Mary Barton

Today, Mr. Delacruz gave us an example of prompt from an old AP Lit test. It asked you to look a text written Elizabeth Gaskell.  The passage from Mary Barton describes an English mill worker in the 1840’ s who seeks out his boos to ask him to care for another worker dying of typhus. The question the prompt asked was to describe the Gaskell’s use of characterization, point of view, selection of detail, and dialogue to make a social commentary. Now that is where the confusion began. First off, I had no idea what a social commentary was, let alone how Gaskell formed it.

Once Mr. Delacruz defined social commentary as promoting change by informing the general public about a given problem and appealing to people’s sense of justice, I was able to get a better sense of what the prompt was asking. We then were divided up into four groups of people and were asked to look specifically at characterization, point of view, selection of detail, or dialogue. I was assigned to look at characterization so I tried to focus on how Gaskell attempted to make the reader feel towards the characters in the passage.

Once we started to read I was confused about the plot of the story. In the prompt, the scene was described as George Wilson, a mill worker, was going to the house of Mr. Carson, the mill owner to ask Mr. Carson if he could take care of a worker dying of typhus. From reading this, I expected there to be a lot of dialogue between two men, with a lot of confrontation. This is where I was sure to find the social commentary: between the boss and the worker. However, this was not the case at all. The majority of the story focuses solely on the interactions between Wilson and Carson’s servants. After reading the passage, I found the social commentary was not between the boss and the worker, but between the rich and the poor. I was confused as to why the prompt would confuse the reader, so I asked Mr. Delacruz, and he explained before we looked at the boss-worker conversation, we first need background. That specific passage gave us a ton of background. If we did not know who Wilson was, his socioeconomic background, details about Carson’s life, etc., then we might not understand what would happen during the conversation. Mr. Delacruz did a great job of explaining this.

PS: I completely agree with Stephen not wanting to read aloud. I always trip up when I have to read in front of class.