James Bond Guest Lecture #1: Historical Context & Role-playing the "Angry Young Man"

I was given the opportunity this year to do a number of guest lectures on Ian Fleming's Casino Royale. In this first lecture, I discussed the historical context of that first James Bond novel, focusing on the widespread poverty and economic destruction following Britain's losses in the wake of World War 2. I argue that this creates both a personal and a national identity crisis which Fleming seeks to address with this novel.

One of my favourite aspects of this lesson is the opportunity for role-playing for the students. For many traditional instructors, this type of activity might seem silly. Even I acknowledge that such an activity could become too much about the novelty and not enough about actually learning the material. However, I like to use role-playing activities as a means of getting my students to engage with characters. In this case, it enables the students to create a personal connection to the cultural context. They do not just understand the economic perils of the British people from an intellectual perspective, but rather they come to understand those social ills from an emotional perspective, also. This engages students with kinesthetic learning preferences, as well as students with high emotive intelligence. In that this activity it different from their usual learning devices, the historical and emotional context of the novels enters their longterm memory more fully because they connect these feelings of disenfranchisement and national insecurity into their own perceptions.

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The historical context of postwar Britain is both geographically and intellectually remote for our students, so grounding them in the historical background is a must.

We talk about the interrelationship between personal and national identity. This is an interesting concept for them: they do not usually consider how national identity influences personal identity, perhaps because Canadians are so wishy-washy about their national identity.

John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" (1956) is another contemporary text that explores the engagement of individual identity with historical context, so I like mentioning it here.

There are two parts to this role-playing section: the first one could be omitted if you had a smaller group of people who were very comfortable already.

So what do you do to respond to the world when things seem to be falling apart? Write fiction!

I think this is a good way into talking about Ian Fleming: his personal experience is definitely part of his writing, and I think this ties into the idea of personal identity very nicely.

I love this chart from The Economist: 

So this is the introduction to the novel: they understand historically, socially, and emotionally how people would respond to Casino Royale in 1953. 

The Yellow Wallpaper: Science & Women's Health

I gave a guest lecture on "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and I wanted to avoid discussion of the wallpaper. I knew that the professor would likely want to talk about all of the shifting imagery of the paper, so my purpose here was to take a different approach. 

Throughout the lecture, I referred to several passages which I neglected to write down in this lesson plan, but in reading these notes, I largely thought that the arguments were still fairly sound. The notes in box brackets [] denote an action item or item for discussion.

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The way that I read "The Yellow Wallpaper" is as a fictionalized discussion of women's health in relation to science and medicine.

In order to clarify what I mean, we need some background information on how science and medicine have treated women's health in the past, and there is no better example of that than in the word "hysteria."

What does hysteria mean?

[they define] 

They actually have difficulty defining it beyond "highly anxious," which is interesting: they can give examples of hysteria, and they know it when they see it, but to define it proves difficult.

[I define]

So when we hear the word hysteria (or its cousins, hysterical, hysterics, etc), we have this impression of what the word means. However, the root of the word is latin, and means "wandering uterus."

This was originally a medical term that was used to explain women's extreme mood swings. We know that there are many medical reasons why women especially have changes in emotion: these can be related to pregnancy, lack of pregnancy, or post-pregnancy; menopause; puberty; depression and anxiety; thyroid conditions, and so on. Keep in mind that women are imagined to be "feminine," which means that they are soft and nurturing, not angry or excitable, or sad and detached. The inability to perform "proper" female emotion was seen as a medical condition. The answer that 17th century doctors determined to explain all emotional issues that a woman can experience was... their uterus: in particular, that their uterus was detached and wandering around, bumping into stuff and causing emotional outbursts, and so on.

So you are all logical thinkers: you have discovered that an organ is wandering around bumping into stuff. What do you do?

[you remove it!]

They figure this one out right away, to general hilarity.

We know now, (in this fascinating modern age we live in!) that removing a uterus actually causes even more hormone imbalances.

This short story is about the medical methods that are used to try and "cure" the narrator.

A scientific / feminist reading enables us to see a lot more about the text than we might otherwise miss:

·        When she refers to being alone, we recognize that this is actually a medical treatment. The sun and the air provided in the room are also part of her treatment.

·        When she refers to her husband as her prescribing physician, we recognize that women's health is further dismissed because there doesn't seem to be an acknowledgement that it is unethical for him to treat his own wife. The point Gilman is making is that the husband is refusing to see her problems as authentic. The issue that we can read from that is that women's health issues were considered below thinking about conflicts of interest or the ethics of treating your own family members and so on. (Another thought: is it possible for a male doctor to be conflicted by his feelings for his patient if he is a man and has no feelings?)

