"Chees now": some thoughts on the Wife of Bath's Tale

Wife of Bath's Tale in Brit Lit I today, which seemed very apposite. I didn't bring up current events -- I almost never do in class -- and neither did the students, but I've been thinking about the tale all day.

When I first encountered the Wife of Bath's Tale, at the age of twenty, I fell in love with it at once; it seemed like an awesome badass fable of female power. I've noticed a shift in the last few years, with this newer, woker, generation of students. They want more from it. They want the rapist to be punished more harshly, and his victim not to simply disappear. One of them, last year, wondered whether Chaucer had ever actually met a woman. I can't really fault them for wanting these things, but I still love the tale as it is.

The Canterbury Tales -- along with most of Shakespeare's plays and Joyce's "The Dead" -- is one of those rare works I can teach year after year and still notice something new every time. This time, what I noticed most was the verb chese: choose, or chose -- Middle English spelling makes no very consistent distinction between the present and the past. It's all over this tale; the Wife of Bath uses it at least nine times in 400 or so lines. So many choices. Most of them are from a limited palette of options: either / or, and sometimes neither choice is very good. Our rapist-protagonist -- who is very young, very privileged, and very entitled -- suddenly discovers, when his crimes land him at the mercy of a jury of women, that "he may not doon al as him liketh." He has to choose whether to be executed then and there, or go on a twelve-month quest to find the answer to a riddle that may or may not have one. Conversely, some of the choices in this tale are radically free: Jesus, who could do anything, "In wilful poverte chees to live his life," and we're given to understand that Jesus wouldn't choose anything shameful. (There's a lot about social class in this tale, and a lot of play with words that were originally class descriptors but come to have moral connotations: gentilesse, vilainye, cherl. Our protagonist's elderly and undesired wife tells him that "men may wel often finde / A lordes sone do shame and vilainye," which has got to sting, and goes on to argue that such a man has no claim to gentility.)

And, in the end, the word becomes a present-tense imperative: chees now. The "now" matters a lot, I think: we are always making fresh choices, even when we're also constrained by our previous choices. And in the end, whatever he may have done in the past our protagonist chooses rightly (a third option, not one of the "thinges twaye" that he was originally presented with): Cheseth youreself.

It occurs to me that all three of the Norton Anthology standards that I teach regularly -- the Miller's Tale, Wife of Bath's Tale, and Pardoner's Tale -- are about justice on some level, and this is the only one that offers a vision of justice that is redemptive and not retributive, where people can be educated into choosing better. I think that may be why I like it so much.

I feel like we are being governed, at this particular moment, by people who are making choices again and again, and still and still choosing worse. I like to hope that there is still time to choose better. Even now.

On teaching Caesar in the age of Trump

So I have been in Green Country for almost three weeks, and one of the nice things is that the time difference and the geographic distance mean I'm not bombarded with American news first thing in the morning. In fact, while I haven't absolutely unplugged from American politics, it all feels less urgent and outrage-making here.

Until the latest culture-wars outrage du jour turned out to be about Shakespeare. Shakespeare is always urgent around here. (OK, I'm sort of amused and baffled that a production that has been running for three weeks without anyone paying much attention is SUDDENLY urgent as far as the rest of the world is concerned, but whatever.)

Other, better Shakespeare scholars have weighed in on why nothing about the Public Theater's production of Julius Caesar is particularly new or outrageous; I will note, however, that this play definitely seemed to have more bite when I last taught it, a few weeks after the election, and I plan to teach it again this fall, and probably again every year for the foreseeable future.

It is, in fact, really HARD to get students to read Caesar's assassination as justifiable, so I doubt that a "go assassins!" reading of this play is likely to come naturally to anyone. They don't, as a rule, want to see the conspirators as people they should like. (Particularly Cassius. I really like Cassius, but students in general do not -- they tend to accept Antony's judgment of Cassius, and the other conspirators who aren't Brutus, as acting "in envy of great Caesar," without considering that Antony has political reasons of his own for holding up Brutus as the Great Exception. What we actually get in the text is more nuanced; Cassius is so damn right about most of the questions of strategy, and perceptive and clearheaded about the consequences of letting Antony live and speak, and any successful political movement needs manipulative pragmatists as well as idealists.) As a rule, students tend not to see small-r republicanism as something worth killing to preserve. Politics, at the grand history-making level, are not quite real to them. Friendship is real, and they tend to fixate on the "Brutus literally stabbed his friend in the back!" part, even though Brutus and Caesar's friendship is something we're informed about rather than something we actually see. It's not clear that the Caesar we do see on stage is capable any more of friendship, in the sense of a relationship among equals. (Contrast with the Brutus / Cassius friendship, which is messy and stormy and tender and substantive, to the point where Cassius is the only person with whom Brutus gets to be really human by Act 4, and Cassius noticeably doesn't exploit or take advantage of that vulnerability.)

