Susan Glaspell's one-act play is a fantastic play to teach. It's not only short, so you don't have to devote a huge chunk of your syllabus to it, but also rich with symbolism and provocative in its assertions about justice and gender. Students usually end up have so much to say about the play.

Before I dive into anything, I want to share a heart warming anecdote from my experience teaching this play. After the final exam, one of my male students hung back to talk to me as I was collecting the exams and saying goodbye. He had a story that he wanted to tell me that he had been too embarrassed to share up until that moment. 

When he was studying for the exam, some friends of his drove to Davis from San Francisco to surprise him. He told them that he couldn't really hang out because he was studying for his English final, so they inquired about the material. When he told them that he was reviewing a play, they proposed that they act out the play together to help him study. So, they had a few beers together, and proceeded to stage an impromptu, private performance of Trifles.

If that wasn't adorably dorky enough--apparently, they got REALLY into it, and by the end of the play, all three boys were in tears thinking about poor Mrs. Wright and what she must have been going through to have gotten to the point where she snapped and killed her abusive husband. They were so worried about her and whether she would have to face consequences that her husband would never have had to face.

!!!!!

How amazing is it that three young men (hopefully all 21 by this time since they were probably also pretty drunk) spent their weekend together bonding over Trifles and thinking deeply about the ways that the justice system can be skewed toward the people who are already in power? God, being a teacher is the best job ever. That student, by the way, aced his final exam.

Onward to teaching strategies!
So this is another installment of "My Smart Friends," because I have lots of ideas to share with you that come from my friend Tiffany Gilmore, who is a general bad-ass. She is wicked-smart, hilarious, and generous; and she runs the full gamut between irreverently dirty-minded and pristinely proper--the type of lady who could make men blush at a hockey game and then turn around and whip up pistachio macarons that cause Martha Stewart to feel a deep sense of shame because she's been doing wrong all these years.

The image above is one that Tiffany recommend to me, which you can find on the website for the Susan Glaspell Society. That site, by the way, is a treasure for information about Glaspell and criticism on her works. The photograph is from the first performance of the play, and Tiffany uses it as a spring board into discussion about the play itself. Here's what she has to say about the activity:

Tiffany also has a paper prompt that puts Trifles in dialogue with Williams' The Glass Menagerie, which I will share in a future post.

Tiffany recommends also starting with an in-class writing prompt for the first 10 minutes of class: are the women justified in hiding their findings from the men, why or why not? This generates a really good discussion on justice, versus morality etc. 

Both Tiffany and I have had the experience that each term some students are adamant that withholding information is absolutely illegal because someone was murdered and some think that--while not exactly legal-- it is at least understandable because Mrs. Wright was at the very least emotionally abused, and her alibi is so weak, that she will probably be found guilty anyway.

I like to hold a mock trial for Mrs. Wright, using as "evidence" passages from the play itself--this is good for their papers because students start gathering textual evidence immediately. I divide the classroom into two: a prosecution side that argues for the charge of first degree murder with a death penalty sentence and a defense side that can either argue for innocence ("not guilty by reason of insanity") or for a lesser crime like manslaughter. I usually act as judge, but it could be cool to assign an actual jury in the classroom along with a student judge.

My activity differs from Tiffany's because she's asking students to judge Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale whereas I am asking students to judge Mrs. Wright. We might then go to the next logical step and ask students to consider if there is anyone or anything else that we could or perhaps should be judging. Who or what is really on trial in this play?

I really enjoy reading Tennessee Williams' plays, but I have only taught The Glass Menagerie. It's a great play for teaching close reading, especially if you are interested in exploring the concept of symbols with your students.

Here are the basic questions that I ask students to consider:

On symbols:
Part of how Williams develops his characters is through the things that they say and do (including the things that people say about them), and part of how he develops his characters is through symbolism.  Certain concrete items in the play become invested with meaning because of how the characters talk about them. 

Consider the following symbols in relation to each character. Look at the various symbols and discuss how these items in the play reinforce, qualify, or nuance what we know about the character through dialogue and/or stage directions.

Laura: the glass unicorn in her menagerie, the blue roses, birds, and the Victrola (a type of phonograph where the speaker is hidden inside a piece of furniture). 

Amanda: the Old South, jonquils (a type of flower in the narcissus family that looks like a daffodil), and Mary (the mother of Jesus). 

Tom: the magician (he compares himself to one and he tells Laura about the show of Malvolio the magician), the fire escape, the Jolly Roger (the flag on a pirate ship), the movies, and Shakespeare.

On the reliability of the "narrator":
Tom opens and closes the play with soliloquies at the same time that a scrim drops down and completes the fourth wall to the Wingfield apartment. He also calls himself the “narrator” of the play and tells us that this is a memory (i.e., that this is his memory).  To some extent everything we see is supposed to be biased because it is filtered to us through Tom’s memory.  Look at his soliloquies. What is he saying?  How are we supposed to understand his escape at the end: necessary to save his life, completely selfish, or something else in between?

This last question is the big one that students enjoy talking about. To some extent, students will either sympathize with or judge Tom depending on how they read the character of his mother, Amanda.

