AIC Flashcards
Highlights Priestley’s ideas on social responsibility
- “We are responsible for each other,”
- “We are members of one body”
- “fire and blood and anguish”
- “There are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths”
Shows the older generation’s view on responsibility and their reactions to Eva Smith’s death
- “Obviously it has nothing whatever to do with the wretched girl’s suicide,”
- “I can’t accept any responsibility,”
- “Naturally I don’t know anything about this girl,”
- ‘I’ve done nothing wrong,”
Shows the younger generation’s view on responsibility and their reactions to Eva Smith’s death
- “I’ll never, never do it again to anybody,”
- “We all helped to kill her,”
- “everything’s all right now,”
Portrays how the male characters behave towards the females
- “she was a good sport”
- “I was in that state a chap easily turns nasty”
- “she was pretty”
- “women of the town”
shows how the upper classes neglect social responsibility
- “If we were all responsible for everything that happened to everybody we’d had anything to do with, it would be very awkward, wouldn’t it?”
- “Everything’s alright”
- “naturally I dont know anything about this girl”
Shows the class difference from the opening stage directions and elsewhere
- ‘Girls of that class -”
- ‘her husband’s social superior’
- ‘EDNA The parlourmaid’
How the Birlings have used their power and influence immorally
- ‘It’s a free country, I told them.’
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Shows the socialist perspective
- ‘But these girls aren’t cheap labour. They’re people.’
- ‘There are millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths’
- “We all helped kill her”
Shows the capitalist perspective
- ‘a hard-headed business man’
- ‘A man has to make his own way, has to look after himself, and his own, ’
- “We employers at last are coming together to see that our interests - and the interests of Capital - are properly protected,”
- “It’s my duty to keep labour costs down,”
- ‘you’d think everybody has to look after everybody else, as if we were all mixed up together like bees in a hive’
Shows the family are not close from the stage directions and elsewhere
- “Not cosy and homelike’
- “A man has to make his own way - has to look after himself - and his family too,”
- “the kind of father a chap could go to when he’s in trouble”
Shows the younger generation are more likely to change their views
‘more impressionable’
to show Priestley’s negative view of the older Birlings in the opening stage directions
‘‘a rather cold woman’
“heavy looking, rather portentous man”
Shows the stereotypes of the younger females in the opening stage directions
- ‘’a pretty girl in her early twenties’
- “a hysterical child”
- “over-excited”
- ‘She was a very pretty girl too “
- “She was a lively good-looking girl
- “I hate these fat old tarts round the town,”
- “just used her for the end of a stupid drunken evening, as if she was an animal, a thing, not a person,”
- “very pretty […] young and fresh and charming”
Shows how society thought highly of the upper classes and aristocrats from the opening stage directions
- ‘easy well-bred young man-about-town’
Shows the stereotypes of males
- “need not be a big man but he creates at once an impression of massiveness, solidity and purposefulness,”
- “Now just be quiet so that your father can decide what we ought to do”
