Agenda for Saturday 16th May

09:30 Arrival & Distribution of Resources

09:40 Session 1: A View from the Bridge
Eddie, Catherine & Marco
10:40 Five minute comfort break
10:45 Session 2: A View from the Bridge
Alfieri, Beatrice, Rodolpho
11:10 Session 3: Unseen Poetry

Eddie
02. Answer part (a) and part (b)
Part (a)
A theatre critic described Eddie as a weak man. How far do you agree
with this view?
and then Part (b)
How does Miller present Eddie in the play as a whole?

Task:
Is Eddie a weak man? Come up with your own
ideas about this.
- Where does his strength/weakness come
from?
- How/why is his power and status challenged?

How are you marked on this

paper?

AO1
Respond to texts critically and
imaginatively; select and evaluate
relevant textual detail to illustrate and
support interpretations
AO2
Explain how language, structure and
form contribute to writers presentation
of ideas, themes and settings

Eddie: across the whole of the play

Eddie

Contained
Bottled up
In control
Part of community

Out of control
Cant control his feelings
Desperate
Scared
Outcast from community

How to approach part b)

Method- method/device
Example- evidence
Reader Response- what this suggests to the reader and why?
Interpretation- is there an alternative interpretation? Could it suggest anything
else?
Detail- pick out a key detail(s)/word from quote/example and explain what this
suggests
Theme- how does this link to the theme?
Purpose- what is Miller trying to show by using this method/quote?
Miller is criticising
Miller is trying to highlight
Miller is trying to raise awareness
Link- link back to what the actual question is asking

Eddies story is timeless

What do I mean by this?
As, humans, are we unable to control our
emotions?
What are our flaws and weaknesses?

What are Millers intentions

through Eddie?

Eddie is a suitable subject for a modern tragedy

because the potential for self-destruction, which is in
all of us, in Eddie's case has destroyed him.
Eddie is a very ordinary man, a decent and well-liked
man, and yet the one flaw in his character forces those
around him and Alfieri to watch "powerless" (as does
the audience) as the case runs "its bloody course".
What Miller does suggest is that we have basic
impulses, which civilisation has seen as harmful to
society, and taught us to control. We have selfdestructive urges, too, but normally we deny these.
Eddie does not really understand his improper desire,
and thus is unable to hide it from those around him or
from the audience.

How do these themes link to Eddie?

Immigration, home and

belonging
Love and desire
Respect, honour and
reputation
Justice and the law
Maturity and independence

Eddie: links to themes

Immigration, home and belonging:

Miller uses the topic of immigration to make larger points about the idea of home
and a sense of belonging. Eddie takes pride in the home he works hard to maintain
and is irritated when Rodolpho and Marco intrude on his place as master of his
home. Throughout the play he struggles to maintain control over his home as a
place where he belongs, but is gradually excluded from it as he drifts away
from Catherine and Beatrice. By the end of the play, he hardly belongs in his
own home, or even in his own neighbourhood, as his neighbours shun him for
betraying Marco and Rodolpho.
Love and Desire:
Eddies intense love for Catherine lead to the central problems of the play.
Beyond this, though, A View from the Bridge especially explores the way in which
people are driven by desires that dont fit the mould of normal or traditional
forms of familial and romantic love. For one thing, Eddies love for Catherine is
extreme and hard to define exactly. He is very overprotective, and to some
degree is a father figure for her. However, as Beatrice subtly hints several
times, his love for Catherine often crosses this line and becomes a kind of
incestuous desire for his niece, whom he has raised like a daughter.
Eddie is a mess of contradictory, half-repressed desires that are difficult to pin
down or define, perhaps even for him. Through this tragically tormented and
conflicted character, Miller shows that people are often not aware of their
own desires, and reveals the power that these desires can exert over people.
Eddies suffocating love for Catherine becomes a desire to possess her. He
even claims that Rodolpho is stealing from him, as if she were an object he
owned. His obsession with Catherine drives him apart from his family and
leads him to betray Beatrices cousins, thereby effectively ostracizing himself
from his friends and neighbours. Through the tragic descent of Eddie, A View
from the Bridge can be seen not only as the drama of a family, or of an
immigrant community, but also as the internal drama of Eddies psyche, as he is
tormented and brought down by desires he himself doesnt even fully
understand.
Respect, honour and reputation:
One of Eddies main concerns in the play is his honour and the respect (or lack
thereof) he gets from those around him. Eddie works hard to
support his family and has a proud sense of personal honour. At the beginning
of the play, he is a respected, well-liked member of his community. But the play
follows his tragic demise as he loses the respect of others and his good
reputation. He constantly worries about being disrespected or dishonoured by
Catherine, Beatrice, Marco, and especially Rodolpho. Closely related to the
concepts of honour or respect is the idea of reputation, which can be
understood as a more social form of honour. In addition to Eddies personal
sense of honour, he is greatly concerned with his reputation amongst his
neighbours. He is infuriated when Marco spits on him and accuses him of
turning him in to the Immigration Bureau (even though Eddie really did do it)
because these actions are disrespectful and dishonour Eddie, but especially
because they occurred in public, in front of the neighbourhood.

