Long, long, busy, busy days, but those three hours this morning with my students? The best.
Showing posts with label Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Show all posts
Monday, February 9, 2026
"His Heart's Desire"
9 February 2026: What fun it was to teach Alice Dunbar-Nelson's "His Heart's Desire" today in my seminar. These students are so good at talking about this material and it continues to be a delight to teach things I've never taught before.
Tuesday, April 16, 2024
"His Heart's Desire"
16 April 2024:
“But Andy was a boy, and boys don’t tell their hearts out, and he would have died rather than confess his weakness for the world to laugh at and jibe and jeer. For Andy wanted a doll” (Dunbar-Nelson 416).
I am glad to have come across "His Heart's Desire," an Alice Dunbar-Nelson story published in a special issue of Legacy in 2016. As the editors explains, the tale shows "her ability to transmute what could be sentimental subject matter into a masterful story without one false note,” her sensitive understanding of children (informed by her work as a teacher), and also reminds us of her work on behalf of poor families (Gebhard, et. al 405). It's also an study of the construction of masculinity in progress, as poor Andy hides his desire for the doll.
Works Cited
Dunbar-Nelson, Alice. “His Heart’s Desire.” Legacy, vol. 33, no. 2, 2016, pp. 416-421. JSTOR.
Gebhard, Caroline, Katherine Adams, and Sandra A. Zagarell. “Recovered from the Archive: Two Stories by Alice Dunbar-Nelson.” Legacy, vol. 33, no. 2, 2016, pp. 404–07. JSTOR.
Tuesday, November 27, 2018
"Sister Josepha"
27 November 2018: "Perchance, had Sister Josepha been in the world, the eyes would have been an incident. But in this home of self-repression and retrospection, it was a life-story." --Alice Dunbar-Nelson, "Sister Josepha"
This excerpt from "Sister Josepha," one of the texts we talked about in Gender and Women's Studies today, has always stood out to me. Clearly Camille/Sister Josepha is making so much out of nothing here. She sees a pair of sympathetic eyes across the church and falls in love. It's sad and misguided, but we ought not to see it--or more importantly, her, as ridiculous.
Dunbar-Nelson's compassion towards her character--and by extension, her plea that we feel it, too--moves me, as so much Regionalist writing does. Again and again, these texts ask us to just be compassionate and understanding towards people who are different, strange, or have simply had lives we don't recognize. Though they are about very specific people in very specific places, this gesture seems so very timeless to me.
This excerpt from "Sister Josepha," one of the texts we talked about in Gender and Women's Studies today, has always stood out to me. Clearly Camille/Sister Josepha is making so much out of nothing here. She sees a pair of sympathetic eyes across the church and falls in love. It's sad and misguided, but we ought not to see it--or more importantly, her, as ridiculous.
Dunbar-Nelson's compassion towards her character--and by extension, her plea that we feel it, too--moves me, as so much Regionalist writing does. Again and again, these texts ask us to just be compassionate and understanding towards people who are different, strange, or have simply had lives we don't recognize. Though they are about very specific people in very specific places, this gesture seems so very timeless to me.
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