THE MAGAZINE FOR ADVANCED LEVEL ENGLISH

ISSUE 94 DECEMBER 2021 ENGLISH AND MEDIA CENTRE

Pandemic Metaphors
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Conversations with Corinne – CLA
Shakespearean Tragedy
The Great Gatsby
Investigating Your Idiolect
All My Sons
The Merchant’s Tale

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2 emagazine December 2021
Contents
05
Pandemic Metaphors
21
Conversations with Corinne One
Professor Elena Semino has done significant Year On
research on metaphor and how we use it in Gillian Thompson has been recording her two
our lives. Here she draws on recent work by granddaughters, Leonie and Corinne, since
many linguists across the globe to explore the the eldest, Leonie, was two years old. Several
implications and effects of the metaphors we articles analysing their speech features have
use to talk about Covid-19. appeared in emag. Here she adds to these, with
fresh data on Corinne, now four years and
08 Alienation, Reification, and
three months old.
a Poverty of Imagination in Never
Let Me Go
Rebecca Shapland asks why the characters in
23 The Tyranny of Custom in
Shakespearean Tragedy
Never Let Me Go don’t try to rebel as one might Philip Smithers
perhaps expect in a dystopian novel. She ranges across
draws on several Marxist theories to reveal several plays
how the novel explores power and shows and comment by
how compliance is achieved. contemporary
philosophers Bacon,
Montaigne and
11 More than Minor –
Characters in The Tempest, Much
others, to show
Shakespeare’s
interest in the idea
Ado and Measure for Measure of custom and habit
Diane Crimp challenges the idea that minor and his characters’
characters and sub-plots are just there for desire to ‘overleap’
comic ‘relief’, showing how the characters’ what’s expected
behaviour offers a different angle on the key of them.
issues and ideas playing out in the main plots.
14 28
Is it Rude to
The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Point? This
Disconnect and Belonging and That
Roshan Doug explores issues of otherness About This
and exclusion in Mohsin Hamid’s novel,
focusing particularly on the parts of the novel
and That
Following on from her article on the word
set in America and the representation of the
the in the last issue of emagazine (‘Beyond
narrator’s experience as an immigrant.
Pronouns, issue 93), Professor Lynne Murphy
discusses the demonstrative determiners this,
that, these and those, with an equally fascinating
exploration of the ways in which they express
much more than just straightforward spatial
relationships.
32 A Deadly Thirst for
Knowledge – Bram Stoker’s
18 Reading Thoughtfully –
The Complex and the Simple
Dracula (1897)
The main protagonist of Stoker’s novel is not
just a monster, argues teacher, Alice Reeve-
Exemplifying his ideas using various texts, Tucker. His intelligence, learning and the
including a poem by Christina Rossetti, quest for knowledge in his earlier life are at
Malcolm Hebron explores why the simple is the very heart of the novel’s exploration of
sometimes more powerful than the complex, transgression and evil.
both in texts themselves and in writing
about them.
35 The Little Mermaid
A Level student Florence Wolter wrote this
story while studying The Bloody Chamber. It
imitates Angela Carter’s style and we hope you
agree that it works brilliantly as a story in its
own right too.
37 A Perfectly Tangible Body’
– The Undoing of the Body in The
Great Gatsby
Andrew Atherton explores the role of the body
in Fitzgerald’s novel, suggesting that it comes
to represent many key themes in the text,
making concrete the ways in which the society
is brutally fractured.
42
Investigating Your Idiolect
– Drawing Together the Threads
emagazine co-editor, Barbara Bleiman, explains
the value of investigating your own idiolect,
not just for its own sake but also as a way of
deepening your thinking about all the different
aspects of linguistics that you are learning on
your course.
45
All My Sons – ‘There’s something
bigger than the family’
This is a play where terrible things are done by
one individual, Joe Keller. Yet the playwright
allows the audience to feel deep compassion
for this man. Why does Miller seek to do this,
asks Varsha Shah, and how does he achieve it?
49 American Pioneering
Women – Ántonia Shimerda,
Carrie Meeber and Ma Joad
English teacher, Amy Taylor-Davis, examines
three characters in American fiction who
epitomise the pioneering spirit, whether
striking out west in the open spaces of the
country, or in the new urban environments of
the early twentieth century.
52 Students in Online
Breakout Rooms – A Language
Investigation
When teacher, Anna Wexler, saw her students
exchanges in breakout rooms in Microsoft
Teams meetings, she noticed some interesting
contrasts with their small group discussion
in the classroom that she thought worthy of
further investigation. With their permission,
she shares some of her thinking about it here.
55 ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ – The
Dangers of Desire
John Hathaway argues that ‘The Merchant’s emagplus
Tale’ is less anti-feminist satire and more
a warning against unfettered male desire,
showing where Januarie’s lust takes him and • Samuel Tapp: Humanity and
how dangerous that proves to be. Animality in Life of Pi
• Deborah Halifax: The Poetry of
Ocean Vuong
58 The Mother Country –
Andrea Levy’s Small Island
• Rebecca Shapland: Exploring the
Postmodern in The Handmaid’s Tale
Georgina Ramsay interrogates the concept of • Roshan Doug: Journey’s End – The
the Mother Country in Andrea Levy’s Small Case for the Officer Class
Island. The novel follows the experiences of its
four narrators, who are all living in London
after the Second World War: Queenie and
Bernard, an English couple and Hortense and emag web archive
Gilbert, a Jamaican couple.
Look out for the links to
61 Suicide
in Hamlet’s First
recommended articles in the archive,
listed at the bottom of each article.
• You can access these articles by
Soliloquy logging onto the subscriber site of the
The theme of suicide
is startlingly and
emotionally introduced
emagazine website, if your school or
college subscribes.
Remember, the login details can be
by Hamlet in Act 1,
used by any student or member of
Scene 2 – but there is
staff, both in the institution and
more to this topic than
from home.
the simple fact that
Hamlet is suicidal, as See www.englishandmedia.co.uk/e-
A Level student Abi magazine for tips on getting the most
Marett reveals. from the new and improved website.
64 Frankenstein – So Much
More Than a Story
Hester Glass suggests that Shelley’s novel rests
on deep philosophical thinking, a tradition
of poetic endeavour and a recognition of
the power of language in human life. She
argues that these combine to make it
much more than a simple story, or even
a novel, breaking the boundaries of
genre in its complex treatment of the
creature and its desires.
December 2021 emagazine 3
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PANDEMIC
METAPHORS
Professor Elena Semino has done significantnt research on metaphor and how
we use it in our lives. Here she draws on recent work by many linguists
across the globe to explore the implications and effects of the metaphors we
use to talk about Covid-19.
What do wars, races, and three-course meals
have in common? They have all been used as
metaphors for some aspect of the Covid-19
pandemic, alongside many other areas of
experience, from fires to waves.
This is not surprising. We use metaphors to
talk and think about phenomena that are
complex, abstract, subjective, and/or sensitive
in terms of phenomena that are more clear-
cut, accessible and image rich. The pandemic
has been a new, difficult, and unpredictable
experience for everyone, and has increased
in complexity as time has gone on, including
medical, social, political, economic, and
educational aspects. In addition, at all
stages it has dominated private and public
communication and has created enormous
pressures in terms of public health messaging.
In this context, metaphor has been a useful
tool for communication and sense-making,
but also one that requires careful scrutiny.
A War Against a Deadly Enemy
In March 2020, UK Prime Minister Boris
Johnson described the coronavirus as an
‘enemy’ that can be ‘deadly’ but that the
country will be able to ‘fight’ and ‘beat’. In
China, President Xi Xinping talked about a
‘people’s war’ against the virus, while, in the
USA, President Trump declared himself a
‘wartime president’.
It is conventional in many languages to talk
about problems as opponents to be fought
in a metaphorical battle or war. You can
probably think of many different non-literal
ways of completing the phrase ‘war against
…’, such as ‘cancer’, ‘drugs’ or ‘poverty’.
In early 2020, it became increasingly clear
that the coronavirus was going to be a huge
problem for individual countries and for the
world, and war metaphors were therefore
a useful rhetorical tool to convey danger,
urgency, and, even more crucially, the need
for people to come together and be prepared
to accept huge sacrifices to beat this new
common enemy, such as living in lockdown
conditions. But war metaphors have also
been rightly criticised for inappropriately
attributing intentions and agency to the virus,
and for potentially making it easier to accept
as inevitable large numbers of deaths and the
imposition of authoritarian measures. As I
write this piece, it has become clear that there
will be no imminent nor clear-cut ‘victory’
against the coronavirus, and war metaphors
have become much less common.
A Fire Burning Through a
Forest
Fire metaphors have also been used since
early 2020 to convey the seriousness and
urgency of the threats posed by the pandemic.
For example, in June 2020, the Director of the
Center for Infectious Disease at the University
of Minnesota described Covid-19 as a ‘forest
fire that may not slow down’.
In addition, however, fire metaphors have
been used to perform other functions that
war metaphors, for instance, cannot easily
perform. The fact that fires can subside for
a while and then increase in intensity again
has been used to try to prevent complacency
when things seem to be getting better. In
February 2021, for example, the Director
General of the World Health Organisation
announced a decline in the global number of
weekly cases but added:
What matters now is how we respond to this
trend. The fire is not out, but we have reduced
its size. If we stop fighting it on any front, it will
come roaring back.
More importantly, fire metaphors can be used
to explain contagion and how to stop it, as in
an article in Medscape in late March 2020:
Think of COVID-19 as a fire burning in a forest.
All of us are trees. The R0 is the wind speed. The
higher it is, the faster the fire tears through the
forest.
But just like a forest fire, COVID-19 needs fuel to
keep going. We’re the fuel.
[…] A few fire lines – quarantines and social
distancing measures – keep the fire from hitting
all the trees.
Medscape, 31st March 2020
At the time, the now familiar concept of
social distancing was new, and the fire
metaphor explains vividly and clearly why
it is effective and necessary. In October
2020, the same metaphorical parallel
was used by the Welsh Government
when they introduced what they called a
‘firebreak’ lockdown.
A Series of Waves
Some metaphors can become so central to
how we talk about particular phenomena
that we don’t have a proper literal
replacement for them. One such case is that
of the pandemic as a series of ‘waves’ of
infections. In fact, ‘wave’ is conventionally
used as a metaphor in English for the
rapid increase of something that is hard to
control and that is perceived as negative
or damaging, as in ‘wave of violence’ or
‘wave of anger’.
December 2021 emagazine 5
 Linda Combi, 2021

6 emagazine December 2021

In the context of the pandemic, however,
this very conventional metaphor has
sometimes been extended creatively, and
its implications have been questioned. In
October 2020, German Chancellor Angela
Merkel introduced a ‘Wellenbrecher-
lockdown’, which literally translates as a
‘wave-breaker’ lockdown. In March 2021,
Boris Johnson stated that it would be
inevitable that a wave of infection affecting
the continent of Europe would ‘wash up
on our shores’. As early as summer 2020,
however, the World Health Organisation
had criticised the wave metaphor precisely
because it can suggest that the virus is
uncontrollable and increases in infection
therefore inevitable. This is indeed suggested
by Johnson’s use of the metaphor, arguably
to deflect blame away from government
policies if the situation deteriorates. In
contrast, in July 2020 a WHO representative,
Margaret Harris, said:
It’s going to be one big wave. It’s going to go up
and down a bit. The best thing is to flatten it and
turn it into just something lapping at your feet.
Vaccine Races
Sports metaphors have also often been
applied to Covid-19 (e.g. the pandemic as
‘a marathon’ rather than ‘a sprint’), but the
specific idea of a metaphorical ‘race’ has been
associated with vaccines in particular. First,
there was a race to develop, test and produce
the vaccines themselves, and then another
race to vaccinate as fast as possible, with the
UK sometimes being described as ‘leading’ or
‘winning’ this race in early 2021.
This metaphor may have helped create a
sense of hope and optimism during some
very difficult times, by suggesting that huge
efforts were being made to reduce the impact
of the pandemic as quickly as possible.
However, the metaphorical association
between vaccines and races has at least two
negative consequences. First, it emphasises
competition at the expense of collaboration,
whether it is applied to vaccine development
or to vaccination campaigns. In the book
Vaxxers, Sarah Gilbert, who led the team that
developed the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine,
comments that the race was definitely not
against other scientists making other vaccines
but rather against the virus. She adds that,
to protect billions of people, it was always
preferable to have a range of different
effective vaccines using different technologies
and ingredients. With regard to vaccination
campaigns, the idea of a race against other
countries encourages nationalistic pride at
the expense of international solidarity, for
example by sharing vaccines with countries
that have fewer resources to vaccinate
their citizens.
The second major negative consequence
of a metaphorical ‘race’ to develop the
vaccines was that it could suggest a reckless
enterprise where safety was sacrificed for
the sake of speed (to make matters worse,
in the US the effort to develop vaccines was
called ‘Operation Warp Speed’). This has
created legitimate but potentially dangerous
concerns among people who would not
describe themselves as anti-vaxxers.
From Restaurant Meals to Seat
Belts – Metaphors and Vaccine
Hesitancy
While some metaphors, such as that of a
vaccine race, may increase concerns about
vaccines, other metaphors have been used to
allay those concerns. The specific worry that
vaccines against Covid-19 were developed
too fast to be safe has been addressed by
metaphors to do with cooking. A Guardian
columnist used a restaurant scenario:
A process that usually takes years when worked
through sequentially – first the scientific
breakthrough in the lab, then entering clinical
trials, then winning approval from the independent
safety regulator, then beginning production – is
effectively happening all at once, as if a restaurant
brought out your starter, mains, and pudding
simultaneously. The cooking time for each is no
shorter, but the meal isn’t half speeded up.
The Guardian, 16 November 2020
Scientists are also coming up with ingenious
metaphors to explain another aspect of
Covid-19 vaccines that is raising concerns
and, in some cases, discouraging people from
getting vaccinated – the fact they don’t give
100% protection.
This concern is being countered via
metaphorical comparisons with other
familiar experiences where we take
precautionary measures against unpleasant
or dangerous things even if those measures
don’t work in all circumstances, as in the
case of flame retardants or, in a Tweet from
July 2021, raincoats:
Concerning breakthrough infections. Think of the
vaccine as a very effective raincoat. If it’s drizzling,
you’ll be protected. If the rain is coming down
hard, you might still be fine. But if you are going in
and out of rainstorms all the time, you could end
up getting wet.
@sailorrooscout on Twitter, 13th July 2021
Similar points have also been made by
comparing the vaccines to seat belts, which
we wear even if we know they can’t protect
us in all kinds of accidents. However,
the comparison with seat belts is often
additionally used to argue for compulsory
vaccinations, which are highly controversial
(e.g. an article by Peter Singer from August
2021 entitled ‘Why vaccination should be
compulsory’: https://www.project-syndicate.
org/commentary/why-covid-vaccine-should-
be-compulsory-by-peter-singer-2021-08).
In Conclusion
Metaphors are invaluable tools in
communication and thinking, and can be
helpful in dealing with difficult problems,
such as Covid-19. However, metaphors are
never neutral. Different metaphors frame the
topic in different ways, facilitating different
inferences and evaluations. Therefore, it is
important to reflect on the implications of
the metaphors that are used for any topic,
but particularly for crucial and complex
topics such as a global pandemic.
Finding Out More
Some of my examples have been drawn
from a crowd-sourced collection of
metaphors for the pandemic in different
languages, #ReframeCovid. You can read
about it here, and also add examples to the
collection: https://sites.google.com/view/
reframecovid/initiative
Elena Semino is Professor of Linguistics at the
University of Lancaster.
Further Reading
You can read an academic paper I have
written on metaphors for Covid-19 here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.
1080/10410236.2020.1844989
emag web archive
• Professor Elena Semino: Metaphors
for Cancer, and Why They Matter,
emagazine 67, February 2015
• Ian Cushing: Containers,
Sponges and Operating Systems –
Metaphors for Language, emagazine
81, September 2018
• Alice Deignan and Elena Semino:
Metaphors for Climate Change in
Science, Education and Young People’s
Talk, emagazine 89, September 2020
• Jennifer Kemp: Metaphors of Life and
Death, emagazine 65, September 2014
December 2021 emagazine 7
 Alien

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8 emagazine December 2021

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Andrew Garfield, Carey Mulligan, in Never Let Me Go, d. Mark Romanek, 2010
Credit: Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Rebecca Shapland asks
why the characters in
Never Let Me Go don’t
try to rebel as one
might perhaps expect
in a dystopian novel.
She draws on several
Marxist theories to
reveal how the novel
explores power and
shows how compliance
is achieved.
Those of us who are familiar with the
structural conventions of dystopias may
have reached halfway through reading
Never Let Me Go expecting a rebellion to
erupt. Surely – we think – there would be
an attempt to overthrow the state system
that raises human clones to harvest their
organs slowly and painfully until they
‘complete’? Ishiguro’s novel is defined by
deferrals: the recognition that the students
of Hailsham are clones is deferred until
a third of the way through the book;
the romantic union between Kathy and
Tommy is deferred until the end of the
novel, when it is too late; the only glimmer
of hope is that Kathy and Tommy will
be granted a ‘deferral’ of their organ
donations; the rebellion against the ‘factory
farming’ of human clones is deferred
indefinitely. By the end of the novel, the
reader recognises that the characters have
a poverty of imagination such that they
cannot even fathom what a rebellion is,
let alone what it could look like. The most
frightening dystopic vision Ishiguro offers
us is one where people’s imaginations
are strangulated to the point that they
cannot even hope.
Marxist Ideas of Alienation
Marxist critical theory describes the
relationship between the proletariat
(working class) and the bourgeoisie (ruling
class). Karl Marx writes that the bourgeoisie
symbolically ‘owns’ the proletariats’
bodies because traditionally working-class
people were physical labourers who use
their bodies to perform work which the
bourgeoisie can profit from. In the case
of slavery, the bodies are literally owned.
This has an effect called ‘alienation’, where
the proletariat are psychologically divided
from their bodies which are owned by the
bourgeoisie in a capitalist system. In Never
Let Me Go, Ishiguro explores this concept in
an explicit and superlative way – the clones
are entirely alienated from their bodies
because their bodies are commodities that
are owned by the state. These ‘products’ are
quality checked regularly:
at Hailsham we had to have some form of medical
almost every week.
The clones’ psychological alienation
from their bodies manifests in some
uncomfortable ways; consider the
emotionless, practical, and performative
approach to sex, for example. They have
been raised in a system where bodies are
viewed as marketable and mechanical
objects and not as a part of a unified
‘self’, so they struggle to perform ‘human’
behaviour. Despite Hailsham’s attempt
to offer a more humane treatment than
other schools, the students still suffer from
their commodification (being treated like
a raw material, not a human being). The
fracturing of identity is represented in
the novel through images of steamed up
windows, mirrors and uncanny descriptions
which are Gothic motifs symbolising
unstable identity: in chapter three
Kathy notes that
the first time you glimpse yourself through the
eyes of [a normal human] it’s a cold moment. It’s
like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past
every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you
something else, something troubling and strange.
In this way, Never Let Me Go can be
read as an allegory for the Marxist
theory of alienation.
Reification – Creating
Compliance
Objectifying the clones’ bodies is one of
several ways that Kathy and her peers
are conditioned into their role in society.
György Lukács was a Marxist writer who
created the ‘Reification Theory’ which can
be used to explain why the characters in
Never Let Me Go are passive and compliant.
According to Lukács, hierarchical social
relationships are ‘reified’, which means
presented as being innate and natural, so
that those in power can maintain their
position, and those without power don’t
question their position. A powerful way
that reification of the mind is achieved
for the clones is through language. The
cloning system in Ishiguro’s speculative
world is shrouded in euphemistic language.
‘Donations’ of organs are made until a
donor ‘completes’: they are denied humane
language, and by being denied a ‘death’,
this linguistically suggests that they never
really ‘live’ (as how can one live if one does
not die?). Subtly, the use of language strips
the clones of their humanity, and therefore
‘reifies’ their minds to convince them they
are sub-human and therefore underserving
of a normal lifespan. The relationship
between language and power is a key
element of the canonical dystopic novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, and
the stripped-back, restrictive language used
by the cloning institutions and by extension,
Kathy H, makes this novel a direct
descendant of Nineteen Eighty-Four and its
fictional language ‘Newspeak’ which limits
people’s ability to express dissenting ideas.
Foucault – Knowledge and
Power
Another way that the clones are ‘reified’
is through the restriction of knowledge.
Throughout the novel, Kathy offers the
reader barely any scientific description.
This is a foundational irony of the novel:
it is a science fiction novel that is almost
completely devoid of scientific detail. Kathy
does not choose to omit the description of
which precise organs are being removed
from the donors she cares for, or which
tests have been performed on Tommy
at the hospital which ‘left him feeling
pretty woozy’. Kathy offers us description
wherever she can; she pores over details as
her memories are the only things that are
uniquely her own. The reason she leaves
out such scientific details is that she doesn’t
know them. The French philosopher Michel
Foucault argues that knowledge and power
are inextricable: to have knowledge is to be
powerful. The clones are denied scientific
and medical knowledge; they aren’t taught
about their bodies at Hailsham, and they
aren’t privy to the medical details at the
donation centres; instead, they exchange
vague sentiments, for example commenting
that the donor is ‘recovering well’. In this
way, the clones do not have an awareness of
exactly how their bodies are being used, and
do not feel the requisite rage and disgust
that we, as readers, feel. The suffocation of
their scientific knowledge helps ensure that
the clones do not understand the unjustness
of their position in society.
Panoptic Power
Literary critics have noted how Hailsham
exemplifies ‘Panoptic’ power. Foucault was
inspired by a prison designed by Jeremy
Bentham called the Panopticon. In the
Panopticon, there is a central tower where
a watchman can look into each of the
December 2021 emagazine 9

prison cells which are arranged around
the watchtower in a circle. The inmates
cannot see whether the watchman is
observing them at any one time, but the
point is that they could be being watched,
and therefore must maintain obedient
behaviour. Hailsham seems to engage in
this kind of panoptic surveillance. The
students are constantly concerned that they
are being watched and therefore regulate
their behaviour: for example, at the start
of chapter three Kathy describes the pond
where she meets Tommy as
clearly seen by the house. And the way the
sound travelled across the water could be hard to
predict: if people wanted to eavesdrop it would
be the easiest thing to walk down the outer path
and crouch in the bushes on the other side of the
pond.
being watched and managed, which ensures
a continuation of obedience.
The Ending – A Half-hearted
Revolt
The climax of the novel sees Kathy and
Tommy visit Madame and Miss Emily to
ask for a ‘deferral’ of their donations so
that they can spend some time together as
a couple. This attempt to push back against
their imminent institutionally sanctioned
deaths still ‘plays by the rules’ of what they
think is allowed within the system they live
in and is therefore perceived by the reader
as half-hearted and unimaginative. When
they are told this is not possible, the closest
we see to a rebellion is Tommy screaming in
a field on the drive home:
Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, in Never Let
Me Go, 2010. Copyright ©Fox Searchlight Pictures.
Credit: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo
characterised by fascist dictatorships,
genocide and war, it is pertinent that
Ishiguro explores how most humans can
exist in these systems without rebelling.
Denied knowledge of their bodies and
position in society, conditioned with
reifying language which constricts their
imaginations, and constantly regulated
through panoptic surveillance, the clones
in Never Let Me Go are bereft of the very
concept of rebellion.
Rebecca Shapland is a is a lecturer and
Programme Leader for A Level English Literature
at Exeter College.

