Liberty Is the Mother of Virtue

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Wollstonecraft writes, "Liberty is the mother of virtue" (37). I love this idea. Only to the extent that we are free can we be good.

Yet in the same way that the First World War forever changed our relationships to abstract nouns like "honor" and "freedom" (as Paul Fussell explains in his tremendous book, The Great War & Modern Memory), my relationship to the word "liberty" feels fraught.

I like thinking about the opportunities in my own life to learn and grow, to become a better person. These include education, travel, work, voting, choosing friends and boyfriends and now my husband and partner, making choices about my own body and sexuality, choosing places to live, inhabiting and exploring a city, reading, and writing. These opportunities cannot be understood, however, without thinking (and talking) about privilege. And privilege exists on a wide spectrum, from having an awful lot of it to having an awful little.

I just got back from the White Privilege Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, and I found the whole experience hard, important, moving, educative. It gave me a lot to think about, as I'd hoped it would. It gave me a lot to learn, a privilege in itself to attend. It also resonates now as I reread Wollstonecraft's book and as I look around myself in the world.

I love Wollstonecraft's passion and idealism: "Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated..." (133). Perhaps Naomi Wolf would say that Wollstonecraft never imagined the backlashes in response to wave after wave of progress for women. Wollstonecraft wanted a quick and total emancipation. We know from other movements for emancipation that it is not so easy.

In some ways, I think Wollstonecraft's negative statements and questions are more apt than her positive ones. For example: "How can women be just or generous, when they are slaves of injustice?" (124) In other words, there is no chance of generosity without emancipation. It wouldn't logically follow that emancipation necessarily yields generosity, but generosity becomes possible.

Soon in this course, we're reading Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee, and the main character's experiences journeying to America raise hard questions for us about "the land of the free." 

I can still enjoy Wollstonecraft's philosophical optimism, of course; in fact, I think we need these voices able to articulate a clear and whole vision for our future, for what is possible if not inevitable or even very likely.

Awakenings, Resonances, & Towards Healing

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Why do passages like these in Ensler's Vagina Monologues make me well up with emotion?

"It was better than the Grand Canyon, ancient and full of grace" (46).

"There was a choral thing that began to occur, a kind of wild collective song" (33).

"And Bob lost himself there and I was there with him, in my vagina, and we were gone" (57).

"My vagina swimming river water, clean spilling water over sun-baked stones over stone clit, clit stones over and over" (62).

"I began to feel beautiful and delicious" (57).

"I had awakened to what the woman who ran the workshop called 'vaginal wonder'" (46).

"You know, actually, you're the first person I ever talked to about this, and I feel a little better" (30).

Perhaps it's because Ensler affirms our experiences of shame and simultaneously, in this play, awakens the possibilities of our self- and collective love.

Just when we're feeling devastated, incensed, and deeply empathic for the women in the play and their stories, Ensler shares messages of healing.

I've heard lots of people dismiss this play--as a work of literature, as a piece of art--on various grounds. Some say Ensler is an "ugly feminist." Others say her writing has "no literary merit." (ETC.) Yet I've seen and read this play now close to a dozen times, and its form and content both move me again and again.

Ensler finds a way of sharing hundreds of voices, stories, and experiences in this work, and the pluralism of her approach means that the play refuses to be about one thing, one voice, or one narrative. For this reason alone, the wondrous inclusiveness of this play makes it worth our time and thoughtful attention.

Furthermore, Ensler moves in and out of voices across time and place, age and background, as well as kinds of experiences with sex, sexuality, and sexual violence. The effect of this is for the play to become everyone's play, for it to belong to everyone.

Maybe you're reading this and don't know the play. (Maybe you're thinking, WTF? Who knows.) Reading this handful of lines out of the play's whole context won't do it justice. I urge you: buy a ticket to the show in a city or on a university campus near you. Buy a copy of the play. Check out scenes or the script online. Check out Ensler's TED talks.

At least for me, over quite a few years and encounters, this play is worth our careful attention.

In Praise of Male Feminists

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To my brother, Trey, who cherishes being a father to his little girl and shares the labor of her upbringing with his wife (who also works outside of the home)...

To my mentor, Selden, who sees and celebrates his amazing wife and daughters and granddaughters and who tells stories with strong female characters...

To my friend, Bret, who knows himself, tells his story, and brings people together with magic tricks (literally) and jokes...

To my friend, Dave, whose patience and commitment to human development make everyone around him richer, brighter, and more empathic...

To my friends, Naheed and Jose, who make me smarter and wiser and more thoughtful (not to mention their students, friends, and neighbors)...

To my colleague, Greg, for caring about our students, wanting for them a world in which we share and learn together, and speaking truth to power...

To poets, writers, and thinkers like Chris Abani, Tony Porter, and Nii Parkes, who help us pluralize our thinking about humanity and challenge us to think and see beyond a single dimension...

To Byron Hurt, for helping us look at misogyny in hip-hop (and therefore elsewhere)...

To my colleagues like Neil and Jack, who are committed to social justice and building community...

To my friend, Wade, who didn't realize that he self-identifies as a feminist until we let him know that he does!

To my nephews, Spencer and Wesley, for meeting this world with love, creativity, generosity, and enthusiasm for people and things great and small...

And above all, to my partner, Chris, who is the kindest, funniest, smartest, and most generous man I know, for challenging me, loving me, and going through this life with me...

This is in praise of male feminists (whether or not they self-identify).

"What's Your Dream?"

"Femme Maison" by Louise Bourgois

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Remember the guy on the street at the beginning of "Pretty Woman" (not to get started on that movie) who stands around Hollywood asking, "WHAT'S YOUR DREAM"? I can hear his voice in my head: "What's your dream?"

