NANCY AND REAL BOOKS

As I head into Week 7 of the first quarter of the probably 18 (!) quarters of Grad School that I’m anticipating, I find myself concertedly (and often disconcertedly) treading water as I am increasingly inundated by waves of theoretical, philosophical, and critical essays about all things literary. I’d almost forgotten what drew me to this discipline of English Literature until I read Nancy Armstrong’s “Gender Must Be Defended.”  Nancy, too, poured on the theory but, to her credit, she actually mentioned some Real Books in her discourse that made me so nostalgic that—to my surprise—I almost found myself in tears. Really. And then I remembered why I came to this PhD program and what I must remember should I ever wish to teach the magic of literature to undergraduate students who may or may not care about the theory expounded beyond the covers of the novels I assign.

When Nancy (I’m so grateful to her for mentioning those Real Books that I feel a kinship with her that allows me to call her by her first name) gives me a Bronte, a Dickens, a Shelley, and a Mrs. Henry Woods (always Mrs. Henry Wood) on which to rest my hat for a few paragraphs, I begin to feel like I am again in familiar literary territory. This territory feels like home, and as I contemplate her words about Jane Eyre, Bleak House, Frankenstein, and East Lynne, I recall not only the feel of those book in my hands and the physical situation in which I first encountered the works (by the fireplace at Christmas, in an air conditioned Starbucks during the heat of another valley summer, in a high school classroom I haven’t thought of for years…,) I also remember the voices of the teachers and professors who taught those books, the voice on NPR that cajoled listeners to “dig up those classics and give them a good read,” and the voice of my child presenting a book as a gift, saying, “Here, Mom, I know you love Dickens.”

This is what literature is all about to me. And this joy of reading is what I want my students to take and hold onto when they leave my class and head out into whatever real world they are going to live in for the rest of their lives. I am fully cognizant that the excitement of encountering a novel can be enhanced by positioning the work in a historical and theoretical framework that enriches the understanding of an author’s words, and hopefully explains their reason for putting pen to paper in the first place. Still, I think I’ll be especially wary of overwhelming the novel I’m teaching with so much critical thinking that I remove the ‘joy’ from ‘joy of reading,’ leaving in it’s place only a text that must be endured for the sake of an exam or essay assignment.

Which brings me to Nancy’s real purpose in writing her essay (you know we need to go there): her wish to discuss the placement of the feminine in the Victorian novel when it is re-read through Foucault’s lens of biopolitics, which he propounds as the social and political powers over life that control a population as a whole. Pale Horse, Pale Rider actually is on board with Nancy’s theory and can be studied not only as a discourse about a specific disease but also as a discourse of the changing role of women during WWI. The novel discusses the toll the role-change struggle took on women who were left behind to ‘keep the home fires burning’ while also being forced out of that home to take on many traditionally male roles abandoned by men heading to the trenches. The novel also delineates the task of reframing ‘feminine’ in the wake of that war.

Miranda, the intrepid protagonist of Pale Horse as you’ll recall (and probably prefer not to, by this stage of the game) is a ‘working woman’ in the newspaper game before influenza strikes her down. She and her female peers struggle to be assigned to write columns that are not society/gossip or theater/book review driven. They wish to remove themselves from being sent to cover  “a scandalous elopement, in which no marriage had taken place, after all, and the recaptured girl, her face swollen, had sat with her mother, who was moaning steadily under a mound of blankets […] both wept painfully and implored the young reporters to suppress the worst of the story (Porter 149).

She also chafes against having to play the fresh, happy face sent to cheer injured soldiers sent home for rehab. “Taking clean gray gloves out of her pocket she went out to join a group of young women fresh from the country club dances, the morning bridge, the charity bazaar, the Red Cross workrooms who were wallowing in good works” (Porter 150). She does her part but on her own terms: “I draw the line at talking to them (the soldiers at the USO.) I told the chaperons at those dances for enlisted men, I’ll dance with them, every dumbbell who asks me, but I will NOT talk with them, I said, even if there is a war” (Porter 151).

It takes a few rounds with Death to convince Miranda to live the rest of her life on her terms. And since Miranda is a pretty good doppelganger for the author, Katherine Anne Porter, one can believe she went on to be an author of Real Books that readers recall by the feel of their covers, and by memories of where the readers were when they encountered the first pages of books that took them somewhere else. In the case of Pale Horse, readers are transported to a time of war and modern day plague; it introduces them to a time of limited women’s rights and to the women who pushed against those limits. That’s what a good book should do: allow one to encounter another time and place and then to reposition themselves in their own world based on that encounter.  That’s what I hope to share with my students.

I couldn’t help thinking about Charlotte, and Charles, and Mary, and Mrs. Henry Wood as I was reading this essay. I wonder if they had any idea how parsed their words would be in the future, if they ever intended their stories to become dissected and theorized as we have a tendency to do nowadays. Ask yourself: when Nancy writes “The novel’s disciplinary use of gender to differentiate men from women and assess their normativity is, in other words, but one move in the cultural logic by means of which liberal societies biologically recoded certain groups exempt from the protections accorded people of property” (Armstrong 545), would our Victorian authors be likely to fist-bump her and say “You go, girl!” Or would they have cocked their collective heads and said, “Huh?” That’s the fine line one needs to to walk when teaching such incredible literature. Like Nancy, I hope I never get too carried away with theory to forget to mention Real Books, often and with great feeling, as I teach ‘the rest of the story.’