The rumours about the woods being
haunted with starved and mutilated
students who attempted to leave the
grounds are also a tool initiated by
Guardians and perpetuated by the students,
in the vein of self-regulation which
characterises panoptic power. Moreover,
the novel is littered with references to a
vague ‘they’ who choose when clones
start their deferrals and where donors and
carers are placed. The clones do not know
who ‘they’ are, just as the prisoners in the
Panopticon cannot see the watchman, but
even in adulthood they know they are
I could make out in the mid-distance, near where
the field began to fall away, Tommy’s figure,
raging, shouting, flinging his fists and kicking out. emag web archive
It is poignant that his moment of clarity –
• Stephen Dilley: Holding on and
that he is the victim of some great injustice
Letting Go – The Tangible World
– is not in the form of language, but a
in Never Let Me Go, emagazine
wordless expression of angst.
69, September 2015
• Diane Crimp: Coping with Mortality
Kazuo Ishiguro uses Never Let Me Go to
– Never Let Me Go, emagazine
demonstrate the ways in which people can
73, September 2016
be controlled, and how it is possible for
• Anita Lu: Never Let Me Go – The
people to be complicit in a system which
Blandness of Sex, emagazine
from the outside seems abhorrent. Set at
90, December 2020
the end of the twentieth century, a century

10 emagazine December 2021

More
than
Minor
Characters in The Tempest, Much Ado & Measure for Measure
Diane Crimp challenges the idea that minor characters and sub-plots are
just there for comic ‘relief’, showing how the characters’ behaviour offers a
different angle on the key issues and ideas playing out in the main plots.
When studying Shakespeare’s darker
comedies and romances, it is tempting to
pay scant attention to the so-called comic
relief scenes and their somewhat two-
dimensional characters. However hilarious
in good productions, they can seem to
have little to offer serious students. In
actual fact, a closer exploration of them
reaps unexpected rewards, revealing
their importance in offering parallels
and contrasts with central themes, often
through the comic characters.
The Tempest – Stephano and
Trinculo
One example is the sub-plot of The
Tempest, which involves the comic antics
of Stephano, the drunken butler, and
Trinculo, the fool or clown. An obvious
theme of the main plot is ambition and
treachery, with Antonio having supplanted
his brother Prospero as Duke of Milan many
years before the play starts and Sebastian
now plotting with Antonio to murder his
own brother, Alonso, and seize the crown
of Naples. The suggestion of Caliban,
Prospero’s unwilling slave, that Stephano
should kill Prospero and take over as king of
the island is willingly taken up:
Monster, I will kill this man; his daughter and I
will be King and Queen.
No audience is likely to take seriously the
prospect of this drunken bungler actually
going through with his plan, especially
considering the magical protection Prospero also make it clear, however, that Stephano
has, but the parallel with Sebastian is is actually exploiting Caliban and could turn
unmistakable. The latter may display some on him at any moment:
hesitations and scruples – ‘but, for your
Do you hear, monster? If I should take a
conscience … ‘ – but Stephano illustrates displeasure against you, look you …’
how, once these are stripped away, his
ambition is just as stark and brutal. This might make us think again about
Prospero’s treatment of Caliban which,
to a great extent, has been justified by
Caliban and Cultural
the latter’s attempted rape of Miranda,
Exploitation Prospero’s daughter.
The behaviour of Caliban himself, as well as
displaying the treachery so rampant among Blurring Moral Distinctions
the main characters, may also reinforce in Measure for Measure and
elements of cultural exploitation pointed
out by post-colonial critics. It seems that
Much Ado About Nothing
he was anxious to accommodate Prospero Very different themes are reinforced by the
when his now-master first arrived on the comic characters in Measure for Measure and
island and ‘made much of’ him: Much Ado about Nothing. Both plays boast
a minor character, Elbow and Dogberry
I lov’d thee,
And show’d thee all the qualities of the isle. respectively, whose use of malapropisms
Disturbingly, we see him display exactly the
same kind of behaviour towards Stephano,
who also makes a pet of him:
I’ll show thee the best springs …
He even goes further, declaring,
I’ll kiss thy foot; I’ll swear myself thy subject.
This could be argued to suggest that the
original inhabitants of countries ‘discovered’
by Western navigators were instinctively
subservient to their invaders, seeing them
as superior – not a comfortable suggestion
to a modern audience. The comic scenes
December 2021 emagazine 11
means he often says the opposite of what he
means. In Measure for Measure Elbow confuses
the words ‘malefactors’ and ‘benefactors’
to comic effect. However, in a state where
Claudio, who has merely slept with his
intended bride too soon, is sentenced to
death, while Angelo, intent on seducing
a novice nun, has actually pronounced
Claudio’s sentence, we may well wonder
who actually are the ‘malefactors’ and who
the ‘benefactors’, pointing up the play’s
concern with both deceptive appearances
and the difficulty of establishing moral
absolutes. When Elbow refers to Pompey
and Froth, a pimp and customer of brothels
respectively, as ‘precise villains’, the foolish-
seeming oxymoron may do more than
raise a laugh at his expense. Since the word
‘precise’ has already been used to describe
Angelo’s puritanical nature, the phrase
neatly describes him, again making it hard
to create a clear-cut distinction between the
wicked and the virtuous.
In Much Ado about Nothing, we see a similar
blurring of moral distinctions. The nobly-
born battle heroes Don Pedro and Claudio
descend into near-villains when they
publicly accuse the virtuous Hero of sexual
infidelity, apparently bringing about her
death, tainting her in the eyes of most of the
other characters. It seems appropriate, then,
that Dogberry, like Elbow, misunderstands
the word ‘malefactors’, taking it to refer to
himself and his colleague Verges. He also
appoints George Seacoal to be in charge
12 emagazine December 2021
of the other Watchmen on the grounds
that he is the ‘most desertless’ (rather
than ‘deserving’) and ‘senseless’ of them.
Shakespeare could well be hinting that it is
not always the characters worthiest of high
positions who hold them.
Elbow’s Wife – Moral
Ambiguity
In Measure for Measure the story of Elbow’s
wife continues the exploration of moral
ambiguity as well as illustrating subversion
of the truth. She is a character who
doesn’t appear on stage but is introduced
in Act 2, Scene 2. She has apparently
been insulted in some way at the brothel
Mistress Overdone runs behind a more or
less respectable façade. On the face of it,
Elbow’s wife, suffering the cravings of a
pregnant woman, goes innocently into the
brothel in search of some fruit. There Froth,
presumably mistaking her for a prostitute,
either propositions her or gropes her and
she beats a hasty retreat and goes to tell her
husband. Another version of Elbow’s wife,
however, is created by the language given
to these minor characters, whether they are
using double entendres unknowingly or with
the explicit aim of being crude (and hence,
from Shakespeare’s viewpoint, raising a
laugh from the audience). In this alternative
depiction, Elbow’s wife becomes a willing
participant in the goings-on. We are told that
she was ‘longing … for stewed prunes’, a
slang term at the time for brothels; Pompey
amuses himself by reflecting that ‘his wife
is a more respected’ (in the sense in which
Elbow is using the word, i.e. ‘suspected’)
person ‘than any of us all’; and, when
Escalus asks, not for the first time, ‘what was
done to Elbow’s wife, once more’, Pompey
sniggers, ‘Once, sir? There was nothing done
to her once’, which implies that she was
‘done’ sexually more than once (presumably
with her consent). This language clearly
subverts the truth about Elbow’s wife (that
she is an honest woman and a chaste wife)
just as Angelo will go on to subvert the
truth about Isabella. As the second ‘great-
bellied’ woman we have heard of in the play,
Elbow’s wife may also act as a parallel with
Juliet, another character who may be seen
as innocent (‘Upon a true contract … fast my
wife’) or guilty (‘the adulteress’), depending
on the language used about her.
Minor and Non-Characters
The idea of language being used to distort is
also prominent in Much Ado about Nothing,
Illustrations from The Tempest sourced from Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare
Archive https://shakespeareillustration.org/ Public domain

where it is mainly through the power of his drunken conversation with Conrade the
words that Don John is able to convince his night before the aborted wedding: ‘seest thou
emag web archive
brother and Claudio that Hero slept with not what a deformed thief this fashion is?’
another man the night before she was due One of the Watchmen, keen to appear on top • Barbara Bleiman: Exploring Character
to marry Claudio. It is significant that they of his job, comments self-importantly, in Drama Texts – Beyond Description to
are already convinced of her guilt before any Sharp Analysis, emagazine 76, April 2017
I know that Deformed. A has been a vile thief this
‘evidence’ is produced: • Sean McEvoy: Measure for Measure – Sex
seven year. A goes up and down like a gentleman.
as Expression or Oppression? emagazine
Don Pedro: O day untowardly turned!
By the end of the scene, when Borachio and 15, February 2002
Claudio: O mischief strangely thwarting!
Conrade are arrested, the Watchman adds, • Antonia Reed: Measure for Measure –
Don John has said very few words, but his Who are the Fools?, emagazine 30
And one Deformed is one of them. I know him – a
promise to show them ‘her chamber-window wears a lock. • Nigel Wheale: Shakespeare’s Dynamics
entered’, the short description probably – Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale
chosen for its double meaning (a woman’s In the space of very few lines a character has and The Tempest, emagplus for emagazine
sexual organ was traditionally referred to as been created, entirely out of words, who has 37, September 2007
her ‘Venus’ chamber’), presents them with a name, an identifiable (and misleadingly • Liam McNamara: A Problematic
such a vivid image that they feel they have gentlemanly) appearance, contacts and a Comedy – Measure for Measure,
practically witnessed the shocking sight. criminal record. This, of course, is exactly emagazine 78, December 2017
what has happened in the case of the • Nigel Wheale: Sex and the City,
Language not only distorts the image Claudio deformed/defamed version of Hero. 1604 – Measure for Measure, emagazine
and Don Pedro have of Hero but proceeds to 58, December 2012
build her up into a shameless, promiscuous The comic interludes are, then, a rich source • Francis Gilbert: The Pompous
woman. The one-night encounter Don John of comment on the ideas and themes of Ass in Shakespeare, emagazine
started with becomes the main plot, while their characters act as 18, December 2002
enlightening foils to the main characters. • Tricia Kelly: Playing the Fool in
the vile encounters they have had
Like words themselves, they should never be Much Ado About Nothing – An Actor’s
A thousand times in secret
underestimated. Insights, emagazine 32
the hyperbole showing how quickly • Neil Bowen: The Tempest – Authority and
Diane Crimp has over 30 years’ experience of
language can seize on an impression and Leadership, emagazine 35
teaching English A level and currently writes exam
inflate it. In the scenes with the minor papers for an awarding body. • Fran Hill: The Tempest – Our Noble
characters this is shown comically through Selves, Our Baser Instincts, emagazine
another non-character who has even less 73, September 2016
reality than Elbow’s shadowy wife. This • George Norton: ‘Two Neapolitans
is Deformed, who starts off as part of a ’scaped’ – Trinculo and Stephano in The
metaphor used to describe the absurd Tempest, emagazine 93, September 2021
fashions of the day satirised by Borachio in

December 2021 emagazine 13

14 emagazine December 2021
Disconnect and belonging
The Reluctant
Fundamentalist

Live Schreiber in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, d. Mira Nair, 2012

Contributor: AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo
 In his essay, ‘Monolingualism of the Other:
Roshan Doug explores or, The Prosthesis’ (1996), the linguist and
issues of otherness and philosopher, Jacques Derrida discusses the
paradox of speaking a language you cannot
exclusion in Mohsin claim as your own. In his often quoted
Hamid’s novel, focusing two-sentence line,
particularly on the I speak one language. It is not my language
parts of the novel set Derrida who was born in Algeria, paints the
politics of adopting the lingual mode of the
in America and the French colonials. He states how French is
representation of the the only language that pervades him – yet it
is not his language. He has not made it nor
narrator’s experience as accepted its words because it’s an acquired
an immigrant. language, imposed by the French policy
of expansionism.
We can link this linguistic disconnect
to Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant
Fundamentalist. In some ways, through
the first-person narrator, Changez, who
refers to his American interlocutor as ‘sir’,
the novel explores the notion of being an
outsider, both linguistically and culturally.
The American Dream
The British-Pakistani born Hamid presents
Changez as an immigrant, removed from
the American dream – culturally, racially
and in terms of class. Having grown up in
Lahore, there is a disconnect between the
harsh reality that Changez is familiar with
and the private, segregated America that
he and people like Jim (his line manager at
Underwood Samson) and he must navigate
their way through.
Jim is the first one in his family to go to
university whilst Changez only gained entry
through a scholarship. Neither character is
a native of the upper echelon of American
society that Princeton personifies. In that
respect, they are both immigrants walking
amongst privilege and in elite spaces. As the
narrator observes, the economic disparity is
startling where some people spend more in
after-work drinks than others earn in a day.
Essentially, there is an enclosed America
that only those of a certain status can
belong to. As Changez concludes,
I was – in four and a half years – never an
American; I was immediately a New Yorker.
Being an American and being a New Yorker
are, to Changez, two different things. New
York represents a certain multicultural mix
that all can share. Despite his ability, his
elite education and training, Changez is
never quite accepted as an American – not
linguistically and, especially after 9/11, not
culturally either. It’s an idea that the French
sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu illustrates.
Bourdieu and Cultural Capital
In his essay, ‘The Forms of Capital’ (1986),
Bourdieu provides a Marxist interpretation.
He suggests that outsiders may acquire
education – and even language – but
won’t ever possess ‘cultural capital’ or
‘institutional capital’. This is because these
elements are owned by the ruling and
upper middle classes, the custodians of
elitism. Erica, Changez’s romantic interest,
and her family belong to such groups.
They have an historical stake and vested
interest in the hierarchical structures of
their country. However, although their class
offers them all kinds of privilege – social,
cultural and economic – its presence, the
system and the old order that harbour
it are destructive; they drain the human
spirit. They cocoon them from the harsh
reality. It is appropriate, therefore, that
Erica’s obsession with her former – and
dead – boyfriend, rules her present life,
preventing her from moving on. As the
nurse confides to Changez when he visits
Erica in the clinic,
‘…right now you’re the hardest person for her to
see. You’re the one who upsets her most. Because
you’re the most real, and you make her lose her
balance.’
Changez’s ‘Acquired’
Language
We also see this disconnect in Changez’s use
of language. The way he speaks – his overt
politeness and turn of phrase – hints that he
is not quite the Westerner his education and
assimilation would suggest. This is alluded
to in the opening sentence of the novel,
establishing a tone of formal civility that
one would expect from a sales assistant in
a retail store,
Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance?
Erica also notices this when she says,
‘I don’t think I’ve ever met someone our age as
polite as you… Not boring polite. Respectful
polite,’
while Jim comments,
‘You’re polished, well-dressed. You have a
sophisticated accent. Most people probably
assume you’re rich where you come from.’
It’s not Changez’s lack of English or
refinement that exclude him. In fact –
quite ironically – the narrator’s impeccable
English makes him the outsider. He is – as
Edward Said states in his book Orientalism
(1979) – part of the ‘otherness’. Changez’s
December 2021 emagazine 15
16 emagazine December 2021
Kate Hudson and Riz Ahmed in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, d. Mira Nair, 2012
Contributor: Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
stylised, anachronistic vocabulary
(inauspicious, ubiquitous, connivance,
purchase, provenance, perused, reconstitute
etc.) suggest his disconnect with informality.
His language – as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus
observes in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man – may be rich but it’s acquired not
inherited; it’s inferior lacking the ease of
tone and common colloquialisms.
Clothing and Behaviour
The immigrant idea of the ‘outsider’ – trying
to fit in – is also captured in Changez’s
feeling of uncomfortableness about his
‘Western’ attire. Prior to visiting Erica’s
parents, for instance, he spends half a day
deciding what to wear,
I knew her family was wealthy, and I wanted to
dress as I imagined they would be dressed: in a
manner elegant but also casual. My suit seemed
too formal; my blazer would have been better,
but it was several years old and struck me as
somewhat shabby.
His Western clothes don’t feel right. In the
end, he chooses the ethnic white kurta and
is surprised when he is greeted by Erica
wearing, ‘a short Mighty Mouse tee-shirt’
and notices that – unlike him – she’s
not been preoccupied with issues of dress
selection.
Despite his efforts to fit in, Changez learns
later, his ‘Pakistaniness’ cannot be made
invisible or ‘cloaked by his suit’.
The allusion to clothing and attire
further emphasise the ‘peculiar’ feeling
of disconnectedness. It’s an experience
of humiliation which Changez registers.
At the airport, for instance, he is made
to strip to his boxer shorts – ‘a pink pair
patterned with teddy bears’. Coupled with
the embarrassment and suspicion with
which he is looked upon by others on the
plane, it heightens his sense of guilt and
self-consciousness.
The Desire to Fit In
Wanting to fit in is a common characteristic
of many immigrants settling in a strange
environment that linguistically and
culturally excludes them. It makes them
overtly accommodating and compliant. This
is certainly the case with Changez who even
goes against his religion that prohibits the
drinking of alcohol.
Essentially, immigrants like Changez
challenge and question their own identity.
And yet still people like Eric’s father will
ask him – in a tone of ‘typically American
undercurrent condescension’ – ‘how are
things back home?’ But perhaps as Erica
observes, Changez needs his ‘home’ because
America is killing him.
‘I love it when you talk about where you come
from,’ she said, slipping her arm through mine,
‘You become alive.’
The Outsider Everywhere
Changez’s disconnect isn’t only related to
language but to class and possibly race. For
instance, Jim’s comment,
‘You’re a watchful guy. You know where that
comes from?’ I shook my head. ‘It comes from
feeling out of place. Believe me. I know.’
Later, Jim reminds him of feeling
like an outsider,
‘I never let on that I felt like I didn’t belong to this
world. Just like you.’
Changez also acknowledges this
when he states,
‘I was not certain where I belonged – in New York,
in Lahore, in both, in neither’
for both places are uncomfortable for him.
Changez is one who has lost certain
privileges in Pakistan and so has to look
to the West to re-establish his position
amongst the middle-class but that requires
his dealing with class and privilege.
As he concludes,
Jim and I were indeed similar: he had grown up
outside the candy store, and I had grown on its
threshold as its door was being shut.
So, when he returns to Lahore after a short
spell in America, he is saddened to find the
place in such a state
no, more than saddened, I was shamed. ‘This’ was
where I came from, this was my provenance, and
it smacked of lowliness.
Literary Disconnect –
Questions Unanswered?
However, despite the presentation of these
themes, the novel, for me, also has a certain
literary disconnect and leaves further
questions unanswered. Is it a romantic
piece, a novel of suspense, a polemic against
the West or an autobiography? Maybe
it’s all of these or none. It’s difficult to
ascertain. That, in itself, could be seen as
an ambitious crossing of genres and styles,
a deliberate fusion to parallel Changez’s
immigrant identity and disconnect. In
addition, Hamid’s form and structure make
us question the handing of the narrative.
For instance, in choosing the first-person
monologue as the voice, the novel poses
problems for the reader regarding the
suspension of disbelief. It’s arguable as to
how authentic or plausible the voice is
because it sometimes seems too elevated in
style to be wholly realistic. Coupled with
the fact that the themes of language and
cultural identity – which Hamid is treading
on – are familiar territory explored with
great skill and inventiveness in the works of
Hanif Kureishi and Salman Rushdie in the
1970s and the 80s, one is left questioning
whether The Reluctant Fundamentalist adds
anything new to either the literary tradition
or the discourse about immigration, class
and the ownership of language.
Roshan Doug is an education management
consultant and Founder of Perspective Education.
emag web archive
• George Norton: Defamiliarising the
Fundamentals – Mohsin Hamid’s
Reluctant Capitalist, emagazine
74, December 2016
• Stephen Morton: Imaginary
Homelands – The Reluctant
Fundamentalist and Other
Contemporary Novels, emagazine
69, September 2015
• Sadia Habib: Recognising
Islamophobia – In Novels and Other
Texts, emagazine 90, December 2020
December 2021 emagazine 17
Reading
The Complex
Thoughtfully and the Simple

