Fantasizing the A-levels

Having taught ill-prepared college freshmen this semester, I've been thinking a bit about how the A-levels were possibly the hardest and most stressful exams that I've ever had to do. Even though I took them with almost no pressure to do well (I was headed for NUS to do an Arts degree: four Cs would have sufficed; though, in accordance to the grim and deterministic laws of mugging, I ended up with much better grades), the sheer scope and intensity of the thing was quite staggering.

So it was with much interest that I watched An Education this week, where the A-level year of our protagonist, Jenny, played by a be-witching Carey Mulligan, takes an interesting turn as she becomes involved in a romantic tryst with a much older man. Like many a smart, independent minded female protagonist before her, she offers English as an A-level subject (with aspirations to read English at Oxford) and there are nice references to Jane Eyre in the film. A week before, as I struggled with final grading, A.S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden was a constant companion. That book also features a precocious 17-year-old on the cusp of an Oxbridge career. Frederica Potter, whose devastating intellect (and grating attempts to demonstrate it) is only matched by her adventurous cavorting with older men ends the book losing her virginity (as does Jenny) under the most unromantic of circumstances.


I'm wondering how the A-level year, when it isn't filled with anxious mugging, does represent a way into adulthood that "senior year" in an American High School doesn't. Are there American films and books that don't infantilize 12th graders and deal with girls on the cusp of becoming women at the same level of sophistication as An Education and The Virgin in the Garden? I've rehearsed a version of this argument on these pages (in a desperate attempt to rationalize my fascination with the High School Musical franchise) but the characters of Twilight series, Fast-times at Ridgemont High, Dazed and Confused, and the Gilmore Girls, and even Dead Poets' Society don't come close to capturing the aspiring sophistication of Jenny and Frederica.

Given that both works are set in the 50s and 60s, and that both Jenny and Frederica contemplate NOT going on to University--one to be married and the other with hopes of pursuing a career on the stage--I suppose the A-levels is much more the symbol of a final academic hurdle than senior year in High school will ever be. I'm sure there are interesting literary and filmic representations of precocious 12th graders but I think that given the cultural imaginary, "senior year" in High School can't ever take on the symbolic weight of the momentousness that is enshrined in taking the A-levels.