Letters | Sunday, 28 March 2010

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Nonsensical women’s council stand on Realtà saga

The National Council of Women president commented in an article carried by your paper on the 21 March that the main reason the Council had condemned Alex Vella Gera’s story (not an article) was that the paper carrying it, Realtà, had been distributed even at Junior College, and that it would have a negative effect on minds not yet mature or intellectual.
Apart from the fact that the first person narrative used in a story (as opposed to an article), does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the writer, I wish to contend that the choice of texts for the Advanced English Matriculation exam, for which Junior College students sit, assumes their minds are mature and intellectual enough to cope with Margaret Atwood’s dystopian, feminist novel ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’, which depicts women in a society totally degrading to them. Nor is the language employed by the writer always particularly puritanical!
I am in favour of minds being weaned from immaturity and, since I think Atwood’s novel cannot, at any point, reflect her own opinion about the recognition meted out to women in the novel, I welcomed the introduction of it into the syllabus. Nevertheless, the reason I refer to it here is because, if Junior College students are as immature as the NCW president thinks them, they would have found lots to snigger about in this compulsory text.

Maria Grech Ganado
Gharghur

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