start REVISION and to think of symbolism. List as many symbols as you can think of, and for each, make notes on what is represented. You should record the Chapter/pages numbers for some key quotes.
4. Quote gathering
Begin making a set of key quotes from across the text. You can group them under character and/or theme headings.
5. Essays - you can send me any essays you do from question lists on Handmaid's / Gatsby-Poetry/Unseen Prose (in booklet)
BUT for now please can I have the Charlotte Simmons Unseen before Easter.
Thanks,
Stay safe,
Kerstin

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Writing about Language and Structure (AO2) should be in all of your essays, so this is important work.

The promised Power Point on Language and Structure for you to read. (posted on Handmaid's Column)

It includes activities to do on Biblical Language, Language Musings and Neologisms.

The final Slide is about Structure – with a task for you to do.

On Monday I will send some photocopies from the York Notes study guide which you can read over to consolidate your own thinking.

This aspect of the novel could also be the basis of a question such as

“Atwood’s primary concern is that women’s voices are undervalued.”

Examine this view of Atwood’ presentation of the women in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Write a plan in answer to this question.

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17/03/20 I am Charlotte Simmonds Unseen Prose Question

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17/03/20 I am Charlotte Simmonds Unseen Prose Question

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Read the insert carefully. It is taken from I Am Charlotte Simmons, a novel by Tom Wolfe published in 2004.
Charlotte, a poor but highly gifted teenager from a small town in rural Alabama, USA, has just arrived at elite Dupont University to start her freshman (first) year of undergraduate study. Her mother and father have driven her to Dupont in their pickup truck. Answer both questions. 0 5 Explore the significance of insecurity in this extract. Remember to include in your answer relevant detailed analysis of the ways that Wolfe shapes meanings. [25 marks]

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You should have completed the task on the sheet about storytelling posted below – locating all the quotations.

Now

1. Make notes on the ideas about storytelling that are raised and explored by “The Handmaid’s Tale”?

1. Then, list as many ideas the novel raises about language.

On Friday, I will post a power point with a range of responses to these questions that you can look at and compare to your own ideas, and a question title that you can plan.

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Complete the work on storytelling and language posted on The Handmaid's Tale column (Today's date) I will post a power point on Friday with ideas you can read to check against your own thoughts :)

Other things…

1. Before the government announcement, I took in a set of Handmaid essays. I will mark them and return them to you electronically.

2.     We planned a response to the
unseen prose question on I
am Charlotte Simmonds –
posted on the Unseen Prose
column (dated 17/03/20) If
you complete it and send it,
I will mark and return it.

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Read along with this excellent audio production.

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Log in to PlayShakespeare.com to view this and other great content.

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Extension: Article - Tragic Consummation

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Extension: Article - Tragic Consummation

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Extension: Article - First Black Protagonist

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Extension: Article - First Black Protagonist

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Extension: Article - Iago - Psychoanalytical Reading

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Extension: Article - Iago - Psychoanalytical Reading

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Revision - Self love, honour and reputation

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Revision - Self love, honour and reputation

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Revision - Desdemona's Posthumous Speech

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Revision - Desdemona's Posthumous Speech

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When John Keats was finishing "La Belle Dame sans Merci" in the early spring of 1819, he was just weeks away from composing what would become some of English literature's most sustained and powerful odes. "La Belle Dame," a compact ballad, is wound as tightly as a fuse. Keats's life and conflicts, his love for his neighbor Fanny Brawne, and his awareness of impending death are written like code into the predicament of a dying medieval knight, the poem's principal character. It is one thing to read this explosive ballad for the story of the knight, but if we peer behind the tragic surface we can see a writer-with one of the shortest working lives of his generation-creating a pact with literary immortality. We can glean from his letters at the time that there is a sudden and powerful merging between his thinking about poetry (what we now call theory or, more loosely, poetics) and the gestation of his poems. "La Belle Dame" also shows how Keats expanded his own poetic capabilities by reacting to the poems and theories of other poets, namely his contemporary Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

John Keats's use of the English balladic form in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" has its Romantic precursors. Lyrical Ballads, a collaboration between William Wordsworth and Coleridge, was his principal reference. It was everyone's. Coleridge explains the book's inception twenty-odd years after it was published, in his Autobiographia Literaria. By then Keats was an avid reader of Coleridge, and in two of the book's chapters he would find a basis for components of his own poetic justifications. These bear directly on "La Belle Dame" and what was to come in the months following. Coleridge writes,

. . . it was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least Romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. . . . ( Chapter XIV)