The Complex Because I would not stop for death,

Exemplifying his ideas
In English studies, we often find ourselves
using various texts, using the word ‘complex’: ‘the novel has a
including a poem by complex structure’ or ‘the poem presents
a complex picture of motherhood’, and so
Christina Rossetti, on. Of course we do, since much of what
Malcolm Hebron we study is complex: the multiple narrators
of Wuthering Heights, the collage of The
explores why the Waste Land, the play on different meanings
simple is sometimes of a word in a line from Shakespeare –
such features are undeniably ‘complex’
more powerful than and exploring them is one of the great
the complex, both in pleasures of reading.
texts themselves and in
… and the Simple
writing about them. But just as literature offers us intriguingly
complex material, it can also be very simple,
distilling thoughts into a few words:
To be or not to be, that is the question.
William Shakespeare
He kindly stopped for me.
Emily Dickinson
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
William Wordsworth
Lines like this stop us in our tracks. Against
the blurry rush of daily thoughts, we see a
human experience as if in a spotlight.
Simple and Simplistic
The language of lines like these is simple –
no fancy terms, nothing beyond what might
come up in ordinary conversation; and the
words are held in place by straightforward
frames of rhythm and rhyme. Simple, but
not simplistic. I very often see these terms

18 emagazine December 2021

confused, and the confusion points to a
misunderstanding of the nature of language.
So, what is the difference? It is important to
remember that ‘simplistic’ is not a neutral
term. It means that the language is not
adequate for what it is trying to convey. So,
for example, if I tried to give a description of
photosynthesis, or financial derivatives, or
how a car engine works, or any one of the
thousands of things I only half understand
(if that), then the result would be simplistic:
it would not give a sufficient explanation of
the topic. ‘Driving is easy: you just put your
foot down and go’ is a simplistic account of
driving. There is more to it than that! A lot
of language is simplistic in this sense – the
language of advertising, for example, or
political slogans – because it deliberately
simplifies a difficult topic, leaving out many
important details.
Literary Language
Of course, literary writers are not normally
in the business of explaining how a car
works, or what a hedge fund does. They are
more likely to be expressing the thoughts
and feelings of a human subject. And here,
uncomplicated language might be the only
adequate way of getting such a moment
across. Simple words are the ones we use
at our most important moments: ‘I love
you’, ‘I do’, ‘rest in peace’. These examples
remind us how plain and simple words can
have a huge depth beneath them. Herbert
and Hemingway are examples of writers
who write simply, with intense thought.
Wordsworth’s lines above convey the way
the simplest thing – ‘the meanest flower
that blows’ – can trigger a deep response.
Seamus Heaney speaks of the same
sensation in his poem ‘Postscript’:
You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things
pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
In lines such as this – both Wordsworth and
Heaney reach towards the monosyllabic
– we can feel a pressure of experience
pushing into the words. We can heighten
our reading experience by catching that
thoughtfulness, that ‘big soft buffeting’
of experience that has blown the words
onto the page.
Writing About Literature
Like literature itself, good criticism is
thoughtful. There is a strong temptation
when we write a critical essay to use
complex language because we hope it will
make us seem clever. Today, a popular
source for specialised words in English is
rhetoric: as early as GCSE, children are
taught to use labels like anaphora and
epanalepsis in their essays on poems,
partly because exam boards demand some
knowledge of critical terminology. But
these can be learned from a spreadsheet,
and repeated. They do not necessarily
prove any thinking has gone on at all. And
it is increasingly common to see A Level
essays sprinkled with words like fricative,
tricolon, hyperbaton, zeugma and
lexical field, as their authors anxiously
strive to look sophisticated.
Of course, a literary term can be helpful,
and necessary: in discussing a poem, we
may well need to use words like sonnet
and couplet. But specialised words can also
be risky: they are easy to get wrong, and
they may have the opposite effect to the
one intended. Instead of showing a wide
vocabulary, long critical words can actually
point to a limited vocabulary underneath –
those normal, unspecialised words we need
to describe what is going on as we read.
How then to escape from the grip of
terminology and the temptation to get
fancy words in somehow? I suggest the
answer lies in what I mentioned above –
being thoughtful. The essential challenge of
English is to think about a text and record
those thoughts in words.
To illustrate what I mean, here is a poem by
Christina Rossetti.
Up-Hill
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
Ways of Reading Thoughtfully
I would suggest we start our thinking about
this by jotting down what we think the
poem might be about. Here, it describes a
December 2021 emagazine 19
journey, up a hill to an inn and night and

Images public domain

rest. Then we can read it again, slowly,
asking questions. The title, for example,
‘Up-hill’. What ideas does that bring with
it? We might remember expressions like ‘it’s
an uphill struggle’. Our first thought may be
that the poem is going to explore some kind
of challenging task.

We read the first verse, and here some

terms may be useful, not as labels but as
aids to thinking about the poem: it’s a
quatrain (4 lines), and it’s cross-rhymed
(abab). OK, but so what? Rather than just
labelling it, we need to ask, how is this
form being used? We notice, for example,
that there are two speakers, so the rhyme
scheme neatly fits the exchange of question
and answer: abab/qaqa. And what does
this Q&A ritual sound like? Rossetti’s
nineteenth-century readers would have
recognised the similarity to a catechism,
in which the teachings of a religious faith
are explained. The form is rather hymn-
like, too. Is this some kind of religious
poem, about the journey of life? The simple
words – ‘road’, ‘hill’, ‘end’, ‘day, ‘night’ –
have behind them the pressure of thought
about the nature and purpose of life’s
journey. Can you think of other authors
who have written with these kinds of bare,
memorable images?
Noticing Absences
Words can be simple, yet also subtle. What
about that word ‘wind’ in line 1? The poet
could have said ‘lead uphill’ or ‘go uphill’,
but ‘wind’ gives us an image of a path
circling the hill, a long and winding road.
And if we listen carefully we hear the triple
stress in ‘whole long day’, which suggests
the plodding steps of the weary traveller.
What’s missing from a text can be as
important as what is there. We notice that
the speakers are not named. There are not
even any speech marks. What do we think
of this? Perhaps it suggests that the speaker
asking the questions is not one particular
person, but anyone – the voice of humanity.
And who would the speaker answering be?
A spiritual voice, perhaps, like a conscience?
Could this be an internal dialogue, a
soul speaking to itself? And what are the
emotions under the words? What is the
tone of that first line? We could hear it
being spoken plaintively, like a child in a
car (‘Are we nearly there yet?’), but there is
also the feeling of courageously facing up to
hard truths, of calm acceptance. The speaker
shows no self-pity, simply asks for guidance.
The ritualistic question and answer may be
a means of managing the fear that come
with thoughts of that journey through life,
‘from morn to night’.
Confidence to Speak Clearly
These are merely some thoughts about
the first verse of the poem. But ‘thought’
is the key word here. We have thought
about the title, the choice of form and
words and the sound of a phrase; we have
thought about its context and tried to pick
up the emotional tone in the speaker’s
voice. What we have not done is use
the text as an opportunity for showing
off long critical words, though we have
used some critical terms when we have
needed to, to comment on the use of the
form and rhyme.
You might like to continue with the rest
of the poem in the same spirit – giving
yourself time to pause and consider the
words, always thinking about how a detail
contributes to the effect of the whole.
Another challenge is to write about a poem
without using any critical terms at all, to
test your resources of ordinary language.
If we don’t strain to be complex and have
the confidence to speak clearly, we will
experience the best that close reading can
offer. On a good day, it brings us a little
closer, not just to the poem, but also to ‘the
human heart by which we live’.
Malcolm Hebron teaches English at Winchester
College. He is author of How to Read a Poem
(Connell guides) and edits The Use of English,
published by the English Association.
emag web archive
• Barbara Bleiman & Dan Clayton:
Beyond Linguistic Labelling – Towards
Textual Analysis and Interpretation,
emagazine 87, February 2020
• Barbara Bleiman: Using
Terminology (or Not) to Write
About Texts, emagplus for emagazine
85, September 2019
• Barbara Bleiman: Words Greeting
Each Other – Rhyme in Poetry,
emagazine 64, April 2014
• Ray Cluley: Sounds Poetic – Listening
to How Poetry Works, emagazine
59, February 2013

20 emagazine December 2021

Conversations with Corinne One Year On
Gillian Thompson has been recording her two granddaughters, Leonie
and Corinne, since the eldest, Leonie, was two years old. Several articles
analysing their speech features have appeared in emag (issues 74, 79, 83, 86
and 90), with transcripts and videos of their conversation available on the
emag website. Here she adds to these, with fresh data on Corinne, now four
years and three months old.
The Wug Test Revisited
Corinne is now four years and three
months old. Comparing her current speech
with that of a year ago enables us to gain
an impression of how a child’s language
changes over time. For example, back in
July 2020 I introduced Corinne to the Wug
Test. Psychologist Jean Berko devised
this test back in 1958, to test children’s
capacity to apply grammar rules. She
drew a fictitious character called a wug
and showed it to a child. Then she drew
another one and asked the child to describe
the pair. Children, who had never heard
adults say wug (as they don’t exist!) were
able to apply the plural rule: wugs, thus
suggesting they have an implicit knowledge
of the way words are formed. At three years
old Corinne was able to show she could
pluralise nouns but was unable to construct
the simple past tense. Now, a year later,
she confidently applied the regular -ed
past ending to the fictitious verbs ‘spow’
and ‘rick’ (lines 71 and 74 of the video
one transcript).
Time and the Past Tense
As well as becoming grammatically
more proficient, Corinne’s conceptual
awareness is expanding too. The twentieth-
century Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget
linked linguistic development with an
understanding of the concepts surrounding
a word’s meaning, suggesting that children
can only learn when they are ready. At
three, Corinne’s understanding of time
was sketchy – like most children her age
she lived in the present and her language
reflected this. But now she is gaining a
sense of the past, present and future. For
example, in the transcript to video one
I am asking her about a recent trip to a
zoo. In lines 101 to 105 she is telling me
about a model of a giraffe that she and her
sister played on:
Leonie went under it and I went up it
line 105
Consistent with a narration of past events,
Corinne correctly applies the standard past
tense form of the irregular verb ‘to go’ (‘I
went’). Social Psychologist Roger Brown
found that children acquire grammatical
structures in stages. These are categorised
in a developmental chart, often known as
‘Brown’s List.’ According to Roger Brown’s
chart, most children can form the third
person irregular past tense at around 41
to 46+ months (stage five), and Corinne
clearly fits this model (‘Leonie went’).
But she is still modifying the language
she uses to describe the past. In video two
she is pouring water onto some playdoh
to soften it. When I ask her what she is
doing she replies, ‘make it… how it was…
yesterday’ (line 19). Now I know for a fact
that Corinne hadn’t been using the playdoh
the previous day: ‘yesterday’ is simply a
term used to describe any time in the past
– be it the day before or several weeks ago.
This is known as overextension, where a
word is applied too broadly (such as using
the noun ‘dog’ to describe all animals).
Like most children her age, Corinne is still
developing and refining her mental lexicon
so her understanding of word meanings
isn’t yet precise.
The Future
She is similarly vague about the future. In
video two, when I ask her how long she
needs to leave the playdoh to soften, she
says: ‘Loads of waiting,’ (line 27), suggesting
she cannot measure time – although, when
I press her, she comes up with an arbitrary
figure ‘thirteen’ (line 29) indicating she is
aware numbers can be applied to amounts
of time, even if she has no idea how long
that represents.
Delayed Gratification –
Chocolate Buttons
This is borne out when I ask her if she
would prefer ‘one chocolate button now
or two chocolate buttons later’ (transcript
two, line 37), she replies ‘one chocolate
button now’ (line 38) suggesting that
she cannot fully relate to the concept of
‘later,’ preferring to play safe and stay
in the present.
The chocolate button experiment is
also a measure of a child’s ability to
December 2021 emagazine 21
delay gratification. First developed by
psychologist Walter Mischel in the late
1960’s and early 1970’s, and originally
known as The Marshmallow Test, the
experiment involved bringing a child into
a room and offering them a reward, such
as a marshmallow or sweet. The child was
then told that the researcher would leave
the room and if they could wait until the
researcher returned they would get two
marshmallows or sweets instead of just the
one. When a longitudinal (long term) study
was conducted it was discovered that those
who were able to delay gratification during
the marshmallow test as young children
later scored higher on cognitive tests and
were better able to cope with stress and
frustration in adolescence. Corinne clearly
has some work to do in this area!
The Real and the Imagined
Corinne is also exploring the concept of
what is real and what is imagined. She
enjoys role play, and in video one, is
‘making tea’ with a toy tea set and creating
biscuits out of playdoh. At one point
however she says ‘I want real biscuits’ (line
32). Piaget would suggest she is able to use
the adjective ‘real’ because she understands
the concept of real and imagined. In fact,
when I tell her ‘we’ll have pretend biscuits’
(line 33) she clearly understands and
returns to making them from playdoh. It is
interesting that when she is describing the
animals at the zoo she visited, she feels the
need to establish that they are ‘real animals’
(video one transcript line 94), although she
and her sister later play on ‘a giraffe [but]
not a real giraffe’ (line 100).
At other times however, she is happy to
mix the real and the imagined. In video two
she sees an insect on the wall, which she
calls a ‘spider’ (line 40) although I describe
it as ‘a sort of grasshoppery thing’ (line
44), suggesting Corinne is again employing
overextension – the noun ‘spider’ being
used to cover other types of insects. When
I ask her how the insect managed to get up
the wall she replies, ‘with a ladder’ (line 45)
which is clearly unlikely. She continues to
conjecture the insect’s activities, claiming it
climbs the wall to find food (line 57) which
it takes home to the baby spiders (line
67). Linguist Michael Halliday identified
seven functions of speech: instrumental
(fulfilling a need); regulatory (influencing
the behaviour of others); interactional
(developing social relationships); personal
(conveying opinions); representational
(conveying facts); imaginative (creating
imaginary worlds) and heuristic (learning
22 emagazine December 2021
about the environment).
Corinne is clearly developing
her ability to create imaginary
worlds, as her speculations
about the spider’s lifestyle
demonstrate. Elsewhere
we have a discussion about
unicorns (transcript two video
two, lines 73 to 99), which she
claims live in ‘unicorn houses’
(line 92) and eat ‘hay’ (line
95) which they get from ‘their
house’ (line 97). Although
she would probably agree that
unicorns are fictitious, she is still
happy to enter into the world of
make believe. She attends pre-
school five mornings a week,
where role play is encouraged.
She also borrows books from
the library, particularly enjoying
stories which merge the real
and the imagined, thus further
fuelling her imagination. In
1968, Nasa scientist George
Land (with Beth Jarman) conducted a
research study to test the creativity of 1,600
children ranging in ages from three-to-five
years old, using similar assessments to those
On the open site
devised to recruit innovative engineers and • Transcript and video to accompany
scientists. He discovered that whilst 98% of this article are available on the open
under-fives fell into the ‘genius’ category pages of the emagazine site.
for their imaginative problem solving,
only 30% were there five years later, and
12% five years after that, suggesting that
creativity peaks in toddlers.
emag web archive
• Gillian Thompson: Doing What Comes
Starting School
Naturally – Leonie Speaking (CLA),
Corinne is just about to start school. Soon emagazine 74, December 2016
her language will be further developed • Gillian Thompson: Leonie
through interaction with other children Speaking – One Year On, emagazine
as well as responding to instructions and 79, February 2018
feedback from her teacher. Considering • Gillian Thompson: Leonie
how far she has come on since she was Speaking: One Year On (CLA) –
three I expect her language will show a Transcript, emagplus for emagazine
considerable change by the time she is 79, February 2018
five. Acquiring and refining language is • Gillian Thompson: Leonie and
a lifelong process, but Corinne is already Corinne – Child Language Acquisition
well on the road. (CLA), emagazine 83, February 2019
• Leonie and Corinne Transcript – Child
Gillian Thompson teaches English part-time at
Godalming College. Her first novel The Oceans Language Acquisition (CLA)
Between Us was published by Headline in 2019 and • Gillian Thompson: Conversations
her second The Child on Platform One in March with Corinne, emagazine
2020. She blogs about writing on her website
wordkindling.co.uk 90, December 2020
• Leonie Talking – Theories
and Transcript, emagazine
74, December 2016
• Gillian Thompson: Leonie and
Corinne Transcript – Child Language
Acquisition (CLA), emagplus for
emagazine 83, February 2019
 The Tyranny
of Custom in
Shakespearean
Tragedy

Philip Smithers
ranges across several
plays and comment
by contemporary
philosophers Bacon,
Montaigne and others,
to show Shakespeare’s
interest in the idea of
Ralph Fiennes (Coriolanus) in Coriolanus, d. Jonathan Kent, Gainsborough Studios

custom and habit and

his characters’ desire
to ‘overleap’ what’s
expected of them.
Credit: Donald Cooper / Alamy Stock Photo

December 2021 emagazine 23

24 emagazine December 2021
Lolita Chakrabarti (Goneril), Ben Thomas (King Lear), Cathy Tyson (Regan) in King
Lear, d. Ellen Cairns/Yvonne Brewster, Cochrane Theatre 1994
Credit: Donald Cooper / Alamy Stock Photo
Habit as Pharmakon
Clare Carlisle, in her book On Habit,
writes that habit is at once a ‘blessing and
a curse’: it is
akin to the Greek concept of pharmakon, which is
a drug that may be both a poison and a cure.

Habit can allow us to become proficient

at a task as well as dulling our senses.
Shakespeare was acutely aware of such a
notion: Hamlet, when advising Gertrude to
‘go not to my uncle’s bed’, tells her to
Assume a virtue if you have it not.
That monster custom who all sense doth eat
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this
3.4 157-160

Here we see that custom (habit), while

capable of being a ‘monster’, is also capable
of being an ‘angel’: over time, habit will
make her period of abstinence more
bearable. This is after Hamlet has already
accused her of allowing habit to dull her
senses and harden her heart:
Peace, sit you down
And let me wring your heart. For so I shall
If it be made of penetrable stuff,
If damned custom have not brazed it so
That it be proof and bulwark against sense.
3.4. 32-6

According to Hamlet, damned custom

(accursed habit) has hardened Gertrude’s
heart and prevented her from coming to
terms with her guilt. He sees it as his duty
to penetrate through to her dulled senses.
As Horatio comments about the gravedigger
joking over the bodies he is burying,
custom hath made it in him a property of easiness
5.1. 51

In Shakespeare’s Othello, the eponymous

soldier also makes reference to the
‘tyrant custom’:
[it] hath made the flinty and steel couch of war
My thrice driven bed of down
1.3. 242-3

For Othello, habit has made that difficult

task easier; the force of habit has dulled his
senses to the hardship of war.

The Plague of Custom

Francis Bacon, Shakespeare’s contemporary,
says that many examples of the ‘force of
custom’ may be given, both upon ‘mind
and body’. The ‘predominacy of custom is
everywhere visible’ he writes; it makes men
do just as they have done before; as if they were
dead images, and engines moved only by the
wheels of custom.

