Novel Readings

I was about to open this post by saying “it has been a tough week” when I realized it’s only Monday! On the other hand, it has been a challenging week if we start it back at last Monday, and since I haven’t posted here since then, I think that’s fair enough.

It’s nothing in particular making things difficult: just the usual end-of-term craziness. I had four different assignments to grade last week. In 19th-Century Fiction, the students who’d opted to write their first paper on Jane Eyre had turned those in, while the students who’d opted to write theirs on North and South submitted their proposals; and most of the class also wrote our unit test on North and South. Then in Close Reading the students who had opted to do their second assignment on Middlemarch (which was most of them) turned those in. I’m pleased to say that as of this morning I had returned all of these assignments, meaning I’ve cleared the deck for the North and South papers coming in on Wednesday, after which nothing else is due until the Great Expectations test next week.

I know I’m not the only one feeling a bit overwhelmed: my students are too. I’m doing what I can to keep up my own spirits and bring a lot of energy to class, but I admit I faltered today when all my efforts to spark discussion of Great Expectations seemed to dead end. I’ve never struggled to get people talking about Wemmick and his Aged Parent before! Things have been a bit quieter than I’m used to in 19th-Century Fiction for a while now, and today after class I was worrying that I’ve made it worse by talking more myself to compensate, and then by showing my frustration, which is always a bad move. I haven’t felt this stymied in class since the last time I taught Waverley–which was the time I decided to stage an “intervention” and see if we could bust out of our collective slump. It worked pretty well, and I think I need to try something similar on Wednesday, if probably less elaborate: we have only two sessions left on Great Expectations and it will be a real shame if they all go the way today’s did.

In Close Reading we are nearly finished with The Remains of the Day. Discussion is going better there: I always feel that I get a bit of a bump just because a lot of students are so relieved to be done with Middlemarch that Remains looks especially good to them! But of course it is a genuinely great novel and full of artful and important things to talk about. I should say, too, that although I felt at times that as a group we were struggling with Middlemarch, I did hear from a couple of students who appreciated the novel a lot, which I found very encouraging, as I did the excellent work a number of them did on their assignments. I do think it is worth giving students the opportunity to read it and think about it even if they don’t enjoy it: I try every trick I can think of to boost their pleasure in it, but ultimately a literature class is a place to learn, after all. I have resolved, however, that the next time I teach Middlemarch it will be in a 19th-century fiction class where nobody can reasonably express surprise or resentment at being assigned a very long book.

It’s going to stay pretty busy for the next week, and then the pace changes as daily classes end and we move on to final essays and exams. I usually steal a little time for Christmas shopping before these last assignments come in, as once they do they have to be my top priority until grades are filed. I’ve also got an outstanding review to finish: I’ve read the books (two of them, on Golden Age crime fiction) but my notes and draft have been malingering because I’ve just been too tired to concentrate on writing after my other work is done. When my brain is otherwise too addled to use, I’ve been working on this website, especially on updating my blog indices so the links go to addresses on this domain. It occurred to me last night that this is barely half the battle, as so many of my posts have internal links as well…wish me luck! And if you know of any shortcuts to getting this stuff done, do tell.

I was talking with some colleagues last night and we all agreed that it is going to be hard to regain the momentum we’ve lost in our classes after this unusually long fall break–it’s extended because today is a holiday “in lieu of Remembrance Day.” A fall break itself is a relatively new thing: last year was the first year Dalhousie worked it into the schedule (adding a day or two at the beginning and end of the semester to make up for the “lost” time). I was (indeed, I am) a bit skeptical about it in some ways, especially pedagogically, but it certainly has been nice to have my schedule ease up for a bit, and I’m sure our students have been grateful too to have the day-to-day pressure lifted. But when we go back, will we find ourselves restored and energized, ready to throw ourselves back into the work that remains, or will we be sluggish and struggle to get going again?

I am certainly hoping that students in Close Reading have used some of their extra time to catch up on reading Middlemarch. It seemed pretty clear to me before the break that only a handful of them were really in the game during class discussions. I don’t know if the proportion of students who are engaged with the novel is actually that different from last year, but it has felt harder to me to draw people out, or in, and naturally I have been brooding about why. Is it me? Is it them? It’s both, no doubt–there’s always that mysterious classroom alchemy. (Maybe I can blame our windowless concrete block room, too, just a bit? It does have such a gloomy aspect.) The resistance I often experience to the novel in Close Reading is also, I think, partly a function of the class being one none of the students chose in order to read Middlemarch in particular (or any other 19th-century fiction): it’s a program requirement, a hoop to jump through. When I assign it in the ‘Dickens to Hardy’ class, at least nobody can claim they didn’t expect to read any long books! I do sometimes point out to students in Close Reading who say Middlemarch is too long to read in a one-term class that in my other one-term class it is one of five Victorian novels . . .

