Set texts at school

[MillyR]

Sorry that this is a bit of a thread about a thread, but in education there is a thread discussing Of Mice and Men still being a set text at GCSE. Nobody has mentioned in that thread that it is a book about a man killing a woman. As Steinbeck wrote:

She is 'not a person, she's a symbol. She has no function, except to be a foil ? and a danger to Lennie.'

This is in addition to 'Atonement' and "To Kill A Mocking Bird' both being set texts. In both of these a woman makes false accusations about who is the rapist. So in all three books a woman is harmed but we are pushed towards sympathising with a male character.

I am just wondering if this has a bit of an impact. When I was at school we did 'The Color Purple' and it had a major impact on me. I know these books must be looked at critically in schools, but criticising the books doesn't really cancel out the impact of the stories. Of Mice and Men is particularly sentimental and melodramatic so designed to move the reader to care about the killer.

Did anybody study these books at school, or teach them?

'amd LRD - you think you Shouldn't critically analyse a text because as a feminist you don't agree with it's themes? Even though it is situated in a certain time and expresses those values? Even though it is a work of great literature?
Of course you can examine it from a feminist perspective?'

I don't know how I gave that impression, because that's not what I think at all! What I'm saying is, a feminist reading of these texts mentioned in the OP - especially if they're all read together (which I think is the big problem), will show students very clearly how misogynistic literature can be. It's a pity to give only that impression.

If you notice, I mentioned studying Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Webster, and enjoying doing so. Those are all male authors and all have written plenty that you could dislike, as a woman reader or a student of male/female relations. But they are great texts about women and shape our literary heritage. What makes you think I don't recognize that?

The thing is, there are also plenty of great texts written by and about women that get missed out on in schools, and that's a shame.

Chinua Achebe thought so!

Norman, I agree with you - I do think kids should be challenged to notice this stuff and think critically, and that things like Heart of darkness and so on should be read.

I would just also say I think it's probably very difficult to get them thinking about that stuff critically, and I think quite often that's not what ends up happening. Certainly not at GSCE.

Well the set texts my son has done are: Of Mice and Men, Macbeth, A Christmas Carol, and An Inspector Calls. I think with those texts there is a lot of breadth about themes, and some strong women.
I cannot see my son getting through The Color Purple etc. But then he is a male reluctant reader.
Maybe "Cannery Row" would be a good alternative, I can still picture the wife who hung curtains while living in a drainage pipe.

Actually getting someone to say "She deserved it" of Curly's wife would be a great point to bring out and challenge pupils attitudes.

Yes, I think that is important too, LRD. Lots of male writers are not sexist and pupils shouldn't be given a biased impression that there is an overwhelming amount of sexist writing.

French children get Georges Perec's 'Things' as a set text, and he writes really wonderful characterisation of men and women.

Lots of male writers are sexist ... so are lots of female writers. Much of 'great literature' was written in very different times and it's fair to recognize that.

But there is a very influential myth that only men really write 'great literature', and that you have to look very hard to find women doing it at all .. so texts by women must, automatically, be second rate. This is to ignore the fact that several women writers (eg. George Eliot, the Brontes) first published under male names and were therefore judged by their societies on exactly the same criteria as men. There are a lot of brilliant women writers out there.

Well the whole notion of 'great literature' and a 'canon' is up for debate anyway!

sorry LRD it was your 6.30am post - perhaps I misunderstood.

In the end I suppose it's up to the school. Perhapsthey should have a quota of 'sexist' texts, some 'racist' ones.

I think you might be vastly overestimating the number of texts studied at GCSE if you think it is possible to introduce quotas!

Apology accepted - it happens, don't worry!

Personally I don't think quotas make sense. Few texts are so simple, and if they were genuinely purely 'sexist' or 'racist' texts (none mentioned on this thread are, IMO), no-one in their right mind would study them.

From the Irish Leaving Cert in the early 80s I remember Bacon's 'Of Youth and Age' and other deadly prose, 'The Portrait of a Lady', 'Coriolanus', lots of Yeats, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Gerald Manley Hopkins. I'm sure there was a lot more but a good deal of water has gone under the bridge since then.

One current Leaving cert novel is 'Amongst Women' which could lend itself to much feminist leaning discussion.

I teach both 'Of Mice and Men' and 'To Kill a Mockingbird' - the first one is perfect for lower ability as it is a short book! [bursts bubble about how texts are chosen]

'To Kill a Mockingbird' has a female narrator who struggles to understand why some people don't want her to be educated or have an opinion, and using a child as a narrator points out how very plain and simple the effects of snobbishness, racism and sexism are, when the adults make things seem more complicated than they should be.

