Chels

To celebrate exam season (and the fact that I no longer have to take exams), this week I’d like to look back on the set texts I had to study for my GCSE and A Level exams. Some of them I still think of fondly, and others … not so much.

Of Mice and Men

Probably the most iconic set text for any GCSE student, there’s really no way to study Of Mice and Men without having the ending spoiled for you. I’m pretty sure every copy of the novel our school owned had the ending written on the front page. It’s interesting, actually, because looking back on it, the ending (which I won’t spoil here) isn’t really a twist. I don’t think I’m letting hindsight cloud my memory, but to me, the ending seems inevitable, as if the entire novel is building up to and hinting at it.

The book is controversial for its use of racial slurs, but it also serves as a time capsule, capturing American working class society in the 1930s. It’s Steinbeck’s willingness to portray the racism, ableism, and misogyny of the time that gives the novel so much realism, and in fact, it opens up opportunities for students to consider the themes in a wider context.

In terms of my personal enjoyment of the book, for me it was lukewarm. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I read it of my own accord rather than in a year nine classroom, so perhaps a reread is in order.

Lord of the Flies

I studied Lord of the Flies and Of Mice and Men in the same school year, but for some reason, I can’t remember Lord of the Flies quite as well. I’ve returned to it though, as an adult, mostly through coincidence. While I haven’t reread the book, I’ve been very interested in discussions about the themes. A lot of people have suggested that the novel is unrealistic, or that it is wrongly suggesting that when left to their own devices, people will inherently resort to evil. Others then point out that this isn’t quite the case. The key is that Lord of the Flies is a specific criticism of British upper-class schoolboys and the culture and attitudes surrounding private school boys of the post-WW2 era. While it can of course be read as an allegory of human nature in general, people often pass over the context. This was the case for my English class. Coming across debates around Lord of the Flies as an adult has been quite illuminating, and again, I’d love to reread the novel, both with an adult perspective, and with the awareness of the academic discussions surrounding the novel and its themes.

Macbeth

I have to preface this by saying that when I was in secondary school, I was incredibly nerdy. I read Shakespeare for enjoyment, and so there are two factors that influenced my opinion of Macbeth. The first is that we were told we were studying Much Ado About Nothing, which is my all time favourite Shakespeare play. I even reread it in preparation. So you can imagine my disappointment when the day we were due to start, it turned out that we would be reading Macbeth. The second factor is that a year earlier, we had read Lady Macbeth, an adaptation which put me off Macbeth in general. I really did not enjoy that play at all, and the teacher we’d had for the play adaptation never fully explained to us that it was nothing to do with Shakespeare himself, or the actual play, so I just assumed I wasn’t a fan. We also, and this may be wrong of me to say, didn’t actually read the whole play in order. We watched a theatre performance and analysed some scenes in depth.

Of course, now that I’m older and wiser I can appreciate Macbeth on its own, and I do recommend it, but in terms of my experience in school, it’s probably ranked the lowest.

The World’s Wife

I love Carol Ann Duffy. Enough said. I love this poetry collection so much that I bought a copy. For those unfamiliar, in The World’s Wife, Carol Ann Duffy takes existing stories and writes from the perspective of the existing or invented wife of the male protagonist. They’re really clever and creative, and they explore feminism in a way that doesn’t feel too on the nose or inaccessible for a young audience. The World’s Wife was genuinely enjoyable to study, and equally enjoyable to read for pleasure.

The Handmaid’s Tale

I moved from a college to a sixth form about a week into my first year of A Levels, so I didn’t get to do the summer reading. One of which was The Handmaid’s Tale. A Levels are busy at the best of times, so I was quite behind the rest of the class, who’d read the whole novel already and were going over it chapter by chapter with an awareness of the ending and themes, whereas I was seeing it with fresh eyes. I felt very out of my depth, which put me off this one a bit. However, we started studying it in late 2016, so as you can imagine, it was very relevant to the political landscape at the time. The HBO series started airing while we were studying it too, and I remember spending a lot of time talking about the differences in the early seasons and the novel. I’m glad that The Handmaid’s Tale is set reading, I think it’s a very important novel that’s still politically relevant almost ten years on from when I studied it, and forty years on from its publication.

The Great Gatsby

This one honestly shouldn’t count, because I’d already read the novel before I studied it. This is the book I’ve reread most in my life, because I was determined to not sound like an idiot in class. I wasn’t successful, but I did love the book. I do think it’s interesting that we study so much American literature, though, because I feel like we’re more in tune with the cultural contexts of British lit. I guess it doubles as history education.

I recommended Gatsby in my 10 must-read accessible classics list a few months ago, and I stand by it – I think it’s a really great story, and as stupid as I felt during some classes, I still enjoyed studying it.

Othello

I go between loving Othello and feeling lukewarm towards it. I’ve studied the play twice now, once more productively than the other. As an English A Level set text, I don’t love it – even though I believe Shakespeare is best when read aloud rather than as a book, I personally hate reading aloud. So while it was great to study Othello as a piece of drama, I was dreading every single class and trying to work out the characters with the fewest lines to volunteer to read them.

I want to end today’s post by sending some luck to everyone taking their exams over this next few weeks. I hope in a few years you’ll also look back on the things you studied with at least a bit of fondness (although I don’t blame you if you don’t want to even think about your set texts for the foreseeable future)