. . . That illusion, contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith which simply permits the images present to work by their own force. . . . (Chapter XXII)

Keats's notion of "negative capability"-the most famous among his rare contributions to literary theory-is the child of Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief," and is an important working principle in the conception of "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and its cast of two, the knight and the belle dame, "shadows of imagination," as Coleridge would have called them. Keats's reimagining of Coleridge's formulation of poetic faith first crops up a couple of months after the publication of the Autobiographia, in a letter to his brothers, George and Thomas Keats:

. . . I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. ( Letter XXIV -December 21, 1817)

If read as a rephrasing of Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief," Keats's famous statement demonstrates that he, like Coleridge, feels the need to allow the powers of the imagination to rise above the critical demeanor that is part of every great poet's arsenal. The transference of inward nature onto supernatural characters, the fleshing out of those characters to create plausibility and verisimilitude, is beautifully executed in the poem.

To carry the story forward, Keats invents a swiftly moving variation on the traditional balladic stanza, which used the quatrain as the principal stanzaic form, alternating tetrameters and trimeters. These metrics evolved out of the folk idiom and early minstrel forms to create a rolling, almost singsong pace, but Keats compresses the lines by using three tetrameters followed by a final, truncated line of only four or five syllables. This pattern, which at first we hear and then internalize, hastens the poem's rhythm: the shorter last lines of each quatrain act like a spring hurtling us forward.

It is not only the form that sustains the wonderful economy of the poem, but the way Keats pushes negative capability beyond just a tolerance for working through uncertainties toward a truly dramaturgic investment in character development. This is linked to his conception of poetic identity. The more we consider the knight's story, the more we uncover parallels with Keats's life. The knight's predicament in the poem is Keats's drama transformed and played out in allegorical fashion. Keats's knight is lost, abandoned, and already living a posthumous existence, which is how the poet himself would eventually refer to the last months of his life just two years later. Keats articulates his view of poetic character in a letter to his friend Richard Woodhouse, by using Wordsworth's attempts at character development as a juxtaposition:

As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort, of which, if I am anything, I am a member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian, or egotistical Sublime....) it is not itself-it has no self-It is everything and nothing-It has no character.... What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the cameleon poet. . . . A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no Identity. . . . (Letter LXXVI-October 27, 1818)

In contrast with what he calls the "egotistical Sublime" in Wordsworth's narrators, who are nearly always a dramatis personae, Keats seemingly loses his own self to fully inhabit the inner mood of his malingering knight. Except for the first three stanzas, Keats stays out of the poem itself; he is neither a self-conscious narrator nor a character who symbolically mirrors the poet, like the one who appears in Coleridge's " Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

To structure the poem's narrative, Keats borrows a question-and-response form from earlier folk ballads and pastoral eclogues. In the first three stanzas the poet does indeed appear as a third-person narrator, but only as a kind of rhetorical presence, addressing the knight in a series of questions that allow the poet to "transfer," in Coleridge's words, "from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth" onto the character of the knight. Likewise, the knight's predicament is laid out in this mini-interrogation-he is given a vocabulary-and the rest of the poem will be taken up by his response, his story, as it were.

With the belle dame playing a figure of love and fantasy and the agent of death and decay to the knight, it is as though Keats has stumbled upon his mirror image as he gazes upon the knight:

For a fantasy poem whose setting seems so distant from real time, the poem might very well express figuratively what Keats was experiencing in his love life and his health. The mix of literary and emotional forces influencing Keats at the time he wrote "La Belle Dame sans Merci" was nothing less than extreme. His mother had died of tuberculosis when he was 14; his brother, whom Keats nursed through his final months, died of the same disease in 1818. Even before his brother's death, Keats too would begin to show signs of the disease, returning from his rigorous tour of Scotland and Ireland with a harsh cough and an ulcerated throat. That year he would also fall in love with Fanny Brawne and by the spring of 1819 would embark on what was to become one of the most important sequences of odes in our literature, all written in a single year. "La Belle Dame sans Merci" was written in the heat of his passion for Fanny, the fever of death hanging over him. He was on fire poetically, in love, growing ill, and suffering from depression. By the end of May 1819 Keats finished the poem:

The knight's story is of coming upon "a lady in the meads," "a faery's child" with wild eyes. The story is full of double entendres: "fragrant zone" (a girdle of flowers or his lover's nether regions?), "I set her on my pacing steed" (his horse, or his erection?). She weeps and sighs "full sore" (until she is sore?). There are often two ways of seeing this scene, as the knight quickly learns. The landscape is lush with meadows and spring, wild honey and manna dew, but the story quickly moves from idyllic to horrific, as the fairytale romp turns to imprisonment on a cold hillside.