December 2021 emagazine 25

26 emagazine December 2021
Ben Whishaw as Hamlet and Imogen Stubbs as Gertrude, Old Vic, 2004.
Credit: REUTERS / Alamy Stock Photo / Kieran Doherty
He also comments on the ‘reign or
tyranny of custom’ – the mindless
following of tradition that has become
naturalised and concretised by collective
habitual behaviour. In King Lear, Edmund
holds up to the light this ‘plague of
custom’, subjecting it to sceptical analysis.
Due to his bastardy, he is deemed
‘illegitimate’ and ‘base’ by the standards
of society and he asks himself why
should I
Stand in the plague of custom and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me
For that I am some twelve or fourteen
moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Why base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they
With base? With baseness? Bastardy? Base,
base?
1.2. 2-10
Edmund questions (quite reasonably)
why he is deemed to be lesser than his
brother when there is scarcely anything to
differentiate between them. He is deprived
of respectability and denied the same land
that his brother, ‘legitimate’ Edgar, is due
owing to Edgar’s luck in not being born
a ‘bastard’. The reason for this arbitrary
binary between the two brothers is
merely habit and custom. These customs
are accepted, despite their arbitrariness,
because the collective habits of a society
have anaesthetised the people into
unquestionably accepting them: custom
gives them a ‘property of easiness’. An
acknowledged influence on King Lear
is the sceptical French writer Michel de
Montaigne, who consistently rails that
‘habit stuns our senses’. In a fabulous
phrase, he writes that
habit is a violent and treacherous schoolteacher.
Gradually and stealthily she slides her
authoritative foot into us.
For Montaigne, Bacon and Shakespeare,
habit can be a deadening force that lulls
us into accepting the ways of the world as
some kind of immutable naturally given
order, when they are in fact man-made –
and therefore alterable.
What customs wills, in all things should we
do’t?
In Coriolanus, another of Shakespeare’s
tragedies, the martial Caius Martius, after
performing heroically in battle, is offered
the position of consul and asked to speak
to the people who have gathered to greet
him. Caius, uncomfortable at speaking
and performing in front of a crowd, asks
if he can ‘overleap that custom’. He is
told, however, he must do it: ‘go fit you Let Him Tear Off That Mask
to the custom’. So uncomfortable is he in
performing such a role, he launches an Shakespearean tragedy is preoccupied
attack on custom: with pushing against the boundaries of
established thought. It is a way to re-
Custom calls me to’t.
evaluate to what extent we are dulled
What custom wills, in all things should we do
by ingrained habits and inculcated into
it?
following arbitrary customs. Habit and
The dust on antique time would lie unswept,
And mountainous error be too highly heaped custom are monstrous and tyrannical since
For truth to o’erpeer. their ‘property of easiness’ deceives us into
2.3.93-7 acquiescence. Montaigne said that
a man who wished to loose himself from the
In Caius’s wonderful phrasing, he makes a violent forgone conclusions of custom will find
case that mindlessly following established many things accepted as indubitably settled
customs prevents truth from being which have nothing to support them.
realised. For things to change, we must
His advice was to ‘tear off that mask’ and
break free of our settled habits, sweep the
dust off ‘antique time’. bring matters back to truth and reason.
Shakespeare’s tragedies, I argue, permits
A Custom More Honoured in us to peer beneath the mask of habit
the Breach and custom, laying them open for
sceptical analysis.
Hamlet, when asked by Horatio if his
murderous uncle’s drunken celebration is Philip Smithers is a teacher at Cardinal Wiseman
a ‘custom’, replies that it is a Catholic School and has an MA in Shakespeare
Studies from King’s College London.
custom more honoured in the breach than the
observance
1.4. 13-16
Hamlet sets himself up as one who can
take a disenchanting and sceptical analysis
of the court of Denmark, one who is not
willing to mindlessly follow custom. He
considers the ‘customary suits of solemn
black’ (1.2. 78) to be an inadequate
expression of his inner feelings and grief
as well as feeling how ‘weary, stale, flat
and unprofitable’ are ‘all the uses of the
world’ (1.2. 134) – ‘uses’ is typically
glossed as habits and customary practices.
And Hamlet is not the only one who is
willing to ‘overleap custom’. Tellingly,
it is another young man in Elsinore:
Laertes. Upon his arrival from France to
take revenge for the death of his father,
Polonius, he storms the castle ‘like an
ocean overpeering his list’ (4.4. 96). This
imagery, employed by the conservative emag web archive
messenger in the employ of Claudius’s
corrupt court, implies that Laertes is rising • Sean McEvoy: Time in Hamlet,
above what is normal, ‘overpeering’ the emagazine 40, April 2008
boundaries of established order. Not only • Susan Bruce: Dirty Rotten Bastards
this, but he shows a blatant disregard for – Edmund, Class and King Lear,
authority, almost as if he has ‘antiquity emagazine 60, April 2013
forgot, custom not known’ (4.4. 101). • Sean McEvoy: Time in Hamlet,
Montaigne writes that it emagazine 40, April 2008
is a common failing not only of the mob but of • Elspeth Carruthers: The Tyranny
virtually all men to set their sights within the of the Law? Angelo in Measure for
limits of the customs into which they were born Measure, emagazine 44, March 2009
• Katy Limmer: Male Friendship in
but we see in Shakespeare that is possible
Hamlet, emagplus for emagazine
to rise above such limits.
74, December 2016
December 2021 emagazine 27
 Is it rude
to point?
this and
that
about
this and
that

28 emagazine December 2021

 English has plenty of rude nouns for
Following on from referring to people – you’ve probably just
her article on the thought of some, so I won’t bother to list
those. Those rude nouns are not said in
word the in the last polite company, but ‘polite’ company can
issue of emagazine find other ways to be disparaging of others,
using otherwise harmless words. In the last
(‘Beyond Pronouns, issue of emag (‘Beyond Pronouns’, issue 93),
issue 93), Professor I discussed why and how the word the – the
most frequent word in written English –
Lynne Murphy discusses can make otherwise descriptive words for
the demonstrative people sound denigrating, as in the Muslims
or the gays. The is a determiner – a word
determiners this, that, that helps us determine which possible
these and those, with referents a noun phrase has. It’s that
‘determining’ that can make it seem a bit
an equally fascinating sinister. When Donald Trump talked about
exploration of the ways the African-Americans the the was saying ‘You
know which ones. That undifferentiated
in which they express group of them.’
much more than just
The isn’t the only determiner that sneaks
straightforward spatial emotive connotations into noun phrases.
relationships. The demonstrative determiners – this, that,
these, and those – bring layers of attitude, as
do their twins the demonstrative pronouns.
You know, those.
Demonstrative Determiners
and What They Do
These four words seem simple enough,
carrying just two tiny bits of meaning into
the noun phrase. The first meaning type is
number: is the noun singular (this, that)
or plural (these, those)? Simple enough.
The second meaning type seems simple
but gets very complex. It’s called deixis or
deictic meaning, from the Greek word
for pointing (the same Greek word that
gives us the name index finger for our main
tool of pointing). Deictic words change
what they refer to depending on who/
where/when they are said. The proximal
demonstratives this and these signal
something near me as the speaker. To talk
about things near you, the hearer, or things
that are away from either of us, the distal
demonstratives that and those seem more
apt. (Some languages have a three-way
demonstrative distinction between ‘those’
nearer the hearer and ‘those’ far away
from speaker and hearer. Modern English
generally doesn’t, but we can see the
remnants of a three-way deictic system in
here – there – yonder.) Because these deictic
demonstratives are pointing words, they
have a lot in common with our old friend
the definite determiner the: indicating
that the speaker has a particular referent
in mind: not just any old thing, but this
thing or that thing.
Beyond Straightfoward Spatial
Meanings
Demonstrative determiners seem fairly
straightforward when you’re picking out
which pastry you want from the bakery
display: ‘Not that one,’ you might say
as the tongs approach the squashed one
nearest the shop assistant. ‘This one,’ you
say, pointing to one that’s closer to you.
But straightforward spatial language has
a way of being recruited to communicate
non-straightforward, non-spatial meanings.
The physical, spatial world, where things
can be close or far from each other, lends
us the metaphors we need to talk about
abstract relationships between things. And
so we use demonstratives even when we
can’t physically point at things – that woman
who was here yesterday, that idea of yours, these
politicians who say one thing and do another.
Whether we use this/these or that/those tells
our listener something about the stance we
are taking toward the people or things we’re
talking about.
When something is good, we often want
to be associated with it. We want it near
us, so we might draw them closer by using
this. An American friend of mine often says
‘I love this guy’ when my husband displays
his English sense of humour. Even if he
is standing nearer to me than to her, she
wants him in her deictic space, so he’s this
guy, not that guy or your guy. Meanwhile,
when she talks about behaviours she
wants to discourage in her teenage sons,
she admonishes them: ‘Don’t be that
guy.’ That guy is a type of person we can
readily identify, but one we want to keep
at arm’s length.
December 2021 emagazine 29

That isn’t always negative, but it often feels
that way. Look at how it was used with
proper names in tweets about Love Island
contestants last summer:
That Lillie is a bad person ain’t she
Omg that Lillie is a wee witch
That Lillie is a HORROR.
Wowww that lillie is a little trouble causer
Man that #teddy is a smooth operator...
That Toby is a right sleeze
That Jake is a danger
None of the tweeters needed that to refer
to the people in question. Since they all
used the #loveisland hashtag, the names
30 emagazine December 2021
themselves would have been enough
to let us know who the tweeter was
talking about. But that before a personal
name, as the Oxford English Dictionary
(OED) notes, often
impl[ies] censure, dislike, or scorn; but sometimes
commendation or admiration.
The tweeters used that to point an accusing
finger at the contestants.
Similarly, when Hermione Granger
comments that Fleur Delacour ‘really
thinks a lot of herself, that one, doesn’t
she?’, it’s not a simple pointing-out of
another student, it’s a put-down. The OED
says that that one is ‘used disparagingly of
a woman’. The historical sexism of the
phrase affected its interpretation when
Images: Public domain
Republican Senator John McCain used
it to refer to his opponent in the 2008
US presidential election, Barack Obama.
Talking about some legislation he didn’t
like, McCain said ‘You know who voted for
it? […] That one.’ Commentators wondered
if McCain was trying to undermine Obama
by feminising him, or whether in this
case that one had shifted from a sexist to
a racist usage. Whatever the intention,
the distancing effect of the that and the
impersonal nature of the one made it sound
unsavoury. Obama’s supporters capitalised
on the occasion, selling t-shirts promoting
‘THAT ONE 2008’.
Proximal Demonstratives –
Heightening Attention
The proximal demonstratives have
different effects.
I was grabbing some fish fingers when this man
just starts singing in the middle of the frozen
foods aisle.
Why this man? I didn’t know him; I don’t
expect you to know him; he’s not right
here. So why didn’t I say a man? Well, I
could have said a man, but this allowed
me to metaphorically point at him. It’s
the verbal equivalent of an OMG face.
This signals that he’s new and exciting
information, unlike that, which would have
said ‘the man you already know about’. It’s
not a coincidence that this is often found
in clickbait headlines (‘You’ll never believe
what this boxer does every morning’) and
advertisements (‘This patented technology is
doctor-approved’). It’s saying ‘Hey! Look
here! There’s something fresh to see!’
We use these demonstrative determiners
when the things they refer to are important
enough to point at. They heighten the
attention we give to the nouns they
describe. Since this and these signal things
that are physically or metaphorically
 emag web archive
• Lynne Murphy: Beyond Pronouns
– What Function Words Say About
People, emagazine 93, September 2021
• Margaret Coupe: Referring With
Respect – The Way We Talk
about Gender Identity, emagazine
79, February 2018
• Lucia Aguilar-Gomez: One Small Step
for Grammar, One Giant Leap for
Peoplekind, emagplus for emagazine
85, September 2019
• Ryan Davidson: Hey, I’m
Talking to YOU! emagazine for
emagplus 52, April 2011
closer to the speaker than to the hearer,
it precedes information that the hearer
doesn’t yet know about. The speaker not
only knows about this information but
finds it important enough to linguistically
point at it with a demonstrative. That and
those signal things that are less new and
less important, but still worth more special
attention than a plain old the would signal.
These differences can be summed up in a
table (adapted from Strauss 2002):
this child screamed
that child screamed
the child screamed/they screamed
A stereotyped anti-immigrant sentiment
is ‘These immigrants are coming here
and they’re stealing our jobs’. (It’s so
stereotypical that comedians often use
it in their routines; Dane Baptiste has
a funny one – look it up.) Why these?
Surely it’s not new information that there
are immigrants. Wouldn’t those immigrants
sound more disparaging? But these makes
the issue seem more urgent. They’re right
here! It certainly makes it more emotive.
Other Examples to Look For
Have a look for these and those in
intergenerational talk: are people talking
about these kids or those young people? Or
where people talk about their nearest and
dearest – when are they called that (wo)man
or this one? What does that phrasing tell you
that wouldn’t have been so evident if the
speaker had called them by name? When
is Parliament these politicians and when are
they those politicians? Look particularly for
cases where the demonstrative determiner
introduces the topic of conversation.
Amount of attention Relation to hearer
HIGH FOCUS new info to hearer
MEDIUM FOCUS info shared by speaker & hearer
LOW FOCUS
Linguists haven’t fully figured out how
or why English speakers choose their
demonstrative determiners, but we do
know that speakers and writers make the
most of their communicative choices.
Lynne Murphy is Professor of Linguistics at Sussex
University and author of The Prodigal Tongue:
The Love–Hate Relationship Between British and
American English.
Further Reading
Squires, Lauren. 2008. Ya know, that
that one. The Polyglot Conspiracy [blog].
https://polyglotconspiracy.wordpress.
com/2008/10/08/ya-know-that-that-one/
[Accessed 6 Sept 2021]
Strauss, Susan. 2002. This, that, and
it in spoken American English: a
demonstrative system of gradient focus.
Language Sciences 24: 131–52. https://
doi.org/10.1016/S0388-0001(01)00012-2
Relation to speaker
important to speaker
less important
December 2021 emagazine 31

A Deadly Thirst for
Knowledge
Bram Stoker’s
Dracula Bram Stoker’s interest in forbidden
knowledge is evident in the pre-vampiric
past of Dracula’s titular protagonist. In
The main protagonist details that can be easily overlooked,
of Stoker’s novel is not because only briefly mentioned, we learn
about Count Dracula’s background from
just a monster, argues the research of Professor Van Helsing, his
teacher, Alice Reeve- antagonist. Van Helsing reveals that as
well as being an exemplary warrior and
Tucker. His intelligence, statesman, Dracula was once renowned
learning and the quest for his superior intelligence and pioneering
learning, before being drawn to the
for knowledge in demonic arts. In these respects, Dracula
his earlier life are at is strikingly similar to other brilliant and
transgressive thinkers in Gothic texts:
the very heart of the Victor Frankenstein, from Mary Shelley’s
novel’s exploration of Frankenstein (1818), and Dr Henry
Jekyll, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s
transgression and evil. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886). By aligning Stoker’s creation
with these Gothic protagonists and their
dangerously ambitious uses of transgressive
32 emagazine December 2021
Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
knowledge, we can see unexpected
and important dimensions in Dracula’s
characterisation as a monster.
Van Helsing’s Research into
Dracula
Van Helsing undertakes detailed research
into Dracula’s heritage and life as a man
to learn all that he can about his enemy,
so that he can pursue and destroy him.
Referring to the findings of his friend
‘Arminus of Buda-Pesth’, Van Helsing
reveals that when the Count was human he
had ‘a mighty brain’ with ‘learning beyond
compare’ (321). Moreover, Dracula was ‘in
life a most wonderful man’, as he was a
‘Soldier, statesman, and alchemist – which latter
was the highest development of the science-
knowledge of his time.’
Here Van Helsing emphasises Dracula’s
intelligence and ambitious thinking; he
was at the forefront of contemporary
knowledge and hungered to develop it as
far as he could.
Yet Dracula’s desire for such knowledge
drew him to explore the dark arts under
Satan’s guidance. Van Helsing explains that
the Draculas as a family ‘had dealings with
the Evil One’, and that they
‘learned [the devil’s] secrets in the Scholomance,
amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt,
where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his
due.’
A few chapters later, Van Helsing returns to
Dracula’s association with the devil when
he repeats the fact that Dracula
‘dared even to attend the Scholomance, and there
was no branch of knowledge of his time that he
did not essay.’
The Scholomance and the
Devil’s Influence
In researching Dracula, Stoker learned
about the legendary Scholomance, and its
place in Romanian folklore, by reading the
work of the travel writer Emily Gerard,
specifically her essay ‘Transylvanian
Superstitions’ (1885). Gerard explained that
the ‘Scholomance, or school’ was ‘supposed
to exist somewhere in the heart of the
mountains’; it was
where all the secrets of nature, the language of
animals, and all imaginable magic spells and
charms [were] taught by the devil in person.
She then revealed that only ‘ten scholars’
were admitted at a time, and that when
their ‘course of learning’ had expired,
nine were released to go back to their
homes, with the tenth ‘detained by the
devil as payment.’
In referencing the Scholomance, Stoker
indicates that Dracula was an esteemed,
enlightened thinker, who was educated
by the devil himself; and thus establishes
a clear connection in the novel between
certain kinds of progressive thinking and
Satanic temptation. While Dracula’s actual
transformation into a vampire is never fully
explained in the text that bears his name,
the fact that he was most likely taught
by the devil could provide a reason for
his metamorphosis.
MARKA / Alamy Stock Photo
Dracula and the Devil
This association between Dracula and the
devil is apparent in other aspects of the
novel. As a vampire, Dracula is explicitly
classed as being unholy, and there are
repeated references to the cursed state of
his soul and those of his victims. Moreover,
Van Helsing’s efforts to destroy the Count
amount to a religious quest, as he is
armed with crucifixes, sacred wafers, and
holy water. At one point, Van Helsing
reclaims the soul of one of Dracula’s
victims, Lucy Westenra, and triumphantly
declares that he has liberated her from the
devil’s clutches:
‘For she is not a grinning devil now – not any
more a foul Thing for all eternity. No longer she
is the devil’s Un-Dead. She is God’s true dead,
whose soul is with Him!’
Such statements explicitly establish the idea
of vampires working for the devil, which is
one that feasibly originated when Dracula
was said to have come under his influence
in the Scholomance.
Van Helsing – Knowledge for
Good
Stoker’s interest in transgressive knowledge
is also evident in the characterisation of Van
Helsing, who is Dracula’s antithesis. Like
Dracula, Van Helsing is highly intelligent
and celebrated for his deep and broad
learning. He’s described by his former
student, John Seward, as
‘a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of
the most advanced scientists of his day, and he
has, I believe, an absolutely open mind.’
However, in contrast to Dracula, Van
Helsing uses his intelligence and extensive
knowledge for the good of mankind; he
performs ‘noble work’ and is recognised
for having ‘the kindliest and truest heart
that beats’, with views that are ‘as wide as
his all-embracing sympathy’ (122). These
benevolent traits are key. Van Helsing is a
pioneering thinker who uses his knowledge
to benefit others and to eventually destroy
Dracula, whereas Dracula’s quest for
learning was, it seems, a key source of
his monstrosity.
Dracula, Frankenstein and
Jekyll – Pushing at the
Boundaries
Dracula’s desire to push the boundaries
of contemporary scientific knowledge,
along with his demonic associations, can
be compared to the profane learning
of Victor Frankenstein. In her ‘Preface’
to Frankenstein, Shelley describes her
protagonist as a ‘pale student of unhallowed
arts’, labelling his experiments ‘frightful’
because of their ungodly nature:
December 2021 emagazine 33
supremely frightful would be the effect of any
human endeavour to mock the stupendous
mechanism of the creator of the world.

When Frankenstein reflects on the rationale

for his monstrous experiment (his desire to

MARKA / Alamy Stock Photo

reanimate a corpse), he confesses that he
had a ‘thirst for knowledge’ (29) which was
combined with an ‘evil influence’, as
the Angel of Destruction […] asserted omnipotent
sway

over him during his time at university.

Frankenstein thus frames his scientific
interests as satanic. He goes on to view the
product of his experiments in similar terms,
referring to the ‘demoniacal corpse’ (46) to
whom he had given life. Dr Henry Jekyll
likewise experiences an ambitious desire to
experiment, which leads him into corrupted
malpractice. In his ‘Full statement of the
case’, he refers to how he had once had
philanthropic motives, when he
laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of
knowledge and the relief of sorrow and suffering.

However, his pursuit of knowledge became
malevolent when he concocted a formula
to separate the ‘evil’ aspect of himself,
giving it the grotesque human form of
Edward Hyde, who
alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.
paralleling Frankenstein, Jekyll refers to the
‘accursed’ (57) night that his experiment
worked, whereby he created a monstrous
familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent
forth alone to do his own good pleasure.
Thus, in all three novels, the protagonists
intelligently pursue knowledge in ways that
corrupt them by association with evil.
Transgressive Knowledge –
Denying God’s Authority
A fascination with transgression has
been identified by Fred Botting as
one of the Gothic genre’s overarching
features, whereby
the terrors and horrors of transgression in Gothic
writing become a powerful means to reassert the
values of society, virtue and propriety.
these writers imply that learning has certain
limits which must be respected, and that the
exceeding of such limits will be punished:
Frankenstein is pursued to his death by his
creation; Jekyll commits suicide in order to
murder Hyde; and Dracula is destroyed at
the end of the novel, having been pursued
by Van Helsing’s comrades as he retreats
to Transylvania. Viewing the Count’s
pre-vampiric aptitude for learning and
his association with the devil allows us to
discern an aspect of his characterisation that
might otherwise be neglected. We can infer
a reason for his transformation into an evil
monster; recognise his association with the
devil throughout the novel; and identify a
key Gothic theme in Dracula that connects it
with other major texts of the genre.
Alice Reeve-Tucker teaches English at
Malvern College.
Further Reading
Botting, F. 2007. Gothic, 2007
emag web archive
• Ray Cluley: Fearing Female
Sexuality in Dracula, emagazine
50, December 2010
• David Punter: Dracula – Degeneration
and Modernity, emagazine
73, September 2016
• Nicolas Tredell: Documents,
Modernity and Feminism in Dracula,
emagazine 81, September 2018

With regards to transgressive knowledge in

particular, the values that Stoker, Shelley,
and Stevenson reassert are explicitly
religious; their protagonists’ transgressive
acts are all in their distinctive ways Satanic
threats to God’s authority. Accordingly,

34 emagazine December 2021

© Linda Combi, 2021
A Level student
Florence Wolter wrote
this story while studying
The Bloody Chamber. It
imitates Angela Carter’s
style and we hope you
agree that it works
brilliantly as a story in
its own right too.
My mother taught me to string pearls. It
is a violent act; you hold their spherical
perfection in your fingertips for a moment,
then force a hole straight through. For a
full necklace you must penetrate orb after
orb, like a chain of lovers. Often do I slip,
and my fingers offer up a drop of blood to
coat their waxy whiteness. The sacrifices we
make, says my mother.
We sing as we work. Songs of the ocean,
with melodies that rise and fall like waves.
We plait our music into the necklaces, that
they might glisten as if fresh from the sea,
and glint like sunlight off the shallows.
Some say it is a siren’s song. Others say
it is a tourist’s trick, a con to raise the
price. I like to think it is a song of joy;
perhaps I am naïve.
We sell the strings to travellers passing
through our island. Gifts for girls back
The
Little
Mermaid
home. They are people of the land, heavy
as they plod, trading men, farmers. Not like
my mother, who swims through the air. Her
hair waves as if with the weightlessness of
submersion, like she is constantly floating
in watery depths that I cannot see. Many
a man has come to our island for a chance
to unclothe her, to see if she truly has the
scales of a fish beneath the woven layers
of fabric, as some claim to have glimpsed.
They say crude things, they ask if she is
wet from the ocean or from them. They say
they always wanted a kiss from a mermaid,
maybe something more. My mother only
smiles. They leave with a string of pearls.
My mother carefully folds their grubby
green paper. She locks it safely in a box that
she wears the key to on a string around her
pearl-less neck. A man’s money is more
valuable than pearls, she would say. When
I was young, I thought that men’s blood
was brown, that the grime on their fingers
bled onto their green paper as my red bled
onto white pearls. But men do not make
sacrifices, only dole out the dirt on their
hands from a life on the shore.
I have been to the mainland. There is a
causeway. Twice a day the ocean wracks in
her breath and the water drags itself back.
We are like a broken clock that twice a
day aligns with the world. It is not a mercy
but a dreary coincidence that our twilight
moments connect day to night and us to
land. I must never miss the causeway at
dusk, or else I will be stranded on the land.
My mother has warned me; men may shake
your hand by day, but they will take what
they want by night.
Once a moon I take our pearls at dawn and
walk across the water. I take them to the
market and sell our strings. I watch our
precious drops of sea foam weep against
the pale planes of duchesses’ breasts. These
are not people of the water. Our pearls will
wither and die I think, for they cannot hear
the singing of the waves. But I smile like
my mother and tell the ladies that the finest
pearls could not compare to the opal of
their skin. And these are the finest pearls –
six shillings thruppence a string, and worth
every penny – I continue, turning to their
fat husbands with their fat pocketbooks.
Everything has a price. For six shillings
thruppence you can buy the soul of the
sea, strung up like laundry. For six shillings
thruppence you can buy my smiles.
You can buy a body for a night, too. I have
seen them, the women who stand on the
corners of streets. They, like the tide, come
out at dusk and disappear at dawn. I know
how much it costs. I tell myself that I would
never. But I know, that if the sea ran out of
pearls, everything has a price.
There is a man. You see, there is always a
man. He is a prince. Each moon I think he
waits for me, for he returns to my market
stall. He likes to hear me hum as I lay
out our wares. He listens hungrily. Like
clockwork he asks for our finest pearls. But
December 2021 emagazine 35
they are all the same, I will reply. And he
will smile, select a string and let me keep
the change. He must have a hundred pearls.
I wonder if he has a hundred women to
wear them, and the octopus in my stomach
curls its tentacles around my heart.

