TPL - The Thatcherite Hero As A Cynical Opportunist (Assessment) Flashcards
The subject of _____ relations offers a useful starting point for an analysis of The Ploughman’s Lunch because it reveals a fundamental understanding of the character of James Penfield.
Class
Penfield is willing to adopt either _____ __ ______ wing political positions according to the demands of the occasion.
Left or right
His priorities have been shaped almost exclusively by a neoconservative agenda and he sees himself as belonging to an enterprise culture in which the pursuit of ________ goals overrides traditional class affiliations and values.
Individual
Even though he is still in touch with his father and his terminally ill mother, Penfield is almost completely ________ from his roots.
Alienated
In separate conversations with his girlfriend, Susan Barrington, and with her mother, Ann, Penfield denies all familial ties by claiming that both his parents are _____.
Dead
Who is Ann Barrington?
A socialist academic
Penfield never speaks about his reasons for cutting himself loose from his parents but it is obvious that he has discarded them as _________ to his personal ambitions.
Irrelevent
Penfield’s preferred company consists of sophisticated friends such as the journalist, Jeremy Hancock, and the television researcher, Susan Barrington, who can help him in his present career and enhance his social status, or people such as the _______, Gold, who wield power and influence in the fields where he hopes to make progress in the future.
Publisher
However, Penfield’s belief that class distinctions have become irrelevant in an highly individualized entrepreneurial Britain is naïve.
He may speak and dress like his chosen companions; he might feel at one with the ‘truly ambitious’ Susan Barrington when she talks about ‘progress’ and ‘taking responsibility for one’s own happiness’; and he may be rich enough to buy Jeremy Hancock outrageously expensive drinks in a fashionable cocktail bar.
Nevertheless, in the final analysis, neither Jeremy nor Susan considers James their ______.
Equal
Who is Jeremy Hancock?
A journalist friend of Penfield
Susan Barrington’s sense of the innate inferiority of working class people is evident, for example, in her ________ account of a meeting with a group of trade union officials, ‘all incredibly fat and beery, huge trousers and braces. And so sweet’.
Patronising
Who is Susan Barrington?
Ann Barrington’s daughter
Jeremy turns James’s social class into a joke. He describes Susan, for instance, as ‘a glamorous young lady way above [James’s] station’.
On another occasion, having persuaded Penfield to drive the three of them to the _________ Party Conference, he then reduces him to the status of chauffeur with the mock command, ‘Brighton, James’.
Conservative
However, like many jokes, Jeremy’s have an origin in real prejudice.
This finally becomes clear even to James when, speaking for once without irony, Jeremy seeks to justify the romantic betrayal of his supposed friend by arguing that he has ‘known Susan for more than fifteen years’ and that they are ‘old _____’.
Allies
Who is Gold?
Publisher