Anyway,  I hope those who needed it have take this opportunity to catch up, and that our  class discussion on Wednesday, which will be our last on the novel, shows the results. I’m keeping my own lecture notes for that day to a minimum to make sure there’s enough time and flexibility for the things they want to talk about. After that, we will be hurtling towards the end of term: their Middlemarch assignments are due next Monday, when we will also be starting The Remains of the Day, which is our last reading and, with Middlemarch, the subject of their term papers.

In Austen to Dickens, we’ve got a couple more sessions on North and South – which I also hope students will have caught up on! Then it’s time for Great Expectations, which is our final book in that class. The students who chose Jane Eyre for their first paper will be submitting them this week: there are a lot of them (for some mysterious reason, Vanity Fair was not as popular a choice!), so I’ll be busy marking these and then the North and South tests and papers, and then we are on to proposals for final essays and/or preparation for the final exam.

The end of term always feels like a mad rush for all of us. We have  had such a mild fall that I think it added to the illusion that we were somehow still just starting up: both the time change (which means dark afternoons) and the precipitous drop in temperatures have shifted us abruptly into more wintry conditions. From the relative quiet of our last day off, it’s hard to imagine getting it all done, but somehow we always do!

I am, mostly, but today I had my doubts about my students, many of whom seemed pretty tired and some of whom I’m reasonably certain were also (probably not unrelatedly) too behind on the reading to have anything to say in class.

That’s OK: it happens, especially around this time of term. It is startling to realize how far through the term we are, actually. We had an unusually warm October, and I think all the pleasant, sunny weather contributed to the sense that we were still in the opening phases. But here we are on November 1, and by the time we get back from our protracted study break (all of next week, plus the following Monday ‘in lieu of Remembrance Day’) we will be hurtling towards the end of it.

So what are we keeping up with? Well, in Close Reading we are working our way through Middlemarch. By today’s class everyone was supposed to have read to the end of Book V, which includes my favorite chapter (42) as well as the chapter in which Casaubon asks Dorothea to promise that if he dies, she will “carry out my wishes … avoid doing what I should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what I should desire.” It’s a painful moment for Dorothea, who is confronted with an impossible moral choice. (See for here for a more detailed commentary on that choice and its tangled ethics.)

I was worried going into class this morning because I spent most of Monday’s class talking at the students instead of with them. Sometimes when I’m teaching this novel, which I love so much and know so well, I have trouble getting out of my way — and out of theirs! I had been fretting, leading up to Monday’s class, because of the long break we’re going to have before we come back and finish our work on the novel, and I overcompensated. (In my defense, I think I did a pretty good job explaining the novel’s intricate structure with the help of my “Skwish” toy.) Today, however, I asked them to generate topics for discussion and then we just worked through the ones we had time for, with some left over for Friday’s class. One of the things we talked about was that terrible promise and why she should or shouldn’t (or, must or must not) say yes to it; one of the things I was asked to do next time was explain the Raffles connection, which I will certainly do.

So that class went better than expected, but then my afternoon class went a bit worse: participation was pretty minimal (though everything that was proffered was really useful) and there was a lot of that whole “look down intently at your book every time she asks a question” thing that clearly signals “don’t ask me! don’t even look at me!” Again, that’s fine–up to a point! Everyone’s busy and reading for my class can’t always be everyone’s top priority, even if it is North and South. I was disappointed, though, because usually it’s a class favorite and today’s was a good installment, taking us right through the strike to the remarkable scene on the steps of Marlborough Mill:

Their reckless passion had carried them too far to stop — at least had carried some of them too far; for it is always the savage lads, with their love of cruel excitement, who head the riot — reckless to what bloodshed it may lead. A clog whizzed through the air. Margaret’s fascinated eyes watched its progress; it missed its aim, and she turned sick with affright, but changed not her position, only hid her face on Mr. Thornton s arm. Then she turned and spoke again:’

‘For God’s sake! do not damage your cause by this violence. You do not know what you are doing.’ She strove to make her words distinct.

