Small Island

English Literature AS A level Wider Reading

Small Island - Andrea Levy (2004) Analysis

Struggle for Identity in Modern Literature Wider Reading

Decided to read it…

A)     The struggle for racial identity is a prominent theme in a lot of 20^th century literature and would be great for comparisons with other novels of the time.

B)      Written by a British writer about our own nation. Saw this as a contrast against all the other American literature that seems to dominate literature of the 20th century. 

Andrea Levy uses the voices of four different characters (Queenie, Hortense, Gilbert Joseph and Bernard Bligh) to paint a picture of post war Great Britain. As Jamaican immigrants escape their own “Small Island” to that of another, their “mother country” their expectations of a grand, imminent and colonial society isn’t quite what greets them.  Instead they’re faced with the economic and social turmoil of a war torn country.

This novel is not just about the character’s own search for identity, but the transformation of Britain itself. The end of the imperial age and the birth of the diverse nation we know Britain as today - the Britain that creates a home for asylum seekers and embraces athletes of all ethnicities and backgrounds into its Olympic team as we saw this summer. The Second World War was a catalyst for multi-cultural Britain.

The Author

Andrea’s father sailed, along with many others, from Jamaica on the Empire Windrush in 1948.  Her mother sailed to join him a year later.

Andrea was born in 1956 in London and grew up as a minority in a primarily white country. Through her own experiences, as well as discovering her own racial and sexual identity she became aware of the changing attitudes of the rest of Britain.

She realised into her thirties how powerful literature could be and began to “read excessively”. She found there to be an abundance of American literature covering the theme of racial identity, but little from a British perspective; so she set out to change that. She’s written five novels and won 5 literary prizes including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the  Whitbread Book of the Year 2004.

The Characters

Queenie

·         Native British

·         Open-minded, friendly,  approachable, honest.

·         Husband Bernard posted to India in the war, she doesn’t know when he’ll return.

·         She takes in Jamaican lodgers, much to the dismay of her neighbours.

·         She has a black child with Michael after a night of passion with an airman.

·         Her affair is an enlightening experience in many respects.

Bernard

·         Deeply in love with Queenie

·         Colonial British – perhaps enhanced by his posting to India.

·         Racist

·         Close Minded

Gilbert Joseph

·         Jamaican

·         Likable

·         Laid back

·         Sees the best in everyone

·         Always tries to please everyone

Hortense

·         Jamaican

·         Well-mannered

·         Stubborn

·         Haughty

·         Naïve

Extract

Mrs Bligh, or Queenie, the familiar name she desired I use, came to her door, wrapping herself in a dowdy woollen coat. I presumed she had changed her mind about the presumed excursion to the shops, for I believed this dreary coat to be her housecoat. Wishing to allay any anxiety that I might be disappointed by this alteration of plan, I told her “Do not worry yourself on account of I. I shall find my way around the shops with no problem.”

I was astounded when, closing the door shut behind her, she said, “What? What are you talking about? I’m ready.” For this dismal garment, which I had taken to be her dressing gown, was her good outside coat. Could the woman not see this coat was not only ugly but too small for her? She determined, wrestled herself in to do up the button. When she was finished this fight, she look on me distasteful, up and down. I was dressed as a woman should be when visiting the shops in England. My coat clean, my gloves freshly washed and a hat upon my head. But Mrs Bligh stare on me as if something wrong with my apparel, before telling me once more, “I’m  not worried about what the busybodies say. I don’t mind being seen in the street with you.”

Gender Quotes 
"A wife must do as her husband say. You ask a judge. You ask a policeman" In the novel, Levy highlights not only racial discrimination, but the nation's imposing view of women also - the husband likening himself to positions of notoriety and power in the "judge" and policeman" which likens a woman's duty to her husband to a act of law.

"Her frame, over the years, had obligingly hunched shorted so as to spare her husband the indignity" This shows how  some women became weak to the dominance of their husbands - encompassed in the word "hunched" meaning, furthering the metaphor of superiority physically.

Racial Quotes

"Big Nigger man" Spoken by a child, these words depict a fumbling naivety of the British which makes one think their racism is born from a lack of knowledge - like a child. Scared of the unknown.

"Have you seen Sugar? She's one of you." Although Britain never experienced segregation, this shows the influence Americans had over the British people - giving them the attitude of separation of "us" and "them".