What is my dream? What's yours?

Naomi Wolf's from 1990 seems to me a pretty good one, pretty compelling, pretty grounded in personal and general experience (as she saw and felt it, as she found it in her research).

Wolf writes, "Our culture gives a young woman only two dreams in which to imagine her body, like a coin with two faces: one pornographic, the other anorexic" and she calls on us "to demand a better dream" (199).

Wolf wants us to be free, to love ourselves, to be ambitious, to be individuals (and sisters, and citizens), to choose "a woman-loving definition of beauty" (201). Further exploring the metaphor of the Iron Maiden, she describes "an urgent social expedient that [makes] women's bodies into the prisons that their homes no longer [are]," saying, "women's bodies are not our own but society's" (184, 187).

In her chapter on "Hunger," Wolf says, "Whom a society values it feeds well," and she describes the proliferation of eating disorders and disordered eating among women and girls (189). For Wolf, food, weight, hunger, and physical health and wellness are political issues, ultimately about power, who has it and who doesn't. She writes, "Hunger makes women feel poor and think poor" (197). I can't help but remember the hunger young women in my life felt during those years of our adolescence in particular (though perhaps women in my life now are hungry, too).

I'm struck by Wolf's conclusion of the chapter: "Everyone is telling her to be careful" (217). This resonates with me. It is not my dream to have to be careful, yet I have felt in various ways throughout my life that being careful is the message I receive from my culture. Wolf wants us to "be shameless. Be greedy" (291). Is this too bold? Does she go too far? Wolf is interested in courage and freedom--as, I realize, am I.

Wolf talks about literal, physical hunger, but she is also interested in what she calls a "spiritual hunger" (279). She references Betty Freidan's Feminine Mystique several times and "the problem without a name," exploring a domestic's imprisonment's transition to a new kind of imprisonment in the Iron Maiden. Her dream gets us out of both.

"The pressure of beauty pornography and the pressures of achievement combine to strike young women where they are most vulnerable: in their exploration of their sexuality in relation to their sense of their own worth," Wolf explains (213). In my experience, this is profoundly true. In a beauty economy, essentially a beauty caste system, it is difficult (to impossible) for young women to feel valuable, worthy, powerful in our current world of images.

Since I started this post, we're nearing the end of Wolf's book from 1990 and asking ourselves what (if anything) has changed. I'm not convinced that Wolf's dream has been fully realized, of course, yet education and awareness have to be part of getting there.

"Torture of Women" by Nancy Spero Siglio

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The Iron Maiden

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Naomi Wolf borrows a symbol from the middle ages, a torture device, in order to introduce an important metaphor in her book, The Beauty Myth. She writes,

"The original Iron Maiden was a medieval German instrument of torture, a body-shaped casket painted with the limbs and features of a lovely, smiling young woman. The unlucky victim was slowly enclosed inside her; the lid fell shut to immobilize the victim, who died either of starvation or, less cruelly, of the metal spikes embedded in her interior. The modern hallucination in which women are trapped or trap themselves is similarly rigid, cruel, and euphemistically painted. Contemporary culture directs attention to imagery of the Iron Maiden, while censoring real women's faces and bodies" (17).

This seems like both a wild claim and simultaneously an eerily apt one. The standard to which women and girls are held is unreal, oppressive, and exhausting. The photo of the woman above (heavily manipulated so that it is no longer a real woman at all, not even a real supermodel) becomes the Iron Maiden of today. And some women and girls are trapped inside the thin, beautifully painted container, starving, invisible, and enslaved.

Am I going too far? Maybe. Throughout high school and college, however, I watched many of the young women in my life hurt themselves with impossible beauty standards, eating disorders, exercise, obsessions with their bodies. (And in many ways, this continues into our adulthood.) Did they (or we) choose this? Personally, I don't believe they (or we) did. Our dance teacher in high school encouraged the dancers to consume zero fat (which became dangerous for my sister one summer), girls were praised by adults for being thin and pretty, and everywhere we all looked there were vivid messages about what we were supposed to look like. Above all, the critics and ultimate determiners of our fate were young men who decided how we measured up in the competitive beauty economy. Did the boys choose it, then? I don't think they did either. We inherited a culture and everyone became complicit in it.

My sister and I were talking recently about how going to the mall makes us feel anxious, like we don't have any of the right stuff (the right clothes, shoes, makeup, purses, etc.). It sounds ridiculous, and I like to think that I have inoculated myself against these kinds of trivial concerns. Yet I am both a victim and a perpetrator of the beauty myth. All around us, I see "a secret 'underlife' poisoning our freedom; infused with notions of beauty, it is a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control" (10).

Naomi Wolf is a provocative writer, and even now, her book from 1990 gets under the skin. She wants us to consider the "new cultural censors of women's intellectual space" and "the relationship between female liberation and female beauty" (11, 9). It's uncomfortable and difficult, and we would much rather leave it be. (I would, too. As a female teaching this class, I do not want to be scrutinized for my own relationship to the beauty myth. I am not a conqueror.)

Wolf calls our attention to how "An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that 'justify' the institution of slavery" (18). Using the word slavery and invoking the institution of slavery (in the American South and otherwise) is bold, antagonistic, and understandably controversial. I don't know if I would make that comparison, or if I would make the one Atwood makes in The Handmaid's Tale, alluding to the Holocaust...