After his rough-and-tumble, the knight finds himself in a kind of hell through the common gothic transport of a dream. He is surrounded by all of the lady's previous victims, who include kings and princes and warriors; her taste in men is evidently consistent.

The repetition of "pale" reinforces the subtext of tubercular illness. In the next stanza we see the victims' "starved lips" (starved for air?) and hear their only words, "La Belle Dame sans Merci / Thee hath in thrall!" The thrall of love is clearly equated with the thrall of illness.

The partnering themes in gothic literature-love and death; temptation and duty; dream and waking, and the murky suffering of the consequences of ungoverned emotion; ecstasy and its aftermath of despair; the otherworldly seductress, Homer's Circe or Sirens, or the poetic muse herself-these are all figures without pity (sans merci) whose function is to entrap. All of this informs the consumptive grayness of the knight's predicament, a cache of themes that are echoed in the poet's own feverish condition. Even nature cooperates, with its withering sedge and finished harvest.

Keats's notions that the poet is "without identity" and "the most unpoetical of anything in existence" extend Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief," but mostly in practical ways: Keats's knight seems a purer creation of dramatic character than Coleridge's Ancient Mariner or Christabel, and more like a Hamlet or a King Lear, albeit in miniature. Of course, a total subjugation of "poetic character," as Keats calls it in his letter, would be impossible, though many modern and postmodern poets have attempted just that. In this way, Keats was certainly anticipating post-Romantic strategies of expression. Through allegorical displacement Keats is able to diffuse overobvious "self-expression" and transform what in a lesser poet would remain self-pity into a self-erasing empathy for his created characters. By using the figure of the knight as a dramatically convincing surrogate for the pathos he himself feels, Keats makes powerful use of some of the most important Romantic themes: the stress of self-examination, the fraught duality of Eros and death, and individual mortality and its mirroring in the cycles of nature.

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John Keats: "La Belle Dame sans Merci" by Martin... | Poetry Foundation

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When John Keats was finishing "La Belle Dame sans Merci" in the early spring of 1819, he was just weeks away from composing what would become some of English literature's most sustained and powerful odes. "La Belle Dame," a compact ballad, is wound as tightly as a fuse.

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https://padlet.com/latusf/handmaid
Password: Atwood

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06/02/20  HOMEWORK - essay for Fri 13/03/20 - choose if you do it to time or not - write on the top of your paper if it was done in timed conditions.

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06/02/20  HOMEWORK - essay for Fri 13/03/20 - choose if you do it to time or not - write on the top of your paper if it was done in timed conditions.

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‘Men, in The Handmaid’s Tale, are oppressors of women.’

Examine this view of gender and oppression in The Handmaid’s Tale.

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You have been given a character in class today. Prepare for working with a partner on Friday by
1. Picking key moments involving that character
2. Research key quotations for that characters.
3. Look at the questions on the Handmaid's Tale column, and decide which questions you could include evaluation of your character.

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https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/handmaid/quotes/character/the-commander/

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There is a Handmaid's Tale course on Massolit.

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Consider the questions on Historical Notes, posted on Handmaid's column, ready for discussion on Monday 10/02/20

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A close focus on a short passage from The Handmaid

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Synopsis of Historical Notes

This section is supposedly a transcript of one lecture from a conference, held in the year 2195, of historians interested in the former Republic of Gilead, which, it is implied, ceased to exist some time in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century. The conference is being held in Canada, and the speaker is a Professor Pieixoto from the University of Cambridge, England, talking on 'Problems of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid's Tale'.

He describes how he and a colleague, Professor Wade, have been working on transcripts of a group of about thirty old cassette tapes found in a metal box in what had once, before Gilead, been the State of Maine. Professor Wade has given the title The Handmaid's Tale to these tapes. The voice on all the cassettes is the same, but they have no way of knowing the correct order in which they should be organised, nor even if they are authentic. Pieixoto points out that, in Gilead at the time the material deals with, the tapes could not have been recorded, since a Handmaid would have had no access to such facilities, so presumably they were not made at the time the speaker is talking about (even though most of the material is in the present tense).

