On Her Blindness Flashcards
TITLE
- Intertexuality of John Milton poem
- Mocking by being stoic
“Bear being blind”
- Plosive Alliteration : builds a blunt, brutal reading of mothers suffering
“To be honest. One shouldn’t say it”
- Colloqial language - blunt truth
- Endstop : bluntness of societal expectation now allowed to say it
- Opening couplet emphasises honest account of suffering
“One should hide the fact that catastrophic handicaps are hell”
- Overly formalised language / anaphora : mocking of stoic language
- Enjabment : personal story, flow of the text, thought process of speaker, monosyllabic
“Like a roman”
- Simile : noble / warrior-like
- Courageous
“In a Paris restaurant”
- Setting : connotations of sophistication and prestige
- Mother is incongruous to setting
- Eloquence is juxtaposed, lack of status and decorum
- Undignifying
“Whispered”
- Not fully accepting of truth
- Painful reality
“I’d bump myself off”
- Euphemistic : element of truth hidden in stoicism
- Colloquial language - confession is honest and exposing
“The usual sop, inadequate: the locked-in son”
- Caesura : reflects him being inadequate, son feels trapped
- Colloquialism : facetious and mocking stoicism, formality criticised
- Illness is personal
“Bumping into walls like a dodgem”
- Simile : element of pathos and tragedy, colloquial creating sympathy
- Contrasting imagery of dark humour : coping mechanism
“No built in compass”
- Negators / metaphor : whole family in denial , no one can comfort her illness
- Trying to use humour to cope
“Or laughed it off. Or saw things she couldn’t see”
-Polysyndetic listing : conjunctions show she is trying to disguise illness
- Inescapable fate
“The long, slow slide has finished in a vision as black as stone”
- Enjabment / metaphor: disease/illness if elongated emphasising suffering
- Assonance : illness is brutal and long drawn out, will get worse and worse, like the slide down
- Simile : emphasises irreversibility of illness, sense of hiding behind dignity, degeneration of eyesight, permanence of illness, cold harsh brutal reality
“She’d visit exhibitions, admire films, sink into television while looking the wrong way”
- Asyndetic listing : dark humour. Bathos/ antic-climactic humour emphasises futility of illness. Coping mechanism.
“Golden weather” / “autumn trees” / “ablaze with colour”
- Symbolic of ending of life - Autumn
- Setting is ironic : such beautiful natural imagery cannot be seen, connotes wealth rich and luxury which mother cannot see. Pitiful / empathising
“Her eyelids were closed in the coffin; it was up to us to believe”
- Unrhymed couplets : rapid progression of one idea to another, alongside lack of contemplation
“She was watching, somewhere, in the end.”
- Hopeful and illusionary
- Subversion of sight as a form of grief management, they are no longer pretending
- Unlikely / unrealistic
