NEA Independent critical study: Texts
across time - exemplar response B - band
5
This resource gives an exemplar student response to a non-exam assessment
task, with an accompanying moderator commentary illustrating why the
response has been placed within a particular band of the assessment criteria.
This resource should be used in conjunction with the accompanying document
'Guidance on non-exam assessment - Independent critical study: Texts across
time'.
Exemplar student response
It has been argued that the epistolary novel is the ideal form for conveying
minds under stress in literature.
Compare and contrast the presentation of minds under stress in The Yellow
Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and We Need to Talk About Kevin by
Lionel Shriver in the light of this view.
Brindle argues that towards the end of the eighteenth century the epistolary
novel began to lose its popularity because of its letter form’s ‘inability to
continue representing psychological tensions.’ (2013) One might question,
therefore, why Gilman writing in the late nineteenth century and Shriver writing
in the early twenty-first century chose this ‘old-fashioned’ form to portray their
respective female narrators’ minds under stress. Neither text of course conforms
wholly to the epistolary conventions of a series of letters between characters:
Gilman’s unnamed narrator is ‘writing to herself’ in the form of a journal;
Shriver’s narrator, Eva, writes a series of letters to her estranged husband but
receives no reply and we eventually discover that she is also essentially ‘writing
to herself’. What both narrators maintain is that this very act of writing to
themselves provides ‘a great relief to my mind’ (Gilman, 2011) and from the
stressful situation each finds herself in, and so both authors place their versions
of this literary form at the forefront of their portrayal of a mind under stress.
Despite the time span between the texts’ publication, their narrators’ respective
situations are arguably very similar in that each narrator seemingly descends
into depression as a result of the demands of her role as a wife and mother.
Each suffers with post-natal depression, although not diagnosed as such in the
nineteenth-century, which contributes to a disconnection with her son; Gilman’s
narrator exclaims: ‘Such a dear baby! And yet I CANNOT be with him, it makes
me so nervous’ (2011), whilst Eva bemoans: ‘Surely all this tenderness that in
the end I simply aped should have come knocking at the door uninvited’ (Shriver,
2003). Each feels that her husband fails to understand her perspective: Gilman’s
narrator is the opposite of her ‘public sphere’ husband who ‘is practical in the
extreme…and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and
put down in figures’ (2011), whilst Franklin’s habit ‘of pretending to have no idea
what I was talking about…warped into a darker incapacity to grasp what I was
getting at not because it was abstruse but because it was all too clear and you
didn’t want it to be so’ (Shriver, 2003). Each yearns for a life which she believes
this domestic role has stolen from her: Gilman’s narrator longs to write but John
warns ‘that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous
weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I
ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try’ (2011); Eva
remembers how ‘I’d been used to airports, sea views, museums. Suddenly I was
stuck in the same few rooms, with Lego’ (Shriver, 2003). Each suffers from the
weight of expectation society places on a wife and mother: Gilman’s narrator
sees this in John’s sister who ‘is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and
hopes for no better profession’ (2011); Eva, in order to feel worthy, feels
compelled to develop a ‘virtuous alter ego, a pleasingly plump maternal icon with
floury hands’ (Shriver, 2003). It is therefore interesting to explore the relative
success of the epistolary form in each text in enabling the reader to engage with
these struggles.
The portrayal of a mind under stress is arguably enhanced by an unreliable
narrator, achieved through the first-person narration of both Gilman’s and
Shriver’s versions of the epistolary novel. Brindle maintains that ‘framing a voice
as a diary narrative suggests this will be confiding, sincere and confessional, but
also potentially self-deceiving’ (2013) and, accordingly, in The Yellow Wallpaper,
the reader is invited to judge the narrator’s mental health through her intimate
journal entries at the same time as the latter reads and interprets the wallpaper
in an attempt to make sense of her situation. Jackson explains how, in the same
way, readers of We Need to Talk about Kevin are left to judge the reliability of
Eva’s highly subjective narrative in order to answer the question: ‘Has Kevin
been mangled by his mother’s coldness, or is he innately horrid?’ (2013)
Narrative ambiguity is achieved in part through an ironic tone and Gilman’s
narrator appears initially oblivious to her depression, which she describes as ‘not
serious’, to her incarceration which she sees as ‘lucky’, and to the effect of
patriarchal oppression where ‘John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that
in marriage’ (Gilman, 2011). As the narrative continues, and her self-awareness
grows (or she descends further into madness depending upon the interpretation
you accept), the initial irony that ‘it is so hard to talk with John about my case,
because he is so wise, and because he loves me’ (Gilman, 2011) moves to
enlightenment that John ‘pretended to be very loving and kind’ and to an ironic
incredulity: ‘As if I couldn’t see through him!’ (Gilman, 2011). Verbal irony in We
Need to Talk about Kevin also creates ambiguity but works in a different way,
with the reader only fully appreciating late the irony in some of Eva’s reflections:
early on Shriver includes Eva’s explicit opinion on the prevalence of irony in
America: ‘I was sick of it’, without any sense that Eva might now recognise the
irony in her later reflections. Like Gilman’s narrator, Eva shows a lack of
awareness of her mental state, suggesting that purposely ‘seeming a little
unhinged’ helps her to cope with humiliating social situations post ‘Thursday’.
