Lesson video

Hello, and welcome to today's English lesson.

I'm Miss Gayle.

I hope you haven't had any ghostly visitors since I saw you last.

Today, we're going to be thinking about structure, meaning the choices a writer has made about how a text has been put together.

Take a moment to clear any distractions away and make sure you have everything you need to hand.

You'll need a pen and paper as always.

Take a moment to write down the title thinking about structure.

Hopefully, you've already watched the lesson where we focus on reading the story, A Haunted House for meaning, and we thought about the summaries and interpretations that we can make.

Today, we're going to focus on how that story is put together.

So this lesson, we're going to begin with a quick recap of the story and the plot.

Before we go into thinking about what we mean by structure and how we analyse structure.

We'll reread the story, and then we'll go on to some structural analysis.

We'll then finish with the end of lesson review quiz.

So the story we're going to look at is A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf, published in 1921, and following the narrator telling the story of a ghostly couple who glides through the rooms of her well-loved home at night.

So if you have read the story, and you've watched the previous lesson, you can go on to the recap now.

If you haven't already watched it, I would recommend you, do lesson one first, before this lesson.

Which of these statements are true? I'd like to pause the video and decide whether the statements on your screen are true or false.

Well done.

So the first statement is true.

The story is set in a house at night.

The story is not narrated by a ghostly woman.

It's narrated by a living woman who is dreaming or half-dreaming half-awake.

The key characters in the story are a ghostly couple and another couple.

So the third one is false.

The ghosts are not hunting for gold.

They are looking for hidden treasure, but it turns out that's the treasure of the heart that they're looking for.

So question four, you should have written false.

Question five, the house does seem to speak.

And question number six, the ghosts are in love with one another.

Well, then if you got all those correct and remembered some of those key ideas in the story.

As we remember, last lesson, we looked at Virginia Woolf, who believed that if the old methods of writing are obsolete, it is the business of the writer to discover new ones.

And she was quite experimental in her writing.

Virginia Woolf was a modernist writer and this story is a good example of how writers of her time and her period tried to experiment with new styles of writing.

In A Haunted House, she takes some of the conventions of the ghost story and starts to subvert them, or in other words, do something different.

So it's a good story to use when we're looking at analysing structure.

What is structure? The structure of a text is the sequence of ideas that it contains, and how they're put together.

And there are many choices that writers make regarding structure.

But here are some of the main ones that you might want to focus on.

A writer has to decide who and what to introduce first.

They might make shifts between person or place.

A writer introduces other characters or viewpoints into the story, a writer might introduce a complication or change.

They might zoom in and describe tiny details or zoom out and describe a bigger picture.

Sometimes writers choose to change.

Sometimes writers choose to change perspective from the individual to a wider world.

And sometimes, they might combine external actions with the narrators or a character's internal thoughts so that we as a reader can really empathise with their thoughts and feelings.

And when we're looking at structure, these are the things that we should be looking for.

When you're approaching structural analysis, when you're approaching structural analysis, it's really important to be clear about the writer's decision and why they've done it.

So, structure is not just summarising what happens in a story, it's much more interesting than that.

We need to go beyond just a basic summary of what happens first, next, then and finally.

And we need to think about what decisions and choices the writer makes at that point.

And most importantly, we need to think about why they are making those choices.

I would like to draw a table with three columns.

The first one headed what, the second one headed writer's decision or technique, and the third one headed, why.

Do not write first, next, then and finally at this point, please, because you don't know how much you're going to write in each row, and you don't want to run out of space.

So you should have three columns.

But do not draw in the rows yet.

So what we're going to do first is reread the story of A Haunted House.

So I'd like you to pause each slide, read the text on your screen, and then I will read the summary heading.

Whenever the narrator wakes, she has a ghostly couple whispering together, looking for something.

The narrator puts her book down and tries to find the ghost but sees nothing.

When the narrator tries to see the ghosts, all she finds are reflections of everyday things.

The narrator hears the voice of the house, as it seems to drop hints about treasure.

The narrator continues to search, but understands that they're kept separate by death.

We learn that the male ghost left the house after the death of his wife.

The weather outside seems wild.

The ghostly couple wander through the house whispering about their memories.

