ELIT 48C: Class 7

What is the difference?

Peek

Peak

Pique

"I knew a peek at the peak would pique my curiosity.” While that's not something anyone would ever say, it does illustrate proper usage of three of the most commonly confused homophones.

"Peek" (a verb and a noun) denotes a stolen glance: "I have a present for you, so close your eyes and don't peek.”"Peak" (also a verb and a noun) signifies the top of something: a mountain peak, or the peak of popularity."Pique,” (French) (also a verb and a noun) : As a verb it means to stimulate (interest or curiosity). As a noun, it suggests a feeling of irritation or resentment resulting from a slight, esp. to one's pride.

AGENDA

Gatsby and Af. Am Criticism

Lecture: Trifles

Historical Context and Style

Discussion:

QHQs,

Themes

Symbols

Author introduction:

Willa Cather and My Antonia

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s grave

Courtesy of Lindsay King

The Great Gatsby

Q: Certain literary theories lend themselves to certain works more effectively than others, but is it possible for a literary theory to be entirely incompatible with a work of literature? For example, if one were to make the argument that The Great Gatsby does not have any underlying themes of race, would it be appropriate to apply African American literary theory to the work?

Q: According to Tyson, one of the basic tenets of critical race theory is that racism stems from an “interest convergence,” which is an overlapping interest over “something needed or desired” between two groups; often, it manifests as “material determinism” or the struggle to “advance oneself in the material world.” Given that its characters are highly materialistic, can this concept be applied to The Great Gatsby?

Author: Susan Glaspell

On July 1, 1882, Susan Glaspell was

born in Davenport, Iowa. She excelled in

academics as a student, studying Latin

and journalism. After graduation from

high school, she worked as a

newspaper reporter for the Davenport

Morning Republican, then as the society

editor for the Weekly Outlook. From

1897-1899 she attended Drake

University and received a Ph.D. in

Philosophy.

At the time of her death in 1948, she

had written fifty short stories, nine

novels, and fourteen plays; most of

these works feature strong female

protagonists and stories that focus

on the experiences of women.

Perhaps not surprisingly, her work

faded from public interest during the

conservative1950s, and practically

disappeared from bookshelves and

the stages of amateur theatres. Yet

in the past few decades, her work is

being reexamined and celebrated

by a new group of critics and audiences.

Lecture: TriflesHistorical Context

and Style

Historical Context:Women’s Issues

In many ways, Susan Glaspell’s success at the turn of the century signaled a new age for women, and Trifles, still her best-known play, represents the struggles women of her era faced.

In 1916, the year Glaspell wrote Trifles for the Provincetown Players, some of the important issues of the day were women’s suffrage, birth control, socialism, union organizing, and the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud.

Women had not yet achieved the right to vote (19th

Amendment 1920), and in most states women could not sit on juries.

1914: Margaret Sanger publishes the first text on birth control.

1916: Sanger arrested for opening America’s first birth control

clinic.

City life: Manufacturing jobs pay little for long days of work.

Pre-teens constitute a sizable portion of America’s workforce.

The factory system creates earning opportunities for women, yet

women earn significantly less than men, and most are relegated

to jobs in domestic service, textile factories, or offices.

Life for rural women was not much better. A large portion of

America’s population was still scattered in rural towns, ranches,

and farmsteads. Women were responsible for the maintenance of

the family.

Style: One-Act Play

The structure of a play affects all of its most important elements—the plot, characters, and themes. The one-act play is restrictive and difficult. With playing times of fifteen to forty-five minutes, the number of characters introduced is limited, and they must be developed quickly.

The one-act format tends to focus on a single location and a tight plot. The Wright farmhouse, located in the countryside and set back from the road, is a lonely, desolate place. The plot involves seeking clues to suggest a motive for the murder of John Wright. Note that everything that is said and done, from the way the characters enter Mrs. Wright’s kitchen to the discovery of her dead canary, relates in some way to the mystery at hand.

