In a world of much
simplicity, where the men pride themselves on coming from the land and working
the land, one woman is trapped on the inside looking out at the future that she
could have herself if she were allowed to educate herself. In The
Rainbow, author D. H. Lawrence employs a metaphor characterizing the farm
in which the men work as hell, a contrast between the life of education and the
life without it, and a personification of the vicar in order to portray the woman
as a woman who passionately yearns for an education.
The
passage opens on a peculiar phrase: “It was enough for the men.” It was enough for them to live on a farm
where they modestly grow their own food, and take pride in living off the
land. The woman, though, sees this from
a different perspective. She sees the
men in a bloody struggle against nature.
She sees the men as creatures who naturally have “pain and death … in
their blood.” They beg for mercy from
this perpetual cycle that they are “unable to turn around from.” So instead of glorifying the work like the
men might, through the depiction of farming as a battle against nature it is
only natural for her to want an education so that she can “face outward” from
this hell and move on towards the promising village.
Once
this farming is established as a hellish, unglorified struggle, she contrasts
it to the life that she could have had if she was like “the vicar” that spoke “the
other, magic language” of “knowledge.”
The knowledge that she could obtain if she was to be educated,
personified as the vicar, is idolized by this woman. “She craved to know” of the vicar’s movement
through “worlds beyond where her own menfolk existed.” This personification of her life after
education, even though she was much smaller and weaker than her husband,
promised a power over him in the form of knowledge. This idolization of the personified knowledge
shows the life that she believes that she could attain if she “faced outward”
and defied the men’s wishes and got an education.
When
life on the working-class farm, characterized by Lawrence as a hellish,
miserable place, is directly contrasted with the idealized vicar, who
represents the woman’s life after an education it is clear that the woman
passionately desires an education, even if it is against the men’s wishes.
Part II:
Initially my peer, Reilly Carr, scored my essay at
an 8. He said that my essay did offer a
persuasive analysis of the prompt, just as the essay states. In addition he wrote that it was well
organized, and used apt and specific text references. Though it does have characteristics of high
ranging essays, one worry that Reilly had was with the voice. He told me that in order to score a nine, one
must use quite sophisticated language. I
agree wholeheartedly with his statements.
Though highly sophisticated language may only be explicitly stated as a
deciding factor between 8 and 9 essays, it is always important to use the
jargon of literary analysis in order to effectively communicate the points that
you are trying to make to your reader.
Certainly as mentioned above, using highly
sophisticated language can be very important as it comes to clearly
communicating ideas, but it does no good if you do not have any noteworthy
ideas to start with. While I feel that I
did well in outlining the principle literary devices use to characterize the
woman in The Rainbow, after
researching the author, D.H. Lawrence, reading the “Prose Passage” section in
the 5 Steps to a 5 book, reading the
1-9 norming essays set as examples by College Board, and participating in class
discussion, I have come up with quite a few ideas to include and areas to
improve upon. Though all of this took
much more than the estimated 40 minutes given by College Board on the AP exam, some
of the elements that I discovered can be applied even without the research
beforehand.
Part I
The 5 Steps
to a 5 is great help when looking to improve on the prose passage
essay. It gives great models that
provide as close to a perfect formula for writing as possible. Unfortunately though, this is English, not
Calculus. A perfect formula for writing
about the devices on one passage may not hold true for a multitude of other
passages that may be thrown at you on an exam.
Instead you must adapt to the passage and prompt, and write an essay
that is specifically tailored to that.
While I believe that I did a good job structuring my essay into two
parts, mirroring the structure that Lawrence uses when characterizing two
groups (men and women), I still feel that my structure is very rigid, and
limits what I may have to say. In future
essays I would like to transcend beyond the 4 or 5 paragraph structure limited
to one thesis, a few points and then a conclusion. Instead, I would like to be able to elaborate
deeply on a subject, or literary device in a paragraph, and then be able to
bring it back into a bigger meaning without waiting for the conclusion to wrap
it all up.
As said before, effective communication is useless
if you do not have ideas worthy of communication. In my essay I feel that I quite effectively
answered the prompt by showing how a multitude of literary devices contributed
to the characterization of the men and woman in the passage. Even still there is a strong element that is
quite central to characterization but is somewhat absent from my essay: a
discussion of tone. Just as beefing up
on the tone words is critical before taking the multiple choice portion of the
AP English Literature Exam, it is also quite integral to the process of writing
a prose passage essay. The tone in which
a character is introduced speaks volumes on the emotions and desires of the
characters themselves. The fact that the
one isolated woman is introduced with a tone of longing, and the men introduces
with a sense of complacency, is quite important, and though I danced around
these ideas, it is always good to explicitly state that it is a specific tone
that contributes to characterization in order to earn a higher score on the
prose passage essay.