Amanda Wingfield is a divisive character, and I have found that it is useful for students to realize that their reading of her might not have been at all like their classmates. To this end, I have found it incredibly useful to bring in images from Al Hirschfeld's illustrations of various actresses who have performed the role of Amanda in stage productions of the play. The Historic New Orleans Collection (which houses the Williams Research Center) has collected an amazing book entitled Drawn to Life: Al Hirschfeld and the Theater of Tennessee Williams. (You can buy the book here.)

All of the images below are from the book, where you can also find a treasure of Hirschfeld's illustrations for all of Williams' plays if you are interested.

Katherine Hepburn in the image above looks so creepy--her beady eyes and skeletal face come across as Havisham-esque. In contrast, Maureen Stapleton looks so warm and grandmotherly. Jessica Tandy comes across as proud and disdainful, whereas Linda Harris looks intelligent and even a bit amused, perhaps. In each case, the way we think about the significance of Tom's "escape" changes when we consider whom he's leaving.

I ask students to think about what qualities of Amanda are captured in the performances of these various actresses, to consider how a casting director might want to emphasize one reading of Amanda through a particular actress, or how Hirschfeld may have emphasized various qualities of Amanda through his portraits. I ask them to look for lines that support the various interpretations of her character, and then to consider whom they would cast to play Amanda if they were in charge of casting a play.

This has been another installment of "My Smart Friends." My approach to teaching the play was shaped by my best friend, ironically named Amanda, who works at The Historic New Orleans Collection, and who introduced me to this marvelous teaching aid. Thanks, Amanda! Y'all should go visit The Collection if you're in NOLA.

I will be teaching Thomas Pynchon's novel about Oedipa Maas and her labyrinthine quest for the first time, starting tomorrow. I am excited to be talking about this book with my class, because the semester has been slowly traversing through literary history, paying special attention to the idea of the sublime and its permutation in Joyce's modernist thought as an "epiphany." (We've been thinking about epiphany a lot in relation to Mrs. Dalloway).

In a lecture leading up to our class discussion, I've asked my students to think about what might constitute sublimity in a postmodern world. I introduce them to some very basic structural linguistics (Saussure) and then ask them to think about how the idea of the sublime would change if we think of language as a closed system of signs that never points to a referent in the "real" material world (or the eternal, spiritual world for that matter!).

We consider the notion that "there is nothing outside of the text" (Derrida) and whether that would lead inevitably to nihilism and relativism or possibly to freedom and then play in signification. I offer that, perhaps, this playful irrationality might be a way to conceptualize the postmodern sublime.

The Crying of Lot 49 is self-consciously a book about signs: Oedipa's central quest can be understood as an attempt to understand the signs around her—books, words, letters, couriers, stamps, names. All of these are self-evident signifiers. But what do they signify? Is there any referent to which they point, either something in the material world or another signifier, another sign?  How could either of these options be explained or described in terms of the story or the plot? What would it mean for our understanding of The Crying of Lot 49 to say that the signs point to a referent in the world or that they resonate playfully among other signifiers?

Moving students from a passive lecture to an active class discussion:

Now, all of that is, I guess, pretty complicated literary theory. I certainly didn't read Derrida in high school or even early college. So how to get students to engage with these ideas? What are some practical applications for the classroom?

I asked one of my colleagues at the OHS--Kristina Zarlengo--for her recommendations, and she had a wonderful idea. Kristina is returning to (alt?)-academia after a career in law; she's a phenomenal teacher, and she has boss style too. [True story, she mixes Jackie-O and punk aesthetics, and I love it.]

Following Kristina's advice, I ask my students to sign up to be responsible for tracing one of the following symbols, signs, or motifs. This is great because it puts them into the role of being a literary detective, much like Oedipa herself.

Here are the motifs:

• The muted horn

• Stamps, letters, mail, mail couriers, etc.
• Bones in a lake or corpses in the water
• Books and textual variants
• Names of people, places, and organizations
• Visual arts, such as the painting by Remedios Varo
• Printed circuit cards, maps, hieroglyphs, highway systems
• Any instance of the following words: revelation, belief, redemption, truth
• Any instance of the following words: paranoid, sensitization, plot
• Actors of various kinds: movie stars, lawyers, singers who have stage personas, etc.
• Signs, placards, posters, advertisements, notes
• Attempted seductions of Oedipa
• Science and pseudoscience: esp. entropy and Maxwell’s demon
• The incident with the can of hairspray
• Drugs and alcohol
• Shadowy assassins in black
• Metaphors and “embodied” language: discussions of giving spirit or life to the “dead” flesh of the letter or the word

In class we talk about signs: I will ask my students to consider how their motif functions as a sign for something. What does it mean for Oedipa if the sign points to something real? What does it mean for Oedipa if the sign doesn't point to something real?

It's also worth noting that some of these things that students trace are real (by which I mean that Pynchon refers to historical events, people, groups, or concepts) and others are fictional. For example, Thurn and Taxis was a real mail carrier and Maxwell's Demon is a real idea, but The Courrier's Tragedy is a pastiche of every revenge tragedy ever written (but especially those of Ford, Tourneur, and Webster).

Wikipedia is actually a super useful site for teaching this text, because there's a similar sense of the information being unreliable: perhaps the research my students will do will feel "real" to them, and perhaps they'll think I am pulling off an elaborate hoax (which is something that Oedipa worries about herself). As long as they walk away thinking about that indeterminacy then I will be happy.