The idea that reasonable people might be willing to die or kill to protect a tradition of self-governance feels more charged, these days, like something my last crop of students could feel on a gut level.

I don't mean to suggest that the conspirators are right; the point is that we don't know whether they are right. Brutus agonizes over the unknowability of the future; he can't be sure whether Caesar will hatch into a poisonous snake until it's too late to do anything about it. We see farther than Brutus does; we know what he will choose, and what the consequences of his choices will be. But what we don't, and can't, know is what would have happened if he had chosen differently. It's a play about the difficulty of choosing and acting rightly when the information we have is necessarily imperfect (even in a world where omens and soothsayers and prophetic dreams are real, they can pretty much all be read in multiple ways, stymieing everyone's attempts to foresee the future; how much more difficult it is in our world). Moreover, the really fatal choices, from Brutus's point of view, are not the big ones but the little ones, not should we kill Caesar? but who gets to speak last at the funeral?

Some students have a hard time with this, too. They want the messages about right and wrong, and what people should have done, to be clearer. They aren't. They never will be. And I think we desperately need to know that, in a culture that tends to overvalue confidence and decisiveness and undervalue questioning and thought.

Trading Austen for Auden

So. The world is changing -- in ways that I didn't will, and can't do much about -- and I am trying to plan out syllabi for classes that will be taught in that new world, without fully knowing what it will look like. Perhaps it will be very much like the Bush years; perhaps it will be very different from everything we've ever known, and very scary.

I asked one of my colleagues if she could cover my Shakespeare class on January 23rd, the Monday after the Women's March on Washington, just in case I got arrested. That is definitely something that I have never said, or had to think about, before.

But Shakespeare class will probably look much like it always has, only with more Coriolanus, and with the "you must needs be strangers" speech from Sir Thomas More to start off the semester. I just realized I'll be teaching that speech in the very last hour of Barack Obama's presidency, which is both very right and very wrong.

Brit Lit II is shaping up to be ... different. It was always going to be different this year, because I've been doing some new stuff in all of my gen ed classes, but it feels like it's been wrenched out of shape these last few weeks, woken from summer dreams. There are a couple of contemporary texts (one play, one novel) that I've ordered secondhand from Amazon and am planning to give away, because the deadline for ordering books had long past by the time I realized that I very much needed to teach them this semester. The rest of the syllabus is ... skewing later, away from the hopeful Romantics and confident Victorians, toward the catastrophes of the twentieth century and beyond. (For ages, I didn't really do much with the twentieth century. A couple of early Joyce stories, sure, and Woolf's A Room of One's Own, but the class often stopped in the 1920s. That's going to be different next semester.) I feel like I'm axing a lot of the readings I love to make room for these new ones -- maybe not forever, because I change things up all the time anyway -- but maybe it is forever. Maybe we are not going to have time ever again for comedy, or for beauty for beauty's sake. Maybe I'm not going to have this job until retirement, like I thought I would. Maybe our profession won't exist at all in a few years (because God knows, there seem to be some concerted, very specific, rhetorical attacks on universities just now, and someday it won't be just rhetoric). I don't know. I have no idea about the shape of this new world.

I have been looking over the dates on this new syllabus -- that list of as-yet-interchangeable Tuesdays and Thursdays -- and wondering if some of them will end up being Dates That Matter, like September 1, 1939, or whether they will all, perhaps, be days that we will forget, like the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875. I hope that we will, after all, be given the grace to forget.

Hermione; a parable

So I have this one student in the quieter of my two freshman comp sections. I'll call her Hermione.

Hermione talks a lot, in a class where almost no one wants to talk. She raises her hand virtually every time I ask a question. I don't always acknowledge her right away, because I want to hear from the other students, but the truth is that Hermione is modeling exactly the right sort of student behavior, so I'm reluctant to ignore her. She does the reading; she's prepared; she has relevant and thoughtful things to say. Hermione is very politically outspoken, and very obviously liberal and feminist. Occasionally she expresses opinions that are slightly daft, in the way that idealistic eighteen-year-olds are sometimes daft, but they are always thought-provoking, the sort of ideas that should start an interesting conversation, except most of the other students don't want to talk about ideas.

We were doing a thing in class yesterday (I have to be vague here), where students had to propose some things, and then vote on the proposals. Hermione, naturally, jumped in with a nomination every time; perfectly reasonable ideas, in all cases. After a round or two of voting, I noticed a pattern: she was having a hard time getting the votes from her classmates (all but a handful of whom, for the record, are female). I could see what they were thinking: We don't like this person. She talks too much. She's too opinionated. We think she's showing off, and showing us up. We don't want to vote for her stuff. Maybe there was a bit of we don't trust her lurking behind it all.

