Compare what happens to the two girls and the attitudes they have and other people have towards it Essay Example For Students

Compare what happens to the two girls and the attitudes they have and other people have towards it Essay Cousin Kate was Set and written in the mid 1800s and set in rural England. The Seduction was written in 1985 for the Young Observer poetry competition, which it won first prize. It was written when she was seventeen. In The Seduction a girl goes to a party with the intention of finding a nice boy next door boyfriend. She meets a boy who takes her to the grimy, putrid Birkenhead docks. He seems like the complete opposite to her, he does not have any plans for the future, and truants school and spends his time sniffing paint thinner by the docks reading his dads magazines. She seems to have things more planned out, as she talks to him about her O levels and school. He pulls a bottle of vodka out of his bag and gets her drunk. He talks with her and gains her trust and then has sex with her. She then discovers she is pregnant 3 months later. In the poem Cousin Kate the narrator is a cottage maiden. She is quite content with her life and happy the way she is. One day the Lord of the manor discovers her. He thinks she is beautiful and lured her back to his home. The Lord exploited her and treated her as a plaything but she allowed him to do it because she was in love. The Lord saw her cousin Kate and thought she was much fairer and prettier and cast the narrator aside and married Kate instead. The narrator was left an outcast because she was then an unmarried mother. She became bitter and resentful towards Kate because she felt she loved the Lord, and Kate didnt, Kate only loved his wealth. The narrator also felt that if she had been in a similar situation she would not have betrayed her own blood and would have spit in his face than taken his hand. But she loves her son and calls him her shame and her pride. She knows that the Lord needs an heir and calls her son a gift that Kate is not likely to get. In The Seduction the girl was hoping to find a nice boyfriend, which all her magazines had promised. She talks about all the parties where you meet the boy next door She was looking for a relationship and the kind of romances she had been promised in her magazines. She wears her high white shoes with the intention of looking older. The boy she meets had come for a different reason entirely. He had come for sex. He had even come prepared with alcohol to get his victim drunk and Listerine so he wouldnt put the girl off with his smoky breath at the crucial moment. He occupied her with idle chatting, to gain her false assurance, and slowly got her drunk with his vodka, so she would think she was in love with him. He seduces her in a filthy damp dock. The story becomes more tragic when he talks about truanting, sniffing paint thinner. They are a similar age but he has nothing to lose, and will not end up losing anything, whereas the girl will lose her education, her reputation and more importantly, her childhood from this. Three months later when she discovers her pregnancy, she doesnt feel bitter towards the boy, but towards her magazines. She feels angry at her teenage magazines because they broke their promises of romance and love. She takes her frustration out on her high white shoes And on that day she broke the heels of her high white shoes (as she flung them at the wall) In comparison the narrator in Cousin Kate was content with her life and didnt have the need to find a boyfriend. But the similarity between the two women is that their partners exploited them both. They both thought they were in love, even if it was only induced by the alcohol that the boy was giving her. The poem says: As he brought her more drinks, so she fell in love. (The Seduction) In the poem Cousin Kate the narrator says, Why did a great lord find me out to fill my heart with care? (Cousin Kate) Both men in the poems had the same attitudes towards the women. They regarded them almost as toys. In Cousin Kate it refers to her as His plaything and his love. The narrator also says He wore me like a silken knot, and changed me like a glove This suggests that the lords attitude towards the narrator was more that she was a plaything, and that he paid attention to her when he wanted to, and would discard her when he wanted. In the narrators view, he treated her more like a whore, than someone he loved and respected. The boy in The Seduction also thought very little of the girl. In the poem it says: She giggled drunk, and nervous, and he muttered little slag The difference between the two women is that in Cousin Kate the narrator was left by the lord because he saw Kate, who was younger, prettier, and purer. In the case of the girl in The seduction, it does not seem likely that he had any intention of pursuing a relationship with her. Another similarity between the two women is that they both felt like outcasts and worried what their neighbours thought of them. The neighbours call you good and pure, call me an outcast thing; (Cousin Kate) The neighbours whisper that youd always looked the type (The Seduction) The narrator in Cousin Kate is called an outcast thing, almost as if she has fallen so low that she can only be described as a thing. The narrator in Cousin Kate felt resentful towards both the lord and Kate. But she seemed more distressed that her own cousin had betrayed her and she is bitter that Kate doesnt even love him. The girl in The seduction seems more bitter about her high white shoes and her teenage magazines. She feels disillusioned and cheated by the promise of it all because she read all the romanticised stories of love and what it should all be like. She calls them stupid, stupid