A Snake Down Under by Glenda Adams

A Snake Down Under written by Glenda Adams is a text which explores the dominant cultural ideologies displayed in early 20^th century western civilization. The story depicts a series of different instances where young Anglican girls experience encounters with ‘snakes’. At first glance the story is difficult to understand as there is no set sequence. This was exemplified in the workshop session when small table groups were handed a cut up version of A Snake Down Under and asked to arrange the story in a logical sequence. While doing this activity we were asked to take note of some of the tools we employed to put the story in the correct format. My group used knowledge we gained from reading traditional texts; to sequence the title at the start of the story. Our table attempted to group some of the stories elements together such as grouping all of the school related paragraphs together. However, the task was a difficult one as when the text was later revealed in its correct format it was noticed that the paragraphs were not cohesive with one another.

When reading this text in a dominant position it made very little sense as the text often skipped from speaking about snake’s and their poison to religious oriented paragraphs. However, once my group and I began to take a resistant reading to the text we were able to draw the conclusion that the snake suggested throughout the story was not the literal kind. Throughout A Snake Down Under there were uses of intertextuality (Moon, 2010) as suggested when the author mentions ‘The East of Eden’ and in the last line ‘Did it offer you an apple?’. Both of these examples have reference to the bible where a snake offers an apple to Eve as a sign of temptation. As I was aware of this knowledge from my Christian upbringing I understood the reference to ‘snake’ in the story as temptation. Upon my re-reading of the text I was able to identify with the story a lot more as the position of the religious paragraphs actually gave the story substance.

The class discussion of A Snake Down Under bought out some interesting points which I would not have thought of by myself and helped me to understand the story at a depper level than I already did. One of the class members suggested that where there is reference to a girl being bitten by a snake, but as the class is full of boys she did not say anything and died later suggests that perhaps she caught an STI and died from the infection. However, another class member contradicted this thought with their opinion that they believed the death was more of a metaphor as the girl had been raped and felt dirty and dead inside. The second theory would explain why the girl did not want to say anything amongst a class of boys in particular as while rape is not acceptable in modern western cultures, in some cultures or in past times it was seen to be acceptable. The idea of rape is again suggested in the final paragraph where the girl telling the story mentions that she broke the rules and yelled and screamed.

Through the re-reading of the text and the class discussion my understanding of the text was developed. The text which I originally could not understand began to discuss topics which are usually silenced in society and forced the reader to question the morality of both society and religion. The author’s intentions were to leave this text open as the reader could then consider the way the text positioned them. Ultimately, every reader will assume different things about the text due to their age, gender, culture and prior experiences.

The workshop on this text developed my understanding of how I piece together different parts of texts to make meaning. I was challenged to not only understand the text and how it positions me as a reader, but also how I am able to make sense of texts. To assist students in making these cultural connections with texts a simple table which lists the connotations and denotations of major themes in the text (i.e. snake) could be completed in class. This would develop the way which student’s understand particular texts and how they relate to texts. Both of these activities develop qualities which are important for students’ education as they must understand how and what influences them to make the inferences that they do in texts. As a teacher, I would be happy to use these approaches to develop my students’ understanding of literary texts.

References

Moon, B. (2010). Literary terms. a practical glossary. (2nd ed.). Cottesloe, Australia: Chalkface Press.