This Week In My Classes: Wrapping Up

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

The last ten days or so have been all about evaluating the final assignments for my two fall-term classes, Mystery and Detective Fiction and The Somerville Novelists. The students in my Intro to Literature class wrote a last essay for the term too, but that came in earlier and so I was able to turn it around before the final exams and essays and projects came in from the other groups. That means, though, that basically, for about two weeks, I’ve been in what we refer to on Twitter with the hashtag “#gradingjail.”

I went to a teaching workshop a few years ago where the very helpful advice offered was not to assign any writing you won’t want to read when students turn it in. That’s a good idea, but it’s also a ridiculous idea, as any writing instructor knows: there is no assignment so meticulously conceived, there are no instructions so compellingly worded, that every student will be motivated to, much less able to, do a wonderful job. And it’s not the well-intentioned imperfections in assignments by motivated students that drag us down at this time of year: it’s the lame-ass ‘I’m only doing this because you’re making me’ ones, or the ‘everything else was a higher priority so I threw this together at the last minute’ ones, or the ‘I really have no idea how to do this but even though I never came class or to your office hours, I’m still turning something in to see if I can pass’ ones. It’s the ones in which even the authors’ names are misspelled, despite being right there on the book cover for easy reference, or the advice on three previous assignments was ignored, or that show beyond a reasonable doubt that the student never finished the book they are writing about. Though it would be fun (and fast!) to grade a batch of final essays or exams all of which deserved A+ grades, we don’t expect perfect work: these are students, after all, and they’re learning — that’s the point of their being in our classrooms in the first place. But learning really is a two-way street. Exciting as a truly great assignment by an already flourishing student can be, often it’s the students who have, by effort and persistence and caring, and also by consultation, just made their work better who give me the best feeling when I’m marking.

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Happily, I did see some examples of that this term, and overall my sense of all three classes was that most students were doing their level best. One of the biggest surprises of my recent marking was that a significant majority of the answers to the essay question on the Mystery and Detective Fiction exam (on social justice in Devil in a Blue Dress and Indemnity Only, in case you wondered) were very good: smart, articulate, and supported with detailed discussion of examples. It was hard work going through the entire stack of exams, and it took a long time (between students who did the optional final paper and students who mysteriously vanished from the course over time, there were 74 exams in the end, which certainly felt like plenty) but it was a familiar experience, and I think it gave me a good sense of who was really on top of the course material and who really wasn’t, which after all is the point of the exercise.

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Evaluating the wiki projects for the Somerville Seminar, on the other hand, was a new kind of effort. As my Twitter friends know, I felt a lot of stress about these projects while they were still in progress, mostly because despite my urging, not a lot of students put even draft material up early, thus making ‘gardening’ as well as some aspects of collaborating and conceptualizing difficult. But it was also stressful because of the difficulties I knew some groups were having organizing meetings and getting everyone to participate. As I said, rather defensively, to people who responded to my stress by wondering why I assigned group projects in the first place, I have included a group project of some kind in nearly every 4th-year seminar I’ve taught in my 17 years at Dalhousie, and they have always seemed to go very well! So what was different this time? A couple of things, I think. First of all, this time I had a backstage pass: the projects were going up on a shared PBWorks site, so not only could I see posted content, but I got daily reports of which users had been doing what – including, sometimes, discussions among group members about logistics and frustrations. If I had seen only the finished product, as in the past (not counting the mandatory ‘confer with me at least once about your plans’ sessions that are always part of the process), I might never have known it wasn’t a seamless, harmonious process.

Would it have been better for me to hide my eyes? More important, would it have been better for them? In both cases, I think the answer is no. Because the assignment was experimental, for one thing, I needed to know if clarification or intervention was required, which sometimes it was. Also, because one aspect of the assignment was precisely ‘good collaboration among group members,’ I needed to see if this was going on. Without watching the sausage get made, too, there would be no way for me to learn if I had done my part well, in terms of designing the assignment, laying out the instructions, and supporting the class in meeting the requirements. From their point of view, I think my surveillance, though no doubt occasionally felt as intrusive, was mostly a good thing: I did step in with suggestions when I felt they were heading in unhelpful directions, and when I realized how imbalanced the (visible) contributions were getting, I did some covert, as well as some overt, er, motivating.

All in all, then, I think it was not just useful but responsible of me to pay attention to how things were unfolding. Looking over the final projects, which range from good to outstanding, I’m not sorry, either, to have put everyone (myself included) through this difficult process. But I have certainly been thinking about whether I could have made it any less stressful, and this leads me to another way in which these projects differed from previous group assignments: instead of being staggered across the term, they all came due at once; and though there were multiple components, there was really only one explicit deadline. I thought that it would suffice to address the various components through in-class workshops aimed at developing concepts and getting people started, but clearly, though that was not wasted time, people didn’t (mostly) get started. Probably 75% of the final content on the wikis went up in the 2-3 days before the final deadline, and as far as I could tell, a pretty significant amount of the research was done during those days as well. I talked and talked about the importance of doing the projects in stages, and especially about putting content up early so that others could ‘garden’ it, but I think this advice was just too abstract, the required work too amorphous or theoretical. Also, I think most of them wildly underestimated how much work would actually be involved in building the different components (something earlier attempts would, of course, have alerted them to). As a result, these projects lost out in the day-to-day triage, as they did other work that felt more urgent because it had concrete deadlines coming right up. Lesson learned: when (indeed, if) I do anything similar again, I’ll build in more staged deadlines. To me that goes against the atmosphere of open creativity I was trying to foster: setting deadlines means spelling out exactly what has to be done by then, and that’s tricky if you want them to make decisions about what needs to be done in the first place. That’s why I didn’t have more interim deadlines this time–that, and because I thought they would be better at managing their own time. Some of them were, amazingly so, but that didn’t help them too much when they were dependent on others to do their parts. I’m of two minds, really, about how much responsibility to take for some students’ work habits, which is really what we’re talking about here. But ultimately what I want (what I wanted) is to see everyone involved and successful and excited: it made me sad to see, instead, people feeling frustrated, stymied, and harried. If there’s a next time, I’ll see what I can do to structure their time better for them.

