Workbook 20thbritish Antologia 19 Enero 2014

20 CENTURY
BRITISH LITERATURE
Irlanda Olave
th
NOTES
NICENET PASSWORD: Q288402X28
ARABY .............................................................
James Joyce .......................................................
Katherine Mansfield ...............................................
Miss Brill ........................................................
Smile .............................................................
DH Lawrence .......................................................
The Demon Lover ...............................................
Elizabeth Bowen ..................................................
The open window ..................................................
Saki ..............................................................
The end of the party ..............................................
Grahan Greene .....................................................
Frank OConnor ....................................................
My Oedipus Complex ................................................
No Witchcraft for Sale ............................................
Doris Lessing .....................................................
THE DEATH OF THE MOTH .............................................
Wirginia Wolf .....................................................
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT ..............................................
T. S. Eliot: The Hollow Men .......................................
The Wild Swans at Coole ...........................................
by W. B. Yeats ....................................................
The Lake Isle of Innisfree ........................................
by W. H. Auden ....................................................
'"Muse des Beaux Arts" ...........................................
by W. H. Auden ....................................................
Seamus Heaney .....................................................
Digging ...........................................................
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20TH CENTURY BRITISH
Professor:
Course:
Irlanda Olave
6st Semester
LITERATURE SYLLABUS
Email:
School Phone:
Office Hours:
irlanda_olave@yahoo.com
614135450
By appointment
COMPETENCES:
The students will be able to identify orally and in writing the characteristics and
style of each author of the 20th Century British period; they
will respond to
fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, orally and in writing, through analysis of its
elements, and will be able to define and identify significant literary techniques.
TOPIC AREAS
Unit 1: Twentieth-Century
James Joyce
Katherine Mansfield
D.H. Lawrence
Elizabeth Bowen
H.H. Munro Saki
Graham Greene
Frank OConnor
Doris Lessing
Short Story. Part I

Araby
Miss Brill
Smile
The Demon Lover
The Open Window
The End of the Party
My Oedipus Complex
No Witchcraft for Sale
Unit 2: Twentieth-Century Non Fiction Story. I

Virginia Woolf
The Death of the Moth
George Orwell
Shooting an Elephant
Santha Rama Rau
By any other name.
Unit 3: Twentieth-Century
T.S. Elliot
William Butler Yeats
W. H. Auden
Dylan Thomas
Poetry. Part I
The Hollow Man
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
Muse des Beaux Arts
Do Not Go Gentle
Drama: Bernard Shaws Pygmalion

FINAL PROYECT
SHORT FILM OF A STORY OF A 20TH CENTURY BRITISH AUTHOR.
EVALUATION:
Quizzes and Presentations 50% Final proyect 50%
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
No make ups for quizzes, essays replace missed quizzes.
Attendance is important since most discussions and analysis take place in class. If a
student's absences exceed the number permitted by law , s/he will be dropped from the
class with a failing grade.
Students must do all outside essays and assignments as directed by the instructor.
These must be turned in on due date. Due dates and times for essays, homework and
exams will be given by the teacher. Late assignaments will be accepted with a 35%
reduction per day.
Students arriving late 15 minutes or more will be marked absent but will be able to
attend the class with the teacher's permission. (Teacher's watch)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
*Elements of Literature. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc. Sixth Course , 1993 edition.
English Literature with World Masterpieces. Scribner Literature Series. Signature
Edition, Macmillan, Inc, 1989. Most of the material will be available in the form of
Xerox copies.
LITERATURE BIOGRAPHIES AND TOPICS
BIOGRAPHY
STUDENT
POINTS
5,4,3,2,1,0
1. JAMES JOYCE
2. EPIPHANY
3. KATHERINE MANSFIELD
4. D.H. LAWRENCE
5. ELIZABETH BOWEN
6. HALLUCINATION
7. H. MUNRO (SAKI)
8. GRAHAM GREENE
9. FRANK OCONNOR
10. COMIC IRONY
11. DORIS LESSING
12. VIRGINIA WOLF
13. ALLEGORY
14. GEORGE ORWELL
15. SANTHA RAMA RAU
16. BERNARD SHAW
17. T.S. ELLIOT
18. WILLIAM B. YEATS
19. W.H. AUDEN
20. DYLAN THOMAS
21. SEAMUS HEANEY
22. APARTHEID
23. OEDIPUS AND ELECTRAS
COMPLEX
24. GUY FAWKES DAY

25. PURGATORY IN DIVINE COMEDY
26. THE MYTH OF ICARUS
27. BRUEGHELS PAINTINGS MUSEE DES BEAUX
ARTS
28. THE FIVE STAGES OF MOURNING
29. ELEGY
30. SYMBOLISM
TOPICS FOR ESSAYS

1
James Joyces Araby
Katherine Mansfields Miss

Brill
D.H. Lawrences Smile
Elizabeth Bowens The

Demon Lover
Sakis The Open Window
Graham Greenes The End of

the Party
Frank OConnors My
Oedipus Complex
Doris Lessing s No
Witchcraft for Sale
Explain a situation from your life where the opposite

of what you had expected occurred. Make sure you
define the term epiphany in your essay and reflect
on what happened to Arabys protagonist in the story.
Explain to what extent you agree with the statement
that even the smallest remark may inflict damage if
our words are not well-chosen. Make sure you define
the term dramatic irony in your essay and reflect
on what happened to the protagonist in the story.
Explain whether you agree with the storys topic that
we can love and hate someone at the same time, and
how we may feel trapped, rather than liberated, by
the death of those who have had a great impact on our
lives.
Look at studies of people in wartime and
posttraumatic stress syndrome. Can you find any
connection with Mrs. Drovers state of mind?
or
that The Demon Lover is the story of a woman who has
suffered gender violence and if her reactions are
explained by this.
Though it is a remarkably short piece of fiction,
"The Open Window" explores a number of important
topics, including the difference between appearances
and reality. Which is real? Can they both be real?
Deception provides another key topic in the story.
The action and irony of the story revolve around the
apparent deception practiced by Vera, Mrs.
Sappleton's niece. It remains to be seen, however,
whether this deception is a harmless prank or the
result of a sinister disposition. In addition, "The
Open Window" shows us just how fine the line can be
between sanity and insanity. Mr. Nuttel's
susceptibility to deceit is no different from that of
the reader of the story. Yet Mr. Nuttel is insane,
and the reader, presumably, is not. To maintain this
distinction, Saki forces his reader to consider the
nature of insanity and its causes. Explain in a two
page essay what is the topic of this short story.
In a two page essay show how this powerful story
shows how indifferent and unaware adults can be about
their own children's phobias and anxieties. Even
though the twin/narrator feels great empathy for his
brother and understands his fears, he cannot really
help him, though he tries to intercede and explain to
the adults, who dismiss Francis's fears as silly.
that families need to be constantly adapting to
different circumstances in order to survive. Make
sure you define the term comic irony in your essay
and reflect on what happened to the protagonist in
the story.
that society erects barriers among people that need
to be overcome. Make sure you reflect on what
Virginia Woolfs The Death

of the Moth
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George Orwells Shooting

an Elephant
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Santha Rama Raus By any

other name.
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T.S. Eliots The Hollow

Men and Preludes.
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W.B. Yeats
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W.H. Auden
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Seamus Heaney
happened to the protagonist in the story.

that we are constrained by the restrictions of time
and aging. Make sure you define the term allegory
in your essay and reflect on what happened to the
moth in the essay.
Explain a situation from your life when you have to
go against the dictates of your consciousness. Make
sure you reflect on what happened to the protagonist
in the essay.
Explain a situation from your life when you had felt
out of place or like a foreigner. Make sure you
reflect on what happened to the two girls in the
essay.
Preludes and Hollow men are both poems written
in the early 1900s that exemplify Eliots cynical
views and gives little promise of spiritual
regeneration. The poet puts across these views
through the use of numerous poetic techniques as he
both challenges the reader at an intellectual level
and horrifies them at an emotional level. Write a
two page essay in which you analyze how Preludes
and Hollow men express Eliots negative view of the
human condition.
Compare and contrast The Lake Isle of Innisfree, a
very early poem by Yeats, with The Wild Swans at
Coole, Yeats exploration of the relationship between
the natural and the artificial, What, if anything, do
these poems have in common? How are they different?
How can these poems best be understoodin other
words, should they be read today strictly for their
magnificent language, or is there a way in which they
embrace more universal elements of human experience
than their romantic or mythological frame of
reference might imply?
What does each poem say about the human heart, and
how does the difference between those statements
indicate Yeatss development as a poet?
Not much is worse than feeling all alone in the
world, feeling like no one cares or understands.
Every detail of Funeral Blues and Musee Des Beaux
Arts by Auden drips in loneliness and solitude.
These poems, so similar in theme, leave the audience
with a feeling that human beings are in complete and
total desolation. Auden knows how to use his words to
convey the intense feelings in the poems, write about
the topic of loneliness in these poems. Support your
statements by specific references to the poems.
Seamus Heaneys poems: "Digging" and, "BlackberryPicking describe basic and ordinary activities and
the reader does not expect anything meaningful when
reading the poems. Explain how this is deceptive, and
how Heaney immediately makes us aware of the deeper
issues of the subjects he explores in them.
LITERATURE ESSAY EVALUATION
Check if the essay
If the essay is plagiarized, the author will
Maximum
has the following
receive a zero if its a first offense,
20 points for
points:
otherwise the students will be subject to the
each
schools policies on plagiarism.

Interesting
-is there an introduction?
Introduction
-is there an arguable thesis sentence?

-does the thesis address the essay prompt?
Good Arguments in
-is there supporting evidence for each
the body of essay.
argument?
-do the arguments support the thesis sentence?
-do the paragraphs flow in a logical manner?
Strong Conclusion
-is there one?

-does the conclusion support what has been
stated in the paper?
Style/grammar
-are there spelling and grammar errors?

(Deduct from 1 to 20 points)
-is it written in an academic manner?
-are there organizational issues?
Length and/ quotes
-Is the essay of the assigned length? (deduct

from 5 to 20 points)
Is it written using Arial 12, in double space?
(deduct 10 points)
is there a bibliography? -are there proper
citations?
Sample Reading Comprehension Questions Based on Blooms Taxonomy

The following are examples of reading comprehension questions for the novel we will be
reading. Within groups, the questions begin at a level suitable for the beginning of
the semester, then increase in difficulty to reflect questions suitable for advanced
literature students.
Level
1: Knowledge
What people were in the story?
Tell three things that happened in the story.
Where did the story take place?
When does the story take place?
Write 6 facts from the story.
What time in history did the story take place?
Level
2: Comprehension
Tell me about the main character use your own words.
Tell the main problem of the story and how it was solved.
Tell another thing that could have happened in the story that would make sense.
What was the cause of the main event in the story?
Tell this story in only 3 sentences.
Explain what is happening in the first picture of the story.
Tell in your own words what the story is about.
How did the main character feel at the beginning of the story?
How did the main character feel at the end of the story?
Think of a main event in the story. Why did it happen?
Level 3: Application
What can you do that is like what the person in the story did?
Tell how you would have solved the problem.
If you were in this story, what would you do?
Tell about a time when something similar happened to someone you know.
Think of a situation that occurred to a person in the story and decide whether
you would have done the same thing or something different.
Tell why the information in text is useful in real-life situations.

Level 4: Analysis
Identify the different parts of the story (introduction, development,

climax, resolution.)
Tell me the parts of the story that could be real.
What parts of the story are necessary? What parts are not?
Who is the most important character in the story? The least important?
What part of the story was the funniest? The most exciting? The saddest?
Tell what things happened in the story that couldnt happen in real life.
Some of the things in the story were true, and some were only opinions. List
the things that were true.
Organize the story into parts and think of a good title for each of the parts.
Level 5: Synthesis
Make a story like this one but use only your friends as characters in it.
Make up what would happen if the story continued.
Make a picture about this story.
Draw a picture of the place where most of the story took place. Dont copy the
book.
Be ready to act out the story with no words.
Make a different problem for the main character to solve.
Use your imagination to draw a picture about the story. Then add one new thing
of your own that fits but was not in the original story.
Write another ending to the story that is different from the authors ending.

Pretend you are the main character in the story.
happened.
Write a diary about what
Level 6: Evaluation
Did you like this story? Why or why not?
Why do you think the author wanted to write this story? Would you?
Why or why not?
Could this story happen in another country? On another planet? In the days of
the cavemen? Tell why or why not.
Compare this story to the another you have read. How are they the same? How
are they different?
Does this story seem interesting to you? Why or why not?
Was the main character in the story good or bad? Why?
Compare two characters in the story. Tell which one you think is braver
and why. Or better, and why. Or more cunning and why.
Compare and contrast the setting in this story and the setting in (Little
Red Riding Hood; the last story we read). Tell which is better and
why.
Do you think the main character acted in the best way? Why or why
not?
Was this the best ending for this story? Why or why not?
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20TH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE SHORT FILM EVALUATION

Topic: _______________________________________________________________________________
Team members:
Yes +10
No -10
points
points
The script was handed-in the same day as the video was
shown in class.
The film is in VHS or DVD format, not in a USB.
The films lenght is no longer than 8 minutes.
At least 85% of the film is based on the original story.
The film includes the following story elements:

introduction, rising action, climax, falling action and
resolution.
The setting, sound effects, subtitles and costumes were

appropriate for the story (if one was not appropriate or
missing, mark -5)
The films sound is clear (and the students brought

speakers for the presentation).
The studens appear in the video and have dialogs, they

do not seem to be reading the script. Do not use
internet images, this will give you a 10 percent GRADE
REDUCTION.
In the last two minutes, each student explains what