Style: Local Color (Regionalism)

In the late nineteenth century, a style of writing known as ‘‘local color’’ emerged. It is characterized by its vivid description of some of the more idiosyncratic communities in the American landscape. Writers such as Mark Twain created characters whose speech and attitudes reflected the deep South These stories and novels appealed to people in larger cities, who found these descriptions of faraway places exotic and entertaining.

Susan Glaspell began writing during this age of regionalism, and Trifles incorporates many of the elements of local color: regional dialect, appropriate costuming, and characters influenced by a specific locale.

Trifles is filled with a strong sense of place. The characters in the play are deeply rooted in their rural environment. Lewis Hale was on his way into town with a load of potatoes when he stopped by the Wright’s house to see about sharing a party line telephone, a common way for people in small communities to afford phone service during the first few decades of the century.

The lives of the women seem to consist of housekeeping chores, food preparation, sewing, and raising children, with little time left for socializing.

The characters’ manner of speech reveals their limited education and rural, Midwestern environment. They use a colloquial grammar peppered with country slang. ‘‘I don’t think a place’d be any cheerfuller for John Wright’s being in it,’’ Mrs. Hale tells Henderson.

Still, at the same time that she provides these carefully crafted details of country life, Glaspell provides her audience with ideas that transcend local color. The struggle between the sexes, loneliness, and the elusive nature of truth are all experiences shared by people across cultures and boundaries of geography.

Themes:Gender Differences

Perhaps the single most important theme in Trifles is the difference between men and women, distinguished by the roles they play in society, their physicality, their methods of communication and—vital to the plot of the play— their powers of observation.

In simple terms, Trifles suggests that men tend to be aggressive, brash, rough, analytical and self-centered; in contrast, women are more circumspect, deliberative, intuitive, and sensitive to the needs of others. These differences allow Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale to find the clues needed to solve the crime, while their husbands miss the same clues.

Themes:Isolation

The devastating effects of isolation—especially on women—is another theme of the play.

The men seem better suited to the loneliness and isolation of rural farming. John Wright, for example, is described as a hard-working farmer who kept to himself. He did not share a telephone line, and no one other than his wife knew him very well.

The women, on the other hand, are deeply affected by isolation. Mrs. Peters remembers with dread when she and her husband were homesteading in the Dakota countryside and her only child died, leaving her alone in the house all day while her husband was out working the farm. Mrs. Hale, who has several children of her own, imagines how terrible it would be to have to live in an empty house, like Minnie, with nothing but a canary and a taciturn man for company.

Trifles: QHQs, Symbols, Criticism, and Manifestos

Take 5 minutes to discuss

Symbols

The Title

The Home

The Kitchen

The Dirty Towel

The Apron What is the significance of pleating

an apron or knotting a quilt?

The Fruit Preserves

The Bird

The Bird Cage

The Quilt

The Knot At the end of the play,

Mrs. Hale says that they would “knot” the quilt. What is the significance behind knotting vs. quilting?

QHQs

1. Q: Mrs. Wright, the central character of the short play, makes no appearance over the course of events. In some ways, this makes her an object. What does Mrs. Wright symbolize?

2. What is the importance of Glaspell choosing to explicitly state Minnie Foster’s name, as opposed to just keeping her known as Mrs. Wright”?

3. Q: John Wright is describe as a “good man,” but also a “hard man.” What is the meaning and significance behind this description?

4. Q: What role do the women in the play have, how do they reverse roles, if at all?

5. Is Mrs. Hale’s decision of hiding the truth from Mrs. Wright the right decision?

6. Q: Why does Mrs. Wright want her apron at a time when she’s being accused of murder, and why does Mrs. Hale tell the men that a cat killed the bird when she knew that there was no cat to begin with?

QHQs

4. Q: Why would the women decide not to give crucial evidence to the men?

5. Do you think the murder of Mr. Wright was just? And if so, would that mean that we, in turn, found his life to be a trifle that wasn’t of any worth?

3. Why is the act of taking on the husband’s last name often seen as a symbol of the patriarchy?

4. Q: How do gender roles/expectations deprive women of their liberty and conscience?

What do you think? Criticism

New Criticism

Tension, paradox, ambiguity, irony?

