The "Comedy" of Manners

This week, in Brit Lit, we have begun reading Oscar Wilde's classic play The Importance of Being Earnest. Coming at the tail end of the Victorian Era, Wilde skillfully and wittily skewers what he views as the ridiculous and limiting social rules of the time.

For a modern audience, these rules of social order can seem both difficult to grasp and entirely absurd. But I do think it is imperative to our engagement with the text to not only understand the sort of complex rules Wilde was dealing with while also taking a step back and recognizing that, while they may be different, we too have our own cultural understanding of certain proper social behavior.

For this week's blog post, students have two issues I want them to address:

1. Please read the chapter entitled "Evening Parties" (pg. 122-127) from the 1913 etiquette guide Manners and Rules of Good Society: or Solecisms to Be Avoided. In your blog, give a general response to this chapter and also identify one rule that seems absolutely ridiculous as well as one rule that still applies today. You can find the chapter here.
2. Secondly, I want you to think about social media in particular. What are one or two "social rules of etiquette" that exist today regarding social media. What is okay and what is a no-no? How and why do you think these rules came into existence?

Have fun with this assignment. And remember, Wilde once said, "It is ridiculous to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious." Don't be tedious!!!

Emma's Social Freedom?

In her book, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Marilyn Butler states that, "Jane Austen's purpose in giving [Emma] an exceptionally unfettered social position is rather to leave her free to act out her willful errors, for which she must take entire moral responsibility." What Butler is essentially arguing here is that because Emma is, in many ways, the social and moral center of Highbury, she is able to behave in a way that otherwise would have been considered unfeminine and/or tactless at the time. Many of Austen's other popular heroines are not of the social station that Emma is and do not necessarily have the same freedom, which may be why Austen herself claimed that Emma might be a heroine "no one but myself will much like."

For this week's blog entry, I want you to reflect on the argument Butler poses. Do you buy what she is  selling? Give one or two examples to support your response.

Merit vs. Birth in Jane Austen's Emma

We spent just a short amount of time in class today discussing students' take on their reading of Jane Austen's Emma so far. I mentioned that many consider this to be a novel of manners and that, during Austen's time, a person's behavior, purpose and agency greatly varied depending on their position in society. In what students have read so far, they should already be able to see that Emma herself (as well as some of the other characters in the novel) have very clear ideas of what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior for certain people based on where they fit in terms of title, class and position.

In his introduction to the Norton Critical Edition of Emma, editor George Justice discusses this idea when he writes that, "everyone in the novel, and most people within early nineteenth-century culture, would judge the value of people in relationship to a number of expectations. English literary works from Geoffrey Chaucer's late fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales with its "worthy" Knyght to Henry Fielding's Tome Jones (1749)... tackle the issue of the relationship between birth and merit. Emma inserts itself into the class dynamics of its culture, both overturning and confirming that a person's value should be linked simultaneously to merit and birth" (27).

For this week's blog entry, I want students to pick two characters from the novel, that they have encountered so far (besides Emma), and identify what values they bring to the community of Highbury via their merit versus their birth. Does his/her birth give him/her a certain advantage in the community? What characters might not have the advantage of birth but certainly are valued because of their merit? Why is this so? How are certain characters expected to behave because of the elevated esteem (or lack thereof) of their birth? Finally, can students make some modern day connections to this idea? Do we still have these expectations today?

The Emma Complex(ity)

You've now spent a few days reading Jane Austen's Emma. For some of you, this may be your first foray into the world of Austen. Or maybe we have some Janeites in the class (for those of you not in the know, that is the term for Jane Austen superfans and, yes, they have their own Wikipedia page). Either way, I hope you are at least enjoying the experience so far. You can't really teach a British Literature course without studying at least one Jane Austen text and I chose Emma because I think it is fun, the title character is close to you in age, and there is a subtle complexity to this comedy of manners that I believe will make for some interesting class discussions. (And, to be perfectly transparent, Clueless (which is a modern adaptation of the novel) came out my own senior year of high school , and I was/am obsessed with that movie.)

