Lesson video

Hello and welcome to today's English lesson.

I'm Ms. Gayle, and today we will complete our study of "A Haunted House" by Virginia Woolf.

We'll begin with a recap of the key themes and ideas from our analysis so far.

And then we will begin to develop a personal response to the story.

I'd like you to take a minute, to make sure you've cleared any distractions away, and check that you have everything you need at hand, including a pen and paper.

Now, write down today's title, giving a personal response.

So today, we're going to focus on the skill of critical evaluation, which just means providing your opinion or personal response to a text.

This is a vital skill for you to develop as you work in both English language and English literature.

This lesson, I'll show you how to explain your personal opinion about a text, by responding to a statement.

We will also learn about the concept of the uncanny, and think about how it might apply to the text that we just read.

After that, we will read some key sections of the text, before practising our critical evaluation.

So what can you remember about "A Haunted House"? I'd like you just to write down everything you can remember about the short story we've been reading this week.

Well done, hopefully, you know, that "A Haunted House" was a modernist short story written by Virginia Woolf, with a fluid non-linear structure that tells the story of a ghostly couple wandering through the home where they used to live, while searching for the hidden treasure of the heart.

Today, we're going to be evaluating this statement.

"A Haunted House" is not a scary story, but it is unsettling because the haunting blurs the line between reality and the supernatural.

So we need to start to organise our ideas, before we start evaluating the statement.

And whenever you do an evaluation, you need to think, to what extent do you agree with it? So to do that, we need to read the story again.

And we're going to read it in full before we focus on one particular section for your analysis.

I'd like you to use the summary boxes on each slide, to remind yourself of the key ideas in each section.

And as we read, I'd like you to think about whether the story is scary, unsettling, and whether the line between reality and the supernatural is blurred.

"Whatever hour you woke, there was a door shutting.

"From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, "opening there, making sure, a ghostly couple.

"Here we left it," she said.

"And he added, "Oh, but here too!" "It's upstairs," she murmured.

"And in the garden," he whispered.

"Quietly," they said, "or we shall wake them." "But it wasn't that you woke us, oh no.

"They're looking for it, they're drawing the curtain," "one might say, and so read on a page or two.

"Now they found it," one would be certain, "stopping the pencil on the margin.

"And then, tired of reading, one might rise "and see for oneself, the house all empty, "the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling "with content and the home of the threshing machine sounding "on the farm.

"What did I come here for? "What did I want to find?" "My hands were empty.

"Perhaps it's upstairs then?" "The apples were in the loft.

"And so down again, the garden still as ever, "only the book had slipped into the grass.

"But they'd found it in the drawing room.

"Not that one could ever see them.

"The window panes reflected apples, reflected roses, "all the leaves were green in the glass.

"If they moved in the drawing room, "the apple only turned its yellow side.

"Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, "spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, "pendant from the ceiling, what? "My hands were empty.

"The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet, "from the deepest wells of silence, "the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound.

"Safe, safe, safe," the pulse of the house beat softly.

"The treasure buried, the room.

." the pulse stopped short.

"Oh, was that the buried treasure? "A moment later, the light had faded.

"Out in the garden then? "But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun.

"So fine, so rare, coolly sunk beneath the surface, "the beam I sought always burned behind the glass.

"Death was the glass, death was between us, "coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, "leaving the house, sealing all the windows, "the rooms were darkened.

"He left it, left her, went North, went East, "saw the stars turned in the Southern sky, "sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs.

"Safe, safe, safe," the pulse of the house beat gladly.

"The treasure yours." "The wind roars up the avenue.

"Trees stoop and bend this way and that.

"Moonbeam splash and spill wildly in the rain.

"But the beam of the lump fall straight from the window.

"The candle burn stiff and still.

"Wandering through the house, opening the windows, "whispering not to wake us, "the ghostly couple seek their joy.

"Here we slept," she says.

"And he adds, "Kisses without number." "Waking in the morning." "Silver between the trees." "Upstairs." "In the garden." "When summer came." "In winter snow time." "The doors go shooting far in the distance, "gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.

"Nearer they come, cease at the doorway.

"The wind falls, the rain slides silver down the glass.

"Our eyes darken, we hear no steps beside us.

"We see no lady spread her ghostly cloak.

"His hands shield the lantern.

"Look," he breathes.

"Sound asleep, love upon their lips." "Stooping, holding their silver lamp above us, "long they look and deeply.