Yet I do know that in 2014, Wolf still gets my attention. She has me thinking all over again about things that would be much easier to ignore. It's painful, for example, to remember my friend in college whose bulimia got so bad that she kept her vomit in gallon-sized Ziploc baggies in her sweater drawer. Was she trapped inside an Iron Maiden? Did she ever get out? We don't keep in touch, but I'm left wondering, visiting and revisiting, being haunted by those old ghosts.

(Iron Maiden images from a google search in 2011)

Freedom to Choose

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"I have a Dream: That People Will View a Picture Like This and Not Think It's a Big Deal." If you haven't seen it yet, I encourage you to read this piece by Doyin Richards on goodmenproject.com:
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Why did Doyin Richards' photo and his piece prompt such outrageous and shocking reactions, from racist outbursts, to jealous tirades? Why do we either ooh-and-ahh over a photograph like this one or treat it as a pariah, an object of our disdain? Might we get comfortable with (even indifferent to) men and women actively parenting and/or working in a variety of forms? When will it be at last okay for anyone to do or be anything (within the confines of law)?

A lot of writers in women's literature end up writing, intentionally or inadvertently, about choice, the ways in which and extent to which we do or do not have it. Is a world possible in which every human being (of any gender identity) has agency, the ability to determine (at least to some extent) his or her (or zer) own destiny? Plenty of days, when I look around me, I do not see a world like that.

Erica Jong, in "How different the history of world literature might look if mothers were writers too," writes:

"The very fact that no generation before ours has really been in a position to challenge the lie that creativity and generatively are one and the same makes us privileged beyond any earlier generations. And that privilege rests almost entirely upon motherhood remaining optional for us. It is the key to all our freedoms--even the freedom to dwell seriously on the meaning of pregnancy and childbirth" (62). 

The privilege of choice, if it must be a privilege, is surely the key to all our freedoms--everyone's.

It seems to me that granting more citizens of humanity more choices (or some choices at all) is not necessarily to diminish the choices enjoyed already by others. To allow girls to study and go to school isn't to withdraw boys from school. To allow women to choose to have children or to work or both isn't to withdraw those freedoms from men. To make the world safer for women and girls, hundreds of thousands of whom are raped and beaten every year on this planet is not to deny abusers freedom; no one should be free to rape or abuse. This is why we have justice systems and universal declarations of human rights.

Giving more people more choices also do not necessitate that every individual will make the right choice (if there is such a thing) or even a good one. Imposing certain choices or kinds of choices is tyranny.

Francise Prose in "Other Women" says, "Gender doesn't confer moral superiority, nor the opposite, needless to say" (172). Most feminists I've ever met, read, or known believe that women, like men, are complex, imperfect human beings, flawed but entitled to certain inalienable rights like their human brothers.

Right on, Doyin Richards, for helping us complicate and make plural our understandings of masculinity and femininity, of parenting and loving children, of liberating ourselves and others around us from failures of the imagination.

"I lie there like a dead bird."

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"Fake it, I scream at myself inside my head," Offred narrates in the hotel room with her Commander. "I lie there like a dead bird," she says earlier on the same page (267). Offred, who doesn't even have her own name, finds herself in a world of roles, costumes, appearances. What does it mean, then, to be herself--or, indeed, to be anyone?

Atwood is exploring identity and humanity. What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to be human? She ends Chapter Thirty-Seven with the line: "Nobody says anything." And maybe she's talking about Offred's near tumble across the floor of Jezebel's because it's difficult to walk in her heels, but I reckon she is also talking about the fact that no one says anything to question the whole charade of Jezebel's, of Gilead, of society's norms.

When they're talking about "the club," the Commander wants to know what Offred thinks of it (or perhaps he's just making small-talk). "'I thought this sort of thing was strictly forbidden,'" Offred replies. "'Well, officially,' he says. 'But everyone's human, after all'" (248). Yet the Commander is hardly a proponent of a shared and universal humanity. He goes onto say that "Nature demands variety, for men" (249).

Offred sees herself in the bathroom mirror in their upstairs room at Jezebel's: "I'm a wreck. The mascara has smudged again [...] the purplish lipstick has bled, hair trails aimlessly. The moulting pink feathers are tawdry as carnival dolls and some of the starry sequins have come off [...] I'm a travesty, in bad makeup and someone else's clothes, used glitz" (266). Encountering oneself (in the mirror) is usually important: in literature and perhaps in general. When characters see themselves in the glass--when we do--we are invited to reflect on the relationship between what we see and what we feel.

Offred, it seems, feels ridiculous and ashamed. She also feels increasingly less alive because this is what happens to us in an oppressive atmosphere: some of our humanity and vitality is lost. Earlier in the novel, Offred wishes she's spoken to Luke about killing the cat: "He went into the garage with her. I don't know what he did and I never asked him [...] I should have gone out with him, taken that small responsibility. I should at least have asked [...] because that little sacrifice, that snuffing out of love, was done for my sake as well." Then--get this!--she says, "That's one of the things they do. They force you to kill, within yourself" (203).

So what are the ways in which others liberate or imperil us? What about the ways in which we liberate or imperil ourselves?

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Atwood, Freud, & Hitler

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I've been thinking a lot about Freud while re-reading The Handmaid's Tale--partly because of the "Pen Is Envy" passage and partly because of the allusions to hysteria (196).

At the end of Chapter 24, Atwood writes: "I stand up, in the dark, start to unbutton. Then I hear something, inside my body. I've broken, something has cracked, that must be it. Noise is coming up, coming out, of the broken place, in my face [...] The wandering womb, they used to think. Hysteria. And then a needle, a pill. It could be fatal" (156).