s/he did in the film and what theyve learn about story
analysis.
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The video was shown in front of the class.
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Jigsaw Steps:
Students form
of ability.
4- or 5-person jigsaw groups. The groups should be diverse in terms
One student from each group is appointed as the leader. Initially, this person
should be the most mature student in the group.
The storys lesson is divided into 5-6 segments.
Each student is assigned to learn one segment, students have direct access only to
their own segment.
Students will be given time to read over their segment at least twice and become
familiar with it. There is no need for them to memorize it.
Temporary "expert groups" are formed by having one student from each jigsaw group
join other students assigned to the same segment. Students in these expert groups will
be given time to discuss the main points of their segment and to rehearse the
presentations they will make to their jigsaw group.
Students will be brought back into their jigsaw groups.
Each student will be asked to present her or his segment to the group. Encourage
others in the group to ask questions for clarification.
At the end of the session, each team will be given a quiz on the material.
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ARABY
James Joyce
Activity 1: Discuss the name of the story. Its connotations and allusions.
North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the
Christian Brothers' School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood
at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of
the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown
imperturbable faces.
The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room. Air, musty
from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the
kitchen was littered with old useless papers. Among these I found a few paper-covered
books, the pages of which were curled and damp: The Abbot, by Walter Scott, The Devout
Communicant, and The Memoirs of Vidocq. I liked the last best because its leaves were
yellow. The wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few
straggling bushes, under one of which I found the late tenant's rusty bicycle-pump. He
had been a very charitable priest; in his will he had left all his money to
institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister.
When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners.
When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was
the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their
feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts
echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy
lanes behind the houses, where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the
cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the
ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or
shook music from the buckled harness. When we returned to the street, light from the
kitchen windows had filled the areas. If my uncle was seen turning the corner, we hid
in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan's sister came out on
the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea, we watched her from our shadow peer up
and down the street. We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she
remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan's steps resignedly. She was
waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother
always teased her before he obeyed, and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her
dress swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to
side.
Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door. The blind was
pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she came
out on the doorstep my heart leaped. I ran to the hall, seized my books and followed
her. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which
our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after
morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was
like a summons to all my foolish blood.
Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday
evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We
walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid
the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the
barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you
about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises
converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice
safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange
prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears
(I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out
into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever
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speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused
adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers
running upon the wires.
One evening I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died. It was a
dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes
I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in
the sodden beds. Some distant lamp or lighted window gleamed below me. I was thankful
that I could see so little. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and,
feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together
until they trembled, murmuring: 'O love! O love!' many times.
At last she spoke to me. When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused
that I did not know what to answer. She asked me was I going to Araby. I forgot whether
I answered yes or no. It would be a splendid bazaar; she said she would love to go.
'And why can't you?' I asked.
While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist. She could not
go, she said, because there would be a retreat that week in her convent. Her brother
and two other boys were fighting for their caps, and I was alone at the railings. She
held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me. The light from the lamp opposite
our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and,
falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and
caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.
'It's well for you,' she said.
'If I go,' I said, 'I will bring you something.'
What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that evening!
I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days. I chafed against the work of
school. At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me
and the page I strove to read. The syllables of the word Araby were called to me
through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over
me. I asked for leave to go to the bazaar on Saturday night. My aunt was surprised, and
hoped it was not some Freemason affair. I answered few questions in class. I watched my
master's face pass from amiability to sternness; he hoped I was not beginning to idle.
I could not call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the
serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me
child's play, ugly monotonous child's play.
On Saturday morning I reminded my uncle that I wished to go to the bazaar in the
evening. He was fussing at the hallstand, looking for the hat-brush, and answered me
curtly:
'Yes, boy, I know.'
As he was in the hall I could not go into the front parlour and lie at the window. I
felt the house in bad humour and walked slowly towards the school. The air was
pitilessly raw and already my heart misgave me.
When I came home to dinner my uncle had not yet been home. Still it was early. I sat
staring at the clock for some time and, when its ticking began to irritate me, I left
the room. I mounted the staircase and gained the upper part of the house. The high,
cold, empty, gloomy rooms liberated me and I went from room to room singing. From the
front window I saw my companions playing below in the street. Their cries reached me
weakened and indistinct and, leaning my forehead against the cool glass, I looked over
at the dark house where she lived. I may have stood there for an hour, seeing nothing
14
but the brown-clad figure cast by my imagination, touched discreetly by the lamplight
at the curved neck, at the hand upon the railings and at the border below the dress.
When I came downstairs again I found Mrs Mercer sitting at the fire. She was an old,
garrulous woman, a pawnbroker's widow, who collected used stamps for some pious
purpose. I had to endure the gossip of the tea-table. The meal was prolonged beyond an
hour and still my uncle did not come. Mrs Mercer stood up to go: she was sorry she
couldn't wait any longer, but it was after eight o'clock and she did not like to be out
late, as the night air was bad for her. When she had gone I began to walk up and down
the room, clenching my fists. My aunt said:
'I'm afraid you may put off your bazaar for this night of Our Lord.'
At nine o'clock I heard my uncle's latchkey in the hall door. I heard him talking to
himself and heard the hallstand rocking when it had received the weight of his
overcoat. I could interpret these signs. When he was midway through his dinner I asked
him to give me the money to go to the bazaar. He had forgotten.
'The people are in bed and after their first sleep now,' he said.
I did not smile. My aunt said to him energetically:
'Can't you give him the money and let him go? You've kept him late enough as it is.'
My uncle said he was very sorry he had forgotten. He said he believed in the old
saying: 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.' He asked me where I was going
and, when I told him a second time, he asked me did I know The Arab's Farewell to his
Steed. When I left the kitchen he was about to recite the opening lines of the piece to
my aunt.
I held a florin tightly in my hand as I strode down Buckingham Street towards the
station. The sight of the streets thronged with buyers and glaring with gas recalled to
me the purpose of my journey. I took my seat in a third-class carriage of a deserted
train. After an intolerable delay the train moved out of the station slowly. It crept
onward among ruinous houses and over the twinkling river. At Westland Row Station a
crowd of people pressed to the carriage doors; but the porters moved them back, saying
that it was a special train for the bazaar. I remained alone in the bare carriage. In a
few minutes the train drew up beside an improvised wooden platform. I passed out on to
the road and saw by the lighted dial of a clock that it was ten minutes to ten. In
front of me was a large building which displayed the magical name.
I could not find any sixpenny entrance and, fearing that the bazaar would be closed, I
passed in quickly through a turnstile, handing a shilling to a weary-looking man. I
found myself in a big hall girded at half its height by a gallery. Nearly all the
stalls were closed and the greater part of the hall was in darkness. I recognized a
silence like that which pervades a church after a service. I walked into the centre of
the bazaar timidly. A few people were gathered about the stalls which were still open.
Before a curtain, over which the words Caf Chantant were written in coloured lamps,
two men were counting money on a salver. I listened to the fall of the coins.
Remembering with difficulty why I had come, I went over to one of the stalls and
examined porcelain vases and flowered tea-sets. At the door of the stall a young lady
was talking and laughing with two young gentlemen. I remarked their English accents and
listened vaguely to their conversation.
'O, I never said such a thing!'
'O, but you did!'
'O, but I didn't!'
15
'Didn't she say that?'

'Yes. I heard her.'
'O, there's a... fib!'
Observing me, the young lady came over and
tone of her voice was not encouraging; she
of duty. I looked humbly at the great jars
side of the dark entrance to the stall and
asked me did I wish to buy anything. The

seemed to have spoken to me out of a sense
that stood like eastern guards at either
murmured:
'No, thank you.'

The young lady changed the position of one of the vases and went back to the two young
men. They began to talk of the same subject. Once or twice the young lady glanced at me
over her shoulder.
I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in
her wares seem the more real. Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of
the bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I
heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part
of the hall was now completely dark.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity;
and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
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QUESTIONS
1. Did you like the story? Why?
2. Some critics like Wallace Gray have said that the title of "Araby" holds the key
to the meaning of Joyce's story. Explain what does Gray means.
3. From what point of view is the story told? What are the advantages and the
limitations of having this point of view?
4. Define irony and explain what do you see as the central irony in Araby?
5. Analyze the following fragment from Araby identify and explain the literary
devices used by Joyce:
My eyes were often full of tears (I could not understand why) and at times a
flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I though little of
the future. I did not know whether I would speak to her or not, if I spoke to
her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp
and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
6. Define the literary term epiphany and explain what the narrators epiphany in
the story is.
17
7. Define the literary term metaphor, and explain how is the description of the
setting in North Richmond Street a metaphor.
8. Define "situational irony"and describe how this device is used in the story.
9. Define "Foreshadowing" and explain what scene in Araby foreshadows the outcome.
10. Explain the storys climax.
11. Explain how the quest of a medieval knight is suggested in Araby.
12. In what ways is Araby a coming of age story?
13. Explain in your own words what the theme of Joyces Araby is.
18
Katherine Mansfield
Miss Brill
Activity 1: Comment about the habit of eavesdropping.
Although it was so brilliantly fine - the blue sky powdered with gold and great spots
of light like white wine splashed over the Jardins Publiques - Miss Brill was glad that
she had decided on her fur. The air was motionless, but when you opened your mouth
there was just a faint chill, like a chill from a glass of iced water before you sip,
and now and again a leaf came drifting - from nowhere, from the sky. Miss Brill put up
her hand and touched her fur. Dear little thing! It was nice to feel it again. She had
taken it out of its box that afternoon, shaken out the moth-powder, given it a good
brush, and rubbed the life back into the dim little eyes. "What has been happening to
me?" said the sad little eyes. Oh, how sweet it was to see them snap at her again from
the red eiderdown! ... But the nose, which was of some black composition, wasn't at all
firm. It must have had a knock, somehow. Never mind - a little dab of black sealing-wax
when the time came - when it was absolutely necessary ... Little rogue! Yes, she really
felt like that about it. Little rogue biting its tail just by her left ear. She could
have taken it off and laid it on her lap and stroked it. She felt a tingling in her
hands and arms, but that came from walking, she supposed. And when she breathed,
something light and sad - no, not sad, exactly - something gentle seemed to move in her
bosom.
There were a number of people out this afternoon, far more than last Sunday. And
the band sounded louder and gayer. That was because the Season had begun. For although
the band played all the year round on Sundays, out of season it was never the same. It
was like some one playing with only the family to listen; it didn't care how it played
if there weren't any strangers present. Wasn't the conductor wearing a new coat, too?
She was sure it was new. He scraped with his foot and flapped his arms like a rooster
about to crow, and the bandsmen sitting in the green rotunda blew out their cheeks and
glared at the music. Now there came a little "flutey" bit - very pretty! - a little
chain of bright drops. She was sure it would be repeated. It was; she lifted her head
and smiled.
Only two people shared her "special" seat: a fine old man in a velvet coat, his
hands clasped over a huge carved walking-stick, and a big old woman, sitting upright,
with a roll of knitting on her embroidered apron. They did not speak. This was
disappointing, for Miss Brill always looked forward to the conversation. She had become
really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn't listen, at sitting
in other people's lives just for a minute while they talked round her.
She glanced, sideways, at the old couple. Perhaps they would go soon. Last Sunday,
too, hadn't been as interesting as usual. An Englishman and his wife, he wearing a
dreadful Panama hat and she button boots. And she'd gone on the whole time about how
she ought to wear spectacles; she knew she needed them; but that it was no good getting
any; they'd be sure to break and they'd never keep on. And he'd been so patient. He'd
suggested everything - gold rims, the kind that curved round your ears, little pads
inside the bridge. No, nothing would please her. "They'll always be sliding down my
nose!" Miss Brill had wanted to shake her.
The old people sat on the bench, still as statues. Never mind, there was always
the crowd to watch. To and fro, in front of the flower-beds and the band rotunda, the
couples and groups paraded, stopped to talk, to greet, to buy a handful of flowers from
the old beggar who had his tray fixed to the railings. Little children ran among them,
swooping and laughing; little boys with big white silk bows under their chins, little
girls, little French dolls, dressed up in velvet and lace. And sometimes a tiny
staggerer came suddenly rocking into the open from under the trees, stopped, stared, as
suddenly sat down "flop," until its small high-stepping mother, like a young hen,
rushed scolding to its rescue. Other people sat on the benches and green chairs, but
19
they were nearly always the same, Sunday after Sunday, and - Miss Brill had often
noticed - there was something funny about nearly all of them. They were odd, silent,
nearly all old, and from the way they stared they looked as though they'd just come
from dark little rooms or even - even cupboards!
Behind the rotunda the slender trees with yellow leaves down drooping, and through
them just a line of sea, and beyond the blue sky with gold-veined clouds.
Tum-tum-tum tiddle-um! tiddle-um! tum tiddley-um tum ta! blew the band.
Two young girls in red came by and two young soldiers in blue met them, and they
laughed and paired and went off arm-in-arm. Two peasant women with funny straw hats
passed, gravely, leading beautiful smoke-coloured donkeys. A cold, pale nun hurried by.
A beautiful woman came along and dropped her bunch of violets, and a little boy ran
after to hand them to her, and she took them and threw them away as if they'd been
poisoned. Dear me! Miss Brill didn't know whether to admire that or not! And now an
ermine toque and a gentleman in grey met just in front of her. He was tall, stiff,
dignified, and she was wearing the ermine toque she'd bought when her hair was yellow.
Now everything, her hair, her face, even her eyes, was the same colour as the shabby
ermine, and her hand, in its cleaned glove, lifted to dab her lips, was a tiny
yellowish paw. Oh, she was so pleased to see him - delighted! She rather thought they
were going to meet that afternoon. She described where she'd been - everywhere, here,
there, along by the sea. The day was so charming - didn't he agree? And wouldn't he,
perhaps? ... But he shook his head, lighted a cigarette, slowly breathed a great deep
puff into her face, and even while she was still talking and laughing, flicked the
match away and walked on. The ermine toque was alone; she smiled more brightly than
ever. But even the band seemed to know what she was feeling and played more softly,
played tenderly, and the drum beat, "The Brute! The Brute!" over and over. What would
she do? What was going to happen now? But as Miss Brill wondered, the ermine toque
turned, raised her hand as though she'd seen some one else, much nicer, just over
there, and pattered away. And the band changed again and played more quickly, more
gayly than ever, and the old couple on Miss Brill's seat got up and marched away, and
such a funny old man with long whiskers hobbled along in time to the music and was
nearly knocked over by four girls walking abreast.
< 4 >
Oh, how fascinating it was! How she enjoyed it! How she loved sitting here,
watching it all! It was like a play. It was exactly like a play. Who could believe the
sky at the back wasn't painted? But it wasn't till a little brown dog trotted on solemn
and then slowly trotted off, like a little "theatre" dog, a little dog that had been
drugged, that Miss Brill discovered what it was that made it so exciting. They were all
on the stage. They weren't only the audience, not only looking on; they were acting.
Even she had a part and came every Sunday. No doubt somebody would have noticed if she
hadn't been there; she was part of the performance after all. How strange she'd never
thought of it like that before! And yet it explained why she made such a point of
starting from home at just the same time each week - so as not to be late for the
performance - and it also explained why she had quite a queer, shy feeling at telling
her English pupils how she spent her Sunday afternoons. No wonder! Miss Brill nearly
laughed out loud. She was on the stage. She thought of the old invalid gentleman to
whom she read the newspaper four afternoons a week while he slept in the garden. She
had got quite used to the frail head on the cotton pillow, the hollowed eyes, the open
mouth and the high pinched nose. If he'd been dead she mightn't have noticed for weeks;
she wouldn't have minded. But suddenly he knew he was having the paper read to him by
an actress! "An actress!" The old head lifted; two points of light quivered in the old
eyes. "An actress - are ye?" And Miss Brill smoothed the newspaper as though it were
the manuscript of her part and said gently; "Yes, I have been an actress for a long
time."
The band had been having a rest. Now they started again. And what they played was
warm, sunny, yet there was just a faint chill - a something, what was it? - not sadness
- no, not sadness - a something that made you want to sing. The tune lifted, lifted,
20
the light shone; and it seemed to Miss Brill that in another moment all of them, all
the whole company, would begin singing. The young ones, the laughing ones who were
moving together, they would begin, and the men's voices, very resolute and brave, would
join them. And then she too, she too, and the others on the benches - they would come
in with a kind of accompaniment - something low, that scarcely rose or fell, something
so beautiful - moving ... And Miss Brill's eyes filled with tears and she looked
smiling at all the other members of the company. Yes, we understand, we understand, she
thought - though what they understood she didn't know.
< 5 >
Just at that moment a boy and girl came and sat down where the old couple had
been. They were beautifully dressed; they were in love. The hero and heroine, of
course, just arrived from his father's yacht. And still soundlessly singing, still with
that trembling smile, Miss Brill prepared to listen.
"No, not now," said the girl. "Not here, I can't."
"But why? Because of that stupid old thing at the end there?" asked the boy. "Why
does she come here at all - who wants her? Why doesn't she keep her silly old mug at
home?"
"It's her fu-ur which is so funny," giggled the girl. "It's exactly like a fried
whiting."
"Ah, be off with you!" said the boy in an angry whisper. Then: "Tell me, ma petite
chere--"
"No, not here," said the girl. "Not yet."
On her way home she usually bought a slice of honey-cake at the baker's. It was her
Sunday treat. Sometimes there was an almond in her slice, sometimes not. It made a
great difference. If there was an almond it was like carrying home a tiny present - a
surprise - something that might very well not have been there. She hurried on the
almond Sundays and struck the match for the kettle in quite a dashing way.
But to-day she passed the baker's by, climbed the stairs, went into the little
dark room - her room like a cupboard - and sat down on the red eiderdown. She sat there
for a long time. The box that the fur came out of was on the bed. She unclasped the
necklet quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the lid on
she thought she heard something crying.
21
QUESTIONS:
1. Did you like the story? Explain your answer
2. Some critics state that the appearance of the fur in Miss Brill is an example
of the importance of symbol in the modern short story. Explain why is the fur a
symbol in the story.
3. The modern story aims not at the effect on the reader but at revelation to the
reader- the revelation of some essential truth implicit in the story. The main
character of the story may remain ignorant of this truth even at the end, and
irony, the result of the reader knowing more than the character, is a
characteristic element in modern fiction.
What is the biggest irony in Miss
Brill?
4. Read the following passage from Miss Brill, and find, underline and explain at
least four different devices.
ALTHOUGH it was so brilliantly finethe blue sky powdered with gold and great
spots of light like white wine splashed over the Jardins PubliquesMiss Brill
was glad that she had decided on her fur. The air was motionless, but when you
opened your mouth there was just a faint chill, like a chill from a glass of
iced water before you sip, and now and again a leaf came driftingfrom nowhere,
from the sky. Miss Brill put up her hand and touched her fur. Dear little thing!
It was nice to feel it again. She had taken it out of its box that afternoon,
shaken out the moth powder, given it a good brush, and rubbed the life back into
the dim little eyes. "What has been happening to me?" said the sad little eyes.
5. Read the following passage from Miss Brill, and find, underline and explain at
least three different devices.
The old people sat on a bench, still as statues Other people sat on the benches
and green chairs, but they were nearly always the same, Sunday after Sunday,
andMiss Brill had often noticedthere was something funny about nearly all of
them. They were odd, silent, nearly all old, and from the way they stared they
looked as though they'd just come from dark little rooms or eveneven cupboards!
22
6. Explain whether Miss Brill is a dynamic or a static character support your

answer with elements from the storys plot.
7. Explain whether Miss Brill is a flat or a round character support your answer
with elements from the storys plot.
8. Write the definitions of each of the following literary devices:

