Tag Archives: literature

The Letter

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This week, I am turning this space over (mostly) to a guest blogger.

Francis Burke O’Neill is a former student of mine, and we have stayed in touch since his graduation in Spring 2011. As an undergraduate he was an English Major and wrote an excellent senior thesis, “If Margo Channing had Quit Smoking,” which was an analysis of adaptation, translation and appropriation (and which was awarded a Pass WIth Honors). Francis is a native New Yorker who lives in Brooklyn, and says that he considers himself an “unread writer” at this point in his career.

There is no greater gift for a teacher than to have a student do well. By this, I don’t mean make lots of money or become hugely successful. I mean go out into the world and evince character, kindness and thoughtfulness. Francis is one of those former students who has done just this, and I am very proud of him and the work he is doing.

Now for The Letter (and subsequence responses).

Dear Wendy,

          I hope your semester is off to a good start. Something interesting (upsetting, actually) happened in my class on Chaucer this week, and after reading your most recent blog entry, “Female Poets, Agency, and the ‘Suicide Girls,'” I thought you might find it valuable.
          While the professor was mentioning how “awesome” he thought it was that Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde had probably had sex with each other, a young woman yelled out, “Okay, like I am not okay with that.” With all eyes now firmly planted on her, the student went on to say, “Oscar Wilde couldn’t have been gay. He was a genius!” She then attempted to preface this with the only mildly less ignorant assertion that if Wilde had been gay, he would have certainly been “out.”
          The professor explained the circumstances by which Wilde had been put on trial, to which the student responded, “No, that was for his work – not because he was gay.” The discussion ended in quiet exasperation.
          This is not the first time I have been in a literature class where this particular form of prejudice has commandeered the discussion. As far back as high school, I can remember teachers avoiding the subject of queerness. Perhaps it seemed easier for them to make a student feel misunderstood than have to blush their way through an exploration of Nick Carraway’s sexuality or the unrequited longing which serves as the driving force of John Knowles’s heartbreaking A Separate Peace. I vividly remember when one of the students had the courage to ask what many of us were thinking by questioning the queer overtones of that text, the teacher snapped back mockingly, “I don’t know what book you’re reading.” The class of all boys laughed as if his masculinity had rightly been called into question by merely allowing for such a possibility to surface.
          One would hope by the time one reaches graduate school, things would be different. Unfortunately this type of biased reading seems to be just as rampant, and at times more disquieting when one considers the age of the participants.  Last spring when I took a class on feminist literary theory, the students seemed for the most part broad minded in their readings of the various texts, but when it came to the subject of queerness there was expressed among many a strong resistance to this kind of interpretation. Such resistance went beyond mere hesitation and took on a quality closer to outrage.
           During a discussion of Nella Larsen’s Passing, I felt the need to speak up in defense of a queer reading of the text. Most of the students refused to consider the implications of interpreting the text in this way, but took no issue with the complexities of race the novel presented. I relied only on textual evidence to prove my point, and emphasized Larsen’s embracing of ambiguity to construct a multifaceted narrative voice.  It is in this marvelous ambiguity that one finds room to interpret or refute suggestions of queerness. After all, Larsen so elegantly uses the interiority of her characters and the act of racial “passing” to play on an experience of otherness most closely associated with queerness, that of invisible otherness.
          Unlike race or gender, Queerness has no discernible biological signifiers and so it is possible, some would say unavoidable, to be exposed to prejudice in its truest venom and be seen not as the target, but as the audience. There is a passive agony unlike any other given way to upon hearing judgment espoused as if you were not the intended subject. Such ignorance or hate is both expected because it is feared, and yet no less shocking when it arrives in the room, laying its hand on your shoulder amidst the shallow clatter of shaking teacups. And it was all right there in the text.
          I guess the most frightening suggestion of finding this casual prejudice in a literature class is the stripping away of a text’s identity. Works by women and minorities have always been underrepresented by the academy, but when we talk about queerness we are not only talking about being omitted or devalued. We are also talking about those texts being included in the canon but under the condition they are taught as if queerness were not an element of their complexity. In other words some would purchase Dorian Gray’s picture only to hang it in a heteronormative frame. 
          The text itself dictates how it should be taught. I would never argue that a writer should be taught as being solely a “gay writer” or a text as solely a “gay text,” because that would be limiting, but if the text itself deems such interpretations valid then we owe it to the writer and to ourselves to include it in the discussion. Is it necessary to know of Virginia Woolf’s relationship with Vita Sackville-West to successfully interpret all her work? Of course not, but surely it enlivens a reading of her Orlando. And can we ever hope to know the man who wrote A Room with a View if we refuse to also see him as the man who feared publishing Maurice? It is said that when that manuscript was found, it included a note which read “Publishable, but worth it?” Forster knew all too well how his story would be read.
 
Best wishes,
Francis

Francis’s letter prompted this response from me:

Wow! You have written well and movingly about a subject that is so important.  I have been lucky in that, when I teach LGBT writers I haven’t had overt reactions such as the one expressed by the student in your class.  I am very aware, however, that there is, in all likelihood, at least one person in the classroom who would react that way if asked for his/her opinion.  As you well know, I believe that knowing the biography of a writer can — in some instances at least — help us better understand her works.  