Of hysteria, Wikipedia reports: "Women considered to be suffering from [hysteria] exhibited a wide array of symptoms including faintness, nervousness, sexual desire, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in the abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and "a tendency to cause trouble."  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria

Freud concluded that sexual abuse caused hysteria but, after a vehemently resistant reception to his theory, withdrew it.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freud's_seduction_theory

(The important idea here is that something happened to these women to make them hysterical--something that wasn't their fault.)

Offred is becoming hysterical, perhaps, because she has to repress so many--all?--of her feelings. In Gilead, she is not allowed to react genuinely to anything. Laughter at the absurdity of the Commander's request to play Scrabble and the absurdity of her situation boils out of her, and yet she has to shove herself into the closet to stifle the sound. We would all become hysterical under these conditions. They are a form of abuse.

Freud also talked about Penis Envy, believing that women subconsciously envied male anatomy. Atwood incorporates this ideas into her novel, cleverly revising it to: "Pen Is Envy [...] And they were right, it is envy. Just holding it is envy. I envy the Commander his pen" (196). It isn't a penis Offred craves but a pen. A pen is phallic, sure, but this isn't the point. Perhaps what women envy of men is not their penes but their power.

Atwood rarely spends a page of words in this work of speculative fiction without using some of them to explore power. I just saw "American Hustle" this weekend and was struck by its explorations of power in relationships: Irving and Sydney, Irving and Rosalyn, Sydney and Richie, Irving and Richie, Sydney and Rosalyn, etc.

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The film explores the stories and lies we tell both others and ourselves. This is an incredibly relevant theme for our course and this novel in particular. What lies do we tell ourselves out of necessity? What lies is Offred telling herself out of necessity, for instance--that the Commander sees her as a human being? This is a dangerous fiction.

In the passage about WWII and the Holocaust, the main character talks about the "mistress" of one of the men "who had supervised one of the camps where they put the Jews" and how "she denied knowing about the ovens," "was wearing pearls," said, "He was not a monster" (154, 155). Atwood concludes, eerily: "How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all" (155).

In her diary, Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun, wrote things like, "I am so infinitely happy that he loves me so much, and I pray that it will always be like this." She wrote about her desperation to spend more time with him, his surprise visits, gifts he would bring her. I guess she chose to believe all kinds of things until she couldn't believe them anymore (and took her own life).

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Points of Contact II

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The points of contact trend continues in Atwood's novel, The Handmaid's Tale. They include rare moments of physical contact, speaking in whispers in a bathroom stall, communicating in writing across time and space, even shows of emotion.

Our main character, whose new name turns out to be Offred ("Of Fred," meaning belonging to her Commander, Fred), finds a trace of a former handmaid in her room (what she comes to call her room): "There it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum." Offred doesn't know what it means (not yet), but she exclaims (to us), "I'm communing with her, this unknown woman [...] her taboo message made it through, [...] washed itself up on the wall of my cupboard" (62). The words are a point of contact between them, a kind of communication, something they share apart from the oppressive world of Gilead.

Through snatches of memories, fragments, dreams, Offred tries to remember and hang onto her daughter, who was taken from her. When Offred steps into the bath, she closes her eyes and says, "She's there with me, suddenly, without warning, it must be the smell of the soap. I put my face against the soft hair at the back of her neck and breathe her in [...] She comes back to me [...] She's not really a ghost" (73). This passage is one of many involving hunger, longing, craving for physical touch. Offred imagines holding her daughter. If she were able to hold her, she would know that she exists and is alive--that they both are--in a reality that has become almost entirely surreal.

They are many other kinds, points of contact. The handmaids long to touch the pregnant handmaid when they are out to market; Offred longs for the physical touch of her husband, Luke. There are also a thousand instances of contact being denied, outlawed, made impossible upon penalty of death. Aunt Lydia, when she is training the Handmaids, bursts into tears. Atwood writes, "I'm doing my best, she said. I'm trying to give you the best chance you can have [...] Don't think it's easy for me either" (65). Surely the handmaids know, then, have affirmed, that Lydia, too, is one of them--human, feeling.

Points of contact let us know we are alive; they tell us we exist and help us belong to something bigger than ourselves. Babies die without being touched. We are nourished by physical contact. Indeed, we need it to survive.

This has me thinking about points of contact in my own life, of course. (Perhaps this will be a third post soon.)

Points of Contact

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I'm struck so far in the literature of this course by the moments and points of contact between characters; in contrast, some of them are kept from contact and communication, and we see an absence instead of a presence. For example, Minnie Foster (Mrs. Wright) has no telephone, a symbol of connection and conversation, in Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers." In Zora Neale Hurston's "Sweat," Delia seems to live alone without the companionship of other women.

In "A Jury of Her Peers," Martha Hale and Mrs. Peters gradually establish a connection--both between the two of them and between them and Mrs. Wright. As they spend time in Mrs. Wright's house, they begin to experience empathy for her, her story, her situation. And understanding begins to pass between them, manifested in moments of making eye contact. Glaspell writes, "Their eyes met--something flashed to life, passed between them; then, as with an effort, they seemed to pull away from each other" (Glaspell 10).

Somewhat similarly, Andrea Lee creates a scenario of contact and connection in her story, "Brothers and Sisters Around the World." When the main character slaps the young island girl, Lee writes, "In that second of contact I feel the strange smoothness of her cheek and an instantaneous awareness that my hand is just as smooth. An electric current seems to connect them" (Lee 4). A slap both seems and is violent; yet in this moment of violence emerges an unexpected moment of connection and communication. The next time the main character sees the girls, they have become like "sisters" (Lee 7).

