Lesson video

Welcome to today's English lesson.

I'm Mrs. Crompton.

Before we begin our learning, let's make sure we have everything we need.

You will need a pen and paper.

Take a moment to make sure you've cleared any distractions away and have everything you need at hand.

So, quite a strange title for the lesson today, but I will explain a little bit more.

Space and where we expect to find characters and how they interact with one another is a really interesting angle when it comes to reading literature.

So what we're going to have a look at are some really common images that seem to have travelled through literature, and therefore are really interesting to apply, not just to the extract that we've got today, but any other text that you are working with.

As we have done in the previous couple of sessions, what you're going to need for this initial learning is a note page, so you're going to be taking notes.

Today's title, The Lady on the Pedestal.

There's your starting points.

And as usual, if you need to stop me, pause me, please do.

I'm still going to be here at the other end, and we will work our way through and try and think about how understanding how the positioning of our characters also feeds into that status and that power and the dynamic that is being generated in our texts.

Okay, let's begin.

On the left hand side, I have given you a mediaeval image.

And on the right hand side, the right hand image, it's taken from a Victorian production of Romeo and Juliet.

So let's have a look at these two.

On the left hand side, let's have a look at what we can see.

We have a man and a woman.

We have a woman seated and we have a man kneeling.

The woman seems to be placing her hands on the man's.

It seems to be quite a chaste gesture.

It doesn't look overly physical.

It looks to be almost like she's blessing him.

And she seems to be some sort of powerful figure too, because she does seem to be wearing a crown.

And the man almost seems to be lowering his eyes, bowing his head slightly.

And we have got a dynamic here whereby you would suggest that the female has power and the man is receiving some sort of reward for his devotion, or certainly looking like he's worshipping the female figure.

On the right hand side, the dynamic is the same.

We actually have the man positioned as lower and the woman as higher.

That's interesting, isn't it? And it's interesting that this scene that everybody talks about Romeo and Juliet and the balcony scene is one of the most iconic images, and it mimics the image that we've just seen.

However, there are some slight differences.

I wonder if you notice the man seems to be reaching up with his hand, the woman seems to be bowing down, obviously with her face pointing forwards.

There seems to be more of a physical connection rather than a spiritual connection between these two characters.

And these are some fundamental images that we can work with in terms of dynamics that we will see repeated throughout literature.

So this idea of the lady on the pedestal refers to this iconography, this imagery that we see in front of us of the female elevated, the male below.

It associates with it the idea that the woman is to be worshipped.

It has the idea of spiritual diversion to the female, as opposed to a physical focus to the relationship.

So we can already see by the Victorian period, that's starting to be broken, isn't it? And to be fair, Shakespeare was also suggesting that break in his depiction of Romeo and Juliet because Juliet does not stay quiet as she stands at the top of the balcony and they make their connection.

And so we've got those boundaries being broken already.

We've talked about this idea that there are patterns in literature that their writers subvert or play around with or twist slightly.

The dynamic places the woman as higher, but she is a passive figure.

So just to explain this last part, the most famous period for this imagery of the lady on the pedestal goes back to the Elizabethan period.

And it goes back to the courts.

And in this period, courtiers would write love sonnets to ladies who were considered to be unattainable.

So their love would never be something that would develop, but they would write these fantastic love poems. And in these poems, they would worship the woman by describing all of the qualities she had, all of her physical features, and literally they'd map parts of her body, talking about her lips, talking about her eyes, talking about the quality of her hair.

Modern criticism is that that's quite an objectified version of the female.

It focuses very much on her being placed as like a work of art for the man to worship, and that this relationship that is being presented isn't actually true.

The man presents himself as suffering and that the woman has all the power, but the woman doesn't really have any.

The woman's not asking for this attention, the woman is passive.

It is being given to her and she is this lady on a pedestal, this goddess figure, the static character who doesn't have a voice.

So we do have a critique of this.

This is a power suggested, but not a reality of power for the female within this situation.

So I'll just give you a moment to pause, have a little look at some of those key ideas, woman to be worshipped , spiritual diversion to the female, the dynamic places the woman as higher, but in reality she is quite a passive and objectified figure.

Okay, let's have a look at another idea that's contemporary to the time that our extract is written.

And this is the idea of the angel in the house.

That particular phrase comes from a poem by Coventry Patmore in 1854.

It's a really long poem.

I have taken a little bit of a section there for you if you want to read a little bit more of this.

So you can pause and then come back to this and have a look at it in a little bit more detail.

But for our purposes, and in terms of the key ideas, I've picked out a few lines from the poem for us to look at.

On the left hand side, we have a scene from a Victorian household.

You will see that we are in a domestic setting.

We've got the children, we've got the dogs around, we've got the gentlemen quite relaxed, sat on an armchair, and the lady attending to him.