Heritage Quotes
""Too many Poles. Overrun by Czechs. Couldn't move for the Belgians. And as for the Jews"... Mr. Todd wanted none of them down our street." Changing attitudes towards Black people and other immigrants after the war brought many people to question their own national identity - would an influx of foreign people change who they were regarded as themselves? "England is for the English and the West Indies for these coloured people… I've got nothing against them in their place. But their place isn't here"

"A universe that runs only a few miles in either direction before it falls into the sea.". Gilbert descibes Jamaica, a country he feels national pride for. "A universrse" juxtaposed against the Jamaica's tiny perimeters. 

Sexual
"The zebra of their legs twined and untwined together on the bed." Animalistic passion. 
 "Mrs Bligh, usually worked out what she could make for dinner during sexual relations with her husband" Mundane household chore. 

The Handmaid's Tale

"The Handmaid's Tale" - Margaret Atwood (1985) Analysis

Struggle for Identity in Modern Literature Wider Reading

English Literature AS A level Wider Reading

Context

"The Handmaid's Tale" is a dystopian novel set in the future. In it, Atwood explores the consequesnces of certain uncomfortable issues that came to light in the 1980s - Atwood questions whether the changing "modernity" of the world will lead us into self destruction, politically, socially and morally. Feminism, falling birth rates, credit cards, increasing state control, lack of privacy, sexual abuse and consumerism are all issues explored in "The Handmaid's Tale". 

Atwood's novel is extremely central to  the "struggle for identity" course. In the text Offred (our narrator)'s identity is completely decimated under the totalitarian regime and leads the reader to question what it is that gives us our identity? It's written as a palimpsest - new material written on top of old (this is exposed in the "historical notes" where we find the text is actually recorded voice on tapes over old records of "the time before") this is mirrored in the regime where The Aunts try to crush old habits, buildings echo the previous life and memory seeps into every crack.

Themes

Feminism

Language

Social

Polictical

Religion

Double and individual identity

The past and memory

Power and control

Sex

Motifs

Names - identity
Mirrors - repetitive, monotony, everything the same
Eyes - Seeing things, spying, lack of privacy, being watched
Flowers - fertility, the natural world
Blood - fertility, human life
Hands (and the human body) - things that make us human, make us the same, make us individual
Religion and the bible - control, faith, hope
Eggs - fertility, birth, hope, comfort
Clothing and self expression - identity, individuality
Colour

The Visit to the Doctors
Atwood uses "the visit to the doctors" in chapter two to portray much about the many themes in the novel. The struggle of gender, power and sexual desire which make up the identity of the characters and the stifling regime of Gilead.

The narrative in the chapter remains in recent times of her memory and does not flash back to "before" as her memory often does. Atwood presents the character in a stream of conciousness which allows such windows into the past to appear in the narrative, as our own thoughts are a mix of present and memory.

In this chapter we are exposed to one of the only three males we meet in the present Gilead. This stands out in a novel where men so obviously hold the power but women play more of a part in the shaping of the narrative; our narrator herself being female. The doctor's palimpsest is revealed in "his wife" his generic tone "honey", his hospital curtains "the snakes and the sword are bit of broken symbolism left from the time before" and his rebellion. In exposing the reader to these details (that are all familiar to life today) she shows how every member of society in Gilead is affected by the revolution and is haunted by the past. "Some tic of speech from another time" shows how tiny each detail is, but how utterly consuming: it leaves an itch. Or perhaps it shows how the doctor, just like Offred, feeds upon the past like a parasitic creature who latches on to every little thing that touches on the time they so miss.

Atwood also presents ideas about how sexist the regime is. The different levels of power constitute of men and women on every level, but men are superior on every level. "We rode in a red car, him in the front, me in the back". This, on one hand, could show how superiority and power in the form of control is given to men ad he is the one driving the car; deciding the path. But on the other hand, this could be Atwood challenging ideas about pure male dominance. It could signify that, as a Handmaid, Offred is more highly regarded than the driver: a guardian. She has a seat in the back and is being driven, much like one being chauffeured - and the car is red - the colour of Handmaid's. However, it does show the workings of the Gilead regime: she is a "chalice" of children, perhaps superior to the guardians, but that is her only job. She is still a woman "incpeable of any occupation other than reproduction".

She also uses irony where the doctor's abuse is the very thing Gilead claim to be protecting women from. Atwood continues to suggest here the idea that protection can also be viewed as a form of entrapment and suppression.

Atwood uses this passage in the novel to highlight Offred's "use " in society  This emphasises Offred's role as a mere "vessel" of life. Events like where the doctor offers for her "to use him" is accentuates the clinical and impassive air Gileadiean society has.