·        When she refers to it being lucky that Mary is so good with the baby, but she can't deal with it because she is nervous, she is referring to her own baby and her feelings about it. This gives us a clue as to what actually ails her:

[post partum depression]

They eventually get to this; the mentions of the baby are so subtle that I missed them on the first reading, but eventually one of the students comes up with this answer.

At this point, I say that we should largely try to avoid diagnosing fictional characters, especially with mental issues of any kind, because a fictional character is just that. HOWEVER, we are cheating a little bit: we know that Gilman had a nervous breakdown following her own pregnancy, so we can reasonably assume that the similarities between the narrator's condition and actual symptoms of post-partum depression are quite accurate, at least within Gilman's experience

·        When the narrator says that writing makes her feel better, but she is told that it is not good for her, Gilman is pointing to an actual treatment that was prescribed for women of all manner of health issues: they were quite frequently kept from reading, from writing, from exercise, and from house work (but not always the latter!) in order to keep their minds and bodies from becoming "excited." The narrator's point that she feels better when she writes suggests that her feelings about her own body are being ignored at the advice of what (rudimentary) science tells her doctors.

·        As the narrator's condition progresses (the wallpaper continues to bother her, the sights and smells get more pronounced, and she suddenly sees a woman within the paper), we can see that her isolation and her lack of stimulation has given way to delusions and dissociative thinking. (If you see the woman as another being, then it's delusional; if you see the woman as being herself within the paper, it's dissociative)

Reading the short story for medical methodology is fruitful because we can see how Gilman is pointing to very specific ideas in science and suggesting that they are deeply incorrect.

However, we also cannot claim that Gilman is a scientific genius before her time: she is merely pointing out that women's experience - the patient experience - should be part of the medical process. But she is not able to tell us what the condition is, what exactly her narrator is suffering, or other details that we can read into the text given our position in time and history. We should therefore be careful of such readings.

Similarly, Gilman gives us another reasons to be suspicious of a scientific or medical explanation for what's occurring to the character. What clue does Gilman give us as to the reason for the narrator's behaviour?

[the foreshadowing of the haunted house, therefore supernatural forces at work]

I go back and read the intro to the story, and they immediately understand that there is some gothic stuff happening here. I love doing this, too, because here I've just - apparently - undermined my own reading to give them a different direction to consider.

For this reason, this text is often read as early American Gothic, or feminist gothic, because it concerns issues of the Gothic as well as feminist themes.

If I were to write an essay claiming that Gilman is making a point about female medicine, I would use all of the arguments that I gave to you, but I would add that the author is likely adding in these supernatural and gothic details in order to prevent her text from being taken too politically: if she can wave critics away by saying "Oh it's just a gothic fantasy," critics and scientists in the medical community can't criticize her for not knowing what she's talking about. The short story is in fact the very place where she CAN criticize medical practices with regards to female health, because she is taken less seriously as a critic of the science because she is "just a writer." 

Frankenstein and Intersectionality: Guest Lecture

I had the opportunity in Term 2 to Guest Lecture in Lindsey Banco's English 110 class. Since I wrote my Master's on Frankenstein, we thought this would be a good idea. In this lecture, I introduce the basic theoretical framework of my Master's project to the students. (PS - these are my lecture notes, so not the polished handouts that I frequently post. I have put in a selection of the slides, too, for further clarification where potentially necessary)

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Frankenstein: Intersectionality and the Creature

I’m going to do something different. I’m going to start with a question that I’m not going to answer, and I will end the class with the same question, which I still won’t answer. Here it is:

Is the creature gendered feminine?

(explain difference between sex and gender in most basic terms: We are not asking if the creature is female, but rather does he exhibit feminine traits? (or for that matter, uniquely masculine traits?))

(reasons why I won’t answer: I don't want to bias your opinions (I am extremely biased!); I want to give you the tools to come up with your own answer to the question, etc; I am experimenting with basic teaching principles because I CAN!)

In the meantime, I’m going to give you some tools to think about how to answer the question: I’ll give the same question to you at the end of the class.

Three terms:

Binaries

Hierarchical binaries

Intersectionality

Binaries

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            Anybody know what a binary is?

-         (Shout out opposites)

-          Tall

-          Small

-          Thin

-          Hot

-          Wide

-          Good

-          Ugly

Ok, now they get harder

-          Love

-          Green

-          Light

-          White

-          Sun

Some of these pairings are neutral, some of them are not: one half of the binary seems to be better than the other.

One foundational aspect of how we learn is to learn how to categorize things into groups of twos: this is a simple way that we learn how to understand the world, and so it is introduced to us at a fairly young age. One of the difficult things about this is is that it’s a system of organizing information that does not allow for a lot of flexibility or complexity.