Evaluating these projects was challenging for me. There was a lot of content (eventually!) and there were a lot of different aspects to take into account, from layout to research to clarity and focus to effective linking between sections: it made reading a traditional essay seem like a reductively linear process! But in many ways it was a much more interesting task than reading a stack of critical analyses. One reason is that a lot of students wrote about quite obscure books, so I learned a lot myself from the work they had done. Another is that several of the components were more reportage than literary criticism, which meant that the prose was crisper and more straightforward and didn’t need to be read with a painstaking eye to argument or interpretation. One of the hardest parts of commenting on literary essays is trying to grasp what thesis would have worked to unify the examples, or even just to understand what a conceptually garbled sentence or paragraph might have been intended to mean, in order to propose a better version of it. There wasn’t much of that involved here, and that was great! Freed from the obligation to write academic-ese, they proved perfectly capable of saying very insightful things and making all kinds of good connections between texts and contexts and concepts we worked on in the course. That was very satisfying to see, and it encourages me to keep looking for different kinds of writing to assign. Hardly anybody in my classes is going to become an academic critic, after all, so teaching them to write like one seems less and less like it should be my priority. As far as that goes, in fact, everything about these assignments still, in spite of everything, seems like a good idea.

And now my final grades are filed for the two courses that ended, and I’m going to take a break from fretting about teaching for a few days before I turn my attention to the final planning for the winter term. My Introduction to Literature class continues, and I start another round of The 19th-Century British Novel From Dickens to Hardy. As usual, I’ve tweaked the reading list by a book or two, and I have ideas for yet another twist on course requirements … but first, I’m looking forward to returning to Anna Karenina.

Holiday Concerts

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

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Every year we attend at least one school holiday concert, events which are as much a part of our family traditions at this time of year as seasonal music, books, and presents.

School concerts are not my favorite special events. I find noisy, chaotic environments very stressful, I find it frustrating to have performances disrupted by restless toddlers and to see adults blatantly disregarding the principal’s directions to keep the aisles clear and to wait until the end of each piece for pictures (really! what kind of example does that set?), and I struggle with the ‘everyone participates’ ethos for band and choir that means there’s no baseline skill demanded–which, for the school band especially, means the playing is typically dreadful but must be applauded nonetheless. (I’m all for kids participating in band, don’t get me wrong, but not every beginning effort deserves a captive audience.) And then between the need to be inclusive and inoffensive and the difficulty (or so I assume) in acquiring rights, the music itself is hopelessly tedious pablum. Add in the likelihood of icy roads and you have a perfect storm of reasons for me to grumble and whine every time one of these events draws near.

And yet for all my grumbling, I’m always won over by the events themselves–not by any specific performance, but by the spirit they embody, by the ideal they bring so naively to life. There in the shabby school gym, on the uncomfortable plastic chairs lined up in rows that are always too close for comfort, with terrible acoustics and (except for the lucky winners of the ‘front row seat’ lottery) pretty poor visibility too, we are brought together because we love our children. Different as we may be from each other in some respects, this is something we in the gym share. We love them, and we want them to flourish. We cherish their innocence and the wide-eyed delight with which they look out at a familiar space transformed for them by our presence. On these occasions we also get a glimpse of the life they lead without us: we see their trust for their teachers and their friendships with each other. Though they sing for us, they sing with each other, and there is no more beautiful, more hopeful sound.

I was busy with work and put off writing about the concert we went to last week. Then on Friday, like everyone else I was overwhelmed with the news of the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. Since then it has been very hard to think about how or what to write – not just about the school concerts, but about anything. There’s a sense, of course, in which that terrible event has nothing to do with me. I wouldn’t presume to have anything special or useful or important to say about it. But I don’t know how to not say anything about it at all and just go back to writing about my life and my books and all the rest of it without at least acknowledging it. “Any man’s death diminishes me,” says Donne in his famous Meditation. The deaths of these beautiful, innocent children and the brave, dedicated women who loved and cared for them diminish us all.

More Anna Karenina: What About Love?

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

Well, that was abrupt. Here I thought that this novel told a great love story, and instead we seem to have stumbled into a love affair with no good reason. Not that Anna and Vronsky don’t have their reasons, but we hardly know what they are or why we should care when all of a sudden we hear that it “had come to pass.” I’ve read about a hundred pages past this development and I still feel disoriented by it. We hardly know anything about these people, and we’ve barely seen them flirting, much less falling in love. Immediately upon the consummation of their passion–which seems little more than an infatuation–it’s shame, not love, that dominates the atmosphere: even as Vronsky showers kisses on her face and shoulders, all Anna can think about is that “These kisses were what had been bought by their shame!”

Maybe it isn’t a love story, then, at least not for these two. Though Anna is now declaring her love for Vronsky to her husband:

‘You were not mistaken. I was, and cannot help being, in despair. I listen to you but I am thinking of him. I love him, I am his mistress, I cannot endure you. I am afraid of you, and I hate you. . . .’

“I love him, I am his mistress, I cannot endure you”: the juxtaposition of these declarations makes Anna’s feelings and motives more obscure to me rather than less. Maybe they are obscure to her too. Is she his mistress because her love was too great to resist, or because her distaste for her husband made her restless? Is there more to her love for Vronsky than being his mistress? How is their love different from desire, or gratification? Is it worth the shame? Is it worth the 550 remaining pages of the novel? This situation–their affair, but also Karenin’s knowledge of it–came much sooner than I expected. It turns out barely any of the novel is about the gathering storm of their passion, or a desperate struggle to hide it. It can only be a novel about love’s consequences, then, but I wonder how we will navigate those consequences when we understand so little about that love. Also, I wonder how I will feel about those consequences when so far I feel so little for either Anna or Vronsky. I think I am not reading the novel right.

