[April showers
bring May flowers, and May flowers bring, besides
Pilgrims, the end of another semester. So this week I’ll share a few
reflections from my Spring
2019 semester, leading up to a special weekend post on what’s ahead for the
summer and beyond. I’d love to hear your Spring reflections in comments!]
On the
delightful surprises that come with juxtapositions of stories.
As I wrote back
in my semester
preview post, I added a couple new short texts to my very-familiar American
Literature II syllabus. One of them was one of my favorite American short
stories, Sui
Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free” (1909). I’ve written about Far’s story
about as often as I have any single literary text, not only in this
space but in my third
book, for multiple
online writing
gigs, as part of this
recently published Oxford Research Encyclopedia article on “The Chinese
Exclusion Act and Early Asian American Literature,” and I imagine in a few
other places I’m forgetting right now. Which is to say, I would have said that I
had about as clear an existing take on Far’s story as I did on any work. But
besides the obvious and awesome benefit of getting student perspectives, adding
a text to a syllabus also opens it up through the other texts that surround it,
and I experienced that effect very fully with the pairing of Far’s story and
another short story in that same week, Kate
Chopin’s “The Storm” (1898).
Pairing Far’s
story with Chopin’s text opened up both works in complex and compelling ways. I
should note that I had already started to rethink aspects of gender and motherhood
in Far’s story as a result of the wonderful student paper I highlighted
in this post (and indeed, my experience teaching Far in that online
American Lit II course went a long way toward convincing me to bring her story
into the in-person class as well). But with Chopin’s story in the mix, I began
to think more actively about whether the couple’s experiences in Far’s story
might destroy their marriage, and more exactly whether the wife and mother in “Free,”
Lae Choo, might seek solace with another man as does Chopin’s protagonist
Calixta. Because Far’s story focuses so fully on its themes of immigration and
exclusion, and because through that lens her married protagonists seem to be
entirely on the same page in their quest to reunite with their stolen child, it’s
easy to lose sight of just how differently the two characters react and act at
times. Indeed, the husband and father, Hom Hing, limits his wife’s freedom to
act in ways that are not dissimilar to (if certainly not identical to) the
government’s actions in the story. Does that mean that infidelity or other
marital strife is in the couple’s future? Who knows, but Chopin’s story pushes
us to consider such possibilities.
Pairings always
work both ways, of course, and Far’s story similarly allowed me to reexamine Chopin’s
text (which I have taught in every American Literature II section for more than
a decade, making it a very familiar one as well). In particular—and this is
likely a startling admission from someone who has defined
himself so fully as a Dad for the last thirteen-plus years, but it’s the
truth—I had never focused very much on the character of Bibi, Calixta’s young
son. We know his absence from the home during an approaching hurricane, along
with that of her husband/his father Bôbinot, is an initial source of concern
for Calixta that she forgets in the passion of her own sexual storm, although she
still seems genuinely relieved and happy to see him and welcome him home at the
story’s end. But all those points are still really about Calixta and her
emotional and psychological states. What about Bibi’s perspective, though? What
might the future hold for his young person, a child who is part of a seemingly
far more stable home environment than the boy in Far’s story (and certainly
that home is not threatened by exclusionary laws and bigotries in the way that
Far’s is) yet who, we see all too clearly, occupies a world full of its own
fraught adult realities? If it were ever possible to overlook such questions
(and for this reader at least it had been), Far’s story demands that we
consider them, one more beneficial effect of this serendipitous pairing.
Next reflection
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Spring reflections you’d share?
No comments:
Post a Comment