For this week's blog entry, I want you to reflect on your first impressions of Emma herself. Sometimes the novel is dismissed as lighter fare than other of Austen's more "serious" novels (such as Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility), but I think this is a mistake. The subtle complexities of the novel that I alluded to earlier are present right from the beginning in the somewhat contradictory nature of Emma herself.

In the very opening of the novel, we are told that "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her." Which is all fine and good until we learn just a little bit later that her mother died when she was a child and that "the real evils indeed of Emma's situation were the power too having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself..." (Austen 1). How are we to reconcile this first description of Emma with what we later come to learn about her? 

Having read several chapters of the novel, do you see these conflicts in Emma's character? What are your impressions of her so far? Similarly, what do you think of the novel itself? For those of you who have never read Austen, is it what you expected? 

Love is Love

For modern audiences, one of the fascinating aspects of William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello, is how seemingly progressive the play is in its portrayal of an interracial marriage. While Othello and Desdemona's relationship certainly causes controversy and distress in the play, the fact that the relationship exists at all is somewhat remarkable.

This is even more amazing to think about when we know that our own culture's comfort level with interracial relationships, and black-white relationships in particular, has only really evolved in the past forty to fifty years. It might be shocking for my students to know that it was only in the year 2000 that Alabama officially removed the law making it illegal for an interracial couple to get married! In fact, anti-miscegenation laws were only ruled unconstitunional by the Supreme Court in 1967.

This court case and the story of the Lovings (I mean, what a great last name, right?) who were the couple behind the case has been made into a movie that will be released in theaters soon. For this week's blog prompt, I want students to read this article about The Lovings and their case (written a few years ago about a documentary that was also made about the couple). Then I want you to talk about why you think interracial relationships were so taboo for so long. Is it strange for you to read something like this article or even Othello in a day and age where you have essentially grown up where interracial relationships are much more a part of the social norm? What parallels might we make between the challenges Othello and Desdemona face and the story of the Lovings?

The Image of Othello

This week in British Literature, we will begin our work with William Shakespeare's famous tragedy, Othello. In class today, we watched several short video clips that all focused on the issue of race and "blackness" in the play. We heard from literary critics, actors, professors and others who all offered opinions on whether the play is racist, whether Shakespeare was a racist, whether racism even existed at the time of the play's production, etc. What these questions prove in their multitude is that race certainly matters, regardless of how you answer any of those questions.

Above, I offer you six examples of posters created for various theatrical productions of Othello. Since the Brit Lit students are just jumping into the play for the very first time this week, I thought it would be interesting for them to reflect on what themes they see emerging simply based off of these images. Without knowing much, what do they think the play is about? How do the posters make them feel? Is there one that is particularly striking or thought provoking? 

Poetry in Motion

"I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty."
~ Edgar Allan Poe

While I love teaching poetry, I am keenly aware of the challenges it presents to students. One of my favorite poets, Billy Collins, maybe captures this concern best when he says, "People think of poetry as a school subject... poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover."

With those concerns in mind, in Brit Lit this week we are diving into British Renaissance Poetry. The language is (at times) antiquated, the ideas complex and the concerns may feel a bit trivial. At the same time, the poetry of this era is considered by many to be some of the best ever produced by mankind (although it is worth mentioning that we often focus these discussions on Western literature and completely ignore the poetry of other cultures and regions).

For this week's blog posts, I want students to reflect on why we study poetry in the first place. What things can poetry achieve that prose cannot. Poets like Shelley, Spenser and Milton all believed that the Poet had the power to change the world through his words. Do you believe this to be true? We all sort of chuckled when Spenser tries to convince his beloved that his poetry can make her immortal in "One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand" and yet here we are, nearly four-hundred years later, still reading his works. So tell me, students, is this a fruitless endeavor or is there still something to be learned from studying poetry?