EN3144 The Thatcher Factor: The 1980s in Literature
Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ (1982)
Adrian Mole
What does Adrian Mole’s name suggest about his character?
What does Adrian’s repetition of the phrase ‘Just my luck!’ (or ‘worse luck’)
convey about him?
How does the novel indicate that Adrian is an unreliable narrator and what is
the significance of this unreliability?
Is Adrian likeable?
How does the novel evoke sympathy for Adrian?
What does Adrian’s preoccupation with cleanliness and tidiness suggest
about his life?
‘This is the first year I have been able to pass a horse-chestnut tree without
throwing a stick at it. / Pandora says I am maturing very quickly’ (167). In what
ways and to what extent does Adrian change and mature across the novel?
Thatcher, Thatcherism and The 1980s
To what extent does Adrian embody Thatcherite values?
How is Thatcher portrayed in the novel?
What does the novel suggest about the impact of Thatcherism?
In what ways does the novel subvert Thatcher’s celebration of Victorian family
values?
The Headmaster, Mr Scruton, evokes Townsend’s gym teacher (Mrs Scruton)
but also Roger Scruton, the philosopher closely associated with Thatcherism.
In what ways does it oppose his values?
What does the novel suggest about the possibility and effectiveness of
resistance to Thatcherism?
What is the effect of concluding the novel with the Falklands War?
Class
What factors indicate that Adrian and Pandora belong to different social
classes?
In what sense is Adrian socially aspirational?
How does the novel convey that Adrian is a snob?
What motivates Adrian to send his poems to the BBC?
How effectively does Adrian use language to convey social elevation?
Thatcher regarded the working class as ‘idle, deceitful, inferior and bloody-
minded’. Does the novel endorse or challenge this view?
Gender
In Adrian’s view, what roles and characteristics are natural to men?
Does the novel endorse or undermine his view of masculinity?
What role does Adrian wish women to occupy?
Does the novel affirm his view of women?
Townsend has said that she sees aspects of herself in Adrian, Pandora and
Pauline. What is the appeal and effect of cross-gender prose?
Townsend defines herself as a feminist. Is this a feminist novel?
Structure, Form and Genre
Is this a novel for teens or adults?
What is the function and effect of the diary form?
To what effect are the seasons used to structure the novel?
What comic techniques are employed in the novel?
Who or what is the target of Townsend’s satire?
Is comedy / comic fiction gendered?
Intertextuality and Literary Context
What is the significance of the epigraph taken from D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and
Lovers?
In what ways does Adrian’s reading reflect his life?
‘I think Jane Austen should write something a bit more modern’ (13). In what
sense does the novel update Austen?
How does the character of Grace Pool revise Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre?
How does the novel compare to other fictional representations of male
adolescence and working class coming of age stories?
Given that The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole was the bestselling book of the
1980s, why has it produced so little academic interest and literary criticism?