I wonder how it would have gone if Hermione were Herman. I wonder if they would simply have accepted her as a leader, the sort of person they could trust to have good ideas.

Feeling utterly heartsick and angry and frightened for so many reasons.

How to comment on an online news article about higher education: a helpful list of rhetorical tropes

1) Refer to everything outside of higher education as "the real world," with the implication that colleges and universities are somehow unreal.

2) Refer to all students who express opinions you dislike as "coddled." As nobody ever uses the word "coddled" any more to describe anything except These Kids Today, this is a particularly useful way to create the impression that their ideas can be discounted automatically.

3) Describe all professors as left-wing Marxist tenured radicals. (Unless, of course, the news story you are commenting on is about the latest "disruptive" innovation or technology, in which case it should be taken as read that all professors are hide-bound conservatives who refuse to change anything ever. In either case, their opinions can safely be dismissed.)

4) Mention Saul Alinsky a lot. Nobody has the foggiest idea who this is, so he can be used as a convenient shorthand for All Things Vaguely Menacing, and you'll sound super-smart while you're doing it.

5) Pick a random arts-and-humanities course with a normal title, such as "Existentialist Philosophy" or "Eighteenth-Century Literature," and refer to it as a "major." Demand to know where all the jobs are for the eighteenth-century literature majors, and express your sincere concern that they need to be saved from themselves.

6) Pick a random arts-and-humanities course with a somewhat odd title, such as "Taco Literacy," and hold it up as an example of Everything Wrong With Every University Ever. Do this in the comment threads on stories that have nothing whatsoever to do with this particular course. (Or, in general, cherry-pick the strangest and most extreme example you can find of anything, treat it as a typical example, and shoehorn it into the comments on stories that have nothing to do with that thing.)

7) Refer to all fields of academic inquiry that focus on people other than white men as "Grievance Studies," and declare them to be intellectually and morally bankrupt by definition. If you do this often enough, and loudly enough, you will be excused from having to explain how you know this.

8) Ah, hell, you might as well declare all fields that end with "studies" to be intellectually and morally bankrupt by definition. If you are feeling particularly generous, you might make an exception for Religious Studies, Classical Studies, or International Studies ... no, on second thought, you've never seen any job ads with any of those fields in the title of the position, so it's safe to say they're all equally pointless.

9) Assume that liberal arts colleges, liberal arts majors, a liberal arts curriculum, and political liberalism are all exactly the same thing.

10) Conflate "holding an unpopular opinion" with "being a member of a minority group," and, in general, fail to distinguish between categories-based-on-opinion-and-belief and categories-based-on-identity. This will allow you, for example, to accuse people who disagree with you of hate speech, or to call for affirmative action for people who do agree with you. If anybody calls you on this, mention look, a squirrel! Rachel Dolezal.

ETA: 11) When citing examples of wasteful university spending, be sure to mention climbing walls. Never any other sort of sports or recreational equipment. Always climbing walls.

... I need to stop reading the comments, don't I?

political bafflement

Why has being anti-French literature, anti-Greek-philosophy, anti-anthropology, and anti-non-vocational-education in general suddenly become such a popular conservative talking point?

Aren't these the very fields that have the most to do with preserving the knowledge and traditions of the past? What, exactly, do these people think they are conserving?

in which I cannot resist weighing in

Three idle thoughts, in response to the latest gubernatorial pronouncement about how universities are doing everything wrong:

1) If I had to pick a graduate of Misnomer U to hire for a job of an unspecified nature, and if I had to do this without knowing anything at all about the prospective candidates except their majors, my first pick would be ... Women's Studies. For real. It's not a popular major; the few students it does attract tend to be much brighter and more dedicated than average; and almost all of them have served an internship with Grande Dame Colleague, who teaches them all kinds of useful skills, like grant writing and archival research and conducting interviews and transcribing oral histories, as well as general responsibility and professionalism. I don't mean to suggest that this is true of all gender studies programs everywhere, but in general, it's a grave mistake to assume that you can tell from the name of a program whether it teaches students marketable skills.

2) Last time I looked, math WAS a liberal art. (OK, it's possible that the last time I looked might have been sometime in the fifteenth century, but whatever.) Now, I think all the stuff they do over in the math and science department is pretty darn awesome. But much of it is not inherently any more practical than the things we do in humanities. (Nor should it be, since the university is supposed to be a space where knowledge is valued for its own sake, and where people have the freedom to study things because they're cool and interesting.)

3) People have been coming to universities to study philosophy for a lot longer than they've been coming to study business or engineering. It takes a certain amount of cognitive dissonance to cast yourself as a defender of traditional institutions and social values AND take potshots at the very programs and ideals which are, in fact, integral to the traditional mission of a university. (But then, one of the things I find puzzling about conservatives is that they don't actually seem to be interested in conserving things, most of the time.)