Professors Pieixoto and Wade have tried to establish the identity of the Handmaid, but with no success. They realise that she must have been one of the first women forced by the régime to try to bear children because of the fertility problems in Gilead - the result of AIDS, syphilis, nuclear-plant accidents and toxic leakages. However, they do not know her name, and suspect that other names she mentions may be pseudonyms to protect identities.

They have tried instead to identify the Commander in the story, and have come up with two suggestions: a Frederick Waterford and a Frederick Judd. Waterford was responsible for the design of uniforms, and details of names and ceremonial details for activities such as Salvagings, whilst Judd was involved in the massacre of Congress at the time the new régime took over, and for the forced emigration of Jews. Judd was also responsible for promoting the idea of particicution, and for forming the group known as the Aunts, whereas Waterford thought of giving them the reassuring names of well-known commercial products.

However, neither of these men was married to a woman called Serena Joy, but they think this name may have been invented by the Handmaid. They think the evidence is most in favour of the Commander being Waterford, who was executed for being in possession of literary material and for 'harbouring a subversive', which could have been Offred.

Pieixoto admits that they have no idea what happened to the Handmaid, and whether Nick really assisted her. He may have done so, Pieixoto suggests, because Nick himself would have been in danger after indulging in illicit sexual activity and could not risk Offred talking under torture.

Pieixoto then asks if there are any questions.

Commentary on Historical Notes

These 'Historical Notes' completely alter our perception of the novel. We have been made aware throughout that Offred's account is a construct, but now we are told that the order of the material is totally arbitrary. We are also asked to consider the Republic of Gilead not as a possible future state, but as one that existed in the past, as far as the speaker is concerned. See Structure and methods of narration.

Notes - This term perhaps suggests something relatively unimportant, as if the whole of Offred's experiences is a mere side issue for these historians

Gileadean Studies - The Republic of Gilead no longer exists, and is merely the subject of historical research. This is a reminder to Atwood's readers that even the most powerful régime or empire will in time fail or fade into obscurity.

Denay, Nunavit - Nunavut is a genuine place - a large region of northern Canada. Atwood's choice of the names for this place and region create an interesting pun: 'deny none of it'- which suggests that, although Pieixoto is patronising and flippant about Offred's experiences, Atwood may well be indicating that there is an essential truth to be found in her narrative.

Chair ... Keynote Speaker - The Chair is a woman, and her name suggests that she is of native Canadian Indian descent. However, the Speaker, from a different academic background, is male and indulges in patronising comments belittling women.

The Nature Walk - these activities suggest a very different environment from the toxic-waste and nuclear fall-out background which so affected Gilead. Atwood herself spent her childhood summers in the Canadian backwoods with her entomologist father. (See Biography of Margaret Atwood.)

Republic of Texas - We learn that the structure of the USA has obviously changed if Texas is now a separate republic.

Gileadean Civil Wars - Presumably the rebels grew in numbers until civil war erupted - an echo of the Civil War in nineteenth century America.

If not personally - The word 'personally' is significant: ironically, Pieixoto, like Offred, is only known through what is written; yet his writings are obviously impersonal and, as we see later, he does not value her revelation of her own thoughts and personality.

Authentication - The Professors are only interested in proving the provenance of the material. Its actual content, and the way in which Offred shares her thoughts with us, together with her insights into human relationships, seem of little or no interest to them. Later Pieixoto expresses regret that the Handmaid did not talk about 'the workings of the Gileadean empire'. He never discusses what she does talk about.

'enjoy' - Pieixoto indulges in a sexist punning joke: he enjoyed eating the fish, char, and he finds the Chair pleasant, but he implies that a man such as himself might once have 'enjoyed' such a women sexually.

'The Handmaid's Tale'... Chaucer - Chaucer, the fourteenth century English poet (whose work features elsewhere on the Crossref-it website), wrote a series of stories in verse called The Canterbury Tales, including, for example, The Wife of Bath's Tale.

puns ... intentional, particularly ... tail - Pieixoto - and some of his audience - find it amusing that his colleague has chosen a title which makes a joke about Offred's being forced into sexual slavery.

Underground Frailroad - In chapter 38, there was an escape route from Gilead known as the Underground Femaleroad - an echo of the nineteenth century escape route for slaves known as the Underground Railroad. Pieixoto puns on the name substituting 'Frail' for 'Rail' or 'Female', since females were once known as the 'frail sex'. This is another sexist joke which Atwood - a feminist - ascribes to the Professor, suggesting therefore that she is presenting a type of man whose views we are not to share.

