Wind back the clock 30+ years, and imagine me - beardless, fearless, and in all honesty, clueless - sitting in one of our sixth form classrooms for a Y12 A-Level English Literature lesson.
It’s fair to say that I wasn’t the only student who might not have been fully engaged with our text: EM Forster’s A Passage To India (1924). It’s a novel I’ve come to appreciate more in later life, but at the time I, and several others, found it a bit ‘dry’.
What can you do in this situation, if you’re the teacher?
Our teacher was Mrs Rees, a kindly Welsh lady with a mad twinkle in her eye and a passing resemblance to Margaret Atwood in her 50s. What did Mrs Rees do to try and stimulate us? She did what many English teachers have relied on, before and since.
She told us it was all about sex.
Is it? I still don't think so. Did it work? Not for more than a lesson or so, when we were hunting down the dirty bits like crazed Year 7s with a highlighter and a school dictionary. And then we resumed our ennui - if there was sex in there, it was drowned in metaphor, allusion, and euphemism, and completely incapable of titillating young minds. Look at this:
‘All this fuss over a frightened girl! Nothing had happened, 'and if it had,' she found herself thinking with the cynicism of a withered priestess, 'if it had there are worse evils than love.'
If A Passage To India was explicitly sexual, I have no idea how I would have dealt with it. And it's highly possible you don't.
Like it or not, your A-Level English Literature IS full of sex. And up until now, your teachers have probably been reluctant, almost frightened to talk about anything for fear of reprisals: politics, religion, and yes, sex, are potential minefields when you are an adult speaking to other people’s children. There are good reasons for this. Of course there are. However, if your text does contain sex (not least Shakespeare), how on earth are you supposed to write about it? Which words or phrases are critically acceptable? How do you sound academic, not perverted? Disinterested, not obsessed?
It’s unfair, right? Look at this passage from Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2007) - a book I’ve been teaching at A Level for 6 or so years:
‘They could see the beginnings of a footpath, dropping by muddy steps, a way lined by weeds of extravagant size - giant rhubarb and cabbages they looked like, with swollen stalks more than six feet tall, bending under the weight of dark, thick-veined leaves.’
It is unfair to just throw you into that - and that’s before, about 100 pages later, we get to:
‘She trailed her fingers along its length, noting with interest its silky texture, right to the tip, which she lightly stroked …’
Or we ask you to study Philip Larkin, only to whack you between the eyes with ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ and the immortal lines:
‘Huge tits and a fissured crotch
Were scored well in, and the space
Between her legs held scrawls
That set her fairly astride
A tuberous cock and balls.’
Or (no quotations this time, the squeamish will be pleased to hear), we launch John Donne’s ‘The Flea’ at you in all its filthy glory ...
One of my tutees wanted some advice on this - here are my thoughts.
Clinical and disinterested is the way to go. If you’re talking about body parts, I’d probably use the words you’d find in a basic human biology book. Steer clear of slang in expressing your argument, but don't be afraid to quote in full, and analyse, what you have been asked to read. Asterisks are not for me (but they won’t harm your mark if you use them out of personal preference. Let’s do some quick AO1 / AO2 style analysis on the quotations I’ve given you so you have a flavour of what I mean.
MODEL ANSWER: McEwan, first quotation
McEwan seems to be using the ‘extravagant’ vegetation as a metaphor to emphasise the prominence of the forthcoming sexual encounter in Edward and Florence’s minds. The shape of the ‘giant rhubarb’ is almost certainly a phallic symbol, disturbing in its unnatural size and vivid colour. In this reading, the cabbages would correspondingly represent outsized testicles, and the swollen ‘veins’ add an unsettling picture of the male genitals almost full to bursting, which mimics Edward’s sexual anticipation. With the characters able to see these from the window, we can infer that these grisly, hyperbolised images cannot be escaped by leaving the room.
MODEL ANSWER: McEwan, second quotation
In this section, McEwan writes Florence’s encounter with Edward’s penis as a mixture of curiosity and insecurity. The verb ‘trailed’ might imply slow movement, but she is not experienced enough to do this purposefully to excite Edward. Instead we might read this as a lack of confidence in what she is doing - in fact in the context of this part of the novel, we might go so far as to infer that she might be unsure that she has permission to touch it. There is something in the phrase ‘noting with interest’ which suggests perhaps relief at an assumption being proved wrong. However, what it also strongly implies is a detachment that tells us that Florence is not at all aroused.
MODEL ANSWER: Larkin quotation
Larkin commonly employs coarse language, as he does here, for a number of purposes. The colloquial - almost offensive - nouns, in particular, ‘tits’, ‘cock’, and ‘balls’, have a shock value to them which slows the pace of the poem, almost as if we dwell on their use in this context with disbelief. As slang words, they raise potential implications about the act and the perpetrator, signifying a grubby working-class defacement by a grubby working-class man. This class-based reading helps create or increase Larkin’s trademark aloofness, almost as if he, and we as readers are colluding in dismissing this violation as something ‘people like us’ would never do. The defacement goes further than simply vandalising the girl’s image. It degrades her by engaging her image in a sexual act, ‘astride’ what we might assume to be an oversized, erect penis, as suggested by the adjective, ‘tuberous’.
How do these work for you? Let me know in the comments.
Got a question about academic writing style, or something else to do with your A Level English Literature studies? Get in touch!
Commentaires