Interesting views on society are conveyed through distinctive voices.
Explore how this is achieved in your prescribed text and ONE other related text of your own choosing.
Sample response: Poetry
Prescribed text:
Related text:
on a clear day, Joanne Burns, 1992
To Kill a Mocking bird, Harper Lee, 1960 (prose fiction)
Voices are
linked to
attitudes and
values
The voices in texts tell us about the attitudes and values of the speaker and through this,
the values and attitudes of the writer. Exploring what the speaker says and how he or she
says it helps us to identify and understand the important ideas and issues in texts. Joanne
Burns’ poems, ‘public places’ and ‘echo’ both have clear, individual voices that present
interesting views about the speakers’ worlds. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
presents a range of distinctive voices that help us to understand the attitudes and values
of the town of Maycomb in the 1930s.
A brief outline
of ‘public
places’ and the
narrative voice
‘public places’ is a prose poem about a person with a personal obsession about leaving
things behind in public places like trains or shops. This causes the speaker to be always
looking over his or her shoulder, which causes neck problems. The humour of this
situation quickly changes to something more serious, when the speaker thinks about
some of the other personal things that could be left behind in public places, such as
private thoughts and daydreams, and what other private information could be made
publicly available as technology continues to improve.
The technique
of monologue
The poem is an internal prose monologue, where the thoughts are presented in sentences
that detail the speaker’s ideas, reactions and fears. The poem begins with a direct
statement about how the obsession with looking over the shoulder has affected the
speaker: “since i’ve had my neck in a brace”, tells us the harm that has been caused by
this paranoid habit. But the speaker is honest about the problem: “but in a way i'm glad.
for i had become what some people might call an obsessive.” Throughout the poem, the
speaker tells us honestly and in intricate detail about his/her fears and problems, so we
gain a very clear understanding of the person and how he/she reacts and adapts to wider
society. At first, this is quite amusing: the lines, “i couldn't move from room to room
without turning around to check that i hadn't left anything there. a tissue a hair a biscuit
crumb a toe a finger an odour a desire a thought. well, you can imagine the wear and tear
on my neck. you only get one of them.” create a clear picture of someone forever looking
behind and ending up in considerable pain as a result. There is humorous irony in the
speaker’s statement that “there's so many weird people walking about in these troubled
times”, where the speaker has distanced him/herself from the “weird people”. This is a
feature of monologues, where the speaker unconsciously reveals things about him/herself
– in this case, we learn that the speaker thinks that he/she is perfectly normal and that
other people are the problem.
A monologue
reveals
important
things about
the speaker
Tone shift in
the poem, and
how it reveals
interesting
views of the
speaker
The tone of the poem changes from humour to something more serious when the
speaker starts to worry about the more abstract parts of the self that could be left behind
in a public place, and what might then happen to them: “you leave your fingerprints on a
lot of the products on the shelves when you go to the supermarket ... what science can
extract from a fingerprint these days is nobody's business.” Light-heartedness had given
way to serious concern about how we are constantly monitored and under scrutiny in
public. Rapid technological advances mean that this surveillance will probably only get
worse: “what if they decided to electronically print everyone's personal details on their
bodies ... and what if they made a mistake with the information. you never know whose
history you could end up wearing.” Suddenly, the amusing, crazy person doesn’t seem so
silly, and the paranoid obsession seems like a sensible response to a world where no-one
has any privacy any more.
Discussion of
voices in
‘echo’
‘echo’ presents a distinctive experience of silence and noise in each of its seven stanzas.
Each stanza recounts an encounter with noise or silence from a different narrative
perspective, so that we gradually develop a sense of how noisy modern life is, how
difficult it is for people to find silence when they want it, and how important to us the
voices of others are. This poem also relies partly on humour to emphasise the points
Burns is making. In stanza ii. the speakers are incapable of silence: after only a few
minutes of trying, their stomachs rebel and start talking to each other. In stanza iii. the
bushland silence is shattered by music and the noises of nature. The narrators of stanza
iv., living in a noise-restricted compound, are forced to write their noisiness on the walls,
which bores them to sleep, and the neighbours then complain about the sound of the
snoring, suggesting that no matter what they do, others will find something to complain
about.
