Problematic literary texts

[kickassangel]

I have no real answers or even a point to make, just commenting on a situation I encounter, and would like to hear comments.

I teach English, and one of the texts I do is The Aeneid. This is such a patriarchal text that we obviously have to discuss the complete blanking of women from Virgil's history. The idea that Aeneas would found an entire nation without women on the ships is ridiculous.

So we discuss that, and it generally goes quite well with the students laughing about this and sometimes they even notice for themselves that women aren't mentioned.

I have also recently been doing The Taming of the Shrew.

So I'm just wondering how much other people noticed and discuss these things, what other texts you struggle with etc. I can't exactly ignore all patriarchal texts as it's my job to educate teens about literature past and present.

Gonna post and run now but I wanted to get this thread started for the eve crowd.

I tend to struggle more with writers when I have a problem with their lives IFYSWIM. Ted Hughes is difficult. F Scott Fitzgerald I have just lost respect for having read he mined his wife's life for his own career (and prevented her publishing her own stories about herself). Hemingway is just like a big testosterone soak, repellingly male outlook, I can't explain why though!
Bleak House is one of my most favourite book's ever but Esther ffs...

A writer I love is Iris Murdoch because she seems to be truly nongendered in her creation of character. both male and female - they exist in their own right and without any sense of authorial intrusion. jaw dropping.
Angela Carter is almost the opposite - equally nongendered but like she turned the opposite direction and saw the entire universe rather than just the other pole of a planet - she seems to have really got what the opposite of patriarchy might be.

I find John Fowles negative in this way.

Which Angela Carter would you recommend to start, oma

Brilliant thread, I am interested too.

I've taught medieval literature and run into the same issues.

I agree with you that it's harder to cope with dubious authors than dubious texts.

I have set some quite deliberately feminist crit, but I'm lucky that the course I taught was designed by one of the well-known feminist scholars, so she'd written a lot of the feminist crit too.

It's tricky with Taming of the Shrew, because something I actually have a bit more of an issue with is the performances where they make out it's all a big game between Katharine and Petruccio and there's loads of nudge-nudge, and Bianca is made out to be some spineless little goodie-goodie. I've never seen it portrayed in a way that doesn't implicitly and explicitly pit the women against each other, and I think I almost find that nastier than Petruccio and Baptista's attitudes.

And something I'm finding I'm really wary of is implying that modern-day literature and gender relations are inherently absolutely equal, too.

I don't know if this is a good idea or not - but I reckon students notice a lot from the language I use. So if I'm conscientiously avoiding misogynistic language and even using bits of deliberate feminist jargon, they picked up on it. OTOH the payoff is that I'm sure some of them were eye-rolling about it.

ooh Doctrine... nights at the circus is a heart warmer, fantastical wild romantic wonderful historical novel; passion of new eve is your one for amazingly imaginative gender deconstruction wrapped as a kind of end of days scifi. I also love her retellings of fairy tales (name escapes me) if you fancy a drop-in-outer.

Please god don't read her commentary on de Sade unless you have a very strong stomach and ability to remove images from your memory . She was a genuinely unafraid adventurer of gender and literature and there I could not follow her.

Ooh, off to google some of those now.

I also teach Richard III and Things Fall Apart. I have to work alongside the social studies curriculum so need to stick to Ancient Rome, British monarchy and African colonialism.

Actually I may need to change from Things Fall Part, so if anyone knows of a novel about that topic with a strong female character, I would love to know. Has to be appropriate for 12 year olds.

I agree about the life of someone. Eg I find Morissey incredibly problematic, some of his lyrics as so cool, but he's such a wanker in so many ways.

LRD I thought you were likely to come on this thread.

Interesting thread. Back when I was studying English at uni I chose an option that looked at 18th century novels from a feminist perspective - my introduction to this issue. I couldn't read anything else after that without considering it from a feminist viewpoint. It was difficult to read Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina without thinking that with less rigid social barriers and more opportunity their stories would have been very different, and just maybe happier. I got into a bit of trouble with one of the other lecturers for questioning whether their stories were really about transgressing moral boundaries, or social ones. Who sinned more, them or those around them? Did they need to repent, or did society need to change and become less judgemental?

I've been reading Adam Bede and there's one character in there that goes on a misogynistic rant that is very difficult for a modern reader to stomach. I'm wondering how shocking it would be to a Victorian readership. Not very, I suspect. Kind of like Alf Garnett in my childhood - horrendous views, but everyone just laughed at him in a kind of I-know-someone-like this way...

I have never got the end of Jane Eyre. Did Bronte somehow think she had to add that strange saintly comment about Jane's cousin onto the end?? nothing about it fits with the celebration and joy of Jane and Rochester finally being together. But it doesn't read right ironically either. Is it like a wink to the 'advertisers' kind of thing?

Of Mice and Men, which I teach every year is very interesting and problematic when it comes to victim-blaming. The murdered woman is so clearly blamed for what happens to her and 15 year-olds rarely feel sympathy for her. East of Eden, which I love, it's a fascinating read, has a very frightening female character which makes me suspect Steinbecks misogyny was not just a reflection of the time, but his own.
Wise Children is Angela Carter's best IMO, so funny and evocative but Nights at the Circus also good and The Bloody Chamber is short stories, so that could break you in gently.