That lady is Queen Victoria and that gentleman is Prince Albert, her husband.

And it's really interesting that the sovereign herself presents herself in this domestic setting.

She wants to be the angel in the house.

You could say that she is slightly on a pedestal, 'cause you will notice that Albert's sitting and her head is slightly higher.

I think she was quite short in real life, so that's an interesting dynamic.

I think that's also to do with the fact that she is the Queen, so he couldn't be seen to be higher than her in a picture.

But the sovereign chooses to present herself in a domestic sphere.

She chooses to present herself in this very natural setting for her, as opposed to the more public images that we also see of Queen Victoria.

The public domain, the world outside, going out, going to business, building the new factories, developing things, that's the man's world.

The woman is the angel of her house.

And what does the woman do, being the angel? Well here's Coventry Patmore.

The woman is at home because a man must be pleased, but him to please his woman's pleasure.

So I'm not going to go down a feminist critique of all of this, but it's very interesting that we've got these clear domains and clearly defined roles for the male and the female.

And this suggestion that the female takes pleasure from being that angel in the house, from having the absolute control of quite a small space, isn't it? In terms of spheres, man gets all of the world, she gets the house.

"Through passionate duty love springs higher." This is also an interesting idea.

Passion suggests lost, it suggests sensuality, however it's passion for giving your duty.

It is made to be a far more subdued, serious sombre thing.

She is dutiful first and foremost, rather than a sexualized being.

So it's the duty to her role in society, the duty to being a mother, the duty to being a good wife, the duty to upholding the responsibilities of a household that will make that love spring higher.

And those are the ideas that Coventry Patmore is presenting.

But notice again, a male voice.

Was it that rigid? I mean, these are the things that we need to think about.

We talked in session one about the fact that ideas were being questioned.

So let's have a look at our same lady who has presented herself in her very domestic sphere.

And we've got an extract here from Queen Victoria's journal written on the 11th of October, 1839.

"Albert really is quite charming, "and so excessively handsome, "such beautiful blue eyes, an exquisite nose, "such a pretty mouth with delicate moustachios "and slight, but very slight whiskers; "a beautiful figure, "broad in the shoulders and a fine waist." Wow, in terms of objectification, one could accuse Queen Victoria very much objectifying Albert here, all about his physical qualities.

And we can see that there is a very passionate focus to her comments.

And we start to see some subversions.

The image that we might have in our heads of Victorian lifestyles is not as clear cut as we would imagine.

And that's where our literature comes from.

It comes from the bubbling surface between expectation and reality and the frictions that are created between those two identities.

At the bottom of the screen, you can see a reference there to a site that might be of interest to you.

And you can find out a little bit more about this time period, and it might be relevant to some of your other studies, but actually it's a fantastic website as a resource that you might want to tap into.

And that's just running along the bottom that for you.

Let's try and apply what we've been looking at today.

So the way this is going to work, you are going to reread a passage, little sections from the text that I've picked out for you for today's session, all from the original extract, as usual.

As you read the passage, there'll be sections of text highlighted to support you in applying our learning from the session and making links to our last one.

We're then going to think about synthesising things too.

Once you've read through the text, we'll get back together to consider how to show our thinking, to pull all of the strands together to try and consolidate our learning.

Just to show you how this is going to work, I'm going to look at this one with you.

So I've given you a little bit of background information about the setting.

I have mentioned this information previously, but we're going to work with it right now.

The prompt question running along the bottom, think about the setting in relation to the Lady in the House.

Think about the positioning of Lucy, where should she be and where is she? So, the four men have gone to Lucy's tomb at midnight and found it empty.

Van Helsing takes garlic and communion wafers, crushing them together and rubs them into the door jambs and crevices of the tomb.

So if you remember, that's how they've set it up so that when the vampire Lucy returns with the child that she's taken, they can get her into that area and then make sure that she gets back into the tomb.

But this time it has been protected with these Christian symbols.

So what am I going to do with this? Think about the setting in relation to the Lady of the House.

She's not in the house, is she? In fact, Lucy no longer has a house.

She seems to have some sort of tomb that she keeps going into.

So I think I'm going to make a comment on that.

She is no longer under the protection of the Lady in the House.

In fact, she has been rejected from that role, hasn't she? In her undead status, she no longer has access to the home.

So this is a question of what happens to an individual when they are no longer protected by that status.

Where is she right now? Well she's out there somewhere, nobody even knows where she is.

So she is free.

She is in an unknown location.

She's actually in that public sphere where she should not be.

So Lucy's transgressing boundaries.

She's moving from one space to another.

She has broken out of that space.

So think about the positioning of Lucy and where should she be and where is she? So that's one point.

The other thing that I'm starting to think about, just in terms of positioning, is the imagery.

