Teaching the Gaps

I've been thinking about Carson McCullers ever since my last blog entry. Specifically, I've been thinking about the fact that no one reads McCullers anymore, as far as I can tell--she's rarely ever represented in the big anthologies of American literature, dozens of which are sent to my office every year. I find that very depressing, because I learned so much about writing with emotional accuracy from reading her work. At one point in my academic career, when I was contemplating a focus on literature instead of creative writing, I aspired to become the preeminent Carson McCullers scholar. Her work is pretty sentimental, I'll admit, but I think that's understandable when you consider how young she was when she died.

When I was in my first graduate program, working on my M.A., one of my professors visibily turned up his nose when I mentioned McCullers as a writer I admired. "I suppose she wrote some nice little stories," he said. The operative words in that sentence were nice and little. From this comment I was to understand that nothing she'd written really mattered that much--it wasn't innovative or groundbreaking or any of those other words that quickly become associated with writers like Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald, the men who were writing and publishing at about the same time McCullers was. The one story my professor did like was "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud," probably McCullers' most famous story (and, ironically, my least favorite of her work.) But in retrospect, it's no surprise that my professor would have liked this one: the words of wisdom spoken at its pivotal moment come from an old man, not a young girl.

I didn't even realize how many "nice little stories" I'd missed out on in my academic studies until I got into my Ph.D. program and had to put together a reading list for my comprehensive exams. Then, suddenly, I saw the hundreds of women who'd just been left out of the anthologies my professors had selected for all the courses I'd taken. Those books left no way for me, the literary novice, to see all the gaps in their versions of American literary history--many of which are populated by women.

My response to that has been to teach the gaps whenever I teach a course in literature, especially an intro-level survey (which may well be the only literature course some college students take.) Working from the assumption that most of the teachers my students have encountered so far will have taught the Big Name Writers, I teach Sarah Orne Jewett instead of Mark Twain. Instead of Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry. The Street is nearly always the book my students list as their favorite among those we've read in that class. We do read male authors as well, if it's a general survey course, but we read selections by lesser-known writers, like Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson.

It probably comes as no surprise that some students object to this strategy. On my teaching evaluations, I get occasional comments like "We read all these weird authors I'd never even heard of before," and "I thought this was supposed to be American literature." I'm not shy about being a feminist, and I teach Women's Studies in addition to literature, so the fact that I teach a lot of literature written by women is nearly always seen as a political statement. Which it is, of course--but it's something I do in order to help my students see the gaps in their education, to see who's in those gaps and start thinking about why those writers might be there. Why did they get left behind or glossed over? What are they saying that's so dangerous and uncomfortable? My students laugh at the thought that The Awakening was considered scandalous in its own time, but that doesn't mean they're okay with Edna Pontellier, a mother who isn't completely devoted to motherhood. That idea is still uncomfortable, even now, a hundred years later.

Still, my students like to argue that "teaching the gaps" is unnecessary; discrimination is a thing of the past, they claim, and I'm just perpetuating it now by discriminating against white men. Whenever they make that argument, I tell them the story of when my daughter came home, just two years ago, with a list of 20 Famous Americans on whom she could choose to do a report for her history class. Of the 20 people on that list, 2 were women. So I explained to my daughter that I thought this was a ridiculous list, and I proposed a solution: I'd make up a new list, and my daughter could take it back to her teacher, and the teacher could choose any name she liked for my daughter's report. (I also told my daughter I'd be happy to write a note to her teacher explaining my problem with the assignment, so she didn't have to do that if it made her uncomfortable--but my daughter said she didn't mind talking to her teacher about it. That apple didn't fall far from the tree.)

Our list included 18 women and 2 men, the same proportions on the original list. When my daughter came home the next day, she said her teacher had indicated that any of the names on our list would be fine.

As long as there are lists of Famous Americans like that one coming home from school--and as long as there are anthologies that minimize or leave out Carson McCullers in favor of her male contemporaries--I'm going to keep teaching the gaps. It might not make me popular, but I'm hopeful it will lead some of my students to see how carefully their knowledge is constructed to avoid certain people and the difficult questions they dare to raise.