University of Strathclyde

Department of
English Studies
Glasgow G1 1XH
0141-552 4400

Children's Literature

Malorie Blackman, Noughts and Crosses (Corgi, 2001).

1. Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (c.1594-96).
1.1 Prologue (spoken by Chorus, referring to feuding families of Montagues and Capulets; Juliet is a Capulet, Romeo a Montague):

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents' strife.

1.2 Juliet: 'A fortnight and odd days' short of fourteen (I, iii, 12-15).
1.3 Juliet's nurse acts as go-between for Juliet and Romeo.
1.4 Two famous love scenes: Romeo in Capulets' orchard, Juliet at her window (II, ii); Romeo and Juliet 'aloft' at her bedroom window/balcony – disturbed by nurse, who warns them that her mother is coming; Romeo descends into orchard (III, v).
1.5 Tragedy could have been avoided if Friar's letter to Romeo had been delivered (IV, i, 113-17; V, i, 12-33; V, ii, 1-20); and if Friar had arrived at tomb a few moments earlier (V, iii, 119-20).
1.6 Deaths of Romeo and Juliet bring about reconciliation between Montagues and Capulets (V, iii, 286-304).
1.7 On her website, Blackman claims that some of these parallels not consciously planned/intended.

2. Other allusions/intertextuality: characters' names (see Blackman's website).
2.1 Persephone: 'A goddess of the Underworld. Persephone was the only child of Zeus and Demeter. Carried off by Hades, who had her father's consent, she lived with him a third of the year, but spent the rest with her mother. … Her return to earth, and the consequent sprouting of the crops in spring, after the seed had remained in the ground all winter, was celebrated in many rites shared by mother and daughter … In the story of her abduction and the trick by which Hades forced her to spend a part of each year with him, Persephone was the unwilling victim torn from her mother. … Apart from the tales of her rape and the rites celebrating her return to earth, she always appeared in myths as the dread goddess of the Underworld' (Colin Tripp, Collins Dictionary of Classical Mythology).
2.2 Minerva: 'Roman Goddess regularly identified with Athena. Minerva was the patroness of the arts and crafts and therefore of the intelligence and skill required in their practice. These qualities were extended to the skills of war' (Tripp).
2.3 Jude: Judas? Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)? 'Hey Jude'?

3. Blackman: number of novels for teenage and younger readers – see her website.
3.1 Noughts and Crosses – first of four-novel series: Knife Edge (Doubleday, 2004); Checkmate (Doubleday, 2005); Double Cross (Doubleday, 2008); also see An Eye for an Eye (Corgi, 2003).

4. Noughts and Crosses
4.1 Title: the game (see Blackman's website); symbolism; effects on reader.
4.2 Prologue: 3rd person narrative; irony; origins of individual/family tragedies within general political context (pp.9, 12-15).
4.3 Narrative technique of rest of novel: alternating between two 1st-person narrators/individual viewpoints – sometimes coinciding, sometimes tragically misinterpreting one another in contexts that distort relationship; first five chapters begin with 'I'.
4.4 Viewpoints/points of view: Sephy (pp.23-31); Callum (pp.33, p.38; 39; 41; 53); Sephy (pp.58; 59; 60; 62).

5. Politics.
5.1 Parallel world – reverses expectations.
5.2 Effects of/responses to apartheid.

6. From innocence to experience (sexual/political); rites of passage; search for identity.

7. Dynamics of reading.
7.1 Noughts and Crosses – deferral of racial characteristics.
7.2 Narrative technique: each character tries to interpret other characters' speech and actions from limited point of view.
7.3 Readers in similar position, except have access to other main character's viewpoint.
7.4 Deferral of information, and/or [ironic?] significance: e.g., see pp.11 and 35; pp.13 and 156; pp.16, 29, 35ff, 124-5.
7.5 See Wolfgang Iser, 'The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach' (1974 – in many collections) and 'Interaction Between Text and Reader' (1980), in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, pp.1673-82.

8. Chapter 30, and 'Author's Note' (p.446).

Workshop

Examine the novel as a whole and decide on one particular aspect, literary technique, passage or character that you would like to focus on and present to the class as a whole.

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