An inspector calls - does the suicide victim lack agency with her relationships with Eric and Gerald?

But also a ridiculous option for a modern text. You’re right of course. But most departments are no longer given the choice. Parents prefer the option that there are the most resources for. We have a generation of teachers now who were probably taught it themselves and are now repeating it. It’s beyond time that we went back to the regular text rotations.

I don’t teach it. Of the 5 classes in my school, 2 do choose it. We are very unusual in giving staff a free choice.

Schools don't need to choose it. Our school studied Animal Farm instead. - same exam board.

The men are tragic too in the Lit GCSE spec. Macbeth effectively gets Macduff to kill him, Romeo (well, that’s obvious), Jekyll is destroyed by himself, Eric sinks into destructive alcoholism from the very beginning of the play (seriously, he’s the one genuinely feeling guilt). The issue around sexism within the spec is the lack of women writers when the most popular board can find space for two novels by Dickens!
That board were also the last to work with Penguin on the Lit in Colour programme and to ‘improve diversity’ simply replaced three of the most ‘diverse’ texts with others.

There are serious issues with the texts chosen, but Priestley realistically representing the world of upper and working class women at the time is not the issue.

The bleach is meant to be symbolic

There are options with stronger women (although Lady Macbeth is fab - women can be evil too you know).
Just as I don’t choose texts because they’re boy friendly there’s no such thing as girl friendly either (not all girls identify with Jane Austen characters).
The consumption of bleach instead of hanging is in keeping with methods chosen based on sex (where data exists). There’s an interesting sociological study by Durkheim.
The main issue is nothing will change until the exam boards are forced to. And schools are now scared of change. We used to rotate texts regularly that hasn’t happened in a long time. There are English departments who are unaware of this as they all qualified after. And in trusts where departments can’t choose what they teach there’s already been a major deskilling. I’ve been raising this as an issue for at least 5 years!

Beloved was one of my A level Eng Lit texts, and has a very strong female lead, who overcomes extreme adversity - but is so bleak and dark that AIC is light-hearted social commentary by comparison.

I thought for a minute you meant Reform the political party 🙈 end of term brain clearly still in motion!

I’m waiting to hear the results of the curriculum review at the end of the year. If the timetable for reform makes it worthwhile I will switch to Leave Taking. It’s a great play.

Part of the learning is to look at the play through the lens of the time that it was written. The choices women had available to them:

no benefits system
No nhs
no ability to take out a mortgage, open a bank balance etc
no birth control/abortion options etc etc

what choices might a young girl make against that backdrop?

Yeah that's fair @BlueEyedBogWitch but for example the Penguin Lit in Colour has supported schools by providing free texts for the entire cohort. I think sometimes cost is a convenient excuse too.

I think ‘too skint’ comes into it, too.

Leave Taking is a decent little addition to the texts, but most schools are frightened/too lazy/complacent to change texts.

@BlueEyedBogWitch - my favourite Shakespeare is Macbeth BUT after doing lots of student voice where the relentlessness cropped up I’ve changed my texts (we have free choice). I do Much Ado About Nothing (still lots of meaty discussions but also a lot of humour), A Taste of Honey (still dark, but again some humour and takes my middle class southern students out of their comfort zone), the new Worlds and Lives anthology (which has small moments of joy) and then Frankenstein. The nineteenth century choices are all pretty dark to be honest.

The texts haven’t changed in ages. They need to. I
They used to rotate regularly.

For clarity, I love Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, but there’s a time and a place, and served up along side the others…they’re a lot.

Hear hear!

I’ve said time and again that the GCSE texts are inappropriate, especially at a time when young people’s mental health is at an all-time low.

R+J - suicide/murder
Macbeth - suicide/murder
Inspector - suicide
Power and Conflict poetry - war, ptsd, murder.

It’s an endless diet of misery!

This really isn’t the case. Women in pre-mid 20th Century Literature aren’t meek and mild victims accepting their fate by any stretch of the imagination.
Inspector Calls isn’t a great play. It’s a clear play. It’s a good choice therefore for a non-tiered GCSE exam as it’s accessible at all levels. Interestingly, it wasn’t a box office success in the UK when it was first performed (the moralising was a little much for a country that had just elected Clement Atlee). It has total market dominance now courtesy of our exam system. And you can’t get performance rights for even an amateur performance due to the Stephen Daldry production (not sure Priestley would agree with that tbh). It’s going nowhere until someone higher says so (like Gove getting rid of Of Mice and Men at GCSE).
Regardless, there’s a lot of ‘dark’ texts on the GCSE specification. Too many references to suicide and not enough joy.

Exactly. There’s a world of difference between a period TV drama made today with our 21stC sensibilities, and in the case of Bridgerton and Downton primarily to entertain, versus a drama that seems period to us but was contemporary to its time and had a social purpose as well as being a piece of theatre. Period dramas get reimagined for the audiences in each era in various ways, but the original play texts and novels shouldn’t change to make the women more kickass or Humbert less pervy. We’ve gotta get past the basic studio exec note of needing characters to be likeable and engage in the complexity, and when the work is really great it can transcend eras and take on all manner of settings (Shakespeare, Chekhov etc) because they key into a humanity that always feels relevant.

Well yes, I don't think anyone, even GCSE students thinks Bridgerton (or Downton Abbey, or even some of the modern adaptations of classic novels like Jane Austen) are realistic historical depictions, do they? The writers and producers of those shows primarily want their characters to be likeable and relatable to a modern audience and their shows to be fun and light-hearted to watch, so of course they do things like showing young Regency women to be empowered and making their own choices around sexual partners (when realistically these choices would be extremely limited and parentally controlled, but that would make a frothy show about sex and romance with frocks and characters less fun) or aristocrats having interesting friendships with their servants based on equality of thought and frank exchange of views (when that would be extremely unlikely in the 1920s but that would make the programme much more overtly political and stiff). It doesn't mean you can't have fun analyzing these shows or have them provoke interesting discussions but in terms of passing GCSE exams the kids need to understand they can't simply apply modern day British moral standards to make value judgements about characters in texts written in the past and/or another culture. (a) Because the examiners want to see that they understand the book or play's context and that they've learnt something about that time period and how it differs from today and (b) simply saying Penelope in Bridgerton is a good character because she's a strong empowered woman or Sheila is a bad character because she doesn't stand up to the men doing bad things to her isn't proper literary analysis. Its not about whether you personally like the character or not, or relate to them or not, it's about probing and understand what the author was trying to depict and say through that character and the techniques s/he uses to do so, and how successful they are...

For instance have you read Lolita? Not that it would ever be used for GCSE or even A Level (and I'm not saying give it to your teenager to read!) but you wouldn't get very many marks in a literature exam character analysis question for just saying Humbert (the main character) is a bad man because he's a paedophile, even though it's pretty universally agreed paedophilia is very very wrong. You wouldn't even get that many marks for adding in interesting historical context and discussion of differing attitudes to children and paedophilia or even censorship and moral outrage in the early-mid 20th century to today. You'd need to dig into what the author was trying to do with the character and why and how he's depicted as he is to answer the question. Does that make sense?

I went to see this with DS, I swear that most the people there were GCSE students with their families.

I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but avoided it during my school education luckily.