Paper One: Love Through The Ages

Poetry

Whoso List
 Hebron
o “deeply personal” – Petrachan sonnet
o “hopeless love”
o “despair, wild and dangerous feelings”
 Ruben
o Topazes/diamonds
o Lack of chastity
o Invitation

• W. S. MERWIN: I think this is probably the greatest sonnet Wyatt wrote, and I think it’s one
of the greatest sonnets in English. I’ve known it for so many years, but it always startles me
with the real strength of passion in it—and irony and freshness of language and the mixture
of sensual feeling and bitterness that runs through the best of Wyatt. Take that first line—
the whole courtly feeling about the opposite sex, which angers, quite rightly, the feminists—
the pursuit of women becomes a kind of predacious pursuit: if hunting is what you want to
do, I know a deer who’ll keep you busy. The speculation is that it’s about Anne Boleyn, and it
may well be; it’s certainly about a very elusive and uncatchable person. […]
• It’s a translation of a sonnet from Petrarch—a lovely, dreamy, medieval, allegorical poem in
which someone sees a white deer and decides to leave what he’s doing, his whole daily life,
to follow the white deer, which eludes him. It’s a dream, and then it’s gone. It is not,
however, a dream that Wyatt is talking about; it’s something very much wide awake.
• What’s interesting is that the Petrarch sonnet does not have the noli me tangere  part in it. In
Petrarch’s poem, at the end, as the dream vanishes, it says “it is my Caesar’s will to set me
free.” The deer in Wyatt’s poem has a thing around her neck that says “Noli me tangere”—
touch me not, for Caesar’s I am. “I belong to Caesar,” not “Caesar set me free.”

Sonnet 116
 Hebron
o “Solicitor defining a term in a contract”
o “Legal flavour”

Absent from Thee

 Thormahlen
o “Only death can stop him straying”
o “errant sinner and god”

The Scrutiny
 Rachel Stanley
o “society was very much patriarchal”
o “cocky”

Ae Fond Kiss
 Melissa March
o Normal human experience – Romantic ideas
o Not common ballad metre
Cynara
 Rumens
o “pure unfeigned emotions” – archaic language
 Burdett
o Hedonism
o Perversity and paradox
o Transgressive sexuality
o Artificiality

La Belle Dame

• Femininity can be as powerful as masculinity and women can be as cruel as men.

• Keats transfers the agency of sexual desire from the male to the female and presents it as a
supernatural power that makes the male the victim and absolve him of responsibility for his
own feelings.

Gatsby

 Fitzgerald
o “The Crack Up”
o “greatest, gaudiest spree in history”
 Tanner
o Nick requires uniformity and cleanliness
o Nick and Gatsby seem to become the same person at times – “Nick Gatsby”
 Matthew J. Bruccoli: ‘Gatsby becomes an archetypal figure who betrays and is betrayed by
the promises of America. The reverberations of the fable still sound.’
 We are accustomed to think of the The Great Gatsby as a story of mobility and change, but it
is also a story of disguise, that is to say, of appearing to change while remaining the same. –
old money vs new money is the same as the aristocracy in the UK – link to context
 The Great Gatsby offers some of the severest and closest criticism of the American dream
that our literature affords. – AO4 potential
 Kathryn Schulz: ‘I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally
complacent’ – maybe link to the idea of why Gatsby is not the narrator – would this have
exacerbated this view?
 Nicholas Tredell: ‘His is a vitality which they lack – the inner fire which comes from living
with an incorruptible dream’ – is it a vitality? Or delusion
 Bryant Magnum: ‘he will never be accepted into the world of old money that Daisy could
never leave’

• ‘As the novel progresses and Fitzgerald deconstructs Gatsby’s self-presentation, Gatsby
reveals himself to be an innocent, hopeful young man who stakes everything on his dreams,
not realising that his dreams are unworthy of him. Gatsby invests Daisy with an idealistic
perfection that she cannot possibly attain in reality and pursues her with a passionate zeal
that blinds him to her limitations. His dream of her disintegrates, revealing the corruption
that wealth causes and the unworthiness of the goal, much in the way Fitzgerald sees the
American Dream crumbling in the 1920s, as America’s powerful optimism, vitality and
individualism become subordinated to the amoral pursuit of wealth.’
 • Judith Fetterley: ‘the weight that Gatsby's dream brings to bear on Daisy is unbearable’ –
Daisy focus: do not treat her as a one dimension character – recognise she is a victim to in
this (or can be considered so)