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator essentially invents another woman (who is also she--potentially the "Jane" at the end) behind the wallpaper--a self, a persona, a woman who needs freeing--with whom to identify, to try and understand, to aid in breaking free of her predicament. She splits herself in two and then becomes the woman behind the wallpaper, the paper itself becoming a point of contact. Gilman writes, "I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper" (Gilman 8). A partnership forms between the two women, even if only one of them exists concretely. They are both enemies and allies, I think--kind of like the main character and the two island girls in "Brothers & Sisters…"

All of this so far has me thinking a lot about points of contact. Where are mine? Where are ours? Where might they be? When do they alienate us from one another, and when do they make us free?

There She Was

Mrs. Dalloway explores mortality without grimacing or shying away from it yet simultaneously affirms life. This, for me, is the heart of the novel, the challenge for us to wrangle with as we attempt to make sense of and meaning from the novel (in spite of its Modernist futility). 

At the very end of the novel, several characters consider young Elizabeth Dalloway. Peter says, "There's Elizabeth" and "she feels not half what we feel, not yet" (171). This book in so many ways has been about how much and how intensely individuals feel. The heroes of this novel (even if they're Modernist anti-heroes) are those who are capable of complex thought; sensitive, deep reactions and feelings; fluid movement between joy and anguish. Peter and Clarissa are certainly most prominent among them. 

'I will come,' said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he though to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was. THE END (172).

Terror, ecstasy, and excitement are overlapping; the world is pluralistic, not singular; it cannot be divided into good and evil or right and wrong. This, too, is one of Woolf's very Modernist thoughts, yet she develops it uniquely in Mrs. Dalloway. Pluralism, multiple perspectives, and the variability of truth look different for Eliot, Joyce, Faulker, and the rest. 

Here are some examples of things (seemingly contradictory) that are simultaneously true and overlapping (as opposed to mutually exclusive and non-overlapping) in the novel:

• "Are we not all prisoners?" (170)
• "We know everything" (171).
• "Somehow it was [Clarissa's] disaster--her disgrace" (164).
• "Death was defiance" (163). 
• "Perhaps there was somebody there. But there was nobody" (162).
• "They looked; that was all. That was enough" (157).
• "She hated her; she loved her."
• "...it is certain we must die" (155).
• "...still these semblances, these triumphs."
• "That was satisfying; that was real" (154).
• "Every one was unreal in one way; must more real in another" (151).
• "Life was that--humiliation, renunciation" (148).
• "Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life" (144).

Woolf's project, it seems to me, is to proclaim the connectedness of joy and anguish, life and death, loss and triumph--the ways in which they are one and the same, not opposites. I love how C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed and Surprised by Joy writes about how one must understand pain in order to truly know love, how grief and joy and interrelated. Lewis and Woolf in this are immensely brave. 

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Connecting Mrs. Dalloway to This Week at School

I keep thinking about our high school's struggle to contend with the news that one of our recent graduates has been charged with multiple counts of aggravated sexual assault at his college. I am not bringing this up to focus all over again on his particular case, nor do I want the conversation to be about him--who he is, whether or not he did it. 

As I reread Mrs. Dalloway this year, I'm thinking a lot about the life of the mind, our interior worlds, the things that make up our lives, the relationships and environments that determine them. Clarissa calls her parties "an offering"; she feels "quite continuously a sense of [other people's] existence" and she feels "what a waste" and she feels "what a pity"; "if only they could be brought together." The parties are an offering; "to combine, to create; but to whom?" (107)

This novel acknowledges--in rich, profound, heartbreaking ways--people's love of life as well as their anguishes. The novel, Virginia Woolf, makes important the life of the mind, our inner worlds and feelings, everything that has ever happened to us, how it feels, what it means. She shows the simultaneous meaninglessness and meaning of one life. 

This, to me, is the ultimate affirmation of being human. 

Rape is exactly the opposite. It is a denial of humanity, an assault on another person's humanity. When someone rapes, he (or she) is failing to honor, in the most horrific and offensive way, an individual's personhood, what is sacred, what is felt, what makes us human. 

I will be haunted all my life by the rapes of women I love and have loved. 

One of my college roommates, a friend I cherish, transferred to my school as a sophomore because she was raped at her first college as a freshman. She knew the guy. His fraternity often mixed with her sorority. He was powerful and known. She didn't press charges. Her parents, learning that she was in hospital, put her long-distance boyfriend on a plane to see about her. I still get chills. I got in her car one night in the pouring rain; we drove away from the dorm, and she told me the story. 

One of my friends from high school, our class speaker at graduation, hugely loved and admired, was raped our senior year of high school when she visited her sister at college. She fought an eating disorder and self harm for several years in the aftermath--I remember seeing the marks on her lovely legs and arms--and has emerged in adulthood as one of the most loving, passionate leaders in her field and one of the most loving, passionate people I have known. 

I was "rufeed" right after college (when I was twenty-two): Halloween, costumes, snow, a big tent party in the ski town where I lived, and I took a drink from a cute guy I didn't know wearing a Rasta costume. I can still see his hovering figure sometimes. I woke up screaming in my apartment, half-clothed, with stitches in my face. My roommate and her boyfriend, my saviors, told me what had happened: how they had crossed the icy parking lot; how I was bleeding, had broken a heel, was falling, was trying to get away and being pursued; how my roommate's boyfriend challenged the guy and pushed him away from me; how they took me to the emergency room to get my face sewn up; how I was practically catatonic for hours. I remember nothing, not even shades of that night after I took the drink. 

I didn't go to the police. I didn't understand what had happened. I blamed myself. I had been drinking. My sister said over the phone from Tennessee, "God is punishing you for wearing that outfit."

