I am going to be teaching a Shakespeare survey in the spring, and I have spent the past few days putting my syllabus together. I am so freaking excited about this course! Generally speaking, I have had really awesome students at the OHS, and now that I am on the semester system instead of the dreaded quarter system, I can really dig into a topic and do it justice! With students who are up to the challenge!

I am using a "Texts and Contexts" approach to this course. Every class meeting, students will come to class having read contextual material in addition to an act of Shakespeare's play. I am really excited about the transitional material between As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra.  Students will read Francis Beaumont’s “Salmachis and Hermaphroditus”and look at a selection of icons allegorizing marriage from early modern emblem books.

My Latin is not very good (basically non-existent except for what I can hobble together through my French and Google Translate), but I think that the motto could be translated more or less into the following: one flesh, one mind out of two: let neither death, the bed, nor the tomb put asunder those who are together tied. Let me know if you have a better translation. There is also a German couplet there, but I am at a complete loss for that one. If you're reading, German-speaking friends and relatives, let me know.

The Latin couplet and the pictura allude to several biblical verses.

• In Mark 10:8: they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh.
• Genesis 2:24: Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
• Ephesians 5:32: a man [shall] leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.

Those biblical verses, and indeed Reusner's image above, idealize this dissolution of two into one. Perhaps As You Like also idealizes this type of union in its whopping FOUR marriages at the conclusion. But this blending of boundaries is something that can produce anxiety and fear as well as pleasure and comfort, as we see in Antony and Cleopatra.

The image above was published in two emblem books, one in French and one in Latin. The subscriptio in both can be translated as follows:

O son of Angles [English], and offspring of noble ancestors, has, then, a chaste maiden given you the pledge of her hand? Did you know how to win the love of a girl of high-born virtue, so that Juno, patroness of weddings, is binding you as equals, in matrimony? I congratulate you, and I pray all happiness for this fecund beginning. Let conjugal love grow, and let God, through it, make you twins. Let the Author in the sky keep you faithful to your marriage-vows, and let the desired act be celebrated…

It is worthwhile to ask students to think about the discrepancies between the idealizing language ("let the desired act be celebrated") and the language that presents marriage as entrapment ("binding you").  There is an emphasis on sameness here: the married couple will be "twins" to each other, "equals" in matrimony. What is up with the picture depicting this union? Why do they look terrified? Why are they bound with chains? Why is there a snake that winds itself between the two couples? Why would being twins or equals be anything other than a good thing?

This emblem has the following subscriptio:

Let there be a Hermaphrodite of double shape in a single body; and let one face be a woman’s, the other a man’s. Let kisses then be given and taken as if with a twin mouth: which are the shared exchanges of sweet love. Let, on the one side, the Sage say that both are one flesh; but on the other (when they fight), let the satyr laugh that they are two. For the horned Jew commanded that they be two in a single flesh; this body is what the Androgyne expresses. [N.B. ‘the horned Jew’ refers to Moses. This epithet is based on a mistranslation of a Hebrew word and is not meant to be antisemitic.]

Then, let a fruitful TREE stand near, in whose branches many a bird shall sit…

FINALLY in the field far behind, a second scene takes place, a herdsman ploughing with two oxen. He does the equal work of shared labor and a like concern for making wealth grow. This is an apt symbol for well-grounded marriage in a wedding-bed blessed by law.

What does it meant to say that two people in a marriage--or even in love--are like a hermaphrodite? How does the term "hermaphrodite" register in our culture now, and do you think our connotations of the term are the same as they might have been when these emblem books were written and when Shakespeare was writing Antony and Cleopatra?

Myths of Hermaphrodites:

Ovid (a Roman poet) and Francis Beaumont (an early modern English poet and playwright) both have version of this myth, which you could assign for students depending on their grade level and ability. The poets tell the story of the female water nymph Salmachis who suffers unrequited love for the beautiful male hunter named Hermaphroditus. When she dives into the pool where he is swimming, she clasps her arms against his unwilling body and prays to the gods that they will make her embrace of him permanent. They do, and the two bodies fuse into one, both male and female.

Students might not see this myth as a depiction of rape because they are (generally speaking) not used to the ideas that men can be raped and that women can rape men, but they WILL see this myth as depicting a loss of the male's agency and freedom. It make take some coaxing, but get them to identify who's got the power in this story.

Consider the following important question: what does it mean, then, that these emblem books draw on iconography and literary allusions that invoke this particular myth when they are describing marriage and heterosexual love?