Similarly Eva recounts Franklin’s attempts to smother her with ‘last time I read,
pregnancy wasn’t a prison sentence’ (Shriver, 2003), ironic given the
imprisonment she now feels as a result of her son’s actions. Shriver turns Eva’s
definition that ‘irony means at once having and not having’ (2003) into an ironic
self-fulfilling prophecy where Eva suggests that one of the reasons to have a
child, just in case of Franklin’s early death, was that ‘I wanted to have someone
to miss you alongside, who would know you if only as a chasm in his life, as you
were a chasm in mine’ (Shriver, 2003). The reader will only recognise the irony
of this once Franklin’s fate, and Kevin’s involvement therein, is revealed and this
is where the effect of Shriver’s use of irony differs from Gilman’s; as with Eva’s
retrospective narrative, the reader better recognises the ambiguity in it
retrospectively whilst readers of The Yellow Wallpaper will enjoy a more
immediate sense of the narrator’s unreliability.
If, as Sigurðardóttir suggests, The Yellow Wallpaper ‘depicts both the insanity of
the narrator, as well as the helplessness that came with being a woman in the
nineteenth century’ (2013), the reader follows this story step by step through
the narrator’s journal entries. Dramatic irony is evident in the narrator’s belief
that her asylum is in fact a nursery where children previously caused
destruction: ‘the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is
dug out here and there…this bedstead is fairly gnawed!’ (Gilman, 2011); a
disconnection exists between her assumption and the actual physical
environment where ‘the windows are barred…and there are rings and things in
the walls’ (Gilman, 2011), along with her later admission of her own destructive
behaviour where ‘I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner’ (Gilman,
2011). Her helplessness to fight against this patriarchal ‘rest cure’ prescribed by
‘a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband’ (Gilman, 2011) leaves the
narrator asking ‘what is one to do?’ (Gilman, 2011) but, for Johnson, the
narrator’s journal is ‘her own text in defiance of John’ (1989) and so in defiance
of a patriarchal system which is trying to squash her belief that ‘congenial work,
with excitement and change, would do me good’ (Gilman, 2011). The fact that
the journal is supposedly written in secret adds to this defiance: ‘There comes
John, and I must put this away’ (Gilman, 2011).
This concept of narrative secrecy again casts doubt on the reliability of the
narrator; Gilman’s narrator appears sufficiently lucid to be ‘sly about’ (Gilman,
2011) writing her journal but the comment that John ‘hates to have me write a
word’ (Gilman, 2011) could imply that John knows about the journal or that she
makes this assumption of a patriarchal world; in the same way, she claims that:
‘I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time. Of course I don’t while John is here’
(Gilman, 2011). Again, this questions how the ‘insane’ narrator has sufficient
self-control not to cry in front of the person causing her distress even though
she admits crying for no reason. Shriver also employs the concept of secrecy to
create ambiguity where Eva knows that Franklin ‘would tell a different story’
(Mullan, 2008) about Kevin and is at pains to divulge ‘all the little stories I never
told you’ (Shriver, 2003). This includes both details which feed into the idea of
Kevin as ‘innately horrid’ such as his collection of computer viruses, and details
which challenge this view such as the fact it was Lennie who threw rocks at cars
and not Kevin as Eva had argued. Through these admissions to Franklin, Shriver
is presenting Eva’s perspective as one to which Franklin now has ‘no choice but
to submit’ (2003) but to which the reader can still challenge Eva’s assertion that
‘you’ll just have to take my word for it’ (2003).
