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Gcse - Blog Posts
Me when I’m studying but literally not retaining anything (at least I look cute doing it)
Call me Galen the way I do my exam about medieval medicine
(I have 300 + mistakes)
Pros of not:
- I don’t have to
Cons of not:
- It will ruin my life
won’t be doing the biology exam tomorrow; you’ll find me kissing the makers of the RE exam
im js so tired, these mocks are killing me, I can't do this anymore. I'm a fucking teenager why are they making my life depend on some tests I do in highschool? I fucking hate this.
just heard someone say "revision is just doubting you knowledge" and i cant stop thinking abt it
Reminder: look closely at the type of clay your buying before your part with your hard earned cash
why we should reevaluate how we learn about classical literature
not my image (i believe the credit is @endlessbookclub on instagram). message me for removal.
Classic Literature is important. It helps us understand the perspective and viewpoint of the past, which impacts the future as it helps us learn from the faults and mistakes of our predecessors.
Classic Literature is a fluid term; it can be used to describe any period of literature that has been enjoyed for generations. But perspectives change over generation, especially over the past 50-60 years. We have seen massive changes in the way we view each other and development in tolerance and acceptance of race, sex, and orientation. And hence, some classical literature can perpetrate offensive and harmful stereotypes, as many authors of the time had similar views because they were cisgender, heterosexual white men. For example, of the top 30 classical authors, only 8 were women, and only 1 was a confirmed homosexual. None of them were people of colour. Due to the oppression of the time, there was a complete lack of diverse voices in society at the time. But considering that we have come a long way since then, we should read a book by wider range of narrators and acknowledge that a lot of classical literature is problematic.
To start, let’s talk about race. There are some obvious issues about race in some classics. For example, in ‘Huckleberry Finn’ by Mark Twain, he uses the same racial slur around 200 times in the text. This is problematic because Mark Twain was a white man, and the slurs he used were derogatory to black people. Another example of this is Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’. It perpetrates harmful racial stereotypes when it depicts the African natives, even though it was trying to antagonise European colonialism. But, as it is written from the perspective of a white man, it doesn’t do justice to the experience of the African natives. The savage and cannibalistic behaviours in relation to the natives depicts the idea of black people being violent. These stereotypes can be harmful as it can influence current perspectives of black people, as it can cause them to be misjudged and therefore discriminated against.
There are also oppressive undertones to books such as ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘The Secret Garden’. ‘The Secret Garden’ is set in India at the beginning, and the use of disease to remove Mary from India perpetrates the idea that India is a disgusting, disease-ridden wasteland, which is untrue. Mary’s treatment of the servants at the beginning and then later when she comes back to England, is extremely racist. Mary seems to believe people of colour are supposed to subservient, for example the fact that she expects the servant to be coloured. It also presents Indians as willingly in servitude, which is historically inaccurate. The same is true for ‘Gone with the Wind’ as it depicts slaves as docile and loyal, thus ignoring their struggle. This racist viewpoint invalidates people of colour, who have faced hundreds of years of oppression. This type of narrative silences the stories of those who have faced incredible hardship, and though these books are not necessarily intentionally silencing people, they still have that effect.
Then in terms of women in classic literature, they are generally portrayed as subservient and one-dimensional. In Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’, many of the characters are shown to only want to be marriageable, which creates the idea that women are dependent on men. However when a woman is powerful or emotional, she is generally crazy, evil or both. This is because women were supposed to be innocent and submissive to men, so when they are not submissive, they must be evil. A prime example of this, is Lady Macbeth in the play ‘Macbeth’ by Shakespeare. She is a powerful woman, as she is seen to have power over her husband in some scenes in the play. However, her power leads to her eventual demise - as she is driven insane and commits suicide, which was a terrible sin.
In Classic Literature, homosexuality is rarely discussed, even implicitly, as in a largely christian society, homosexuality was an extremely taboo subject. However, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, the ambiguity of the character of Hyde could lend itself to the interpretation that Hyde is the manifestation of a homosexual. The fact that he was an indescribable malformation could be that he is a homosexual as homosexuality is not something that is visible, but was considered a malformation at the time. In conjunction with this, the fact that through the use of metonymy, Hyde is linked to Soho. Soho was a place of disrepute, and housed many ‘sinful’ things such as prostitution, gin palaces, and music halls. It wouldn’t be wrong to assume that the few homosexuals of Victorian London lived in Soho, or a place akin to it. However, the fact that Hyde is a manifestation of evil and thus perpetrates the idea that homosexuality is evil.
At the Holt School, we learn a variety of books. However, out of all the books we read, only 2 were written by women, and one by a person of colour. Chinese Cinderella was written by Adaline Yen Mah, a woman of colour. It discusses Chinese culture in a very interesting way, and it inspires discussions about the complexity of foreign traditions. Learning in school is one of the best ways to combat discrimination, and so the following books are ones about different experiences that I believe are important to discuss in school: in terms of race, the book ‘Things Fall Apart’, written by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, discusses pre-colonial life in Nigeria and the arrival of Europeans in the late 19th century. and the book ‘Train to Pakistan’ by Khushwant Singh which discusses the Partition of 1947 from the perspective of an Indian villager who lived on the border. In terms of sexuality, the book ‘Freakboy’ discusses the idea that being transgender isn’t related to your appearance and how much you enjoy stereotypically masculine things, just what you believe to be your gender identity. In terms of race, there is the book ‘Daughter of Fortune’ which has an immigrant female protagonist, and discusses the gold rush in America, and the mass immigration that happened there. Finally, the book ‘Boys don’t cry’ by Malorie Blackman discusses single parenthood and men taking on a stereotypically feminine role in a household.
All of this is to say that while Classic Literature can be interesting and is important to know about, we should also read books that discuss more current struggles and were written by a wider range of authors, in order to gain exposure to a larger range of narratives and become better global citizens.
(this was my gcse spoken language from 2021. i was really proud of it, so i thought i’d share)
love, n. xx