Secrets and consequences — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Secrets and consequences
Themes
What you need to know
How Eliot explores secrets, chance and consequences, as Godfrey trusts to luck to hide his marriage and his child, and the past comes to light 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: 'a secret marriage, which was a blight on his life', 'The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature', 'that of warding off the evil day', 'the old disposition to rely on chances which might be favourable to him', 'Favourable Chance, I fancy, is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in', 'the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind', 'no sort of duplicity can long flourish without the help of vocal falsehoods', 'no disposition is a security from evil wishes to a man whose happiness hangs on duplicity', 'are worn as lightly as mere trimmings when once the actions have become a lie', 'When God Almighty wills it, our secrets are found out', 'now gave his childless home the aspect of a retribution', 'While I’ve been putting off and putting off, the trees have been growing—it’s too late now', 'it is too late to mend some things, say what they will'.
Structure: the Stone-pit that hides Dunstan and the gold for sixteen years, and the draining that brings both to light.
Godfrey's punishment, a childless home and a daughter who turns from him, against the reward of Silas's love.
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.
