Not my best side - notes and quotes

Question 1

What does a tone of Bathos mean?

Answer 1

an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous.

Question 2

What does Verbal Irony mean?

Answer 2

Variation between what a speaker or writer actually says and what they mean - for examples there is a disparity in between what the dragon says and what the author means.

Question 3

Tenor meaning?

Answer 3

The degree of formality of the language used.

an important means of creating authenticity, and portraying scenes, characters and their relationships.

Question 4

Active Voice
Passive Voice

Answer 4

A) subject executes the action indicated by the action verb in a sentence.
B) Subject is acted upon by the verb in a sentence.

Question 5

Transitive Verb
Intransitive Verb

Answer 5

a) verb that allows one or more direct objects.
b) verb that does not allow direct objects or use of passive voice.

Question 6

Tone of Bathos in this poem 1st Stanza?

Answer 6

-Dragon presented as sensitive/thoughtful creature.
-Feels worse about ‘bad publicity’ that its own ritual slaying.
-Suggests Dragon is vain - transforms heroism of myth of St George and the dragons status as a symbol of evil into absurd comedy.

Question 7

‘Not my best side, I’m afraid.’
‘Pose properly’
‘I was sorry for the bad publicity’

Answer 7

-Tone of Bathos - above card.
-Conversational with reader - polite humorous language.
-Anthropomorphises the dragon into polite/camp/vain gentle man - humorously subverting our expectations of beast.
-Alliteration ‘pose properly’ - exaggerates his vanity.
-‘Bad publicity’ juxtaposes the past with the present - satirising modern advertising and superficiality.

Question 8

Dragons Language 1st Stanza?

Answer 8

-relatively sophisticated words:
‘ostentatiously’.
-Poses rhetorical questions ‘What, after all, are too feet/to a monster?’
-Dragon appears to be addressing the reader.
-Seems polite - warms reader to traditionally terrifying creature - amusing and subversive of convention.

Question 9

Use of Verbal Irony 1st Stanza?

Answer 9

-employs both understatements and overstatements - create and ironic contradiction between dragons words and meaning of the author.
-E.g. Dragon queries failure of each character to uphold their stereotype - simultaneously contradicting its own stereotype.

Question 10

‘Should my conqueror/ be so ostentatiously beardless’
‘Why should my victim be so / Unattractive as to be inedible’

Answer 10

-emasculating - suggest St George is vain and effeminate.
-Ironic - dragon is unaware of its own vanity.
-Upholds stereotypes - ironic as it does not fit stereotype itself.
-‘unattractive’ subverts norms of pure and beautiful damsel in distress.
-Dragons words are slightly camp when he assesses physical attributes of knight and princess - sexually ambivalent personality.
-repeated syntax - emph how the both fail to uphold their stereotypes.

Question 11

Tone of the princess’s dramatic monologue?

Answer 11

-Modern - of a teenage girl.
-Seems to lack self-esteeem.
-Frets about image - attracted to wrong boy who shows her attention.
-doesn’t want to be rescued - imagines being eaten in a sexualised way, naive virgin - fantasies.
-Modern - not understanding armour and sexually liberated.

Question 12

Princess about dragon: ‘So nicely physical’ ‘claws/ And lovey green skin and that sexy tail’
‘eat me’

Answer 12

-Sexualises Dragon - female gaze, depicts him as hunky and muscular.
-Descriptive adjectives - her desire.
-humorous - she wants to be eaten.
-Subverts virginal medieval princess stereotype - sexually liberated yet immature.

Question 13

‘It’s hard for a girl to be sure if/ She wants to be rescued.’

Answer 13

-Challenges patriarchal myth and conventions.
-Unexpected - creates humor.
-Conversational tone again.

Question 13

Princess’s thoughts on Saint George:
his horse: ‘really dangerous’
his armour: ‘wearing machinery’
he might have: ‘acne, blackheads or even/ Bad breath’.

Answer 13

-Subverts relationships in myth.
-Underwhelmed and alarmed by Knights appearance.
-‘Really dangerous’ horse - juxtaposed past and present - imagery of modern dangerous motorbike - symbol of masculinity.
-‘wearing machinery’ - limited and modern perspective - lack knowledge and history - doesn’t know what armour is - mocks masculine obsession with machinery.
‘acne, blackheads or even/ Bad breath’ - perspective of teenage girls - rule of 3 - honest depiction of reality p challenges idea of handsome rescuer.