Is Lucy positioned as a higher being? Well, actually, if we put Lucy into a tomb, she is not actually elevated.

She's the exact opposite.

She is being forgotten, she's being made to be subjective.

Sorry, objectified and subjected to this position where she no longer has any height or authority.

And so she's literally going to be buried.

So that is going to be her new situation.

So we've gone from height to being absolutely flat.

So I think that's an interesting dynamic.

So have that sort of thinking, have that sort of conversation, play around with it.

You saw me getting my words tied up there a little bit, and that's because I was thinking as we're working through, and I want you to do that.

That's the beauty of literature, playing around with ideas and thinking well that's interesting, what would happen there? So Lucy is going from the elevated to this very stationary and very lowered position where she couldn't be any more markedly taken away from the pedestal.

So now over to you.

What you're going to get are a series of slides.

You're going to read the passage, respond to the prompts like I've just done, and then I will meet you at the other side and we will bring all of this together and draw our conclusions.

Welcome back.

So we're going to try something a little bit different.

With each lesson, I can feel your confidence growing and I can see that we're starting to bring lots of different ideas together.

So what we're going to do now, and you can pause it if you really need to, but I am going to read the question to you.

And what I would like you to do is to take a clean sheet of paper and I would like you to just respond to the question that I ask with any ideas that come to mind.

So I'm going to read the question.

For example, what type of character type do you want to give to Lucy? You get an opportunity to write, and I am literally going to give you three minutes on each question.

And I quite like this as a teaching tool.

I quite like it as a way of working because it stops us from worrying about getting started.

And we've got a few questions, a few prompt questions that will bring all of our ideas together.

Once we've got our draught, then we can refine.

Okay, let's try it out, see how it goes.

Try not to pause me.

But we will see.

If you have to, you can.

The first question is what type of character type do you want to give to Lucy? So what type of character type do you want to give to Lucy? I'm going to give you three minutes.

Off you go.

You're into your last minute.

Okay everybody, if you just pop your pens down for a moment.

How did that feel? Hopefully you felt like you had plenty of time, lots of ideas.

You might have written down a few different things, but try and write much as you can, try and be as precise as possible.

We're going to do it again, another three minutes.

And we have our second question, which is what is the significance of the setting? So three minutes.

Off you go again.

That's half your time.

So you've still got a minute and a half.

If you think you finished, you might want to make a few tweaks, try and get the sentences very precise.

Into the last minute now.

If you just start to finish that sentence.

And we'll look at the next question.

Not too many, just two, but these are a little bit more challenging.

So I will read through it first and then you can begin to write.

Why does Stoker make her slayers men who have loved her? So this is obviously in reference to Lucy.

Why does Stoker make her slayers men who have loved her? Have little think about that.

Three minutes, off you go.

That's half your time again.

Okay, everyone.

If we just finish off the words that we're writing.

So that was a trickier question, wasn't it? Why does Stoker make her slayers men who have loved her? I think it's an interesting angle to take, those men who had, at some point had this affection for her now want to destroy her.

Why are they wanting to destroy her? It's because of the change in her behaviour.

It's the change in who she is as a character, who she identifies as now, i.

e.

the other, rather than the Angel in the House.

She has gone away from that character.

Which leads into the final question.

So this one is the most challenging and I've left at the end.

It might be something that you look at and you think this is something I'm really not sure of.

I'm not going to time this to three minutes, I'm going to leave this as the last question you look at and I'm going to give you a little bit of help with it and then give you opportunity to have a look at this and then complete this reflective work.

And as an exercise, I thought it would be quite interesting to see if we could try and do something together.

If you did need to stop me, it really doesn't matter.

But thinking about things, not getting stuck on a question is really important.

We need to make sure that we have confidence in knowing what we know and expressing our ideas and writing to time.

So I wanted to build that into our work as we carry on with our English lessons.

So final one from me today before you go into your recap quiz is Lucy was placed on a pedestal, but now she's positioned in a tomb.

This has given her more power than she had before.

So now I've got my words out right here, haven't I? Now that I've got it written down.

This is what I was thinking before.

Lucy was placed on a pedestal, but now she's positioned in a tomb.

This has given her more power than she had before.

Do you agree? Do you disagree with that statement? Do you want to play around with it a little bit? What could it possibly mean? What power has Lucy got, and think about the space she's now in charge of rather than what she was in charge of before.

If you disagree with it, again, evidence it, expand on your ideas, make sure you're absolutely clear.

So the final one, Lucy was placed on a pedestal, but now she's positioned in a tomb.

This has given her more power than she had before.

Once you have all your answers, review them, tweak them, think about it.

We're starting to build up yet another layer to our interpretation of this extract.

To finish the learning for today, you have a recap quiz to complete.

All that remains for me to say is thank you for your focus and enjoy the rest of your learning today.