Dramatic irony, Dynamic
character, Verbal irony
1
2
3
4
5
6
character,
Round
characters,
Situational
irony,
Static
This is the contrast between what is said and what

is meant. In other words, sarcasm.
This is the contrast between what the character
thinks to be true and what we (the reader) know to
be true.
It is the contrast between what happens and what
was expected (or what would seem appropriate)
This type of character is the one who changes
significantly during the course of the story.
Changes considered to qualify include changes in
sight or understanding, changes in commitment, and
changes in values.
This
type
of
character
does
not
undergo
significant change. Is a literary character that
remains basically unchanged throughout a work
These characters are characters who are complex
and
realistic;
they
represent
a
depth
of
personality which is imitative of life. They
frequently possess both good and bad traits, and
they may react unexpectedly or become entangled in
their own interior conflicts.
This character is distinguished by its lack of a
realistic personality. Though the description of
this character may be detailed and rich in
defining characteristics, it falls short of
complexity.
9. Explain whether Miss Brill is a character-oriented or a plot-oriented short

story.
10. Explain in your own words, what is the theme of the story.
Making connections: Think of Relevation by Flannery OConnor.
23
Smile
DH Lawrence
Activity 1: Comment about hate-love relationships
He had decided to sit up all night, as a kind of penance. The telegram had simply said:
"Ophelia's condition critical." He felt, under the circumstances, that to go to bed in
the wagon-lit would be frivolous. So he sat wearily in the first-class compartment as
night fell over France.
He ought, of course, to be sitting by Ophelia's bedside. But Ophelia didn't want him.
So he sat up in the train.
Deep inside him was a black and ponderous weight: like some tumour filled with sheer
gloom, weighing down his vitals. He had always taken life seriously. Seriousness now
overwhelmed him. His dark, handsome, clean-shaven face would have done for Christ on
the Cross, with the thick black eyebrows tilted in the dazed agony.
The night in the train was like an inferno: nothing was real. Two elderly Englishwomen
opposite him had died long ago, perhaps even before he had. Because, of course, he was
dead himself.
Slow, grey dawn came in the mountains of the frontier, and he watched it with unseeing
eyes. But his mind repeated:
"And when the dawn came, dim and sad
And chill with early showers,
Her quiet eyelids closed: she had
Another morn than ours."
And his monk's changeless, tormented face showed no trace of the contempt he felt, even
self-contempt, for this bathos, as his critical mind judged it.
He was in Italy: he looked at the country with faint aversion. Not capable of much
feeling any more, he had only a tinge of aversion as he saw the olives and the sea. A
sort of poetic swindle.
It was night again when he reached the home of the Blue Sisters, where Ophelia had
chosen to retreat. He was ushered into the Mother Superior's room, in the palace. She
rose and bowed to him in silence, looking at him along her nose. Then she said in
French:
"It pains me to tell you. She died this afternoon."
He stood stupefied, not feeling much, anyhow, but gazing at nothingness from his
handsome, strong-featured monk's face.
The Mother Superior softly put her white, handsome hand on his arm and gazed up into
his face, leaning to him.
"Courage!" she said softly. "Courage, no?"
He stepped back. He was always scared when a woman leaned at him like that. In her
voluminous skirts, the Mother Superior was very womanly.
"Quite!" he replied in English. "Can I see her?"
The Mother Superior rang a bell, and a young sister appeared. She was rather pale, but
there was something nave and mischievous in her hazel eyes. The elder woman murmured
an introduction, the young woman demurely made a slight reverence. But Matthew held out
24
his hand, like a man reaching for the last straw. The young nun unfolded her white
hands and shyly slid one into his, passive as a sleeping bird.
And out of the fathomless Hades of his gloom he thought: "What a nice hand!"
They went along a handsome but cold corridor, and tapped at a door. Matthew, walking in
far-off Hades, still was aware of the soft, fine voluminousness of the women's black
skirts, moving with soft, fluttered haste in front of him.
He was terrified when the door opened, and he saw the candles burning round the white
bed, in the lofty, noble room. A sister sat beside the candles, her face dark and
primitive, in the white coif, as she looked up from her breviary. Then she rose, a
sturdy woman, and made a little bow, and Matthew was aware of creamy-dusky hands
twisting a black rosary, against the rich, blue silk of her bosom.
The three sisters flocked silent, yet fluttered and very feminine, in their volumes of
silky black skirts, to the bedhead. The Mother Superior leaned, and with utmost
delicacy lifted the veil of white lawn from the dead face.
Matthew saw the dead, beautiful composure of his wife's face, and instantly, something
leaped like laughter in the depths of him, he gave a little grunt, and an extraordinary
smile came over his face.
The three nuns, in the candle glow that quivered warm and quick like a Christmas tree,
were looking at him with heavily compassionate eyes, from under their coif-bands. They
were like a mirror. Six eyes suddenly started with a little fear, then changed,
puzzled, into wonder. And over the three nuns' faces, helplessly facing him in the
candle-glow, a strange, involuntary smile began to come. In the three faces, the same
smile growing so differently, like three subtle flowers opening. In the pale young nun,
it was almost pain, with a touch of mischievous ecstasy. But the dark Ligurian face of
the watching sister, a mature, level- browed woman, curled with a pagan smile, slow,
infinitely subtle in its archaic humour. It was the Etruscan smile, subtle and
unabashed, and unanswerable.
The Mother Superior, who had a large-featured face something like Matthew's own, tried
hard not to smile. But he kept his humorous, malevolent chin uplifted at her, and she
lowered her face as the smile grew, grew and grew over her face.
The young, pale sister suddenly covered her face with her sleeve, her body shaking. The
Mother Superior put her arm over the girl's shoulder, murmuring with Italian emotion:
"Poor little thing! Weep, then, poor little thing!" But the chuckle was still there,
under the emotion. The sturdy dark sister stood unchanging, clutching the black beads,
but the noiseless smile immovable.
Matthew suddenly turned to the bed, to see if his dead wife had observed him. It was a
movement of fear.
Ophelia lay so pretty and so touching, with her peaked, dead little nose sticking up,
and her face of an obstinate child fixed in the final obstinacy. The smile went away
from Matthew, and the look of super-martyrdom took its place. He did not weep: he just
gazed without meaning. Only, on his face deepened the look: I knew this martyrdom was
in store for me!
She was so pretty, so childlike, so clever, so obstinate, so worn - and so dead! He
felt so blank about it all.
They had been married ten years. He himself had not been perfect - no, no, not by any
means! But Ophelia had always wanted her own will. She had loved him, and grown
obstinate, and left him, and grown wistful, or contemptuous, or angry, a dozen times,
and a dozen times come back to him.
25
They had no children. And he, sentimentally, had always wanted children. He felt very
largely sad.
Now she would never come back to him. This was the thirteenth time, and she was gone
for ever.
But was she? Even as he thought it, he felt her nudging him somewhere in the ribs, to
make him smile. He writhed a little, and an angry frown came on his brow. He was not
GOING to smile! He set his square, naked jaw, and bared his big teeth, as he looked
down at the infinitely provoking dead woman. "At it again!" - he wanted to say to her,
like the man in Dickens.
He himself had not been perfect. He was going to dwell on his own imperfections.
He turned suddenly to the three women, who had faded backwards beyond the candles, and
now hovered, in the white frames of their coifs, between him and nowhere. His eyes
glared, and he bared his teeth.
"Mea culpa! Mea culpa!" he snarled.
"Macch!" exclaimed the daunted Mother Superior, and her two hands flew apart, then
together again, in the density of the sleeves, like birds nesting in couples.
Matthew ducked his head and peered round, prepared to bolt. The Mother Superior, in the
background, softly intoned a Pater Noster, and her beads dangled. The pale young sister
faded farther back. But the black eyes of the sturdy, black-avised sister twinkled like
eternally humorous stars upon him, and he felt the smile digging him in the ribs again.
"Look here!" he said to the women, in expostulation, "I'm awfully upset. I'd better
go."
They hovered in fascinating bewilderment. He ducked for the door. But even as he went,
the smile began to come on his face, caught by the tail of the sturdy sister's black
eye, with its everlasting twink. And, he was secretly thinking, he wished he could hold
both her creamy-dusky hands, that were folded like mating birds, voluptuously.
But he insisted on dwelling upon his own imperfections. Mea culpa! he howled at
himself. And even as he howled it, he felt something nudge him in the ribs, saying to
him: Smile!
The three women left behind in the lofty room looked at one another, and their hands
flew up for a moment, like six birds flying suddenly out of the foliage, then settling
again.
"Poor thing!" said the Mother Superior, compassionately.
"Yes! Yes! Poor thing!" cried the young sister, with nave, shrill impulsiveness.
"Gi!" said the dark-avised sister.
The Mother Superior noiselessly moved to the bed, and leaned over the dead face.
"She seems to know, poor soul!" she murmured. "Don't you think so?"
The three coifed heads leaned together. And for the first time they saw the faint
ironical curl at the corners of Ophelia's mouth. They looked in fluttering wonder.
"She has seen him!" whispered the thrilling young sister.
The Mother Superior delicately laid the fine-worked veil over the cold face. Then they
murmured a prayer for the anima, fingering their beads. Then the Mother Superior set
26
two of the candles straight upon their spikes, clenching the thick candle with firm,
soft grip, and pressing it down.
The dark-faced, sturdy sister sat down again with her little holy book. The other two
rustled softly to the door, and out into the great white corridor. There softly,
noiselessly sailing in all their dark drapery, like dark swans down a river, they
suddenly hesitated. Together they had seen a forlorn man's figure, in a melancholy
overcoat, loitering in the cold distance at the corridor's end. The Mother Superior
suddenly pressed her pace into an appearance of speed.
Matthew saw them bearing down on him, these voluminous figures with framed faces and
lost hands. The young sister trailed a little behind.
"Pardon, ma Mre!" he said, as if in the street. "I left my hat somewhere. . . ."
He made a desperate, moving sweep with his arm, and never was man more utterly
smileless.
27
Questions
1. Did you like the story? Why?
2. What is direct characterization and indirect characterization? What does the

writer tell us directly/indirectly about the character?
3. What does it mean when the author explains that the main character has been a
monk?.
4. Why do you think that the couple in the story have separated 12 times?
5. What might the smile symbolize?
28
6. What is the climax of the story?
7. How would you describe the tone of the story?
8. Explain in your own words, what is the theme of the short story: smile.
29
The Demon Lover

Elizabeth Bowen
Activity 1: Discuss about ways of ending relationships.
Toward the end of her day in London Mrs. Drover went round to her
shut-up house
to
look
for
several
things
she
wanted
to
take
away. Some
belonged to herself, some to her family, who were by now used to their
country life. It was late August it had been a steamy, showery day: At
the
moment
the
trees
down
the
pavement
glittered
in
an escape
of humid
yellow afternoon sun. Against the next batch of clouds, already piling up
ink-dark, broken chimneys and parapets 1 stood out. In her once familiar
street, as in any unused channel, an unfamiliar queerness had silted up a
cat wove itself in and out of railings, but no human eye watched Mrs.
Dovers return. Shifting some parcels under her arm, she slowly forced round
her latchkey in an unwilling lock, then gave the door, which had warped, a
push with her knee. Dead air came out to meet her as she went in.
The staircase window having been boarded up, no light came down into
the
hall. But
one
door,
she
could
just
see,
stood
ajar,
so
she
went
quickly through into the room and unshuttered the big window in there. Now
the prosaic woman, looking about her, was more perplexed than she knew by
everything that she saw, by traces of her long former habit of lifethe
yellow smoke stain up the white marble mantelpiece, the ring left by a vase
on the top of the escritoire 2 the bruise in the wallpaper where, on the
door being thrown open widely, the china handle had always hit the wall.
The piano, having gone away to be stored, had left what looked like claw
marks on its part of the parquet.3 Though not much dust had seeped in,
each object wore a film of another kind and, the only ventilation being
the chimney, the whole drawing room smelled of the cold hearth. Mrs. Drover
put
down
her
parcels
on the
escritoire
and
left
the
room
to
proceed
upstairs the things she wanted were in a bedroom chest.
She had been anxious to see how the house wasthe part-time caretaker
she shared with some neighbors was away this week on his holiday, known to
be not yet back. At the best of times he did not look in often, and she
was
never
sure
that
she
trusted him.
There
were
some
cracks
in
the
structure, left by the last bombing, on which she was anxious to keep an
eye. Not that one could do anything
dead
A shaft of refracted daylight now lay across the hall. She stopped
and stared at the hall tableon this lay a letter addressed to her.
She thought firstthen the caretaker must be back. All the same, who,
seeing the house shutttered, would have dropped a letter in at the box? It
was not a circular, it was not a bill. And the post office redirected, to
the address in the country, everything for her that came through the post.
The caretaker (even if he were back) did not know she was due in London
todayher call here had been planned to be a surpriseso his negligence in
the manner of this letter, leaving it to wait in the dust, annoyed her.
Annoyed, she picked up the letter, which bore no stamp. But it cannot be
important, or they would know . . . She took the letter rapidly upstairs
with her, without a stop to look at the writing till she let in light.
The room looked over the garden and sharpened and lowered, the trees and
rank lawns seemed already to smoke with dark. Her reluctance to look again
at
the
letter
came
from
the
fact
that
she
felt
intruded
uponand
by
someone contemptuous of her ways. However, in the tenseness preceding the
fall of rain she read it: It was a few lines.
Dear Kathleen: You will not have forgotten that today
and the day we said. The years have gone by at once
is our anniversary,
slowly and fast. In
30
view of the fact that nothing has changed, I shall

your promise. I was sorry to see you leave London,
you would be back in time. You
may
expect
me,
therefore,
at
the
hour
arranged.
rely upon you to

but was satisfied
Until
then
keep
that
K.
Mrs. Drover looked for the date: It was todays. She dropped the letter
onto the bedsprings, then picked it up to see the writing againher lips,
beneath the remains of lipstick, beginning to go white. She felt so much
the change in her own face that she sent to the mirror, polished a clear
patch
in
it,
and
looked
at
once
urgently
and
stealthily
in. She
was
confronted by a woman of forty-four, with eyes starting out under a hat
brim that had been rather carelessly pulled down. She had not put on any
more powder since she left the shop where she ate her solitary tea. 4 The
pearls her husband had given her on their marriage hung loose round her now
rather thinner throat, slipping in the V of the pink wool jumper her sister
knitted last autumn as they sat round the fire. Mrs. Drovers most normal
expression was one of controlled worry but of assent. Since the birth of
the third of her little boys, attended by a quite serious illness, she had
had an intermittent muscular flicker to the left of her mouth, but in spite
of this she could always sustain a manner that was at once energetic and
calm.
Turning from her own face as precipitously as she had gone to meet
it, she went to the chest where the things were, unlocked it, threw up the
lid, and knelt to search. But as rain began to come crashing down she
could not keep from looking over her shoulder at the stripped bed on which
the letter lay. Behind the blanket of rain the clock of the church that
still stood struck sixwith rapidly heightening apprehension she counted each
of the slow strokes. The hour arranged . . . My God, she said, what
hour? How should I . . . ? After twentyfive years . . .
The
young
girl
talking
to
the
soldier
in
the
garden
had
not
ever
completely seen his face. It was dark they were saying goodbye under a
tree. Now and thenfor it felt, from not seeing him at this intense moment,
as though she had never seen him at allshe verified his presence for these
few
moments
longer
by
putting
out
a
hand,
which
he
each
time pressed,
without very much kindness, and painfully, on to one of the breast buttons
of
his uniform.
That
cut
of
the
button
on
the
palm
of
her hand was,
principally, what she was to carry away. This was so near the end of a
leave from France that she could only wish him already gone. It was August
1916.
Being
not
kissed,
being
drawn
away
from
and
looked at
intimidated
Kathleen
till
she
imagined
spectral
glitters
in
the
place
of
his
eyes.
Turning away
and
looking
back
up
the
lawn
she
saw,
through
branches of
trees, the drawing-room window alight: She caught a breath for the moment
when she could go running back there into the safe arms of her mother and
sister, and cry: What shall I do, what shall I do? He has gone.
Hearing
Youre
Not
so
her catch her breath, her fianc

going away such a long way.
far
You dont
wassuppose
that.
as
you
think. I
dont
have to, he said. You

youI mean, suppose.
said,
without
feeling:
Cold?
understand?
will.
I shall be with you, he said,