The stories proliferate. I could write several further posts all about the girls I've known in high school and college who suffered assault. Some of them got away (like my sorority sister who escaped a cab driver who locked the doors and tried to crawl into the back seat with her), and some did not. All try to heal. Everyone wants to be free. 

I don't want to scare anyone. I want girls and guys, my students, all of us to go into the world boldly, with love, with hope, without fear. 

Mrs. Dalloway advocates for life, even as it explores death. They are two sides of the same coin. 

All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!--that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how every instant... (108)

Thinking (As Ever) about Mrs. Dalloway & The Hours

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If there is a novel from which I will never recover (in terms of its beauty as well as its anguish), it's Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. And perhaps not unrelatedly, if there is a film from which I will never recover (in terms of its beauty as well as its anguish), it's "The Hours," based on the novel of the same name by Michael Cunningham, which is based on Mrs. Dalloway. 

Nicole Kidman plays Virginia Woolf so movingly and memorably in "The Hours" that her performance retains its magnificence in my mind year after year. Meryl Streep, typically, also becomes her character, a modern-day Clarissa Dalloway in New York City (as opposed to London). Julianne Moore is likewise astonishing. The three of them juxtaposed transcend everything we've ever come to expect or understand about what is possible in film.

I'm rereading the novel, of course, in Women's Literature this spring. And we're in London. And we're approaching June. It's all too perfect--and a bit too much. 

I open the novel and reread the line, "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself," and the beautiful, anguishing world of the novel pops instantly back to life; takes me in (1). The city and its people are somehow the same city and people Clarissa (and Woolf) knew in 1917, in spite of the various wars and years between us. 

Clarissa and Septimus feel and see and rejoice and hurt with the same intensity as anyone today--anyone, that is, who experiences life with extraordinary intensity, the highs and the lows. (Is this, some readers wonder, manic depression or bipolar disorder?)

"Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that," Clarissa feels, on one hand (4). Yet it is just as real and just as intense when she feels that "often now this body she wore [...] this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing--nothing at all." Woolf continues, "She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street..." (7-8). 

Somewhat similarly, Septimus feels everything, too. 

...it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signaling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks. (17-18)

Sometimes the beautiful and the anguishing merge into one, so that life and death are intertwined in one gorgeous, painful feeling. Though I do not suffer from mental illness (as far as I know), all of this seems incredibly poignant and real to me as a reader. Woolf captures how it feels to be in the wild, bustling, lonely, wonderful world: "life; London; this moment of June" (2).

Greedy with Wants & Reckless from Hope

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"There is nothing I can do," Jasmine says at the end of Mukerjee's novel, Jasmine. 

Time will tell if I am a tornado, rubble-maker, arising from nowhere and disappearing into a cloud. I am out the door and in the potholed and rutted driveway, scrambling ahead of Taylor, greedy with wants and reckless from hope (241). 

At the end of The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf recommends being greedy, too: 

How to begin? Let's be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Seek out the sex we want and fight fiercely against the sex we do not want. Choose our own causes. And once we break through and change the rules so our sense of our own beauty cannot be shaken, sing that beauty and dress it up and flaunt it and revel in it: In a sensual politics female is beautiful (291). 

Eve Ensler, too, calls us to a celebration, a feast, a revelry. From one of her interviews near the end of The Vagina Monologues, she writes: 

To love women, to love our vaginas, to know them and touch them and be familiar with who we are and what we need. To satisfy ourselves, to teach our lovers to satisfy us, to be present in our vaginas, to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humor, to make them visible so they cannot be ravaged in the dark without great consequence, so that our center, our point, our motor, our dream, is no longer detached, mutilated, numb, broken, invisible, or ashamed (118). 

There is something going on here. These writers all describe a woman-loving world--a safe, whole, celebratory, nurturing, vibrant place for women (and men) to thrive and be strong. Is it "greedy" to want these things: freedom (political and otherwise), safety (in our bodies, in our communities), agency? 

Maybe hearing Jasmine and other women talking about choosing themselves, their own wants and needs, makes us uncomfortable because it is so strongly normalized for women to submit themselves to the needs and wants of others. Women's literature, in many places and in many ways, challenges that norm, calling for the kind of world in which a woman or a man can be free, own her or his body, and make her or his choices. 

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Women's Lit Poem & Freedom for Jasmine

Little Women's Lit Poem

If Virginia Woolf were water, she would be an ocean--which
one is the deepest? That one. One that harbors movement,
glances through the dim, granular void, to the surface. And
Eve Ensler would be the smoke-rich music in some safe,
underground space where listeners and speakers peer gently
into one another's faces under twinkles of light. On a long
road into another world, Margaret Atwood pedals, practically,
on a symbolic bicycle, passing a cigarette to Gloria Steinem. 

AND... somewhat (mostly) unrelatedly... 

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"It thrilled me," Jasmine writes of seeing the Hayeses' apartment in Manhattan for the first time. "Sunlight smeared one wall of windows. It spoke to me of possibility, that one could live like this and not be struck down" (160). From the beginning, Taylor and his life represent freedom from the fates of India. Remember her saying, “If we could just get away from India, then all fates would be cancelled,” which made us wonder if they would—or could (85).

Perhaps that is where Mukherjee subtly leads us: freedom.

After she murders Half-Face, Jasmine says, "The pitcher is broken" and that she begins "[her] journey, traveling light" (120, 121). Perhaps this is the turning point, then, even if it is precipitated by horror. Jasmine passes through a portal to the other side (her tongue sliced down the middle), where Lillian Gordon, the Christ figure (if you're up for this sort of literary analogy), offers mercy and resurrection. 

