Genesis

Question 1

Plot Summary for Genesis

Answer 1

• Starts with the list of Louie’s friends and enemies​
• Intro to Louie as “Old Testament through and through”​
• Mention of her dad as “her husband”​
• Jeanette and Louie go for a walk through the town – intro to Lancashire mill town ​
  -Mentions of the two women in the sweet shop​
• Jeanette’s adoption; Intro to Pastor Spratt and Louie’s conversion​
• (metanarrative)​
• Pastor Finch and the demons​
• Daniel in Fuzzy Felt​
• The gypsy predicts she won’t marry​
• Louie obliquely refers to Pierre and sex as something “nasty”​
• Ends with J on point of going to school for the first time.​

Question 2

Metanarrative summary and links to Jeanettes story in Genesis

Answer 2

• First ‘fairy tale’ allegorically develops this exploration of the reasons for J’s mother’s adoption of her faith and of Jeanette. The ‘princess’ represents Jeanette’s mother. It tells the story of her mother’s conversion to Christianity from being a young, beautiful, middle class girl with an exciting and comfortable life.​
• This ‘version’ frames her conversion as a ‘calling’ rather than necessity. It is a ‘version’ of the decision making process and this time the decision is framed as a ‘moral’ one. Like Pastor Spratt’s calculated approach to conversions, Jeanette’s mother is calculating about her adoption of Jeanette; it is not the result of maternal feeling, but her need to find a role and forge a future for herself.

Question 3

Contextual notes on Genesis

Answer 3

• 1960’s Lancashire Mill Town established.​
• Pentecostal Evangelical Church established.​
• Sense of the swinging sixties having completely by-passed this part of the world.
• Favour towards Margaret Thatcher atypical to classic working class 60s town, shows her class origins.
• Mormonism is a different denomination of Christianity, seeks confrontation in the ‘other’.
• Allusions to mother as ‘Bonaparte’ - Napoleon, due to her mothers dogmatism
• Parodies of the Bible setting to establish comedy early on within the text.
• Evangelical church an insular community within an insular community
• Secrecy of sexuality in the 1960s, alluded to through childlike eyes
• Reference to Errol Flynn - convicted rapist, religion as seduction
• Allusions to Mrs. W as William Blake, mystic
• Mother differing class background established through her French speaking abilities and piano talent.
• Alludes to Zeus and Athena through Jeanettes ‘conception’, immaculate conception
• Whole novel as a rewrite of the Bible itself
• Absolutism of the Bible in the evangelical church

Question 4

Poems linked to Genesis

Answer 4

• The Long Queen
• The Map Woman
• The woman who shopped

Question 5

Links to the bible story in Genesis

Answer 5

Creation of the world, the fall, the Noah story and the tower of Babel; describes events in the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Lot, Jacob and Joseph. Links to Jeanette’s own creation as Louie is her adoptive mother

Question 6

Key quotes in Genesis

Answer 6

• “my father liked to watch the wrestling; my mother liked to wrestle.” (5)​
• “She had a mysterious attitude towards the begetting of children; it wasn’t that she couldn’t do it, more that she didn’t want to. She was very bitter about the Virgin Mary getting there first.” (6)​
• “The town was a fat blot and the streets spread back from it into the green, steadily upwards.” (9)​
• “There were two women I knew who didn’t have any husbands” (10)​
• “My mother said he looked like Errol Flynn, but holy.” (11)​
• “She would get a child, train it, build it, dedicate it to the Lord” (13)​
• “I learned that it rains when clouds collide with a high building” (21)​
• “Unnatural Passions”​
• “The Breeding Ground” ​

Question 7

Masters notes on Genesis

Answer 7

• “Metamorphoses a variety of literary forms such as romance, the gothic mode, and fairy tales while raising questions about life, love, boundaries, desire, identity, and individual responsibility”
• “Subversive re-vision of the foundational texts of Western Culture from a new critical perspective”
• “Constant subversion of the patriarchal binary regulations of sexuality”
• “Restrictiveness of the concept of love within the compulsory heterosexual economics”
• “Disrupt the models that define the patriarchal order such as our sense of self in a binary/gendered constructed system and its restrictive heterosexual model of love”
• “Distinctive fairy tale elements with fantastical ones to underscore the impossibility of separating fact from fiction”