While Eddie does lose the respect of others around him, part of the problem
with his obsession with respect and honour is that he has a rather warped idea
of the concepts. Whenever Beatrice or Catherine disagrees with him, he
interprets this as a sign of disrespect. Furthermore, he thinks that Rodolpho
disrespects and dishonours him merely by spending time with Catherine. In the
end, Eddie loses the respect of his family and community precisely because he
is so overly concerned and defensive regarding his own honour and reputation.
He interprets all sorts of things as affronts to his personal honour. Then,
ironically, this very habit of overreaction causes Catherine, Beatrice, Rodolpho,
and Marco to lose actual respect for him gradually. Nonetheless, even after
Eddies self-destructive decline, Beatrice and Catherine show some respect for
him, when he is stabbed by Marco. And Alfieri ends the play by affirming that
he still mourns Eddie respectfully, granting Eddie some vestige of a positive
reputation after all.

Justice and the law:

As Eddie grows suspicious of Rodolpho, he asks Alfieri for help, but Alfieri tells
him he has no legal recourse as Rodolpho has done nothing illegal. Eddie is then
upset because he feels that Rodolphos behaviour simply isnt right, and that he
should have some way of getting justice for Catherine and himself. When Eddie
finally turns on Rodolpho and Marco, he is behaving legally, and helping the
Immigration Bureau enforce the law. But, in doing so, he is also betraying his
own family, and in this way not delivering justice. If Eddie chooses the
law over justice in turning Marco and Rodolpho in, Marco chooses his own
form of justice over the law in killing Eddie. As these examples suggest, the
play can be read as displaying the failures of the law to guarantee real justice.
When he has no legal recourse to separate Rodolpho and Catherine, Eddie
turns Rodolpho and Marco in, setting off a chain of events that ostracizes him
from his family and neighbourhood (and also leads to his own death). But at the
same time, the play cautions against taking justice into ones own hands, which
both Marcos and Eddies actions reveal to be a dangerous, not to mention
ineffective course of action.
Maturity & Independence
Eddie misjudges Catherines maturity and continues to see her as a young girl;
because of this, he denies her independence. But she is not the only one
whose maturity he misjudges. He underestimates Rodolpho, repeatedly
referring to him early in the play as just a kid. And, given his own childish
jealousy and behaviour, Eddie perhaps overestimates his own maturity, as well.
Eddie is sad to see Catherine grow up, and tries to hold onto her as she
matures and becomes more independent.

What are you going to select as

your evidence?
AO1
Respond to texts critically and
imaginatively; select and evaluate
relevant textual detail to illustrate and
support interpretations

AO2
Explain how language, structure and
form contribute to writers presentation
of ideas, themes and settings

AO2:
Use of foreshadowing to show magnitude of
Eddies crime in phoning the immigration
bureau
Violence of Eddies language to Marco
Sympathy created by Eddies talks with
Alfieri
Marco kills Eddie with his own knife- killed by
his own jealousy and betrayal
Cuts people off, responds to questions with
closed answers
Stage directions
Greek tragedy

Marco
02. Answer part (a) and part (b)
Part (a)
Marco tells Alfieri, All the law is not in a book. How does Marco show this
in the play?
and then Part (b)
How does Miller present Marco in the play as a whole?