I do not put his change in my mother’s box.

She does not know that I have kept it and it
has grown. Soon I will have enough to buy
a fine silk gown like those of the ladies who
buy our pearls. And I will go to him and he
will pick me like he picks his string of pearls
each moon, only the finest. And I will be his
crowning jewel.

And so, one moon, I walk across the water

at dawn. I hear my mother’s song on the
breeze, the gentle waves slapping at the
sand, like a hundred tigers drinking milk.
I do not look back. I trade my money
for a blue silk gown that feels cold and
stiff against my bare legs. I braid my hair
with pearls, tying it behind me. I wait
for him to come.

He tells me he lives in a castle, and I will

be its queen. I will rule over ball rooms
and banquet halls, and there shall be
dances and feasts in my honour. He will
bring me flowers in the spring and golden
leaves in the autumn. I will drip with satin
and diamonds. But the castle is in the
mountains, he says, so there shall be no
ocean. The sacrifices we make, I say, the
words of a mother I have forgotten.

© Linda Combi, 2021

‘And you shall need a dowry, of course,’ he
says. His eyes are hard and cold as pearls.

‘But I have spent all my money and I

have sold all my pearls. I have nothing
left to give.’
He looks at me and his eyes glint with a
greed I tell myself is love.
‘Give me your voice,’ he says. ‘Give
me your siren’s song and I will
make you my wife.’
I know that everything has a price, so I take
a pearl from my hair and hold it tight in
my palm. I sing.
When she is finished, he takes the pearl.
‘I have fine silk dresses and strings of pearls.
I have a hundred women to wear them and
a hundred whores to wear nothing at all. I
do not want you.’ His voice is cold and hard
as ice. She knows she cannot melt his heart.
By day she walks through the castle’s empty
rooms. By night she lies alone, in the great
deserts of her marriage bed. Perhaps if she
would weep, she would drown in the salty
sea of her tears, perhaps she wishes she
could cry an ocean and swim away. Perhaps
her skin would melt above her pearly white
scales or these too might dissolve until she
was nothing but foam upon the waves.
But she is parched. She hears her mother
singing to her across the water. But her
voice is so dry; she cannot answer.
Florence Wolter is a Year 13 student at Saffron
Walden County High School and is applying to study
the history of art at university.
emag web archive
• James Brown: Recreative Writing
– A Clockwork Orange, emagazine for
emagplus 49, September 2010
• Liz Wray: Tackling Recreative
Writing – The World’s Wife, emagazine
36, December 2007
• Harry Whitehead: From The Bloody
Chamber to Cinderella, emagazine
54, December 2011
• Year 13, Surbiton High: The Bloody
Chamber Meets The Gruffalo, emagazine
93, September 2021
• Rebecca Millar: Fraulein Braun –
Poem and Commentary, emagplus for
emagazine 53, September 2011

36 emagazine December 2021

 Tobey Maguire and Elizabeth Debicki, in The Great Gatsby, 2013
Credit: LANDMARK MEDIA / Alamy Stock Photo

The Undoing of the Body in The Great Gatsby

BODY
TANGIBLE
PERFECTLY
A

December 2021 emagazine 37

 The Great Gatsby is a novel littered with
Andrew Atherton bodies and body parts, some dismembered,
explores the role of some ‘glowing’, some ‘cruel’ and some
brutally broken. Even a cursory glance
the body in Fitzgerald’s reveals a body-scape comprised, for
novel, suggesting that instance, of the giant disembodied eyes of
TJ Eckleburg, Tom’s ‘cruel body’, with its
it comes to represent ‘great pack of muscle’ as well as Myrtle’s
many key themes in the ‘broken nose’, her ‘surplus flesh’ and
‘left breast swinging loose like a flap’. Yet
text, making concrete what significance do these bodies, and the
the ways in which body more generally, have in The Great
Gatsby? If we take our cue from literary
the society is brutally critics Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle
fractured. when they claim
literature is always inextricably bound up with
bodies
then how far might an analysis of the body
push our thinking about The Great Gatsby?
Intangible Ideas Made
Concrete
One possible answer comes from the image
that gives its name to this article. Taken
38 emagazine December 2021
from the start of the novel when Tom and
Jordon are touring the Buchanan mansion,
this curious simile imagines the two
walking next to each other in silence ‘as if
to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body’.
What exactly might it mean for a body to
be ‘perfectly tangible’? Perhaps, Fitzgerald
is disclosing and making half-explicit one
of the most significant tropes of the novel,
yet one that is rarely explored: the power
of the body to make concrete and ‘tangible’
the novel’s many abstract and thematic
preoccupations. Whether concerned with
social class and perceived status, desire,
power, the dreams towards which Myrtle
and Gatsby ‘run faster’, the figure of the
body makes concrete and gives physical
form to the most important ideas of the
novel. The Great Gatsby is a novel both about
and rendered through the body.
Collisions Between Competing
Worlds
In particular, and perhaps most
compellingly, the body is used throughout
Tobey Maguire, Joel Edgerton, Elizabeth Debicki, in The Great Gatsby, 2013
Contributor: AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo
the novel in order to register and frame the
kind of collisions that take place between
the competing worlds, ideologies and social
classes that underpin the action of the
novel. It is onto the body that Fitzgerald
etches these grand thematic ideas, making
them ‘tangible’ and teasing out of this the
unutterable damage that can be done.
Whilst not referring specifically to The Great
Gatsby, critics Molly Hall and Kara Watts
neatly capture the capacity for the literary
body to register such collisions when they
talk about how bodies
relate to, co-constitute, and undo one another.
Similarly, Bennett and Royle claim that
bodies are intrinsically and inescapably political
since
the (human) body is a critical site of political,
legal, cultural, ideological contestation.
And so what of the bodies in The Great
Gatsby? How might they act on or against
each other? How might one be ‘undone’ by
another? In a novel preoccupied by conflict
and the collision between two worlds, each
cast to one side of the ‘inextricable barbed
wire’ of social class, how might the figure
of the body frame such contestation? In
what follows I hope to offer some routes
into thinking about the bodies that populate
Fitzgerald’s novel, focusing attention on
Tom and Myrtle in particular.
Tom’s Overbearing Physicality
Tom is introduced to us with an immediate
focus on his overbearing physicality: he is,
Nick tells us,
one of the most powerful ends that ever played
football at New Haven
the ‘end’ being responsible for blocking
other players or breaking an opponent’s
defence. Here, then, and at once, we have
the attributes that come to define Tom’s
character, suggesting not only strength,
but domination. Indeed, in his next breath
Fitzgerald compounds this initial description
by confirming the way that Tom ‘leans
aggressively forward’ and the ‘enormous
power of that body’, with ‘that’ seeming to
signal Nick’s obvious distaste for Tom. Nick,
albeit from his characteristic unreliable and
retrospective vantage point, summarises his
feelings towards Tom in this manner, again
attentive to his body:
It was a body capable of enormous leverage, a
cruel body.
This word ‘leverage’ brings us immediately
back to Fitzgerald’s use of ‘power’ and
we recall Hall and Watts’ words about
the ways bodies ‘act on or against each
other’, since to have leverage is to have
power over someone, to be able to move
them, to prise them open, to manipulate.
Fitzgerald’s masterful narrative style means
Nick describes Tom at this point knowing
what later happened to Gatsby and to
Myrtle and so of course colouring this initial
description. Not long after this we begin
to see Tom’s ‘cruelty’ and ‘leverage’ when
Daisy, in mock jest perhaps, calls attention
to what her ‘hulk’ of a husband did to her
knuckle, leaving it ‘black and blue’. Later
too we witness how with a
December 2021 emagazine 39
short deft movement Tom Buchanan broke
[Myrtle’s] nose with his open hand.
Notice, here, the description of this attack
being ‘short’ and ‘deft’, betraying not
only the latent violence and power at
Tom’s disposal, but the ease with which
he commits such an attack. ‘Deft’ perhaps
suggests that, for Tom, this is almost a skill,
something, maybe, he is well practised at.
How does Tom use his body to manifest
his sense of self in bodily action? By
wielding it to dominate, and yet despite
this, Nick bitterly reminds us, he is able to
‘retreat back into his money’, such is the
society that he lives in, that Fitzgerald is
indirectly critiquing.
Myrtle – Literally and
Symbolically ‘Undone’
If, as Hall and Watts suggest, bodies have
the capacity to ‘undo’ one another then
what of Myrtle whose body is, in the end,
both symbolically and literally ‘undone’?
Myrtle is first described by Nick as a
40 emagazine December 2021
‘thickish’ woman who ‘blocks out the light’
and is ‘faintly stout’ whilst carrying her
‘surplus flesh sensuously’. Later in this
same scene, we hear of her ‘immediately
perceptible vitality’ and the way the
nerves of her body were continually smouldering.
As well as the immediate focus on her
physical presence, we might notice the
almost oddly anatomical language that
Fitzgerald deploys as he draws attention to
her ‘nerves’ and ‘flesh’. Perhaps echoing
her final description, it is almost as though
we are seeing her as anatomically ‘undone’
(pulled apart by Fitzgerald), but also the
way in which her body becomes a spectacle
to be observed and watched, in this
instance by Nick, Tom and George as she
descends the stairs. This continues in her
moment of death, one of the most graphic
descriptions in the novel, where we hear
of her ‘left breast swinging loose like a flap’
and her mouth ‘wide open and ripped’,
with her shirt ‘torn open’. Again, there’s an
anatomical focus not seen elsewhere and,
again, a body that is left, literally, ‘undone’.
We hear too of how the
work bench was stained where her body had been
lying
with Myrtle reduced to an object to be
viewed by groups of people huddled around
her. The repeated use of ‘open’ in her death
also suggests the way in which, arguably
from the start, her fate is cruelly visible, as
well as the ease with which Daisy and Tom
are able to hide and retreat, yet Myrtle dies
vulnerable. There is a complex interplay,
here, mediated through the figure of the
body, between Myrtle’s failed pursuit of
success (killed by a symbol of the material
wealth and status she pursued), her final
transmutation into a material object herself
and, finally, how her ‘thick dark blood
mingled’ with the ‘dust’, anchoring her to
the very Valley she so desperately sought
to escape, her body becoming, in the
end, a part of it.
Those Who Smash Things Up
By focussing on Tom and Myrtle, we see
both the power that bodies have within this
novel and the ease with which certain ones
are undone and further how this functions
as a strong metaphor for the wider sense of
different social worlds colliding. The bodily
undoing of Myrtle, and indeed Gatsby,
set alongside the cruelty and ‘leverage’ of
Tom, renders in physical form exactly the
kind of callous society that Fitzgerald seeks
to condemn. Indeed, Fitzgerald seems to
capture this best when at the very end of
the novel, almost in a tone of summation,
Nick laments that Tom and Daisy ‘were
careless people’
they smashed up things and creatures and then
retreated back into their money.
Even this use of ‘smashed’ returns us
immediately to the bodily and physical
and we think back to Myrtle’s broken
body, torn open on the road. A focus on
the body makes apparent the impossibility
of transcending the ‘inexplicable barbed
Tobey Maguire, Joel Edgerton, Carey Mulligan, Leonardo Dicaprio,
Contributor: AA Film Archive / Alamy Stock Photo
Elizabeth Debicki, in The Great Gatsby, 2013
wire’ that separates Tom and Daisy and
Gatsby and Myrtle and the inevitable bodily
undoing, implicit even in this image of
barbed wire, to those who try. The figure
of the body, then, is a rich repository of
symbolic value within the novel, compelling
us to consider, like Hall and Watts, how
its characters ‘relate to, co-constitute, and
undo one another’. It is a prism through
which to think about the novel, perhaps not
often considered, but one absolutely worthy
of our critical attention.
Andrew Atherton is a secondary school English
teacher, a career he started after completing a PhD
in twentieth century literature. He also writes about
literature and teaching at his blog ‘Codexterous’.
emag web archive
• Ian and Michelle McMechan: Gatsby’s
Women, emagazine 32
• Nicolas Tredell: From Green Light
to Green World – An Ecocritical
Reading of The Great Gatsby, emagazine
67, February 2015
• Andrew Green: Fragmentation in The
Great Gatsby, emagazine 80, April 2018
• Benedict Gilbert: ‘Brakes upon my
desires’: Mobility in The Great Gatsby,
emagazine 76, April 2017
• Nicolas Tredell: Narrative Structure
and Voice in The Great Gatsby,
emagazine 42, December 2008
• Andrew Green: The Great Gatsby – A
Close Reading, emagplus for emagazine
79, February 2018
December 2021 emagazine 41
Investigating Your
Idiolect
Drawing Together the Threads
emagazine co-editor, Barbara Bleiman, explains the value of investigating
your own idiolect, not just for its own sake but also as a way of deepening
your thinking about all the different aspects of linguistics that you are
learning on your course.
One of the most enjoyable ways to start
exploring and investigating language is to
begin with yourself and your own language
use. Thinking about how you use language
in your everyday life can be the spark for
further reading, finding out about theories
of how language works and tying together
different elements of your A Level language
studies into a bigger overview.
The way you talk with other people in
different contexts will almost inevitably take
you into aspects of sociolinguistics (the
language of social groups and interactions).
It might also help you to think about
pragmatics, (language in context and how
what people say to each other depends on a
whole range of contextual understandings
and implied meanings.) It touches on
language change and language history
(the ways in which you might use words
or grammatical constructions that your
parents or grandparents don’t use, or even
the ways in which you no longer use words
or phrases that you used to use just a few
years ago). It raises issues of language
variation according to geography (the
language you use that is confined to your
own particular area of the country perhaps).
42 emagazine December 2021
It will undoubtedly also generate interesting
ideas about attitudes to language (what
you say that is perhaps either frowned
upon by parents, teachers or others or
regarded as something to be applauded).
This might include attitudes to the words
you use, your accent and dialect,
repeated use of ‘like’ as a filler or quotative,
your use of youth dialect, perhaps called
‘slang’ in a pejorative way) and so on. You
might also find yourself thinking about
register – the language you would use in
one context as opposed to another, and
style-shifting or code-mixing, how you
talk differently with parents, teachers and
friends for instance.
What Is an Idiolect?
An individual’s use of language is known as
their idiolect. It encompasses everything
that has influenced the way an individual
speaks, their experiences of school, family,
friendships, jobs, hobbies and interests, the
music they listen to, where they live and
much more. And inevitably, because of
this, one’s idiolect is constantly changing.
When you move from school to university,
for instance, and new influences come into
your life, you may find all kinds of things
about your uses of language changing,
often subtly, sometimes more obviously
(for instance if your language style starts to
change as you find yourself wanting to be
accepted into a new group, or if you adopt
a different register to signal to others your
more adult, or academic self).
Research on Idiolects
Generally, linguistic research has been
more focused on the language of groups
than individuals. In a piece of research
on the idiolects of five White House Press
Secretaries, Michael Barlow (University
of Auckland) suggests that this is for both
practical and theoretical reasons. First, it’s
hard to obtain valid data on individuals and
to draw conclusions from it. Idiolects are
also, by their very nature, unstable. They’re
constantly changing in response to different
influences. Second, he argues, an interest in
language is most likely to make one want
to focus on what he calls ‘idealisations and
abstractions’, in other words theoretical
ideas and new conceptual insights about
the way language in general works and
these ideas are most likely to emerge from
generalising about the common ways people
use language, rather than focusing on
differences between them.
First wave sociolinguists such as Labov were
less interested in the individual than the
group. Labov stated in 1989 that
language is not a property of the individual, but
of the community. Any description of a language
must take the speech community as its object if
it is to do justice to elegance and regularity of
linguistic structure.
The gist of these views is that the language
of the community is primary, that language
© Linda Combi, 2021
is a fundamentally social phenomenon and
that is of central importance in linguistic
study. However, linguists today are
more influenced by third wave thinking,
espousing the view that there’s a repertoire
that we can all draw on to perform
different aspects of our linguistic identities
in different situations. According to this
model, it’s no longer the speech community
that is the most important focus but rather
the individual’s choices and performances
of aspects of their identity in relation to the
context they are in.
What Barlow suggests, in his research,
is that you can only understand the
language of groups by thinking about
it as an aggregation of how individuals
use language. Groups are made up of
individuals, and understanding more
about individual language use helps us
to throw light on many aspects of the
language of the group. In particular, he
argues that a focus on the individual allows
us to understand much more about the
distinction between comprehension and
production. Most linguistics, he suggests,
focuses on comprehension whereas a study
of idiolect is more interested in production,
and allows you to see the relationship
between comprehension and the active uses
of language made by people.
So this is another aspect of language that
you might think about when reflecting
on your own idiolect, these meta-
level considerations about how much
language derives from group identities
and communities of language use, and the
extent to which you produce these yourself
in ways that reflect those communities or
are unique to you.
What Might an Investigation of
Your Idiolect Include?
Bearing these things in mind, I want to
show you briefly what a mapping of your
idiolect might look like. Here are just a
few things I thought about when mapping
my own idiolect, at this moment in time. I
jotted down some thoughts under different
headings. Of these aspects of my idiolect,
a few leap out as being unique to me.
Others, though part of my idiolect, are
more obviously shared with communities
of language users (for instance football
language or the language I share with other
Londoners). All would offer me a rich array
of different aspects of language to explore.
Family
My lexicon is broadly derived from my
education, my reading and my work. But
family influences also feature very strongly.
Here are some examples:
Yiddish words, particularly from my
childhood, e.g. schnorrer (someone
who is always out to get something for
nothing), plotzing (just dying to hear
or do something), a mensch (a decent,
honourable, good person).
December 2021 emagazine 43
Jewish Expressions and Jokey
Idioms
‘Go! I’ll give you sandwiches!’ (an
expression of not caring the slightest
if someone threatens to walk
off, or walk out).
‘Cancer shmancer, so long as you’re
healthy!’ (not taking something
very seriously).
Afrikaans or South African words and
phrases – sistog (what a shame!), again from
my childhood, almost entirely heard and
understood by me but not actively used.
Baby language coming into the shared
family lexicon via my grandson Max –
splishy splashy, (water) tick tack (watch
or clock), ‘Oh wow!’ (anything interesting
from a street sweeper or digger to a
balloon), weeeee-choo choo (the Brio train
set where we say ‘weeeee’ when it comes
down the hill). These are his own words
entering my language, but I have also
adopted parentese in talking to him – doggy,
choo-choo train, woof-woof, pussycat,
wibble wobble, tummy, footsies and
toesies and so on.
Family words arising from specific events, or
family shorthands – debris (for crumbs and
bits of food left on the face after eating), bits
(quick lunches, involving lots of different
cold items like salad, cheese, dips, bread,
put out on the table).
German words – brought in via Max
who is being brought up bilingual – pilz
(mushrooms), baum (tree), wau-wau (the
German equivalent of woof woof).
Changing Language Use Over Time
As a teenager, I enthusiastically adopted
the youth language of the period, along
with all my friends (not mates, chums, pals,
buddies, homies, besties or BGFs in those
days, just friends). Words I might have
used would have included: cool, groovy,
with it, straight, right-on, far out, outa
sight, straight, funky, heavy, it’s a gas, fab.
Some I would have used habitually and
without humour – others more ironically,
recognising that they were the ‘in’
words of the time.
As an adult, I no longer use any of these.
I didn’t ever adopt new ones as I grew
older, like awesome, bad (for good), sick
(for good) wowsers or even cool as used
now by my children. It seems like youth
language really is a youth thing, and in
44 emagazine December 2021
the mouths of older people what’s current What Next?
just sounds ‘lame’.
If I were to take this exploration further, as
Like others I have, however, adopted a more fully developed piece of research, I
many hundreds of new words over my might interview family members, or take
lifetime, including a multitude since the one aspect (such as language change) and
COVID-19 pandemic: lockdown, self-isolate, talk to younger members of my family
Zoom, Chat (with new specific Zoom to dig deeper into common underlying
patterns versus individual features. One
meaning), upload speed for the internet
question that has been raised for me, for
(versus download speed), social distancing,
instance, is what happens to youth speak
furlough, bubble, Zoom fatigue.
and whether it’s possible to generalise from
my experience to those of people who
Have I adopted any new grammatical
are younger than me. Do my 35-year old
forms? Quite a few have definitely crept
daughter and 32-year old son look back
into my spoken usage. ‘I’m loving it’, (using
on their own use of youth language in
a stative verb in the progressive tense) or
nominalisations like ‘I received an invite’ their teens as something that they have
outgrown? Are they adopting the new
or ‘the take-away from this session is…’, or
words of a younger generation? This is just
verbing (creating verbs from nouns) such
one of many directions one could go in,
as ‘texting’, ‘googling’ ‘skyped’, ‘download’
using one’s own idiolect as a starting-point.
and ‘zooming’.
Barbara Bleiman is a former English teacher. She
In terms of accent, I don’t think much has
is co-editor of emagazine.
changed for me, apart from at the very
beginning of my life, when my parents
emigrated from South Africa to the UK.
Then my brother and I were laughed at in
school for saying ‘mulk’ for milk or ‘Efrica’
for Africa. We adapted quickly!
London (and my part of London)
Shortenings and nicknames for local places
– Ally Pally for Alexandra Palace, the
Woods (Queens Wood and Highgate Wood),
Suicide Bridge, the Broadway, Couch End
(instead of Crouch End, to jokily reference
the number of psychotherapists living
there!), the Emirates (meaning the Stadium,
not the Middle Eastern country).
The Orange Line – London Overground (in
orange on the London Transport map).
The Cheese-grater, The Gherkin, the
Shard, the Walkie-Talkie (big new high-rise
buildings in Central London).
The Eye, the Wobbly Bridge.
(Millennium Bridge).
Interests
Football – Jose, Poch, Nuno, Hugo or Harry
(as if I were on first name terms with the
Spurs striker and goalie and the long string
of Spurs managers in recent years), the
Lane, the Lilywhites, Paxton End, ‘he’s one emag web archive
of our own’, ‘gutted’, ‘high press’, VAR, 4-3-
3 formation, ‘Spursy’ or ‘doing a Spurs’. • Dan Clayton: Crimebusters!
Forensic Linguistics, emagplus for
emagazine 56, April 2012
• Daniel Pearce: Idiolect, emagazine
All My Sons at the Liverpool Everyman, with permission.
Credit: Stephen Vaughan

All My Sons
‘There’s something bigger than the family’

The question at the heart of All My Sons is He murdered twenty-one pilots.