You need do nothing but wait.
You
sooner
know
what
or
later.
we
You
said. But
wont
that
forget
31
Only a little more than a minute later she was free to run up the
silent lawn. Looking in through the window at her mother and sister, who
did not for the moment perceive her, she already felt that unnatural promise
drive down between her and the rest of all humankind. No other way of
having given herself could have made her feel so apart, lost and forsworn.5
She could not have plighted a more sinister troth.6
Kathleen behaved well when, some months later, her fianc was reported
missing, presumed killed. Her family not only supported her but were able to
praise her courage without stint because they could not regret, as a husband
for her, the man they knew almost nothing about. They hoped she would, in
a
year
or
two,
console
herselfand
had it
been
only
a
question
of
consolation things might have gone much straighter ahead. But her trouble,
behind just a little grief, was a complete dislocation from everything. She
did not reject other lovers, for these failed to appear. For years, she
failed
to
attract
menand with
the
approach
of
her
thirties
she
became
natural enough to share her familys anxiousness on the score. She began to
put herself out,7
to wonder, and at thirty-two she was very greatly relieved
to find herself being courted by William Drover. She married him, and the
two of them settled down in the quiet, arboreal8
part of Kensington: In
this house the years piled up, her children were born, and they all lived
till they were driven out by the bombs of the next war. Her movements as
Mrs. Drover were circumscribed, and she dismissed any idea that they were
still watched.
As things weredead or living the letter writer sent her only a
threat. Unable, for some minutes, to go on kneeling with her back exposed
to the empty room, Mrs. Drover rose from the chest to sit on an upright
chair whose back was firmly against the wall. The desuetude 9 of her former
bedroom, her married London homes whole air of being a cracked cup from
which memory, with its reassuring power, had either evaporated or leaked
away, made a crisisand at just this crisis the letter writer had,
knowledgeably, struck. The hollowness of the house this evening cancelled
years on years of voices, habits, and steps. Through the shut windows she
only heard rain fall on the roofs around. To rally herself, she said she
was in a moodand for two or three seconds shutting her eyes, told herself
that she had imagined the letter. But she opened themthere it lay on the
bed.
On the supernatural side of the letters entrance she was not
permitting her mind to dwell. Who, in London, knew she meant to call at
the house today? Evidently, however, that had been known. The caretaker, had
he come back, had had no cause to expect her: He would have taken the
letter in his pocket, to forward it, at his own time, through the post.
There was no other sign that the caretaker had been inbut, if not?
Letters dropped in at doors of deserted houses do not fly or walk
to tables in halls. They do not sit on the dust of empty tables with the
air of certainty that they will be found. There is needed some human hand
but nobody bot the caretaker had a key. Under the circumstances she did not
care to consider, a house can be entered without a key. It was possible
that she was not alone now. She might be being waited for, downstairs.
Waited foruntil when? Until the hour arranged. At least that was not six
oclock: Six has struck.
She rose from the chair and went over and locked the door. The thing
was, to get out. To fly? No, not that: She had to catch her train. As a
woman whose utter dependability was the keystone of her family life, she
was not willing to return to the country, to her husband, her little boys,
and her sister, without the objects she had come up to fetch. Resuming her
work at the chest she set about making up a number of parcels in a rapid,
fumbling-decisive way. These, with her shopping parcels, would be too much to
carry these meant a taxiat the thought of the taxi her heart went up and
her normal breathing resumed. I will ring up the taxi the taxi cannot
come too soon: I shall hear the taxi out there running its engine, till I
32
walk calmly down to it through the hall. Ill ring upBut no: the telephone
is cut off . . . She tugged at a knot she had tied wrong.
The idea of flight . . . He was never kind to me, not really. I
dont remember him kind at all. Mother said he never considered me. He was
set on me, that was what it wasnot love. Not love, not meaning a person
well. What did he do, to make me promise like that? I cant rememberBut
she found that she could.
She remembered with such dreadful acuteness that the twenty-five years
since then dissolved like smoke and she instinctively looked for the weal1 0
left by the button on the palm of her hand. She remembered not only all
that he said and did but the complete suspension of her existence during
that August week. I was not myselfthey all told me so at the time. She
rememberedbut with one white burning blank as where acid has dropped on a
photograph: Under no conditions could she remember his face.
So, wherever he may be waiting, I shall not know him. You have no
time to run from a face you do not expect.
The thing was to get to the taxi before any clock struck what could
be the hour. She would slip down the street and round the side of the
square to where the square gave on the main road. She would return in the
taxi, safe, to her own door, and bring the solid driver into the house
with her to pick up the parcels from room to room. The idea of the taxi
driver made her decisive, bold: She unlocked her door, went to the top of
the staircase, and listened down.
She heard nothingbut while she was hearing nothing the pass 11 air
of the staircase was disturbed by a draft that traveled up to her face. It
emanated from the basement: Down where a door or window was being opened by
someone who chose this moment to leave the house.
The rain had stopped the pavements steamily shone as Mrs. Drover let
herself out by inches from her own front door into the empty street. The
unoccupied
houses
opposite continued
to
meet
her
look
with
their
damaged
stare. Making toward the thoroughfare and the taxi, she tried not to keep
looking behind. Indeed, the silence was so intenseone of those creeks of
London silence exaggerated this summer by the damage of warthat no tread
could have gained on hers unheard. Where her street debouched 12 on the
square where people went on living, she grew conscious of, and checked, her
unnatural pace. Across the open end of the square, two buses impassively
passed
each
other:
Women,
a perambulator,1 3
cyclists,
a
man
wheeling
a
barrow signalized, once again, the ordinary flow of life. At the squares
most
populous
corner
should
beand
wasthe
short
taxi rank.
This
evening,
only
one
taxibut
this,
although
it
presented
its
blank
rump, appeared
already to alertly waiting for her. Indeed, without looking round the driver
started his engine as she panted up from behind and put her hand on the
door. As she did so, the clock struck seven. The taxi faced the main road:
To make the trip back to her house it would have to turnshe had settled
back
on
the
seat
and
the
taxi had
turned before
she,
surprised
by
its
knowing
movement,
recollected
that
she
had
not
said where.
She
leaned
forward to scratch at the class panel that divided the drivers head from
her own.
The driver braked to what was almost a stop, turned round, and slid
the glass panel back: The jolt of this flung Mrs. Drover forward till her
face was almost into the glass. Through the aperture driver and passenger,
not six inches between them, remained for an eternity eye to eye. Mrs.
Drovers mouth hung open for some seconds before she could issue her first
scream. After that she continued to scream freely and to beat with her
gloved hands on the glass all round as the taxi, accelerating without
mercy, made off with her into the hinterland of deserted streets.
33
QUESTIONS:
1. Did you like the story?
2. What is the setting of The Demon Lover
3. From what point of view is the story being told?
4. Some critics have stated that the structurally unsound house serves as a symbol
of Mrs. Drovers mental state, Explain in detail why agree or disagree with this
statement.
5. One possible, decidedly psychological, interpretation of The Demon Lover is

that Mrs. Drovers experience is a hallucination. Another way of looking at the
story is to consider it a horror tale. Which interpretation do you favor, or,
you have another? Support your interpretation with evidence from the text.
6. Some critics have stated that the soldier-lover becomes a symbol for all war; an
everyman with an unknown face, whose promise to be back takes on a frightening
significance in wartime London. Explain in detail why agree or disagree with
this statement.)
34
7. Analyze the following fragment from The Demon Lover and identify the literary
devices used by Bowen:
I shall be with you, he said, sooner or later. You wont forget that. You need do
nothing but wait. Only a little more than a minute later she was free to run up the
silent lawn. .. In this house the years piled up, her children were born and they all
lived till they were driven out by the bombs of the next war. Her movements as Mrs.
Drover were circumscribed, and she dismissed any idea that they were still watched.
8. Explain in your own words what the theme of The Demon Lover is.
35
Saki
The Open Window
"My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel," said a very self-possessed young lady of
fifteen; "in the meantime you must try and put up with me."
Framton Nuttel endeavoured to say the correct something which should duly flatter
the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that was to come. Privately
he doubted more than ever whether these formal visits on a succession of total
strangers would do much towards helping the nerve cure which he was supposed to be
undergoing.
"I know how it will be," his sister had said when he was preparing to migrate to
this rural retreat; "you will bury yourself down there and not speak to a living soul,
and your nerves will be worse than ever from moping. I shall just give you letters of
introduction to all the people I know there. Some of them, as far as I can remember,
were quite nice."
Framton wondered whether Mrs. Sappleton, the lady to whom he was presenting one of
the letters of introduction came into the nice division.
"Do you know many of the people round here?" asked the niece, when she judged that
they had had sufficient silent communion.
"Hardly a soul," said Framton. "My sister was staying here, at the rectory, you
know, some four years ago, and she gave me letters of introduction to some of the
people here."
He made the last statement in a tone of distinct regret.
"Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?" pursued the self-possessed
young lady.
"Only her name and address," admitted the caller. He was wondering whether Mrs.
Sappleton was in the married or widowed state. An undefinable something about the room
seemed to suggest masculine habitation.
"Her great tragedy happened just three years ago," said the child; "that would be
since your sister's time."
"Her tragedy?" asked Framton; somehow in this restful country spot tragedies
seemed out of place.
"You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October afternoon," said
the niece, indicating a large French window that opened on to a lawn.
"It is quite warm for the time of the year," said Framton; "but has that window
got anything to do with the tragedy?"
"Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her two young
brothers went off for their day's shooting. They never came back. In crossing the moor
to their favourite snipe-shooting ground they were all three engulfed in a treacherous
piece of bog. It had been that dreadful wet summer, you know, and places that were safe
in other years gave way suddenly without warning. Their bodies were never recovered.
That was the dreadful part of it." Here the child's voice lost its self-possessed note
and became falteringly human. "Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back
someday, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that
36
window just as they used to do.

That is why the window is kept open every evening till it is quite dusk. Poor dear
aunt, she has often told me how they went out, her husband with his white waterproof
coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing 'Bertie, why do you
bound?' as he always did to tease her, because she said it got on her nerves. Do you
know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that
they will all walk in through that window - "
She broke off with a little shudder. It was a relief to Framton when the aunt
bustled into the room with a whirl of apologies for being late in making her
appearance.
"I hope Vera has been amusing you?" she said.
"She has been very interesting," said Framton.
"I hope you don't mind the open window," said Mrs. Sappleton briskly; "my husband
and brothers will be home directly from shooting, and they always come in this way.
They've been out for snipe in the marshes today, so they'll make a fine mess over my
poor carpets. So like you menfolk, isn't it?"
<
>
She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds, and the
prospects for duck in the winter. To Framton it was all purely horrible. He made a
desperate but only partially successful effort to turn the talk on to a less ghastly
topic, he was conscious that his hostess was giving him only a fragment of her
attention, and her eyes were constantly straying past him to the open window and the
lawn beyond. It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that he should have paid his
visit on this tragic anniversary.
"The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental excitement,
and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical exercise," announced
Framton, who laboured under the tolerably widespread delusion that total strangers and
chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one's ailments and infirmities,
their cause and cure. "On the matter of diet they are not so much in agreement," he
continued.
"No?" said Mrs. Sappleton, in a voice which only replaced a yawn at the last
moment. Then she suddenly brightened into alert attention - but not to what Framton was
saying.
"Here they are at last!" she cried. "Just in time for tea, and don't they look as
if they were muddy up to the eyes!"
Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look intended to
convey sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring out through the open window
with a dazed horror in her eyes. In a chill shock of nameless fear Framton swung round
in his seat and looked in the same direction.
In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn towards the
window, they all carried guns under their arms, and one of them was additionally
burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders. A tired brown spaniel kept close at
their heels. Noiselessly they neared the house, and then a hoarse young voice chanted
out of the dusk: "I said, Bertie, why do you bound?"
Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall door, the gravel drive, and
the front gate were dimly noted stages in his headlong retreat. A cyclist coming along
the road had to run into the hedge to avoid imminent collision.
37
"Here we are, my dear," said the bearer of the white mackintosh, coming in through
the window, "fairly muddy, but most of it's dry. Who was that who bolted out as we came
up?"
"A most extraordinary man, a Mr. Nuttel," said Mrs. Sappleton; "could only talk
about his illnesses, and dashed off without a word of goodby or apology when you
arrived. One would think he had seen a ghost."
"I expect it was the spaniel," said the niece calmly; "he told me he had a horror
of dogs. He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges by a
pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures
snarling and grinning and foaming just above him. Enough to make anyone lose their
nerve."
Romance at short notice was her speciality.
38
Topics for Further Study

1.Did you like the story? Why?
2. What does the line mean "Romance at short notice was her speciality"?
3. What different things does the open window in the story symbolize to the characters?
4. Give some other examples of symbols that mean different things to different people.
5. Has the country provided Mr. Nuttel with a respite from his nervous condition? What
does this say about the nature of his nervous condition?
6. When and how do readers know that Mrs. Sappleton's niece has been lying? Once it is
revealed that she has been lying, can you find anything earlier in the story that, in
retrospect, might seem like a clue to her deception?
7. Try to formulate a theory about why Mrs. Sappleton's niece would behave in this way.
Is she sinister? Bored? Both?
39
Frank OConnor
My Oedipus Complex
Activity one: Discuss about Oedipus and Electras Complex