It is perhaps through the narrators’ interpretation of stories that Gilman and
Shriver are able to demonstrate how their epistolary forms successfully convey
minds under stress, with Gilman’s narrator piecing together the story of female,
and so her own personal, oppression told by the yellow wallpaper and Eva
piecing together the ‘truth’ about Kevin and her part in it. Lanser describes the
yellow wallpaper as an initially ‘unreadable text’ (1989), where, because of the
patriarchal suppression of her creativity, the narrator is ‘confounded by its
contradictory style’ (1989). It is at once ‘dull’ and ‘lame but also ‘pronounced’
and ‘uncertain’ (Gilman, 2011). As the narrator’s awareness of her oppression
grows, so her understanding of the wallpaper grows: she sees a ‘recurrent spot’
and begins to trace a ‘pattern’ which conveys ‘expression’ until a ‘sub-pattern’
and then a ‘formless sort of figure’ (Gilman, 2011) becomes apparent. The effort
required to make sense of her oppression is evident in the complexity of the
wallpaper’s pattern which includes ‘bloated curves and flourishes…isolated
columns of fatuity…sprawling outlines [which] run off in great slanting waves of
optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase’ (Gilman, 2011). As
the narrator determines to unravel the complexity of the wallpaper, ‘the dim
shapes get clearer every day’ (Gilman, 2011) until finally the narrator sees the
single image of a woman behind bars. For Lanser, the narrator’s interpretation
of the wallpaper’s story represents her ‘fixing and reducing possibilities, finding a
space of text on which she can locate whatever self-projection will enable her to
move from "John says" to "I want"’ (1989). The narrator’s movement from
awareness to action is shown initially in her determination ‘that nobody shall find
it out but myself’ (Gilman, 2011), and then in her understanding that escape is a
possibility: ‘The front pattern DOES move – and no wonder! The woman behind
shakes it!’ (Gilman, 2011) The difficulty of overcoming patriarchal oppression is
conveyed in the way the wallpaper ‘strangles so’ (Gilman, 2011) but the narrator
determines ‘to try it, little by little’ (Gilman, 2011) until her identification with the
woman in the wallpaper, and so her own escape, is complete: ‘I pulled and she
shook. I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of
that paper’ (Gilman, 2011). The thought of having to ‘get back behind the
pattern’ (Gilman, 2011) and continue under the patriarchal regime ‘is hard!’
(Gilman, 2011) and so having unravelled the story of patriarchal oppression the
narrator declares to John: ‘you can’t put me back!’ (Gilman, 2011)
For Jackson, Eva’s letters as ‘confessional narratives of guilt, failure, and
resentment’ (2013) are so ‘searingly honest’ (2013) that they render her ‘a
reliable narrator, at least of her own experience’ (2013). She argues that ‘now
that the worst has happened, she has no reputation to salvage, no reason to
deceive herself or anyone else’ (2013). Mullan, however, questions Eva’s
reliability as a narrator given that ‘her discovery in her child of cunning and
malevolence might be thought the wisdom or the illusion of hindsight’ (2008)
and indeed Eva readily admits that ‘it’s hard for me to reconstruct that period
without contaminating the memories with the outsized regret of later years’
(Shriver, 2003). Such reconstructions include difficult to defend or contest
assertions such as whether Kevin’s late delivery was a sign of his abject apathy
for life: ‘I am superstitiously convinced he was foot-dragging even in the womb that he was hiding’ (Shriver, 2003), thereby leading the reader towards a
judgement of Kevin as ‘innately horrid’. Mullan, however, recognises an
‘awkwardness’ in Shriver’s use of the epistolary form in that it relies on an
acceptance that Eva ‘would tell her husband things that he must already know’
(2008). Whilst he can understand that Eva ‘wants to tell Franklin about malicious
actions that he never saw or invariably denied’ (Mullan, 2008), Mullan finds it
strange that she also recounts ‘events that he, too, witnessed’ (2008). In her
dependence upon the letters to Franklin ‘to debrief from Chatham’ (Shriver,
2003), however, the reader is again left to consider whether Eva’s stories are
simply her way of confirming her innocence to Franklin or indeed of trying
desperately to convince herself of her lack of culpability. In judging the success
or otherwise of the epistolary form in portraying Eva’s troubled mind, Shriver’s
readers have the benefit, unlike Gilman’s, of comparison with Lynne Ramsay’s
film version of the novel. Fisher describes how Ramsay’s rejection of the firstperson perspective ‘means that much of what we learn about Eva we glean from
studying her facial expressions and her body postures’ (2012). Whilst praising
how Tilda Swinton, as Eva, ‘deploys the angularity of her face and body to
convey misgivings and trauma that are never spoken’ (Fisher, 2012), a viewer
cannot help but notice what is lost from the agonies of the novel: the close up
shot of Eva’s suddenly swollen belly and Franklin’s one-line protestation: ‘When
were you going to tell me?’ (Ramsay, 2011) cannot compete with many insightful
pages of Eva’s justifications for plotting and manipulating a second pregnancy in
spite of Franklin’s rejection of the idea, and her delight in deceiving him: ‘I
practically had to put my fist in my mouth to keep from laughing’ (Shriver,
2003).
