Prejudice and injustice — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Prejudice and injustice
Themes
What you need to know
How Shelley explores prejudice against appearance, injustice in courts and in society, and how they drive the creature to violence across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'this wretched mockery of justice', 'all judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer, than that one guilty should escape', 'I almost began to think that I was the monster that he said I was', 'Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!', 'the barbarity of man', 'a fatal prejudice clouds their eyes', 'the sanguinary laws of man', 'is the custom of the Irish to hate villains', 'Who could be interested in the fate of a murderer, but the hangman who would gain his fee?', 'Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me?'.
Justine's trial and the creature's rejection as two kinds of injustice: one by the law, one by appearance.
Nature or nurture: whether the creature is born a monster or made one by how he is treated.
Edexcel's novel question has two parts, and neither marks context: part (a) on the printed extract marks language, form and structure (AO2); part (b) on the novel elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1), not language analysis. Use context only where it explains a reading, and say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
