Sujet du Bac Anglais 2021 · Métropole Candidat libre 2

Document A

Document B

Mamacita is the big mama of the man across the street, third-floor front. Rachel says her name ought to be Mamasota, but I think that's mean.

The man saved his money to bring her here. He saved and saved because she was alone with the baby boy in that country. He worked two jobs. He came home late and he left early. Every day.

Then one day Mamacita and the baby boy arrived in a yellow taxi. The taxi door opened like a waiter's arm. Out stepped a tiny pink shoe, a foot soft as rabbit's ear, then the thick ankle, a flutter of hips, fuchsia roses and green perfume. The man had to pull her, the taxicab driver had to push. Push, pull. Push, pull. Poof!

All at once she bloomed. Huge, enormous, beautiful to look at from the salmon-pink feather on the tip of her hat down to the little rosebuds of her toes. I couldn't take my eyes off her tiny shoes.

Up, up, up the stairs she went with the baby boy in a blue blanket, the man carrying her suitcases, her lavender hatboxes, a dozen boxes of satin high heels. Then we didn't see her.

Somebody said because she's too fat, somebody because of the three flights of stairs, but I believe she doesn't come out because she is afraid to speak English, and maybe this is so since she only knows eight words. She knows to say: He not here for when the landlord comes, No speak English if anybody else comes, and Holy smokes. I don't know where she learned this, but I heard her say it one time and it surprised me.

My father says when he came to this country he ate hamandeggs for three months. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Hamandeggs. That was the only word he knew. He doesn't eat hamandeggs anymore.

Whatever her reasons, whether she is fat, or can't climb the stairs, or is afraid of English, she won't come down. She sits all day by the window and plays the Spanish radio show and sings all the homesick songs about her country in a voice that sounds like a seagull.

Home. Home. Home is a house in a photograph, a pink house, pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light. The man paints the walls of the apartment pink, but it's not the same, you know. She still sighs for her pink house, and then I think she cries. I would.

Sometimes the man gets disgusted. He starts screaming and you can hear it all the way down the street.

Ay, she says, she is sad.

Oh, he says. Not again.

¿Cuándo, cuándo, cuándo? 1 she asks.

¡Ay caray! 2 We are home. This is home. Here I am and here I stay. Speak English. Speak English. Christ!

¡Ay! Mamacita, who does not belong, every once in a while lets out a cry, hysterical, high, as if he had torn the only skinny thread that kept her alive, the only road out to that country.

And then to break her heart forever, the baby boy, who has begun to talk, starts to sing the Pepsi commercial he heard on T.V.

No speak English, she says to the child who is singing in the language that sounds like tin 3. No speak English, no speak English, and bubbles into tears. No, no, no, as if she can't believe her ears.

Sandra CISNEROS (American short-story writer and poet of Mexican origin born in 1954),

House on Mango Street, Vintage edition, 1983

1 cuando: 'cuando' means 'when' in Spanish

2 ¡Ay caray!: exclamation in Spanish

3 tin: a sort of metal

Document C

Franklin Hata is a Japanese migrant who moved to Bedley Run, a town in the New York City suburbs, and opened a medical supply store.

PEOPLE KNOW ME HERE. It wasn't always so. But living thirty-odd years in the same place begins to show on a man. In the course of such time, without even realizing it, one takes on the characteristics of the locality, the color and stamp of the prevailing dress and gait and even speech—those gentle bells of the sidewalk passersby, their How are yous and Good days and Hellos. And in kind there is a gradual and accruing recognition of one's face, of being, as far as anyone can recall, from around here. There's no longer a lingering or vacant stare, and you can taste the small but unequaled pleasure that comes with being a familiar sight to the eyes. In my case, everyone here knows perfectly who I am. It's a simple determination. Whenever I step into a shop in the main part of the village, invariably someone will say, "Hey, it's good Doc Hata."

[...] When I first arrived in Bedleyville, few people seemed to notice me. Not that they were much different from those in the other towns, at least not intrinsically. [...] I suppose it was because Bedleyville was still Bedleyville then, and not yet Bedley Run (though desperately wanting to be), and pretty much anybody new to town was seen as a positive addition to the census and tax base. It was 1963, and from what I'd seen during my brief travels in this country, everyone for the most part lived together, except, I suppose, for certain groups, such as the blacks, or the Chinese in the cities, who for one reason or another seemed to live apart. Still, I had assumed that once I settled someplace, I would be treated as those people were treated, and in fact I was fully prepared for it. But wherever I went—and in particular, here in Bedley Run—it seemed people took an odd interest in telling me that I wasn't unwelcome.