Father was in the army all through the war the first war, I mean so, up to the age
of five, I never saw much of him, and what I saw did not worry me. Sometimes I woke and
there was a big figure in khaki peering down at me in the candlelight. Sometimes in the
early morning I heard the slamming of the front door and the clatter of nailed boots
down the cobbles of the lane. These were Fathers entrances and exits. Like Santa Claus
he came and went mysteriously.
In fact, I rather liked his visits, though it was an uncomfortable squeeze between
Mother and him when I got into the big bed in the early morning. He smoked, which gave
him a pleasant musty smell, and shaved, an operation of astounding interest. Each time
he left a trail of souvenirs model tanks and Gurkha knives with handles made of
bullet cases, and German helmets and cap badges and button sticks, and all sorts of
military equipment carefully stowed away in a long box on top of the wardrobe, in
case they ever came in handy. There was a bit of the magpie about Father; he expected
everything to come in handy. When his back was turned, Mother let me get a chair and
rummage through his treasures. She didnt seem to think so highly of them as he did.
The war was the most peaceful period of my life. The window of my attic faced
southeast. My mother had curtained it, but that had small effect. I always woke with
the first light and, with all the responsibilities of the previous day melted, feeling
myself rather like the sun, ready to illumine and rejoice. Life never seemed so simple
and clear and full of possibilities as then. I put my feet out from under the clothes
I called them Mrs. Left and Mrs. Right and invented dramatic situations for them in
which they discussed the problems of the day. At least Mrs. Right did; she was very
demonstrative, but I hadnt the same control of Mrs. Left, so she mostly contented
herself with nodding agreement.
They discussed what Mother and I should do during the day, what Santa Claus should give
a fellow for Christmas, and what steps should be taken to brighten the home. There was
that little matter of the baby, for instance. Mother and I could never agree about
that. Ours was the only house in the terrace without a new baby, and Mother said we
couldnt afford one till Father came back from the war because they cost seventeen and
six.
That showed how simple she was. The Geneys up the road had a baby, and everyone knew
they couldnt afford seventeen and six. It was probably a cheap baby, and Mother wanted
something really good, but I felt she was too exclusive. The Geneys baby would have
done us fine.
Having settled my plans for the day, I got up, put a chair under the attic window, and
lifted the frame high enough to stick out my head. The window overlooked the front
gardens of the terrace behind ours, and beyond these it looked over a deep valley to
the tall, red brick houses terraced up the opposite hillside, which were all still in
shadow, while those at our side of the valley were all lit up, though with long strange
shadows that made them seem unfamiliar; rigid and painted.
After that I went into Mothers room and climbed into the big bed. She woke and I began
to tell her of my schemes. By this time, though I never seemed to have noticed it, I
was petrified in my nightshirt, and I thawed as I talked until, the last frost melted,
I fell asleep beside her and woke again only when I heard her below in the kitchen,
making the breakfast.
40
After breakfast we went into town heard Mass at St. Augustines and said a prayer for
Father, and did the shopping. If the afternoon was fine we either went for a walk in
the country or a visit to Mothers great friend in the convent, Mother Saint Dominic.
Mother had them all praying for Father, and every night, going to bed, I asked God to
send him back safe from the war to us. Little, indeed, did I know what I was praying
for!
One morning, I got into the big bed, and there, sure enough, was Father in his usual
Santa Claus manner, but later, instead of uniform, he put on his best blue suit, and
Mother was as pleased as anything. I saw nothing to be pleased about, because, out of
uniform, Father was altogether less interesting, but she only beamed, and explained
that our prayers had been answered, and off we went to Mass to thank God for having
brought Father safely home.
The irony of it! That very day when he came in to dinner he took off his boots and put
on his slippers, donned the dirty old cap he wore about the house to save him from
colds, crossed his legs, and began to talk gravely to Mother, who looked anxious.
Naturally, I disliked her looking anxious, because it destroyed her good looks, so I
interrupted him.
"Just a moment, Larry!" she said gently. This was only what she said when we had boring
visitors, so I attached no importance to it and went on talking.
"Do be quiet, Larry!" she said impatiently. "Dont you hear me talking to Daddy?"
This was the first time I had heard those ominous words, "talking to Daddy," and I
couldnt help feeling that if this was how God answered prayers, he couldnt listen to
them very attentively.
"Why are you talking to Daddy?" I asked with as great a show of indifference as I could
muster.
"Because Daddy and I have business to discuss. Now, dont interrupt again!"
In the afternoon, at Mothers request, Father took me for a walk. This time we went
into town instead of out in the country, and I thought at first, in my usual optimistic
way, that it might be an improvement. It was nothing of the sort. Father and I had
quite different notions of a walk in town. He had no proper interest in trams, ships,
and horses, and the only thing that seemed to divert him was talking to fellows as old
as himself. When I wanted to stop he simply went on, dragging me behind him by the
hand; when he wanted to stop I had no alternative but to do the same. I noticed that it
seemed to be a sign that he wanted to stop for a long time whenever he leaned against a
wall. The second time I saw him do it I got wild. He seemed to be settling himself
forever. I pulled him by the coat and trousers, but, unlike Mother who, if you were too
persistent, got into a wax and said: "Larry, if you dont behave yourself, Ill give
you a good slap," Father had an extraordinary capacity for amiable inattention. I sized
him up and wondered would I cry, but he seemed to be too remote to be annoyed even by
that. Really, it was like going for a walk with a mountain! He either ignored the
wrenching and pummeling entirely, or else glanced down with a grin of amusement from
his peak. I had never met anyone so absorbed in himself as he seemed.
At teatime, "talking to Daddy" began again, complicated this time by the fact that he
had an evening paper, and every few minutes he put it down and told Mother something
new out of it. I felt this was foul play. Man for man, I was prepared to compete with
him any time for Mothers attention, but when he had it all made up for him by other
people it left me no chance. Several times I tried to change the subject without
success.
"You must be quiet while Daddy is reading, Larry," Mother said impatiently.
It was clear that she either genuinely liked talking to Father better than talking to
me, or else that he had some terrible hold on her which made her afraid to admit the
truth.
"Mummy," I said that night when she was tucking me up, "do you think if I prayed hard
God would send Daddy back to the war?"
She seemed to think about that for a moment.
"No, dear," she said with a smile. "I dont think He would."
41
"Why wouldnt He, Mummy?"

"Because there isnt a war any longer, dear."
"But, Mummy, couldnt God make another war, if He liked?"
"He wouldnt like to, dear. Its not God who makes wars, but bad people."
"Oh!" I said. I was disappointed about that. I began to think that God wasnt quite
what He was cracked up to be.
Next morning I woke at my usual hour, feeling like a bottle of champagne. I put out my
feet and invented a long conversation in which Mrs. Right talked of the trouble she had
with her own father till she put him in the Home. I didnt quite know what the Home was
but it sounded the right place for Father. Then I got my chair and stuck my head out of
the attic window. Dawn was just breaking, with a guilty air that made me feel I had
caught it in the act. My head bursting with stories and schemes, I stumbled in next
door, and in the half-darkness scrambled into the big bed. There was no room at
Mothers side so I had to get between her and Father. For the time being I had
forgotten about him, and for several minutes I sat bolt upright, racking my brains to
know what I could do with him. He was taking up more than his fair share of the bed,
and I couldnt get comfortable, so I gave him several kicks that made him grunt and
stretch. He made room all right, though. Mother waked and felt for me. I settled back
comfortably in the warmth of the bed with my thumb in my mouth.
"Mummy!" I hummed, loudly and contentedly.
"Sssh! dear," she whispered. "Dont wake Daddy!"
This was a new development, which threatened to be even more serious than "talking to
Daddy." Life without my early-morning conferences was unthinkable.
"Why?" I asked severely.
"Because poor Daddy is tired." This seemed to me a quite inadequate reason, and I was
sickened by the sentimentality of her "poor Daddy." I never liked that sort of gush; it
always struck me as insincere.
"Oh!" I said lightly. Then in my most winning tone: "Do you know where I want to go
with you today, Mummy?"
"No, dear," she sighed.
"I want to go down the Glen and fish for thornybacks with my new net, and then I want
to go out to the Fox and Hounds, and "
"Dont-wake-Daddy!" she hissed angrily, clapping her hand across my mouth.
But it was too late. He was awake, or nearly so. He grunted and reached for the
matches. Then he stared incredulously at his watch.
"Like a cup of tea, dear?" asked Mother in a meek, hushed voice I had never heard her
use before. It sounded almost as though she were afraid.
"Tea?" he exclaimed indignantly. "Do you know what the time is?"
"And after that I want to go up the Rathcooney Road," I said loudly, afraid Id forget
something in all those interruptions.
"Go to sleep at once, Larry!" she said sharply.
I began to snivel. I couldnt concentrate, the way that pair went on, and smothering my
early-morning schemes was like burying a family from the cradle. Father said nothing,
but lit his pipe and sucked it, looking out into the shadows without minding Mother or
me. I knew he was mad. Every time I made a remark Mother hushed me irritably. I was
mortified. I felt it wasnt fair there was even something sinister in it. Every time I
had pointed out to her the waste of making two beds when we could both sleep in one,
she had told me it was healthier like that, and now here was this man, this stranger,
sleeping with her without the least regard for her health! He got up early and made
tea, but though he brought Mother a cup he brought none for me.
"Mummy," I shouted, "I want a cup of tea, too."
"Yes, dear," she said patiently. "You can drink from Mummys saucer."
That settled it. Either Father or I would have to leave the house. I didnt want to
drink from Mothers saucer I wanted to be treated as an equal in my own home, so, just
to spite her, I drank it all and left none for her. She took that quietly, too. But
that night when she was putting me to bed she said gently:
"Larry, I want you to promise me something."
42
"What is it?" I asked.

"Not to come in and disturb poor Daddy in the morning. Promise?"
"Poor Daddy" again! I was becoming suspicious of everything involving that quite
impossible man.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because poor Daddy is worried and tired and he doesnt sleep well."
"Why doesnt he, Mummy?"
"Well, you know, dont you, that while he was at the war Mummy got the pennies from the
post office?"
"From Miss MacCarthy?"
"Thats right. But now, you see, Miss MacCarthy hasnt any more pennies, so Daddy must
go out and find us some. You know what would happen if he couldnt?"
"No," I said, "tell us."
"Well, I think we might have to go out and beg for them like the poor old woman on
Fridays. We wouldnt like that, would we?"
"No," I agreed. "We wouldnt."
"So youll promise not to come in and wake him?"
"Promise."
Mind you, I meant that. I knew pennies were a serious matter, and I was all against
having to go out and beg like the old woman on Fridays. Mother laid out all my toys in
a complete ring round the bed so that, whatever way I got out, I was bound to fall over
one of them. When I woke I remembered my promise all right. I got up and sat on the
floor and played for hours, it seemed to me. Then I got my chair and looked out the
attic window for more hours. I wished it was time for Father to wake; I wished someone
would make me a cup of tea. I didnt feel in the least like the sun instead, I was
bored and so very, very cold! I simply longed for the warmth and depth of the big
feather bed. At last I could stand it no longer. I went into the next room. As there
was still no room at Mothers side I climbed over her and she woke with a start.
"Larry," she whispered, gripping my arm very tightly, "what did you promise?"
"But I did, Mummy," I wailed, caught in the very act. "I was quiet for ever so long."
"Oh, dear, and youre perished!" she said sadly, feeling me all over. "Now, if I let
you stay will you promise not to talk?"
"But I want to talk, Mummy," I wailed.
"That has nothing to do with it," she said with a firmness that was new to me. "Daddy
wants to sleep. Now, do you understand that?"
I understood it only too well. I wanted to talk, he wanted to sleep whose house was
it, anyway?
"Mummy," I said with equal firmness, "I think it would be healthier for Daddy to sleep
in his own bed."
That seemed to stagger her, because she said nothing for a while.
"Now, once for all," she went on, "youre to be perfectly quiet or go back to your own
bed. Which is it to be?"
The injustice of it got me down. I had convicted her out of her own mouth of
inconsistency and unreasonableness, and she hadnt even attempted to reply. Full of
spite, I gave Father a kick, which she didnt notice but which made him grunt and open
his eyes in alarm.
"What time is it?" he asked in a panic-stricken voice, not looking at Mother but at the
door, as if he saw someone there.
"Its early yet," she replied soothingly. "Its only the child. Go to sleep again....
Now, Larry," she added, getting out of bed, "youve wakened Daddy and you must go
back."
This time, for all her quiet air, I knew she meant it, and knew that my principal
rights and privileges were as good as lost unless I asserted them at once. As she
lifted me, I gave a screech, enough to wake the dead, not to mind Father.
He groaned. "That damn child! Doesnt he ever sleep?"
"Its only a habit, dear," she said quietly, though I could see she was vexed.
"Well, its time he got out of it," shouted Father, beginning to heave in the bed. He
suddenly gathered all the bedclothes about him, turned to the wall, and then looked
43
back over his shoulder with nothing showing only two small, spiteful, dark eyes. The
man looked very wicked. To open the bedroom door, Mother had to let me down, and I
broke free and dashed for the farthest corner, screeching.
Father sat bolt upright in bed. "Shut up, you little puppy," he said in a choking
voice.
I was so astonished that I stopped screeching. Never, never had anyone spoken to me in
that tone before. I looked at him incredulously and saw his face convulsed with rage.
It was only then that I fully realized how God had codded me, listening to my prayers
for the safe return of this monster.
"Shut up, you!" I bawled, beside myself.
"Whats that you said?" shouted Father, making a wild leap out of the bed.
"Mick, Mick!" cried Mother. "Dont you see the child isnt used to you?"
"I see hes better fed than taught," snarled Father, waving his arms wildly. "He wants
his bottom smacked."
All his previous shouting was as nothing to these obscene words referring to my person.
They really made my blood boil.
"Smack your own!" I screamed hysterically. "Smack your own! Shut up! Shut up!"
At this he lost his patience and let fly at me. He did it with the lack of conviction
youd expect of a man under Mothers horrified eyes, and it ended up as a mere tap, but
the sheer indignity of being struck at all by a stranger, a total stranger who had
cajoled his way back from the war into our big bed as a result of my innocent
intercession, made me completely dotty. I shrieked and shrieked, and danced in my bare
feet, and Father, looking awkward and hairy in nothing but a short gray army shirt,
glared down at me like a mountain out for murder. I think it must have been then that I
realized he was jealous too. And there stood Mother in her nightdress, looking as if
her heart was broken between us. I hoped she felt as she looked. It seemed to me that
she deserved it all.
From that morning out my life was a hell. Father and I were enemies, open and avowed.
We conducted a series of skirmishes against one another, he trying to steal my time
with Mother and I his. When she was sitting on my bed, telling me a story, he took to
looking for some pair of old boots which he alleged he had left behind him at the
beginning of the war. While he talked to Mother I played loudly with my toys to show my
total lack of concern.
He created a terrible scene one evening when he came in from work and found me at his
box, playing with his regimental badges, Gurkha knives and button sticks. Mother got up
and took the box from me.
"You mustnt play with Daddys toys unless he lets you, Larry," she said severely.
"Daddy doesnt play with yours."
For some reason Father looked at her as if she had struck him and then turned away with
a scowl. "Those are not toys," he growled, taking down the box again to see had I
lifted anything. "Some of those curios are very rare and valuable."
But as time went on I saw more and more how he managed to alienate Mother and me. What
made it worse was that I couldnt grasp his method or see what attraction he had for
Mother. In every possible way he was less winning than I. He had a common accent and
made noises at his tea. I thought for a while that it might be the newspapers she was
interested in, so I made up bits of news of my own to read to her. Then I thought it
might be the smoking, which I personally thought attractive, and took his pipes and
went round the house dribbling into them till he caught me. I even made noises at my
tea, but Mother only told me I was disgusting. It all seemed to hinge round that
unhealthy habit of sleeping together, so I made a point of dropping into their bedroom
and nosing round, talking to myself, so that they wouldnt know I was watching them,
but they were never up to anything that I could see. In the end it beat me. It seemed
to depend on being grown-up and giving people rings, and I realized Id have to wait.
But at the same time I wanted him to see that I was only waiting, not giving up the
fight.
44
One evening when he was being particularly obnoxious, chattering away well above my
head, I let him have it.
"Mummy," I said, "do you know what Im going to do when I grow up?"
"No, dear," she replied. "What?"
"Im going to marry you," I said quietly.
Father gave a great guffaw out of him, but he didnt take me in. I knew it must only be
pretence.
And Mother, in spite of everything, was pleased. I felt she was probably relieved to
know that one day Fathers hold on her would be broken.
"Wont that be nice?" she said with a smile.
"Itll be very nice," I said confidently. "Because were going to have lots and lots of
babies."
"Thats right, dear," she said placidly. "I think well have one soon, and then youll
have plenty of company."
I was no end pleased about that because it showed that in spite of the way she gave in
to Father she still considered my wishes. Besides, it would put the Geneys in their
place. It didnt turn out like that, though. To begin with, she was very preoccupied
I supposed about where she would get the seventeen and six and though Father took to
staying out late in the evenings it did me no particular good. She stopped taking me
for walks, became as touchy as blazes, and smacked me for nothing at all. Sometimes I
wished Id never mentioned the confounded baby I seemed to have a genius for bringing
calamity on myself.
And calamity it was! Sonny arrived in the most appalling hulla-baloo even that much
he couldnt do without a fuss and from the first moment I disliked him. He was a
difficult child so far as I was concerned he was always difficult and demanded far
too much attention. Mother was simply silly about him, and couldnt see when he was
only showing off. As company he was worse than useless. He slept all day, and I had to
go round the house on tiptoe to avoid waking him. It wasnt any longer a question of
not waking Father. The slogan now was "Dont-wake-Sonny!" I couldnt understand why the
child wouldnt sleep at the proper time, so whenever Mothers back was turned I woke
him. Sometimes to keep him awake I pinched him as well. Mother caught me at it one day
and gave me a most unmerciful flaking.
One evening, when Father was coming in from work, I was playing trains in the front
garden. I let on not to notice him; instead, I pretended to be talking to myself, and
said in a loud voice: "If another bloody baby comes into this house, Im going out."
Father stopped dead and looked at me over his shoulder. "Whats that you said?" he
asked sternly.
""I was only talking to myself," I replied, trying to conceal my panic. "Its private."
He turned and went in without a word.
Mind you, I intended it as a solemn warning, but its effect was quite different. Father
started being quite nice to me. I could understand that, of course. Mother was quite
sickening about Sonny. Even at mealtimes shed get up and gawk at him in the cradle
with an idiotic smile, and tell Father to do the same. He was always polite about it,
but he looked so puzzled you could see he didnt know what she was talking about. He
complained of the way Sonny cried at night, but she only got cross and said that Sonny
never cried except when there was something up with him which was a flaming lie,
because Sonny never had anything up with him, and only cried for attention. It was
really painful to see how simpleminded she was.
Father wasnt attractive, but he had a fine intelligence. He saw through Sonny, and now
he knew that I saw through him as well. One night I woke with a start. There was
someone beside me in the bed. For one wild moment I felt sure it must be Mother, having
come to her senses and left Father for good, but then I heard Sonny in convulsions in
the next room, and Mother saying: "There! There! There!" and I knew it wasnt she. It
was Father. He was lying beside me, wide-awake, breathing hard and apparently as mad as
hell. After a while it came to me what he was mad about. It was his turn now. After
45
turning me out of the big bed, he had been turned out