Question 14

‘He made me feel he was all ready to/ Eat me.’

Answer 14

-dramatic irony - effect of multiple view points.
-she thinks dragon wants to eat her - ironically - dragona found her ‘So/ Unattractive as to be inedible’.
-teenage girls wishful thinking.

Question 15

‘The dragon got himself beaten by the boy,/
And a girl’s got to think about her future’

Answer 15

-Stability - context on 1970s - patriarchal.
-Conforms to stereotype in the end.
-transfers her affections to the knight - shallow - very much the voice of teenage girl.
-suggest shift in her affections is result of social necessity - not an act of her own will.

Question 16

Multiple viewpoints - final stanza effect?

Answer 16

-poems ironic tone.
-far from chivalrous - knight is full of himself - preoccupied with equipment - dramatic irony - maiden found it off putting.
-language at odds with expectations of the myth.

Question 17

‘My horse is the latest model, with/ Automatic transmission and built in/ Obsolescence’
‘Prototype armour’
‘my spear is custom built’

Answer 17

‘built in/ Obsolescence’ - ephemeral nature of modern manufacturing - locates knight in modern world.
-Juxtaposes past and present - machinery and chivalry - shows he is not a man of honour - superficial - obsessed with latest gadgets.
-lexical field of machinery - modern masculine hobbies and interest.

Question 18

‘diplomas in Dragon / Management and Virgin Reclamation’

Answer 18

-tips light hearted tone into absurdity.
-brazen materialism suggests commodification of original myth - which has lost all its meaning.
-euphemisms for killing and taking virginity - reflect modern language for public relations purposes.

Question 19

‘Don’t you want to be killed and/or rescued/ in the most contemporary way’
‘Don’t you realise…/ you are endangering job prospects/ In the spear- and horse-building industries?’

Answer 19

-Tenor unsuited to romantic situation or dramatic event.
-speaks in drilled, mechanistic fashion.
-rhetorical questions - postmodern deconstruction of myth very explicit.
-attempts to preserve conventional myth roles.
-Ironic - knights lack of chivalry means he himself does not conform to original role of hero.

Question 20

Stereotyping or subversion of it

Answer 20

-Idea that stereotypes - of little value - people are rarely what they appear.
-gives voice to the stereotyped characters in painting.
-Resistance to stereotype in Dragons monologue:
-bemoans own failure to conform to fearsomeness - ‘literally/ On a string.’
Princess:
-Conforms to stereotype of modern sexually liberated young women - contrast to virginal medieval princess.
-Comical abandonment of propriety - sexual innuendo dragons ‘equipment’ - ‘eat me’ - oral sex.
-reveal tendency to think of opposite sex in sexualised way.
St George:
-undermines own stereotype of chivalrous hero.
-small minded - jobsworth.
-eradicates stereotype of knight - stripped of romantic sensibility.
-almost laddish modern figure.

Question 21

Storytelling/myth

Answer 21

-Ancient and medieval myths - victors and the vanquished.
-outcome framed in conservative moral of religious context - moral message.
-Subverts rubric of myth - refusing to adhere to historically accepted roles.
-myth and painting challnged in Dragons easy going tone - patronising of painter ‘poor chap’.
-Princess - questions meaning itself - can’t take for granted that a girl wants to be rescued.
-King reveal postmodernist perspective of myth in rhetorical questions.

Question 22

Feminist messaging

Answer 22

-Princess defies gender role of virginal princess - however still sentimental.
-Objects to being deprived of the female gaze - can’t see Knights ‘Hardware’.
-May be extended objection to painter male gaze - knights limited physical detail - implies gender bias of paintings creator.

Question 23

Male domination and objectification

Answer 23

-constantly uses ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’ - shows knight is the agent of his own destiny - unlike other characters.
-Enforcer of patriarchal order
-repeated use of transitive verb ‘want’ with the passive voice.
-tells princess what she should want ‘don’t you want to be killed and/or rescued’
-then deprive she of right to want” by being choosy - she is jeopardising industries supporting Knights work - thus his place in society and patriarchal order itself.
-Knights job of ‘Virgin reclamation’ denies autonomy of princess from the outset - she is objectified according to stereotype that the myth upholds.