U.S. Army issue - Nick had a U.S. Army blanket, though this does not offer any proof that he was involved in hiding the tapes. As Pieixoto says, 'This fact of itself need have no significance.'

two or three songs - In chapter 10, Offred recalls her mother's old cassette tapes of songs. She says that her mother had 'a scratchy and untrustworthy machine, too' and would play the music tapes for her friends.

tapes ... in no particular order - In the rest of the novel, Offred's story moves backwards and forwards in time, but seems a coherent narrative. Now Atwood seems to suggest that the order of events is arbitrary, leaving us to assume that the real significance of Offred's tale is not when things happened but how she felt about them or reacted to them. (See Structure and methods of narration.)

judgements are ... culture-specific ... not .. censure but .. understand - Although the audience seems to share Pieixoto's view that we should not judge Gilead harshly, Atwood may well be presenting us with a more complex ethical dilemma: how far can, or should, we stay morally neutral? If the depiction of Gilead includes some terrible atrocities which we find echoed in our own society, should we ignore the comparisons?

establish an identity for the narrator - Pieixoto and Wade see their task as 'establishing an identity' for Offred, but fail to respond to the identity which she has established for herself through her narrative. (See Themes and significant ideas > Individualism and identity.)

The first wave of women recruited - 'Recruited' suggests that volunteers were asked for, whereas Offred's account makes it clear that women were arrested, imprisoned and forced into sexual slavery. Pieixoto goes on to describe the men who 'required such services and could lay claim to them', which seems to suggest that men such as the Commander had a right to use women in such a way.

Nuclear-plant accidents ... disposal sites - Atwood's strong awareness of, and commitment to, environmental issues has in recent years led to her writing two dystopian novels about a cataclysmic end to most of humankind and to civilisation as we know it: Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. (See Social / political context > Atwood's use of actual historical events > The real dystopia.)

Utah in the nineteenth century - A reference to the Mormon s, a religious group founded in America in the mid-nineteenth century, which initially supported the idea of polygamy (men having several wives).

Our author ... was one of many - Pieixoto seems to undermine the idea of Offred's individuality. As she herself said in chapter 30, 'One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique.' (See also Themes and significant ideas > Individualism and identity.)

Names ... connection - Pieixoto's choice of terminology again diminishes the horror of what happened to these women. They did not 'take' the names, but, against their own wills, were called by their 'owners'' names. Their relationship with these men was not the bland one suggested by 'connection' but a forced imprisonment for sexual purposes.

Sons of Jacob - The twelve sons of Jacob were the founders of the twelve tribes of Israel. Jacob's two wives were Rachel and Leah, after whom Gilead's Rachel and Leah Centre (the Red Centre) was named.

mistake ... teaching them to read - Atwood is extremely aware of the significance of reading and of nuances of language. She has shown how Gilead closed the Universities and banned literature, knowing that the dissemination of ideas through reading could be a vital weapon against oppression. (See also Social / political context > Political satire > Hitler and the Nazis or China and the Cultural Revolution.)

Scapegoats ... useful throughout history - A scapegoat is someone who is blamed for the faults or sins of others. For example, in Orwell's novel 1984, the populace is invited to scream in hatred at a supposed enemy of the state, Emmanuel Goldstein, to divert their attention from government failures. The term comes from a ritual, described in the Bible in Leviticus 16:6-22, of sending a goat out into the desert, symbolically carrying away the sins of the Israelite s.

Particicution ... echoes ... fertility rites - In such rites men are sacrificed to ensure the fertility of the earth (as described in Mary Renault's novel The King Must Die). It is ironic that such a rigorously patriarchal, and supposedly fundamentalist Christian, society as the Republic of Gilead should use a practice associated with strongly matriarchal pagan societies.

invention by our author - There may be a sly joke here by Atwood: for Pieixoto, 'our author' who has created the name 'Serena Joy' is Offred - but we are also reminded that 'our author' is actually Atwood. (The same is true of the later phrase 'our anonymous author', even though Atwood is not 'anonymous'.)

the workings of the Gileadean empire - Pieixoto has missed the point of Offred's - and Atwood's - narrative. Atwood has not chosen to invent the details of a totalitarian regime. What we do learn about its methods are echoes, deliberately chosen by Atwood, of tactics used in many real tyrannies, so we do not need to have further invented details. Instead, Atwood has chosen to give us an insight into the mind of a woman trapped in such terrible circumstances, and her attempts to survive in both body and soul.

the human heart remains a factor - For Pieixoto, Nick's only motive would be that 'no male of the Gilead period could resist the possibility of fatherhood.' Pieixoto fails to realise that the factor which is 'the human heart' could mean that Nick felt love, or at least strong affection, for Offred, as she did for him.

We cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day - Atwood leaves us to wonder whether we can, in any case, 'decipher' the voices of the past. How do we begin to do this, and is 'our own day' at all 'clearer' than the past?

Are there any questions? - We should, after reading The Handmaid's Tale, have many questions to ask about our own society, and what we find acceptable or unacceptable in it.
Investigating Historical Notes

In what ways do the Historical Notes change your perception of the novel?

What does Atwood gain by adding the Historical Notes?

Does she lose anything, in your opinion?

What would have been the effect if the Historical Notes had been put as an Introduction rather than at the end of the novel?

A play on the meaning of words, often for comic effect.

a name for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints

In the Old Testament the son of Isaac and Rebekah and twin brother of Esau. He wrestled with God and was often devious.

The descendents of the twelve sons of Jacob, who formed the nation of Israel. The tribes are central to Israel's identity.

The Old Testament frequently refers to Israel as the Promised Land allocated to God's children. Prophecies refer to it as his chosen nation and the one out of which the Messiah would come.

Daughter of Laban, sister of Leah, wife of Jacob and mother of Joseph and Benjamin.

In the Old Testament, a live goat which symbolically carried the sins of the people into the desert on the Day of Atonement.

Disobedience to the known will of God. According to Christian theology human beings have displayed a pre-disposition to sin since the Fall of Humankind.

Descendant of Israel (Jacob) and occupant of Israel.

1. A followers of a religion who believes the strict, literal interpretation of their scriptures 2. Strict beliefs or principles relating to a specific subject or discipline.

Name originally given to disciples of Jesus by outsiders and gradually adopted by the Early Church.

Term applied to those who are not Christian, particularly followers of the classical religion of Greece and Rome and of the pre-Christian religions of Europe.

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This section is supposedly a transcript of one lecture from a conference, held in the year 2195, of historians interested in the former Republic of Gilead, which, it is implied, ceased to exist some time in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century.

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Examine the view that , up to the end of Chapter 21 of "The Handmaid's Tale" Offred is presented as a passive victim.
Deadline Monday 03/02/20

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1. Read the section titled Birth Day for Friday 24/01/20
2. Start making notes on characters and themes that could e the focus of questions - see the exemplar question sheet on the Handmaid's Tale column.
3. Read the Dystopian Fiction Handbook - also on the Handmaid's Tale column.

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20/01/20                                                              Dystopian Fiction

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20/01/20                                                              Dystopian Fiction

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Read to support your understanding of Handmaid's as a dystopian novel.

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20/01/20                                                             Exemplar Questions

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20/01/20                                                             Exemplar Questions

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20/01/20                                                                     Past Paper Questions + write your own

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20/01/20                                                                     Past Paper Questions + write your own

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How to access MASSOLIT when in college (and if you access Remote)

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How to access MASSOLIT when in college (and if you access Remote)

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06/01/20                               They Flee From Me / Neutral Tones 

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06/01/20                               They Flee From Me / Neutral Tones 

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06/12/19                         UNSEEN POETRY Exemplar title and planning             

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06/12/19                         UNSEEN POETRY Exemplar title and planning             

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A close reading of 'The Flea'

The suitor in 'The Flea' enviously describes the creature that 'sucks' on his mistress's skin and intermingles its fluids with hers. Here Aviva Dautch explores images of eroticism, death, guilt and innocence in John Donne's poem.

Fleas were a popular subject for ribald humour during the Renaissance. The creatures were everywhere in both real life and in erotic poetry (inspired by the writing of the Roman poet Ovid) - their ability to freely roam ladies' flesh making them the envy of John Donne 's poetic narrator as well as many others. Since 17th-century society viewed sex as the mingling of bloods, the flea's bloodsucking nature had huge possibilities as a risqué metaphor. Donne's poem is composed of three stanzas of nine lines. The first six lines in each stanza are made from three rhyming couplets, while the last three lines of each is a triplet. In this way Donne's form mirrors his content as three distinctly separate entities - man, woman and flea - become one.

First edition of John Donne's Poems, 1633

'The Flea' as it was first printed, with the long 's' looking like an 'f'.

