A Streetcar Named Desire

A Streetcar Named Desire ~ Tennessee Williams 


Summary - Blanche moves to stay in New Orleans with her younger sister and her husband Stanley after losing the family estate. The longer she stays, the more they discover about her past and the more Blanche moves into insanity.


Struggles

• Sexual
• National - Stanley 
• Individual
• Social

Blanche

• 'Her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light' - the first description of Blanche in the stage directions gives audience the impression of a fragile moth-like creature. The moth reference could also suggest that this character is annoying, by fluttering around and getting in the way.
• Blanche is incredibly vain; 'How do I look?', 'Clothes are my passion' and 'In my youth I excited some admiration.' This manner means the audience is prompted to dislike her character, as she is frustratingly self centred. This could however also show that the character is extremely unconfident.
• This lack of confidence or self-worth for Blanches character is explained to the audience later in the play; after losing her love at a young age, she slept around to try and find herself again, as after the death of her young husband, 'the searchlight that had been turned on the world was turned off again' and she has been unable to find that light again from anyone. 
• This creates some sympathy for Blanches character from the audience, as part of her individual identity was stripped away with the death of her love, and it could be suggested that she doesn't have a strong social identity in that she is 30 years plus and has not found a husband to settle down with, which was the 'proper' thing to do when the play was set in 1940's America and with Blanches upbringing in the South. 

Blanche has large sections of dialouge where her true self is revealed to the other characters and the audience.  These sections are always opened and closed with the sound of the trains passing outside Stella's flat; 'A locomotive is heard approaching. She claps her hands to her ears and crouches over.'

- The loud, impossible to miss sound of the train shows the audience the significance of what she is about to say and the significance of her speech to the outcome of the play.
- The loud noise and glaring light and Blanches reaction also adds to her characters weakness; it is too much for her to physically cope with, due to her fragmented mental state.


TBC

[EXPLORE THE LINKS TO LIGHT AND SOUND FOR BLANCHE AND HOW SHE RESPONDS TO MEN]

Refugee Blues

Refugee Blues ~ W.H Auden


Summary - A poem about the oppression of the Jews in Nazi Germany

Struggles for identity

• National
• Political

'Blues' - suggests a sad song, gives the reader an idea of the type (form?) of poem

National

• 'Once we had a country' - a country is relating to Germany, which the Jews could once consider their home, but Hitler and the Nazi regime has changed everything.
• 'If you've got no passport you're officially dead' - The context of the poem is the Nazi's taken away Jewish Germans passports, so officially they do not have a national identity. The next line however, 'but we are still alive, my dear' shows that just because they do not have an official identity linking them to a country does not mean they no longer exist.

'They weren't German Jews my dear,' shows the reader that in the Nazi's opinion, the Jews were lower than animals in this society, and that there is no place for them in society, leaving the Jews with nothing but their personal identity.

Structure

• 12 stanzas set in lines of three
• First two lines - a statement describing the oppression of the Jews in Nazi Germany ie: 

'Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees,

They had no politicians and sang at their ease;'

• The final line of each stanza ends with a repeated phrase with 'my dear' between:

'They weren't the human race my dear, they weren't the human race'

The short but many stanza's could relate to the fragmented broken lives the Jews are now leading, as they are stripped of their identities.

'my dear' - suggests the poem is a letter to a loved one describing the consequences of the injustice

               - 'he was talking of you and me' on the other hand suggests that the speaker of the poem could be talking to a child or similar (affectionate tone of 'my dear') and the speaker is trying to explain what and why this is happening to them.

We need to talk about Kevin

We need to talk about Kevin ~ Lionel Shriver


Characters - Kevin (son and murderer), Eva (mother of Kevin), Franklin (father of Kevin, killed by him)


Struggles

• social 
• individual - Kevin puts on a face but underneath it all he is the same as any other normal child

The novel is written as a series of letters from Kevins mother Eva to her deceased husband, so if written from her perspective as she tries to find why Kevin committed all the murders and what happened to him to make him turn out the way he did.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane

The Beauty Queen of Leenane ~ Martin Mcdonagh


Characters - Mag, Maureen


Struggles

• sexual - Maureen, no experiences with men
• national - Ireland, wanting to escape (Maureen)
• Mags pretends to love Ireland
• individual - Maureens insanity and violence

This be the Verse

This be the Verse ~ Philip Larkin


Summary - how parent's 'fuck their kids up' or mess them up for life when they are being raised, and how this has been happening for all of time for every child.

