Mod C - Spotty Handed Villainesses' speech quotes

Question 1

Title

Answer 1

Spotty-Handed Villainesses’ - allusion, symbolism, intertextual reference

Question 2

Sense of ownership + connection to audience (2 quotes)

Answer 2

Inclusive language + personal pronoun + Exordium
“My title is… my subtitle is… I should…”
“Is OUR female protagonist…”

Question 3

Introduced subject of speech

Answer 3

“Female bad behaviour…” - Alliteration

Question 4

Personal anecdote - connection to audience (3 quotes) - the rhyme

Answer 4

“I began to think about this subject at a very early age. There was a children’s rhyme that went … when she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was horrid!” - Personal anecdote
“I took this to be a poem of personal significance - I did after all have curls” - Humour + personal anecdote
“My older brother used this verse to tease me” - Personal anecdote

Question 5

Binary rigid thinking reflected

Answer 5

Academic/literary reference

“No doubt this is a remnant of the Angel/Whore split so popular among the Victorians…”

Question 6

Invitation of audience to consider her points - tentative tone (3 quotes)

Answer 6

Use of low modality and tentative tone
“Some of you may wonder…”
“Not usually”
“Probably”

Question 7

Casual, conversational nature + humour

Answer 7

Colloquial language + Humour +
“I sometimes get a question - almost always, these days, from women -That goes something like, ‘Why don’t you make the men stronger?’ I feel that this is a matter which should more properly be taken up with God…”

Question 8

Lady macbeth + spots - extended metaphor (5 quotes)

Answer 8

“Create a flawless character and you create an insufferable one; which may be why I am interested in spots” - Personal pronoun
“Wicked Lady Macbeth. Spot as in guilt, spot as in blood, spot as in ‘out, damned’.” - Literary allusion + Playful/humorous + Anaphora
Repetition of ‘spots’ - Metaphor
“Or it can be the revelation of the spottiness of a spotty woman.”
“Lady Macbeth, however, did her wicked murder for a conventionally acceptable reason, one that would win approval for her in corporate business circles – she was furthering her husband’s career. She pays the corporate-wife price… Wifely devotion, as I say.” - sarcasm

Question 9

The hypophora - continued questioning encourages reflection - female bad behaviour

Answer 9

Series of rhetorical questions, use of hyphen.
“But is it not, today - well, somehow unfeminist - to depict a woman behaving badly? isn’t bad behaviour supposed to be the monopoly of men? Isn’t that what we are expected - in defiance of real life - to somehow believe, now. When bad women get into literature, what are they doing there, and are they permissible, and what, if anything, do we need them for?”

Question 10

Personal Anecdote + extended metaphor of breakfast - makes the speech personal (5 quotes)

Answer 10

“When my daughter was five, she and her friend Heather announced that they were putting on a play. We were conscripted as the audience. We took our seats, expecting to see something of note. The play opened with two characters having breakfast.”
“Shakespeare is not big on breakfast openings… if we are going to sit still for two or three hours in a theatre or wade through two or three hundred pages of a book, we certainly expect something more than breakfast.” - literary/academic reference to Shakespeare.
“Eternal breakfast - It happens to be my favourite meal…”
“To avoid the eternal breakfast, some of the characters must cause problems for some of the others.”
“Other-than-breakfast” - referring to literature

Question 11

Caesura (3 quotes)

Answer 11

“What kind of something?”
“How do I know this?”
“What is a novel, anyway?”

Question 12

Comparison + Biblical reference

Answer 12

“I feel that this is a matter which should more properly be taken up with God. It was not, after all, I who created Adam so subject to temptation that he sacrificed eternal life for an apple; which leads me to believe that God – who is, among other things, an author”

Question 13

Cumulative listing for emphasis

Answer 13

“The kinds of questions I’m talking about have to do with how the characters in novels ought to behave. Unfortunately, there is a widespread tendency to judge such characters as if they were job applicants, or public servants, or prospective roommates, or somebody you’re considering marrying.”

Question 14

Anaphora - “Novels” (4 quotes)

Answer 14

“Novels are not sociological textbooks, although they may contain social comment”
“Novels are not political tracts”
“Novels are not how-to books;”
“Novels are not, primarily, moral tracts.”