I think that this discussion will be useful to pair with Shakespeare's tragedy, especially around the repeated claims (made by the Romans), that Antony, once a phallic "pillar of the world" has lost his masculinity because of his love for Cleopatra.  The threat of hermaphrodism lurks in the play when Caesar says that Antony "is not more man-like / Than Cleopatra; nor the queen of Ptolemy / More womanly than he." In other words, they are equally androgynous. Whereas Cleopatra and Antony seem to find this equality sexy (they even cross-dress in each others clothes), Caesar sees this equality as a sign of Antony's debasement.

My aim in this exercise is to get students to think about how--within the early modern period and the world of this specific play--desire itself could be seen as destabilizing heroic masculinity, even if the object of desire was the "appropriate" female object. 

I mean THIS is what our culture associates with Cleopatra:

So fierce.

I want to emphasize that the 1963 Cleopatra is not just another example of Hollywood sexing up a story. On some level, "Cleopatra" as a cultural idea has become a signifier for sex, passion, and female authority--this cultural work has been literally hundreds of years in the making. Sometimes she's demonized for that (see the "wicked books" that the Wife of Bath's husband reads to her) and sometimes she's praised for that, but she has pretty statically remained a sex symbol since Roman times. 

Antony getting to be with Cleopatra is like Joe DiMaggio getting to be with Marilyn Monroe, or Brad Pitt getting to be with Angelina Jolie.  Cleopatra's pretty much the crème de la crème of women out there, and we could feasibly argue that Antony's ability to win her affection makes him more "manly" and not less. Why, then, does Caesar make the opposite argument?

What I hope that my students will get out of this discussion is the concept that ideas of masculinity and ideas of heterosexuality do not line up universally or naturally.  If those two ideas line up now (so that we think of straight men as "real" men), then we have culturally constructed that association just as much as Caesar has constructed his ideas of masculinity and martial austerity.  According to Caesar, there is only one way to be a "real" man and it is never in the bedroom.

Hopefully, though, seeing the diversity of images from the emblem books will help students to see that this militant austerity is only one conception of masculinity, and a pretty dangerous one at that.  Antony and Cleopatra's love seems like a poignant and courageous protest against the gender norms of Rome, and their deaths seem all the more tragic to me.

Yeah: you're seeing that correctly. That's a man holding his own severed head while he rides a green horse. Medieval romances are just the best. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is so weird and so much fun to teach!

I like to assign the Norton Critical Edition of the poem, which uses Marie Borroff's translation and includes some canonical but accessible critical essays. I reference this edition in the following blog post, including some of the essays in the back.

For more advanced students, it's fine to split the poem up into three days: Fitts I-II, Fitt III, and Fitt IV. For younger or less advanced students, I would spend one day per Fitt.

There are at least three definitions that you will want to go over before diving into the poem. Either these terms refer to concepts that will be foreign to students, or they are middle English words that have "false friends" in modern English:

• Trouth (many alternate spellings): a word to describe the interrelated concepts of loyalty, fidelity, honesty, integrity, the keeping of promises and oaths, and justness and innocence. Related to our modern English words truth and troth, it goes far beyond simply "telling the whole story without any lies."
• Gentilesse: a word to describe both the kindness and goodness that everyday people can practice and also the state of being part of the landed nobility or the "gentils". Its meaning was contested during the time of the writing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (see the Wife of Bath's Tale in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales), but we cannot quite divorce gentleness from gentility in this time period. I have learned from my medievalist friend, Kristen Aldebol, that asking students to think about what it means to call someone a "gentleman" is a good way to get them thinking about how class is still attached to the concept in our modern use of the word "gentle."
  
• Translatio imperii: (Latin for "transfer of rule") originating in the Middle Ages, translatio imperii is a concept for describing history as a linear succession of transfers of an empire. In England, this is manifested in Galfridian historiography (i.e., English history that takes its cues from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae), which argues that Brutus of Troy (son of Aeneas) is the "founder" of Britain. The empire thus transfers from Troy to Britain.
  

I have found that the key into this poem is to focus intensely on imagery. Various symbols are weaved together through this poem, almost like an intricate tapestry, and getting students to read for imagery instead of for plot is a hugely important gain in terms of making the poem engaging and building towards strong student writing in response to the poem.