This is Mukherjee's introduction of Lillian: "At that moment, an old white lady came out of the barracks [...] 'How dare you speak to a young lady in such a despicable fashion. She asked for water--well, get her water man!'" Like Jesus, who washed the feet of the unwashed or drew water for the woman at the well (and so on), Lillian has compassion on Jasmine, who has been shamed and abused by America (for all of its promise) until now. 

Is Jasmine Free?

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The question Mukherjee raises about her main character and narrator, Jasmine, on the first page of her novel by the same name endures throughout the novel: essentially, is she free (in what ways and to what extent)? And it seems to me that a lot of literature, and--to be sure--a lot of women's literature, grapples with this essential question. 

"Lifetimes ago, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, as astrologer cupped his ears--his satellite dish to the starts--and foretold my widowhood and exile [...] 'No!' I shouted," the novel begins. The astrologer cackles, "What will happen will happen," and Jasmine whispers, "I don't believe you" (3). 

And though Jasmine (now Jyoti) says, "I was nothing," she soon retracts it: "I didn't feel I was nothing" (3, 4). We need to hang onto this Jasmine in Mukherjee's novel; it's easy to lose track of her.

Perhaps I just have Hamlet on the brain, but Jasmine, like him, questions her existence--its nature, its meaning, its significance--again and again. Also, she often references Hindu notions of reincarnation with literal and metaphorical implications. Life and death are locked in a tango. On one hand, Jasmine's existence can't matter terrifically if she's going to destroy it (or accept that it is destroyed) before remaking it: "There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we are so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams" (29).  

After we see Prakash's death in her arms and her brutal rape by Half-Face, Jasmine's seeming complacence makes more sense: "What was fated to happen would happen," she quotes the astrologer. "My mission, thank God, was nearly over" (111). Yet the self who says this will be no longer, live no more. In order to "survive," "adapt," Jasmine "rebirths" herself. Part of this transformation is seeing herself in the mirror and slicing her tongue (118). 

So have there been moments of agency, of freedom, for this young woman along the horrible way? She does feel "a buzz of power" at times, like when she faces off with the attacking dog as a girl (54). At one point, she even thinks, "Let it come. Let him pounce. I had the staff" (55). This scene is reflected again when Jasmine stabs the rapist to death through a sheet (119). 

I, for one, don't find it difficult to see or appreciate this character's extraordinary fortitude. If she has never known freedom, how does she know she wants it? Yet I think she does. 

Wollstonecraft's Legacy

Mary Wollstonecraft fascinates me. I just think she was shockingly, mind-alteringly ahead of her time. She supported her sister (Eliza) and best friend (Fanny) and best friend's sister, starting a school in a progressive community--in 18th Century England, no less. She lived in Ireland, France, and Scandinavia, too, had two illegitimate children and several lovers, wrote passionately about women's education, and was essentially marginalized and forgotten because of her autobiographical works (published by Godwin after her death), which convinced many people of her day that she was a "loose" woman, even a "prostitute," and not worthy of their consideration. 

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In class, we've been wondering about Wollstonecraft's revolutionary choices in her personal life relative to the messages in her Vindication. On one hand, she says things like, "Women [...] all want to be ladies, which is simply to have nothing to do," implying that women are at least complicit in--if not wholly responsible for--their fragility and ennui; on the other, she describes instances of chivalry, saying, "when the lady could have done it herself," suggesting women's capacity if only they could have agency (100, 63).

Perhaps because Wollstonecraft did a lot of her writing at my age (and died after childbirth complications just five years later), I am thinking about ideas and identity--how Wollstonecraft knew enough about her beliefs and passions in her twenties and thirties to leave an extraordinary legacy in spite of her social, historical, political context. This is more than exciting (and relevant) for us in education, a kind of call to act on what we see and to name that which has not been named. 

It is so moving to learn that Wollstonecraft, in 1792, wrote, "Every individual is in this respect a world unto itself" and "I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves" (58, 70). She could see and think into the future, understanding and articulating what needed to happen. 

It seems especially ironic for Wollstonecraft to have been ignored and forgotten for decades because of her unconventional (wild) behavior. Even though her ideas were inconsistent with her life choices to some extent, what the world needed in both cases was a little more wildness but wasn't ready. 


http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/wollstonecraft_01.shtml

A Found Poem (based on TVM)

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The Power of Saying the Unsayable

I.
Fana, Shakti, truth-telling; Kunda, Cunti,
cunt, kin, and country; journey, naming,
alternatives, the sacred center, the womb,
primordial; conceive life energy, some-
thing, mystical, practical; attention, love
revealed; poonani, pal, pajama, tottita;
sweatpants, embrace me; to finally find
the clitoris, dreams, the flood; a choral
thing, a wild collective song; the petals,
vaginal wonder, ancient and full of grace;
orgasms, layers, mystical, magical; find it,
be it; shell, tulip, destiny; suddenly easy,
ready, alive; to feel connection; twice, twice,
twice, love, real looking; innocent and wild.

II.
Worried, scratching, fire; stinky, weird,
cancer; not since, the room, the car; witch
trial, convicted, guilty; throwing up, slapped,
screaming; unsettling, frantic, terrified; out-
rage, systematic tactic of war; monstrous, dead,
butchered and burned; mutilation, anger; scary,
loud, and life-threatening; garbage, exhausting,
package, cutter; terrors, force, twisted, omission; for 
the women we do not see, who hurt and who need us.