I peered at John Bayley’s introduction to my edition for help with my confusion and found that I am making a weak echo of a complaint made by Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction, and by Matthew Arnold in an early review, that “we do not know enough about Anna, as Tolstoy sets her before us.” We are making, Bayley proposes, the mistake of a reader of other kind of novels, of European novels such as Madame Bovary or Emma or Middlemarch. In these novels “the author seeks to understand [the heroine], and to convey understanding to his [sic] reader, by means of analysis and the careful establishment of a social and moral context. . . . Tolstoy’s method is very different.” That method, Bayley says, is to have Anna “soar above the book, and above all its family details and social events, as if she were the vehicle through which the force of passion declares itself. . . . This vivid insubstantiality of Anna is one of the most remarkable things about her.” Is the implication here that the love that really matters is mine for Anna? If so, I’m in trouble, since at this point I am only mildly interested in her, and that interest is not of a wholly positive  kind, as I don’t understand her infidelity and thus can’t sympathize with it. If she is going to be the animated “force of passion” my sympathies are likely to remain muted, steeped as I am in a tradition that values the moral struggle with passion over someone who lives like “a gale of wind or a roaring fire.” Did Anna struggle? How did Vronsky win her over? Or was the seed of her betrayal in her own weakness, rather than his strength? Did she fall because she loves him, or or does she love him because she was already fallen?

Maybe the love story is not Anna and Vronsky but Kitty and Levin. At this point they are quite far from their consummation, but I know where things will end up for them as well as I know how things end up for Anna. They seem to be learning about love, or about life, and there is more explanation in their sections about character and motives and circumstances. Overall, though, I’m finding the novel episodic and disjointed, organized into set pieces (the ball, the race, the religious experiment) without a supporting web of ideas or attitudes. Maybe Tolstoy is just making me work harder to figure out his novel’s morality than George Eliot does.

Getting Started with Anna Karenina

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When I posted about Madame Bovary a few months ago, I remarked on the oddity of reading a very famous book for the first time–it is, I said, “intensely familiar and yet strange at the same time. . . it is no longer an idea of something but the thing itself.” My posts on Madame Bovary show me trying to come to terms with “the thing itself,” trying to see for myself just what kind of thing it is. What a foolish thing to attempt, after one reading. How presumptuous! And yet there it was, and there I was, reading it, and a blog post is not, after all, a pronouncement but an encounter. What a relief, for an academic, not to even pretend to be definitive! In that case, too, what a good conversation ensued. If one way to measure the worth of a book is by the quality of the conversations it inspires, Madame Bovary (for all that I didn’t actually like it) is way up there.

One of the many comments that stayed with me from those conversations is Tom’s observation that “I consider Anna Karenina to be a novel of comparable merit that works as a blend of the Eliot & Flaubert approaches, that wants to keep the meaning generated by the full, precise physical world while also finding ways to comment.” Anna Karenina is of course one of those novels I always meant to read, and yet, as with Madame Bovary, somehow I had always deferred actually reading it. You couldn’t make a better pitch for it than Tom did, though, and so I confessed my Anna-less state to my supplier and he set me up with the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation, which I am now about 100 pages into. But if it’s presumptuous to say anything on a first reading, what could I possibly dare to say after my first reading of just 100 pages?

Not much, actually. For one thing, I’m eager to read more tonight, so I don’t want to use up all my remaining energy here. For another, I hardly know what I think yet. I’m just observing a few things at this point, feeling my way along. My very first observation is that the novel is briskly paced — that surprises me. It is possible that only someone who reads a lot of 19th-century fiction, for work and for pleasure, would think this, but here’s a bit of very scientific evidence on my side. When I was trying to choose what book to read next, I took a stack of options in with me when I joined my daughter for our ritual reading time before her ‘lights out.’ I read her the first few sentences of each of them, and then she and I each scored them out of 10. Of all my options (and they included The Master, The Line of Beauty, A Time of Gifts, and Winter’s Tale), it was Anna Karenina that got the most points. (Mind you, the overall results were somewhat skewed by Maddie’s giving the opening of A Time of Gifts a scornful zero. She and I will take that up again another time!) With Anna Karenina, we knew right away what was happening and who was involved, and we were caught up in the buzz of activity and the stress of the domestic conflict. So far, at my modest 100 page distance, that first impression has held up. There is a light layer of exposition and commentary, but most of it is about the characters, rather than about context or abstractions, and the interpersonal complications just keep multiplying.

Of course, here too I can’t help but read knowing how it ends, and so the foreshadowing at every train station is a bit obvious (“She felt that there had been something in it relating personally to her that there should not have been”). But the other thing that’s obvious is that Anna is not Emma, and so I’m caught up in wondering how this very different woman will live out a plot that is in some ways so similar and yet that already feels so different. Keeping in mind that I don’t know Anna very well yet (we’ve only just had a few scenes told from her point of view, for instance), it’s striking that she enters the novel with a warmth and vitality that is totally missing from Emma – no nasty snaky tongue here! It’s true that she seems less benign and charming when she steals Vronsky’s attention away from Kitty (who then uses the unexpectedly harsh term “satanic” for her)–though it isn’t exactly her fault, she enjoys it all a bit too much. Still, the first active thing Anna does in the novel is to effect a reconciliation between Stiva and Dolly: she advocates forgiveness and love, and that seems like a good thing.

The other detail that stood out for me is that while we hear endlessly in Madame Bovary about Emma’s dangerous penchant for reading novels, Anna finds it “unpleasant to read, that is to say, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She was too eager to live herself.” As a devoted reader myself, I can hardly endorse or sympathize with her position … and yet, again, this seems like a sign of her vitality. When she does settle in to her reading, it prompts her to reflections on her own life: “‘What am I ashamed of?’ she asked herself with indignant surprise.” Imagine the doctor’s wife (actually, either doctors’ wife!) asking herself this question. Self-reflection — another good thing. Whether it will lead to self-understanding, or, more important, to moral understanding, remains to be seen.

This Week In My Classes: Finishing Touches

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

Today was the last day for my fall term classes, which means the last meeting altogether for two of them. One of them, Introduction to Literature, continues in January, when I will also be adding another round of The 19th-Century Novel from Dickens to Hardy–a very different round, just by the way, from the last one, since not one of the books will be the same and a couple of them are ones I’ve never, or very rarely, assigned before. But I can’t think about that now! That’s next term … and tempting as it is to wander away from the remaining obligations of this term, they do still have to take precedence.

