Between the Lines

What's behind the cheeky smile? My three year old nephew is absolutely obsessed with the anthropomorphic trains of Thomas and Friends. He can’t get enough of the TV show, the songs, and the, rather pricey, range of toys.  I have seen more than my fair share of the children’s show for a man of my age, and this has led to me questioning some of the values the show perpetuates. It seems evident that the series is threaded with a conservative ideology of imperialism, rigid class structures and racial overtones. The way in which Sodor functions is very much a hierarchical class system. At the top of the pyramid is fat cat boss, Sir Topham Hatt, also known as The Fat Controller. He embodies the values his name implies: aristocratic wealth, exuberance and importance. Below him are the lower-middle class steam engines. They take orders directly from Hatt and have far greater authority over the diesel engines, trucks and carriages of the bottom class.  The steam engines m...

On a recent trip to a Wilko’s store, I was disappointed to see a range of children’s books both implicitly and explicitly divided by gender. Do we not give children books to engage their imagination, to expand their horizons and to bloom their creativity irrespective of their gender?  I was particularly drawn to two colouring books titled, The Boy’s Colouring Book and The Girls’ Colouring Book by publisher Buster Books pictured below. As is clear from the books covers, the books perpetuate stereotypical ideas of gender. Whilst we don’t fully know what effect the influence of books could have on children’s understanding of gender, the messages that these books send merely reinforce patriarchal ideas of gender, and by perpetuating these ideas we are preventing equal opportunities. They seem to suggest that only males have an interest in space travel, adventure, martial arts, cars and construction, where female interests are limited to fashion, motherhood and all thin...

I have decided to spotlight the poem “The Red Wheelbarrow “ by William Carlos Williams. This poem is perhaps the most famous example of imagist poetry.  Imagist poetry is centred on one exclusive image, an image so deeply focused that it becomes the poem itself. Imagists insisted that a poem should get its power, not from the poet’s clever style, not the symbolism of its content, but from the emotions evoked by an image (An idea that can be traced back to the Japanese Haiku of the 16 th century).  Williams was an imagist whose aesthetic principles were largely focused on everyday life and the common man. It was an aesthetic that went against the grain of the critically acclaimed poets of the day such as the classicist, academic, and formal poetry exemplified by the likes of T. S. Eliot. “The Red Wheelbarrow” is a poem composed of a single sentence broken up at various intervals. The poem’s opening lines set the tone for the entire poem, and its form and meaning ...