III.
Pleasure, heaven, naming things; vulva
girl, vulva song, vulva dance; chalice
essence, the beginning; vagina-friendly,
smart, snowflakes; to make women happy,
the almost- the elegant- the mountaintop-
moan; mystery, to know, touch, satisfy; come
in; to be there, to feel awe and wonder; to
change, expand, forgive, repair, remember;
thank you, all of us, change, day by day; give
birth, sustain, the brave ones, bless them, desire.

*all words & phrases taken from The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler

Can (& Should) We Talk about Vaginas (& TVM) in English Class (in HS)?

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Lots of colleges and universities have a Gender Studies or Women's Studies or Women's Literature, etc. course in which this play is studied. Not many high schools do.

When I first considered this text for our class three years ago, I researched its teaching in various institutions, what teachers, professors, psychologists, and other educators have to say about how it works and whether or not it's appropriate.

Eventually, I submitted these pedagogical goals to our school's administration:

Pedagogical Goals

o   For students to experience a safe, personal, and intellectual discussion of controversial ideas, exploring a controversial text

o   For students to cultivate a spirit of sustained inquiry, even when the going is difficult

o   For students to experience a broader range of the literature that exists

o   For students to identify with realms of human experience generally not explored and discussed (and written about) in class

o   For students to find a language to discuss their own experiences around gender and sexuality

o   For students to be empowered in terms of having words, understanding issues, and participating in a wider conversation (a preparation for identifying problems in the world)
o   “As readers, men as well as women, may emerge from these pages not only feeling more free within themselves—and about each other—but with alternatives to the old patriarchal dualism of feminine/masculine, body/mind, and sexual/spiritual that is rooted in the division of our physical selves into ‘the part we talk about’ and ‘the part we don’t’” (Steinem).

o    “Pedagogically, The Vagina Monologues promoted the goals of empathy towards others. The stories of the women opened-up a greater awareness of how other women live for the students while, at the same time, it spoke to many of their unarticulated experiences and feelings. Engaging in discussions with each other about the monologues enabled the students to identify with women's issues and stories (Belenky, 1986; Ensler, 1998; Fisher, 2001; Gawelek, 1994). In this respect, I believe, one key pedagogical goal was met.

o   “Lastly, The Vagina Monologues was a good text to discuss the concept of "the personal is political" (Fisher, 2001; Minnich, 1990). Framing individual women's experiences within the larger cultural norms of American society gave the students in my class the opportunity to look beyond issues of individual psychology to their own community's and family's perceptions of women's sexuality. In my opinion, the reactions the students in my class faced in being assigned The Vagina Monologues also permitted them a real lived experience of how society's norms impact people's attitudes and behaviors. From a teaching position, I believe, that the students were able to take their personal experiences of adversity and confusion, and frame them within the larger social context of women's sexuality as to promote women's issues, and end violence against women” (Linda Chen, PhD (Chair of Political Science at Indiana University)).

I also wrote the following:

I love the arguments Eve Ensler herself and Gloria Steinem articulate (in introductions) for the purposes and implications of encountering this text. Although I'm hesitant, of course, in some ways, about using the text, I also have some concerns about relegating conversations about sex and sexuality to Health Class (and not even there in some schools) and avoiding a topic so relevant, even urgent, for adolescents. My general educational goals always include helping students feel both safe and challenged simultaneously. In my electives with our oldest students (like Craft of Writing, the Individual and Society in Literature, Outsiders in Literature, Modern African Literature, Poetry, American Literature, etc.) so far, I have found that students (once they've established safe, academic and personal, talking relationships around the Harkness table) are desperate to talk about these subjects--particularly in the era of Facebook, hooking up, etc.  Also, I think the study of literature and writing is the study of human experience--what I care most about as an English teacher. Literature, to me, is an expression or reflection of experience (and/or worldview), an art form in itself, and a means of participating in an age-old dialogue with people from around the world over time. 

Gloria Steinem writes, “Slowly, it dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence toward women—that the desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life and that this failing would, if we did not correct it, be the end of us all.”

She describes a tradition of “shaming words and dirty jokes” to do with female (and I would add, male) sexuality—a trend that has surely affected most, if not all, of our students (and us). I echo Steinem’s sentiment of wishing “my own foremothers had known their bodies were sacred” and with her celebrate The Vagina Monologues’ notions of reclaiming traditions and beliefs to do with female power formerly “marginalized or denied” and “reclaiming devalued word[s]”, using “outrageous voices and honest [language]”. In what Steinem calls “the spirit of self knowledge of freedom” in this text, Ensler takes her audience or readers on a “journey of truth telling”, speaking the “truth of violence against the female body”, “bringing these hidden experiences into the open, naming them, and turning our rage into positive action to reduce and heal violence”, “purging a past full of negative attitudes”. Yet perhaps the phrase I most admire and embrace from this essay of introduction is “the power of saying the unsayable”—ever relevant for teenagers (and adults alike) as they navigate modes of communication, in an ever-growing range of genres, voices, and technologies. As teens go through adolescence and inevitably grapple with their identities, including gender and sexuality, this text meets them at a time when their questions about gender and sexuality are urgent, authentic, and personal.

Moreover, as we focus increasingly on our mission statement’s inclusion of both intellect and character, these issues could not be more pertinent or powerful in terms of cultivating empathy and a global perspective. As Ensler herself explains, “In order for the human race to continue, women must be safe and empowered.”

And three years on, I find myself asking the same questions. The text feels as relevant to me as ever and for the same reasons. Yet it's a challenging as ever to talk about vaginas in English class in high school. 

I still think we should so venture forth, as before, with questions, with curiosity, with wonder.