Even worse is when a teacher responds as yours did to the suggestion about A Separate Peace.  It’s bad pedagogy, it’s bad scholarship, it’s just bad.  And, as you point out, it scapegoats the student who had the courage to try and get at what the text is “about.”  Shame on that teacher!  

There are times, such as when I get the news about one of my gay or lesbian friends getting married, when I start to feel hopeful about how things are changing in the world.  Unfortunately, that hope (at least in its unmitigated form) never lasts long, because there always follows something that reminds me that things haven’t really changed all that much in many places.

Your point about queerness having no distinguishable markers is so important.  This means that “passing” as heterosexual can be “easier” in practice than passing as “white,” but obviously not psychologically.  In fact, it may be harder psychologically because gender and desire can be hidden.  It’s something that I think teachers can forget sometimes; it’s too easy to look out at a sea of faces and think, “We’re all the same.  We have the same beliefs.  We have the same experiences.”  Unless and until teachers break out of that mindset, we will have those moments of cruelty (many, I like to think, inadvertent, although I’m not so naive as to believe they all are).

And I leave the final word to Francis:

I suppose at the heart of it is something very bittersweet. For any artist’s work to be both so celebrated and so restricted by the same institution is violent. There is no word quite strong enough to describe allowing someone a place at the table on the condition they leave their selves at the door. 

Female Poets, Agency and the “Suicide Girls”

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After three class meetings, my course on Contemporary American Women’s Poetry has come together nicely. There are 15 young women in the class who are — more or less — engaged and interested. It saddened me to hear how afraid of poetry they are, but it didn’t surprise me. This is a response I expect, and one of my goals is to get my students past that fear so they can read and enjoy poetry. I have a number of Education Majors with an English concentration in the class, so I hope that if I pass along my love of poetry to them, they will pass that love along to their students in turn.

Students’ fear of poetry is one of the big hurdles we must overcome during the semester, and it is one of the reasons poetry is more difficult to teach than prose. I have found, however, that poetry, by its very nature, lends itself naturally to being taught, and I try to use that to my advantage when faced with a semester in which my students and I are going to spend long hours “working the poems.” The very things that students find difficult about poetry — its structure, its imagery, its metaphors, its wordplay — are the things I can use to help them learn not just to analyze poetry but to enjoy it as well. I know that at first, as i move line-by-line through the poems, many of the students feel lost, confused. But in very short order (if we are lucky) they begin to see, they begin to feel comfortable hazarding a guess as to why a poet might use a particular word in a particular place.

Starting off was (relatively) easy. On the first day I used Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” because it allows me to demonstrate so many things to my students: received form, enjambment, imagery, word play. How does one lose a place? A name? The poem also allows me to talk about whether we should use a poet’s biography as a lens through which we examine her work. By the time I was halfway though the poem I had a few students who were already engaging with the work.

It was also easy to figure out the poems we would read for the next two classes. The second time we met, we had read “Mountain Time” by Kathryn Stripling Byer and we spent the class watching Byer’s marvelous March 2013 reading here in Brooklyn. The students enjoyed the video very much and said they found it helpful to hear a poet read her own words.. For the third class we went through Bishop’s “The Prodigal,” with Bishop’s wonderful imagery and wordplay drawing responses from the students as they began to find their way toward a little more comfort with poetic analysis.

At the end of that third class meeting I introduced the concept of agency, and talked a little about the ways in which female poets are not accorded the same agency as male poets. Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are the obvious examples, the easiest for my students to grasp. We discussed how critical reaction to a male poet such as Robert Lowell, who suffered from what used to be called manic depression, ran along the lines of, “Look how, despite Lowell’s mental illness, his poetic talent was able to emerge.” Then we talked about how critical reaction to a female poet such as Sexton or Plath, a poet who, like Lowell, suffered from a mental illness, tended more toward, “Isn’t it amazing how her craziness made her a good poet?” The students can see how Lowell retains his agency, which for Plath or Sexton is granted to her mental illness and not to her.

But now I’m faced with a quandary. I am not working with a pre-determined order of readings for this course, so each week I pick the next week’s poems depending upon where our class discussions go. Sexton’s “Her Kind” is a great poem to use early in the semester; students respond well to it, and it’s a good work to have them start their own analysis now that I’ve modeled the process for them. So that was an easy choice for Tuesday’s class meeting. I decided to add “Wanting to Die” to the same class so the students can see Sexton’s power and control as she writes about suicide: “But suicides have a special language. / Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build.”

So far, so good. It seemed natural, then, to move to Plath for Thursday, and “Lady Lazarus” was the obvious choice: “I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real. / I guess you could say I’ve a call.” Like Sexton, Plath is retaining agency, presenting the act of suicide as her choice, as something over which she retains control. And even if she was not successful in her most recent attempt to die, she still retains a potent, feminine power: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.”