"Long they pause.

"The wind drives straightly, the flame stoops slightly.

"Wild beams of moonlight cross both floor and wall, "and meeting, stain the faces bent.

"The face is pondering, the faces that search the sleepers "and seek their hidden joy.

"Safe, safe, safe," the heart of the house beats proudly.

"Long years," he sighs.

"And again, you found me." "Here," she murmurs, "sleeping, in the garden reading, "laughing, rolling apples in the loft.

"Here we left our treasure." "Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes.

"Safe, safe, safe!" "The pulse of the house beats wildly.

"Waking, I cry, "Oh, is this your buried treasure? "The light in the heart." So let's think about the question.

There are two parts to it.

Firstly, do you agree that the short story is not scary? Think about what the story is about, and how we discussed, how the writer might subvert or go against our expectations of a ghost story, because of her experimental modernist style.

Think about the key themes of the story, not terror and fear, but maybe love, memory, death and life.

The second part of the statement is that the story is unsettling, because the haunting blurs the line between reality and the supernatural.

So we need to think now, about what evidence we might have for the discomfort that we feel, because it is never really clear what is happening in the short story.

An ordinary, familiar space, the home is being visited by something extraordinary, or supernatural.

So in your initial thinking, you need to decide, to what extent you agree.

And I'd like you to ask yourself these three questions, and then ask yourself why.

Write down your answers to the questions you can see on the screen.

Does the story scare you? Why? Does the story make you feel uncomfortable? Why? Does the story make the characters or the reader question what's real and what is imagined? And why? Pause the video to complete that task.

Now, here's my initial response to those three questions.

What I've decided to do, is to combine them, those three mini questions, I've combined into one introductory paragraph.

And this will help me when I'm coming to write my full evaluative response.

So don't worry if you've got three separate ideas, that's also fine.

So there are a couple of ideas I'd like to introduce you to before we go any further.

I agree to some extent, that the story is not intended to scare or frighten the reader, because the writer subverts our expectations of a ghost story, and places an emphasis on love and memory.

The ghosts are non-threatening as frequent visitors, and the narrator never seems frightened of them.

However, I also agree that it is unsettling and uncomfortable to read, because the ideas and events are often ambiguous, and the writer blurs the line between reality and the supernatural.

Remember, ambiguous just means there's more than one possible interpretation.

The ghosts create a strong feeling of unease because of their uncanny similarity to the living couple.

There's a few concepts that I've included in my introductory response, that we need to hand-pick a little bit.

First, we'll start with the idea of the uncanny.

Now, the uncanny is an uncomfortable psychological experience, where something familiar is encountered in an unsettling or an eerie context.

Many people are afraid of things when what they thought was comforting, familiar and known to them, is suddenly different or strange.

This story is set in a home, a place where you should be the most comfortable and familiar.

Because it's haunted though, there is a strange supernatural force that makes the place uncomfortable and unsettling.

In this story, that eerie similarity between the ghostly couple, and the couple asleep on the bed, makes us realise the similarities and parallels between them.

The living in the dead are very similar.

And one day, the living couple will cross over the threshold in just the same way.

At one point, if you remember, the living narrator says that, "Death was the glass, "death was between us, coming to the woman first, "hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, "sealing all the windows, the rooms were darkened." This suggests that there's a very fragile, invisible barrier between life and death.

When the ghostly couple recognise their joy in the love of the sleeping couple, it feels unsettling for the reader.

I'd like you to pause the video, to complete this definition of the uncanny on your screen.

Well done, check your answer now.

The uncanny is an uncomfortable psychological experience where a familiar thing is encountered in an unfamiliar or eerie context.

In the story, the haunting of a house, and the similarity between the living and ghostly couple can be described as uncanny.

So I mentioned earlier, that the writer subverts our expectations of a ghost story.

What do you think that means? Well, subverts means undermine an established system.

So that means that a writer is trying to overturn or change in its established way of doing something.

And as a modernist writer, Woolf was trying to experiment with these new and unusual ways of doing this.

And it's worth bearing in mind, that the writer doesn't subvert all the expectations of a ghost story though.

We do still have some eerie gothic conventions, like the wild and windy weather, or the whispers and murmurs in the dark and the ghostly visitations.

But the narrator does seem to seek them out, and they don't seem that threatening to the characters.

So many in many of the ideas in the story are simply ambiguous or mysterious.

