The 5 Big Ideas of Literature

This is an extract from:

The 5 Big Ideas of Literature

It is worth thinking through what you believe the unifying principles of English are. They are likely to be different to mine. But they will help you make much greater sense of your curriculum. I hope mine will spark some helpful ways of thinking for you.

Without these, I believe that each text we study will appear random to the students who study them, or at best be linked by theme. To use an analogy, if literature is like a house, themes are just how we decorate the rooms. Next year we could change the décor completely, just as in a themed curriculum next year we might replace each theme with one we prefer. A theme based curriculum is ephemeral and surface level, unless we have principles which underpin literature, principles which will be relevant to every theme. These 5 Big Ideas of literature are what I believe to be the underlying principles.

These 5 principles also help students understand what literature is for, other than escapism, entertainment and, of course, ‘because the author wanted to make money’. All of the literature we study in schools, from the Greek myths and beyond, are a response to the cultural and social issues of the day. It makes sense to think about archetypal issues which recur, in every era. These are what I’m calling literature’s 5 big ideas.

1. Religion

2. Class

3. Role of Women

4. Education

5. Science

1. Religion.

All texts deal with the idea of benevolent, ambivalent or authoritarian gods. For the most part, this is within a Christian tradition. This will also include ideas about fate and free will. We can be explicit about this in every text we study written before 1919, though I am prepared to bet that actually it will be relevant to every novel and play and much of the poetry we study, regardless of when it was written.

Example from Macbeth:

Duncan’s murder attacks the Great Chain of Being. Lady Macbeth is punished with death and hell. She has visions of this before she dies: “hell is murky”. Macbeth is punished so that all his ambitions are soured, before he too is killed and condemned to hell. He regrets having sold his soul so cheaply, “and mine eternal jewel/ Given to the common enemy of man.” Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are portrayed as satanic, in biblical imagery, referencing Original Sin through the “serpent” she asks him to mimic.

2. Social hierarchies and class.

All texts are a response to this. We don’t need a Marxist perspective to see this is true. It is because all texts require a series of conflicts, and these are nearly always produced by the different social status of characters. And we can also look at what a writer has included or excluded from the text because of their own social class, or the social class of their readers. I can’t think of a single text where this is not true.

Example from Macbeth

Macbeth’s social advancement depends on replacing previous Thanes. He became Thane of Glamis presumably as a reward for military victory, and the same is true when he became Thane of Cawdor. This suggests violence is a legitimate way for a Thane to attain social advancement. He calls Lady Macbeth “my dearest partner of greatness” because he knows she is motivated to improve their social status. Macbeth’s desperation to become king is the logical conclusion of this. Because pre-Jacobean society had rigid social hierarchies, the only way for him to succeed is through killing or the death of others. The only way for Lady Macbeth to succeed is through marriage and, by extension, motivating her husband for further social advancement. So the way society is organised contributes significantly to the tragedy.

3. The place of women in society.

This can be, but doesn’t have to be, a feminist reading of texts. Because women have been denied equality for all but the most recent years of our history, every text we study can appropriately be viewed through this lens.

Even texts without women in them can be read in this way – their exclusion will say a lot about that society and help students infer the author’s perspective on this – reinforcing social expectations of women, or pushing against them: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for example, which virtually excludes women.

Example from Macbeth

A feminist reading of Lady Macbeth might suggest that Shakespeare adheres to Jacobean expectations about a woman’s social status, and punishes her for transgressing against these social expectations. Alternatively, all the female characters in the play, and especially Lady Macbeth, might be portrayed as having to seek autonomy and identity, because they are suppressed by social expectations. Shakespeare might be asking his audience to question their social expectations of women.

The witches themselves are also unsexed in the same way Lady Macbeth is. This is why Banquo observes: “You should be women,/ And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/ That you are so.” The imagery of the play implies that women are damaged by society’s refusal to grant them autonomy, such as men enjoy. Shakespeare might simply be reflecting his patriarchal society, or conversely portraying its negative impact in order to criticise it.

4. The role of education.

The idea of literacy and the education of children is a surprisingly frequent theme in many texts. We might argue that the whole of the tragedy in Romeo and Juliet is deliberately centred on the servant’s inability to read the invitation to the Capulet ball. Education is a central theme of any Dickens novel. And where it is not a theme of the novel itself, we can see how novels change once the literacy of working-class readers and writers changed.

Example from Macbeth

Here we will need to consider how far Macbeth is a didactic text. We can cite the fact that it is performed at King James’s court to the very nobles who might be considering rebellion against his rule, or plotting regicide. Punishing this transgression in the play tries to teach divine punishment of the same in life. It places the play in the tradition of the morality play, which saw the whole genre of plays as didactic, teaching Christian behaviour. Shakespeare links this moral tradition to his political instruction – he ingratiates himself with the king by celebrating his divine right to rule.

