Subject Stars: Year 12 Literature
By Emily and Sarah
In this week’s subject stars, we take a look at Ms Wilson’s Year 12 English class who are studying the play: ‘Death of a Salesman’. Using the class’s work of summarising the play, we focus on Mathilda, this week’s Subject Star of her class!
Ms Wilson commended Mathilda for her wonderful collage that summarised the key themes of the play, as shown in the image below.
Ms Wilson explained that ‘it touched on the nuanced ideas of Howard's representation of materialism as well as Willy Lowman's insecure mindset. The images aptly, and at times, abstractly, represent the key themes of the play; the orange peel, for example, being linked to the structural foreshadowing of the play's tragic ending.’
An exciting description for Mathilda’s work and one that surely intrigues to the play.
I reached out to Mathilda to get a statement of her feelings about being chosen as one of Bolingbroke’s first Subject Stars. She explained that she feels, ‘Overfilled with joy’ especially in a subject that she personally enjoys. She believes the reason her work was chosen was due to the ‘creativity and thought’ she put into it—proven with how well it turned out!
Mathilda’s work contains content from ‘Death of a Salesman,’ the play the current Year 12 English Literature students are studying. Mathilda explains that each picture she used highlight's different themes that stuck out to her when reading the play: ‘Behind each picture is the description of how that picture highlights that specific theme.’
She continued to explain how the course of the play follows the main character, Willy Loman, who suffers from a tragic story at around the age of 60. ‘Each theme [that Mathilda covered in her work] adds up to Willy's tragic flaw being the 'American Dream'.’ —a belief that Mathilda has clearly conveyed throughout her work, a testament to her expertly planned composition, understanding and hard-work regarding the subject and her independent work, making her undoubtedly fit to be one of Bolingbroke’s first Subject Stars.
