Today's Thoughts...
After what I thought was a very successful class on the social commentary and pseudo-feminist analysis in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I heard the words that would make any teacher groan: why so serious? Well, in a piece about the effects of psychosis on a woman tumbling into mental deterioration, I suppose one might think that the story might be a bit… serious.
But this is typical commentary for any piece I examine with my kids that doesn’t end with a hearty guffaw or have some secret murderous twist to freeze their hearts in their chests. Often, I hear my students complain not simply that the language is difficult (a deserved statement perhaps when dealing with Shakespeare and ESL readers); not that the concepts are too complicated (as one may be wont to say when digesting Dickens or Hawthorne or Brecht); and not even that the material is too dense (a ten page short story consisting of a series of pithy journal entries hardly warrants the nomenclature of the “tedious text” category). No, my students merely put up a fuss because (surprise, surprise!), sometimes life just ain’t all that purdy.
Now I’ll be fair. Sometimes, we do discuss particularly depressing pieces (excluding the pieces on depression per se). I often find myself explaining some major historical occurrence that, despite the indelible mark stamped upon the West, has left barely a trace this side of the Pacific. For example, the Holocaust.
My students all know what occurred during World War II; they can recite the victors, regurgitate the dates, and recount some tales of woe from these places called concentration camps. Never mind about the atrocious scientific testing on people herded about like cattle. Forget the tales of terror, hiding out in secreted annexes. There was a Hitler, but no frighteningly calculating individuals who went home to their wife and kids every night. There were camps, but no chambers that sucked the life from their inhabitants. That’s just it— it’s simply a veneer of knowledge. For them, these things existed, occurred, but behind a smoke screen, after which the movie was over and everybody lived happily (if brokenly) ever after. The End.
Now how exactly is that going to work in a literature class exploring the depths of mental turmoil and the weight upon the nuclear family unit in Williams’ Glass Menagerie, of the Civil Rights movement in America and the struggle of Black America in Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, of the perils of reader censorship and the future brain drain of modern society in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451? I was already chastised once for thinking these kids could read more than two books in a semester (nearly graduating seniors though most of them are). Now what? Am I saying they can prod the depths? That there’s somewhere deeper to go? That it might be possible in some far stretches of the wild, wild imagination to envision a hypothetical situation not yet determined to exist in which these students, my pupils might comprehend a greater world than the sphere they’ve been bubbled in? Time and tests will tell.
Good literature is supposed to teach us about the world. Good literature is supposed to teach us about ourselves. So when you ask, ajarn, why so serious? My answer?
Unfortunately, sometimes life is more than just smiles.
