64 pages • 2 hours read
To Sir with Love
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Symbols & Motifs
Animal Nature
Throughout the novel, Braithwaite believes he is working to civilize his students. He believes that Victorian manners and an adherence to personal hygiene represent indicators of gentlemanly or ladylike behavior towards which all people should strive. However, his students and other characters frequently fail to uphold these ideals, at which point Braithwaite dehumanizes them, classifying them as animals. When Braithwaite first meets Clinty, he finds her to be the polar opposite of femininity, instead exuding a “brash animal charm” (20), which for Braithwaite is not necessarily a compliment. Similarly, when Weston ogles Dale-Evans, Braithwaite refers to him as having “owl eyes” (88). Braithwaite routinely cites characters with a lack of self-control as having animalistic traits.
Similarly, during the incident with Mr. Bell, when the male students seem to lose all reason, they revert back to an animal sense of natural instinct: blood-red in tooth and claw. Braithwaite admonishes them for this, calling them “slobbering” (156) and “mad wolves” (160). Braithwaite uses this language to force the students to acknowledge the indecency of their behavior in hopes that they will change or at least apologize for it. He believes that violence merely begets violence, and that the only way to combat this is by denying those animal urges towards violence. Braithwaite sees the animalistic characteristics of his fellow humans as problematic, and something that should be eschewed at all costs, in order to better the pursuit of the Victorian ideals of masculinity or femininity.
The Outsider/Other
The lone Black character in the novel, Braithwaite often uses language of the outsider, as he feels isolated from the East End community. Indeed, he is an outsider; every morning, he must travel from the Belmonts’ home, outside East End, to inside Greenslade. When he does try to become an insider by living in the East End, he is rebuffed by Mrs. Pegg, and eventually accepts that he will never be a part of this community: “At the least hint of trouble they, like their elders, promptly closed their ranks, and in a time such as this even I was an outsider” (113).
Braithwaite often views his students almost from afar, recognizing that despite their interpersonal relationships, they are still incredibly different. His students are part of a community that Braithwaite can never be a part of, leading to both a narrative and a physical distance between the Braithwaite and his students. Braithwaite rarely appears amongst the group; rather, he stands off to the side, looking at them “as if I were trying to reach the children through a thick pane of glass” (66).
Of course, his skin color also renders him an outsider within English society. Due to the racism inherent within English colonialism, Braithwaite is both explicitly and implicitly ostracized within English society. Despite what he perceives as his similarities to other Englishmen, he realizes that they will never accept him—or any Black person, for that matter—as one of them, as English. At no point is this made clearer than the episode with Seales, during which his students refuse to go to the boy’s house because he is Black: “I felt weak and useless, an alien among them” (169). Braithwaite finally acknowledges his separation from these students, as well as the pain which they cause him, a type that they can never fully understand.
The Atmosphere and Environment of Greenslade
When Braithwaite first comes to Greenslade, he finds the bombed-out wreckage of a place that has been both neglected and forgotten by the rest of society. In many ways, the terrible conditions of Greenslade act as the physical manifestation of the trauma of war. Braithwaite’s emphasis on the school’s neglected appearance is also interesting because Braithwaite himself refuses to talk about his time spent in the military during the war. In some ways, the school can be seen to represent Braithwaite’s own psyche, and the manifestations of historical trauma remind the reader of the trauma Braithwaite continues to face as a result of racism.
However, Greenslade also represents the lives and futures of its student populace: “[T]he atmosphere of the whole place was depressing, like a prison” (18). While Braithwaite feels this way because he is imprisoned by the confines of his race and English society, the simile used to liken Greenslade to a prison also indicates the harrowing futures of many of its students. Due to the poverty of the community, it is possible that many students will end up imprisoned in the future; the atmosphere of Greenslade can be seen both as a warning and as a preparation for this inevitability. However, the atmosphere of neglect and abandonment also forces readers to acknowledge the impoverished environment of the school and its surrounding community, leading one to believe in the students’ inability to extricate themselves from this perpetual cycle of poverty and neglect.
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