Poshness & Populations; Perforce, Pedagogically

In her essay "Gender Must Be Defended," Nancy Armstrong suggests that it is the possibility of having — or performing — a gendered role that allows 19th-century heroines (and their households) to differentiate themselves from the seething Frankenstein’s monster of “population” that would otherwise be their milieu.

At first, I was thinking that, if Jane Eyre were to voyage across space-time and find herself in mid-century America (itself an interesting idea for a narrative), she would find the situation Armstrong describes inverted. That is, in Zoline’s narrative, it is becoming part of a normative, nuclear, reproductive household that makes one part of a “population," both monstrous and homogenized. I have already, in other posts, exhaustively quoted the scene in which California is spreading metastatically across the globe, as well as numerous scenes in which “reproduction of oneself” is shown to be the horrifying and entropic end result of the nuclear family, so I won’t belabor this idea.

But then I realized that the difference between Jane Eyre’s fate and that of Sarah Boyle is one that makes all the difference: namely, class. To become part of the sort of household that Jane Eyre founds is to become upper-class; by contrast, the middle class is the aspirational ideal of the mid-century American nuclear family. And then I realized that— if we are to imagine that Sarah Boyle is special, and that is why she is so dissatisfied with this mid-century American dream— the ways in which she is special are marked by an upper-class education (and resultant artistic aspirations).

So if Armstrong traces fiction’s attempts to map the anxiety-producing space between being a body (part of a population) and an individual (worthy of rights, protection, and full humanity), then perhaps we can understand the historical development of this trend in terms of a continuity. While Sarah Boyle is not content with a comfortable lifestyle protected by a domestic sphere, she is exemplary of the idea that those who deserve a unique, fully human, representation may still draw their privileged position from all the markers (accent, education, so on) that once allowed a homeless Jane Eyre to come in from the cold.

How would I try to orient a class discussion around this idea? Well, I probably wouldn't REALLY bring this particular essay to bear on this particular text, but let's pretend I would. I think first it would be necessary to spend some time making sense of the Armstrong piece, mostly focusing on reading comprehension. Then I might actually ask about the Jane Eyre time travel quandary: would Jane find that population/monstrosity/masses are located in a similar or different space in the 1950s than it is in her world?

One thought is that I could ask students to brainstorm facts about Boyle that made her “unique” compared to the homogenous California. I expect I would get answers like “She has blue eyes,” or “she wants to eat her children,” but also probably some of the following:

• Boyle attended “a fine eastern college.”
• Boyle "loves music best of all the arts, and of music, Bach, J.S,”
• Boyle’s decorative use of Buddhist iconography (both Chinese and Thai)
• Boyle’s enthusiasm for the Dadaist art of Duchamps, Arp, and Picabia
• Boyle dreams of freedom/escape through making her creative mark on the world:
• "a new symphony using laboratories of machinery and all invented instruments, at once giant in scope and intelligible to all" 
• "a series of paintings which would transfigure and astonish and calm the frenzied art world in its panting race"
• "a new novel that would refurbish language,” and so on.

Writing these on the board, I could ask students what kind of stereotypes they might associate with someone like that. I imagine words like “education” and “art” and “creativity” would come up. Then I could ask about whether that is similar or dissimilar from what makes someone like Jane Eyre special. In a perfect world, my students might be able to conclude that Sarah Boyle is special because Sarah Boyle is not wholly middle class.

I welcome comments telling me I have no idea what teaching is like.