Sunday 23 May 2010

ESSAYS READY FOR COLLECTION

Dear all-good-people-who wrote-essays. They have now been marked, so you can find them in a folder on the desk in ROOM 6

Enjoy!

Wednesday 19 May 2010

The Great Gatsby

I've been thinking about the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy--the initial relationship that he explains retrospectively to Nick--and its implications for the rest of the novel (what a lot of retrospective narrative there is in the text, to be sure!)

It's probably hard for you to feel the force of the confession that he makes, but try to imagine that you are back in the aftermath of the First World War, at a time when young girls were very much protected, and there was a huge premium placed on chastity before marriage. There's Daisy, daghter of a rich family, queen of the neighbourhood, and there's Jay Gatz, with his foreign name and his lack of cash, his only attractions his good looks and his anonymising uniform that gives him a spurious respectability... and then look at these quotations again:

• It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes.

• He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously— eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.

• He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go—but now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail.

• He felt married to her, that was all.

What do you think?

Wednesday 12 May 2010

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

In some ways, this poem is like an object lesson in what to expect from a ballad. It starts in the middle of the story, there is an ambivalent ending, it has (lots of) structural repetition, there is a conventional four-line stanza form, ABCB rhyming scheme, archaic language and the depersonalised figures typical of ballads.

On the other hand, Keats makes it his own. there are many factors that individualise it, from the Shakespearean references (to Macbeth? Romeo and Juliet?) to the single-ended frame narrative. Did he copy that from Coleridge's double-ended frame narrative for The Amcient Mariner, do you think?

Anyway, one of the best ways to understand Keats (or Coleridge) and what they were trying to do by imitating ballads is to go and read some for yourself. This website will show you a fine collection. It is an archive of Child's Ballads (Francis Child was one of the most influential collectors of popular ballads in the 19th century. Have a look and let me know which is your favourite. How does 'La Belle Dame Snas Merci' compare?