"I'm late to the doom conversation..."

30 October 2024: I've got a really great group of ENGL 301 students this semester. They are smart, hard-working, and just really engaged. Every class is lively and fun. Highlights from today's class (discussing "Desiree's Baby" through the lens of deconstruction) went really well. This post's title comes from a student talking about how a sense of doom hangs over the piece, but I laughed out loud when she said it, adding, "I've been here for weeks!" (Seriously--the "doom conversation" in my head is overwhelming at times--mitigated by the magic respite that a classroom brings.)

53,465

23 October 2022: Two years and one day before the manuscript is due, I am at 53,465 words (so clearly over 1/3 through), having just finished the entry on Kate Chopin. This was another tough one to wrestle with, but I suspect that had as much to do with 1000 other things to do. But it's done. And now we do some chair-dancing, to this track that came on as I updated my back-up files. (And then hit "repeat" more than once.)

Morrison and Chopin

27 July 2022: Finished up my entry on The Awakening today, so it's on my mind this evening, particularly Joyce Dyer's superb reading of the novel through the lens of Toni Morrison and Playing in the Dark. This passage, from the piece's final paragraph, sums it up pretty well: 

"In her novel and in her stories, Chopin knows there can be no freedom--in the South, anywhere in the nation, not in a single heart--without the recognition that black servitude in any form dare not remain. And there can be no artistic freedom without finding a way--perhaps encoded, nuanced, contradictory, hidden in the shadows of black Americans--to say this. The message is full of danger and the potential for sabotage, but it is vital to the identity of America's history and of American literature itself. The black presence is never on the edges of a text by white writers, because it lives powerfully at the center of the white imagination. The subject of the dream is the dreamer. This is the message Toni Morrison forces us to hear" (Dyer 152-153).

Work Cited

Dyer, Joyce. “Reading The Awakening with Toni Morrison.” Southern Literary Journal, vol. 35, no. 1, 2002, pp. 138–54. EBSCOhost.  

"I'm in love with your grandmother"

21 July 2022: Doing the research for my entry on The Awakening and really enjoyed Emily Toth's essay (cited below) where she includes this little story: When Per Seyersted--the scholar who played a huge role in the Chopin revival--reached out to Chopin's grandson, he confessed to him, "I am in love with your grandmother" (Toth 19). Of course, this makes sense--loving and studying literature can feel like falling in love. It seems especially relatable with a figure like Chopin.

That anecdote, charming as it is, is only some of what Toth's essay does so well, as she recreates that time when young scholars had to fight and fight to even study women writers--and did so in the midst of great social upheaval and change. It's a great piece.

Work Cited

Toth, Emily. "My Part in Reviving Kate Chopin." Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival, edited by Bernard Koloski, Louisiana UP, 2009, pp. 15-31.

Made it!

22 November 2019: Well, we did it: made it to Thanksgiving Break during this, one of the hardest semesters of my career at Shepherd. Whew!

And Friday was actually kind of awesome. Taught three terrific classes: The Awakening in one, "Sexy" in another, and "Song of Myself" in the third. I was feeling it all. (My fourth class, Bible as Literature, didn't meet--we've been doing paper conferences instead.) And right now I feel--temporarily--caught up. I can breathe a bit.

So the break starts on a good note...

More from The Awakening

23 February 2018: "He could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world." --Chopin, The Awakening

Deep thoughts, courtesy of Kate Chopin, on a kind of dreary Friday.

Back to The Awakening

21 February 2018: "Mrs. Pontellier was not a woman given to confidences, a characteristic hitherto contrary to her nature. Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life—that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions." --Kate Chopin, The Awakening

We start The Awakening in my ENGL 360 class on Friday. A couple of students who have read it before are wary of going back. I get it. I hated this book the first few times I read it. Now it's one of my favorites. The quotation above is a small explanation of why.

"Desiree's Baby"

12 October 2016: Wednesday was a long and busy day, but like so many others, a good one. One of the highlights was teaching "Desiree's Baby" in my ENGL 204 class. This is probably in my top five of the pieces I teach in this class. It never fails and teaching it is always energizing and exciting. So we'll call this story Wednesday's good thing.

Fern, Feminism, and ENGL 360

I spent a few hours today finishing an abstract on Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall. In the abstract, I argue in part that Fern was (obviously) severely constrained in her writing of the book by widely accepted notions of feminine propriety. While looking through my notes, I came across this excerpt from an 1854 (I think) review of the book from The New York Times that confirms what she was working against:

If Fanny Fern were a man—a man who believed that the gratification of revenge were a proper occupation for one who has been abused, and that those who have injured us are fair game, Ruth Hall would be a natural and excusable book. But we confess that we cannot understand how a delicate, suffering woman can hunt down even her persecutors so remorselessly. We cannot think so highly of [such] an author's womanly gentleness. (qtd in Warren 124)

Please notice what this reviewer is saying: Fern could have written this if she were a man, but she’s not, so she shouldn’t have. How dare she seek revenge against those who wronged her? That’s for men to do. Women who are victimized should just sit there (gently) and take it. Because Fern didn’t just take it, we can’t think that much of her.

All the classic moves of suppressing women’s voices are here: shame, suggestions of a lack of feminity, and silencing. And this is in The New York Times, a mainstream publication in the nineteenth century, too.  Because Fern was awesome, though, she wouldn’t be silenced.

Anyway, this evening, while reflecting on both my abstract and the semester I’ve just completed, I wish I could share this review with some students who just took my ENGL 360: Literature and the Sexes class. For the most part, they did great work, but I was quite discouraged by how many of them were still, at the semester’s end, defending the nineteenth-century patriarchy (and, by extension, its effects which linger to this day). I also can’t believe that some of them still saw the course as engaging in some “male bashing.” It’s as if the clichés about feminism have morphed into clichéd responses from students when confronted by feminist thought.

On day, I could (and did) spend 30 minutes trying my best to eloquently explain how one might be even a bit understanding of Edna’s actions in The Awakening only to have some otherwise bright students say, “Yeah, well, she’s still a bad mother and I hate her.” On another day, I could offer the idea that John, the narrator’s husband in “The Yellow Wall-paper” doesn’t have to be an outright villain for the story to be horrifying. In fact, his rather ordinary (for his time) attitudes about his wife, her health, and his authority over  her make the story more horrifying. And somehow, the only thing some students hear is “John is a great husband!” and proceed to explain why in their final exam essays. “All he wants,” (and I am paraphrasing here from a composite of entirely too many essays that argued this point) “is for his wife to get better. It’s not his fault. And in fact, he’s right. She was sick! Who wouldn’t want a husband like that?”

It’s enough to make one a bit depressed. And I get so tired of the clichéd responses. Give me the benefit of the doubt, folks. Feminism doesn’t equal man-hate. In fact, it does a service to men who are also victims of the patriarchy (one of Gilman’s recurrent arguments). I’m not just making this stuff up or (and these words make any English professor want to scream!) “reading into everything.” So to return to the point above: artifacts like this New York Times review serve to remind us how incredibly pervasive and pernicious patriarchal attitudes were (and are). I’ll add it to my bag of tricks, so to speak, and soldier on.

Work Cited

Warren, Joyce W. Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1992.