consideration now for anyone but that poisonous pup, Sonny.
himself.
Mother
had
no
I couldnt help feeling sorry for Father. I had been through it all myself, and even at
that age I was magnanimous. I began to stroke him down and say: "There! There!"
He wasnt exactly responsive. "Arent you asleep either?" he snarled.
"Ah, come on and put your arm around us, cant you?" I said, and he did, in a sort of
way. Gingerly, I suppose, is how youd describe it. He was very bony but better than
nothing.
At Christmas he went out of his way to buy me a really nice model railway.
QUESTIONS:
1. Did you like the story? Explain your answer.
2. How is the setting of the story related to the protagonists adventure?
3. Indicate the literary device that is used in each numbered quotation from My
Oedipus Complex"
_________________________. The war was the most peaceful period of my life.
_________________________. Ours was the only house without a new baby, and Mother said
we couldnt afford one till Father came back from the war
________________________3. And there stood Mother looking as if her heart was broken
between us
_________________________4. The window overlooked the front gardens of the terrace
behind ours, and beyond theses it looked over a deep valley to the tall, red-brick
houses terraced up the opposite hillside, which were all still in shadow
4. In what ways is this story universal and particular at the same time?
5. What event finally resolves the conflict between Larry and his father?
46
6. What ephiphany does the protagonist go through?
7. The story is full of comic irony. Find some of Larrys remarks that show this
device.
8. How does the end of the story indicate that the Oedipal stage is over?
9. Modern writers like Frank OConnor are particularly concerned with relationships
between people.
Look at, "My Oedipus Complex" and Rocking Horse Winner and
compare and contrast the mother-son relationship in each.
10. Explain in a complete thought the theme of the story My Oedipus Complex
47
No Witchcraft for Sale

Doris Lessing
Activity 1: Discuss
strangers or not.
about
family secrets and whether they should be revealed to
The Farquars had been childless for years when little Teddy was born; and they were
touched by the pleasure of their servants, who brought presents of fowls and eggs and
flowers to the homestead when they came to rejoice over the baby, exclaiming with
delight over his downy golden head and his blue eyes. They congratulated Mrs. Farquar
as if she had achieved a very great thing, and she felt that she hadher smile for the
lingering, admiring natives was warm and grateful.
Later, when Teddy had his first haircut, Gideon the cook picked up the soft gold tufts
from the ground, and held them reverently in his hand. Then he smiled at the little boy
and said: Little Yellow Head. That became the native name for the child. Gideon and
Teddy were great friends from the first. When Gideon had finished his work, he would
lift Teddy on his shoulders to the shade of a big tree, and play with him there,
forming curious little toys from twigs and leaves and grass, or shaping animals from
wetted soil. When Teddy learned to walk it was often Gideon who crouched before him,
clucking encouragement, finally catching him when he fell, tossing him up in the air
till they both became breathless with laughter. Mrs. Farquar was fond of the old cook
because of his love for her child.
There was no second baby and one day Gideon said: Ah, missus, missus, the Lord above
sent this one Little Yellow Head is the most good thing we have in our house. Because
of that we Mrs. Farquar felt a warm impulse toward her cook; and at the end of the
month she raised his wages. He had been with her now for several years; he was one of
the few natives who had his wife and children in the compound and never wanted to go
home to his kraal, which was some hundreds of miles away. Sometimes a small piccanin
who had been born the same time as Teddy, could be seen peering from the edge of the
bush, staring in awe at the little white boy with his miraculous fair hair and Northern
blue eyes. The two little children would gaze at each other with a wide, interested
gaze, and once Teddy put out his hand curiously to touch the black childs cheeks and
hair.
Gideon, who was watching, shook his head wonderingly, and said: Ah, missus, these are
both children, and one will grow up to be a baas, and one will be a servant and Mrs.
Farquar smiled and said sadly, Yes, Gideon, I was thinking the same. She sighed. It
is Gods will, said Gideon, who was a mission boy. The Farquars were very religious
people; and this shared feeling about God bound servant and masters even closer
together.
Teddy was about six years old when he was given a scooter, and discovered the
intoxications of speed. All day he would fly around the homestead, in and out of
flowerbeds, scattering squawking chickens and irritated dogs, finishing with a wide
dizzying arc into the kitchen door. There he would cry: Gideon, look at me! And
Gideon would laugh and say: Very clever, Little Yellow Head. Gideons youngest son,
who was now a herdsboy, came especially up from the compound to see the scooter. He was
afraid to come near it, but Teddy showed off in front of him. Piccanin, shouted
Teddy, get out of my way! And he raced in circles around the black child until he was
frightened, and fled back to the bush.
Why did you frighten him? asked Gideon, gravely reproachful.
Teddy said defiantly: Hes only a black boy, and laughed. Then, when Gideon turned
away from him without speaking, his face fell. Very soon he slipped into the house and
found an orange and brought it to Gideon, saying: This is for you. He could not bring
himself to say he was sorry but he could not bear to lose Gideons affection either.
Gideon took the orange unwillingly and sighed. Soon you will be going away to school,
Little Yellow Head, he said wonderingly, and then you will be grown up. He shook his
head gently and said, And that is how our lives go. He seemed to be putting a
distance between himself and Teddy, not because of resentment, but in the way a person
accepts something inevitable. The baby had lain in his arms and smiled up into his
face: The tiny boy had swung from his shoulders and played with him by the hour. Now
48
Gideon would not let his flesh touch the flesh of the white child. He was kind, but
there was a grave formality in his voice that made Teddy pout and sulk away. Also, it
made him into a man: With Gideon he was polite, and carried himself formally, and if he
came into the kitchen to ask for something, it was in the way a white man uses toward a
servant, expecting to be obeyed.
But on the day that Teddy came staggering into the kitchen with his fists to his eyes,
shrieking with pain, Gideon dropped the pot full of hot soup that he was holding,
rushed to the child, and forced aside his fingers. A snake! he exclaimed. Teddy had
been on his scooter, and had come to a rest with his foot on the side of a big tub of
plants. A tree snake, hanging by its tail from the roof, had spat full into his eyes.
Mrs. Farquar came running when she heard the commotion. Hell go blind, she sobbed,
holding Teddy close against her. Gideon, hell go blind! Already the eyes, with
perhaps half an hours sight left in them, were swollen up to the size of fists:
Teddys small white face was distorted by great purple oozing protuberances. Gideon
said: Wait a minute, missus, Ill get some medicine. He ran off into the bush.
Mrs. Farquar lifted the child into the house and bathed his eyes with permanganate. She
had scarcely heard Gideons words but when she saw that her remedies had no effect at
all, and remembered how she had seen natives with no sight in their eyes, because of
the spitting of a snake, she began to look for the return of her cook, remembering what
she heard of the efficacy of native herbs. She stood by the window, holding the
terrified, sobbing little boy in her arms, and peered helplessly into the bush. It was
not more than a few minutes before she saw Gideon come bounding back, and in his hand
he held a plant.
Do not be afraid, missus, said Gideon, this will cure Little Yellow Heads eyes. He
stripped the leaves from the plant, leaving a small white fleshy root. Without even
washing it, he put the root in his mouth, chewed it vigorously, and then held the
spittle there while he took the child forcibly from Mrs. Farquar. He gripped Teddy down
between his knees, and pressed the balls of his thumbs into the swollen eyes, so that
the child screamed and Mrs. Farquar cried out in protest: Gideon, Gideon! But Gideon
took no notice. He knelt over the writhing child, pushing back the puffy lids till
chinks of eyeball showed, and then he spat hard, again and again, into first one eye,
and then the other. He finally lifted Teddy gently into his mothers arms, and said:
His eyes will get better. But Mrs. Farquar was weeping with terror, and she could
hardly thank him: It was impossible to believe that Teddy could keep his sight. In a
couple of hours the swellings were gone: The eyes were inflamed and tender but Teddy
could see. Mr. and Mrs. Farquar went to Gideon in the kitchen and thanked him over and
over again. They felt helpless because of their gratitude: It seemed they could do
nothing to express it. They gave Gideon presents for his wife and children, and a big
increase in wages, but these things could not pay for Teddys now completely cured
eyes. Mrs. Farquar said: Gideon, God chose you as an instrument for His goodness, and
Gideon said: Yes, missus, God is very good.
Now, when such a thing happens on a farm, it cannot be long before everyone hears of
it. Mr. and Mrs. Farquar told their neighbors and the story was discussed from one end
of the district to the other. The bush is full of secrets. No one can live in Africa,
or at least on the veld, without learning very soon that there is an ancient wisdom of
leaf and soil and seasonand, too, perhaps most important of all, of the darker tracts
of the human mindwhich is the black mans heritage. Up and down the district people
were telling anecdotes, reminding each other of things that had happened to them.
But I saw it myself, I tell you. It was a puff-adder bite. The kaffirs arm was
swollen to the elbow, like a great shiny black bladder. He was groggy after a half a
minute. He was dying. Then suddenly a kaffir walked out of the bush with his hands full
of green stuff. He smeared something on the place, and next day my boy was back at
work, and all you could see was two small punctures in the skin.
This was the kind of tale they told. And, as always, with a certain amount of
exasperation, because while all of them knew that in the bush of Africa are waiting
valuable drugs locked in bark, in simple-looking leaves, in roots, it was impossible to
ever get the truth about them from the natives themselves.
The story eventually reached town; and perhaps it was at a sundowner party, or some
such function, that a doctor, who happened to be there, challenged it. Nonsense, he
49
said. These things get exaggerated in the telling. We are always checking up on this
kind of story, and we draw a blank every time.
Anyway, one morning there arrived a strange car at the homestead, and out stepped one
of the workers from the laboratory in town, with cases full of test tubes and
chemicals.
Mr. and Mrs. Farquar were flustered and pleased and flattered. They asked the scientist
to lunch, and they told the story all over again, for the hundredth time. Little Teddy
was there too, his blue eyes sparkling with health, to prove the truth of it. The
scientist explained how humanity might benefit if this new drug could be offered for
sale; and the Farquars were even more pleased: They were kind, simple people, who liked
to think of something good coming about because of them. But when the scientist began
talking of the money that might result, their manner showed discomfort. Their feelings
over the miracle (that was how they thought of it) were so strong and deep and
religious, that it was distasteful to them to think of money. The scientist, seeing
their faces, went back to his first point, which was the advancement of humanity. He
was perhaps a trifle perfunctory: It was not the first time he had come salting the
tail of a fabulous bush secret.
Eventually, when the meal was over, the Farquars called Gideon into their living room
and explained to him that this baas, here, was a Big Doctor from the Big City, and he
had come all that way to see Gideon. At this Gideon seemed afraid; he did not
understand; and Mrs. Farquar explained quickly that it was because of the wonderful
thing he had done with Teddys eyes that the Big Baas had come.
Gideon looked from Mrs. Farquar to Mr. Farquar, and then at the little boy, who was
showing great importance because of the occasion. At last he said grudgingly: The Big
Baas want to know what medicine I used? He spoke incredulously, as if he could not
believe his old friends could so betray him. Mr. Farquar began explaining how a useful
medicine could be made out of the root, and how it could be put on sale, and how
thousands of people, black and white, up and down the continent of Africa, could be
saved by the medicine when that spitting snake filled their eyes with poison. Gideon
listened, his eyes bent on the ground, the skin of his forehead puckering in
discomfort. When Mr. Farquar had finished he did not reply. The scientist, who all this
time had been leaning back in a big chair, sipping his coffee and smiling with
skeptical good humor, chipped in and explained all over again, in different words,
about the making of drugs and the progress of science. Also, he offered Gideon a
present.
There was silence after this further explanation, and then Gideon remarked
indifferently that he could not remember the root. His face was sullen and hostile,
even when he looked at the Farquars, whom he usually treated like old friends. They
were beginning to feel annoyed; and this feeling annulled the guilt that had been
sprung into life by Gideons accusing manner. They were beginning to feel that he was
unreasonable. But it was at that moment that they all realized he would never give in.
The magical drug would remain where it was, unknown and useless except for the tiny
scattering of Africans who had the knowledge, natives who might be digging a ditch for
the municipality in a ragged shirt and a pair of patched shorts, but who were still
born to healing, hereditary healers, being the nephews or sons of the old witch doctors
whose ugly masks and bits of bone and all the uncouth properties of magic were the
outward signs of real power and wisdom.
The Farquars might tread on that plant fifty times a day as they passed from house to
garden, from cow kraal to mealie field, but they would never know it.
But they went on persuading and arguing, with all the force of their exasperation; and
Gideon continued to say that he could not remember, or that there was no such root, or
that it was the wrong season of the year, or that it wasnt the root itself, but the
spit from his mouth that had cured Teddys eyes. He said all these things one after
another, and seemed not to care they were contradictory. He was rude and stubborn. The
Farquars could hardly recognize their gentle, lovable old servant in this ignorant,
perversely obstinate African, standing there in front of them with lowered eyes, his
hands twitching his cooks apron, repeating over and over whichever one of the stupid
refusals that first entered his head.
50
And suddenly he appeared to give in. He lifted his head, gave a long, blank angry look
at the circle of whites, who seemed to him like a circle of yelping dogs pressing
around him, and said: I will show you the root.
They walked single file away from the homestead down a kaffir path. It was a blazing
December afternoon, with the sky full of hot rain clouds. Everything was hot: The sun
was like a bronze tray whirling overhead, there was a heat shimmer over the fields, the
soil was scorching underfoot, the dusty wind blew gritty and thick and warm in their
faces. It was a terrible day, fit only for reclining on a veranda with iced drinks,
which is where they would normally have been at that hour.
From time to time, remembering that on the day of the snake it had taken ten minutes to
find the root, someone asked: Is it much further, Gideon? And Gideon would answer
over his shoulder, with angry politeness: Im looking for the root, baas. And indeed,
he would frequently bend sideways and trail his hand among the grasses with a gesture
that was insulting in its perfunctoriness. He walked them through the bush along
unknown paths for two hours, in that melting destroying heat, so that the sweat
trickled coldly down them and their heads ached. They were all quite silent: the
Farquars because they were angry, the scientist because he was being proved right
again; there was no such plant. His was a tactful silence.
At last, six miles from the house, Gideon suddenly decided they had had enough; or
perhaps his anger evaporated at that moment. He picked up, without an attempt at
looking anything but casual, a handful of blue flowers from the grass, flowers that had
been growing plentifully all down the paths they had come.
He handed them to the scientist without looking at him, and marched off by himself on
the way home, leaving them to follow him if they chose.
When they got back to the house, the scientist went to the kitchen to thank Gideon: He
was being very polite, even though there was an amused look in his eyes. Gideon was not
there. Throwing the flowers casually into the back of his car, the eminent visitor
departed on his way back to his laboratory.
Gideon was back in his kitchen in time to prepare dinner, but he was sulking. He spoke
to Mr. Farquar like an unwilling servant. It was days before they liked each other
again.
The Farquars made inquiries about the root from their laborers. Sometimes they were
answered with distrustful stares. Sometimes the natives said: We do not know. We have
never heard of the root. One, the cattle boy, who had been with them a long time, and
had grown to trust them a little, said: Ask your boy in the kitchen. Now, theres a
doctor for you. Hes the son of a famous medicine man who used to be in these parts,
and theres nothing he cannot cure. Then he added politely: Of course, hes not as
good as the white mans doctor, we know that, but hes good for us.
After some time, when the soreness had gone from between the Farquars and Gideon, they
began to joke: When are you going to show us the snake root, Gideon? And he would
laugh and shake his head, saying, a little uncomfortably: But I did show you, missus,
have you forgotten?
Much later, Teddy, as a schoolboy, would come into the kitchen and say: You old
rascal, Gideon! Do you remember that time you tricked us all by making us walk miles
all over the veld for nothing? It was so far my father had to carry me!
And Gideon would double up with polite laughter. After much laughing, he would suddenly
straighten himself up, wipe his old eyes, and look sadly at Teddy, who was grinning
mischievously at him across the kitchen: Ah, Little Yellow Head, how you have grown!
Soon you will be grown up with a farm of your own. . . .
51
QUESTIONS
1. Did you like the story? Explain your response.
2. What did you focus on most intently as you read the storywhat word, phrase,
image, or idea? Explain.
3. Mrs. Farquar and Gideon share a sense of sadness about the reality of their
childrens future lives. What is the reality that gives these two characters,
and this whole story, a feeling of sadness?
4. Does the narrators presentation of the Farquars as people of goodwill seem