African American (Minority) Criticism

Lesbian, Gay, Queer Criticism

Throughout the text there seems to be an underlying homosocialbonding between Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, which is coded through the language and subtle actions of each character.

What do you think? Criticism

Feminist Criticism

1. The men of the play see the female characters speech and concerns as trivial and unimportant, mocking them and making comments such as, “Well, women are used to worrying over trifles”.

2. When the feminist theory is applied to Trifles many instances of patriarchal oppression can be plainly seen. One such example is how the county attorney refuses to think about any faults John Wright might have had by changing the subject when an unfavorable trait of his is brought up in conversation.

3. Albeit a brief vignette, it is no less a complex study of the extent of sisterhood between women and how far women are willing to go in patriarchal society that both dominates works against them.

What do you think? Manifestos

F.T Marinetti: “Manifesto of Futurism”

Mina Loy: “Feminist Manifesto”

Ezra Pound: “A Retrospect”

Willa Cather: The Novel Démeublé

William Carlos Williams: “Spring and All”

Langston Hughes: “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”

“A Jury of Her Peers”

Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” is her best short story. First published in Everyweek on March 5, 1917, the work is a faithful adaptation of her play Trifles, produced the year before by the Provincetown Players. Glaspell had only to make minor changes in adapting Trifles to a short story. As with some of her other literary work, the main character is never seen.

Film 29 minuteshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGJTHi0rliA

Author Introduction: Willa Cather

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzjTfaqgMD4

Willa Cather

Born in Virginia in 1873. Willa Cather spent the first decade of

her life on her family's farm. In 1884, her family moved to join

her father's relatives among the ethnically diverse settlers of the

Great Plains. This area would serve as the inspiration for

several of her novels, including My Ántonia

Her father tried farming but soon settled the family in Red

Cloud, Nebraska. Cather remembered vividly both the trauma

of leaving a hill farm for a flat, empty land and the subsequent

excitement of growing up in the new country. She took intense

pleasure in riding her pony to neighboring farms and listening to the stories of the immigrant farm women she met there.

At sixteen, she enrolled at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Her freshman English instructor gave her essay on Thomas Carlyle to a Lincoln newspaper for publication, and by her junior year, she was supporting herself as a journalist.

From Lincoln, she moved to Pittsburgh as a magazine editor and newspaper writer. She then became a high school teacher, using summer vacations to concentrate on fiction. In 1905, she published her first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden.

In 1906, Cather was hired to edit a leading magazine and moved to New York City. Her older literary friend Sarah Orne Jewett advised her to "find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world."

Yet, she found it difficult to give up a position as a highly successful woman editor during a time when journalism was almost wholly dominated by men, and did not quit her position for three years. In 1912, on a visit to her family in Red Cloud, she stood on the edge of a wheat field and watched her first harvest in years. By then, she was emotionally ready to use her youthful memories of Nebraska. From this experience evolved O Pioneers!, the novel she preferred to think of as her first. It is this long perspective that gives Cather's work about Nebraska a rich aura of nostalgia, a poignancy also found in her next Nebraska novel, My Ántonia.

Although Cather's 1922 novel about World War I, One of Ours, was received with mixed critical reviews, it was a best seller and won Cather the Pulitzer Prize. She continued to write until physical infirmities prevented her from doing so. In 1945, she wrote that she had gotten much of what she wanted from life and had avoided the things she most violently had not wanted—too much money, noisy publicity, and the bother of meeting too many people. Willa Cather died from a massive cerebral hemorrhage on April 24, 1947.

HOMEWORK

Read My Antonia (1918) Book I Introduction and Chapters 1-19Post #7: Choose one1. QHQ Chapters 1-19 2. Discuss why Willa Cather chose a male narrator and why women dominate the novel.3. Explore the story or relationship of Pavel and Peter. 4. Compare and contrast the lives of Jim Burden and Antonia. Explain what drew them together and enabled them to become close friends.5. Compare and contrast the relationship between Antonia and Jim in Section 1