Eva Smith's body.

Eva's body is a construct. It may or may not exist: the Eva/Daisy that encounters each character could be identical, or not.

We might say it's ironic that although Eva is the subject of mistreatment by the Birlings, the Inspector also appropriates her.

1/
Eva's body is a commodity. It has value because of its youth and physical attractiveness.

Mr B remembers her as "good looking". Her looks help her get the job in Milwards, and they enable her to get "help" from Gerald. They give her a price when she turns to sex work.

2/
Eva's body is all she has of value. She has no other meaningful worth or possessions. Any time her personality shows through -- asking Mr B for a raise, smiling at Sheila, refusing Eric's money, navigating Mrs B's charity -- it ends in disaster.

3/
Eva's body makes her vulnerable, to the predation of Gerald and Eric, the judgement of Sheila and Sybil, and to the paternalistic cruelty of Mr Birling.

4/
Eva's Body is the site of abuse and violence. The treatment she receives from Sheila and Sybil is a response to her physical body as much as to her status. Gerald coerces her into sex by making her materially dependent. Eric rapes her.

5/
Eva's trauma and mistreatment results in suicide, through drinking bleach to symbolically "clean out" the shameful and unwanted baby she carries.

6/
Eva's body, although unseen, also becomes an object of disgust that intrudes into the privileged bubble of the Birlings.

Sheila: "I can't help thinking about this girl – destroying herself so horribly – and I’ve been so happy tonight. Oh, I wish you hadn't told me."

7/
Eva's body becomes a metaphor for others to read and learn from.

The ambiguity over whether Eva/Daisy is one consistent person is linked to the Inspector's "members of one body" speech.

8/
Eva's body is symbolic of the wider body of vulnerable people, and we are all "intertwined" with it. It represents the interconnected web of responsibility and obligation that Birling denies. Her identity is universal.

9/
In the end, we can say Eva's body never really belongs to her. It is the property of others, the object of their prejudice and desire, and eventually it becomes a text constructed by the Inspector.

10/
One gap that frustrates me in the play is the absence of Eva herself. This is a text that speaks FOR the poor without letting them speak. Eva's identity is that she has no identity. There's a lesson to be learnt from that choice, but an absence too.

11/11

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More from @GCSE_Macbeth

10 Sep
I love the opening sentence of A Christmas Carol:

"Marley was dead: to begin with."

Let's dig into it...

1/
Marley was dead to begin with. But obviously Dickens is foreshadowing his return in spectral form. Dickens knew the outlines of good storytelling. You don't say a character is dead unless you're going to have his ghost turn up a few pages later...

2/
So Marley is dead "to begin with" in the sense that Marley's death, and his return as a ghost, marks the "beginning" of the story of A Christmas Carol.

3/
Read 12 tweets
15 Aug
"Pretending" in An Inspector Calls

The words "pretend" and "pretence" appear 12 times in An Inspector Calls.

JBP uses them to reflect the insincerity and moral failure of the Birlings' society.

1/
"Pretend" is first used by Gerald, where it neatly highlights Mr Birling's ham-fisted class pretensions:

Mr B: It's exactly the same port your father gets.
Gerald: [...] The governor prides himself on being a good judge of port. I don't PRETEND to know much about it.

2/
Which is a nice swipe at Mr Birling, who is of course pretending to know something about port as one of the credentials for entry into a higher echelon of the middle class.

3/
Read 14 tweets
23 Jul
A Grade 9 Analysis of the song "Alexander Hamilton" from the musical Hamilton.

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman,

The song opens with a lengthy rhetorical question, suggesting that its subject will be something unintuitive or interesting to find out.

1/
Hamilton's life story will be almost unbelievable.

The phrase "bastard, orphan, son of a whore" uses tricolor to emphasise the severe obstacles that Hamilton faced to success. It introduces themes of class and parentage.

LMM uses humorous juxtaposition with "Scotsman"...

2/
...suggesting that have a Scots father is an impediment or a vice to rank alongside "bastard" and "whore".

3/
Read 34 tweets
21 Jul
I was thinking about how in Macbeth, Shakespeare uses one dramatic scenario over and over again. A big chunk of the play is based around one basic setup.

A character comes onto the stage and reports a death.

1/
There are almost too many examples to list:

- the "bloody man" reporting Macbeth's killing of Macdonwald to Duncan
- Malcolm's report of the Thane of Cawdor's death to Duncan
- Macbeth reports his murder of Duncan to Lady M
- Macduff relays his sight of Duncan's body

2/
- The murderers report back to Macbeth after killing Banquo
- Ross reports to Macduff his family's death
- Lady M sleepwalks on and remembers the murders M committed
- Seyton relays Lady M's death to Macbeth
- Ross informs Siward of his son's death

3/
Read 6 tweets
14 Jul
LONDON by William Blake.

What gives this poem its power is its ambiguity. It has a hallucinatory, nightmarish quality, created through a blurring of physical, psychological and sensory phenomena.

Examples of what I mean:

1/
The "marks of weakness, marks of woe" suggest physical signs, but "weakness" and "woe" can be seen psychologically. Is it physical weakness, mental weakness or both?

2/
"The mind-forg'd manacles I hear"

Again Blake is blurring a psychological aspect with a sensory one: the poet can "hear" others' state of mind. And the message here is ambiguous too: is it internalised weakness that causes imagined enslavement, or external factors?

3/
Read 10 tweets
10 Jul
Some quick, late thoughts about YA books on the curriculum.

@DavidDidau blogged on this today, and it got me thinking. This isn't meant as a point-by-point response or anything -- read this, then read his blog, and decide for yourself.

1/
I think YA books can happily co-exist on the KS3 curriculum with older and more canonical books. That's not to say they're the same, or there are no qualitative differences. I just think our subject can encompass both.

2/
While the concept of the "Canon" is problematic, most teachers would agree that there IS an academic discipline called "English" and at its core is a canon of agreed-upon "great works". And many would say those works should be at the centre of English in schools.

3/
Read 14 tweets

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