ironic or straightforward? How did you respond to them?
5. What implicit criticism can you detect in the fact that while Teddy is riding a
scooter, Gideons son of the same age is a herdboy?
6. Why do you think Gideon refuses to share his wisdom with the Farquars? How do
you feel about his refusal?
52
7. In what ways is this story about a clash of cultures? Reread Gideons comment at
the end of the story. What does it reveal about his understanding of the
relationship between white European and black African cultures?
8. How would you state the theme of this story?
9. How does the story affect your own notions about cultural differences?
10. Describe how you feel about the Big Doctor. Did you find yourself identifying
most with him, Gideon, or the Farquars? Explain your responses.
53
THE DEATH OF THE MOTH

Wirginia Wolf
Activity 1: Discuss about things you have learned from animals.
Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that
pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellowunderwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us. They are
hybrid creatures, neither gay like butterflies nor sombre like their own species.
Nevertheless the present specimen, with his narrow hay-coloured wings, fringed with a
tassel of the same colour, seemed to be content with life. It was a pleasant morning,
mid-September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of the summer
months. The plough was already scoring the field opposite the window, and where the
share had been, the earth was pressed flat and gleamed with moisture. Such vigour came
rolling in from the fields and the down beyond that it was difficult to keep the eyes
strictly turned upon the book. The rooks too were keeping one of their annual
festivities; soaring round the tree tops until it looked as if a vast net with
thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air; which, after a few
moments, sank slowly down upon the trees until every twig seemed to have a knot at the
end of it. Then, suddenly, the net would be thrown into the air again in a wider circle
this time, with the utmost clamour and vociferation, as though to be thrown into the
air and settle slowly down upon the tree tops were a tremendously exciting experience.
The same energy which inspired the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and even, it
seemed, the lean bare-backed downs, sent the moth fluttering from side to side of his
square of the window-pane. One could not help watching him. One was, indeed, conscious
of a queer feeling of pity for him. The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning
so enormous and so various that to have only a moth's part in life, and a day moth's at
that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meagre opportunities to the
full, pathetic. He flew vigorously to one corner of his compartment, and, after waiting
there a second, flew across to the other. What remained for him but to fly to a third
corner and then to a fourth? That was all he could do, in spite of the size of the
downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now
and then, of a steamer out at sea. What he could do he did. Watching him, it seemed as
if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust
into his frail and diminutive body. As oten as he crossed the pane, I could fancy that
a thread of vital light became visible. He was little or nothing but life.
Yet, because he was so small, and so simple a form of the energy that was rolling in at
the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in
my own brain and in those of other human beings, there was something marvelous as well
as pathetic about him. It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and
decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and
zigzagging to show us the true nature of life. Thus displayed one could not get over
the strangeness of it. One is apt to forget all about life, seeing it humped and bossed
and garnished and cumbered so that it has to move with the greatest circumspection and
dignity. Again, the thought of all that life might have been had he been born in any
other shape caused one to view his simple activities with a kind of pity.
After a time, tired by his dancing apparently, he settled on the window ledge in the
sun, and, the queer spectacle being at an end, I forgot about him. Then, looking up, my
eye was caught by him. He was trying to resume his dancing, but seemed either so stiff
or so awkward that he could only flutter to the bottom of the window-pane; and when he
tried to fly across it he failed. Being intent on other matters I watched these futile
attempts for a time without thinking, unconsciously waiting for him to resume his
flight, as one waits for a machine, that has stopped momentarily, to start again
without considering the reason of its failure. After perhaps a seventh attempt he
slipped from the wooden ledge and fell, fluttering his wings, onto his back on the
window sill. The helplessness of his attitude roused me. It flashed upon me he was in
difficulties; he could no longer raise himself; his legs struggled vainly. But, as I
stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to right himself, it came over me that the
failure and awkwardness were the approach of death. I laid the pencil down again.
The legs agitated themselves once more. I looked as if for the enemy against which he
struggled. I looked out of doors. What had happened there? Presumably it was midday,
54
and work in the fields had stopped. Stillness and quiet had replaced the previous
animation. The birds had taken themselves off to feed in the brooks. The horses stood
still. Yet the power was there all the same, massed outside indifferent, impersonal,
not attending to anything in particular. Somehow it was opposed to the little haycoloured moth. It was useless to try to do anything. One could only watch the
extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had
it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human
beings; nothing, I knew, had any chance against death. Nevertheless after a pause of
exhaustion the legs fluttered again. It was superb this last protest, and so frantic
that he succeeded at last in righting himself. One's sympathies, of course, were all on
the side of life. Also, when there was nobody to care or to know, this gigantic effort
on the part of an insignificant little moth, against a power of such, magnitude, to
retain what no one else valued or desired to keep, moved one strangely. Again, somehow,
one saw life a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be.
But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body
relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little
creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of
so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had
been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange. The moth having righted
himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say,
death is stronger than I am.
55
Questions
1. Did you like the essay? Explain your response.
2. At what time of year does Woolf make her observations?
3. How does she comparte the moths environment to the environment at large?
4. What changes come over the landscape when the moth begins to die?
5. When she sees the moth is turned on its back, Woolf reaches out a pencil to turn
in over again. But then she lays the pencil down. Why does she do this?
Read the following passages from the essay The Death of the Moth and explain:
A.
What is the meaning, or message of the passage?
B.
What literary devices or techniques are used, and are they effective?
6. It was a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener
breath than that of the summer months. The plough was already scoring the field
opposite the window, and where the share had been, the earth was pressed flat
and gleamed with moisture. Such vigour came rolling in from the fields and the
down beyond that it was difficult to keep the eyes strictly turned upon the
book.
56
7. He flew vigorously to one corner of his compartment, and, after waiting there a
second, flew across to the other. What remained for him but to fly to a third
corner and then to a fourth? That was all he could do, in spite of the size of
the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic
voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea.
8. Presumably it was midday, and work in the fields had stopped. Stillness and
quiet had replaced the previous animation. The birds had taken themselves off to
feed in the brooks. The horses stood still. Yet the power was there all the
same, massed outside indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in
particular.
9. The moth having righted himself, now lay most decently and uncomplainingly
composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.
57
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT
George Orwell
Activity 1: Discuss about ways of escaping from peer preassure.
in Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people the only time in
my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was subdivisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way antiEuropean feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a
European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice
over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it
seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the
referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter.
This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that
met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly
on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several
thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except
stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind
that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it
the better. Theoretically and secretly, of course I was all for the Burmese and all
against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more
bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of
Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the
lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the
men who had been Bogged with bamboos all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense
of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I
had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every
Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still
less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going
to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I
served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job
impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable
tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate
peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to
drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal byproducts of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.
One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny
incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real
nature of imperialism the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one
morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on
the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do
something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was
happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old 44 Winchester
and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in
terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant's
doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone "must."
It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of "must" is
due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the
only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but
had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours' journey away, and in the
morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no
weapons and were quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo
hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met
the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had
turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it.
The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter
where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid
58
bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that
it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the
people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite
information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear
enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it
becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said
that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I
had almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells
a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of "Go away, child! Go away
this instant!" and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a
hut, violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed,
clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children
ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the
mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have
been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him
round the corner of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and
ground him into the earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his
face had scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his
belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated
with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of
unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the
corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast's foot had
stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the
dead man I sent an orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I
had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it
smelt the elephant.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile
some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below,
only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of
the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were
all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much
interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different
now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an
English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no
intention of shooting the elephant I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself
if necessary and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down
the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an evergrowing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the
huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand
yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse
grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us.
He took not the slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was tearing up bunches of
grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty
that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant it
is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery and obviously one
ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully
eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think
now that his attack of "must" was already passing off; in which case he would merely
wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not
in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to
make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense
crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a
long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish
clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant
was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to
perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was
59
momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the
elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel
their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment,
as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the
futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his
gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd seemingly the leading actor of the
piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of
those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns
tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing
dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that
he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he
has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to
fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent
for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to
know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two
thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done
nothing no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life,
every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.
But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass
against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It
seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish
about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow
it always seems worse to kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the beast's owner to
be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would
only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act
quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we
arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same
thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went
too close to him.
It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say,
twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot;
if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back.
But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle
and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant
charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steamroller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the
watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not
afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man
mustn't be frightened in front of "natives"; and so, in general, he isn't frightened.
The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans
would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that
Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would
laugh. That would never do.
There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down
on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy
sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable
throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful
German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant
one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought,
therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole,
actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further
forward.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick one never does
when a shot goes home but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the
crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the
bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He
neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly
60
stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had
paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time it
might have been five seconds, I dare say he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth
slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have
imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second
shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood
weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the
shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the
last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise,
for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock
toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only
time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake
the ground even where I lay.
I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that
the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very
rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and
falling. His mouth was wide open I could see far down into caverns of pale pink
throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally
I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The
thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did
not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause.
He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where
not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that
dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to
move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for
my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They
seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking
of a clock.
In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took
him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dash and baskets even before I left, and
I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.
Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the
elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing.
Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like
a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided.
The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an
elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn
Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it
put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the
elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely
to avoid looking a fool.
61
QUESTIONS
1. Did you like the essay? Explain your response.
2. The
3.
narrator of this non-fictional piece was going

turnmoil, explain the conflict he has been facing.
through
an
emotional
What does the elephant symbolize?
4.
What is the theme of the selection (include the word imperialism in your
statement)?
5.
Based on the prejudice shown by the narrator, and on the behavior of the
Burmese, what inferences can be made about the effects of imperialism on both the
colonizer and the colonized?
6. If you had been in the narrators place do you think you would have shot the
elephant? Why or why not?
7. How is this essay about the clash of cultures?
8. What is the theme of the story?
62
By Any Other Name