Enduring Love

English Literature AS A level Wider Reading
Enduring Love - Ian McEwan (1997) Analysis
Struggle for Identity in Modern Literature Wider Reading

A startling balloon crash makes for one of the most famous opening chapters of all time. It's riveting first few pages is the hook into an enormously complex and stimulating read which provoked questions that kept me tearing through the pages at an incredible rate of knots. It turns out, pretty much, to be a stalker-novel based around the conflicts of illusion and unreliability. These themes are all embodied, but therefore juxtaposed, in the narrator who's whole belief system is central to science - and therefore we'd believe rationality? Yet we are led to question the sanity of our own narrator - our eyes through the novel - as he makes a number of minimal, yet heartbreakingly significant mistakes. Ones we could see ourselves making so easily in retrospect. McEwan threads these points so seamlessly, so subtly through the novel that we find ourselves questioning our own judgement and realise that our world is built around ambiguity and inaccuracy. This is encompassed in many aspects of the book: Joe's unstable job as a writer, his unsettled relationship with wife Clarissa and Parry (the stalker)'s hazy yet all encompassing concept of religion

McEwan asks musing, psychological questions which made me feel clever and deep, for once. The dwindling scientific passages, which some regard as McEwan's downfall in the novel, I found interesting and inspiring - I felt like my Chemistry and Biology A-Levels might actually mean something! Lo and behold!

Scientific Reading of Enduring Love 

Enduring Love may not seem from the title to be a novel about science, but its origins are entirely based on the clash between relative fact and human nature. The main character’s hamartia comes when unexplainable, turbulent emotions, such as love, cannot be rationalised by way of scientific thought.  He explains incredibly emotional human experiences such as death as “the closing down of countless interrelated neural and bio-chemical exchanges” and a baby’s smile as simply a product of evolutionary requirement and scientific rationality. We are frequently exposed, as the reader, to Joe’s explanations of the unexplainable through scientific chaos: cosmology, formation of the Universe, quantum electrodynamics, general theory of relativity, light curvature, dinosaurs, black holes and neuroscience. These lengthy scientific passages are injected sporadically throughout the novel as part of the wider storyline of Joe’s battle with his stalker, Jed who becomes infatuated with him after they both witness a deadly balloon accident. Jed is religiously obsessed with Joe and claims God sent Joe into his life through an act of fate so they could love each other. This creates another ideological dispute in the novel – the widely argued theme of science versus religion.

As a writer by occupation, “Joe” our narrator, symbolises the crossover point between science and emotion. A writer is inherently someone who can attempt to embody and explain life and human feelings through words. But as a scientist also, Joe struggles with his occupation. His wife Clarissa is an English lecturer on poet John Keats who Joe regards as “a genius no doubt, but an obscurantist too who had thought science was robbing the world of wonder when the opposite was the case.” Writers, especially those like John Keats and his romantic contemporaries, write with the goal of shining greater light on understanding human nature; regarding intuition over reason. “Joe” attempts to challenge this reading of the world by explaining emotional human experiences by way of scientific reason. He writes “We do not arrive in this world as blank sheets, or as all-purpose learning devices. Nor are we the ‘products’ of our environment.” “We evolved like every other creature on earth”. He uses Darwin’s theory of evolution to explain processes we see to be governed by human emotion. Evolution is the theory that every living species on this earth has evolved from a few very simple life forms. These few simple life forms have changed and “adapted” over millions of years to form different species and classes of living things through natural selection. Mutations in genes cause the changes in different organisms. Some mutations are favourable meaning these organisms have better chance of survival, finding food and avoiding predation and therefore live on to reproduce. And some mutations are unfavourable meaning the organisms cannot survive the competition and die out. McEwan writes “we come into this world with limitations and capacities, all of them genetically prescribed.” He uses this to explain why emotional responses are the same in us all “The way we wear our emotions on our faces is pretty much the same in all cultures.” “[The infant smile] appears in Kung San babies of the Kalahari at the same time as it does in American children of Manhattan’s Upper West Side” and that although we may wish to believe as humans that these are emotional responses triggered by something of greater significance than chemical and genetic material built inside us, they are far less “romanticized” in the scientific meaning which we are led to believe.

Interestingly, Darwin and Keats were writing around the same time in the 1800s. Darwin’s work caused outrage in the religious outlook of the world at the time and Keats was writing in the romantic era, which took its inspiration from the animal and impulsive nature of humanity.  As centuries have passed and we have learned more and more about science, we have moved away from being a global community governed by the teachings of religion and instead we rely increasingly on scientific principles to explain the unexplainable. For example, where the origins of the Earth were once biblically believed to have been a good six day’s work for god, instead now, as “Joe” explains in Enduring Love, it has become more widely accepted that it started with the big bang. “Helium, that elemental gas forged from hydrogen in the nuclear furnace of the stars, first step along the way in the generation of multiplicity and variety of matter in the universe, including ourselves and all our thoughts.”

