An experience of teaching two short stories from A snow garden by Rachel Joyce

• I.    ‘The Marriage Manual’

The students were asked to read this story and reflect upon the following questions (some of them were given to them as home assignment, and some were provided in class):

• 1)    Were the relationships of Alan and Alice a real “textbook marriage”? We can note that several things prevented this alliance from being an “ideal” one. Apart from various life circumstances – inevitable disagreements and quarrels, having a son that is unlike other children – this couple suffered from the gap between their idealistic beliefs and reality. In light of these beliefs, the situation with the present for Will is ironic: everything goes not according to the plan, but turns out well in the end.

• 2)    What was the truth – the things Alan and Alice told each other while quarreling, the “stories” they had always cherished or something in between? It is worth talking about such household legends in general: are they necessary for each family, albeit not always faithful to reality, or should we expose the truth? Students can become involved in this discussion by sharing one of their own home legends that practically every family has. It could be useful to watch a 2016 semi-documentary film Cafe Nagler ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5143016/ ), which also describes a family legend and a difficult choice of whether to preserve or ruin it. Although the film is only partly in English (but has subtitles), it can provoke new thoughts and ideas in the group.

• 3)    On page 62 we read: ‘Alan had a queasy feeling about Christmas, as if it was just about adding way too many things so that one could enjoy the relief of removing them all again, come January’ [Joyce 2016: 62]. This attitude of the character can be explained by at least two reasons. First, an important issue is consumerism that is often connected with Christmas: people often put emphasis on the material side of the holiday and don’t stop to think what the real meaning of Christmas is. Second, the root of the problem may be inside Alan’s family; here it is useful to “reconstruct” their relationships using the verbal clues that the text offers.

• 4)    What does the title of the story mean? Before reading, students were asked to look at the title and make their predictions of what it might be about. Then, after studying the story, the group was

encouraged to think about the title once again, comparing their expectations with the actual plot and trying to connect the title with the ideas about marriage expressed by the author (especially on pp. 75–77).

For that end, we divided the reading of both stories into several parts. That enabled us to draw more attention to specific details or speculate on what would happen next (later we compared these initial ideas and the real events in the short story).

If next time there will be enough time to read the book in full, I will ask students to find links between the characters of this and other stories. For instance, Alan and Alice receive a Christmas card from Binny, Alice’s old friend who she had lost touch with. Alice remembers ‘Binny, the girl she had followed everywhere’ [Joyce 2016: 70–71]; in her turn, Binny, the heroine of the previous story, recalls her friendship with Alice.

In terms of language, this story offers an opportunity to study both general vocabulary and a particular lexical group – words denoting instruments and technical appliances. In our case, several students prepared exercises for the whole academic group, trying on the role of teachers. Due to the fact that they did this work conscientiously, such an activity was truly lively and effective. The same technique was used while studying another story within the collection, ‘The Boxing Day Ball’. If there is a need, the real teacher can add some more exercises of his or her own to ensure that the new words are understood and memorised.

• II.    ‘The Boxing Day Ball’

  This short story is quite different from the other ones: it is set in 1962; its characters and the events happening to them have no apparent links to those of other stories. Although these features can present difficulties, they can also lead to quite interesting discussions.

As with ‘The Marriage Manual’, the students had to read the story and answer these questions:

• 1)    Why did the factory girls ask Maureen to go to the ball with them – was there some mockery in it or did they really want her company? We came to the conclusion that probably the latter was the case; the girls ‘watched her every morning on her way to school’ [Joyce 2016: 116–117] because of a genuine wish to communicate.

However, Maureen didn’t really find common ground with her new friends due to the differences in social background and general mindset.

• 2)    Why didn’t Maureen’s mother say openly that she was letting her go to the party? We know that this woman was quite traditional and had firm beliefs in what was “proper” for her daughter. Yet, she must have felt that in this case traditions wouldn’t make her child happy. So Maureen’s mother decided to reach a compromise with herself, giving a silent consent.

• 3)    Being aware of the characters’ future, can we say that the ending of the story is “happy”? Talking on this point with the students, we tried to identify if there is some “moral” in this short story, a message conveyed through its plot (although there shouldn’t necessarily be one). According to some of them, Joyce is saying that life is difficult and unpredictable (if Maureen had married one of the “appropriate” boys, her life could have also been full of hardship). The only way we can counteract this is to make our own choices and be responsible for them later, which is what the main character of the story does.

• 4)    Is there some connection between Maureen and the girl in the Christmas advertisement from other stories? This story is least connected with the other ones: seemingly, there are no correspondences in characters, places and events. But we can notice some similarities between Maureen and the girl in the advertisement who appears in the rest of the stories: they both have red coats; Maureen is thinking of forest animals, while the girl from the advertisement has animals following her.

This list is of course not exhaustive, since more questions can spring up during the discussion.

As mentioned before, the action in thise story takes place in the mid-20th century; it gives us an opportunity to draw attention to the historical and social context. There is a clear connection with the war which had ended just 17 years before: Maureen’s father hadn’t been able to fight because of his health and had worked in a munitions factory, which his wife is ashamed of. ‘The war had been twenty years ago, but people still talked about it’ [Joyce 2016: 121]. As for the social context, we considered the different strata of the society that the factory girls and Maureen belong to. We also mentioned the girls’ accent which, together with other details, characterizes them as belonging to a social group.

It can be concluded that A Snow Garden may be used in a course of Literary Reading either as the main book for studying or as additional material. In these cases approaches and techniques would certainly vary, but the text would invariably provide food for thought and an impetus for discussion.