By Santha Rama Rau.
At the Anglo-Indian day school in Zorinabad to which my sister and I were sent when she
was eight and I was five and a half, they changed our names.
On the first day of
school, a hot, windless morning of a north Indian September, we stood in the
headmistresss study and she said, Now youre the new girls. What are your names?
My sister answered for us. I am Premila, and shenodding in my directionis Santha.
The headmistress had been in India, I suppose, fifteen years or so, but she still
smiled her helpless inability to cope with Indian names. Her rimless half-glasses
glittered, and the precarious bun on the top of her head trembled as she shook her
head.
Oh, my dears, those are much too hard for me.
Suppose we give you pretty
English names. Wouldnt that be more jolly? Lets see, nowPamela for you, I think.
She shrugged in a baffled way at my sister. Thats as close as I can get. And for
you, she said to me, how about Cynthia? Isnt that nice?
My sister was always less easily intimidated than I was, and while she kept a stubborn
silence, I said, Thank you, in a very tiny voice.
We had been sent to that school because my father, among his responsibilities as an
officer of the civil service, had a tour of duty to perform in the villages around that
steamy little provincial town, where he had his headquarters at that time. He used to
make his shorter inspection tours on horseback, and a week before, in the stale heat of
a typically postmonsoon day, we had waved good-by to him and a little processionan
assistant, a secretary, two bearers, and the man to look after the bedding rolls and
luggage. They rode away through our large garden, still bright green from the rains,
and we turned back into the twilight of the house and the sound of fans whispering in
every room.
Up to then, my mother had refused to send Premila to school in the British-run
establishments of that time, because, she used to say, you can bury a dogs tail for
seven years and it still comes out curly, and you can take a Britisher away from his
home for a lifetime and he still remains insular. The examinations and degrees from
entirely Indian schools were not, in those days, considered valid. In my case, the
question had never come up, and probably never would have come up if Mothers
extraordinary good health had not broken down. For the first time in my life, she was
not able to continue the lessons she had been giving us every morning. So our Hindi
books were put away, the stories of the Lord Krishna as a little boy were left in midair, and we were sent to the Anglo-Indian school.
That first day at school is still, when I think of it, a remarkable one. At that age,
if ones name is changed, one develops a curious form of dual personality. I remember
having a certain detached and disbelieving concern in the actions of Cynthia, but
certainly no responsibility. Accordingly, I followed the thin, erect back of the
headmistress down the veranda to my classroom feeling, at most, a passing interest in
what was going to happen to me in this strange, new atmosphere of School.
The building was Indian in design, with wide verandas opening onto a central courtyard,
but Indian verandas are usually whitewashed, with stone floors. These, in the tradition
of British schools, were painted dark brown and had matting on the floors. It gave a
feeling of extra intensity to the heat.
I suppose there were about a dozen Indian children in the schoolwhich contained
perhaps forty children in alland four of them were in my class. They were all sitting
at the back of the room, and I went to join them. I sat next to a small, solemn girl
who didnt smile at me. She had long, glossy black braids and wore a cotton dress, but
she still kept on her Indian jewelrya gold chain around her neck, thin gold bracelets,
and tiny ruby studs in her ears. Like most Indian children, she had a rim of black kohl
around her eyes. The cotton dress should have looked strange, but all I could think of
was that I should ask my mother if I couldnt wear a dress to school, too, instead of
my Indian clothes.
I cant remember too much about the proceedings in class that day, except for the
beginning. The teacher pointed to me and asked me to stand up. Now, dear, tell the
class your name.
I said nothing.
Come along, she said, frowning slightly. Whats your name, dear?
I dont know, I said, finally.
63
The English children in the front of the classthere were about eight or ten of them
giggled and twisted around in their chairs to look at me. I sat down quickly and opened
my eyes very wide, hoping in that way to dry them off. The little girl with the braids
put out her hand and very lightly touched my arm. She still didnt smile.
Most of that morning I was rather bored. I looked briefly at the childrens drawings
pinned to the wall, and then concentrated on a lizard clinging to the ledge of the
high, barred window behind the teachers head. Occasionally it would shoot out its long
yellow tongue for a fly, and then it would rest, with its eyes closed and its belly
palpitating as though it were swallowing several times quickly. The lessons were mostly
concerned with reading and writing and simple numbersthings that my mother had already
taught meand I paid very little attention. The teacher wrote on the easel blackboard
words like bat and cat, which seemed babyish to me only apple was new and
incomprehensible.
When it was time for the lunch recess, I followed the girl with braids out onto the
veranda. There the children from the other classes were assembled. I saw Premila at
once and ran over to her, as she had charge of our lunchbox. The children were all
opening packages and sitting down to eat sandwiches. Premila and I were the only ones
who had Indian foodthin wheat chapatties, some vegetable curry, and a bottle of
buttermilk. Premila thrust half of it into my hand and whispered fiercely that I should
go and sit with my class, because that was what the others seemed to be doing.
The enormous black eyes of the little Indian girl from my class looked at my food
longingly, so I offered her some. But she only shook her head and plowed her way
solemnly through her sandwiches.
I was very sleepy after lunch, because at home we always took a siesta. It was usually
a pleasant time of day, with the bedroom darkened against the harsh afternoon sun, the
drifting off into sleep with the sound of Mothers voice reading a story in ones mind,
and, finally, the shrill, fussy voice of the ayah waking one for tea.
At school, we rested for a short time on low, folding cots on the veranda, and then we
were expected to play games. During the hot part of the afternoon we played indoors,
and after the shadows had begun to lengthen and the slight breeze of the evening had
come up we moved outside to the wide courtyard.
I had never really grasped the system of competitive games. At home, whenever we played
tag or guessing games, I was always allowed to win because, Mother used to tell
Premila, she is the youngest, and we have to allow for that. I had often heard her
say it, and it seemed quite reasonable to me, but the result was that I had no clear
idea of what winning meant.
When we played twos-and-threes that afternoon at school, in accordance with my
training, I let one of the small English boys catch me, but was naturally rather
puzzled when the other children did not return the courtesy. I ran about for what
seemed like hours without ever catching anyone, until it was time for school to close.
Much later I learned that my attitude was called not being a good sport, and I
stopped allowing myself to be caught, but it was not for years that I really learned
the spirit of the thing.
When I saw our car come up to the school gate, I broke away from my classmates and
rushed toward it yelling, Ayah! Ayah! It seemed like an eternity since I had seen her
that morninga wizened, affectionate figure in her white cotton sari, giving me dozens
of urgent and useless instructions on how to be a good girl at school. Premila followed
more sedately, and she told me on the way home never to do that again in front of the
other children.
When we got home we went straight to Mothers high, white room to have tea with her,
and I immediately climbed onto the bed and bounced gently up and down on the springs.
Mother asked how we had liked our first day in school. I was so pleased to be home and
to have left that peculiar Cynthia behind that I had nothing whatever to say about
school, except to ask what apple meant. But Premila told Mother about the classes,
and added that in her class they had weekly tests to see if they had learned their
lessons well.
I asked, Whats a test?
Premila said, Youre too small to have them. You wont have them in your class for
donkeys years. She had learned the expression that day and was using it for the first
time. We all laughed enormously at her wit. She also told Mother, in an aside, that we
64
should take sandwiches to school the next day. Not, she said, that she minded. But they
would be simpler for me to handle.
That whole lovely evening I didnt think about school at all. I sprinted barefoot
across the lawns with my favorite playmate, the cooks son, to the stream at the end of
the garden. We quarreled in our usual way, waded in the tepid water under the lime
trees, and waited for the night to bring out the smell of the jasmine. I listened with
fascination to his stories of ghosts and demons, until I was too frightened to cross
the garden alone in the semidarkness. The ayah found me, shouted at the cooks son,
scolded me, hurried me in to supperit was an entirely usual, wonderful evening.
It was a week later, the day of Premilas first test, that our lives changed rather
abruptly. I was sitting at the back of my class, in my usual inattentive way, only half
listening to the teacher. I had started a rather guarded friendship with the girl with
the braids, whose name turned out to be Nalini (Nancy, in school). The three other
Indian children were already fast friends. Even at that age it was apparent to all of
us that friendship with the English or Anglo-Indian children was out of the question.
Occasionally, during the class, my new friend and I would draw pictures and show them
to each other secretly.
The door opened sharply and Premila marched in. At first, the teacher smiled at her in
a kindly and encouraging way and said, Now, youre little Cynthias sister?
Premila didnt even look at her. She stood with her feet planted firmly apart and her
shoulders rigid, and addressed herself directly to me. Get up, she said. Were going
home.
I didnt know what had happened, but I was aware that it was a crisis of some sort. I
rose obediently and started to walk toward my sister.
Bring your pencils and your notebook, she said.
I went back for them, and together we left the room. The teacher started to say
something just as Premila closed the door, but we didnt wait to hear what it was.
In complete silence we left the school grounds and started to walk home. Then I asked
Premila what the matter was. All she would say was Were going home for good.
It was a very tiring walk for a child of five and a half, and I dragged along behind
Premila with my pencils growing sticky in my hand. I can still remember looking at the
dusty hedges, and the tangles of thorns in the ditches by the side of the road,
smelling the faint fragrance from the eucalyptus trees and wondering whether we would
ever reach home. Occasionally a horse-drawn tonga passed us, and the women, in their
pink or green silks, stared at Premila and me trudging along on the side of the road. A
few coolies and a line of women carrying baskets of vegetables on their heads smiled at
us. But it was nearing the hottest time of day, and the road was almost deserted. I
walked more and more slowly, and shouted to Premila, from time to time, Wait for me!
with increasing peevishness. She spoke to me only once, and that was to tell me to
carry my notebook on my head, because of the sun.
When we got to our house the ayah was just taking a tray of lunch into Mothers room.
She immediately started a long, worried questioning about what are you children doing
back here at this hour of the day.
Mother looked very startled and very concerned, and asked Premila what had happened.
Premila said, We had our test today, and She made me and the other Indians sit at the
back of the room, with a desk between each one.
Mother said, Why was that, darling?
She said it was because Indians cheat, Premila added. So I dont think we should go
back to that school.
Mother looked very distant, and was silent a long time. At last she said, Of course
not, darling. She sounded displeased.
We all shared the curry she was having for lunch, and afterward I was sent off to the
beautifully familiar bedroom for my siesta. I could hear Mother and Premila talking
through the open door.
Mother said, Do you suppose she understood all that?
Premila said, I shouldnt think so. Shes a baby.
Mother said, Well, I hope it wont bother her.
Of course, they were both wrong. I understood it perfectly, and I remember it all very
clearly. But I put it happily away, because it had all happened to a girl called
Cynthia, and I never was really particularly interested in her.
65
Questions:
Read the following passage from the essay and explain its significance.
Suppose we give you pretty English names. Wouldnt that be more jolly? Lets see, now
Pamela for you, I think. She shrugged in a baffled way at my sister. Thats as close
as I can get. And for you, she said to me, how about Cynthia? Isnt that nice?
Explain in a complete thought the theme of the story: By Any Other Name by Santha Rama
Rau.
Acculturation is the
culture are modified
or not you believe
Cinthia) are slowing
process whereby the attitudes and/or behaviors of people from one

as a result of contact with a different culture. Explain whether
the protagonists of the story, Premila and Santha (Pamela and
becoming acculturated.
Racial prejudice perverts this uniqueness of the races and takes the view that these
differences separate individuals further into groups, with one group being inferior to
the other. Explain if racial prejudice affects both the British and the Indians in the
story.
Explain what dramatic irony is and how it is used in the story.
66
Preludes (1917)
T.S. Eliot
Activity 1: What is a Prelude?
I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That times resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
67
Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
QUESTIONS:
1. Comment on the meaning of the image, "burnt-out ends of smoky days".
2. Does the poet have a particular city in mind as he writes this poem?
3. It has been said that "Preludes" paints a picture of the breakdown of society.
While confining your answer to this first prelude, indicate to what extent
the above statement is true.
PRELUDE II
4.
What does the poet mean when he says that the "morning comes to consciousness"?
What type of consciousness is it?
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands."
5.
One critic claims that the waking street is likened to a man with a hangover.
Is this true?
6.
Comment on the imagery in: "From the sawdust-trampled street | With all its
muddy feet".
68
7.
What is the meaning of "masquerades"?
Why would "all the hands | That are
raising dingy shades | In a thousand furnished rooms" be a masquerade? (4)
"With the other masquerades
That times resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms."
8.
In what way can this second prelude be said to continue the theme of a world
that is worn out and decaying?
9.
The poet continues the theme of depersonalization and dehumanisation. How does
he achieve this?
III PRELUDE
10.
What are the "thousand sordid images"? (4)
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling."
11.
What is being personified in the line "the light crept up between the shutters".
"And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands."
12.
What do you think the poet means by this? (4)
"You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands."
13.
Comment on this very rich image.
"Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
69
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet

In the palms of both soiled hands."
14.
If one contrasts this third prelude with the two which have gone before, one
notices a marked use of the personal pronoun. Where Preludes 1 & 2 used the personal
pronoun only once each, Prelude 3 uses it no less that ten times. Comment on this
dramatic change of usage? (6)
PRELUDE IV
15.
Whose soul is being referred to here? (4)
"His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock."
16.
While the "short square fingers" are stuffing pipes, what are the eyes doing?
(1)
"And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world."
17.
(4)
Why does the poet speak of the eyes that are assured of "certain certainties"?
18.
What is "the conscience of a blackened street"? Why would this conscience be
"impatient to assume the world"?
19.
The poet has studiously avoided use of the personal pronoun "I". What is the
significance of his using it now?
"I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing."
20.
What is this "infinitely gentle infinitely suffering thing"?
70
21.
Explain the change in tone in "Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh".
"Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots."
22. Comment on the image of the ancient women "gathering fuel in vacant lots".
71
T. S. Eliot: The Hollow Men

Mistah Kurtz-he dead.
A penny for the Old Guy
The Hollow Men. T.S. Eliot

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form shade without colour,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes to death's other Kingdom
Remember us--if at all-- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer--
10
15
20
25
30
35
Not that final meeting

In the twilight kingdom.
III
This is the dead land
this is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
40
72
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone
45
50
The eyes are not here

There are no eye here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.
55
In this last of meeting places

We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.
60
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
Here we
Prickly
Here we
At five
go round the prickly pear

pear prickly pear
go round the prickly pear
o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea

And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For thine is the
This is the way the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
65
70
75
80
85
90
95
73
QUESTIONS
1. Where do you think that the poem takes place?
2. If "The Hollow Men" shows where idealism leads, what are the implications of the
poem?
3. No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job , Eliot once
remarked. Though Eliots poems are supposedly written in free verse, it
makes use of rhythm, rhyme, and, of course figurative language. How does
repetition in the following lines help create rhythm in the poem(s)?
The eyes are not here/ There are no eyes here/ In this valley of dying stars./
In this hollow valley/ This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
4. Make a list of at least THREE figures

particularly original and memorable.
of
speech
in
the
poem
that
are
5. Note the terms of comparison in the figures of speech. Has Eliot based his
comparisons on things from modern life? Or has he used comparisons based
mostly on elements in the world of nature?
6. The epigraph "A Penny for the Old Guy" refers to the November 5th celebration of
Guy Fawkes Day. Why do you think that Eliot included this epigraph?
7. The last lines this is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper
are the most memorable lines in the poem, what is the poet suggesting with
these lines?
74
The Wild Swans at Coole

by W. B. Yeats
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.
The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
QUESTIONS
1. How is the speaker feeling as he gazes at the swans?
2. How did he feel 19 years ago when he heard the beating of their wings?
3. In what ways have the swans remained unchanged?
4. How are the time of year and the time of day appropriate to the theme of the
poem?
75
The Lake Isle of Innisfree

by W. B. Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
QUESTIONS
1. In the first stanza, what does the speaker say he will do?
2. What sounds does the speakr describe in the poem?
3. How do the surroundings of the lake island contrast with the speakers actual
location?
4. Why do you think the speaker cannot find peace in the city setting?
5. Do you think it could be called a Romantic poem? Explain why or why not.
76
Funeral Blues
by W. H. Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crpe bows round the white necks of the public
doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
QUESTIONS
1. Who is the speaker of the poem?
2. Summarize what the speaker wants others to do.
3. How would you describe the overall tone of the poem?
4. The poem is rich in unusual imagery, pick out some especially striking examples.
77
'"Muse des Beaux Arts"

by W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
QUESTIONS
1. Who are the old Masters?
2. What examples does the speaker provide to show how they understood suffering?
3. Lines 15-19 describe two other paintings of Brueghel. What do you think are the
events that Brueghel portrays? What is the attitude of the bystanders to those
events?
4. Identify and comment on what you think is the oveall theme of the poem.
5. Do you agree with Audens view of the human position of suffering. Explain.
78
Seamus Heaney
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.
My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
79
QUESTIONS
1. Describe what the speaker sees from his window.
2. What images in the poem help you to share what the speaker hears, feels and
smells?
3. At the end of the poem, what does the speaker intend to do?
4. What figures of speech compare to the speakers pen to other things?
5. What do you think the speaker wants to dig for?
80
81
Blackberry-Picking
Seamus Heaney
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
7. Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

8. Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
9. Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
10.
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.
1. What do the fresh blackberries symbolize in lines 1-6?

2. In lines 5-6 the speaker mentions, flesh, wine, and blood, what
is he alluding to?
3. From lines 7-8 what do the blackberries symolize?
4. Read lines 10-17, then answer how far is the speaker's willing
to go to fulfill his hopes and desires?
5. What does the speaker wish for in lines 18 to 24?
6. Read line 24 and explain the meaning of this line:
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20 CENTURY

20TH CENTURY BRITISH

Short Story. Part I

Unit 2: Twentieth-Century Non Fiction Story. I

Drama: Bernard Shaws Pygmalion

20TH CENTURY BRITISH

LITERATURE BIOGRAPHIES AND TOPICS

24. GUY FAWKES DAY

TOPICS FOR ESSAYS

James Joyces Araby

Katherine Mansfields Miss

D.H. Lawrences Smile

Elizabeth Bowens The

Sakis The Open Window

Graham Greenes The End of

Explain a situation from your life where the opposite

Virginia Woolfs The Death

George Orwells Shooting

Santha Rama Raus By any

T.S. Eliots The Hollow

happened to the protagonist in the story.

20TH CENTURY BRITISH

LITERATURE ESSAY EVALUATION

Check if the essay

If the essay is plagiarized, the author will

has the following

receive a zero if its a first offense,

otherwise the students will be subject to the

schools policies on plagiarism.

-is there an introduction?

-is there an arguable thesis sentence?

-is there supporting evidence for each

the body of essay.

-is there one?

-are there spelling and grammar errors?

Length and/ quotes

-Is the essay of the assigned length? (deduct

Sample Reading Comprehension Questions Based on Blooms Taxonomy

Tell how you would have solved the problem.

If you were in this story, what would you do?

Tell why the information in text is useful in real-life situations.

Identify the different parts of the story (introduction, development,

Tell me the parts of the story that could be real.

Make up what would happen if the story continued.

Make a picture about this story.

Be ready to act out the story with no words.

Make a different problem for the main character to solve.

Write a diary about what

Did you like this story? Why or why not?

Does this story seem interesting to you? Why or why not?

Was the main character in the story good or bad? Why?

20TH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE SHORT FILM EVALUATION

The film is in VHS or DVD format, not in a USB.

The films lenght is no longer than 8 minutes.

At least 85% of the film is based on the original story.

The film includes the following story elements:

The setting, sound effects, subtitles and costumes were

The films sound is clear (and the students brought

The studens appear in the video and have dialogs, they

In the last two minutes, each student explains what

The video was shown in front of the class.

4- or 5-person jigsaw groups. The groups should be diverse in terms

'Didn't she say that?'