The creature has a number of binaries that he exists in: TAKE TO THE BOARD: (get them to list) (give them “good”) child/parent, child/adult, evil/good, artificial/real, unfeeling/ caring, dead/alive, etc –

One of the things that you may have noticed is that there is a side of most pairings that you want to be, while others appear to be somewhat neutral. So tall, beautiful, good, come to mind. White and Black can seem neutral until you start to consider that these colours can also be shorthand for race, and you can start to see the privilege inherent in the word white over the other.

Binaries have two types of relationships: the relationship between the two sides of the pairing (old vs young) as well as other halves of binaries that are associated with them. (Old is associated with ugly and young is associated with beauty, because the binaries are organized along positive and negatives.)

The hierarchical binary is therefore the idea that a) one side of the binary is usually preferable and b) negative sides of binaries are associated with other negative sides (and similarly for positive sides of the binaries, which are associated with other positives).

I would like to complicate this idea of binaries, however. With a little bit of whiteboard magic, I want to show you how we can remove some of the simplicity from binaries:

(Turn VS into a LINE)

Explain the spectrum (using the example of the creature: pick any binary)

_______________________________

So let’s take a few minutes to think about the creature’s binaries and hierarchical binaries: what are his perceived binaries, and where would we map him on a spectrum of those binaries?

[Label quadrants of the room: old vs young, alive vs dead, real vs artificial, good vs evil, caring vs unfeeling, etc]

In the group at your table, discuss what side of the binary you would place the creature on. Find at least one passage in the text that supports your idea. I’ll give you five (10?) minutes to do that.

5-10 minutes to discuss. – while we are discussing, write down the binary spectrums with the “good” on the left, and the “bad” on the right.

From the analysis of how binaries interact with one another comes the idea of intersectionality.

various biological, social and cultural categories such as gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, religion, caste, species and other axes of identity interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels, contributing to systematic injustice and social inequality

Observe:

Put the creature’s binaries down the page. (Go back to board)

Place a dot where you think the creature exists.

Then put a vertical line through the dots. What verb would you use to describe what the vertical line is doing to the horizontal lines?

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                    Going through, passing through, intersecting!

Intersectionality is a term that we use in feminist studies to think about identity: how identity is constructed both by the self and externally by society.

Intersectionality is supposed to make us think about the way that privilege works in society: if one side of the binary is usually privileged, if you identify with or are identified as being part of multiple privileged (or under-privileged) sides of the binary, that will affect the way you are treated.

Based on intersecting binaries, who has privilege? How is this person privileged or not?

Compare Donald Trump (as himself) to Gugu Mbatha-Raw (playing Dido Elizabeth Belle). 

What privilege do they have? What ways are they oppressed by dominant cultural ideas? 

In what ways do the intersections of their qualities overlap to create more or less privilege? (That is: wealth, race, gender, age, etc)

Consider these questions in regards to the creature: 

Intersectionality allows us to think about how the creature exists on a variety of spectrums rather than just one; is he young / old? Real or artificial? Good or evil? Is he such a mixture of both sides that it’s difficult to place him on any one side of the spectrum? All of these parts together give us a much more complex vision of his identity, which is another way of complicating his identity.

To put it another way, if we simply think: “is the creature good or evil?” we must choose one side.

If we put him on a spectrum of good ----------- evil, we might place him on different sides at different ends of the text.

If we then say that he exists on several other spectrums (caring / uncaring; young / old; real / artificial; etc) do these other spectrums not give us context to the original question of whether he is good or evil? (if he is both real and artificial, and both alive and dead, might we be a little less sure of where he definitively good or bad?

We can do the same thing with other characters from the text:

Elizabeth, Victor. (is Elizabeth intelligent or kind of imaginative and wispy? Is Victor good or bad? 

A parent or a child? A mother or father? Etc)

A final note to summarize:

Victor says that he “pursues nature to her hiding places”

·        Victor feminizes nature, here.

·        What do we learn from Victor in this very short passage?

-          Aggressive

-          Gendered

-          Eroticized and non-consensual

His project – making the creature – is feminized. The science of discovery and the creation of life is feminized during the act of making the creature … until the creature is formed, when it becomes male, and is no longer referred to by Victor in the feminine.

Only when Victor sees that his pursuit has failed does he consider it a failure, when the project becomes male / masculinzed.

What if, instead of being a failed act by a masculine human, the creature is actually a successful response by a feminine nature? What if the creature is nature’s intentional response to Victor --- "to heck with you, Vic! Go back to your books!"

Does anybody have any final thoughts?

Here is your question that I will leave you with:

Is Frankenstein’s creature feminized?