Task:
What does Marco mean by this quotation?
Which themes does this connect to?
How are Marco and Eddies ideas about law and
justice similar/different?

How are you marked on this

paper?

AO1
Respond to texts critically and
imaginatively; select and evaluate
relevant textual detail to illustrate and
support interpretations
AO2
Explain how language, structure and
form contribute to writers presentation
of ideas, themes and settings

Marco: across the whole play

Marco

Responsible
Respectful
Strong
Silent

Proud
Vengeful
Furious

How to approach part b)

Method- method/device
Example- evidence
Reader Response- what this suggests to the reader and why?
Interpretation- is there an alternative interpretation? Could it suggest anything
else?
Detail- pick out a key detail(s)/word from quote/example and explain what this
suggests
Theme- how does this link to the theme?
Purpose- what is Miller trying to show by using this method/quote?
Miller is criticising
Miller is trying to highlight
Miller is trying to raise awareness
Link- link back to what the actual question is asking

Miller creates a character who

is a murderer
And yet who we see as admirable!
How?
Why?
He follows the same code of honour as Eddie
but he does not deviate from it

How do these themes link to Marco?

Immigration, home and

belonging
Love and desire
Respect, honour and
reputation
Justice and the law
Maturity and independence

What are you going to select as

your evidence?
AO1
Respond to texts critically and
imaginatively; select and evaluate
relevant textual detail to illustrate and
support interpretations

AO2
Explain how language, structure and
form contribute to writers presentation
of ideas, themes and settings

AO1:
Marcos role as illegal immigrant with family at home in Italy;
Family ties between him and Beatrice and Eddie
Hard working and loyal to family sending money home to
feed wife and children
Strong and silent differences between him and Rodolpho
Admired by other longshoremen for his strength
Spits in Eddies face
Kills Eddie at end.
AO2:
Marcos language says little
His actions e.g. lifting the chair like a weapon; what others
say about him
Kills Eddie with his own knife

Catherine

AO1
Catherine at start of play signs of her becoming more
independent such as wanting to get a job, her new clothes;
however, still signs of childishness in how she behaves
towards Eddie;
her growing maturity as her relationship with Rodolpho
develops e.g. disobeying Eddie to stay out late, developing
sexual relationship, plans for marriage.
AO2
Catherines language to Eddie at the start of the play
compared to her more independent language at the end of
the play;
the change in her reaction to Eddie talkative at start of
play, becoming much quieter;
her naivet at the start of the play in walking round in her
slip for example
but hints of her sexuality in the way she dresses and the
phallic symbolism of lighting Eddies cigar

Unseen Poetry

BECAUSE

Structure:
Language:
Line length
Lexical groups
Organisation of poem
Verb choice
Refrain/repetition
Imagery
Caesura
Metaphor
Enjambment
Personification
Rhyme
Simile
Regular/irregular structure
Personification
Direct address
Couplet
Collective pronoun
Stanza
Personal pronoun
Free verse
Effect/Reader Response Develop interpretations
End stopped lines
Also, this connotes...
This demonstrates...
This indicates...
This shows...
This reveals...

In addition, this conveys...

Furthermore, this might
suggest...
Moreover, this implies...

 No alliteration
No onomatopoeia

Address the question directly:

Part A: themes, ideas & message

Explain the themes in the poem:

Explain the purpose of the poem:

When writing about purpose

X is highlighting...
X is trying to raise awareness...
X is critical of...
X is raising a mirror...

Give three focuses you will discuss in Part B with a brief explanation for each:
1.
2.
3.

Method/device:
Example:
Reader response:
Interpretation:
Detail:
Theme Link:
Purpose:

Link back to actual question:

Suicide in the Trenches

By Siegfried Sassoon
1
2
3
4

a) How does Sassoon present the realities of

war?
b) What methods does he use to achieve this?

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
Context:
And whistled early with the lark.
Young men were forced to fight in WW1,

sometimes against their will. Sometimes the

government glamourized fighting in the war,
they told the young men they would be
heroes and did not tell them about the
horrible conditions they would live in.

5
6
7
8

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

9
10
11
12

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.