Love and rejection — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Love and rejection
Themes
What you need to know
How Dickens explores love, desire and rejection, from Pip's love for Estella to Miss Havisham's broken heart 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: 'Her contempt for me was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it', 'the kiss was given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and that it was worth nothing', 'If I could only get myself to fall in love with you', 'If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces', 'So proud, so proud!', 'Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil', 'a warning to back and point my lessons', 'And will continue friends apart'.
Context: the two endings, one in which Pip and Estella meet briefly and part for good, and one that leaves open whether they stay together.
Love as obsession and as revenge, against the steady love of Joe, Biddy and Herbert.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
