Havisham

Question 1

Title

Answer 1

Intertexutal to Dickens Expectations, left at the altar, the character is in status and cannot move forward, disappointing experience of love.

Question 2

1. ‘Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since then (enjab) I haven’t wished him dead’
2. ’ Prayed for it (enjab) so hard I’ve dark green pebbles for eyes’
3. ’ ropes on the back of my hands, I could strangle him with’

Answer 2

1. Vengeful tone, oxymoronic phrase. Cyclical, controlled by her trauma, she is defined by a man’s actions, first person perspective.
2. Praying for death is sacreligious. dark green pebbles as a metaphor to show she is blinded from reality or entrapment.
3. Connotations of entrapment, confined. Symbolism of her as the puppet but now a role reversal to him being a puppet. End-stop creates a definite tone. However ‘could’ is indefinite she is unable to.

Question 3

1. ‘Spinster. I sink and remember’
2. ‘the dress (enjab) yellowing, trembling if I open the wardrobe ‘
3. ‘Who did this?’

Answer 3

1. Spinster- negative connotations, undesirable, sexually transgresssed. Passage of time demonstrated through the self-neglect. Alone, stasis.
2. Ongoing personification of the dress, distorted vision. The wardrobe symbolises the doors into the wedding. Creates threshold imagery from the grieving dress to the grieving woman.
3. She desires closure but it is unattainable.

Question 4

1. ‘Puce curses that are sounds not words’
2. ‘Some nights better, the lost body over me,’

Answer 4

1. The mourning continues, blurred memory represents distorted downward spiral, she mutters to herself- lunacy?
2. Insomnia, the only chance of her reigning superior is in her dreams, represents the inferior position of her, she has succumbed to the patriachal regime of society.

Question 5

1.’Love’s (enjab) hate behind a white veil’
2. ‘Give me a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon’
3. ‘Don’t think its only the heart that b-b-b-breaks.”

Answer 5

1. Oxymoron, duality of love, threshold imagery created through the personifiation of humanising love and hate only a thin barrier between both, the use of a veil as a mask, spiteful. The man gets to unveil the woman, guided by men.
2. Symbolises loveless marriages, her loss of hope in humanity because of her experience.
3. The four b’s on the staggered phrase could represent each stanza, as the persona’s consciousness is distorted as her turmoil unfolds, she is fragmented until she is completely broken at the end of the poem.

Question 6

ao5

Answer 6

‘lonliness haunts her verse’
‘stunted desires’
moves beyond ‘a straightfoward feminist poet and shows the difficulties that patriacy present to both men and women’