Personal experience?

Oppression of the child, and of the world - 'man hands on misery to man', this is a global issue

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers - Adrienne Pierce


Feminist oppression - She sews a tapestry of tigers, who represent everything she wishes she could be: 'they do not fear the man beneath.'

Struggles

• gender
• individual

The tapestry is how she expresses herself

Their eyes were watching God

Their eyes were watching God ~ Zora Neale Hurston


Author - Hurston was a black writer living in America in the 1890s-1960's. She was writing in a time called the Harlem Renaissance, which was a community of black artists who created and collected black literature. The movement expressed a new pride in black racial identity and Hurston was one of these writers. Her success came after her death, with the novel Their eyes were Watching God.


Summary - The novel follows sixteen year old Janie through her life and her marriages to three men, the first for protection on her grandmothers insistence (Logan), the second with promises of a new life (Joe) and the third for love (Tea Cake), and the problems and struggles she faces with finding herself and the circumstances she ends up in.

Struggles for identity

• Gender - In her relationship with Joe, she is expected to act exactly as a wife and do exactly as he says; 'you getting too moufy Janie,' shows that she is not allowed to express an opinion, and is oppressed by Joe, even though his intentions are good.
• Racial - black people such as Tea Cake are considered inferior by many; 'its de colour and de features.' Even spoken by Miss Turner, who is a coloured herself, considers herself above Tea Cake, just because her skin is paler than his.
• Jim Crowe laws
• Segregation
• Great Depression
• Individual

Language

The novel is written in the dialect of the characters, and in doing this, Hurston allows the reader to fully immerse themselves in the culture of the novel. The characters language is a strong part of their identity.

Examples: -'I' > 'ah'

-'the' > 'de'

- 'hasn't' > 'ain't'

- 'gone' > 'done'

Mister Pip

Mister Pip ~ Lloyd Jones


Lloyd Jones - Journalist reporting for an Australian newspaper on the civil war in Papua New Guinea and on the island of Bouganville (where the novel is set)

Summary - Main character Matilda (13 year old) and fellow natives of the Island of Bouganville are trapped in the civil war between Papua New Guinea forces and native rebels over power of the island. The war is triggered by the rich natural mining sources the island holds.

A white man called Mr Watts offers to teach the children of the village after the island is barricaded from outside assistance, and he reads them the novel Great Expectations. There are a number of interesting similarities between the character Pip and Matilda, and the narrative follows through the invasion of their village by the 'redskins', the death of two significant characters in Matilda's life and finally her escape off the island.

Themes of struggle for identity

• Racial
• National
• Individual

National struggle

The island of Bouganville struggles for identity as it is trapped between two armies fighting for control.

• 'Our ignorance of the outside world' - the civilian villagers were isolated from the outside world by the barricade, with no tv, newspapers or contact with a 'modernised world'. 'Ignorance' could also go the other way; other countries were ignoring the struggle and war on the island, effectively stranding the civilian society with no hope of help.
• 'She had never left Bouganville' - could also show the fact that most people in Bouganville had never left the island to tell anyone outside their society of the struggle happening on the island.
• 'How could you seal off a country?' - shows that Matilda doesn't understand they are on an island and surrounded by water; highlights the innocent and honest of the narrative as it is told from the perspective of a young girl.

Racial struggle

• White people are idolised on the island; '[Mr Watts] was the only white on the island' and 'he was the last white man'. In a society where 'white is the colour of all the important things' Mr Watts is something new and exciting for the villagers, but he is also treated with a certain amount of trepidation, as the villagers really don't know what to make of him. 

Individual struggle

Matilda - She is trying to find who she is and uses Pip from Great Expectations as someone to relate to, and as a form of escape. 'It was always a relief to return to Great Expectations. It contained a world that was whole and made sense, unlike ours.' 

- 'contained' adds to the impression that the book is a form of escape for Matilda and Mr Watts, as something that can be opened and the contents explored from a 'container', where they can escape from their harsh reality on the island.