In Intro it was our third editing workshop of the term: we’ve been doing one before each due date. The last two were peer editing, but today they did reverse outlines, using a worksheet I adapted (with acknowledgment) from this useful one prepared for the Writing Center at U of T Scarborough. The only real change I made, besides some tweaks to the explanations to fit our particular assignment, was to add a space between the block for each paragraph for them to put in a transition word or phrase indicating the logical relationship between the paragraphs. I think peer editing has its uses, but it often seems like the blind leading the blind, and I’ve seen papers turned in with crazy problems that peer editors apparently were fine with–so I wanted to focus on their ability to scrutinize their own writing and judge its strengths and weaknesses for themselves. I think it was an effective exercise for turning up problems: certainly they did not simply fill in the blanks and try to leave early! These essays are due in their final versions on Wednesday, so that will be my next big job this week.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction I gave a review lecture, a useful thing, I think, for reminding them about the specific material but also, and more important, for going once more through some of the framing ideas and unifying themes of the course. It was also our last chance to talk about Devil in a Blue Dress. I think it works reasonably well to incorporate comments on the novel into the review session, but I do feel we ended up giving it short shrift, so maybe next time around I’ll be sure to allow one more class on it. After my talk we used the review handout I’d prepared for some Q&A, so students could ask about the material they felt least certain about and get help from their classmates as well as from me. And that’s that, until we meet again for the final exam next week. A handful of students are doing the optional final essay instead, due the same day as the exam, so that’s a lot of what I’ll be doing next week.

In The Somerville Seminar, we had our last round of Pecha Kucha presentations today. Five in one class is too many–not because we ran out of time for the presentations, but because it didn’t leave us much time for discussion after each session. I had originally planned for four a day but we all felt the end of term crowding in on us so I proposed starting them a bit later and tightening up the schedule. Overall it was still probably the best choice, but next time I do them I will allow more space around the presentations. I do think I’d like to use them again as an assignment, though. They were really well done, and though the format does impose constraints that can seem artificial, the dynamic is very different than with standard PPT slides or with other kinds of student presentations. The brisk pace keeps everyone’s attention, and the emphasis on graphics to illustrate concepts or support ideas, rather than using slides as alternative versions of the same things being said aloud, made the experience much more entertaining. The strict time limit moderated by the impersonal settings on the computer also frees me from having to be the Presentation Police. It’s very stressful to see someone running over time and crowding out whoever comes next, and to have to choose between letting them go on and publicly calling attention to the problem by stopping them. The most anyone ran over this time was about 10 seconds. So at this point I’m a fan of this new style, and as for substance, well, it’s amazing how much information and insight you can fit into 6 minutes and 40 seconds if you really think about it.

I felt quite distressed last week as I felt the wiki projects for the seminar were not coming together–despite (she says defensively) my having warned them and warned them about not putting off collaborative work until the last minute, and my having stressed as much as I possibly could that this kind of project is best done in small increments rather than large doses, including regular ‘gardening.’ As I watched the daily reports come in from PB Works, I knew that many (though certainly not all) of the students had nonetheless been putting off their contributions. Facing that reality, and taking into account that the projects for the course were not familiar kinds–for them or for me–and that thus perhaps we had all underestimated how much time it would take to do them well, I took a very rare step for me and acted on the regulation that allows a change to course requirements with a strong vote in favor by the class. I put up a proposal for an alternative plan removing one of the course requirements, and it did get basically unanimous support. There were a few complications, and for a while I regretted having even raised it as a possibility, but we got it all sorted out, so now my only regret is having waited as long as I did to propose it. As I said to the class, I really do believe it was possible to complete all the originally planned components, but this way I hope that everyone will do better work and feel better about it too. There will be more weight, now, on the wiki projects–and reading and evaluating the final product will be my other significant work after the deadline passes next week.

So now I have a very short window between wrapping up the classroom work and getting in my first batch of assignments. I have reference letters to do and department minutes to write up, and a plagiarism hearing, and a dentist appointment! Not all fun and games, in other words. But maybe, just maybe, I’ll get in a little Christmas shopping too. Then I’ll be in what we on Twitter fondly (?) call #gradingjail. In the meantime, also, I have finally begun Anna Karenina, because I’ve been craving some really good reading.

The Stage Swarmed with Maggies: Helen Edmundson’s The Mill on the Floss

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Last night I attended the Dalhousie Theatre production of The Mill on the Floss that I mentioned here: I was invited to give a short talk to the “Patrons” on opening night. As I explained to the attendees, I wasn’t there as an expert on Helen Edmundson’s adaptation, though I had read through most of it in preparation for the night. So, rather than pretending to explain things about the play, I tried to set up what I take to be some of the central problems of the novel so that we could all have them in mind as we watched — not to see if Edmundson “got it right” or anything as reductive as that, but to see what she did with the material, how she reworked or rethought it for a different form.

As I worked on my notes (and it isn’t easy deciding what you’ll use your precious 20 minutes on, when you love a novel as I love The Mill on the Floss), it was form that I kept thinking about. So many things about The Mill on the Floss make it seem such an unlikely choice for the theatre. There’s the ending, for one thing, but of course there are ways of evoking large-scale natural phenomena on stage: nobody expects torrents of actual water to sweep the scenery away. But what about the narrator? Though she does plot and dialogue with the best of them, so much of the wit and wisdom of George Eliot resides in her masterful exposition. What is The Mill on the Floss without my favourite chapter, “A Variety of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet” (which contains not one line of dialogue, not one step forward for the plot) or without the great meditation on “the shifting relation between passion and duty” and the moral failure of the “man of maxims”? How will we understand Maggie’s dilemmas, her “labour of choice,” without the reminder that our striving for something better might lead us astray “if our affections had not a trick of twining round those old inferior things — if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep immovable roots in memory”?