I ask students to sign up for a motif to trace. Obviously some of these motifs are more exciting and engaging than others, but students really like taking ownership of their own special motif:

Motifs:

I do something similar when I teach Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, but in that text the interwoven motifs work to obscure meaning (suggesting that there is no transcendent truth we can access beyond the text) and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, they arguably create meaning (perhaps suggesting that there is a truth hidden underneath the veil of the text). Whereas the overall effect in Gawain is to make a verbal tapestry, Lot 49  seems more like the textual equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting.  I would love to one day teach these two together, but it would be a tall order to organize that syllabus!

In the blog post below, I will share my reading questions for each Fitt or part of the poem.

What is the significance of the translatio in the opening lines of the poem?  Why might the poet choose to remind the audience of the connection between Arthur, Brutus, and the Trojan refugee Aeneas at the beginning of the narrative? 

Arthur is said to be the "most courteous of all" British Kings (ll. 26). What are the characteristics of his court? His knights? His Queen?

As you read, pay attention to descriptive and narrative details. Why are they included? What do they signify? For example, the narrator describes the knights and ladies at Arthur’s feast as “fair folk in their first age” (54). What does that mean?  Why does he characterize them in this way?  How does the Green Knight reinterpret the “first age” of the courtiers? 

Notice the descriptive details the narrator mentions regarding the Green Knight.  What kind of character is he?

Pay attention to the introduction of the knight Gawain. How does he distinguish himself in the opening scenes? How is he different from the other knights? Does he fulfill a chivalric duty that the other knights neglect? What is his relationship to the ideal of "courtesy"?

Does the Green Knight play by the rules of courtesy? Does he seem like a negative or a positive figure in this section of the poem?

Why do you think the poet spends so much time describing the changing seasons at the beginning of part II?  In a poem about steadfastness, why would the poet be interested in describing change?  How might the changing seasons give insight into Gawain’s mental life?

What is the significance of the Pentangle? Why is it described in such detail (ll. 619-665)? What does it symbolize when taken as a whole?   What is the significance of the series of five fives associated with the pentangle?  Taken collectively, what might they represent? Can the pentangle be seen as a symbol of the chivalric virtues? The pentangle as a whole is called a "token of truth" (see ll. 619-626), the very virtue that is put to the test by the Green Knight. Recall that the Middle English term "trouthe" means more than the modern English word "truth." What promises are made by Gawain in this section of the poem?

The following passage is from Gawain’s vision of the castle in the wilderness: “No sooner had Gawain signed himself thrice: “Than he was ware, in the wood, of a wondrous dwelling, / With a moat, on a mound, bright amid boughs / Of many a tree great of girth that grew by the water– / A castle as comely as a knight could own, / On grounds fair and green, in a goodly park” (763-768).  What is important about this vision of the Lord’s Castle, popping up out of thin air after Gawain prays to God and Mary that he won’t freeze to death?  What about the manifestation of the castle should make Gawain suspicious?  Why doesn’t he seem to notice anything symbolic about it? What do you think the poet intends the reader / audience to know about the Lord’s castle?  Remember that one of the symbolic elements of the pentangle is the 5 senses.  Are Gawain’s senses failing him?  Is this castle like a mirage or a dream?  What evidence do you have?

Gawain is stalwart and strong out in the wilderness, but once he gets inside the castle he has all his armor taken off of him, the wine goes to his head, and he spends an awful amount of time lying in bed.  Is he merely recovering from fatigue or does the poet suggest that he is losing strength because of the castle?  On the pentangle, one of the five points represents Gawain’s five fingers.  What do hands symbolize?  Is Gawain’s possible loss of physical strength related to the five fingers symbolized by the pentangle? How so?

Notice when Gawain prays to Jesus and Mary, calling on them for help, guidance, or aid.  In what part in the narrative does he seem connected to Jesus and Mary?  At what point in the narrative does he seem preoccupied with other things?  How does this develop the symbolism of the pentangle?

Characterize the Lord of the castle in lines ll. 842-849 and in ll. 1079-11-25.  What other character in the poem does he resemble in his physical stature and/or age and in his proclivity for seemingly harmless games?  Why might that be important?

This part of the poem is set up as a complex intertwining of sports/games.  The escalating seduction scenes mirror the hunts of each day and both work together to offer insight into the state of Gawain’s soul.  Each of the three days begins and ends with the violent, fast-paced action of the chase, and embedded at the center of each day is the courtly, bawdy bedroom scene. 

