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Teaching Elizabeth Bishop's Poetry in Context

5/27/2014

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Elizabeth Bishop, © Joseph Breitenbach
This spring, I inherited a syllabus that had been hodge-podged together from several of my colleagues at the OHS over the years, and while some of the texts didn't work together anymore after so many years of Frankenstein-ing the syllabus, one really productive grouping was Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, and several poems by Elizabeth Bishop: "In the Waiting Room," "The Filling Station," and "The Moose."

The thread that tied these texts together was James Joyce's modernist notion of the epiphany, an aesthetic philosophy that he develops in Stephen Hero.
The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance.

--James Joyce, Stephen Hero (1944)
Joyce outlines a three-step process of an "epiphany," a secularized moment of inspiration that borrows the language of religious revelation.
  1. The object is understood as a discrete entity that stands apart from the rest of the universe. Its integrity or wholeness becomes an object of meditation.
  2. The object is understood as being perfect in its own kind. Its symmetry and beauty are considered.
  3. The object's "soul" leaps out to the observer. It offers the viewer an epiphany in its radiance.
Now this discussion of objects and their "souls" works really well in two ways: 1) it creates a cohesion for all the modernists texts I've indicated above, and 2) it works really well as a point of contrast  later in the semester for developing a working definition for postmodernism, which is a concept that is legitimately hard to define. (I have discuss this before in my post on Pynchon).

It's also useful to contrast the model of "epiphany" to what Carter-Bresson calls the "decisive moment" in photography:
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment (1952)
Although Cartier-Bresson and Joyce differ in the way that they are talking about the gaze (is it mediated through the artist, or is it experienced directly by the reader/viewer?) they align in their conception that suspended moments of time communicate real meaning or significance.
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Henri Carter-Bresson, Rue Mouffetard (1958)
Cartier-Bresson is considered the "father of street photography" and he is a major influence in both photojournalism and photography as an art form. You can browse through a wide array of his photographs at the Magnum Photography website.

We can see this idea of the revelatory instant--whether its an epiphany or a decisive moment--at work in Woolf's novel in many ways: Clarissa shopping at Bond Street, Septimus waking up from his hallucinations to find Rezia making a hat, Peter looking at Clarissa and feeling excited and comforted that Clarissa simply exists just so, etc.
She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.

Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.

--Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway


In the passage above, Clarissa takes comfort in the material objects around her. They ground her and make her feel suddenly less invisible. They pique her interest and then make her feel that both she and they are real and have meaning. I like to have my students compare and contrast some of the major moments of epiphany in the book.

The epiphany is apparent also in Bishop's three poems.
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Martin and Osa Johnson, c. 1940
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Mursi tribe Woman Reading Vogue Magazine - Omo Valley Ethiopia, © Eric Lafforgue
In the first of the poems, "In the Waiting Room," a child narrator comes to a sudden realization about identity through meditating on a National Geographic magazine while she waits for her aunt in the eponymous waiting room. This poem raises many questions about individual and group identity. It also establishes a complicated temporal shift: the writer reflects back on a moment in her childhood, but the speaker (a child) looks forward in terror to what it will mean to grow up and lose her individual identity through affiliation with other groups: age, familial, gender, cultural, etc.

In the second poem, "The Filling Station," a narrator meditates on the material objects of a family-run gas station shifting her perspective so that she stops thinking of the place as a "dirty" place of business and begins thinking of it as a home where people live and love.  There is a wonderful recording of Bishop reading her poem at this website. In her recitation, Bishop calls attention to a central question in her poem: does the narrator show a lazy sense of complacency, or is this a profound moment of empathy and connection across class boundaries?

In the third poem, "The Moose," a narrator moves from a hazy-dreamlike state into a sudden shock of reality when her bus trip through New Brunswick is interrupted by a moose crossing out of the fog into the street. This one is harder than the others because the moose itself is a complicated symbol in the poem: she is ugly and smells bad, but she somehow makes all the passengers on the bus feel a sudden sensation of joy.
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A photograph of a female Moose in Denali National Park and Preserve © Derek Ramsey 2006
In each case, I ask my students to consider how the poem both depicts an epiphany, according to Joyce's definition, and offers the reader his or her own epiphany.  In more advanced classes, I might ask my students to then consider the frame of mediation that Cartier-Bresson proposes in his definition of the "decisive moment."

The decisive moment differs from the epiphany in that the important gaze comes from the perspective of the photographer and not from our perspective as viewers. In other words, the image is “decisive” because Cartier-Bresson has decided to mediate it or frame it just so for his viewers. As such, it tells us just as much about Cartier-Bresson’s artistic subjectivity as it tells us about the “real” world. The image may cause us to have an epiphany, but it also expresses something about the world that Cartier-Bresson wants us to see. We could investigate Bishop's poems (or, indeed, Woolf's novel) from this perspective as well.