So I'd like you to think about whether you think the writer does subvert our expectations of a ghost story.

Is it your typical ghost story? If not, why not? Use those sentence starters on your screen to help you to think about the answer.

Well then, so I think that the writer subverts some of our expectations of the ghost story, because the ghosts are non-threatening, and the focus is on love and memory instead.

However, Woolf does keep some of the key conventions of a ghost story.

For example, the setting, the mood and the atmosphere.

And the eerie in the story is often ambiguous or mysterious.

We also talked about the fact that the writer blurs the line between reality and the supernatural.

The supernatural means something beyond natural or scientific understanding.

Because so much of the story occurs in a sort of dream-like state, we can't always tell what's happening in reality.

What is imagined and what is haunting and what is not.

Although there is one narrator, there are lots of voices intermingled, and we've already mentioned the similarities between that ghostly couple and the living one, and their experience that start to overlap.

And that whole overlapping of living and dead is quite unsettling.

So as we approach any analysis, remember the process goes a little bit like this.

We start by understanding the text, and then we think about the focus of the question, which is what we've just been doing then.

The next stage is then to select some rich evidence that we can link together to write our analysis.

So let's return to the statement, "A Haunted House" is not a scary story, "but it is unsettling, because the haunting blurs the line "between reality and the supernatural." By now, you should have started to form your own personal opinions about this.

So I'd like you to return to those initial thoughts, because we're going to start looking for evidence to support them now.

We're just going to use the second half of the story for the rest of this session.

So as we reread it, I want you to make a note of any quotations or methods that the writer might have used, to support any of your ideas in relation to the statement.

I want you to read this independently, I will signal when it's the next slide.

Pause the video and read the first section.

Now pause the video to read the second section.

And the third section.

And finally, the fourth section.

So what evidence did you find? And what methods did you pick out? I'd like you to write down your initial response.

What is your initial personal response to the statement? Pause the video to explain whether you agree that the "Haunted House" is unsettling rather than scary.

I'm going to show you a model answer in a moment, that meets this success criteria for the analysis and evaluation.

Remember, with all language analysis we should be making clear points about the question focus, we should be using rich evidence or quotations, and we need to explain the effects of the writer's methods and choices by linking ideas together.

Here's a model answer you can either use to check your answer, or to give you some additional support.

The story is unsettling because the writer subverts our expectations of a ghost story by focusing on the love of ghosts.

The living and dead uncannily similar in "A Haunted House".

For instance, the male ghost is able to see the parallels between his life and the current residents of the house.

"Look," he breathes.

"Sound asleep, love upon their lips." The soft and gentle verb, breathes, suggests the unthreatening whisper of the ghosts as they haunt the couple.

Furthermore, the fact that the ghost recognises the love upon their lips, shows the similarities between the sleeping couple and the ghost, because he recognises feelings and behaviours from his own life, and remembers his own loving and intimate relationship.

And you can see here that I've got my clear expectations, my clear points.

I've used evidence, and I've explained how those methods contribute.

So if you look at the clear points in blue, rich evidence or quotations in green, and then explanations of the effect of writer's methods in red.

And the answer continues with a link in purple.

However, when the narrator wakes at the end of the story, she seems a little distressed and unsettled by the connection between the two couples.

The ending of the story is ambiguous.

"Waking, I cry, "Oh, is this your buried treasure? "The light in the heart." Here, when for the first time the narrator speaks directly to the ghosts, she seems surprised and a little uncertain.

The use of the verb, cry, hints at surprise or feelings of uncertainty, perhaps even fear.

She seems to understand that love or the metaphorical light in the heart is what the ghosts are searching for.

But because the ending is ambiguous, and we never get the ghosts' reply, the line between reality and the supernatural is blurred.

So you can see that all the way through this answer, I'm linking back to the ideas and the statement with my personal viewpoint on that.

I've used evidence to support it, and I've explained the effect of writer's methods, by picking out things like verbs, metaphors, or word choices.

So I want you now to have a go at writing the answer, using your own evidence from the text.

Feel free to use the quotations that I used in that model answer if you wish.

If you haven't quite finalised what you're going to say about each quotation you've chosen, make sure you do that now in your planning before you start writing.

Resume the answer once you're done, and check against the success criteria to make sure you've included everything that you needed to.

Thank you for your focus, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your learning today.

Please take a moment to complete the end of lesson quiz.