Day 1: What does the Host hunt?  How does he hunt it?  What does the Lady do to Gawain?  Is she the hunter or the hunted?  How is Gawain similar to the animal hunted in the larger context of the poem?

Day 2: What does the Host hunt?  How does he hunt it?  What does the Lady do to Gawain?  How does she escalate the seduction just as the hunt scene escalates the danger of the hunt? How is the animal killed and what happens to its body after the Host kills it? How is Gawain like the animal hunted in the larger context of the poem? 

Day 3: What does the Host hunt?  How does he hunt it?  What are symbolic characteristics of the animal that the Host hunts?  What does the Lady do to Gawain?  How is she behaving like the animal that the Host hunts? How does Gawain behave like the animal that the Host hunts?

One of the things I have done that's been really interesting and helpful in class is to survey the class to ask which hunt they thought was the most difficult and why. I admitted to them that the boar hunt, to my mind, seems more exciting than the fox hunt and that I found the final hunt to be rather anticlimactic (although what's happening with Sir Gawain is obviously more climactic).

We developed the above chart--tracing the intensity of various qualities of the hunts over time--to highlight what is being tested of Lord Bertilak in each hunt. On some level, Gawain is being tested in his own way on all of these levels: his social commitment, his physical strength, and his intelligence. The fact that he "falls" on the day that Lord Bertilak faces the fox seems to indicate that Gawain has failed because of an error of judgment, a corruption of his reason: it is the chink in his armor.  It was also kind of fun to do this because the hunts work as a Rorschach test: each reader can find something intimidating in the three hunts because the poem elicits a fear of failing across multiple modes. I think that this activity ended up helping students to identify with Gawain!

Read ll. 1851-1858, wherein Gawain accepts the Lady’s offer of the magical Green Girdle. This is the crucial moment of the poem that is sometimes compared to the temptation of Adam by Eve. On what levels does Gawain fail and/or “fall” here?  If we think about the poem as a Christian allegory, what does his action (accepting the green girdle) represent? What does it say about him as a human being and as a knight?  How harshly do you think we should or are meant to judge him?

Compare and contrast the knot of the pentangle with the knot of the girdle.

What is the poet’s attitude toward "courtly love”? Which characters represent that tradition? In traditional "courtly love," a knight performs feats of valor for a lady he loves who is generally not his wife. He aspires to win her love by proving his worthiness, chivalric merit, etc. through "love service"--doing her will and trying to help her and be worthy of her regardless of her treatment of him. Does Gawain serve a lady in the poem? If so, whom does he serve? Is there a more "traditional" depiction of the courtly lady? What is the poet's (and Gawain's) attitude toward Lady Bertilak? What does that imply about "courtly love"?

What is the significance of that the Green Chapel is a mound instead of a man-made building? What are things that we associate with mounds?

Gawain is accused for a second time in the poem of being an imposter (ll. 2269-2273).  Compare the Green Knight’s accusation that Gawain is an imposter to Lady Bertilak’s similar claim (ll. 1293-95).  What does it matter than Gawain (the real man) is continuously being compared to his reputation (a social idea of himself)?  Does this comparison have an impact on the poem… (the poet presents the ideal of a chivalrous knight, but then maybe undercuts it by making Gawain seem less like a romance hero—greater in degree to his fellow men—and more like a comic hero—equal in degree to both his fellow men and his environment.)  What is the effect? See the Davenport essay, pp. 141-142.

How is Gawain’s reaction to the Green Knight at the Green Chapel like a confession?  Is it a better confession than the one he gives to the priest in Part III?  Why or why not? Make sure you go over the sacrament of confession with the class.

Close read ll. 2374-2384.  What sins does Gawain confess?  On pp. 149-150 of our text, scholar Ralph Hanna III argues that the sins Gawain identifies don’t make sense in the context of the poem. (See the past paragraph on p. 149 and the first paragraph on p. 150).  In other words, the narrator takes pains to undermine Gawain’s analysis of his own sins.  Do you agree with Gawain that these are his chief sins?

Close read ll. 2374-2384.  What sins does Gawain confess?  Some of these sins are really the same (i.e., greed and coveting are basically the same thing).  Group the sins into categories.  With these categories in mind, go back to three temptation scenes with Lady Bertilak.  Does she only tempt Gawain with lust, or does she tempt to sin along the lines he mentions.  How much should we seriously consider his argument than women are behind all of men’s sins?