This is a play where who are humans responsible for when their
The line is sharp, clean and terrible. The
terrible things are done survival is at stake? Keller, the tragic central
audience flinches. How should it react to
character, whose son Larry died in the War,
by one individual, believes it is himself and his family that
a man corrupt enough to knowingly ship
out parts that would crash an airplane
Joe Keller. Yet the he must put first. As he says clearly of his
leading to the death of twenty-one men?
other son, Chris:
playwright allows the Two models of thought are given by the
I’m his father and he’s my son, and if there’s characters. The first by Ann, who has
audience to feel deep something bigger than that I’ll put a bullet in my refused to visit her father after the death of
head!
compassion for this Larry, is to be uncompromising:
As it unfolds, the play questions this notion. It’s wrong to pity a man like that. Father or no
man. Why does Miller It forces the audience to consider whether father, there’s only one way to look at him.
seek to do this, asks our responsibility extends to just ourselves
The second by Keller is more blurred. Again
and our family, as practical experience of a
Varsha Shah, and how cut-throat world may suggest, or whether it,
and again he describes Ann’s father as ‘a
little man’ but says
does he achieve it? as Keller’s own son Chris, puts it on the last
page of the play, much wider, and extends I mean just try to see it human, see it human.
to the entire ‘universe of people outside’?
Miller allows the audience space to think
He murdered twenty-one pilots. about these competing reactions, but then
suddenly, sharply, makes the central crime
Condemnation or Pity? at the heart of the story even darker.
The crux of the question is seen very early
on when Miller sets out what humans are Raising the Stakes
capable of in a world where they do not
By the end of Act Two it is found to be
think of their fellow man. Chris describes
Keller himself, not Ann’s father, who is
the crime that his father’s ex-partner
responsible for the shipment of dangerous
and Ann’s father, who was also their old
parts. Not only is he to blame for the loss
neighbour, is in jail for:
of life of the pilots, but he is also therefore

December 2021 emagazine 45


responsible for allowing an innocent man
to go to jail, tearing that man apart from
his son and daughter, and for doing it all
in the most cowardly way possible – an
untraceable phone call and pretending to be
sick. If we judge a man who is responsible
for the loss of life harshly, then surely a
man who does that, and then lies to cover it
up, sending another man to jail in his place,
is irredeemable?
On its own terms the lack of morality of
Keller’s actions seems clear. But instead
of making us judge Keller harshly, Miller
shows the crime, but also makes us
understand Keller as a tragic, but very
‘human’ figure, who in his own eyes acted
against a system that was seeking to degrade
him by putting his family and himself first.
see it human, see it human.
Love for His Family
Miller makes us feel compassion for Keller.
He does this firstly by showing the depth of
Keller’s love for his family. In this context
Keller’s need to put them before all others,
46 emagazine December 2021
even his neighbours, feels genuine rather
than simply a mask for self-interest. He
says: ‘My only accomplishment is my son’;
to Ann he says in ‘a commanding outburst’:
‘A father is a father!’ and his love for his son
is seen in the last line of Act Two through
the heart-breaking single pronoun ‘My’
when Chris turns away from him: ‘Chris...
My Chris...’ Ultimately, when he realises
his role in Larry’s death, he shoots himself.
His actions suggest that, while there may be
some elements of self-deception, in his own
eyes at least, everything he did was for love
of his family.
Stucturing The Audience
Response
Secondly Miller makes us feel compassion
through his use of structure. He makes us
wait until the end of Act Two for the reveal
that Keller is to blame for the faulty parts,
so that by the time we have that certainty
we have got to know him. Miller shows us
the kind of neighbour Keller is in peacetime
when he is not at risk of losing everything –
All My Sons at the Liverpool Everyman, with permission.
Credit: Stephen Vaughan
metaphorically allows us to play ‘cards’ with
him – so that we understand the pressures
he faced and do not define him purely
through the worst thing that he has done.
The play opens showing Keller’s home
infused with warmth, where neighbours
and family members share tobacco, news,
gentle bickering and again and again, as the
stage directions convey, laughter:
Keller [points at him, laughing]
Sue [laughing, points at him]
Keller [he chuckles and winks at Chris who is
enjoying all this]
Chris [laughing]
Miller conveys that this pervasive feeling
of warmth towards his neighbours is not
just as a result of guilt – even George,
Ann’s brother, recognises that the Keller
household has always been like this:
I never felt at home anywhere but here.
Showing the Economic
Realities
Thirdly, Miller makes us feel compassion
by showing the brutal economic and social
All My Sons at the Liverpool Everyman, with permission.
Credit: Stephen Vaughan
conditions in which Keller lives, flickering
just beneath the surface of the warmth,
and the importance of money in it. Keller
summarises the point saying
it’s dollars and cents, nickels and dimes, war and
peace, it’s nickels and dimes, what’s clean?

but it is not just Keller who speaks of this.

Sue, a neighbour, says:
And he’s got money. That’s important, you know.

Jim, a doctor, says,

Money. Money-money-money-money-money

(although then notes, ‘You say it long

enough it doesn’t mean anything,’) and
while Chris may not have known for
certain that his father was responsible for
the death of the pilots, Miller conveys that
he had at least some doubts about Keller’s
role in the deaths and still took money out
of the business. By showing this materialism
in not just Keller but in almost all of the
characters, Miller, whose own father lost
almost everything during the depression
so did not have it in Keller’s words ‘too
easy’, shows that Keller is not wrong in
his understanding of the world he inhabits
and that he is not the only one who has
been ground down or corrupted by its
values. Society’s role is summed up by the
conversation between Sue and Ann at the
beginning of Act Two in which Sue says
that everyone on the block knows the truth
about Keller and makes the following cold
response to Ann’s defence, showing that in
this cut-throat world, success is not defined
by morality but by survival:
Ann: That’s a lie. People come here all the time for
cards and...
Sue: So what? They give him credit for being
smart. I do, too...

Blame for the System, Not the

Individual
Towards the end of the play, Chris gives a
powerful and savage assessment not of the
‘enemy’ but of a system that values success,
survival, and materialism above all else:
This is the land of the great big dogs, you don’t
love a man here, you eat him!

and then even more bleakly:

The world’s that way…This is a zoo, a zoo!

‘The star of one’s honesty’

Miller has crafted his play with great
compassion. Keller commits a horrific
crime, with horrific consequences, and yet
we do not just pity him: we understand
him. He is portrayed as a tragic figure, not
an evil one, who ironically, in seeking to

December 2021 emagazine 47


protect himself and his family within a
society where the ‘rat-race’ is all, destroys it
by causing his own son’s death.
The compassion makes All My Sons all the
tougher to watch. Its very realism makes
the audience question what they would
do if similar pressures were to bear down
on them and where they would draw their
own lines of responsibility. Yet within the
darkness of the play Miller embeds light,
showing again and again characters who
understand the ‘love a man can have for
a man’ and show that integrity is possible.
Larry, who Keller believed would fall in
line with the corruption, in his agonised
letter shows no toleration whatsoever for it;
Chris, the flawed man described as a ‘killer’
during the War, who the audience has
been set up to believe will also fall in line,
refuses to do so and is willing to walk away
from everyone he loves. The kernel of hope
48 emagazine December 2021
at the centre of the play is articulated by
the doctor, Jim:
– every man does have a star. The star of one’s
honesty.
The struggle is to hold onto that star no
matter what the circumstances, and, as
is crystallised in the title of the play, the
way to do this is not to define family
or self narrowly, but instead to see
‘All’ as our sons.
Varsha Shah is an English teacher. Her novel won
The Times/ Chicken House Children’s Fiction
Competition 2020.
All My Sons at the Liverpool Everyman, with permission.
Credit: Stephen Vaughan
emag web archive
• Tony Coult: All My Sons, emagazine
33, September 2006
• David Kinder: All My Sons
and Naturalism, emagazine
37, September 2007
• Sarah Thind: Tragedy – All My
Sons, emagplus for emagazine
42, December 2008
• Tricia Lennie: Inhabiting the Moral
World of the Play – All My Sons,
emagazine 72, April 2016
• Mike Peters: All My Sons – Joe Keller
and the Idea of Bad Faith, emagazine
77, September 2017
Jennifer Jones, Laurence Olivier, in Carrie, 1952, based on Sister Carrie
Credit: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

American Pioneering Women

Ántonia Shimerda, Carrie Meeber and Ma Joad

Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of these pioneering journeys, both literal
English teacher, Amy labor and the march, and figurative?
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Taylor-Davis, examines
Whitman’s lines here display his veneration Ántonia Shimerda
three characters in for the American pioneer spirit: restlessness Willa Cather’s character Ántonia Shimerda
American fiction who and constant momentum, the search (My Ántonia, 1918) is an immigrant from
for novelty and better things, and the
epitomise the pioneering belief that hard work will be rewarded.
Bohemia, whom the narrator Jim Burden
first meets when they are both children
spirit, whether striking The poem’s title was used by Willa living on the Nebraska prairie in the
Cather in 1913 for her second novel, O
out west in the open Pioneers!, demonstrating the centrality of
1880s. Their innocent friendship and her
vitality are presented in idealised and
spaces of the country, this pioneering mindset to her story of romantic terms:
immigrant endeavour. The idea of a fruitful
or in the new urban and fresh land waiting to be seized is echoed She looked at me, her eyes fairly blazing with
environments of the towards the end of Fitzgerald’s The Great
things she could not
say
Gatsby, as Nick Carraway imagines the
early twentieth century. Dutch sailors’ first sight of America as and
The following stanza from Walt a fresh, green breast of the new world. she was quick, and
Whitman’s poem ‘Pioneers! O Pioneers!’ very eager. We were
epitomises many of the typical values and The feminine image of the land as a
so deep in the grass
aspirations of characters following the nurturing mother, whose ‘breast’ will that we could see
‘American Dream’: nourish the aspirations of settlers, leads nothing but the blue
us to consider how women and images of sky over us and the
All the past we leave behind,
femininity contribute to the presentation gold tree in front of us.
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied
of the American Dream in American
world,
literature: what role do women play in

December 2021 emagazine 49

This innocence and sense of possibility are
mirrored by the landscape, with the prairie
grass stretching on, seemingly forever:
Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, there
was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass, most of
it as tall as I.
Ántonia’s family work hard to gain a
foothold in Nebraska, struggling in poverty
and homesick for their country. In the
second part of the novel though, we see
Ántonia’s determination to succeed as
she goes into service. Prejudice against
immigrants makes this difficult, as Jim notes
the popular attitude that
all foreigners were ignorant people who couldn’t
speak English.
Nonetheless, he then reveals:
I always knew I should live long enough to see
my country girls come into their own, and I have.
To-day the best that a harassed Black Hawk
merchant can hope for is to sell provisions and
farm machinery and automobiles to the rich farms
where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and
Scandinavian girls are now the mistresses.
A Symbol of Success
Ántonia emerges as a symbol of how
the pioneer spirit enables immigrants to
make inroads into unfamiliar territory
and integrate themselves into society. It is
a meritocratic, democratic vision of what
America should be, the ‘Mother of Exiles’,
as ‘The New Colossus’ by Emma Lazarus
proclaims on the pedestal of the Statue
of Liberty. Eventually Ántonia makes her
mark on the land through establishing her
farm, which is described idyllically at the
end of the book.
At the end of the novel, Jim’s narration
returns to the appearance of the prairie
when he finds the remains of the old road
that first traversed the area:
Everywhere else it had been ploughed under
when the highways were surveyed; this half-mile
or so within the pasture fence was all that was
left of that old road which used to run like a wild
thing across the open prairie.
This memory of wildness, the untamed,
untouched land, is intensely nostalgic
for Jim. It speaks of possibility, that same
sense that Nick explains at the end of The
Great Gatsby, whose
dream must have seemed so close that he could
hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was
already behind him.
Ántonia is Jim’s American Dream, and
those days of youthful possibility that he
shared with her belong to the past, like
50 emagazine December 2021
the (literally) ground-breaking first road
into the prairie.
Some commentators have criticised the
presentation of Ántonia, pointing to the
way that the possessive ‘my’ in the title
indicates ownership, and the fact that
Ántonia’s story is mediated through a male
narrator. It does seem at times that Ántonia
is more of a proxy for Jim’s ideas about
America than an agent in her own right.
Note for example his description of her
many children:
they all came running up the steps together,
big and little, tow heads and gold heads and
brown, and flashing little naked legs; a veritable
explosion of life out of the dark cave into the
sunlight.
Ántonia is a success story of immigration,
producing hardy and energetic children
to further American progress and
expansion. As Jim says,
She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of
early races.
The ‘mine’ image seems apt – Jim ‘mines’
his memories of Ántonia to give him
comfort and pleasure and to make sense
of his experiences of a rapidly changing
America. The publication date of 1918
also lends significance to the idealised
and nostalgic tone of the novel. Like
Gatsby, Jim is
borne back ceaselessly into the past
idolising through Ántonia an image of
American possibility and purity untainted
by the horrors of war.
Carrie Meeber
Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900)
follows the story of eighteen-year-old Carrie
Meeber, arriving in Chicago in 1889 to
look for work and excitement away from
her parochial upbringing. Her pioneering
drive is clear; the first chapter title, ‘The
Magnet Attracting: A Waif Amid Forces’,
depicts her irresistible attraction to the
city’s possibilities. Her new territory is not
the open plains of the west traditionally
associated with pioneering journeys, since
in a kind of ‘reverse-pioneering’ she seeks
the metropolis. The transition from rural
to urban is memorably described in the
first chapter through the encroachment of
technological advances upon the prairie:
They were nearing Chicago. Signs were
everywhere numerous. Trains flashed by them.
Across wide stretches of flat, open prairie they
could see lines of telegraph poles stalking across
the fields toward the great city.
Striving for Success in an
Urban Setting
The Chicago that Carrie encounters is
relentlessly growing and does provide
opportunities for work but belies the
idealised vision of the American Dream
in which hard work enables success and
security. Most jobs are low paid, and many
are physically punishing, like Carrie’s
stint on the production line in a shoe
factory, where
she seemed one mass of dull, complaining
muscles, fixed in an eternal position and
performing a single mechanical movement.
Self-sufficiency is key to her survival, as the
narrator describes:
self-interest with her was high, but not strong. It
was, nevertheless, her guiding characteristic.
Dreiser depicts a female character who does
not subordinate herself to the interests of
a larger group or a higher principle, as Ma
Joad does in The Grapes of Wrath, creating
a realistic image of what a pioneering
woman must do to succeed in the
daunting urban setting.
Though Carrie’s eventual career as an
actress might be down to her natural
talent and aspirations, Dreiser’s novel
demonstrates that the pioneering spirit
in women doesn’t automatically lead
to success. Drudgery in factories is only
avoided by chance; her acting career begins
when she is picked out from an anonymous
chorus line by the manager of the company,
who is attracted to her (‘She’s good looking.
Why don’t you let her head that line?’). The
attention of a somewhat lecherous older
manager, who admits that
If he hadn’t made it a rule to have nothing to do
with the members of the chorus, he would have
approached her most unbendingly
is the difference between anonymity and
becoming rich and famous. Dreiser depicts
chance and circumstance as more important
than determination; Carrie’s pioneer
spirit certainly gets her to Chicago, but
the heights she reaches are not a natural
outcome of subscribing to the American
Dream. Unlike Ántonia in Cather’s novel,
the reality of what Carrie has to endure to
achieve her success is not romanticised.
Ma Joad
In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
(1939), the Joad family follow the same
westward journey as their pioneer
forefathers, seeking work and security in
the promised land of California. Ma Joad
Credit: Allstar Picture Library Ltd. / Alamy Stock Photo
Bowden, Darwell, Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath, 1940
is central to the family, and through this
Steinbeck emphasises the importance
of community and women’s role in
maintaining this. Ma does not display the
‘rugged individualism’ on which Herbert
Hoover said America was founded in his
1928 campaign speech, the self-interest
that serves Carrie Meeber. Through her
encouragement and stolidity, ‘the family
[becomes] a unit’ after Grampa’s death; she
then stops them splitting up to find work,
brandishing a jack handle and saying
‘Come on an’ whup me. Jus’ try it. But I ain’t
a-going.’
Ma symbolises Steinbeck’s interpretation
of the American Dream: the idealised
aspirations of financial success and security
in California cause suffering for those
taken in by them, but perhaps a different
kind of success can be achieved through
community strength. Steinbeck writes of
the migrant movement:
The causes are a hunger in a stomach, multiplied
a million times; a hunger in a single soul, hunger
for joy and some security, multiplied a million
times.
This comment demonstrates how the
Joads are a microcosm of the migrants in
general, and therefore Ma’s importance
is greater, as she represents how women emag web archive
are the backbone of the movement. Ma’s
pioneer spirit is displayed in her willingness
• Nicolas Tredell: Migration, Vision
to work hard, her inventiveness, and
and Community: The Great Gatsby
her grit. She lies next to Granma as she
and The Grapes of Wrath, emagazine
dies, and conceals her death so that they
53, September 2011
are not stopped by the authorities before
• Lesley Drew: The Patchwork Quilt of
they reach California; when Granma’s
My Antonia, emagplus for emagazine
death is revealed,
78, December 2017
the family [looks] at Ma with a little terror at her • Nick Johnston-Jones: American
strength. Fiction and the ‘Westering’ Spirit
Steinbeck, Cather, Kerouac, Auster,
Though Ma never reaches the heights of
Cheever, emagazine 44, March 2009
Carrie Meeber’s public fame and wealth, or
• Nicolas Tredell: My Ántonia – Strong
the simple comfort and security of Ántonia
Women, Nostalgia and Progress,
Shimerda’s family and farm, Steinbeck
emagazine 75, February 2017
suggests that the spirit that sustains her
• Nicolas Tredell: Realism,
is an achievement in itself. Readers of
Naturalism and Modernism in
American literature can see that these
the 19th and 20th-century Novel,
women are each pioneers in their own way.
emagazine 80, April 2018
Their new frontiers may be public success,
• Nicolas Tredell: Grapes into Wine
marking a place on the land, or galvanising
– Steinbeck’s ‘We-centred’ Novel,
communities. To return to Whitman’s poem,
emagazine 72, April 2016
they are ‘daughters of the West’.
Amy Taylor-Davis is an English teacher at
Wycombe Abbey School.
December 2021 emagazine 51
 Students
in Online
Breakout
Rooms

A Language Investigation
When teacher, Anna Wexler, saw her students exchanges in breakout rooms
in Microsoft Teams meetings, she noticed some interesting contrasts with
their small group discussion in the classroom that she thought worthy of
further investigation. With their permission, she shares some of her thinking
about it here.
Virtual teaching and learning may not have things occurred to me. Firstly, the fact that reading they’d done to two texts which I’d
been much fun for students, but something students were engaging with their peers, provided for them.
surprisingly positive came out of the winter who weren’t necessarily friends but also
CG: are we just applying the ideas we read about
lockdown for me – the chance to investigate weren’t strangers, created an interesting to text 4&5?
a whole new kind of classroom language audience dynamic. Secondly the fact that EW: I think so yeah/ so we need some key quotes
use. My college used Microsoft Teams to Teams in some ways resembles a social from each i think
deliver ‘live’ lessons to our classes. This media platform – for example it is possible NM: The texts are in the discourse booklet right?
platform allows for group work in breakout for students to ‘react’ to messages using CG: yeh
rooms, something that many of my students emojis – was interesting, given that students NM: Thanks
did entirely through written exchanges. were using this set up to engage in work, EW: yeah i think so/ i think from the reading
Those exchanges were sent automatically something fairly unusual on social media. CG: well i read in the second one it talks about
some people think change is language is either a
to me during lessons, so suddenly I had
decline or just change/ maybe we could talk about
an insight into this new form of written Hedging and Politeness that/ im not really sure haha
language my students were using amongst Strategies – ‘I’m not actually NM: So that would apply to text 4?
themselves, a kind of hybrid between CG: maybe cause she’s implying that people have
classroom speech and writing.
sure’
different views on lang change/ im not sure for
The following exchange took place between text 5
These conversations had rather an a group of A2 students when I asked them EW: yeah i think you’re right/ for number one
unusual context, and a couple of key to go into a breakout room to apply some i wrote abt how lang is clean vs dirty and the

52 emagazine December 2021

‘human struggle to control unruly nature’ i think
basically meaning that it’s always changing/
which kinda relates to text 4 I think/ i’m not
actually sure
Here I was particularly interested in how
hesitant the students seem in the discussion
even though they clearly have some good
ideas. Aspects of Brown and Levinson’s
Politeness Theory seem applicable,
especially the concept of negative politeness
which involves using deferent speech
features to avoid creating offence. Students
in this short extract spend quite a bit of time
mitigating the strength of their opinions:
there are seven repetitions of the hedge ‘I
think’ and also three different occasions
when the students follow a stated opinion
with the clause ‘I’m not sure’. There are
also three questions, all of which I think
the students who asked them knew
the answers to. These seem to be acting
almost as deferent agenda setters: instead
of just getting started on the task, the
students ask questions of each other as a
way of signalling a modest assessment of
their knowledge.
Why So Many Negative
Politeness Features?
So why did the context of these exchanges
encourage such negative politeness
features? Perhaps it shows the students’
unease at having to communicate and work
in this way. They are keen not to seem too
confident, perhaps to avoid causing offence
with their peers, and therefore they hedge
many statements that they make. You
might expect that this hesitancy would be
partly explained by the personality of the
individuals concerned, however what is
particularly interesting is that these students
weren’t like this when working together in
the classroom before lockdown. Maybe their
comparative lack of familiarity with the
on-line learning context, coupled with the
slightly forced nature of this group work,
contributed to them acting so formally with
each other. The link between formality and
politeness is examined further by Professor
Lynne Murphy who says that negative
politeness strategies are particularly British.
In her book The Prodigal Tongue she contrasts
the amount of negative politeness seen in
deferent countries including the UK with
more informal ones such as the USA where
positive politeness strategies (used to show
friendliness) are the norm. There were
instances of positive politeness in my data as
well: students used the ‘reaction’ buttons to
add thumbs up or smiley faces to comments
and also began messages with ‘yeah’ to
show agreement with the person before.
However, these were much rarer than the
negative politeness strategies.
Blended Mode – ‘So What Are
U Guys Thinkn’
A blended mode text is one that contains a
number of features most commonly found
in the spoken mode, within a written text.
They are often informal, spontaneous and
might include acronyms and initialisms,
non-standard spelling and punctuation and
features such as fillers. Around a decade
ago, the media got hyped up about this ‘text
message language’ and how young people’s
use of it would cause the world as we
know it, to end. More recently my students
have often protested that the association
between young people and this form of
writing is inaccurate and that they don’t
use many of these language features when
communicating online.
This seems to have been born out when
looking at my Teams data. True to their
word, there were many less examples of
‘text message language’ in their Teams
discussions than I expected. There were a
few initialisms such as ‘tbh’ (to be honest)
and ‘idk’ (I don’t know) and the occasional
deviant spelling ‘ur’ for your or ‘abt’ instead
of about, most of which seem to be about
creating brevity and speeding up the typing
process. Given that they were working
together, reducing the number of these
blended mode features would make sure
that everyone could understand them.
It was with punctuation that things got a lot
less standard. There were few capital letters
and virtually no other punctuation in the
students’ messages. Wired editor Victoria
Turk’s book on digital etiquette Kill Reply
All suggests that using punctuation such as
December 2021 emagazine 53
full stops in social media can be viewed as
aggressive, writing:
It’s clear when you’ve finished your thought, so
what function does the period fulfil?