Having sustained an ambiguous narrative befitting a mind under stress
throughout their texts, both Gilman and Shriver leave their readers with an
ambiguous ending, which enables different possible conclusions. John’s act of
fainting upon seeing his wife’s behaviour at the end of The Yellow Wallpaper can
of course be seen as his complete disbelief at her ‘creeping’ (Gilman, 2011), at
her having ‘pulled off most of the paper’ (Gilman, 2011) and at her ramblings
that ‘I’ve got out at last…so you can’t put me back’ (Gilman, 2011). Indeed his
exclamation of ‘For God’s sake, what are you doing!’ might support this
interpretation, particularly given John’s arrogant belief that his enforced rest
cure would work and the long periods he appears to have left his wife alone,
which means he is oblivious to her descent into madness. Feldstein, however,
concludes that ‘the ending seems ironic, and the narrator's madness seems
questionable’ (1989) in that we can read the ending as providing an ‘alternative
to the world view of John’ (Feldstein, 1989) and so as a triumph for the narrator.
John’s fainting could suggest a role reversal as fainting was very much the
domain of the ‘hysterical’ nineteenth-century female. Having identified herself as
the oppressed woman in the wallpaper, the narrator’s ‘creeping is a form of
resistance and revenge’ (Feldstein, 1989) and the fact that, while creeping, ‘I
looked at him over my shoulder’ (Gilman, 2011) demonstrates that she is leaving
her patriarchal oppression behind where finally ‘I had to creep over him’ (Gilman,
2011) shows how the narrator has overcome the constraints of the role of a wife
and mother. This interpretation is taken further by Feldstein who suggests that
if the narrator and writer are one and the same, ‘the ending takes on additional
meaning, for the protagonist must have recovered sufficiently from her madness
in order to write an account of it’ (1989).
In the same way, the conclusion of We Need to Talk about Kevin continues to
present the reader with the dilemma between nature or nurture as the ‘person’
to blame for Kevin’s evil actions. Eva writes to Franklin about ‘Thursday’ and
how she imagines he would have reacted faced with the stark discovery in their
back garden that Kevin had killed his own sister and intended to kill him. Having
portrayed Franklin throughout as always erroneously taking Kevin’s side, Eva
continues the idea that only she was able to perceive Kevin’s innate evil by
suggesting no greater reaction than a ‘disappointed’ expression on Franklin’s
face (Shriver, 2003). Immediately following this, Shriver closes Eva’s letter
writing with her most recent visit to Kevin in prison, fitting as this is now all she
has left of her family, but this serves to challenge the ‘nature’ theory. Eva admits
what has been implicit throughout her letters that she and Kevin are very
similar: both are now left with trying to make sense of Kevin’s actions through
‘deconstruction’ (Shriver, 2003) of the story but Eva admits to possibly ‘asking
the wrong questions’ (Shriver, 2003). Further doubt on who or what is to blame
is cast when Eva ambiguously reveals that ‘I’m not quite sure…but I like to think
that he choked, “I’m sorry.” Taking the risk that I’d heard it correctly, I said
distinctly myself, “I’m sorry, too, Kevin. I’m sorry, too.”’ Her later admission that
‘I love my son’ (Shriver, 2003) is tempered by her suggestion that this love is
‘only out of desperation or even laziness’ (Shriver, 2003) but the final lines of the
novel convey the ultimate forgiveness and again leave the reader to decide
whether this comes from a feeling of guilt or from a mother’s unconditional love
for her wayward son: ‘there is a second bedroom in my serviceable apartment.
The bedspread is plain. A copy of Robin Hood lies on the bookshelf. And the
sheets are clean’ (Shriver, 2003).