Each character in the “love triangle”, Joe, Jed Parry (the stalker) and Clarissa (Joe’s wife) have different views on love, the emotion that sparks the majority of conflict in the novel and each I found equally as frustrating. Joe takes a logical approach the emotion, which often leaves him too “cold” and “detached” to understand it. Jed tries to explain it through religious obsession, but

McEwan attempts to convey in Enduring Love the conflict between the logical, and often practical way, of explaining the unexplainable through science versus the more romanticized and intuitive way of explaining the unexplainable through religion, moral code, art or literature (like Keats). Clarissa argues that in Joe’s logical outlook on life  “everything was being stripped down…and in the process some larger meaning was lost.” And although science is important in forwarding our progress on earth and helping us understand our physical selves, art and literature help us learn what it is to be human emotionally and passionately, which is what makes us unique and appreciable beings – even if there are chemical explanations for these feelings.

The Color Purple

English Literature AS A level Wider Reading

The Color Purple - Alice Walker (1982) Analysis

Struggle for Identity in Modern Literature Wider Reading

The story is told through a series of letters from Celie to God, from Celie to her sister Nettie and from Nettie to Celie. They are written in a stream of consciousness - though Celie is writing  to us - not using punctuation or speech marks and spelling words in accented tones causing her voice to come alive as we read. Her simple, southern drawl aids the reader's intimate relationship with the main character "He was pulling on her arm. She say It too soon Fonso, I ain't well..". This style of writing allows us to delve into the mind of Celie - how she relates to her world - a changing world of unfair customs, where males and whites are seen as superior. Celie is an uneducated black woman living in changing 1930s America - a sufferer of rape and abuse, we follow her on her journey of finding true happiness. 


Published in 1982, it's obvious that Walker laced a modern message through the story, set between the wars, relevant as much to the time of writing as to today. 

Walker herself is a black woman who grew up in a poor family in the state of Georgia in the South - a destination of extreme racial prejudice in the 1930s. Her family lived in the grasp of the Jim Crow Laws, and despite the view at the time that Black children didn't need an education and should be put to work in the fields, Walker's parents made sure that she attended school, an issue Walker explores in the novel "'sides I want her get more schoolin'". 

Walker was heavily involved in the civil rights movement which accounts for the complexities of racial identity in the novel. "Miss Millie finger the children some more, finally look at Sofia and the prizefighter. She look at the prizefighter car. She look at Sofia wristwatch. She say to Sofia, All your children so clean, she say, would you like to work for me, be my maid? Sofia say, Hell no." "He slap her." But this is contrasted against the odd moments in the text where racism appears to be almost a formality - "Well, say Sofia, I was so use to sitting up there next to her teaching her how to drive, that I just naturally clammed into the front seat. She stood outside on her side the car clearing her throat. Finally she say, Sofia, with a little laugh, This is the South. Yes ma'am, I say."

The 80s saw the major publicity of the African crisis. The novel follows Celie's sister Nettie as she works as a Missionary with a tiny tribe in Africa whose very existence is threatened by the impending doom of the capitalist white man's expansionist movement.
Religion is a major theme throughout the novel. Celie questions her loyalty to God and her views on what God actually is: 
 "Well, us talk and talk about God, but I’m still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head." " I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?)"

"What God do for me? I ast." "he give me a lynched daddy, a crazy mama, a lowdown dog of a step pa and a sister I probably won't ever see again"

Shug (a beautiful singer of blues that Celie seeks comfort in) believes she has the wrong view of God "Nettie say somewhere in the bible it say Jesus’ hair was like lamb’s wool, I say. Well, say Shug, if he came to any of these churches we talking bout he’d have to have it conked before anybody paid him any attention. The last thing niggers want to think about they God is that his hair kinky." 
Shug recognises that the White man's view of who God is is just another way for them to suppress the coloured. This is juxtaposed against Nettie's experience of African religion where the tribe uses its ancient religious traditions of sacrificial scarring young pubescent girls and female circumcision to display opposition to the white man's influence. In doing this Walker exposes how religion can sometimes be used as a weapon or method of control which is a stark contrast to Celie's take on "religion" in admiration of delicate beauty in nature "I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it". This is a theme similarly mirrored in "The Handmaid's Tale" where religion is used as a tool fundamental to control.  
Walker recognises the need for religion to be personal and not something that becomes "cult-ish" and therefore distorted - as embodied in the African tribe and the White people's church. "...have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show." " The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it"