Not my best side - notes and quotes Flashcards
What does a tone of Bathos mean?
an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous.
What does Verbal Irony mean?
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.
Tenor meaning?
The degree of formality of the language used.
an important means of creating authenticity, and portraying scenes, characters and their relationships.
Active Voice
Passive Voice
A) subject executes the action indicated by the action verb in a sentence.
B) Subject is acted upon by the verb in a sentence.
Transitive Verb
Intransitive Verb
a) verb that allows one or more direct objects.
b) verb that does not allow direct objects or use of passive voice.
Tone of Bathos in this poem 1st Stanza?
-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.
‘Not my best side, I’m afraid.’
‘Pose properly’
‘I was sorry for the bad publicity’
-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.
Dragons Language 1st Stanza?
-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.
Use of Verbal Irony 1st Stanza?
-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.
‘Should my conqueror/ be so ostentatiously beardless’
‘Why should my victim be so / Unattractive as to be inedible’
-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.
Tone of the princess’s dramatic monologue?
-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.
Princess about dragon: ‘So nicely physical’ ‘claws/ And lovey green skin and that sexy tail’
‘eat me’
-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.
‘It’s hard for a girl to be sure if/ She wants to be rescued.’
-Challenges patriarchal myth and conventions.
-Unexpected - creates humor.
-Conversational tone again.
Princess’s thoughts on Saint George:
his horse: ‘really dangerous’
his armour: ‘wearing machinery’
he might have: ‘acne, blackheads or even/ Bad breath’.
-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.
‘He made me feel he was all ready to/ Eat me.’
-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.
‘The dragon got himself beaten by the boy,/
And a girl’s got to think about her future’
-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.
Multiple viewpoints - final stanza effect?
-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.
‘My horse is the latest model, with/ Automatic transmission and built in/ Obsolescence’
‘Prototype armour’
‘my spear is custom built’
‘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.
‘diplomas in Dragon / Management and Virgin Reclamation’
-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.
‘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?’
-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.
Stereotyping or subversion of it
-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.
Storytelling/myth
-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.
Feminist messaging
-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.
Male domination and objectification
-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.