A sharp pebble flew by her, grazing forehead and cheek, and drawing a blinding sheet of light before her eyes. She lay like one dead on Mr. Thornton’s shoulder.

We didn’t actually discuss that scene today, partly because it was clear a lot of them weren’t ready, but we did lay the groundwork, talking about Margaret’s character and her difficult transition from her idyllic country home to the bustle and jostle of Milton-Northern, and about her ability, as a sympathetic outsider, to bridge the gap between the classes caused by misunderstanding and (as they see it) antagonistic interests. She’s not perfect herself, so we are looking at how her Milton experience begins to change her from someone who takes her own preeminence for granted and disdains “shoppy people” to someone eager to be engaged with the industrial world that initially horrifies her. The reeducation is mutual, of course, so eventually (when everyone’s caught up) we will also talk about the changes wrought in Mr. Thornton by Margaret’s influence.

This is just our classroom work, of course. For all of us there are also papers and midterms, and we’re getting into reference letter season, and I’m reading a PhD thesis chapter, and there are committee meetings … I admit I was a bit scornful about having a fall reading week when it was first discussed, but I’m looking forward to the break in the routine, not least because on top of everything else I have some writing deadlines coming up! It’s busy, but mostly it’s a good kind of busy.

In both of my classes this week we are focusing on young women making mistakes. It’s interesting for me (and I hope also for the students who are in both classes) to compare the very different ways their novels approach their rather different errors.

Both of them do wrong things for right reasons. Jane Eyre, for starters, is angry, rebellious, vengeful, even violent, in her early days at Gateshead Hall, but she is this way because she is miserable and unfairly treated and yearns for both justice and love. When she gets to Lowood, she continues to resist injustice and insist on her right to strike back against her oppressors: “you are good to those who are good to you,” she tells her new friend Helen Burns,

It is all I ever desire to be. If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should — so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.

But Helen counsels her to “read the New Testament, and observe what Christ says, and how He acts; make His word your rule, and His conduct your example.” “You will change your mind, I hope, when you grow older,” she tells Jane; “as yet you are but a little untaught girl.” Jane never does stop fighting for what she thinks is right, but she learns to control (or repress) her anger, and we know she takes Helen’s lesson to heart when adult Jane describes Helen’s grave: “now a grey marble tablet marks the spot, inscribed with her name, and the word ‘Resurgam.'” One formal aspect of the novel that is easy to miss on a first reading, because the narrative of her childhood is so gripping and feels so immediate, is precisely that retrospective aspect: it would be our mistake to identify too completely with young Jane, to think she’s in the right–just as we would be replicating Jane’s own error if we didn’t see, well before she flees Thornfield, that her (initial) relationship with Mr. Rochester is all kinds of wrong. (If she read more novels, she too would quickly recognize the split chestnut tree as a warning sign!)

Dorothea Brooke’s errors are easier to spot, because George Eliot gives us not just Dorothea’s perspective but that of everyone around her and, most important, of the narrator. It mystifies every person in the novel that Dorothea chooses to marry Mr. Casaubon: they all believe that it’s a terrible mistake. We understand why she marries him, though, because we know all about her, meaning not just her desire to lead a spiritually significant life but also her impetuous nature and her tendency to interpret things according to her own desires. Of course, that last bit is at once her greatest failing and the one thing we all have in common with her, as the narrator will take pains to teach us. We are given more information in Middlemarch, but we are also kept at more of an emotional distance–both formal choices that serve the novel’s larger purposes.

In my experience, students sometimes find it frustrating that Dorothea is not more “relatable”: the things she wants are strange to them, and thus her decision to marry Mr. Casaubon just seems perverse, rather than something to sympathize with or pity her for. Also (and they aren’t wrong about this) they find her annoying–inconsistent, prone to displays of superiority (“How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?”). Working through this initial response is usually good for helping students see some key things about reading the novel–for instance, that you aren’t supposed to sympathize only with people you like, or who are like you, and that Dorothea too has some work to do, especially in learning to understand and sympathize with Mr. Casaubon. Like Jane, she will grow into greater wisdom. Also, as the students read on they will probably come to see her strangeness as a good thing. It is not actually better to be Celia and fit in than it is to be Dorothea and stand out, even though Celia never makes mistakes (not even when she gets the shocking news of Dorothea’s engagement–“The paper man she was making would have had his leg injured, but for her habitual care of whatever she held in her hands”) and Dorothea makes a lot of them.