Here’s the rub. Have I now, by linking Sexton and Plath through these readings, somehow perpetuated the mythos of the two writers as the “Suicide Girls” of poetry? Have I done them a disservice? Yes, they are both fine poets with strong, vibrant voices. And yes, both do address suicide in their works. But have I reduced them to a caricature, the self-destructive female poet driven to suicide by her uncontrollable madness? Have I taken away their agency just as surely as do those who reduce the two poets’ work to a function of their mental instability?

Of course I can address these questions in next week’s class discussions. The problem is that somehow subtleties get lost, and the action of linking the two poets will end up speaking louder than the words I use to reinforce the idea that both Sexton and Plath retained agency within their poetic works.

I have decided to go ahead and have the students read these poems as planned, and I will address these questions and my uneasiness with the assignment during class. I will trust in the poems — and in each poet’s vision, vibrancy and voice — to carry over the idea that the strength and power in the works are ample evidence of Sexton’s and Plath’s agency. No mere “Suicide Girls,” these two poets produced original, groundbreaking works that continue to speak to readers today.

Synchronicity II

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Being good stewards of the Earth means living within nature.

Being good stewards of the Earth means living within nature.

As if you didn’t see that title coming (with apologies to The Police).

What got me thinking about synchronicity in my last post was the work I have been doing to prepare for my Fall semester courses. As it happens, I am teaching an upper-level English seminar entitled “Nuclear Nightmares: Storytelling After the A-Bomb” and a Freshman Honors seminar on sustainable environment (this year’s Honors topic). The Honors seminars are interdisciplinary, but each of us who teaches one does so through the lens of our own discipline.

I had not planned things this way, but as it turns out there are a lot of points of convergence between the two topics, so my research for one course complements my research for the other.

What strikes me over and over, as I read things as varied as Silent Spring and On the Beach and Welcome to the Greenhouse (a terrific Cli-Fi collection of stories) and A Short History of Nuclear Folly and Flight Behavior and Fail-Safe is that so much of what gets us, and by us I mean all of us, into trouble is hubris. This isn’t a word you hear a lot about today, but it is a theme that is both as old as human time and as current as the debate on climate change: We are masters and commanders of not only our own human domain but of the natural realm as well, and woe betide anyone who tries to point out that maybe we haven’t been the best stewards of our world(s).

Which brings me to what is going on here in Maine. It seems to me that when we picture climate change, we think about the Arctic and Antarctic. We can visualize ice shelves separating, icebergs calving, as the global temperature rises. We can look at NASA’s illustration of the melting polar ice cap and, while the thought of this occurring is intellectually upsetting, it doesn’t really hit home. I mean, not really hit home, not with the sort of sock-in-the-stomach realization that things are changing for the worse.

What does give us this type of shock? The kinds of stories that have been appearing this summer in our daily papers and our local broadcast news. And even more than that, the changes that we are observing all around us.

Maine puffins, already on fragile footing, are having trouble finding the small herring that they need to feed their chicks. Higher tides, warmer water, everything associated with climate change is making it harder for the puffins to survive. These slightly-goofy, comic birds are doing a little better this summer than last, but problems still loom as the global temperature continues to rise.

Even puffins, though, are relatively out of sight for most Mainers. Chickadees, however, are a different story. Even before this article appeared in the Bangor Daily News, it was very apparent to me that something was up with the chickadees, Maine’s state bird. Bold as brass, these little birds will sit on the feeder pole or wait at your feet as you change the birdseed. For many summers, when I would sit out on our deck the chickadees would be all around me, sometimes going so far as to sit on the back and arms of my chair. (This always made me feel a little like Disney’s Cinderella.) This year, I saw one or two chickadees in early June and haven’t seen another since.

And don’t get me started on the fireflies (nearly all gone), bees (disappearing fast) and bats (dying of white nose syndrome).

So here is my challenge, as I see it. I need to help my students find the connections between “big-picture” climate change and the small, everyday moments in their own lives. And the connections between what is happening half a world away in terms of nuclear arms development and the safety of all of us on the planet. One way to do this, I believe, is through literature, by reading stories that humanize the issues involved. Another way is through helping them find the synchronous moments in their own studies, in helping them make the connections between the hard sciences and their lives, between political science and what is happening in their own backyard. Most importantly, they need to come to recognize the ways in which hubris can not only lead to personal downfall (Macbeth, Dr. Frankenstein, Nebuchadnezzar) but, when played out on a larger scale, end up causing global disaster.

Will I be telling them the answers? No. I have my own opinions about what needs to be done to help stop climate change, to end nuclear proliferation, but my task is to allow my students to come to their own decisions about what is happening in (and to) the world and figure out their own responses to what they are learning about. For that, they will need everything a liberal arts education can provide (STEM courses, humanities courses, public discourse and private studies). What we can do, as teachers, is give them the best education, the best resources, the best skills, the best ammunition we can, then keep our fingers crossed that they go out and do a better job than what has been done by those who came before them. Our students, then, embody – both literally and figuratively – the best hope our planet has.

So I guess we now have our answer to what sort of job a humanities major can have: She can save the world.