In the first stanza, Donne outlines his reasoning to his prospective lover: this flea has bitten both of us and so our blood is inside it; even though we wouldn't dare mix our blood by having sex, our blood is already intermingled within the flea. The exact date of its composition is uncertain but it's probable that John Donne wrote this poem in the 1590s, long before he became a respectable and respected religious figure as Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, perhaps when he was a young law student at Lincoln's Inn, sniggering in the back row with his friends. There are moments in this stanza that do feel like the work of a naughty schoolboy daring to be rude. Since at the time the letter 's' when written at the beginning of a word became longer typographically, looking more like the letter 'f', the visual pun of line three, 'Me it suck'd first, and now sucks thee', could explicitly allude to exactly what the narrator thought the flea was doing and he himself wished to be doing... And it doesn't take much imagination to realise that the way the insect 'swells' with blood in line eight, is an allusion to a man's erection.

Portrait of John Donne, c. 1595

'The Flea' was probably written around the time when Donne was living as a young man-about-town at the Inns of Court in London.

However, what follows makes clear that the poem is more sophisticated both technically and in content than merely a series of vulgar puns, riffing on religious imagery to drive home its point. While the opening lines of the second stanza seem to suggest that the mingling of blood inside the flea makes the narrator and the woman he is wooing 'more than maryed', rather than a full-rhyme there is a dissonant half-rhyme which seems to undermine his argument, as if he knows it's false even as he's making it:

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
When we almost, nay more than maryed are. [My italics]

Donne is playing with Christian imagery of the Holy Trinity, the Eucharist and the sacrament of marriage in an attempt to make things respectable; yet however much the narrator might strain to achieve it, 'spare' and 'are' don't quite rhyme and no, the flea's actions don't make the couple married. Donne, who spent time in prison for falling in love with and illicitly marrying Ann More, is someone who fully understood what it was like to be in an unconventional relationship, committing to a woman whose family didn't approve, and so the image of the couple using the inside of a flea, somewhere unexpected, somewhere 'cloysterd', as their marriage bed, 'though parents grudge' is full of pathos as well as being intentionally, hilariously bathetic.

Letters from John Donne about his secret marriage to Ann More

On 12 February 1602, Donne wrote this letter from Fleet Prison to his employer, Sir Thomas Egerton, pleading with him to 'excuse' his secret marriage to Ann More.

As the poem draws to its conclusion it is full of images of death: 'make thee apt to kill me', 'self-murder', as the lady-love purples her nail when she squashes the creature. This could be maudlin if it weren't for the fact that in the Jacobean period all of these phrases about death were euphemisms for orgasm, the petit mort, or little death as it was known. Not only does this enable the poet to make a whole range of innuendoes, but it also shifts his train of thought: faced with the flea's extinction he comes up with a new rationale for his seduction - just as you didn't lose your life when the flea died, you won't experience much loss of honour if you surrender your virginity.

Works by John Donne and Ben Jonson in the Newcastle Manuscript

'The Flea' seems to have been popular in the early 17th century. It was often hand-copied into commonplace books and manuscript collections, like this one made for the first Duke of Newcastle.

One of the most compelling things about Donne's poetry is his ability to bridge seemingly oppositional ideas and tones with ease. It makes his writing feel very immediate and fresh, even though several hundred years old. Since the beginning of the 20th century, poets and critics have highlighted what they view as the modernity of the metaphysical poets and drawn inspiration from them. In 1912, scholar and critic Herbert Grierson edited a two-volume edition of the poems of John Donne, published by Oxford University Press. To give just one instance of how this book was valued by writers at the time, when war poet Isaac Rosenberg enlisted in 1916, he left for the front without taking any clothes or mementos from home; all he carried with him was his copy of Donne's poetry. Isaac Rosenberg's poem, 'Louse Hunting', is clearly influenced by Donne, and perhaps its greatest strength is its wicked humour, describing:

... a shirt verminously busy
Yon soldier tore from his throat
With oaths
Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice.

Drawn from real experience, the poem articulates a scene Rosenberg first recounted in a letter to Gordon Bottomley: 'Last night we had a funny hunt for fleas. All stripped by candlelight some Scots dancing over the candle & burning the fleas, & the funniest, drollest and dirtiest scenes of conversation ever imagined'. It is clearly indebted to 'The Flea', a poem that 'maidenhead', if not 'Godhead', might 'shrink at'; Donne's poem influenced both insect as subject matter and the ironic tone.

'Break of Day in the Trenches' by Isaac Rosenberg

Rosenberg wrote his poems in the army on whatever scraps of paper he could find. He sent this manuscript of 'Break of Day in the Trenches' to George Bottomley, a prominent literary figure.