The narrator of The Mill on the Floss is someone special, to be sure, and the novel is inconceivable without her.  But the play is its own thing; it has its own structure and logic. It offers no substitute for the historical and philosophical commentary (for instance, it doesn’t, as far as I noticed, give any of the narrator’s best lines to characters, the way the famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice becomes Elizabeth Bennet’s line in the BBC adaptation). It does draw a lot of its dialogue directly from the novel, and noticing how much of the script is right out of the novel is a good reminder of just how great George Eliot is at voices (her characters, as I’ve talked about here before, have wonderful specificity: there’s no mistaking any one of them for any other one). It was particularly delightful seeing the Dodson sisters completely embodied (go, Mrs Glegg!). In a more general way, seeing not just familiar people but familiar objects (such as Mrs Tulliver’s tea pot) appear in front of me, in tangible form, was both disorienting and quite moving. For all the vividness and intensity of the novel, my engagement with it is often quite abstract, so that even its tragedies over time lose their visceral clutch. Though watching a play is not, for me, ever as immersive or total as watching a film can be (it’s just harder to lose the awareness that this is acting — which is not a criticism, just a difference in the experience), seeing the physical objects right there, hearing people actually say the words, makes the novel’s truths that much more real. And while we joked a bit in the introductory session about how the play is the Twitter version of the 500-page novel, its minimalism also made some aspects of the story particularly, affectingly, stark, especially Maggie’s suffering and isolation as an unconventional girl. She seemed so beleaguered, throughout the play: I wanted to jump out of my seat and go be on her side!

The most interesting feature of the adaptation is its use of multiple Maggies. It’s not that surprising a gimmick to have different actresses play Maggie as a child, a teenager, and then a woman. But Edmundson goes further: rather than replacing each other in chronological order, the Maggies coexist — not literally, in the action of the plot, but on the stage. This device allows Edmundson to dramatize the moral and emotional conflicts that Maggie faces as she grows up. Young Maggie retains her passionate impetuosity and her painful devotion to Tom; ascetic Maggie struggles between the yearning of her conscience towards an idealized right and the fellowship offered by Philip; grown-up Maggie responds to Stephen in spite of herself. The multiple Maggies literally push and pull each other according to their own loves and loyalties. What ending could possibly be right for any of them, never mind for all three of them? When the ending finally came, one of them lay with Tom, while the other two were flung aside. Again, the physicality of their bodies made the tragedy George Eliot imagined for us more real, even as their overtly symbolic roles neatly laid out the thematic lines of the conflict.

Overall, then, it was a thoroughly stimulating evening. The cast all played their parts with commitment, and they did an impressive job with what I imagine is a pretty challenging script. The three Maggies in particular were busy all the time. By the time the final trial by water came, I felt that everyone in the theatre was thoroughly engaged, and then shocked by the concluding catastrophe. (“It’s so sad! I feel like crying!” said my immediate neighbour.) My only disappointment was that we only got to give them all one round of applause: I thought they deserved at least one more curtain call, if only to let us catch our breath and remember that life goes on and “nature repairs her ravages.”

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Rohan Maitzen14 Comments

I am nearly as reluctant to write about Wide Sargasso Sea as I was to read it — and, yes, until last week, I had never read it, which in some circles (like, for instance, the circle of 99% of my professional colleagues) would surely have made me a winner at “Humiliation.” I knew about it, of course, but what people said to me about it never made me interested in it as a book in its own right. It was always held up, self-righteously, as a corrective to Jane Eyre: the story Charlotte Brontë didn’t tell but should have, the story that shows her and her heroine up for their racism and imperialism, that story that, as the back cover of my Penguin Modern Classics edition says, “rescues the madwoman in the attic … and brings her to life.” The pitch seemed to be that this novel was the post-colonial vitamin pill required to read Jane Eyre in good health. How delightful that sounded!

It’s not that I haven’t read my share of post-colonial responses to Jane Eyre. For some time post-colonial criticism of the novel was all the rage. Then out came an article calling for a “Post-Postcolonial Criticism,” and a bunch of scholars responded vigorously … and for all I know they’re still passing  arguments back and forth. I took a professionally responsible interest in the issues and stakes, and I do believe that it matters to explore what the novel’s emancipatory rhetoric  suppresses (or oppresses) in its turn.  In my graduate seminar on Victorian women writers I used to assemble a whole package of secondary readings just on post-colonial criticism of Jane Eyre. But after a while I kind of got tired of it all, because the arguments seemed to be missing what (thanks to my library-school trained brother) I now think of as the “aboutness” of the novel. Certainly none of them made me want to go read Wide Sargasso Sea. If anything, the scholarly infighting made me more weary of the whole concept.

So I came to Wide Sargasso Sea, after all these years, with some reluctance, but also with relief: since my book club had chosen it, I was finally compelled to put aside my petulant resistance and look at Jane Eyre from the other side. I wish I could say that actually reading Wide Sargasso Sea was in some way decisive for me: that it either confirmed all my worst fears by being ham-fistedly ideological and reductive, or won me over by being good enough on its own terms that I got excited about the dialogue it creates with its predecessor. Instead, I didn’t get worked up about it either way. It was more nuanced and oblique than I expected about its relationship to Jane Eyre. If anything, I expected more direct overlap, but not only is the story Rhys creates of the Bertha-Rochester marriage quite different in its specifics from Brontë’s, but the Thornfield section was surprisingly brief. I suppose the logic was that we know how Bertha ends up and so the interest lies in how she gets there — still, I thought there’d be more. Rhys doesn’t do anything with the parallels between Bertha and Jane, for instance, that give Bronte’s novel so much of its own revolutionary energy. Was it that she didn’t want to admit that Brontë had already made Bertha something more complicated than Rochester’s (and, by association, Jane’s) victim? The introduction to my edition is eloquent about Rhys’s mission to “make amends for the sins of omission committed by the Victorian writer, and by that era’s literature and history in general,” but Rhys keeps the Victorian novel peripheral and doesn’t seem to be engaging with it at a very profound level.