The ghosts stand looking on at the sleeping couple in the bed.

The ghosts look for their treasure of hidden joy in the faces of the sleeping couple.

The narrator wakes suddenly and realises that the light in the heart is the treasure the ghosts are looking for.

Now, that you've read the story, I'd like you to put the events from the story into the right order.

Pause the video and put these events into the correct order.

Now, check your answers.

So first the narrator wakes and hears a ghostly couple whispering together, looking for something.

Then the narrator looks for the ghosts, but she can never see them.

Then the narrator hears the voice of the house as it seems to drop hints about treasure.

Next, we learn the wind and rain of wild in the moonlight.

Then the ghostly couple stand at the end of the bed, looking down at the sleeping couple.

So this is the order.

You might have found this activity difficult, if you did, don't worry.

Part of the reason for that is that the story follows a nonlinear fluid-structure.

We'll talk about what that means in a moment.

The narrator's experience seems to come from a dreamlike sleep.

She's half-waking, half-sleeping all the way through the story.

So the main question that we're going to look at today is how could you describe the structure of A Haunted House.

So let's turn back to our table.

When you think about what happens first, next, then and finally, our initial job as we're analysing structure is that first stage of really understanding the story and what's happened.

Here's my example.

First, the narrator wakes and hears a ghostly couple whispering together, looking for something.

Next, the narrator looks at the ghosts, but she can never see them, only hear their whispers.

Then the narrator hears the voice of the house, as it seems to drop hints about the hidden treasure.

And finally, the ghostly couple stand at the end of the bed, looking down at the sleeping couple.

Now, this is obviously just the bare bones of the story, the key shifts in focus that I've picked out and identified that.

I'm starting to think about the techniques that are being used in terms of the shift in focus, but I've not been that explicit at this point.

We can start to do that as we go on to talk about the effect.

Here are the first couple of things you might talk about.

By focusing on the narrator at first, it creates a sense of mystery and uncertainty.

We're invited to share the narrator's thoughts and experiences.

Next, as the focus shifts on to the narrator looking for the ghosts, there is a fluid dreamlike quality to the story.

Memories, dreams, and reality seem to coexist.

They seem to happen at the same time.

And we learn about the love story of the ghosts.

So we're linking what happens in the story to the effect that it has on us as we are reading it.

Then, as we've said, the narrator hears the voice of the house.

That acts as a reminder that there are supernatural forces at work.

And then finally, the ghostly couple stand at the end of the bed looking down at the sleeping couple, which emphasises the parallels the writer wants us to notice between the living couple and the ghosts.

They're very similar, aren't they? In terms of the way that they're.

The memories of the ghosts seems similar to the way that their living couple now live their life.

There are four key concepts that I'd like us to use in our description of the structure of A Haunted House.

The first is that the story is non-linear, it doesn't happen in a, in a straight.

The events of the story don't happen in a straightforward way.

There are frequent shifts, in tense, time, and place that you might have noticed in the story.

Another new term for you is stream of consciousness, which is something that Virginia Woolf as a writer is famous for.

And what it means is, the continuous flow of thoughts from a first-person narrator.

And it gives us an insight, a really clear insight into their thoughts and feelings.

We can also describe the structure of A Haunted House as quite fluid.

Like we've said, with it being nonlinear time, actions and characters are interwoven and sometimes quite hard to untangle, who's speaking, when they're speaking, where they are.

Finally, we can describe the structure as dreamlike.

The narrator seems to be in a state between waking and dreaming.

So these are some of the techniques that we can talk about and analyse as we think about structure.

In this extract for example, we see that there are frequent shifts in tense, time and place.

Where it says he left her, went north, went east, that's obviously in the past tense, and it's describing the ghost on what he did following the death of his wife.

In the second paragraph, you can see on your screen, we've shifted back to the present tense, the wind rose up the Avenue, and so that a nonlinear structure can make it quite difficult to make sense of where we are in the story, that nonlinear structure really adds to the dreamlike quality of this story.

Similarly, we can describe this section as fluid, there are frequent changes of focus, and we see that again, in this example, we focus on the ghosts, then we focus on the setting and we focus on the voice of the house, and there's frequent changes of focus and shifts in focus throughout the story.