I used to teach OMAM and always made sure that we covered Curley's wife. There's actually a lot to be said about her. I usually got them to feel quite sorry for her, after all, who wants to be married to Curley?

Ooh, I have just discovered forbookssake.net.

There's an article about a book on Zelda Fitzgerld that is interesting.

I think that a certain amount of the problems you talk about with the Aeneid are a result of 1) the norms of classical epic as a genre, particularly the Homeric epics that the Aeneid draws so heavily on; and 2) its status as political/national poem, so to a very great extent concerned with bigging up and providing a mythos for (or perhaps subverting) the Augustan regime.

To me the Aeneid feels so artificial that I find it very hard at all to read or analyse it in the same way I would any other text ... I don't know what it is but there is something qualitatively different from all other classical poetry about it.

Apparently Ursula LeGuin has written a novel from Lavinia's pov but I haven't read it so I don't know what it's like.

Perhaps I'm being very ignorant but why would you teach the Aeneid in an English class? We never did any literature in translation in English Literature when I was at school.

I have to follow what the social studies teacher does. She's been there forever used to teach English, so I have continued with the texts she did. It's a small private school and the parents are very vocal, they luuurve the whole 'my child studied The Aeneid when they were only 5 months old' crapola.

Anyway I have to do something from Ancient Rome. Also, texts in translation have been part of the national curriculum for ages, so I'm ok with that, and we do a lot about the development and use of language etc as well.

But yes, I find Dido problematic. And if they're lauding the greatness of Roman history, why not exalt the women as well? You don't want all those emperors/gods to have weak mothers, do you?

Totally patriarchal society -> totally patriarchal national epic, I think. I don't think we should let the fact that Roman society seems in some ways to have been better for women than other ancient societies blind us to the fact that it was still a completely patriarchal system. The women just didn't count.

The Aeneid was my set book in translation (just Book IV, AFAIR) at A-level. I am still haunted by the exam, nearly a quarter century on. There was a question comparing Dido at Catharge (Virgil) with Ariadne on Naxos (Catullus) after their respective love interests buggered off. I remember I ranted on at some length about Dido having a whole city to run, and she was wasting time on some bloke who wasn't even there any more, whereas Ariadne had nothing but a beach, so it was a bit more understandable that she was moping around after Theseus.

It wasn't my greatest academic triumph, in all fairness.

I know that women only counted as belongings, but they list some of the goods that they have ffs, they could at least mention the women other than the one time that they nearly ruin everything by setting the ship on fire. Can you imagine what it must have been like, to spend years on a boat? Giving birth and raising kids there etc. I know it's fictional, but some women did live in those circumstances. Makes me shudder to think what life used to be like.

I know nothing about the Greek stories - I am actually wondering about reading up on Homer and doing a comparison, but don't really have the time to do much on it during the school year.

All that stuff about Dido is kind of an 'I told you so' about how men shouldn't be distracted by women because Anthony & Cleopatra was relatively recent, so proving that men should ignore women and leave them to burn just showed how Anthony had been a complete traitor to follow his heart instead of his calling. It also totally justified how Augustus had treated A&C and their armies.

It's very, very closely modelled on the Iliad and Odyssey - but subverted into this Augustan propaganda (or not) - it's sort of extremely self-conscious Homeric fanfic, in a way. There are lots of scenes and motifs that gain quite a lot of their interpretation by comparison with their counterparts in Homer - obviously Virgil's audience would have known Homer very well - like where Aeneas descends to the Underworld in Book 6 is a reference to Odysseus' entering the Underworld. But whereas Odysseus just sees his mother and his friend and various mythological figures, in Virgil it's a kind of a very loaded set-piece, the main intention of which is to show us the future kings of Rome and the imperial family. And the ending is pretty significantly subverted from Homer - whereas in the Iliad, Book 24 is ultimately about Achilles recovering from his rage over Patroclus' death and recovering his humanity by giving Hector's body back to Priam, the final moment of the Aeneid is of bitterness and vengeance, when Aeneas sees Turnus wearing Pallas' belt and kills him on the spot.

Dido is also about barbarian passion and irrationality and luxury (again Cleopatra) vs noble Romans selflessly following the call of duty. There's actually a school of thought that she's a "feminist" character in her own context because there aren't any other women in epic who get such a sympathetic and full human treatment as she does - women in Homer don't speak much unless they are goddesses, for example, and we don't see a lot of their inner life - but we see Dido's inner pain in a way which I think is actually very sympathetic, even though she also represents temptation from the true path for Aeneas at the same time. There's absolutely nothing like her in Homer (although we are supposed to compare her to Circe too I think) - it would have been pretty astonishing for Virgil's audience. She has a very phallic death too - make of that what you will!

There are also other things relating to women in the Aeneid which are immediately striking for the fact they are so unlike Homer - like Camilla getting an aristeia (a heroic battle set-piece) - there are many, many of these set-pieces in Homer, but none for women - some Amazons are mentioned in the Iliad, but we don't actually see them at all.

There's a great collection of poems by Ovid called the Heroides which are each a letter written from the pov of an angry and abandoned heroine of classical myth: Dido, Ariadne, Deianeira, Medea etc. Might be quite interesting to read the Dido one alongside Book 4. I'd say those and perhaps the Metamorphoses (also by Ovid) are the closest thing, along with Sappho, to feminist literature in the ancient world.