I found myself wondering, though, if that dissatisfaction wasn’t partly the result of all the propaganda about Wide Sargasso Sea as a revision of Jane Eyre and a corrective to it (the kind of thing I’ve already quoted from the cover and introduction to the novel). Rhys isn’t necessarily answerable for the reductive constructions put on her own book, after all. If you grant Wide Sargasso Sea more literary independence from the outset, looking at it as a response to Jane Eyre, yes, but still its own novel, freely inventive, then my objection that it leaves too much of its original reference out is beside the point. My biggest irritation has always been that there’s a tendency to talk about Rhys’s novel as if it tells the true story of Brontë’s character, when of course there is no such character outside Jane Eyre and there is no reason to doubt the facts about her as Rochester relays them to us. (There are other grounds to object to the story he tells, but I don’t think there’s any suggestion in the novel that he’s outright unreliable about the history of their marriage.) But Rhys makes enough changes to those facts that it seems as if she doesn’t intend to treat the same characters anyway: rather than telling the other side of the same story, she’s inspired by Jane Eyre to tell a different story, one that reflects on Jane Eyre but doesn’t correct it, doesn’t (as that ontologically odd locution of “rescues” implies) set the record straight, somehow, about  Bertha Mason.

If I push Wide Sargasso Sea further away from Jane Eyre in this way, then the question is less how it does or doesn’t engage with Brontë’s novel and more how good a novel it is on its own terms. I’m not sure I can answer that question very well, because while I was reading it I was so preoccupied with Jane Eyre. I’ve reread portions of it, but I have nothing like an intimate knowledge of it. My impressions at this point are not especially favorable. I didn’t find the prose compelling: it often seemed labored, portentous, too insistent on its own profundity. Rhys is fond of ending a paragraph or chapter or section with a heavily meaningful line: “I was young then. A short youth mine was.” “I felt bolder, happier, more free. But not so safe.”  “There was a full moon but I saw nobody, nothing but shadows.” “Once I would have gone back quietly to watch her asleep on the sofa . . . But not any longer. Not any more.” When we’re not getting ka-thumps like that, we’re getting overripe stuff like “She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.” There is a dream-like vagueness to a lot of the scenes, and perhaps that is deliberate, but in our discussion it seemed most of us were frustrated at gaps or confusions, and though most of us agreed that there are sections that are very evocative of the setting or that capture a moody restlessness well suited to the storyline, overall we didn’t — and, not to avoid speaking for myself, I didn’t — find the novel very good overall.

And now I’ll duck, in anticipation of the incoming corrections, if not to Jane Eyre, then to my own imperfect reading of this book which is, whatever I thought of it, now inextricably linked to Brontë’s. Have at!

This Week In My Classes: Where Did It Go?

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

It really does not feel as if it has been a whole week since my student’s thesis defense — where does the time go? This sense that the days are racing past is probably a function of how busy this time of term is: it’s one thing after another after another, and it will stay that way until exams. In some ways, this is how I like it (remember how mopish I get during the summer?). But it has been frustrating for me for the past couple of weeks that I haven’t been able to focus on much reading or writing outside of work. I did finish Crewe Train, and then this week I finished Wide Sargasso Sea–but I can’t seem to work up anything I want to say about it yet. My book group meets tomorrow to discuss it, so I’m going to reread some parts of it between now and then, and I’m sure the conversation with everyone else will get my reading brain working again…and then my blogging will perk up again too! Things have been so sluggish around here I thought I was going to have to do a meme of some kind just to pick up the pace–something like this one. Maybe I’ll do it anyway this weekend, just for fun. Nobody ever tags me for memes! Maybe I don’t seem like a meme-doing kind of blogger. At any rate, much as I’ve been enjoying all the book blogging goodness from all the folks on my Reader feed, I was starting to get depressed that I wasn’t adding anything to it.

Not that I’m not reading for class, of course. On Wednesday we started Sara Paretsky’s Indemnity Only in Mystery and Detective Fiction. I enjoy working through this book with the class, though I sometimes imagine (or am I imagining?) a faint simmering of resistance to its overt feminism. Every year there are a few students who remark that V.I. goes “too far” talking back to the men she finds belittling — they seem to think she doesn’t need to make such a big deal about it. I usually bring up the context of “tough talk,” which is a convention of hard-boiled detective fiction: in a way, she’s just carrying on that tradition, except her relationship to authority figures is affected by her sex in a way that Sam Spade’s isn’t. I also put the novel in a bit of historical context (it was first published in 1982). But in the end, I think we just have to deal with V.I.’s political assertiveness as part of her character and part of the agenda of the novel. Overall, I think the novel doesn’t so much preach a particular feminist agenda as it tries to model it. In case anyone’s interested, a couple of years ago I wrote at greater length about Paretsky at Open Letters.

In Introduction to Literature we’re in our short fiction unit. Today’s story was Alice Walker’s wonderful “Everyday Use.” They seemed pretty interested in it. For Monday, we’re reading Raymond Carver’s “A Small Good Thing,” which I love. I’m having them work on finding what we’re calling “exemplary passages” for discussion. I find it’s a good exercise because in order to decide on a passage that really repays close attention, they have to figure out what they think is really important to say about the story as a whole. Then they can take their ideas about its themes and problems and patterns and focus on how specific details of the language convey and illustrate those themes. Back and forth between general and particular: that’s the basic process of literary analysis, right? The other reason we’re taking this approach, though, is that in the era of control-C control-V plagiarism I really can’t risk assigning a straight “interpret this story” essay — there needs to be some kind of twist. Sadly, I’ve already sent my first plagiarism case of the term on to the appropriate authorities.

In the Somerville Seminar, they have been working on their collaborative wikis and independent reading projects this week. I see a lot of material starting to go up on the wiki site, which is reassuring! And the first student Pecha Kuchas are Monday. I’m looking forward to them. I’m trying to plan ahead to make the technological side of it as simple as possible because we need to fit five into each class session. If things go smoothly, that should leave us about 15 minutes for some Q&A after each round. I hope they have some fun putting them together. I know some of them are chafing at the restrictions of the format, but the more I’ve conferred with people about them, the more pleased I am that they are having to think about the slides less as a projected version of what they are going to say themselves and more as a different dimension of the story they want to tell.

In between classes I’m marking midterms for the mystery class. I’m also preparing a short talk I’m giving for the Dalhousie Theater Department to introduce their production of Helen Edmundson’s The Mill on the Floss. Can you imagine a stage version of The Mill on the Floss? I couldn’t either, but I’ve been looking through the script and it’s fascinating. I’m speaking as an expert on the novel and novelist, not the play, but of course I wanted my remarks to be pertinent to what we’re going to see. File under “Things that make me feel old”: the brilliant, charismatic director, also an award-winning teacher, was a student in one of the first classes I taught at Dalhousie!