Instead of using punctuation, students

commonly split a message up, such as with
the following example:
well I read in the second one that people tend to
think change in language is either a decline or
just change/ maybe we could talk about that in
the first text cause there’s different views/ im not
really sure ha ha/ what did u read that might be
useful?

Here the breaks in messages match exactly

where sentence punctuation would be put
in a written text allowing the reader to
pause and preventing ambiguity.

Use Of ‘Like’ – ‘Emojis

Are Like Built Into Our
Conversation’
The last feature which grabbed my attention
was the use of the word ‘like’. ‘Like’ is a
common filler in conversation, providing
important and necessary thinking time
for the speaker. However, what interested
me is how common it was as a filler in the
breakout room chat where students could mitigated her opinion at the start with the
just pause their writing to think. So why did comment clause ‘I feel’. By including the emag web archive
‘like’ appear so frequently? Have a read of ‘like’ before the noun ‘argument’ she almost
the following examples: makes it sound like she’s not sure. Maybe • Nicola Ball: Online Interactions
IL: they’re like built into our communication/ i also this is another negative politeness feature. and Gender Distinctions,
have like certain emojis that i use with certain emagazine 76, April 2017
friends Drawing Some Initial • Christian Ilbury: Investigating Social
EF: i use them like depending on who im talking Media, emagazine 86, December 2019
to
Conclusions
• Mike Thelwall: The Grammar
IL: she links to other articles and dictionaries tho It has been really interesting to consider of Instant Messaging and Social
to like back up her arguments how participating in on-line teaching and Networking Sites, emagazine
AC: people tend to stick with who they know learning changed the way my students
because theres too many people and like its 42, December 2008
communicated with each other. When • Beth Goddard: Going for Gold –
college
discussing the effect that context can have Research Ideas for a Successful
BR: i feel its easier to come up with a headline
on how we talk and write, undertaking this Language Investigation, emagazine
once we know our like argument
research has reminded me that mode can 74, December 2016.
In his 2007 emagazine article Professor Ron have a huge impact in changing the way • Dan Clayton and Jill Beckwith: The
Carter discussed how the use of ‘like’ was we relate to our audiences and achieve our NEA Language Investigation – Two
broadening in its use. Now, fourteen years purposes. To fully investigate the effect of Fruitful Approaches, emagazine
later, my data supports some of what he mode, it would be advantageous to compare 91, February 2021
suggested, but also addresses some further this data with some gathered in a face-
evolution. As Carter suggests, in some to-face context in the classroom. Thank
student messages, ‘like’ is being used almost goodness I can now do this as my students
as a signal that an example is coming, are back in college!
acting as a discourse marker. See how this
works with the first two examples. In AC’s Anna Wexler teaches A Level English Language
at BHASVIC (Brighton, Hove and Sussex
comment the ‘like’ appears to be being
Sixth Form College).
used to add emphasis to the final clause,
to in essence convey an attitude and take
the place of vocal stress which she might
have used had she been speaking. I wonder
if in the last example from BR the ‘like’ is
another form of hedge. She has already

54 emagazine December 2021

 The
Merchant’s
Tale
The Dangers of Desire
John Hathaway argues that ‘The Merchant’s Tale’
is less anti-feminist satire and more a warning
against unfettered male desire, showing where
Januarie’s lust takes him and how dangerous that
proves to be.
Although some have regarded ‘The
Merchant’s Tale’ as an example of the anti-
feminist literature that was popular in the
fourteenth century, arguably, it is actually a
tale that has more to say about the dangers
of male desire. January’s yearning to marry
and secure for himself the perfect bride
leads him to a distorted understanding
of marriage, his wife, and finally himself,
thereby suggesting that the real ‘snare’
in this raucous tale is not marriage, but
the prison of his own desire that he has
constructed around himself.
Marriage – Terrible Trap or
Paradise?
One of the plentiful sources of irony
in the poem is the mismatch between
what January thinks of marriage and the
experience of both the Merchant and the
Host, who consider it some sort of trap that
leaves them ‘teyd’ or bound. The Tale, by
contrast, contains line after line of poetry
that espouses the virtues of marriage,
which is a ‘paradis’ and is ‘so esy and so
clene’. The noun ‘paradis’ is repeated in
the description of the wife, who is the
husband’s ‘paradis terrestre’. The repetition
of ‘paradis’ draws attention to the Biblical
story of Genesis where Eve is made to be a
‘helpe unto this man’, Adam. With gleeful
hyperbole the Merchant develops this
picture of a wife who
nis nat wery him to love and serve
and who
seith nat ones ‘nay’, whan he seith ‘ye’.
What attracts January to marriage is, in
part, the ‘fantasye’ (a word that is repeated
twice to describe his search for a wife)
of having nothing more than a living
puppet who puts her husband’s desires
permanently before her own. The delusion
of January’s thoughts about marriage is
made clear when we place this view of
marriage alongside the ‘sorwe and care’
that marriage has given the Merchant, as he
states in his Prologue.
Yet more disturbingly, January also makes
it abundantly clear that he desires a wife to
satisfy his sexual desires. It can be inferred
from the text that now he has ‘passed sixty
yeer’, he is finding it harder to satisfy his
sexual ‘appetit’. January views marriage
as a state that will give him carte blanche
to carry out his perverted desires without
concern for the consequences, for, as he
tells May on their wedding night:
... blessed be the yok that we been inne,
For in our actes we mowe do no sinne.
A man may do no sinne with his wyf,
Ne hurte himselven with his owene knyf…
Matrimony, January believes, will transform
his debauchery into virtues. Needless to
say, this is a complete misrepresentation of
the medieval understanding of the Bible’s
teaching on marriage, which was meant
for procreation, not for pleasure. It is also
ironic that the rhyming couplet of ‘wyf’
and ‘knyf’ ostensibly emphasises men’s
power and control whilst subversively
suggesting that women possess their own
dangerous potency.
May – A Suitable Marriage
Candidate?
Crucially, in his search for a wife, January
starts with his list of requirements before
he even begins to think about a possible
candidate. His prerequisites are extensive,
but perhaps what is most notable is the
reason for his insistence on the youth of
his future wife:
... a yong thing may men gye
Right as men may warm wex with handes plye.
‘Gye’ is a verb meaning to train and is
used to refer to hawks and other animals,
reinforcing January’s treatment of his wife
as yet another possession that he can own
and dominate. Yet the simile comparing
his wife to ‘warm wex’ highlights his
desire to form and mould his wife to his
own imaginings. This is reinforced by
the interchangeable nature of ‘mate’ and
‘make’ in the poem, which draw parallels
to medieval retellings of the story of
Pygmalion. Just as Pygmalion created for
himself the perfect wife in the statue that he
carved, January imagines his future wife to
be pliable and made of some base material
that he can manipulate as he wishes.
The ‘heigh fantasye’ and ‘curious bisynesse’
that accompanies January’s search for a
wife finds its most telling expression in the
metaphor of a ‘mirour’ that is placed in the
‘commune market-place’ that January uses
to spy on the various women that he sizes
up and judges. What January fails to realise
is that mirrors do not expose reality. They
are only able to offer a reflection of what
is shown to them, which stresses how his
eventual choice is more a reflection of his
December 2021 emagazine 55
 © Linda Combi, 2021

56 emagazine December 2021

own desires, exposing his own narcissism.
The qualities he ascribes to May are almost
identical to the description that Troilus
gives of Criseyde, in Chaucer’s earlier work,
Troilus and Criseyde:
Hir fresshe beautee and hir age tendre,
Hir middel smal, hire armes longe and sklendre,
Hir wise governance, hir gentillesse,
Hir wommanly beringe, and hire sadnesse.
This demonstrates that January merely
visualised the current vogue for what was
considered to be an ideal wife. The list
begins with physical attributes first and
only then moves on to character, indicating
January’s priorities. However, it also reveals
how January projected these qualities
onto May, which is particularly revolting
as he is lying in bed fantasising about her,
rather than giving us a true description of
May’s character.
May as a protagonist only enters the story
after she has been fully dreamed up by
January. In terms of the narrative, she is only
given life on the day of her wedding. She
is, as the Merchant stresses, his ‘fantasye’,
emerging from January’s forehead fully
formed much like Athene sprung from the
forehead of Zeus. It is clear that January
becomes ‘ravisshed’ with an image of female
perfection that is entirely fabricated and
reflects his own desires rather than any
form of reality.
January – A Suitable Husband?
If January has shown himself unable to
discriminate between fact and fiction in
his view of marriage and of his wife, this
is equally true of his self-understanding.
January is meant to fulfil the caricature of
the senex amans, typical in medieval fabliaux,
to perfection, as he refuses to grow old
gracefully. Although he acknowledges that
he is ‘hoor’, he compares himself to an
evergreen tree:
Myn herte and alle my lymes been as grene
As laurer through the yeer is for to sene.
Paradoxically, he states he possesses both
old age and sprightly stamina, and he tries
to cover up his decrepitude by following the
latest fashions with disastrous consequences.
In one of the many unpleasant images
we are given of January, he ‘kisseth’ May
‘with thikke brustles of his berd unsofte’
after having shaved according to the latest
fashion: a derisory and futile attempt to
regain his squandered youth. Nowhere is his
self-deception more clearly revealed than
in his anticipation of his wedding night,
when he expresses to May his worries that
she might not ‘endure’ his desire, as it is ‘so
sharp and keene.’ His fantasy causes him
to view himself as more virile than Paris
coupling with Helen of Troy, whereas the
reality of his potency is exposed through
the many aphrodisiacs he takes (leaving
nothing to chance), and also the Merchant’s
description of his amorous efforts:
Thus laboureth he til that the day gan dawe.
The verb ‘laboureth’ together with the
length of time referenced indicates the
effort that lovemaking cost him, exposing
his own dreams of youthful potency as a
sham, particularly as May ‘preyseth nat his
pleying worth a bene’.
Happily Ever After?
January therefore has constructed for
himself a careful and meticulous illusion that
allows him to see marriage as sanctioning
his perversions, May as nothing more
than his willing sex slave, and himself as
possessing the virility of a young man. What
distinguishes ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ from
other fabliaux in The Canterbury Tales, such as
‘The Miller’s Tale’, is the lack of exposure of
the cuckold. After having his sight restored
and seeing incontrovertible proof of his
wife’s adultery (‘ye algate in it wente’), he
has to make a choice: either he admits to the
world just how fooled he was by his own
delusions and is mocked for being a cuckold,
or he accepts the ‘alternative facts’ that May
offers him and continues living secure in
the fulfilment of his desires. The genius of
May’s response to January’s denunciation
of her action lies in how she transforms
the reality of what he saw into the fictional
illusion that she creates for him, where she
is reformulated as a loving, ‘kinde’ wife
doing all she can to restore her husband’s
sight, rather than a cold-hearted adulterer.
Since January has always believed in this
alternative fantasy, all May has to do is adapt
her identity accordingly to win freedom for
herself and allow her husband to scuttle back
into the fool’s paradise he has fashioned for
himself. After all, as May’s final words in the
tale correctly state,
He that misconceyveth, he misdemeth.
The final – and most biting – irony of the
tale is May’s pregnancy. Earlier, January
stridently declares that he would rather
be eaten by his own dogs than have his
inheritance passed on ‘in straunge hand’. At
the end of the tale, he has become a victim
of his own desires as
on hire wombe he stroketh hire ful stofte
forced into a position where he has to
believe that May bears his own child, whilst
doing everything he can to ignore the true
paternity of May’s baby.
When the Merchant has finished his tale,
it is the Host who has the final word.
Superficially, his comments on the ‘sleightes
and subtilitees’ of women and how they are
‘as bisy as bees’ in their determination to
‘deceyve’ men supports the critic Bertrand
H. Bronson’’s view of the tale as ‘another
piece of anti-feminist japery.’ However, in
his haste to bemoan the evil of women,
the Host, like January (and arguably the
Merchant), is blind to man’s own fault
in this issue. Deborah Ellis, in contrast
to Bronson, lays the blame for May’s
behaviour firmly at the door of
the patriarchal tyrannies she is subject to; behind
every bad woman lurks a bad man.
Chaucer, by ending the tale with the Host,
ironically exposes him as yet another
example of a man who conveniently
fabricates reality to suit his own purposes.
Perhaps it is better to consider Chaucer’s
final word on men, women and marriage
as contained within ‘The Franklin’s Tale’,
which comes after ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’,
‘The Clerk’s Tale’ and ‘The Merchant’s
Tale’. If, as George Lyman Kittredge argues,
Chaucer structured his tales to create a
‘marriage debate’, it is the relationship of
Averagus and Dorigen, based on love, trust
and mutual respect, that offers a welcome
corrective and conclusion to the vitriolic
and bitter presentation of marriage that the
Merchant offers.
John Hathaway is Head of English at
Glenalmond College.
emag web archive
• Jane Bathard-Smith: ‘The Merchant’s
Tale’ – Deception, emagazine
32, emagazine 2006
• Tina Davidson: The Merchant’s
Tale – Youth and Age, emagazine
39, February 2008
• Jenni Nuttall: An Experiment in
Maneres – Chaucer’s ‘The Merchant’s
Tale’, emagazine 69, September 2015
• Sam Brunner: Mercantile Ideology
in ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, emagazine
82, December 2018
• Mickey Meally: ‘The Merchant’s
Tale’ and The Art of (Bad)
Storytelling, emagplus for emagazine
83, February 2019
December 2021 emagazine 57
 The Georgina Ramsay interrogates
the concept of the Mother
Country in Andrea Levy’s
Small Island. The novel follows

Mother the experiences of its four

narrators, who are all living
in London after the Second
World War: Queenie and

Country Bernard, an English couple

and Hortense and Gilbert, a
Jamaican couple.

58 emagazine December 2021


© Ruby Films for the BBC
‘I am from Jamaica but England is my Mother
Country’
Whilst living in England, the character of
Gilbert repeatedly explains the fact that,
although he is from Jamaica, as it is a
British colony, he also considers England
to be his home. Indeed, Gilbert makes it
clear that this familial relationship is the
motivation for his decision to serve in the
RAF, extending the metaphor of the Mother
Country. He explains to Queenie:
‘Let me ask you to imagine this. Living far from
you is a beloved relation whom you have never
met. Yet this relation is so dear a kin she is known
as Mother. Your own mummy talks of Mother
all the time. ‘Oh, Mother is a beautiful woman –
refined, mannerly and cultured’. Then one day you
hear Mother calling – she is troubled, she need
your help.’
Through this extended metaphor, Levy
makes it clear that for Caribbean men,
like Gilbert, who served on Britain’s side
in the Second World War, their decision
was motivated by a sense of familial duty
to England. In this way we see how the
familial relationship between Jamaica
and its Mother Country ultimately serves
Britain’s political interests. Although the
very concept of a Mother Country conjures
up images of familial harmony and unity,
Levy demonstrates how this seemingly
personal relationship is inherently political.
She uses and questions this personification
of England to show both the imbalance
of power and the infantilisation of
Jamaican people, ultimately revealing it
to be a troubled relationship. The fact that
this metaphor presents the relationship
between the two countries as akin to that
of a mother and child makes the rejection
particularly powerful.
‘This is a white man’s war’
This interrogation of the relationship
between Britain and Jamaica is encouraged
further throughout the novel through
the character of Elwood, Gilbert’s cousin.
There is a clear contrast between these two
Jamaican men and their relationship to
the Mother Country. Elwood repeatedly
criticises England, telling Gilbert to ‘fight
for your own country this time’. Here, the
possessive pronoun of ‘your’ is central to
understanding Elwood’s argument that
it is only Jamaica, not England, that is
Gilbert’s country. In other words, Elwood
rejects the idea of England as Jamaica’s
Mother Country. His mistrust of England is
confirmed when Gilbert informs him that
England is not as he had expected:
‘You no tell me the Mother Country no keep their
word? Cha, nah, man, you wan’ me believe the
English are liars?’
Elwood is thus acutely aware of how the
emphasis on a familial relationship between
the two countries minimises its political
nature. Moreover, the fact that the English
people that Gilbert speaks to are unaware
of this relationship already demonstrates
the power imbalance that exits between
the motherland and its child. Gilbert is
repeatedly forced to explain why he made
the decision to leave Jamaica for England.
For example, a conversation between
Gilbert and a British RAF volunteer echoes
discussions between Elwood and Gilbert as
the volunteer asks him,
‘why would you leave a nice sunny place to come
here if you didn’t have to?’
‘Hardly like our own country
any more’
Despite Gilbert’s loyalty, Levy makes it
clear that England is not loyal to him as he
struggles to find lodgings or a job due to
the racism that he experiences from White
Britons who consider Caribbean people
as unwelcome guests in their country.
In particular, the character of Bernard is
representative of many White Britons who
are unsettled by the presence of Black
Caribbean people in London.
When Bernard returns to find that his home
is now full of lodgers from the Caribbean,
he is disoriented and angrily asks Gilbert,
‘Who the bloody hell are you? This is my house.
In this way, Bernard’s attitude represents
the feelings of many White Britons in
post-war London who felt threatened by
the rising number of Caribbean people in
England. This is confirmed by Queenie’s
narration, where she admits she
had to ask Bernard if he was staying
and simultaneously confirms his fears that
he is a guest in his own home. The same
is true for many White Britons who feared
they no longer belonged in England and
were being replaced. George Lamming
explains this situation as an ‘extraordinary
predicament’ that
quite ordinary English people found themselves in
when they awoke one morning and saw strangers
metaphorically on the sofas of their living rooms
and the people – meaning the authorities – who
had brought these strangers into the ‘native’s
living room’ had not asked permission or invited
consultation about this invitation (4).
When Bernard complains that he fought
in the war ‘to protect home and hearth’,
the implication is that whilst England is his
home, Jamaicans like Gilbert and Hortense
belong in Jamaica:
‘Everyone had a place. England for the English
and the West Indies for these coloured people.’
Therefore, Levy suggests that White Britons
do not subscribe to the familial unity
associated with the Mother Country. Rather,
many White Britons actively discouraged
the integration of Caribbean immigrants
in Britain. It is also striking that it is the
metaphor of home that is repeatedly used
by the English characters, not that of
mother, reiterating their rejection of any
ties to Jamaica.
December 2021 emagazine 59

