Examiners' reports - June (PDF, 385KB) - OCR

OCR Report to Centres – June 2013
underclass...), Heart of Darkness, and quoting/analysing language and imagery with a detail and
thoroughness that was awe-inspiring’.
Mrs Dalloway
Examiners were likewise impressed with work on Virginia Woolf, and praised highly answers to
the more popular (a) option on the triviality of Clarissa’s concerns. One reported seeing ‘some
fantastic and nuanced work on this question, with contextual links made to social class and
gender in Britain in early twentieth century’. Comments on narrative method are to be
encouraged in all Section B answers, but seemed mostly likely to appear in those on Mrs
Dalloway. Another examiner noted that ‘the modernist qualities of the text offer strong
candidates a rich opportunity for exhibiting sophisticated appreciation of literature. I was
impressed by the eloquence of many of these responses as well as their subtle attention to the
characterisation of Clarissa, her links with Septimus, and the place of all of this in the post-war
context.’ Some weaker answers were more-or-less restricted to a character study of Clarissa,
but many arrived at a profound and perhaps unexpected sympathy with the title character,
discussing the ‘inner dialogue of Clarissa which opens to us the true misery of her life and its lost
opportunities’. There were very few responses to the (b) option on the disjointedness of Mrs
Dalloway, but there were some who rose ably to the challenge of discussing the novel’s
structure. One examiner was particularly impressed with the mature conclusion of a candidate
that ‘this after all seems to be Woolf’s intention: to show us that these odd happenings are in fact
all part of our collective consciousness, that a Clarissa and a Septimus share the same
experiences within the day of the novel’.
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