Chang-Rae LEE (First generation Korean-American novelist born in 1965)

Gesture Life, 1999

Partie 1. Synthèse en anglais [16 pts]

Prenez connaissance de la thématique ci-dessus et du dossier composé des documents A, B et C et répondez en anglais à la consigne suivante (500 mots environ):

Show how the theme of adjusting to a new environment is dealt with in the three documents.

Document A

Document B

Mamacita is the big mama of the man across the street, third-floor front. Rachel says her name ought to be Mamasota, but I think that's mean.

The man saved his money to bring her here. He saved and saved because she was alone with the baby boy in that country. He worked two jobs. He came home late and he left early. Every day.

Then one day Mamacita and the baby boy arrived in a yellow taxi. The taxi door opened like a waiter's arm. Out stepped a tiny pink shoe, a foot soft as rabbit's ear, then the thick ankle, a flutter of hips, fuchsia roses and green perfume. The man had to pull her, the taxicab driver had to push. Push, pull. Push, pull. Poof!

All at once she bloomed. Huge, enormous, beautiful to look at from the salmon-pink feather on the tip of her hat down to the little rosebuds of her toes. I couldn't take my eyes off her tiny shoes.

Up, up, up the stairs she went with the baby boy in a blue blanket, the man carrying her suitcases, her lavender hatboxes, a dozen boxes of satin high heels. Then we didn't see her.

Somebody said because she's too fat, somebody because of the three flights of stairs, but I believe she doesn't come out because she is afraid to speak English, and maybe this is so since she only knows eight words. She knows to say: He not here for when the landlord comes, No speak English if anybody else comes, and Holy smokes. I don't know where she learned this, but I heard her say it one time and it surprised me.

My father says when he came to this country he ate hamandeggs for three months. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Hamandeggs. That was the only word he knew. He doesn't eat hamandeggs anymore.

Whatever her reasons, whether she is fat, or can't climb the stairs, or is afraid of English, she won't come down. She sits all day by the window and plays the Spanish radio show and sings all the homesick songs about her country in a voice that sounds like a seagull.

Home. Home. Home is a house in a photograph, a pink house, pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light. The man paints the walls of the apartment pink, but it's not the same, you know. She still sighs for her pink house, and then I think she cries. I would.

Sometimes the man gets disgusted. He starts screaming and you can hear it all the way down the street.

Ay, she says, she is sad.

Oh, he says. Not again.

¿Cuándo, cuándo, cuándo? 1 she asks.

¡Ay caray! 2 We are home. This is home. Here I am and here I stay. Speak English. Speak English. Christ!

¡Ay! Mamacita, who does not belong, every once in a while lets out a cry, hysterical, high, as if he had torn the only skinny thread that kept her alive, the only road out to that country.

And then to break her heart forever, the baby boy, who has begun to talk, starts to sing the Pepsi commercial he heard on T.V.

No speak English, she says to the child who is singing in the language that sounds like tin 3. No speak English, no speak English, and bubbles into tears. No, no, no, as if she can't believe her ears.

Sandra CISNEROS (American short-story writer and poet of Mexican origin born in 1954),

House on Mango Street, Vintage edition, 1983

1 cuando: 'cuando' means 'when' in Spanish

2 ¡Ay caray!: exclamation in Spanish

3 tin: a sort of metal

Document C

Franklin Hata is a Japanese migrant who moved to Bedley Run, a town in the New York City suburbs, and opened a medical supply store.

PEOPLE KNOW ME HERE. It wasn't always so. But living thirty-odd years in the same place begins to show on a man. In the course of such time, without even realizing it, one takes on the characteristics of the locality, the color and stamp of the prevailing dress and gait and even speech—those gentle bells of the sidewalk passersby, their How are yous and Good days and Hellos. And in kind there is a gradual and accruing recognition of one's face, of being, as far as anyone can recall, from around here. There's no longer a lingering or vacant stare, and you can taste the small but unequaled pleasure that comes with being a familiar sight to the eyes. In my case, everyone here knows perfectly who I am. It's a simple determination. Whenever I step into a shop in the main part of the village, invariably someone will say, "Hey, it's good Doc Hata."

[...] When I first arrived in Bedleyville, few people seemed to notice me. Not that they were much different from those in the other towns, at least not intrinsically. [...] I suppose it was because Bedleyville was still Bedleyville then, and not yet Bedley Run (though desperately wanting to be), and pretty much anybody new to town was seen as a positive addition to the census and tax base. It was 1963, and from what I'd seen during my brief travels in this country, everyone for the most part lived together, except, I suppose, for certain groups, such as the blacks, or the Chinese in the cities, who for one reason or another seemed to live apart. Still, I had assumed that once I settled someplace, I would be treated as those people were treated, and in fact I was fully prepared for it. But wherever I went—and in particular, here in Bedley Run—it seemed people took an odd interest in telling me that I wasn't unwelcome.