promises, only tacitly made. She feels like she has been lied to, and the night drunken on the dirty docks should have been a glass of lager shandy on a carpeted floor. She does not seem to be concerned that it was the boy who had taken advantage of her by getting her drunk. Poetry Analysis Analysis EssayHe saw you at your fathers gate, Chose you cast me by. The lord was in a position of power and respect so it would not matter if he had sex with a lot of women, and this is why he could get away with it. In the period in which the poem was set, women did not have as much power as men did and this probably explains some of his behaviour. Women were seen more as people who had and looked after children, so he would have thought he was higher up than she was, which he was because he was a lord, but I think some of his attitude was probably due to the views towards women in that era. In The Seduction the boy did not think much of the girl, and had come to the party with the intention of sleeping with one of the girls. As he was filling her with his vodka, he called her a little slag, even though she had probably never done anything like this in her life, and he was the one corrupting her. I think this shows that he thinks she is stupid for going along with it and has not got much respect for her. The boy was probably attracted to the girl because he had danced with her all night, but he did not had any intentions of pursuing a relationship. The girl was most likely one of a long list of girls he had done this to. He seems to know what he was doing, and had everything planned out. He had brought Listerine, vodka, and he even knew where to take her. To him she was just another girl. In Cousin Kate the neighbours think the narrator is an outcast thing. They think Kate is good and pure. They call the narrator a thing as if she is not a human being. They show no sympathy towards her, despite the fact that it was the lord who had got her pregnant and left her for Kate. The neighbours think she is dirty and this is all her own fault. They think this way because of the social stigma at the time about unmarried mothers, which is still around nearly a hundred and fifty years later when The seduction was written. In The Seduction the girls neighbours judged her before they even knew the situation. In the poem it tells the reader that: the neighbours whisper that you always look the type. They thought that she was the kind of girl who had sex with a lot of boys and then ended up pregnant. This is not surprising because when a young woman like her falls pregnant, people always think they are the type of person that sleeps around. They jumped straight to this conclusion even though she had never done anything like this, had never had a boyfriend, and it was him who corrupted her. But I think that was the norm at the time, and still is sometimes, to take that attitude towards unmarried or single mothers. The things in Cousin Kate which make it recognisable as Victorian are the settings, the language, the attitudes of the characters and their action and the attitude of the poem towards its subject. Some of the language in the poem is immediately recognisable as Victorian such as woes me joy thereof flaxen hair and O Lady Kate. These words are not now in common usage, and have been replaced with modem alternatives, which is why they stand out so much. The attitudes of the characters such as the lord and the neighbours are also typical of the period. The way that an heir is so important to him, the way he treats the narrator and the effect his power has among the common people are all traits which today would not mean as much. The attitudes of the neighbours stand out because the attitude that unmarried mothers are outcast things is not as strong anymore. The fact that the lord is not criticized for what he did, because he is a man, and he is in power is a also recognisable because nowadays people in power or in the public eye are no longer feared as much, and people will criticise them more openly. Kate would not have been so anxious to have a son for the lord and would not have betrayed her cousin so she could marry the lord and be rich, unless she was a malicious person. The setting is quite recognisable as Victorian because they worked among the rye and lived in cottages. The narrator also refers to herself as a cottage maiden. The things which make The Seduction recognisable as 1980s are the events, the personalities, and the comics which the girl reads. The things that the boy and girl talk about are instantly recognisable as 1980s, such as when the boy was talking about football and Sammy Lee and Ian Rush and the Milk Cup and the McGuigan fight. The girl talks about her O levels, which we do not have anymore and the magazines she reads, like My Guy and Jackie are also from that time. The attitude towards the girls pregnancy is also typical of the time. Despite the gap of nearly one hundred and fifty years between them, I think that the poems are still very similar. They both describe the social stigma surrounding teenage pregnancies and unmarried mothers. They both show that despite the situation, it is always the woman who ends up with the blame. The narrator in Cousin Kate was labelled an outcast thing and the girl in The Seduction was whispered about, even though it was the boy who had taken advantage of her. Even though a hundred and fifty years had passed since Cousin Kate had been written, people still had the same ideas about teenage/single mothers. The attitude I pick up from these poems is that it is looked down on for women to become single mothers, and it is wrong for women to have sex with a lot of people, but for a man it is acceptable, and no label or shame is placed upon him.