We can also see how he uses the play to educate King James, warning him of the consequences of repression. This is timely, because after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, King James could quite easily have used this as an opportunity to execute any nobles whom he suspected of disapproving of his succession to the throne. This explains the scene in which Malcolm and Macduff discuss what it means to be a good king. Malcolm pretends to be an evil man, claiming he would “forge,/ Quarrels unjust against the good and loyal,/ Destroying them for wealth.”

The play is also obsessed with knowledge. Notice that the witches never tell Macbeth what he should do, they simply “see into the seeds of time” and tell him what the future is. So many of the exchanges take the form of lessons, from Banquo asking answers of the witches, to Lady Macbeth instructing her husband on how to behave, look, and plan the murder. We might argue that had Macbeth simply accepted the witches’ knowledge as a lesson, rather than as a spur to action, he would have become king in a natural succession of events without requiring evil.

The exchange between lady Macduff and her son also proceeds like a lesson, until he arrives at the unexpected conclusion: “Then the liars and swearers are fools: for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men and hang up them.” He is proved correct, as the murderers enter. However, their deaths could have been prevented, had Lady Macduff learned her lesson from the messenger who arrives to warn her. His intervention is irrelevant to the plot – it exists instead to prompt her response: “Whither should I fly?/ I have done no harm.” In other words, she refuses to learn the messenger’s lesson in time, and is killed.

Even Macbeth’s death occurs as though in a lesson: Macbeth appears to have defeated Macduff, and taunts him with the reason, “I bear a charmed life, which must not yield/ To one of woman born.” Macduff’s reply teaches Macbeth, once again, that he has misunderstood the lesson: “Despair thy charm;/ And let the angel whom thou still hast serv’d/ Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb/ Untimely ripp’d.”

The play therefore promotes knowledge, because it claims to impart certain knowledge to the audience: nobles who rebel against the kings’ rule will be punished in this life and the next.

As usual with all Shakespeare plays, Macbeth is also full of allusions to a classical education – from “Tarquin’s ravishing strides” to “Bellona’s bridegroom”, from “Hecate” to “Neptune” – because his plays are also aimed at the educated and the nobility in his audience. These imply that an education, and the allusions this allows, were necessary to understanding the performance of the play, but also by implication part of the thrill of theatre.

5. Science and scientific advance.

Which usually causes either optimism or fear. This is again a surprisingly frequent theme since the rational thought of the Enlightenment. Most of the 19th century texts we read can be seen as a response to this, and how scientific discoveries undermine or challenge Christian beliefs. In Jekyll and Hyde, it is at the centre of the plot and mystery. But we might also view the supernatural in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre as an attack on or rejection of scientific thinking. It underpins Frankenstein, with the scientific experiment with electricity. The supernatural powers of vampires in Dracula are also limited, and follow rules like natural laws – the fear of sunlight is as much a matter of physics as it is symbolic of evil. Why else include the telling detail that Dracula has no reflection, if not to highlight the physical role of light? It is just as relevant to poems of WW1 which often deal directly with the consequence of scientific advances in weaponry and their inhumane impact.

We can also see that all these Big Ideas are all interrelated. A character’s social status is often dependent on their gender, or their education. A woman’s role is often determined by Christian expectations of morality, or a Christian interpretation of Original Sin. Christian tradition tries to preserve social hierarchies rather than challenge them, and so characters wishing for social advancement often come into conflict with their faith, or with society’s Christian morality.

If we link the Big Ideas to every text we study, all our students will understand these unifying principles. They will understand that texts respond to the societies and eras in which they were written. They will also increasingly understand the chronology of how these Big Ideas have changed over time. And because these Big Ideas are all exactly relevant to today’s texts and today’s news, it allows students to understand their own society and culture and the texts these produce.

Example from Macbeth

Macbeth is a play built on the absence of scientific discovery. Macbeth’s death depends on Macduff having been “from [his] mother’s womb untimely ripped”. This means that his mother has died in childbirth because of the lack of science available to doctors. We might argue that witchcraft fills the void of absent scientific thought. We can cite James the First’s Daemonologie as an attempt to apply scientific thought to witchcraft – documenting precisely how to identify marks of witchcraft, but also how to equivocally rule out others.

We can also argue that Lady Macbeth is also undone by the lack of scientific medical advancement. Macbeth asks the doctor “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, / Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, / Raze out the written troubles of the brain / And with some sweet oblivious antidote / Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart?”

The doctor’s failure is a failure of medicine. The direct consequence of this is that Lady Macbeth commits suicide. We can see an interesting conflict developing here – divine judgement which results in the deaths of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth depend on a lack of scientific advancement. We can argue that the structure of the play yearns towards greater scientific progress. Or we can argue that its absence is part of God’s divine plan.

Some of these have been quite a challenge. But I hope you can see this will lead students to have much richer understanding of literature across all Key Stages.

If you want to be brilliant English teacher, you’ll like The Full English

If you want to find out how to get great progress from students in any subject, you’ll like The Slightly Awesome Teacher

If you want to pass Ofsted with flying colours, you’ll like The Unofficial Ofsted Survival Guide

If you want a quick guide to How to Improve Your School, click here