Catching Up

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When I said I was posting my review of Crewe Train a bit early because I had another big deadline coming up, in a way I misspoke. It wasn’t exactly my own deadline, although I was involved in it: a Ph.D. student I have been supervising defended her thesis on Friday, so my part of the event (reviewing the thesis and preparing questions for the exam), though time-consuming, was not nearly as important as hers! I’m happy to report that the defense was very successful and, aside from some odds and ends of paperwork and the submission of the very final copy, she and I are both done. I am very pleased for her: she should be proud of her hard work and its results. However ambivalent I may be about recommending graduate school as an option, there’s no question that the graduate students I have worked with over the years are some of the best and smartest people I know, and once they have made the commitment to do these degrees, I do my level best to be helpful and supportive.

In some ways, though, I have to admit that in recent years graduate supervision has been harder for me to do. The advice I have to give students based on what I know to be the standards and conventions within the discipline and profession is often not congruent with my own doubts about those standards and conventions, and my aversion to reading some kinds of academic criticism has only worsened as I spend less time doing it myself, making it tricky to coach students to write it! For these reasons, among others, I have been cautiously scaling back my role in our graduate program. As of yesterday, though, that contribution includes supervision of four completed Ph.D. theses and 16 completed M.A. theses. We had a celebratory dinner at Estia for the candidate and all six members of the examining committee. A small point, or maybe it isn’t so small: we couldn’t help but notice that from the external examiner on down, we were all women.

Preparing for Friday’s defense took up a lot of my time and energy last week, but there was routine class business to get done as well. I managed to return a set of papers in my first-year class, which was really worth the extra push so that they weren’t hanging over me this weekend. My conscience needs a break! In Mystery & Detective Fiction we were working through Ian Rankin’s Knots and Crosses. I know he doesn’t consider it his best, and in many ways it is also atypical, but it teaches awfully well because it is so deliberately literary–not to mention terse. Still, I’ve been wondering if next year I might take a chance on one of the longer ones and cut something else from the reading list. It’s such a challenge in that class finding the right balance between providing variety and overwhelming the students with too many different books. My own view has usually been that most of the books we read aren’t really complex enough to require a lot of classroom hours, so just taking longer on them would be counterproductive: we’d go more slowly, yes, but also feel that less was happening, that we were discovering less. The books are not particularly long or difficult reads, either, and I figure they can sub in easily enough for whatever leisure reading students might otherwise be doing! It’s hardly punishment to “have” to read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Indemnity Only, right? But students do often remark that there are a lot of books to keep track of. I might cut An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (even thought it’s a personal favorite) and put in Fleshmarket Close or The Naming of the Dead. Actually, since these are both in the 400-page range, I’d probably have to cut something else too. Well, something to think about. In the meantime, they write a mid-term on Monday which will be my next marking chore.

In the Somerville Novelists seminar, we have moved into the collaborative projects phase, and I’ll admit, I’m a bit worried. I had a sinking feeling last week that though we had been doing very well with our discussions of the individual novels–better and better, in fact, as the weeks went on–I had not done a good enough job keeping the larger frameworks of the course in view, or preparing the students to feel confident with the meta-level questions I’ve been hoping we’d address. I did some intervention once I realized that they were still thinking mostly in terms of local or close reading issues, and as I see the draft material starting to appear for their wiki projects, I think it worked. I also felt that they were tense and uncomfortable approaching their independent and collaborative projects despite the careful and detailed instructions and rubrics I’d given them. My intention was to make sure they had enough information about basic structures and expectations to think creatively and even have some fun working within them. What I’ve been feeling is that they still find them unpleasantly open-ended. I decided that I had to stop responding to this discomfort with yet more specifics. I tried to demystify the Pecha Kucha assignment by preparing one of my own–it worked better than intended, because if anything, I think they were underwhelmed by my efforts!* And now I want to keep out of their way a bit. We have one more group session, to discuss some secondary materials most of which we read before, as we were starting up the course: I’m really hoping that now they will feel ready to engage critically with this criticism, bringing their own sense of the material and its (and their) priorities to what these scholars have said and done about it. And then we don’t convene again until the first of their presentations: I’ll be available for consultations, and I hope they’ll take advantage of that, but otherwise it’s over to them.

In book news, I did manage to putter through Sue Grafton’s latest, ‘V’ is for Vengeance. I didn’t have much to say about it, but what I did say is here. I’ve been reading with interest the other posts on Crewe Train and resolving to make The Towers of Trebizond my next Rose Macaulay read, and I’ve started Wide Sargasso Sea for my local book group, which meets next Saturday. I have been feeling frustrated that nothing I’ve read recently has been really transporting, and when I’m done with Rhys I think I might either buckle down and get a lot more of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon read or start on Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, which has been beckoning to me from my TBR shelf–along with Anna Karenina, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty and Colm Toibin’s The Master. All of these look very tempting…but I worry that the last weeks of term are exactly the wrong time to commit to a book that really deserves my full attention.

*Speaking of those efforts, here are the slides. You’ll have to imagine the commentary that went with them! For this assignment we’re allowed two exceptions to the “1/1/5” rule, to demonstrate literary style.

Honourable Estatehttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/113685859/content?start_page=1&view_mode=slideshow&access_key=key-eo8lez5993z3yxtnrcc

“Why did not anything do?” Rose Macaulay, Crewe Train

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

Crewe Train is the first novel by Rose Macaulay I’ve read. I can’t decide if it makes me want to read another! It was easy to read: the prose is brisk, the tone is lightly satirical, the characters and incidents are quirky but mostly engaging. It has something of the flat quality I’ve noticed in other non-modernist novels I’ve read from the twenties and thirties: everything’s just narrated in order, one thing after another, artlessly. Yet of course there is an art to this too: it’s just not an art that makes itself felt.