Chang-Rae LEE (First generation Korean-American novelist born in 1965)

Gesture Life, 1999

Partie 2. Traduction en français (4 pts)

Traduisez le passage suivant du document B en français:

¡Ay! Mamacita, 1 who does not belong, every once in a while lets out a cry, hysterical, high, as if he had torn the only skinny thread that kept her alive, the only road out to that country.

And then to break her heart forever, the baby boy, who has begun to talk, starts to sing the Pepsi commercial he heard on T.V.

No speak English, she says to the child who is singing in the language that sounds like tin. No speak English, no speak English, and bubbles into tears. No, no, no, as if she can’t believe her ears. (lines 37 to 44)

1 ¡Ay! Mamacita, éléments en espagnol à ne pas traduire.

SUJET 2

Le sujet porte sur la thématique « Expression et construction de soi ».

Partie 1. Synthèse en anglais (16 pts)

Prenez connaissance de la thématique ci-dessus et du dossier composé des documents A, B et C et répondez en anglais à la consigne suivante (500 mots environ):

Show how women are represented or represent themselves in the three documents, paying particular attention to the role of women artists.

Thématique: « Expression et construction de soi »

Document A

[...] Until the twentieth century, it was accepted that women were secondary to men, the mothers, daughters and wives whose value lay in their beauty, their modesty, their biddability 1, their usefulness to their families in terms of marital alliances. The line in Milton’s seventeenth-century epic poem sums it up: ‘he for God only, she for God in him’.

One result of these gender conventions is that when you look at portraits made in earlier centuries, you would be hard-pressed 2 to find a woman with anything much to say for herself. The men hold guns, wear their medals of state, look at globes, read books, point to plans. The women dangle their books in the folds of their skirts, look fetchingly off into the middle distance, stroke a little dog, wear costly clothes. The fact that we know that many of these women had talents and skills, were great letter writers or fine embroiderers, for example, or ran huge households, play instruments or paint to an impressive standard is not usually included in female portraits before the twentieth century. [...] A particularly interesting extension of the language of self-portraiture came from women artists of the past.

When I was writing a history of women’s self-portraits, I realised that some of them must have been dissatisfied with the masculine self-portrait patterns available to them. There was the artist with the tools of his trade. The artist looking like a gentleman. And several variations of the artist at work. But as women, they had a special problem: if they worked for money, they were not considered ladies. If they boasted of their skills they were not considered feminine. If they looked too arty or too industrious, they invited ridicule. So how to depict themselves as both feminine but professional? [...]

Women used the conventions of their times in an original way, showing off a sophistication to rival the men while never for a moment undercutting the modest femininity the age demanded of the weaker sex. [...] Portraiture is continually refreshing itself. At the start of the 1970s, the feminist artists who confidently marched on to art’s stage extended the concept of self-portraiture, turning it from a painter speaking about herself to an artist embodying ideas that mattered to women in general.

Many of these works have become classics, like Eleanor Antin’s 3 144 photographs of herself taken over 36 days in 1972 as she dieted to lose weight. Its witty title, Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, is a reference to the Michelangelesque idea that a sculptor chips away at the marble to release the body inside. Antin is using her body as a way to personify abstract ideas about the female search for the ideal shape, the constant dieting, the perpetual watching of oneself.

Frances BORZELLO, “Facing the Truth”,

Script of a talk given at the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Canberra, July 11 th 2013

1 biddability: obedience

2 be hard-pressed: find it difficult

3 Eleanor Antin is an American artist.

Document B

Lynn HERSHMAN LEESON (American artist born in 1941),

Roberta Construction Chart #1, 1975.

Roberta Breitmore is a fictional person, created by Lynn Hershman Leeson, in 1974.

The photo gives detailed instructions on how to create Roberta’s appearance.

Document C

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.

I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size

But when I start to tell them,

They think I’m telling lies.

5 I say,

It’s in the reach of my arms,

The span of my hips,

The stride of my step,

The curl of my lips.

10 I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

I walk into a room

15 Just as cool as you please,

And to a man,

The fellows stand or

Fall down on their knees.

Then they swarm around me,

20 A hive of honey bees.

I say,

It’s the fire in my eyes,

And the flash of my teeth,

The swing in my waist,

25 And the joy in my feet.

I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

30 Men themselves have wondered

What they see in me.

They try so much

But they can’t touch

My inner mystery.

35 When I try to show them,

They say they still can’t see.

I say,

It’s in the arch of my back,

The sun of my smile,

40 The ride of my breasts,

The grace of my style.

I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

Now you understand

Just why my head’s not bowed.