‘I have found that this is a very
cold country’
Rather than welcoming Caribbean migrants
with open arms, through the narration by
Gilbert and Hortense, Levy demonstrates
that England in fact rejects Caribbean
people. This is particularly evident as
Hortense and Gilbert attempt to find a
job. Gilbert is repeatedly rejected for jobs
because of his race. When he applies at a
factory he is rejected after being told that
‘all hell would break loose if the men found you
talking to their women.’
A similar experience occurs when he
applies to another office and is told that
the boss ‘does not like colored people’.
Moreover, when he does find a job at the
Post Office he experiences racism in the
workplace and is repeatedly reminded that
he is Other with his colleagues mocking his
accent by telling him to ‘Speak English’.
The character of Hortense has a similar
experience of humiliation when she applies
to be a teacher. Her observation that Britain
is ‘a very cold country’ is undoubtedly
a double entendre, referring both to the
cold weather and the hostility experienced
by Caribbean migrants. This hostility
problematises the notion of England as
a loving Mother Country. When Gilbert
states his disappointment upon meeting his
Mother Country and realising it is not as
he had expected:
‘Ragged, old and dusty as the long dead. Mother
has a blackened eye, bad breath and one lone
tooth that waves in her head when she speaks.
Can this be that fabled relation you heard so
60 emagazine December 2021
© Ruby Films for the BBC
much of? this twisted-crooked weary woman.
This stinking cantankerous hag. She offers you no
comfort after your journey. No smile. No welcome.
Yet she looks down at you through lordly eyes and
says, ‘Who the bloody hell are you?’
Gilbert’s personification of the Mother
Country asking migrants like himself, ‘Who
the bloody hell are you?’ echoes Bernard’s
words earlier in the novel. Levy deliberately
draws parallels here to highlight that the
Mother Country is not as welcoming as its
name might suggest. Gilbert describes how
Hortense is left feeling ‘
wounded after a sharp slap from the Mother
Country’s hand’
suggesting that the Mother Country’s
rejection of Caribbean immigrants is an
act of violence.
‘I never dreamed England
would be like this’
Through the character of Hortense, Levy
demonstrates how Caribbean migrants’
expectations of the Mother Country falls
short of reality. In the opening of the novel,
Levy demonstrates how Jamaicans like
Hortense romanticised life in England.
This deliberate idealisation of England
only emphasises the shortcomings of the
Mother Country in the rest of the novel. As
Hortense daydreams about ‘the sun’s heat’
on her face that would ‘gradually change
from roasting to caressing’, Levy alludes to a
nurturing Mother Country to contrast with
the ‘sharp slap’ that Hortense later receives.
Her shock is evident from the repetition of
‘Is this the way the English live?’
as she struggles to reconcile all that she has
been taught about Jamaica in England with
her lived experience.
A consequence of the whole concept of the
Mother Country is to establish Jamaica as
inferior and this is evident by the way in
which Hortense is infantilised by English
people when she arrives. For example,
she is instructed on how to use a doorbell
by a stranger:
‘Just go and ring the bell. You know about bells
and knockers? You got them where you come
from? Just go and ring the bell and someone’ll
come.’
Queenie is similarly patronising as Hortense
observes that upon
seeing a shop selling fish she tell me this is the
fishmonger.
Levy’s novel shows how, for Caribbean
migrants, the Mother Country that they
dreamed of in fact turns out to be far from
the nurturing mother they wished for, but
rather an infantilising, unloving version of
maternal control.
Through the mistreatment of Hortense and
Gilbert, Levy demonstrates how Caribbean
migrants had been misled into believing
the Mother Country was a place of
opportunity and equality
where everyone walked on a blanket of gold.
It is particularly striking that Gilbert and
Hortense were taught so much about
England, but the English people do not
seem to know much about Jamaica,
repeatedly assuming that it is in Africa.
This imbalance of knowledge reiterates
the one-sided nature of the relationship
between Jamaica and its Mother Country,
one in which the desire for warm parenting
goes unanswered.
Georgina Ramsay is a PGCE student at the
University of Oxford, where she is training to be
a Modern Languages teacher. She holds a MA
in Comparative Literature and Critical Theories
from the University of Birmingham. She previously
graduated from the University of Oxford with a
degree in English and French.
emag web archive
• Diane Crimp: Status, Siblings and
Storms: Motifs in Small Island,
emagazine 53, September 2011
• Rebecca Balfourth: Telling Their Own
Stories – Voices in Andrea Levy’s Small
Island, emagazine 57, September 2012
 Suicide in
Hamlet’s
First
Soliloquy
The theme of suicide Innocence and Corruption
O that this too too sullied flesh would melt
is startlingly and Hamlet wants to use suicide as a way of
emotionally introduced escaping the corruption he sees around
him in the Danish court and in human
by Hamlet in Act 1, beings. His emphasised disgust at the ‘too
Scene 2 – but there is too sullied flesh’ is a rejection of immorality
and the sin of ‘the flesh’ – a Biblical term
more to this topic than for worldly desires such as lust. Hamlet has
the simple fact that come to regard physical desire as corrupted,
dirtied and ‘sullied’, possibly from the
Hamlet is suicidal, as association of his mother with ‘incestuous
A Level student Abi sheets’. In an appealing alternative to being
trapped in ‘solid flesh’ (the Second Quarto
Marett reveals. has ‘sullied’, but the Folio text has ‘solid’ –
both versions have interesting implications),
Hamlet wishes to ‘melt, thaw and resolve’,
the gentle movement verbs suggesting a
free flow of water.
Hamlet’s desire to die by ‘melt[ing]’ into
a ‘dew’ perhaps suggests a sympathetic
yearning for innocence, which he imagines
he can find through leaving his body behind
in natural, cleansing death. Rejecting his
‘flesh’ as sinful, Hamlet wants to transcend
his body in a state of purity idealised in the
calming water imagery – the connotations
of ‘melt’ and ‘dew’ suggest natural
cleanliness and innocence.
Religious Barriers to Suicide
fix’d His cannon ‘gainst self-slaughter
Hamlet is prevented from committing
suicide by his religious obedience to The
Commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ which
was thought to include self-murder (that
is suicide) as a sin, and by his fear of
disobeying God, who is presented as a harsh
and unsympathetic opponent. In Hamlet’s
eyes, God has ‘fix’d his cannon’ against
suicide, portraying God as the enemy on a
battlefield. As well as meaning the weapon,
‘cannon’ is also the Christian doctrine, and
Hamlet melds both meanings to suggest that
religious inhibition to suicide is a hostile
attack on his desires. Even God’s name,
‘Everlasting’, is a dark promise of eternal
life to one who wants to die, focusing on
the omniscient and all-powerful nature of
God, rather than the more humane traits
of sympathy and love. Hamlet’s suicidal
impulses have created distance between him
and God, who he views as unsympathetic to
his suffering, while religious duty and fear
of damnation act as powerful inhibitors.
The Pain of Death
The reality of suicide is violence and pain,
in strong contrast to the idealised natural
death of ‘Thaw[ing]’ into a ‘dew’. Brutal
words with connotations of violence, such
December 2021 emagazine 61
62 emagazine December 2021
Ian McKellen as Hamlet, Theatre Royal Windsor, 2021, d. Sean Mathias
Photographer: Ian West
Credit: PA images / Alamy Stock Photo
as ‘fix’d’, ‘cannon’ and ‘self-slaughter’ are
used to shock the audience after the calm
tone and slow listing in the previous two
lines. The violent and explicit description
of suicide as ‘self-slaughter’ suggests that
Hamlet recognises the difference between
his idea of a painless, purifying death,
and the reality of suicide as a forbidden
sin – ‘slaughter’ suggests the murder
of something innocent, revealing that
paradoxically Hamlet cannot fulfil his wish
to leave behind the sinful world without
damning himself too.
Searching for the Ideal in an
Irredeemable World
weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Perhaps the most convincing explanation
for Hamlet’s despair is his loss of faith
in humanity and the world around
him. The Edenic ideal of the world as a
‘garden’ looked after by the human race
‘grows to seed’ as humanity fails in its
task as gardeners, and the world remains
‘unweeded’. The lack of distinction between
good plants and weeds, such as Hamlet’s
father and Claudius (with implied blame on
Gertrude for her lack of judgement) has led
to a world ‘Possess[ed]’ by ‘rank’ and sinful
leaders. Hamlet’s certainty that the world is
corrupted by unpunished evil foreshadows
the Ghost’s revelation of murder in
Act 1 Scene 5.
In response to the fallen, irredeemable
world he sees himself in, Hamlet reaches
for the ideal, creating mythical counterparts
for each member of his immediate family –
his father is ‘Hyperion’, Claudius a ‘satyr’,
Gertrude should be ‘Niobe’, while Hamlet
compares himself to ‘Hercules’. These
idealisations expose how Hamlet’s view
of reality is distorted, perhaps by grief.
Earlier in this scene the audience has seen
how Claudius is in some respects an able
King, controlling the court and managing
a difficult political transition into power,
which challenges Hamlet’s view of him
as a half-bestial and lustful ‘satyr’. The
audience may suspect that Hamlet’s father
and Claudius do not actually fit into the
somewhat binary categories of ‘Hyperion’
and ‘satyr’, divine and bestial, good and evil,
that Hamlet has respectively assigned them.
Gertrude is held to the impossible ideal of
eternal and self-destructive sorrow in the
comparison to ‘Niobe’, who wept until she
became a stone fountain. Hamlet betrays
a sense of inferiority and inadequacy as
he sarcastically compares himself to heroic
and superhuman ‘Hercules’, admitting
in a moment of metatheatre that he is
unsuited to play the revenge hero. Hamlet’s
expectations for himself and others are
impossibly high, so that reality is inevitably
disappointing – this could be the source of
his despair that ‘all the uses of this world’
(that is, living) are ‘unprofitable’.
‘Within a month’
Hamlet is perhaps most sympathetic in his
grief for the death of his father – a grief
which helps to explain his despair and
‘it cannot come to good’
isolation. His obsessive focus on the past,
and his repetitions of ‘Within a month’, When in Act 1, Scene 4 Hamlet
suggests that he is in denial over his father’s asks the Ghost
death, while throughout this soliloquy the
What shall we do?
fragmented structure and jarring changes
what he wants from this unexpected chance
in tone imply that Hamlet’s mental state is
precarious, and that he is barely holding to talk to his father again is an answer to
himself together. For instance, in the his problem of indecision and inaction.
broken phrases Hamlet’s choice to take up his father’s
commands of ‘revenge’ and ‘remember’ set
Let me not think on’t – Frailty thy name is
in motion the tragic plot that will eventually
woman –
A little month – perhaps even inevitably – lead to his
death and the deaths of everyone around
Hamlet initially makes a desperate him. In this way, Hamlet’s indecision over
promise not to dwell on the past, which is whether to take active revenge and his
immediately broken by the angry outburst indecision over whether to commit suicide
at his mother and the whole gender of are ultimately part of the same choice –
‘woman’, and then over the line-turn a in the end, his revenge is suicidal. Both
different tone is introduced, one of grieving threaten to ‘Taint his mind’ with sin and the
remembrance for his father, and pain at corruption he fights to destroy.
his mother’s re-marriage. The intensely
emotional tone of this soliloquy contrasts Abi Marett is in the Sixth Form at Kendrick School.
She hopes to study English Literature at university.
with Hamlet’s often sarcastic public
speeches, in which he must ‘hold [his]
tongue’, even while between the lines
his heart ‘break[s]’. Hamlet’s grief isolates
him from a court which is trying to move
onto a new King and a new era, possibly
explaining why he despairingly views the
world around him as shallow and forgetful.
Gertrude’s ‘o’er-hasty marriage’ betrays
emag web archive
a lack of grief and respect for the dead,
• Lucy Webster: Hamlet’s Dilemma,
forcing Hamlet to conclude that she is
emagazine 19, February 2003
also corrupted by sin and physical desires.
• Yi Wen Ho: Hamlet: Emotion
Hamlet rejects Gertrude for her ‘wicked
or Reflection, emagazine
speed’ in forgetting his father, suggesting
38, December 2007
that the mourning Gertrude has shown is
• Sean McEvoy: Time in Hamlet,
merely a deceptive display of ‘unrighteous
emagazine 40, April 2008
tears’, and that her ‘flushing’ from crying
• Sarah Burdett: Shakespeare’s
was mixed with blushing desire. Hamlet
Way With Words, emagazine
suggests that grief and remembrance
54, December 2011
are basic emotional values that even ‘a
• Sean McEvoy: Hamlet’s ‘Mighty
beast that wants discourse of reason’ can
Opposite’, emagazine 64, April 2014
appreciate, and that Gertrude’s lack of grief
• Rob Worrall: Shakespeare, Death
is therefore less than human. His rejection
and the Hereafter, emagazine
of a mother and a world that is sinful and
53, September 2011
doesn’t value remembrance, or grieve for
• Charlotte Unsworth-Hughes:
the end of relationships, could be a reason
Hamlet – ‘Too much of water’,
why Hamlet is suicidal.
emagazine 84, April 2019
December 2021 emagazine 63
64 emagazine December 2021
AA Film Archive / Alamy Stock Photo
FRANKENSTEIN
– so much more than a story
Hester Glass suggests that Shelley’s novel rests on deep
philosophical thinking, a tradition of poetic endeavour
and a recognition of the power of language in human
life. She argues that these combine to make it much
more than a simple story, or even a novel, breaking
the boundaries of genre in its complex treatment of the
creature and its desires.

December 2021 emagazine 65

In Mary Shelley’s introduction to her
revised version of the novel, published
in 1831, she tells the now famous tale of
how her novel, Frankenstein, came to be
written, while she and her husband were
neighbours of Lord Byron in Switzerland.
Percy Shelley, Byron, his physician Polidori
and Mary agreed to each ‘write a ghost
story’, however hers was the only story to
be completed. She tells us that Polidori ‘had
some terrible idea about a skull-headed
lady’ which he abandoned and the
illustrious poets [i.e., Byron and Shelley] annoyed
by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished
their uncongenial task.

The notion of the ‘platitude of prose’, and

its lowly and banal form being unsuitable
for the great poets, seems to be accepted by
Mary Shelley, but she makes no apology for
her determination to
think of a story – a story to rival those which had
excited us to this task.
Her extraordinary achievement in writing a
story, which does indeed rival all Gothic and
supernatural narratives, is thanks not just to
the richness of ideas in the novel, but also
its elevated language and rhetorical style.
This novel, along with many other ideas,
is about language, and how Mary Shelley
uses language reveals much about language
itself as a concept.
The Influence of Shelley’s
Reading
The Romantic poets published pamphlets,
prefaces, and essays, about the fundamental
importance of poetry to civilisation,
resulting from intense philosophical
discussion and debate. In ‘A Defence of
Poetry’, Percy Shelley argues that poetry
is the highest form of art, and that poets’
use of metaphorical language, produced
from the imagination, has a vital impact
on society. The imagination creates
thoughts and therefore language is, in
Shelley’s words, a ‘direct representation
of our actions and passions of our internal
being.’ These ideas were deeply interesting
for Mary, who comments in her 1831
introduction that,
Many and long were the conversations between
Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout
but nearly silent listener.
The conversations ranged across many
topics, including the ‘nature of the principle
of life’, which provoked Mary’s vivid
imagination to conjure the terrifying image
of her creature and his maker. The resulting
story is steeped in enormously wide-ranging
influences, drawn from Mary Shelley’s very
extensive reading and her avid listening.
Reading and listening, and language
itself, are at the heart of her novel’s
ideas and concerns.
Prose Fiction and High Poetic
Endeavour
When Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The
Modern Prometheus was first published
anonymously in 1818 its preface was
written by her husband. In this preface
Percy Shelley, writing as the author,
presumably with Mary’s agreement,
comments, ‘I have not considered myself
as merely weaving a series of supernatural
terrors.’ He asserts that, like ‘The Iliad, the
tragic poetry of Greece – Shakespeare in
The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream
– and most especially Milton, in Paradise
Lost’, prose fiction can preserve the ‘truth of
the elementary principles of human nature’
while having the freedom to ‘innovate upon
their combinations’.
This imaginative innovation, while
preserving ‘truth’ about human nature,
Shelley concludes, results in the ‘highest
specimens of poetry’. His young wife’s prose
fiction, the work of a ‘humble novelist’, is
therefore placed within this exulted field
of poetic endeavour, from the Ancient
Greeks to Milton, and by inference his own
poetry. In Frankenstein Mary Shelley is not
‘merely weaving’ a terrifying tale, she is
writing prose fiction which adopts the high
drama and language of the greatest poets
and playwrights.
Public domain
The Creature’s Powerful,
Poetic Language
Like Shakespeare’s ‘monster’ Caliban in
The Tempest Frankenstein’s creature shows
significant power in his use of language.
Caliban too has learned language, taught
by Prospero to ‘name the bigger light’, but
is then rejected, accused of villainy, and
abused. Caliban desires brutal revenge,
yet he can also describe the island with
great sensitivity,
Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt
not…
that when I waked I cried to dream again.
Act 3, Scene 2
The gentle rhythm and sibilance of his
language demonstrate that he is a complex,
feeling ‘monster’. Shelley’s creature’s plea
to Frankenstein is similarly powerful in
its eloquence:
‘Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am
irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good;
misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I
shall again be virtuous.’
The harmoniously balanced sentences,
expressive, elegant language, with the
heightened drama of ‘irrevocably’, is typical
of the creature’s eloquent style. And just
as Caliban mourns the love that Prospero
once offered him, so Frankenstein’s creature
knows that language is his only hope; he
puts his faith in ‘the Godlike science’ which
he perceives as engendering love.

66 emagazine December 2021

The Passion of Language and
Hopes of Acceptance
In his psychoanalytical reading of Frankenstein
the academic and writer Peter Brooks explores
the significance of the creature’s supreme
skills with language and rhetoric. Brooks,
(who chooses to use the word ‘monster’
rather than ‘creature’), considers the
monster’s realisation that language is his only
hope of being accepted, and how ultimately
not being permitted to communicate with
others is an act of ‘monsterism’ – that is
the creature is made monstrous. When
Frankenstein demands that his creature
‘Begone!’ the creature places his hands over
his maker’s eyes, saying
‘Thus I relieve thee, my creator – thus I take from
thee a sight which you abhor. Still thou canst listen
to me, and grant me thy compassion.’
Frankenstein, by being compelled to listen is
affected, and later he will tell Walton that
‘His words had a strange effect upon me. I
compassionated him.’
The creature’s tale of alienation and rejection
is profoundly moving; he learns that emotion,
passion, and love are expressed through
‘articulate sounds’ when observing the blind
old man and his family, and he yearns to
express his own emotions. His discovery of
language reflects Rousseau’s argument that
language springs from passion rather than
need and that language develops because
individuals want and need to communicate.
‘The Chain of Existences and
Events’
Brooks goes on to analyse the monster’s
assertion that he needs a female mate to
become linked to the chain of existences and events,
for which I am now excluded.
He argues that what the monster perceives
as ‘the godlike science’ of language
proves deceptive:
his eloquence achieves no more than state of
permanently frustrated desire for meaning
because society judges him on his appearance.
If the monster could establish a link between
himself and others, he would be benevolent
and inherently good, at he was ‘at birth’.
However, as he is denied the opportunity
to participate in the ‘chain of existences
and events’ his knowledge of language
cannot compensate. This the monster
recognises himself,
‘I am malicious, because I am miserable.’
In his novel Emile Rousseau shows the
utopian ideal; Emile can maintain his natural
goodness and coexist with the rules of society.
However, Mary Shelley in Frankenstein shows
the opposite: she shows what happens when
an inherently noble creature is abandoned
by society and denied the necessity of
communication with others.
More Than a Story, More Than a
Novel?
So, for Mary Shelley the written word, shared
language and communication is central to
human existence. The writer Joyce Carol
Oates comments that
Frankenstein is of course one of the most self-
consciously literary ‘novels’ ever written.
Oates puts ‘novels’ in inverted commas as she
believes that Frankenstein is so unique that
one could question whether it is really a novel
at all. It is instead a
unique blending of Gothic, fabulist, allegorical, and
philosophical materials.
In her article, ‘Frankenstein’s Fallen Angel’,
Oates explores Shelley’s ‘didactic intention’,
which is apparent in the speeches and
monologues which echo both Shakespeare
and Milton, as well as Romantic sources. It
is in the creature’s monologue that Shelley’s
moral intention is at its most forceful, as
he adopts the voices from his literary and
philosophical reading. Shelley chooses the
creature’s reading for its symbolic significance
and linguistic power, including Milton’s
Paradise Lost. The creature assumes the
compelling voices of Adam and Satan,
‘I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam, but I am
rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy
for no misdeed’
and ‘Beware’ he says half-way
through the novel,
‘for I am fearless, and therefore powerful. I will
watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting
with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries
you inflict.’
His voice is so powerful that it takes on an
archetypal significance, in which he strikes
the chord of those figures in literature and
ideas representative of so much human pain
and suffering: Adam, Eve, Oedipus, Faust, and
Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Edmund; Oates
argues that arguably
he has become by the novel’s melodramatic
conclusion a form of Christ: sinned against by all
humankind, yet fundamentally blameless, and yet
quite willing to die as a sacrifice.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is so much more
than a story. Her creature has an almost
mythological status; and it is Mary Shelley’s
potent critique of man’s inhumanity and
selfishness, voiced by the supreme rhetorical
expression of the ‘monster’ himself that has
created the myth.
Hester Glass taught English for many years in
a wide variety of secondary schools and for the
Open University. She is now a freelance writer,
examiner and tutor.
References
Brooks, Peter. ‘Godlike Science/
Unhallowed Arts: Language and
Monstrosity in Frankenstein.’ New Literary
History, vol. 9, no. 3, 1978, pp. 591–605.
Oates, Joyce Carol. ‘Frankenstein’s Fallen
Angel.’ Critical Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 3,
1984, pp. 543–554
emag web archive
• Anton Franks: Frankenstein – The
Making of a Modern Myth, emagazine
12/13, October 2001
• Ray Cluley: The Romantic in
Frankenstein, emagazine 44, March 2009
• Judy Simons: Frankenstein – Order,
Narrative and Chaos, emagazine
61, September 2013
• Rory Drummond: Frankenstein –
Layers of Complexity, emagazine
75, February 2017
• Richard Jacobs: Frankenstein
– Revolutionary Times and
Feminist Readings, emagazine
90, December 2020
December 2021 emagazine 67
 Perform a poem
on stage at
Shakespeare’s
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poems from the Poetry By
Heart website, or make
National finalists’ event your own choice – Classic,
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