Crewe Train tells the story of Denham Dobie, the daughter of a widowed English clergyman who can’t stand chatter and sociability and so tries to find a place to live where he can avoid people who “insist on conversing with you.” Unfortunately for him, the English “cannot stay at home” and his quest for perfect peace is ruined by cheerful, well-meaning, annoying people who “insisted on making friends with him and his grave, square-faced, brown-legged girl.” They end up in Andorra: “enquiring about it, he ascertained that it was very difficult of access, being snowbound from November to May, and mountainous all the year round, and that the approach to it was by mule.” Promising as that sounds, Mr. Dobie nonetheless is still unable to cut himself off from life, and ends up remarried and drawn back into society in spite of himself. The irresistible pull of relationships with other people turns out to be a central idea of the novel.

Denham takes after her father in her dislike of “that strange love of human intercourse, of making talk.” She finds other people mostly just puzzling and troublesome in their demands and expectations: “when she saw anyone whom she knew approaching, she plunged aside off the path and lurked hidden until they were passed by.”

Mr. Dobie dies and Denham is taken back to London by her mother’s family, the Greshams. And so the stage is set for the fish-out-of-water comedy that makes up the bulk of the novel. Denham is a perfect device for Macaulay to poke fun at the conventions and morés of high society. She can’t see the point of all the rules–what to wear, what to say, where to sit, when to stand, how to pass one’s time. Since, of course, most of these really are perfectly arbitrary rules, it’s not that hard to satirize the mindless compliance of the Greshams and their friends–but once you get the idea, it’s also not really that interesting or sophisticated a critique. Here’s Denham newly arrived in London, for instance:

London. The problem was, why did so many people live in it? Millions and millions of people, swarming all over the streets, as thick as flies over a dead goat, as buzzing and as busy. Why? Did they all agree with Uncle Peter that nothing was like London and that they must, therefore, be in London, this unique spot? Did they all have to be here? Had they been adopted by relations and brought here, or did they do something here which they couldn’t do elsewhere? . . .

And then the streets. Thousands and thousands of omnibuses, taxis, vans and cars, all roaring down the streets together, like an army going into battle, mowing down with angry trumpetings all human life that crossed their path. Were they all necessary? Was human life in London so cheap? Denham, after the first, had no personal anxieties on this head, for she felt competent to evade the assaults of these monsters; neither had she much pity for the victims, for they could probably well be spared, and certainly the population needed thinning; but it seemed a curious way of doing it.

Funny, right, especially that deft little jab at the end? And the theme is funny in all of its variations, even as its underlying point is serious and well-taken:

With these Greshams life was like walking on a tight-rope. The things you mustn’t do, mustn’t wear. You must, for instance, spend a great deal of money on silk stockings, when, for much less, you could have got artificial silk or Lisle thread. Why?  Did not these meaner fabrics equally clothe the leg? Why had people agreed that one material was the right wear and that others did not do? Why did not anything do?

The same with gloves, with shoes, with frocks, with garments underneath frocks. In all these things people had set up a standard, and if you did not conform to it you were not right, you were left. . . You had, somehow or other, to conform to a ritual, to be like the people you knew.

It’s not only expensive living up to these standards, but it is also a lot of trouble, and if there’s one thing Denham hates, it’s going to any trouble. She dreams “of a life in which one took practically no trouble at all. One would be alone; one would have no standards; there would be a warm climate and few clothes, and all food off the same plate, if a plate at all. And no conversation.” Awash  in the trivial chatter and clutter of London society, Denham goes along to get along, but it’s all folly, as far as she’s concerned.

The novel follows Denham to marriage (to Arnold Chapel, a writer) and then a pregnancy that (happily, from her perspective) ends in a miscarriage — imagine how much trouble motherhood would be! Despite these gestures towards normalcy, she still craves escape, and she finds what she thinks is the perfect alternative to the Greshams’ lifestyle in an ill-kept Cornish cottage complete with a smuggler’s passage to the sea and a cave she sets up as her parlor. Then, when her privacy in this not-so-bucolic retreat is destroyed by a news story about her eccentric choices, she heads off on a bicycle tour, believing that in constant motion she can free herself from the constraints of society.

No such luck, however. Just as her father was drawn into a second marriage by “madness of the blood” and Denham herself also into marriage by her own passionate response to Arnold’s kisses, so once again it’s passion that thwarts Denham’s plans as she has an affair with a fisherman and becomes pregnant again. Her return home feels something like a failure, as she’s clearly capitulating, of necessity, to the trivialities and domesticities she has always hated. For all that human relationships are troublesome and social conventions pointless, life outside them is an impossibility, a fantasy. “Love,” reflects Denham, “was the great taming emotion”:

Oh, life itself was the trap, and love the piece of toasted cheese that baited it, and, the bait once taken, there was no escape.

It’s a potentially poignant moment, but I felt disoriented at the end of the novel about how Macaulay really meant to steer us. So society is silly and superficial–but Denham’s life and thoughts hardly offer us an exhilarating alternative. She’s no untamed genius, no blooming wildflower ruined by her new unnatural environment, no free spirit caught and tragically tamed. She’s dull, sluggish, literal, unimaginative, anti-intellectual, and, in her own dogged way, entirely selfish. She can’t see any motive for doing anything other than for personal pleasure or satisfaction. She holds up no positive value except individual freedom–and not freedom of a high order (political freedom, freedom of the mind, freedom from oppression, freedom to create or worship or love) but just freedom to do what you feel like doing and nothing else. She thinks books are pointless, plays are “tedious stuff,” children are a nuisance. At times I thought perhaps it was Denham who was being satirized (“What a trade it was, increasing the number of books in a world already stocked with them! As bad as parents, who increased the number of people”). I suppose there’s no reason why the scoffing couldn’t go in both directions. Society: can’t live with it, can’t live without it! But the novel would have been more compelling to me–it would have seemed like more than an eccentrically amusing story–if there had been a clearer sense of what the costs are of the two options. I guess I like my social comedy to have a stronger undercurrent of moral seriousness. Vanity Fair, this isn’t.

Crewe Train is this moth’s reading for the Slaves of Golconda reading group. I’m posting here a bit early because I have another big deadline at the end of the week; I’ll cross-post it over there on November 17th. I’m looking forward to seeing what the other readers thought of the book!