Paper 1
Othello
Iago:
Coleridge: ‘Motiveless malignity’
French: Iago and his male wisdom destroys the feminine world
Coghill: ‘Psychologically, Iago is a slighted man powerfully possessed by hatred against a master who (as he thinks) has kept him down, and by envy for a man he despises who has been promoted over him’
McEvoy: ‘The audience becomes complicit in Iago’s intention and is… soon involved in his vengeful plotting’
Gardner: ‘He is monstrous because, faced with the manifold richness of experience, his only reaction is calculation and the desire to manipulate’
Othello:
AC Bradley: ‘trustful, open, passionate.. so noble he inspires a passion of mingled love and pity’
TS Eliot: ‘terrible exposure of human weakness’
Leavis: '‘the stuff of which he is made begins at once to deteriorate’ (unfit for marriage)
‘has a propensity to jealousy and possesses a weak character’
Ryan: [the play is] ‘a critique of racial and s3xual injustice’
Desdemona:
Camden: ‘perfect wife’
AP Rossiter: ‘this pathetic, girlish, nearly-blank-sheet Desdemona’
Jardine: ‘too knowing, too independent’, punished by patriarchy yet shows ‘exemplary passivity in adversity’
Tennenhouse: silencing of female political voice
French: ‘accepts that she must be obedient’
Gatsby
Person: ‘Daisy is in fact more victim than victimiser; she is victim first to Tom’s cruel power, but then of Gatsby’s increasingly depersonalised vision of her’
A.E. Dyson: ‘Tom’s restlessness is an arrogant assertiveness seeking to evade in bluster the deep uneasiness of self-knowledge’
Ramos: ‘By attempting to maintain his way of life, Tom has reduced whole people to ashes without any thought of consequence’
Page: ‘Cars are an emblem of elegance and progress, and a sinister portent of death’
Morton: ‘Daisy’s whiteness is that of absence, or blank space: men project their desires onto her image’
Bernard Bergonzi: ‘The Waste Land has been read as an indictment of twentieth-century civilisation, and a lament for the loss of wholeness and order of the organic society’
B.C Southam- ‘valley of ashes’: ‘The waste… is… the emotional and spiritual sterility of Western man, the waste of our civilisation’
Stern: ‘Gatsby never understood that he was trapped by time and human history.
…and at the moments of his triumph…Gatsby is harassed by time, by dead time. He has troubles with a clock whose time he can’t control’
Kenneth Able: “[chapter 3] ‘the centre of the novel’… ‘This chapter.. was very clearly reworked, chiefly in order to give it a static quality, to approximate in the telling Gatsby’s attempt to make time stand still’
Tredell: ‘Through such names, the world of non-human life permeates Gatsby’s parties.
Some of the names are animal predators and thus reinforce a view of non-human life as aggressive and ruthless’ [with last names such as Bull, Blackbull at party]