Compare what happens to the two girls and the attitudes they have and other people have towards it. In what ways do the poems seem typical of the period in which they were written?

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Compare what happens to the two girls and the attitudes they have and other people have towards it.  In what ways do the poems seem typical of the period in which they were written?

‘Cousin Kate’ was Set and written in the mid 1800s and set in rural England. ‘The Seduction’ was written in 1985 for the Young Observer poetry competition, which it won first prize. It was written when she was seventeen.

In ‘The Seduction’ a girl goes to a party with the intention of finding a nice ‘boy next door’ boyfriend. She meets a boy who takes her to the grimy, putrid Birkenhead docks. He seems like the complete opposite to her, he does not have any plans for the future, and truants school and spends his time sniffing paint thinner by the docks reading his dads magazines. She seems to have things more planned out, as she talks to him about her ’O’ levels and school. He pulls a bottle of vodka out of his bag and gets her drunk. He talks with her and gains her trust and then has sex with her. She then discovers she is pregnant 3 months later.

In the poem ‘Cousin Kate’ the narrator is a ‘cottage maiden‘. She is quite content with her life and happy the way she is. One day the Lord of the manor discovers her. He thinks she is beautiful and  ‘lured’ her back to his home. The Lord exploited her and treated her as a ‘plaything’ but she allowed him to do it because she was in love.  The Lord saw her cousin Kate and thought she was much fairer and prettier and cast the narrator aside and married Kate instead.  The narrator was left an outcast because she was then an unmarried mother. She became bitter and resentful towards Kate because she felt she loved the Lord, and Kate didn’t, Kate only loved his wealth. The narrator also felt that if she had been in a similar situation she would not have betrayed her own blood and would have ‘spit in his face’ than taken his hand.  But she loves her son and calls him her ‘shame’ and her ‘pride’. She knows that the Lord needs an heir and calls her son a ‘gift’ that Kate is not likely to get.

In ‘The Seduction’ the girl was hoping to find a nice boyfriend, which all her magazines had promised. She talks about ‘all the parties where you meet the boy next door’ She was looking for a relationship and the kind of romances she had been ‘promised‘ in her magazines.  She wears her ‘high white shoes’ with the intention of looking older.

The boy she meets had come for a different reason entirely.  He had come for sex. He had even come prepared with alcohol to get his victim drunk and Listerine so he wouldn’t put the girl off with his smoky breath at the crucial moment. He occupied her with idle chatting, to gain her false assurance, and slowly got her drunk with his vodka, so she would think she was in love with him. He seduces her in a filthy damp dock. The story becomes more tragic when he talks about truanting, sniffing paint thinner. They are a similar age but he has nothing to lose, and will not end up losing anything, whereas the girl will lose her education, her reputation and more importantly, her childhood from this.

Three months later when she discovers her pregnancy, she doesn’t feel bitter towards the boy, but towards her magazines.  She feels angry at her teenage magazines because they broke their promises of romance and love.  She takes her frustration out on her ‘high white shoes’

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‘And on that day she broke the heels of her high white shoes (as she flung them at the wall)’

In comparison the narrator in ‘Cousin Kate’ was content with her life and didn’t have the need to find a boyfriend. But the similarity between the two women is that their partners exploited them both. They both thought they were in love, even if it was only induced by the alcohol that the boy was giving her.  The poem says:

‘As he brought her more drinks, so she fell in love.’ (The Seduction)

In the poem ‘Cousin Kate’ the ...

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