To really dislike An Inspector Calls?

[SheilaSybilCroft]

It’s been a GCSE text since the 1990s (and probably before.)

I really don’t like it. I hate the big fuss that is made out of eva smith being ‘pretty’ - as if it would be somehow acceptable to hound her out of jobs if she was plain and old!

She did lie to Mrs B: how was she supposed to know one story was true while another was a lie? And while attitudes to unmarried mothers have changed it’s ridiculous to pretend that someone in Eva’s position would have been met with sympathy and kindness if she’d just met a nicer sort of woman.

I know it’s an attack on the upper classes of the Edwardian period and the characters are representative rather than literal but the preachy tone and high handed sort of manner taken by the inspector is annoying.

And the film version the BBC did about ten years ago presents a saint like Eva and deviates from the text just enough to confuse students!

Or is it just me?

The national curriculum has ruined literary studies, not least the joy and passion of reading, for generations of students since its introduction in 1988.

There are a lot more interesting contemporary dramas I can think of to teach than J B Priestley. As to prose, dystopia is an amazingly rich, diverse genre that reaches much further than 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale, and can be taught in topical and interesting ways which are actually relevant to the world young people live in now. And rather than a constant regurgitation of the war poets, the Beat poets, variations on border crossings or other subversive or counter cultural material usually goes down a storm with students.

The fact that it's the same old stale texts on the curriculum nearly forty years later tells me something has badly stalled somewhere. And as a PP has pointed out, there was Gove: worst education secretary in living memory.

Our arts and humanities are dying by the wayside. IMO, there needs to be heavy investment in a drive to promote reading and literature written in English as a wonderful window into a rich literary heritage (that isn't necessarily dominated by dead white men). I'm an academic and currently working on a strategy to do this, but it's an enormous undertaking that no one project can do alone, and UKRI funding is becoming more difficult to achieve by the year.

Modernism is a huge passion of mine, and even I'm not fond of D H Lawrence. It's bludgeoning literature to death and putting kids off studying a worthy discipline at university. Wish I knew how to stop the rot.

Interesting hearing people talking about the texts all being written by white men. I would say that the texts I studied were 50/ 50 nrn women or possibly women edging it. Though I'd have to try and list them all.

I think you've rather missed the point tbh

Love a passive aggressive smiley.

He says it in response to Sheila’s question - pointing out that she wasn’t pretty any more - as a way of emphasising her objectification and vulnerability. Her youth and attractiveness were why she was exploited by Eric and Gerald.
He is highlighting that she is reduced to “pretty”.

Eva Smith is not even necessarily one person

But nearly all of her "tragedies" would not happen, or not in the same way, had she been "ugly"

She's treated as an object by the men because she's pretty. She enrages Sheila's jealousy because she's pretty. Because she's poor and pretty then Mrs Birling makes judgements.

It wasn’t meant passive aggressively but you’ve been pretty determined to be rude and unpleasant on what should be a fairly nice thread. It was an attempt to keep things polite.

Is this the one where the set more or less disintegrated (obviously symbolic) around the characters during the course of the play?

Ok. If you’re finding me rude/unpleasant, I’ll withdraw.

Enjoy your thread and the bang holiday!

Bank 😂

I’m not the thread police. Post where you want !

My DS is doing it for GCSE and I keep meaning to watch the drama with him so he can talk to me about it. He likes it a lot. I have never read it. This thread suggests I should avoid the BBC production. Darn.

I don’t like it but I loathe and despise Of Mice and Men.

Can’t really explain why - it’s just a really visceral and violent feeling towards it.

Yes! It all crumpled and fell apart like a dolls house. Then got put back together. Coup de theatre-tastic!

I saw the Stephen Daldry production. with the set that set that destroys itself,a couple of weeks ago with DS (GCSE student). I did it for O level in 1987! (In fact, all bar one of the texts that I did are the same as DS'. The difference is we did Great Expectations, DD is doing A Christmas Carol).

It's a blunt tool as social commentary, but I think it works well for 14-16 year olds who generally have a very naive, black & white view of the world.

I saw more people around me who talk the talk, and might even "walk the walk" professionally and/or publicly. But actually, in their personal lives and where it directly affects them, their "values" go out of the window..

Agree,
There is an awful lot of virtue signalling out there

For a dead white male Priestley does a great job of showing how appallingly men treat women, and how being pretty can actually make that worse. When Sheila talks about how Alderman Megartty treats young women, who are lucky to leave his office with a torn blouse, there are shades of Me Too, and that wasn't lost on my recent classes. Mr Birling even says how clothes are more important to women than men and link to their self-worth, then we see the disastrous impact of that on Sheila's behaviour.

I can't think how you get the idea that Priestley's point is that it wouldn't have been as bad if Eva was less attractive. It's just not there.

I enjoy teaching it. It's not subtle, no, but it's accessible, does enable more able kids to flex their muscles and also challenges some preconceptions in a way that remains relevant today.

And if you want me to learn new texts to teach you are going to have to give me time to do that. At the moment, behaviour and pastoral issues are taking up all my time and someone telling me I had to stop teaching AIC because it's a 'shame ' they also did it in 1978 would just about send me over the edge.

Eva’s attractiveness is important in her involvement with Sheila, Gerald and Eric and then, through her pregnancy, with Mrs Birling. Gerald and Eric as rich young men about town would be in a position to exploit a very attractive lower class woman.

The Stephen Daldry version is touring at the moment, I’m taking my teenager to see it tonight as it’s a set text for them for GCSEs. A lot of their class have seen it already, I’m hoping it helps with the understanding of the text.

The ‘pretty’ reference to Eva is really important. It makes her vulnerable because she is noticed - by Mr Birling, by Sheila (who gets her sacked in a moment of jealousy), by Gerald and Eric who exploit her, by Alderman Meggarty, who tries to exploit her. Sheila is also described as ‘pretty’ - for a girl of her class, it was an advantage; for a girl of Eva’s class, it was the opposite.

@Badknitter - fyi there's no interval. It's 1 hr 50 min. Just in case you need to know. I would have been going tonight, but I find the seats in that theatre unbearable close! We went elsewhere a couple of weeks ago.

I love this play, and have seen about every version made, each one brings something different. I'm quite old now, didn't know it was studied in schools.
of course it's dated, but I just take that in the spirit of all old stories, such as Jeeves and Wooster, Agatha Christie etc.
I think the fact that she was pretty rather overlooks the fact that she had spirit, in organising the strike, with other chances she might have gone far.
it resonates how when the father phones the hospital to see if there is a female suicide, and is told there isn't, he is quite ready to go back to his old ways. Just how we are continually told 'lessons must be learned', and they never are. Things never change.
it would interesting to see a modern version of it to suit these times we are living in now.

Sheila thinks that life is easy for a girl if you are pretty, because that’s her experience as an upper class young woman. She doesn’t understand that for working class girls like Eva, it’s dangerous to be pretty. Sheila would not have reacted the way she does in Millard’s if Eva had been plain - she says this herself.

Milward’s, sorry

Ooh good to know thank you! I'm gonna take my kids to it at Wimbledon. Sorry OP, your anti-AIC thread has stoked excitement so it's being inflicted on more unsuspecting DC!

Ex-teacher here, until last summer. I always enjoyed teaching it and never taught a class that didn’t love it.