In an essay in the back of our critical edition—“Unlocking What’s Locked: Gawain’s Green Girdle”—literary scholar Ralph Hanna III argues that there are at least 4 contradictory ways that the characters within the text define the symbolic significance of the green girdle.  How does Lady Bertilak construct the meaning of the girdle (1851-1854)?  How does Gawain construct the meaning of the girdle (2439-2438)?  How does the Green Knight construct the meaning of the girdle (2395-2399)?  How does the Arthurian court construct the meaning of the girdle (2513-2518)?

Who are the women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? Most critics agree that there are four: Guenevere, Mary, Lady Bertilak, and Morgan le Fay.  To what extent do they play similar roles? How do they differ? What is the function of each? What can you conclude (if anything) about the depiction of women in the poem? Is it essentially positive, negative, neutral, mixed? Are they idealized, realistically portrayed, caricatures, ciphers?  Are they marginal or central to the main conflict of the poem?

At the end of the poem, the Green Knight declares that Gawain is the best of all Arthurian knights; this opinion is shared by the Arthurian court but not by Gawain. Why does he think so? Why does Gawain disagree? Does the court’s failure to understand the significance of Gawain’s experience change our opinion of the people at the court?  Is Gawain a savior figure for the Arthurian court?

Why might the poet choose to remind the audience of the connection between Arthur, Brutus, and the Trojan refugee Aeneas at the end of the narrative?  In the light of these translatio reference here and at the beginning of the poem, what do you make of the French motto “Honi Soit Qui Mal Pense” found at the end of the poem?  The some translates this line, “Shame be to the man who has evil in his heart”; an equally plausible rendering is “shame on whoever thinks ill [of him/it].”  How can this motto be connected to the themes of the poem as a whole or to the translatio references which frame the narrative itself?

I like to close our discussion of the book by reading students the following passage, a quote from Jack Slezer in his essay in the MLA’s volume Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

This is a really great passage to consider for the closing discussion. Students often have a lot of sympathy for Gawain, and they see his decision to take the magical girdle as smart instead of sinful.  Although they may disagree with the idea that magical self-preservation is selfish, this idea helps them to conceptualize why it is possible to understand Gawain's decision as a failure that requires forgiveness.

I love teaching this excellent short story by Alice Walker, and I have to say that researching images of quilts to use for this blog post has been a great experience for me. Walker's 1973 short story seems almost prophetic to me now, anticipating the ways that these "use objects" from the past have increasingly become aesthetic objects for preservation, decoration, and contemplation.

Quilting blogs cite Walker's story in praise (which is appropriate since these online communities connect the people who want to preserve this skill rather than the commodity it produces); moreover, quilts are increasingly put in museums as historical object and discussed in artistic communities as aesthetic objects.

For example, this breath-taking quilt (a variation on the "Lone Star" pattern that Walker mentions specifically in her short story) is housed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, our nation's premier history museum (click on the image to see the even higher quality images in the museum's online catalog).

On the one hand, I think that the urge to preserve quilts is understandable and correct; they really do connect us to the past in a tangible way, as Mama notes in Walker's story: "In both of [the quilts] were scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty and more years ago.  Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell’s Paisley shirts.  And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra’s uniform that he wore in the Civil War."  Dee/Wangero's sense that these quilts are worth saving because the specific pieces of cloth used in them give her a tangible connection to the past is not a wholly incorrect way to negotiate her relationship to her ancestors.

On the other hand, however, putting quilts in museums runs directly counter to the decision that Mama makes in the short story when she chooses to give her quilt to Maggie (who will use the quilt) instead of Dee/Wangero (who will hang it on the wall).  In this story, Walker suggests that one's relationship with the past is better negotiated through lived experience than through fetishized objects.

In the following blog post, I will both present my past strategies for teaching "Everyday Use" and also offer some new suggestions, incorporating research of various kinds.

Mama's Perception of herself:

• Is Mama always a reliable narrator?  How does she go back and forth from seeing herself through her own eyes and seeing herself through Dee’s eyes?
• Compare and contrast Maggie and Dee, and then consider how Mama positions herself between her two daughters over the course of the story.
  

Mama's Perception of Maggie:

• Mama says, “Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eyeing her sister with a mixture of envy and awe."  Is this what Maggie actually does?
• Mama says, “I hear Maggie suck in her breath. ‘Uhnnnh,’ is what it sounds like. Like when you see the wriggling end of a snake just in front of your foot on the road. ‘Uhnnnh.'"  How does Mama seem to interpret Maggie’s grunt?  What are other ways to interpret this sound?
•  Why does Mama want to see Maggie as afraid of Dee?

