S5 - Your first Textual Analysis

Hi Everyone and welcome to MrSharpeTheTeacher. If you promise to keep coming back, I promise to keep running this as a useful resource for you to become excellent!

Look at the picture I've embedded here - what do you see? Do you see an old woman, or a beautiful young lady?

The truth is, both are there. This is an optical illusion, and if you look hard enough, suddenly you can clearly see one, then the other.

So here's my point: the answers are always there on the page - you just need to look. Sometimes you need to squint a bit, sometimes change your point of view slightly. And there's no wrong answer, just a range of right ones with varying levels of justification.

If you are still with me, well done. If not, we'll try something else!

Test Answers

You had a wee shot at a textual analysis piece on Thursday. Hopefully you were instructed to come to this blog for the answers, which are below.

Don't cheat. I don't mind if you get them all wrong, or all right. No one wins, no one gets eaten by a lion. What is important here is that we (you and I) work out what skills you already have, and what needs work.

1 a) his wife had an accident (1 mark)
b) the gatekeeper (1)
c) what has happened to her (1)

2 a) water (1)
b) "torrent", "bobbed" (1 for each)
c) reference to "a tap had been turned on inside her" and "a gush of words" (1 for each)

3 a) women - some kind of gloss on "heavy flesh trembling on cheeks and chin" + quote. Son - gloss on "gaunt, high cheekboned face" + quote (3)

4 It contradicts itself (oxymoron) (2)

5 a) vain, glamorous, conscious of her appearance (1), outgoing, sociable, independent (1) - any of the above ideas for one mark each, total of 2)
b) disapproves "any decent woman" or "i told her it wasn't right" or "a judgement" (1)
6 a) they live with her (1)
b) tries to follow her son when he goes to see Sylvia (2)

7 a) there is a large age-gap (15 years) (1)
b) "words had never come easily to him" or "inarticulateness" or "wordless misunderstanding" (1 for any one)

8 a) (the horror of) what has happened to Jock's wife (1)

9 a) reference to "this'll cure her vanity" (1)
b) variety (1)

10a) "like a woman's hair" (1)
b) story is about the accident involving Sylvia's hair (1)

11 anything along the lines of how much he loves her (1)

12 reference to the domination of the mother, Sylvia's striving for glamour and/or independence and Jack appearing to be caught in the middle. (2)

Well done for getting this far! Total marks are out of 30.