• Marius Bewley: ‘Gatsby's guilt was his failure to understand that Daisy was immersed in the
destructive American world as was Tom’

• Robert Ornstein: ‘his fable of East and west is little concerned with twentieth century
materialism and moral anarchy, for its theme is the unending quest for the romantic dream,
which is forever betrayed in fact and yet redeemed in men’s minds’

• Giles Gunn: Nick ‘himself had been partially seduced by Gatsby’s dream’

• Sarah Beede Fryer: 'she does feel, she has suffered, and her desire for her daughter to be a
'fool' is actually a desire to shelter her from experiencing the pain that Daisy herself has
known'

Othello

A C Bradley

 “the most terrible” of Shakespeare’s tragedies

 “such jealously of Othello’s converts human nature into chaos”
 “The skill of Iago was extraordinary, but so was his good fortune”
 “by far the most romantic hero among Shakespeare’s tragedies”
 “Othello is the greatest poet of them all”
 “quite unlike the essentially jealous man” – “wreck of his faith and love”
 “ill-fated persistence” – Desdemona in relation to Cassio
 “evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery” – Iago
 “One must constantly remember not to believe a syllable that Iago utters on any subject,
including himself”
 “the tragedy of Othello is in a sense his tragedy too” argues Iago had previously kept himself
together
 “wholly outside the world of morality” – Iago

Coleridge

 “motiveless malignity”
 “passionless” – Iago
 Cassio’s love of Desdemona described as “religious love”
 “Othello had no life but in Desdemona”
 “his angel”

Paper 2: Texts in Shared Contexts

Spies
  John Lanchester – “difference between what we really know and what we are prepared to
admit”
 Robert Nye – “Stephen comes to understand the truth behind the mysteries of his world by
beginning to understand something about the difference between men and women
 Robert Allen Papinchak – “deciphering of the surreptitious codes of childhood”
 Peter Bradshaw – “It is about memory and imagination” , “how lonely, scared and helpless
being a child feels”
 The Guardian – “more personal than his previous novels” – Frayn’s experience of war
 Adam Mars-Jones – “the sheer foreignness of childhood”
 Jennifer Shuessler – “questions of loyalty, guilt and complicity”
 Paul Bailey – “everyday torment and confusions”
 Caroline Moore – “black tragi-comedy and tragedy”

Plath

 Ellien M Aird – “ brutal insistence on the pain” – Lady Lazarus, Daddy

 Jon Rosenblatt – “The three-line stanza of "Lady Lazarus" and such poems as "Ariel," "Fever
103°," "Mary's Song," and "Nick and the Candlestick" refer us inevitably to the terza rima of
the Italian tradition and to the terza rima experiments of Plath's earlier work. But the poems
employ this stanza only as a general framework for a variable-beat line and variable rhyming
patterns.”
 Paul Breslin – “it seeks an illicit titillation, if not from the speaker's naked body, then from
her naked psyche” – crowd in Lady Lazarus
 Kathleen Lant – “The naked force in "A Birthday Present" is ultimately masculine”, links foam
and glitter in Ariel to female orgasm,
 Christina Britzolakis – “Plath's 'confessional' tropes are often seen in terms of a Romantic
parable of victimization”
 Robert Pinsky – “mysterious bond of loving wonder” – Nick and the Candlestick

A Streetcar Named Desire

 Arthur Miller:
o “(Williams) pushed language and character to the front of the stage as never before”
o “language flowing from the soul”
o (about Brando) – “a sexual terrorist”, “celebratory terror of sex”
o “the individual and his inner life moved to the centre”
 Tennessee Williams
o In “The World I Live In”
 “(writing is) a kind of psychotherapy
 “I have never written about any kind of vice which I can’t observe in myself”
o In stage directions of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”
 “Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play”
 (describing how he thinks a play should be) “a snare for the truth of human
experience”