The Large Cool Store Flashcards
Theme:
class, illusion
‘The large cool store selling cheap clothes Set out in simple sizes plainly’
-sibilance create the pace + alliteration foregrounds the simplicity of the clothes
-simple and lacking imagination
-adverb ‘plainly’ implies that the clothes being made/sold are mass produced and are nothing unique
-adjective ‘simple’ is used to suggest the lack of identity and personality in the shop
- Pre-modifying adjective ‘cheap’ shows the boring nature, lack of imagination, simple life, natural
- Could be describing how the store is laid out, juxtaposed with the next area
‘(Knitwear, Summer Casuals, Hose, In browns and greys, maroon and navy)’
-plain colours
-manmade and mass produced simplicity
- Is Larkin’s idea of the real world, by using two asyndetic lists as a simple way of revealing this
- Demonstrates how this attracts working-class customers
- ‘Hose’ is of German origin, meaning trousers which were already outdated language in the 1950s
- Archaic reference to context links to Larkin’s nostalgia for the past- idea of simplicity
- Larkin always takes a tone/ attitude of for longing for a simpler time
‘Conjures the weekday world of those Who leave at dawn low terraced houses…factory, yard and site’
- Demonstrates how the working class individuals don’t have the money to be worried about aesthetic, no focus on enjoyment
- Weekday world is made up of the mundane, but it is also real
- Triple shows the manufactured life and represents the mundane life everyday of these people
‘Heaps of shirts and trousers’
- Implies a lack of organisation, a mess- important that the previous list shows that the working class are the ones wearing these, and Larkin looks down on them slightly
‘Lemon, sapphire, moss-green, rose’
- Bright colours are synthetic, shows the artificial, fake, cheap feeling
- Coming from factories due to mass production, the people in the ‘factory, yard and site’ are the people making these clothes
- Implication that the working class are perpetuating their own desire by creating a inescapable cycle
‘Bri-Nylon Baby-Dolls and Shorties Flounce in clusters’
- Clothes have connotations of sexual lingerie
- Perhaps shows a modern view more than of the era
- Verb intensifies the suggestion that the clothes are sexual, has an air of playfulness and femininity
‘Or women are, or what they do, or in our young unreal wishes’
- Larkin believes that the image of desire the nightclothes conjure up is fictitious and unobtainable
- Second hypothesis shows how Larkin’s misogyny returns- he is almost blaming the women for the mass production of clothes
- Shows naivety as men are fantasising, and projecting
- Larkin is able to identify with them; he has experience and hindsight unlike they have, but he is more cyclical
- Idea that women are unattainable and cannot co-exist with the normal desires of everyday life
- Breaking the illusion of what lies underneath
‘Seems to be: synthetic, new, And natureless in ecstasies’
- Larkin doesn’t actually believe that people are happy with their lives, instead they are just pretending/ putting on a show through their clothes
- Is un-natural wishes, consumerism is used as a cheap escape
- Harsh ad stark vs natural and magical imagery in Gatsby
- Ant-climax
Structure:
-simple rhyme scheme reflective of ordinary life
Context:
-describes a large store selling cheap and slightly outdated clothes targeted towards the working class
-Larkin adopts a prickly persona and attitude towards the clothes and those that wear them
-based on M&S that originally had cheap prices to attract the working classes
-Larkin has a cynical portrayal about domestic life, relationships and consumerism
critic: Andrew Motion ‘Larkin sees drab house, drab colours, drab lives…
…and drab people during the week trying to change by night into something they’re not’
Critic: Johnathan Edwards ‘often moves from concrete…
…beginnings to an abstract, moral-of-the-tale sort of ending’