It is also a good example of how we have the stream of consciousness, where the thoughts and perceptions of the narrator run into each other.

There's very little interruption as we make those shifts between one thing and another.

And then finally, because of all of the things that we've just described, memories, realities, and dreams seem to exist at the same time.

And that all adds to that dreamlike quality of A Haunted House in the story as a whole.

I would like you to summarise what we've said about the structure of A Haunted House.

Well done.

You should have written something like this.

A Haunted House had a fluid, nonlinear structure because they are frequent and complex shifts of time, place, and character, which are sometimes hard to untangle.

The writer uses a dreamlike stream of consciousness narrator in order to blur the lines of experience and reality.

Now, we're going to enhance that now with a little bit more detail.

So what makes good structural analysis? Well, good structural analysis should show an understanding of the text and its meaning, and you should know which quotations to select as evidence.

It should identify the structural choices and methods being used by the writer such as sequencing, focus, plot, style and pace.

And you should explain how the structural choices helped to create meaning.

So you should focus on effect.

So as we said, these are the key moments that we might think about and talk about in a structural analysis.

And we've already mentioned some of the structural methods that the writer uses.

For example, the writer uses a fluid, nonlinear structure with frequent shifts in time, place, and focus, making it difficult to know who is speaking or which character is being described.

Second, the first-person narrator has a dreamlike stream of consciousness making the line between fantasy and reality blurred.

The dialogue between the ghosts makes them significant characters as well.

And finally, the setting seems to come alive through the description of the wild weather and the beating pulse of the house as it speaks.

So, how does the writer structure the text to create meaning in A Haunted House? I would like to use the sentence structures on your screen, and the methods and techniques that we've talked about along with your table.

Where you started to analyse structure to answer that question.

Resume the video once you're finished.

If you wish to use a model before you start writing, keep playing the video and you can go back and complete the question afterwards.

I'm going to show you a model to think about how your understanding of methods and effect might be used effectively in a clear structural analysis.

As a modernist writer, Virginia Woolf wanted to experiment with structures and conventions of ghosts stories.

In A Haunted House, she structures the text so the narrator's stream of consciousness creates a dreamlike state of mystery, which is shared by the reader.

First, at the beginning of the story, we move from the narrator's thoughts to the dialogue of the ghosts as they search for an enigmatic lost treasure.

And then back to the narrator, as she goes on an impossible search for them.

Next, the conversation the narrator hears or imagines from the ghosts, and even the house punctuates the narrative.

For instance, the pulse of the house repeats, safe, safe, safe, but instead of making us feel secure and comfortable, it can have the opposite effect because of the eerie, supernatural atmosphere.

Even though the ghostly couple do not seem threatening, the uncertainty and mystery still makes us feel uneasy.

The writer uses a fluid, nonlinear structure to move between past and present memory and reality, making these lines blurred and confusing.

Through the detailed description of everyday household objects or the wild weather outside.

It is as if the reader shares the experience of trying to understand something that is just beyond our reach.

Then we learn about the ghosts in their lives.

Then we learn more about the ghosts in their lives than we do about the sleeping couple.

Their conversation including phrases like here we slept.

Kisses without number gives us an insight into their close loving relationship and suggests the importance the writer puts on the power of their love and memory.

Woolf subverts our expectations of the ghost story by making the ghostly couple non-threatening rather than figures of terror.

Finally, the story ends with the ghost standing over the bed of the sleeping couple, and admiring the treasure of love that they once shared in the same space.

The narrator wakes at this point and seems to be able to communicate with the ghosts for the first time as she cries.

"Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart?" This moment of realisation is not entirely comfortable.

And we are left with the uncertainty over how and if the ghosts might reply.

So, in my extended answer, you can see that I've tracked the shift in focus through the story.

And in my analysis, I've identified some of the techniques that the writer has used.

And I've tried to use quotations to illustrate those.

Most importantly, I've tried to explain what we as readers learn, and how the writer's choices create meaning.

So, if you have not already completed your piece of writing, go back and complete it now.

If you have, why not check to see where you could include any additional detail or explanation.

Well done.

And thank you for your focus.

I hope you enjoy the rest of your learning today.

Before you do, please complete the end of lesson quiz.