hiya guys!
I'm trying to work my way through some after the bomb essay questions and I was looking at the 2015 HSC question which was
"Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home. Let us never forget this."
I was wondering how could I argue this in relation to Waiting for Godot and Sylvia Plath in terms of thesis and themes? Any help would be much appreciated thank you!
Hey maria! Definitely a difficult question in that year!
I studied these two texts and these are my ideas:
If I'm taking a gendered approach to analysing Plath's work, I would perhaps consider how contextually, the USA perceived the enemy as always being abroad, but actually an enemy of direct threat to Plath was the alive and working patriarchy within politics and society. So her poetry, in some ways, target this enemy. Also, she, in some ways, sees herself and her intellect as the enemy. You could interpret this to be the enemy of herself, as she cannot lay still and subservient like this (I see this particularly in the Bee Box poems in her oeuvre).
As for Waiting for Godot...more difficult. There's no obvious enemy for me in this one, so I approach it by looking into the alternative readings. There are some perspectives floating around that particular characters are representative of economic theories like capitalism and socialism. This can work if you take on the reading that any of these alternate readings hold water. Undoubtedly, it's really hard to approach the "abroad" in this text. I think perhaps you could say that again, contextually, the concern was on a threat from abroad, the red threat! But this text adequately deals with the idea that religion, trust, politics (depending on the reading you espouse), are all relevant here!
Remember that even if the text doesn't specifically address the terms like "abroad" - you can claim that the context from which the text was born does, and this is why the text gears it's angle towards something more internal.
Home
Help
Search
Login