Rosenberg's 'Break of Day in the Trenches', a poem Paul Fussell identifies as 'the greatest poem of the First World War', owes even more to 'The Flea'. Donne's creature is a conduit between male and female, 'in this flea our two bloods mingled be', and the locus of the combination of opposites - guilt and innocence ('in blood of innocence? / Wherein could this flea guilty be'), falsity and honour ('then learn how false, fears be: / Just so much honor, when thou yield'st to me' and death and life ('this flea's death took life from thee'). Harold Bloom, whose thematic analysis of Isaac Rosenberg's poems in his book on Poets of World War One acknowledged that 'Rosenberg, like many of the First World War poets, was heavily influenced by Metaphysical poets', was the first to suggest that the rat in 'Break of Day in the Trenches' (the title an homage to Donne's 'Break of Day') 'calls to mind the imagery used by John Donne in his poem ''The Flea'''. Rosenberg's rat, with its 'cosmopolitan sympathies' crosses between the German and Allied soldiers:

Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between

Like Donne's flea, the rat is a locus for the heretical and ephemeral; addressing the creature, Rosenberg exclaims, 'they would shoot you if they knew'. Donne's flea is external to, and other than, the man and woman it bites; Rosenberg's rat is a 'live thing' running between the two opposing and entrenched sides of the conflict. Yet for both writers, to an extent, their creature is also a placeholder for the narrator of the poem. Donne's suitor lasciviously implies that he too wishes to be a creature that 'sucks' on his mistress's skin, who intermingles fluids with her: 'this, alas, is more than we would do'. So too, the 'droll rat', the 'queer, sardonic rat', can be read as a figure for Rosenberg, or at least the soldier who speaks his poem in the first person.

Micrographia by Robert Hooke, 1665

This astonishingly detailed illustration of a flea fills a huge fold-out page, 43x33cm. It is part of Robert Hooke's book of objects seen through a microscope, published 34 years after Donne's death.

T S Eliot appreciated Donne for his ability to select the 'image of absolute necessity', and it is this sense of the importance of the precise and necessary image whose connotations will be thoroughly explored and every nuance drawn out that Donne passes onto Rosenberg. In this way, Donne's seemingly casual erotic poem therefore becomes the inspiration of an incredibly serious war poem, his metaphysical conceit the model for modern writers to draw on.

Footnotes

[1] John Donne and Herbert John Clifford Grierson, The Poems of John Donne (London: Oxford University Press, 1912).

[2] Letters from Isaac Rosenberg to Edward Marsh and Sydney Schiff, November 1915, in Isaac Rosenberg and Jean Liddiard, Isaac Rosenberg: Selected Poems and Letters (London: Enitharmon in association with EJPS, 2003).

[3] Rosenberg and Liddiard, Selected Poems and Letters.

[4] Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

[5] Harold Bloom, Poets of WW1: Wilfred Owen & Isaac Rosenberg (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2002).

[6] 'Clark Lecture IV' in T S Eliot and Ronald Schuchard, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (London: Faber & Faber, 1993).

Dr Aviva Dautch is a poet, literary critic and curator. As an academic, she specialises in the Renaissance and Modernist periods, with a PhD in Modern Metaphysical Poetry, and has taught English Literature and Creative Writing at the British Library since 2007. She is Poet in Residence at the Jewish Museum, London, her poems, reviews and literary essays are widely published internationally in journals and magazines, and she has recently received an award from Brandeis University to complete her first full collection of poetry, 'We Sigh For Houses'.

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A close reading of 'The Flea' | The British Library

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By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. For more details of these cookies and how to disable them, see our cookie policy. A close reading of 'The Flea' The suitor in 'The Flea' enviously describes the creature that 'sucks' on his mistress's skin and intermingles its fluids with hers.

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18/11/19                        Children Of Men 

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18/11/19                        Children Of Men 

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11/11/19                            Article on Representation of race in Handmaid's Tale (Book and TV drama) 

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11/11/19                            Article on Representation of race in Handmaid's Tale (Book and TV drama) 

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The Handmaid’s Tale has a problem with racial erasure

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And both use the history of black people to provoke empathy for the suffering of white people.

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11/11/19                                Extension                                Self Test Chapter 1-12  

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11/11/19                                Extension                                Self Test Chapter 1-12  

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11/11/19                       Chapters 10-12                  Zoom In The Bath 

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11/11/19                       Chapters 10-12                  Zoom In The Bath 

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Difference between modernism and post-modernism

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Difference between modernism and post-modernism

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You can't see all the video with subscribing but it defines post-modernism for you