English Advanced: Mod C Discursive Text

[ggreentree]

Okey dokey! This discursive text will be marked/10 on the prompt:
"The most powerful texts assist us to make connections between ourselves, the world of the text, and the wider world" Compose a piece of discursive writing explaining how this is true of your related text (Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister) (400 words).

My problem is that the discursive text examples we've been given are 1000+ words, and most guides to discursive writing focus on discursive essays > 1000 words... My piece doesn't have a real introduction or conclusion pgraph but like... HOW. In 400 words?? While maintaining any sort of analytical depth? Plus, I don't even know if what I've written addresses the prompt enough, or if it's just a wishy-washy preachy mess. Yay!

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Sat in an artfully decorated Newtown cafe with my MacBook Air and Fair-Trade latte, my harem pants drape the minimalist concrete flooring. I tuck was-once-pink hair behind my ears, and it brushes my undercut.

Robert Browning, a prominent Victorian-era poet, wrote ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ in the midst of an inconsistent world. Extreme sexual restraint, religious piousness, and a total intolerance of any deviance constrained the conduct of Victorian individuals. ‘A HandBook of Etiquette for Ladies’ dictates to “Never wear … paste [fake] diamonds; they are representatives of a mean ambition to appear what you are not”. This disdain of deceptive appearances is paradoxical; the upper echelons of Victorian society were soberly, fastidiously devout - and supported prevalent child labor, turned blind eyes to rampant poverty and prostitution. A stern façade maintained subconsciously, for the convenience of homeostasis, or consciously, to preserve those paradigms that afforded them their real diamonds.

My pants are cute and cheap but I’d never divulge where I got them because H&M uses South-East Asian slave labour. I know that because of an article my friend wrote, but I saw her in an identical pair last week.

‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ is a construction of this religious context, interweaving the poet’s experience of the paradoxical Victorian era into an allegorical individual narrative, of a person living life in the most rigidly moralised position: as a monk. Our protagonist monologues in a huff over the perceived hubris of fellow monk, Brother Lawrence, for sin so petty as “Drinking watered orange pulp … [he] drains his at one gulp!” and damning him for the ultimate crime of “Water[ing] [his] damned flower-pots…!”. Much like the strict social order of the Victorian era, our narrator fusses over ridiculously minor slights to social order (in tight tetrameter and rhyme), while his own underlying sin (lusting over women bathing in stanza 4, even conspiring with Satan to send Lawrence to hell in the final stanza) goes without contradiction.

Someone in my socialist memes FaceBook group has been outed as a potential TERF. I feel a thrill, working to dox her. Her personal number, family’s contact details, home address, workplace splain through Twitter - it’s exhilarating.

The most powerful of stories inspire connection of experience in spite of the barriers of context, geography, time, and fiction. Literature is consumed as a pathway to experiences we have, at first glance, never felt first-hand - powerful pieces bond our innate understanding of human nature, explore the phenomena constantly reappearing cross-contextually. The monk is obsolete: the righteous Twitter warrior is in, kitted out with the word of Vice and Vox as gospel and all the vitriol our narrator has for Brother Lawrence.

Gr-r-r: she deserves it.