The voices in
‘echo’ have
some amusing
and some
important
things to day
about noise
and silence
These stanzas comment in a light-hearted way on the desire for peace and quiet, and how
hard it is to achieve in modern life. Other stanzas have more serious points to make. The
narrator of stanza v. is seeking a purpose and meaning in life and believes that it can be
found by following the strict instructions of the guru, to the letter, rather than by looking
inward to the self. The woman in stanza vii. seeks meaning in the neglected, ugly parts of
the city: “she hears voices calling to her from the rims of public rubbish bins.” Like the
persona in ‘public places’, she senses inherent danger in being part of the metropolis and
conveys a feeling of justified paranoia: “she believes in prophecy” and “moves quiet as a
leopard ... frowning as if the city were in grave danger.”
A range of
voices are
presented in
the related text
Harper Lee’s novel about discrimination and hatred in the US south, To Kill a
Mockingbird, presents the reader with a variety of interesting perspectives on society,
through the range of characters involved in the events of the book. While the primary
perspective is from Scout, a ten-year-old girl, we also read commentary by the grown-up
Scout who recounts events and provides an adult perspective on what happened. We
encounter a range of views about the racial and class prejudice that exists in Maycomb,
seen through the words and actions of various characters about town, and thus acquire a
fuller understanding of the causes of conflict in that particular society.
The role of
Atticus in the
novel
Atticus, Scout’s father and a solicitor, provides the moral perspective in the novel. In his
role as Scout’s adviser, he comments on what should and should not be done in certain
situations and provides reasons and justifications for the behaviour of others. Together
with Scout’s voice, his is the most prevalent and distinctive in the novel. The two voices
together give us a view of Maycomb from the partial and uninformed perspective of a
child trying to work things out, overlaid with Atticus’ thoughtful, objective adult
perspective that is informed by knowledge of the town’s citizens and of human nature.
Atticus’ advice to Scout, “If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot
better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider
things from his point of view, until you climb inside his skin and walk around in it”, is a
message about acceptance and understanding that is the core of the novel. Lee helps us
to understand the perspectives of others by letting us, as readers, climb into their skins so
we can see them more clearly.
Interesting
voices that
refuse to
conform to
mainstream
views
One distinctive and interesting voice we learn to understand by the end of the novel is
Boo Radley’s. Boo has the reputation amongst the town’s children of the resident crazy,
scary old man, but we learn from his attempts to communicate with Scout and Jem, and
from his actions in saving them from Bob Ewell, that he is a recluse who has withdrawn
from the world, preferring not to have to engage with the discrimination and
victimisation that were a normal part of life at the time. Another voice that expresses the
same distaste for racist and class-ridden Maycomb society is Dolphus Raymond, who also
provides an interesting perspective on relations in the town. Like Boo Radley, he has
consciously chosen to withdraw from white society because of its hierarchies and hatreds.
He achieves this by pretending to be an alcoholic, so that he is shunned by “good” white
people and left alone to live in the segregated black community, which he much prefers
because it is less hypocritical.
Voices and
views that Lee
finds
unacceptable
The racist and class-conscious voices in the novel that Boo Radley and Dolphus
Raymond want to avoid are conveyed by many people in the town. The strongest racist
voice is Bob Ewell’s, when he falsely accuses Tom Robinson of raping his daughter,
Mayella. Bob Ewell represents an interesting view of the town’s social structure. As a
poor white man, he sees himself as superior to any black person. He therefore thinks that
he is safe in accusing Tom Robinson, a black man, of a crime he didn’t commit. He is
also outraged when Tom Robinson says during the trial that he felt sorry for the Ewell
children, who are very poor and have only a drunken father to care for them. From Bob
Ewell’s perspective, there is a clear racial hierarchy that is challenged by Tom Robinson’s
sympathy. The racist voices are also clearly heard in the lynch mob that decides before
the trial that Tom Robinson is guilty, because he is black. Also because he is black, they
do not believe he deserves the right to a fair trial and want to hang him on the spot.
Conclusion
connects both
texts to the
question
through a
broad
comment on
technique
Both texts show us interesting views on society, conveyed through distinctive voices.
Joanne Burns’ voices are eccentric and varied, showing us the wide range of opinions that
can be held on the one topic, and how the seemingly ordinary can be viewed in unusual
and interesting ways. Harper Lee uses many voices in her novel, and by comparing the
reasonable and the unreasonable views they represent, helps us to a greater understanding
of the conflicted society of Maycomb.