I don’t shout or jump about

Or have to talk real loud.

50 When you see me passing,

It ought to make you proud.

I say,

It’s in the click of my heels,

The bend of my hair,

55 the palm of my hand,

The need for my care.

’Cause I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

60 That’s me.

Maya ANGELOU (American writer and civil-rights activist, 1928-2014),

“Phenomenal Woman” in And Still I Rise, 1978

Thématique: « Expression et construction de soi »

Document A

[...] Until the twentieth century, it was accepted that women were secondary to men, the mothers, daughters and wives whose value lay in their beauty, their modesty, their biddability 1, their usefulness to their families in terms of marital alliances. The line in Milton’s seventeenth-century epic poem sums it up: ‘he for God only, she for God in him’.

One result of these gender conventions is that when you look at portraits made in earlier centuries, you would be hard-pressed 2 to find a woman with anything much to say for herself. The men hold guns, wear their medals of state, look at globes, read books, point to plans. The women dangle their books in the folds of their skirts, look fetchingly off into the middle distance, stroke a little dog, wear costly clothes. The fact that we know that many of these women had talents and skills, were great letter writers or fine embroiderers, for example, or ran huge households, play instruments or paint to an impressive standard is not usually included in female portraits before the twentieth century. [...] A particularly interesting extension of the language of self-portraiture came from women artists of the past.

When I was writing a history of women’s self-portraits, I realised that some of them must have been dissatisfied with the masculine self-portrait patterns available to them. There was the artist with the tools of his trade. The artist looking like a gentleman. And several variations of the artist at work. But as women, they had a special problem: if they worked for money, they were not considered ladies. If they boasted of their skills they were not considered feminine. If they looked too arty or too industrious, they invited ridicule. So how to depict themselves as both feminine but professional? [...]

Women used the conventions of their times in an original way, showing off a sophistication to rival the men while never for a moment undercutting the modest femininity the age demanded of the weaker sex. [...] Portraiture is continually refreshing itself. At the start of the 1970s, the feminist artists who confidently marched on to art’s stage extended the concept of self-portraiture, turning it from a painter speaking about herself to an artist embodying ideas that mattered to women in general.

Many of these works have become classics, like Eleanor Antin’s 3 144 photographs of herself taken over 36 days in 1972 as she dieted to lose weight. Its witty title, Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, is a reference to the Michelangelesque idea that a sculptor chips away at the marble to release the body inside. Antin is using her body as a way to personify abstract ideas about the female search for the ideal shape, the constant dieting, the perpetual watching of oneself.

Frances BORZELLO, “Facing the Truth”,

Script of a talk given at the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Canberra, July 11 th 2013

1 biddability: obedience

2 be hard-pressed: find it difficult

3 Eleanor Antin is an American artist.

Document B

Lynn HERSHMAN LEESON (American artist born in 1941),

Roberta Construction Chart #1, 1975.

Roberta Breitmore is a fictional person, created by Lynn Hershman Leeson, in 1974.

The photo gives detailed instructions on how to create Roberta’s appearance.

Document C

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.

I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size

But when I start to tell them,

They think I’m telling lies.

5 I say,

It’s in the reach of my arms,

The span of my hips,

The stride of my step,

The curl of my lips.

10 I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

I walk into a room

15 Just as cool as you please,

And to a man,

The fellows stand or

Fall down on their knees.

Then they swarm around me,

20 A hive of honey bees.

I say,

It’s the fire in my eyes,

And the flash of my teeth,

The swing in my waist,

25 And the joy in my feet.

I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

30 Men themselves have wondered

What they see in me.

They try so much

But they can’t touch

My inner mystery.

35 When I try to show them,

They say they still can’t see.

I say,

It’s in the arch of my back,

The sun of my smile,

40 The ride of my breasts,

The grace of my style.

I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

Now you understand

Just why my head’s not bowed.

I don’t shout or jump about

Or have to talk real loud.

50 When you see me passing,

It ought to make you proud.

I say,

It’s in the click of my heels,

The bend of my hair,

55 the palm of my hand,

The need for my care.

’Cause I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

60 That’s me.

Maya ANGELOU (American writer and civil-rights activist, 1928-2014),

“Phenomenal Woman” in And Still I Rise, 1978

Partie 2. Traduction en français [4 pts]

Traduisez le passage suivant du document A en français:

« When I was writing a history of women's self-portraits, I realised that some of them must have been dissatisfied with the masculine self-portrait patterns available to them. There was the artist with the tools of his trade. The artist looking like a gentleman. And several variations of the artist at work. But as women, they had a special problem: if they worked for money, they were not considered ladies. If they boasted of their skills they were not considered feminine. » (lignes 14 à 19)