The different effects of the epistolary form might be attributed to the different
intentions of the writers. Whilst initially considered ‘a description of female
insanity and mayhem’ (Gilbert, 2010), to reflect nineteenth-century
preoccupations with female ‘hysteria’, The Yellow Wallpaper has since enjoyed
various readings, primarily feminist, which suggest that it conveys ‘a woman's
struggle to free herself from the oppressive forces in her life where her madness
is her freedom and the attempts to cure her are the oppressors' tools’
(Sigurðardóttir, 2013). Whether Gilman would have approved of varied
interpretations of her novella is not known but it is widely accepted that
‘Gilman's original intent in writing the story was to gain personal satisfaction
from the knowledge that Dr. S. Weir Mitchell might, after reading the story,
change his treatment,’ (Gilbert, 2010), something she had personally undergone
for depression and later rejected, and which he did indeed stop practising. This
autobiographical journal of the ‘emotional and psychological feelings of rejection
from society as a free-thinking woman’ (Sigurðardóttir, 2013) did indeed achieve
the effect Gilman intended. Similarly, Shriver’s late ‘narrative surprise’ of
Franklin’s fate at the hands of Kevin which, for Mullan, justifies why ‘her
narrative must take an epistolary form’ (2008), has resulted in what Shriver
herself describes as a ‘gratifying’ (Jackson, 2013) division between readers who
see Eva as ‘a well-intentioned mother who…is saddled with…a child evil from
birth [or as] a mother whose coldness is itself criminal, and who bears full
responsibility for her son’s rampage.’ (Jackson, 2013). If the result of an
unreliable narrator of an epistolary form is the ‘unanswerable question’
(Jackson, 2013) of whether nature or nurture is to blame for Kevin’s atrocity,
Shriver describes this as a ‘mission accomplished’ (Jackson, 2013).
Bibliography and references
A) Primary texts
Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. (2011) The Yellow Wallpaper, Hollywood: Simon and
Brown.
Shriver, Lionel. (2003) We Need To Talk About Kevin, New York: Counterpoint.
B) Secondary sources: Books and articles
Brindle, Kym. (2013) Epistolary Encounters in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Diaries and
Letters, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Feldstein, Richard. (1989) Reader, Text, and Ambiguous Referentiality in The
Yellow Wall-Paper. In Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Eds. Richard Feldstein and
Judith Roof. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Pp. 269-79.
Fisher, Mark. (2012) Implausible Psycho: “We Need To Talk About Kevin”, posted
In Fisher reviews, Web Exclusives. Available at:
http://www.filmquarterly.org/2012/05/implausible-psycho-we-need-to-talkabout-kevin/
Gilbert, Kelly. (2010) The Yellow Wallpaper: An Autobiography of Emotions by
Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Florida: Florida Gulf Coast University. Available at:
http://itech.fgcu.edu/faculty/wohlpart/alra/gilman.htm
Jackson, Elizabeth. (2013) We need to talk about ambivalence toward the child in
contemporary literary fiction: A case study of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk
about Kevin and Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, Trinidad: University of the West
Indies. Available at: www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the.../eJackson-child3dpaper.pdf
Johnson, Greg. Gilman's Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption in 'The Yellow
Wallpaper. Studies in Short Fiction 26 (1989): 521-30.
Lanser, Susan. (1989) Feminist Criticism, "The Yellow Wallpaper," and the Politics
of Color in America Feminist Studies, Feminist Studies, Inc. Available at:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177938
Mullan, John. (2008) John Mullan on Lionel Shriver's use of the epistolary form in
We Need to Talk About Kevin. Available at:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/03/featuresreviews.guardianrevie
w5
Sigurðardóttir, Elísabet. (2013) Women and Madness in the 19th Century: The
effects of oppression on women's mental health, University of Iceland:
Hugvísindasvið. Available at:
http://www.skemman.is/University of Iceland/Hugvísindasvið/BA verkefni
C) Secondary sources: Film and stage versions
Lynne Ramsay (director). (2011) We Need To Talk About Kevin, BBC Films
Moderator commentary
AO1: This is a clear, precise and cogent response, which is perceptive, assured
and sophisticated throughout. Mature and impressive expression is a particularly
strong feature of this essay. The student demonstrates a confident grasp of
literary critical concepts and terminology.
AO2: The student demonstrates a sustained and perceptive understanding of
authorial methods and the response is assuredly focused on the shaping of
meaning. Textual support is explored in a sophisticated manner and the student
ranges around the texts in an assured way.
AO3: The student demonstrates a perceptive and assured grasp of contexts
throughout the response, particularly in respect of contexts of time, gender,
genre and of social contexts.
AO4: The student perceptively explores wholly relevant connections between the
two texts in a particularly well-sustained and assured manner. Equal attention is
paid to each text.
AO5: The student engages with different possible readings and responses in an
assured manner and demonstrates a confident and sophisticated grasp thereof,
particularly of critical interpretations, including over time.
This essay demonstrates the qualities typical of a Band 5 response.