Tense shifts:

• Notice the verbs in this passage.  What happens?  What impact does that shift have?  What does Walker (or Mama) gain by that shift? Does, perhaps, present-tense narration seem to be a more passive indication of the narrator's immediate observations, whereas past-tense narration offers more of a sense that the narrator is actively shaping the events that she wants to tell into a story? Does it create a distance between Mama and Dee/Wangero?

Speech in "Everyday Use":

Compare and contrast these depictions of speech, action, and silence.  Who talks, and to what effect?  How do Mama and Maggie find their voices when speech is poisoned through Dee’s influence?

I will attempt to present alternatives for targeting student research projects toward a variety of grade levels.

Literary and historical research:

For older students: David Cowart's essay "Heritage and Deracination in Walker's "Everyday Use" (first published in Studies in Short Fiction 33 [1996]: 171-84, and then reprinted in Critical Essays on Alice Walker, ed. Ikena Dieke [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999], 23-32) would be an excellent essay for the presentation assignment.

For younger students: Cowart's basic thesis--that Walker is critiquing certain elements of the rhetoric of 1960s black consciousness (specifically how superficial people are co-opting the radical aims of the movement to fashion a flashy but phony to "African" identity, which in turn undermines the movement's real and worthwhile goal to empower African-Americans)--is a thesis that can be explained by putting certain images or allusions of the short story into context.   David White's essay "'Everyday Use': Defining African-American Heritage" makes a very similar argument in much simpler language for younger or less advanced students.

Either of the essays above could be a springboard into research into the civil rights movement, specifically, the Long, Hot Summer of 1967, the rise of an Islamic alternative to Christianity for African-Americans, Black nationalism and Afrocentrism, and even W.E.B. Dubois' defection to Africa in 1961.  Dee fancies herself to be Angela Davis, but she alienates her family and isolates herself from the "heritage" that she claims to know and love so much.

In either case, students would read the literary essay and then research some of the historical figures and events mentioned in relationship to the civil rights movement. How does Walker present Dee/Wangero as superficial version of black consciousness and to what effect? How does that help to explain Mama's choice?

Imagining an alternate ending:

The second research route into the short story would be through the long(-ish) lens of history since the short story was written. As I mentioned in the lede to this post, African American quilts have become sought-after objets d'art that sell for upwards of $20,000 and hang in museums all over the country.

When the beautiful quilts made by the women of Gee's Bend, Alabama arrived at the Whitney Museum in New York, they were greeted with ecstatic praise by the art community.  Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times wrote:

Another exhibition of the quilts, this time at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, was also highly praised in the Smithsonian.  Neal Conan dedicated an edition of NPR's Talk of the Nation to showcasing the Whitney exhibit and the quilters, a broadcast that I have also embedded below. A playwright-in-residence of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder, even wrote a play--Gee's Bend--about the quilters, a play that has been performed at venues all around the country.

Now, all this effusive praise is indeed merited. The quilts really are shockingly beautiful:

University of Auburn has a webpage where you can view additional quilts, and Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregan has a collection of quilts for sale.

The fact that there is a price tag attached to the quilts drives home the idea that's implicit in Walker's short story: hanging the quilts on the hall instead of using them turns the quilts into a commodity instead of preserving the practice of making them.

One of the conversations, however, that emerges from this discussion is that younger generations (in Gee's Bend in particular) are newly motivated to learn the practice, and that the exposure that the women are getting now might contribute to a revival of the quilt-making tradition.

Another benefit of turning the quilts into aesthetic objects is to turn people's attention to these women as artists who matter. For example, the State of Alabama commissioned a series of interviews with the quilters to promote the "Year of Alabama Arts." I posted only one of the interviews below, but you can watch the whole playlist here.

The sense of pride that these women take in the fact that their work is respected and admired is both heartwarming and poignant.

An alternate research assignment would be to have students learn about the Gee's Bend quilters through the various links I've provided above and through their own independent research. Then ask students to write about how their research has affected their reading of Walker's short story either through expository writing or through a creative assignment such as revising the ending to the story or telling the story through Wangero's point of view. For ideas about incorporating creative writing into the classroom, see Erin Breaux's post Creative Writing in the Literature Classroom.