Vesper Lynd Debate: Sympathetic characters, close-reading, debating

I love debating literature in my classes. One of the key things about assigning a debate is that you should never pick a topic for which you have a biased opinion: the topic for debate should have reasonable readings on either side that are supported by the text, the genre, or critical readings.

(I mention this because I was once made to debate in a university-level teaching course where the outcome they wanted us to come to was a compromise, and I was outraged: debates are not about compromise, debates are about seeing different sides of an issue; it's about picking a side and sticking to it, which is an essential skill of essay-writing. I was thoroughly displeased with this method of teaching debate to teachers, so I have redoubled my efforts to expound on the benefits of debating in class. Correctly. /Rant over).

The second important thing to note about this particular debate is that it's explicitly based off of a quotation from James Bond in Casino Royale, where he says, "[t]he bitch is dead" in reference to Vesper Lynd, who was previously his love interest, but lost that privilege with her death and his discovery that she was, in fact, a Russian spy.

I acknowledge that the word "bitch" carries a lot of cultural baggage with it: not only is it impolite in most places, it is also a problematically gendered insult. It is not a word you want to encounter with a group of students who are both new to university and new to you as a teacher. You really have to have a group of students with whom you've worked, who you know will be able to deal with the strength of the language maturely. You have to be able to acknowledge that the word "bitch" is not just there for the shock value: it expresses a deep sense of emotion and betrayal, which is totally incongruent with Bond's character. It is a line worth delving into.

And so we delve straight into the controversy:

The scene - in addition to the controversial language - forces the reader to come to terms with "cold" and "taciturn" Bond as actually being capable of feeling both love and betrayal, which suggests a depth to his performance of masculinity, as well as the breadth of his character. 

The first term of literature that I discuss with the students here is the idea of the sympathetic character: 

Importantly, I point out, their reading of the situation is all about which character you sympathize with more. We talk about how sympathy is generated for the characters. 

For Vesper, it all hangs on whether or not you trust that suicide note (we talk about epistolary elements in a different class). If you believe that she is acting on her love for Bond, you feel for her. 

On the other hand, if you read Bond's distress as genuine, and you distrust her suicide note (or feel it is flimsy, or what have you), you are likely to sympathize with Bond. I ask to what extent she can be blamed for the events of the novel, because at first glance, it's about Le Chiffre. However, you realize that from the beginning, she was behind the machinations which constantly put Bond in danger and undermined his ability to succeed at beating his antagonist. 

There are at least two opposing ways to read Vesper's complicity within the text; thus, determining whether or not she is a "bitch" is actually a great debate for the students. In this exercise, they must do a close reading of the text to flow the instances of her complicated character and make claims that she is either sympathetic or not (of course, we can't have a motion for debate that reads "This House Believes that Vesper is a bitch," because that would be unnecessarily inflammatory). By making their reading ultimately about sympathy, they not only learn a literary term and get to play around with it, they actually get to sink their literary teeth into a controversial topic.

At this point, I should note that if you've never read my blog before, I often have my students debate. Some years, they debate more often than others, but I always introduce the mechanism for formal debate early. 

(NB 1: I have had to debate in only two instances in a classroom setting: the one I mentioned above, and another in high school which left me desperately debating against fifteen others as my teammates failed to come up with any arguments. I was so emotionally overwhelmed afterwards that I skipped the next class - the only time I've ever done so - to cry in a washroom. My teacher never tried it again, and I learned that setting up the framework for debate feels awkwardly formal at first, but it sets up the necessary rules and directions so that no student has the utterly horrible experience that I did in grade twelve English class).

(NB 2: Now you're wondering why I use debate in my classroom because my classroom experiences were actually horrible. I was introduced to real debate in university, and I have since become a widely-recognized debate judge and coach as a result of nearly ten years with university and high school debate. Once I learned how to do it right, I fell in love :) ) 

As a reminder, I put the instructions up on a slide so that everyone is on the same page. I try to make the distribution of tasks as fair as possible within the groups, and I ask that if someone has debated before, that another group member volunteer. Incidentally, while I walk around the room listening to conversations, I am able to see who is participating in group work who may not otherwise participate in the larger group conversation. This gets them their participation grade.

I always have a vote at the end: the students who put a lot of thought into their work like to feel empowered by the vote of the rest of the class. Usually, it's not entirely fair because each team votes for themselves, but that's part of the fun of it for them. 

Write a comment if you have any questions about how to run a debate in your classroom!