Question 15

Word Play and Declarative Statement + Paradox for wit and humour (2 quotes)

Answer 15

“every artist is, among other things, a con-artist”

“We con-artists”

Question 16

Rhetorical questioning about writing novels (5 quotes)

Answer 16

“What kind of story shall I choose to tell? Is it, for instance, comic or tragic or melodramatic, or all?”
“How shall I tell it?”
“Who will be at the center of it, and will this person be a) admirable or b) not?”
“And- more important than it may sound- will it have a happy ending, or not?”

Question 17

Biblical Allusion drawing comparatives between God and the novelist

Answer 17

“God started with the chaos- dark, without form and void- and so does the novelist. Then God made one detail at a time. So does the novelist. On the seventh day, God took a break to consider what he’d done. So does the novelist. But the critic starts on Day Seven.”

Question 18

High use of adjectives + emotive language to appeal to audience pathos

Answer 18

“Whole areas of human life that were once considered non-literary or sub-literary – such as the problematical nature of homemaking, the hidden depths of motherhood, and of daughterhood as well, the once-forbidden realms of incest and child abuse – have been brought inside the circle that demarcates the writeable from the non-writeable”

Question 19

Literary References and Allusion - for educated/academic audience (2 quotes)

Answer 19

John Keats and Shakespeare- “As Keats said, Shakespeare took as much delight in creating Iago - that arch Villain - as he did in creating the virtuous Imogen. I would say probably more, and the proof of it is that I’d bet you’re more likely to know which play Iago is in.”
Allusion - Cinderella + Short Anecdote
“Other things, such as the Cinderella happy ending – the Prince Charming one – have been called into question. (As one lesbian writer remarked to me, the only happy ending she found believable any more was the one in which girl meets girl and ends up with girl)
“A female character could rebel against social structures without then having to throw herself in front of a train like Anna Karenina”

Question 20

Exclamation and expression - to retain audience attention

Answer 20

“‘Aha! You can’t get away with that!’ ”

“Any story you tell must have a conflict of some sort, and it must have suspense. In other words: something other than breakfast.”

Question 21

Rhetorical Questions - women (4 quotes)

Answer 21

“Were women to be condemned to virtue for life, slaves in the salt-mines of goodness? How intolerable.” - allusion to salt mines + short sentence
“Could one examine the Seven Deadly Sins in their female versions - to remind you, Pride, Anger, Lust, Envy, Avarice, Greed and Sloth - without being considered anti-feminists?”
“Were we to listen to our mothers, yet once again-as they intoned - ‘If you Can’t Say Anything Nice, Don’t Say Anything At All’?”
“In a word: were women to be homogenised - one woman is the same as another - and deprived of free will - as in ‘the patriarchy made her do it’?”

Question 22

Exclamations - women + metaphor (3 quotes)

Answer 22

“Women characters, arise! Take back the night!”
“What power, what untold possibilities!”
“If there’s a closed-off road, the curious speculate about why it’s closed off, and where it might lead if followed; and evil women have been, for a while recently, a somewhat closed-off road, at least for fiction-writers.” - Metaphor

Question 23

Logos - Use of statistic/fact persuades audience to logically consider the contrast she has made

Answer 23

“According to a recent Time story, the average jail sentence in the U.S. for men who kill their wives is four years, but for women who kill their husbands – no matter what the provocation – it’s twenty. (For those who think equality is already with us, I leave the statistics to speak for themselves.)”

Question 24

Satirising business men - Madame Bovary

Answer 24

“And Madame Bovary, who not only indulged her romantic temperament and voluptuous sensual appetites, but spent too much of her husband’s money doing it, which was her downfall. A good course in double-entry bookkeeping would have saved the day. I suppose she is a foolish woman who did a stupid thing for an insufficient reason, since the men in question were dolts.” Literary allusion + humour + colloquial language

Question 25

Idiom to put point into context - calls out artists to tell truthful stories

Answer 25

“Life is short, art is long” - Idiom

Juxtaposition of short and long

Question 26

Literary reference + inclusive language to end speech and reiterate her theme

Answer 26

“I will leave you with a final quotation. It’s from Dame Rebecca West, speaking in 1912 – ‘Ladies of Great Britain … we have not enough evil in us.’ Note where she locates the desired evil. In us.”