The following are my paper prompts for their paper related to these texts:
  1. Compare and contrast the “decisive moment” in one of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs to the moment of falling in Bishop’s poem “In the Waiting Room.” Think about how formal elements of the image and the poem structure a moment in time. What kind of philosophy of subjectivity emerges from Bishop’s poem, and does Cartier-Bresson suggest a similar philosophy in his photograph? How do you know and why does it matter?
  2. Compare and contrast Mrs. Dalloway’s contemplation of Septimus’ suicide with the speaker’s contemplation of the family who lives about the gas station in “The Filling Station.” How does meditating on another person’s suffering help these characters to think about their own sense of self? What kind of philosophy of subjectivity does that suggest?
  3. Compare and contrast the moose in Bishop’s “The Moose” to something that Oedipa finds during her quest in The Crying of Lot 49. Do these textual moments subvert the “modernist sublimity” that we talked about in relation to the concept of the epiphany? Why or why not?
  4. Consider one of the suspended instants in Mrs. Dalloway that we’ve talked about in relation to the “thusness” of a thing and compare it to a comparable moment in The Crying of Lot 49. For example, Oedipa ponders several kinds of objects such as stamps, obscure textual variants of the fictional Jacobean tragedy The Courier’s Tragedy, and pseudoscientific objects related to entropy and demons, etc. What different kinds of philosophies about subjectivity emerge in the modern and the post-modern texts as a result of a character’s meditation on these material objects?

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Strategies for Teaching Mrs. Dalloway

4/27/2014

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I taught Virgina Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway for the first time this past semester. I love Woolf, but she falls pretty far out of my field of specialty, so I had some anxiety about how to teach this beautiful but challenging book. 

I turned to my very smart friends on Facebook asking for advice, and here is what I got. (True story, the response I got to this post on Facebook was the inspiration for my blog. I first envisioned this blog as being called "My Smart Friends." So many people have commented to me that they love my pedagogy posts on Facebook because they draw ideas from so many smart teachers! I thought that it would be nice to have a more permanent place to keep these crowd-sourced ideas but I also wanted to contribute my own ideas as well because I love this gig, and I have perhaps too much to say about it).

The first set of advice comes from my lovely friend Gretchen Braun, who is an assistant professor at Furman University, a Victorianist, and a general bad ass with a totally sick muscle car.

Here is her advice:
I frame discussions of it around the impact of WWI and resistance to both Victorian culture and Victorian narrative conventions. My students have read Wuthering Heights first, so we get some mileage out of comparing Clarissa's choice between Richard and Peter to Cathy's choice between Edgar and Heathcliff (thinking about how this novel explodes the two-suitors marriage plot and figures it retrospectively). We also talk about Septimus in relation to changing paradigms of mental health and illness in the early twentieth century. 

On Septimus and mental health

I talk about how nineteenth-century understandings of nervous disorders like neurasthenia (symptomology we would now associate with depression) totally failed in explaining and treating shell shock. Holmes and Bradshaw are following the "rest cure" approach to Septimus, and obviously, it's exactly what he does not need.  See historian Janet Oppenheim's Shattered Nerves for information on nervous disorder/depression treatments in Victorian/Edwardian England. See also Cathy Caruth's theories of trauma and narration and talk about WWI as the beginning of modern trauma studies. 

On the two-marriage plot:

Jean Kennard's Victims of Convention (there's an article and a book by that name) is an oldie but goodie. She outlines how the traditional female Bildungsroman requires a female protagonist to choose between two suitors who represent different cultural values. In choosing the "right" suitor she accepts his values, but loses her autonomy. Kennard talks about how this limits the kinds of female experiences the traditional novel can tell; obviously, it excludes maternity. Clarissa's story references the two suitors convention but insists that a woman remains fluid, interesting, and complicated after she has "chosen." And then of course there's all the interesting same-sex desire stuff in that book. Sharon Marcus's Between Women is an interesting lens for looking at Clarissa and Sally in their youth.
Dr. Braun's approach to teaching Mrs. Dalloway is super accessible to students, because in our current moment there are so many love-triangle narratives associated with Young Adult fiction, particularly when the protagonist is female. The two most popular are Twilight and The Hunger Games, but students usually can think of many, many more of the top of their heads.  The convention of being TEAM X or TEAM Y is super familiar to them, but that really doesn't work very well in this novel at all, in part because Clarissa is already married, but also because of her memories of Sally Seton complicate everything. My students initially try to start up factions for TEAM RICHARD and TEAM PETER, but inevitably those factions just sort of die away, because Clarissa is marked by fluidity and change rather than stasis:
She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fräulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that… Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. (200)
I got a second piece of excellent advice from another friend of mine, Mindi McMann, professor at the College of New Jersey. Dr. McMann is a postcolonial scholar, a connoisseuse of fine alcohol, and an absolute fanatic for her two adorable cats, Finn and Fergus.

Here is her advice:
I'd second Gretchen's advice, but also point you in the direction of empire and imperialism. London itself is a character in the novel, and it's important to consider the urban space, and in particular the way that space is mostly limited to Westminster. It's the metropolitan center and focused even more on the state apparatus/government. Peter's recent return from India of course feeds right into this reading. Big Ben is the masculine time of governance and empire (and St. Margaret's, always two minutes behind is, at least in Peter's mind, feminine time).
The recurring motif of ticking and chiming clocks is almost overwhelming in the novel. I bring in Monet's series of oil paintings of Westminster, painted to represent different times of the day, and ask students to think about these images in relation to Mrs. Dalloway.
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There are many more paintings in this Houses of Parliament Series.
What is Monet doing with these images? How might the impressionistic style do something similar to Woolf's stream-of-consciousness narration in Mrs. Dalloway? Why does Westminster merit such extended representation in visual art and in Woolf's narrative--what makes it "important" to these artists? Why is time so important in both of these representations of London?
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    Claire Dawkins

    English Instructor at Stanford's Online High School

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