FWIW, I had a student write an A* grade essay on the theme of loneliness using Curley's wife and her treatment at the hands of the author, as well as the charaters, to depict a woman's place in the historical context

Feminist teacher, enlightened students. Should be one of the QTS standards

I think the fact Steinbeck writes Lenny and makes you sympathize with him far more than with Curly's wife is quite scary, in retrospect, but I didn't realize it when I was 13 or so.

The reason that Steinbeck makes you sympathise with Lenny is because he was writing about a real person who he worked with who killed someone. The person that was actually killed was male, so Curley's wife isn't a real person, merely a plot device.

"I was a bindlestiff myself for quite a spell. I worked in the same country that the story is laid in. The characters are composites to a certain extent. Lennie was a real person. He's in an insane asylum in California right now. I worked alongside him for many weeks. He didn't kill a girl. He killed a ranch foreman. Got sore because the boss had fired his pal and stuck a pitchfork right through his stomach. I hate to tell you how many times I saw him do it. We couldn't stop him until it was too late." (Steinbeck, 1937)

I keep reading the thread title as "Sex Texts at School"

There are a lot of concerns educationally about boys' literacy levels and how little they read compared to girls. To make English accessible to them books are chosen which are thought to appeal to boys particularly, so that they don't get put off.

Girls, of course, are expected to like it or lump it.

I read To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men at school pre-GCSE. I hated both, but think that might be my general hatred of "Class Readers" that put me off. I don't even remember TKAM being about rape - wonder if we were just too young for the teacher to emphasise that to the class (we'd have been 13ish), and glossing over/leaving out chunks would certainly explain why the book came over as clunky and imopssible to "get into". We only had the books out in class, so it'd have been easy enough to do.

Other books ruined by school were Carrie's war, Secret Garden, Romeo & Juliet (although not my fave Shakespeare anyway, but repeated class-reading of it in an all girls' class without being allowed to ask why she wouldn't just elope with him in the first place ). For GCSE we also had "I'm The King Of The Castle"; a horrid little book about bullying, which I never quite forgave for the crime of not being Great Expectations which the other group were doing

Me too aye

I'm really disappointed to hear that the set texts haven't moved on since I was at school 20 years ago :(

NG, thanks for writing that; it is exactly what I was trying to get at. What kind of person could write, or read about, a female character being murdered and think that was such a triviality that they could reduce her to a plot device rather than a person? That is what really disturbs me about the book,but it seems implicit in the book that this is what the reader is meant to do.

I remember having a discussion at school about why she was called 'Curley's wife', and not given her own name. Because she wasn't important, but the fact that she was Curley's wife was important. It is because she was Curley's wife that her death caused a problem for Lennie. She had no station of her own.

As an English teacher, the lack of positive female role models in set texts (Exhibit A, Lady Macbeth) does concern me.

But it is totally possible to use this as a teaching point. The treatment of Curley's wife, and the fact that she is never given a name, ENRAGES a lot of teenage girls, and that can only be a good thing!

Oh and some of the poetry on the new syllabus is a feminist's dream. 'A Woman to her Lover' by Christina Walsh(e) says it all.

Also, I've asked this question on the other thread, but what do we think about one of the new set texts being 'About a Boy' by Nick Hornby? I'm a bit conflicted myself...

I totally agree with NormanTebbit on this one.

Of course I think it's great to have Toni Morrison books as A level set texts, not because I see them as 'women's writing' (I hate that concept), but because they're excellent literature, regardless of genre. I actually think that to include them in the syllabus with the primary or perceived intention of redressing a balance actually undermines their literary value by suggesting that they are there because of a political agenda, IYSWIM.

I know that a good teacher can use any text in an intelligent, humanistic, egalitarian (OK, feminist), and as Norm has already said... And I think this is a far more intelligent approach (and credits students with more intelligence) than does well intentioned efforts to create a 'fair' syllabus.

I think girls getting to read about the lives of women is really important. Some intellectual argument about literary merit and politics is rather secondary to that. I don't feel as if the existence of female pupils is purely to serve as some sort of social commentary or teaching point.

Pupils read maybe 4 modern novels for GCSE, and only answer an exam question on one. Who would genuinely be concerned that there are so few decent books written by women that a school would struggle to find one or two with even literary merit to set for GCSE? They already exist on the GCSE set text lists; it is just a matter of schools choosing to teach them.

Girls getting to read about the lives of women is important, but 72.5% of girls and only 58.7% of boys gained a C or above in English this year. Given this discrepancy, I doubt many English departments are going to sit down, look at the figures, then select feminist literature over war poetry (or whatever).

I think girls getting to read about the lives of women is really important.

I agree, but why not in history classes?

I really don't think that the idea that there aren't enough texts by women still prevails at all.

I do think you're on slightly dodgy ground when you start to conflate the study of literature with social history, at schools level, though.