Love through the ages: exemplar student response

Below you will find an exemplar student response to a Section C question in the sample assessment materials, followed by an examiner commentary on the response.

This resource is designed to support your teaching of the Love through the ages component of AS and A-level English Literature A, for first teaching from September 2015.

Paper 1, Section C

Compare how the authors of two texts you have studied present barriers to love.

Band 2 response

There are many types of barriers to love but one of the biggest is when two people in a relationship don't know how to talk to each other anymore. In this essay I will show how Chopin in The Awakening and Larkin in 'Talking in Bed' and Jennings in 'One Flesh' have written about this barrier to love.

Chopin was living in Louisiana where she bases her novel at the end of the 19th century and wanted to put some of her own views about marriage into her novel. She wanted to show that because women were legally their husband's property at that time, they were unhappy and wanted to escape from their lives. Her main character, Edna, is unhappy and wants to escape with Robert, a young man she meets on holiday.

Chopin compares Edna with Adele who is the ideal wife and mother. Chopin says: 'Mrs Pontellier was not a mother-woman'  but then describes Adele as 'fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.' Adele is able to talk freely because she is confident about her role as a good wife and mother. But when Edna tries to do the same, nobody understands her because she is not a good wife and mother. Chopin says she is like a parrot: 'He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood' and her husband does not like the noise the parrot is making.

Edna changes a lot and doesn't want to be a good wife and mother so by the end of the novel, nobody understands her: 'She felt that her speech was voicing the incoherency of her thoughts.' Her husband tells the doctor that 'she's odd, she's not like herself' and asks him to help Edna. The doctor tries to help her 'I know I would understand, and I tell you there are not many who would – not many my dear' but Edna is not interested. All Edna wants is Robert but he leaves her because he does not understand her either: 'He did not know; he did not understand. He would never understand.' This leads Edna to commit suicide.

Both 'Talking in Bed' and 'One Flesh' also write about married people who cannot talk to each other properly. They were both written in the 1960s when couples did not often get divorced and so they show couples who are sticking together even though they are unhappy in their marriage. Both of them show couples at bedtime who are not talking to each other and this is a barrier to love. In 'Talking in Bed' the couple are in the same bed but they are silent: 'more and more time passes silently.' They don't find it easy to talk: 'It becomes still more difficult to find words at once true and kind.' In 'One Flesh' the couple are not in the same bed: 'Lying apart now, each in a separate bed.' The poet is their daughter and she describes them as 'tossed up like flotsam from a former passion.' This means that they used to feel passion for each other but now that has gone so they sleep apart. Like the other couple, the poet's parents do not talk: 'silence between them' and so this is a barrier to love. 

All of these texts show that the barrier to love is not being able to talk to each other like a married couple should.                                                     

Examiner commentary

AO1

The candidate employs a simple structure which does relate to the task i.e. reference to one type of barrier to love and where that can be seen in the novel and then in the poetry. As such there is a simple sense of comparison of general ideas rather than of how these are presented in the texts and appropriate terminology is absent. Although there is some textual knowledge, this remains rather general and direct quotations are almost list-like and, at times, over-long.

AO2 

For the most part the answer is made up of generalised descriptions of characters but some attention is paid to what the writer is trying to show by means of limited but obvious quotations or close reference, although explicit analysis is absent. 

AO3 

The candidate confines him/herself to one example of a barrier to love i.e. a breakdown in communication but there is little analysis of the true nature of that barrier or of its consequences beyond the immediate. There is simple awareness of the context of marriage at the time the texts were written.

AO4

Connections of similarity are generalised and do not extend to comparison of how barriers to love are presented by the writers.

AO5

As required, the candidate has written about examples of prose and poetry, but no overt or meaningful comparisons are made between them, and in this respect the question has not been properly answered.

Overall: Simple and generalised. This response appears to fit the band 2 descriptors.

This resource is part of the Love through the ages resource package.