How to Read Literature Like a Professor (27 page)

BOOK: How to Read Literature Like a Professor
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I’m not done with that hat. It’s a black hat with black velvet ribbon and gold daisies, equally incongruous at the party and at the later visitation, although I’m less impressed by what it is than by whose it is. Mrs. Sheridan has purchased it, but she insists that Laura take it, declaring it “much too young” for herself. Although Laura resists, she does accept the hat and is later captivated by her own “charming” image in the mirror. No doubt she does look charming, but part of that is transferral. When a younger character takes on an older character’s talisman, she also assumes some of the elder’s power. This is true whether it’s a father’s coat, a mentor’s sword, a teacher’s pen, or a mother’s hat. Because the hat has come from Mrs. Sheridan, Laura instantly becomes more closely associated than any of her siblings with her mother. This identification is furthered first by Laura’s standing beside her mother to help with the good-byes and then by the contents of her charity basket: leftover food from the party and, but for the destruction they would have wrought on her lace frock, arum lilies. This growing identification between Mrs. Sheridan and Laura is significant on a couple of levels, and we’ll return to that presently.

First, though, let’s look at Laura’s trip. The perfect afternoon on the high promontory is ending and “growing dusky as Laura shut[s] their garden gates.” From here on her trip grows progressively darker. The cottages down in the hollow are in “deep shade,” the lane “smoky and dark.” Some of the cottages show a flicker of light, just enough to project shadows on the windows. She wishes she had put on a coat, since her
bright frock shines amid the dismal surroundings. Inside the dead man’s house itself, she goes down a “gloomy passage” to a kitchen “lighted by a smoky lamp.” When her visit ends, she makes her way past “all those dark people” to a spot where her brother, Laurie, “steps out of the shadow.”

There are a couple of other odd features here. For one thing, on her way to the lane, Laura is gratuitously accosted by a large dog “running by like a shadow.” Upon getting to the bottom, she crosses the “broad road” to go into the dismal lane. Once in the lane, there’s an old, old woman with a crutch sitting with her feet on newspaper. On her way in and out Laura passes individuals and small knots of shadowy figures, but they don’t speak to her, and the one by the old woman (she alone speaks) parts to make way for her. When the old woman says the house is indeed that of the dead man, she “smiles queerly.” Although Laura hasn’t wanted to see the dead man, when the sheets are folded back, she finds him “wonderful, beautiful,” echoing her admiration in the morning for the workman who stoops to pick and smell the lavender. Laurie, it turns out, has come to wait at the end of the lane—almost as if he can’t enter—because “Mother was getting quite anxious.”

What just happened here?

For one thing, as my student respondents note, Laura has seen how the other half lives—and dies. One major point of the story is unquestionably the confrontation she has with the lower class and the challenge that meeting throws at her easy class assumptions and prejudices. And then there is the story of a young girl growing up, part of which involves seeing her first dead man. But I think something else is going on here.

I think Laura has just gone to hell. Hades, actually, the classical underworld, the realm of the dead. Not only that, she hasn’t gone as Laura Sheridan, but as Persephone. I know what you’re thinking:
now he’s lost his mind.
It wouldn’t be the first time and probably not the last.

Persephone’s mother is Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, fertility, and marriage. Agriculture, fertility, marriage. Food, flowers, children. Does that sound like anyone we know? Remember: the guests admiring the flowers at Mrs. Sheridan’s garden party go about in couples, as if she has in some way been responsible for their pairing off, so marriage is in there. Okay, the long version is in Chapter 19, but here’s the lightning-round version: fertility-goddess mother, beautiful daughter, kidnap and seduction by god of underworld, permanent winter, pomegranate-seed monkey business, six-month growing season, happy parties all round. What we get here, of course, is the myth explaining the seasons and agricultural fertility, and what sort of culture would it be that didn’t have a myth to cover that? Highly remiss, in my book.

But that’s not the only thing this myth covers. There’s the business of the young woman arriving at adulthood, and this constitutes a huge step, since it involves facing and comprehending death. The myth involves the tasting of the fruit, as with Eve, and the stories share the initiation into adult knowledge. With Eve, too, the knowledge gained is of our mortality, and while that’s not quite the point of the Persephone story, it’s sort of unavoidable when she marries the CEO of the land of the dead.

So how does that make Laura into Persephone, you ask? First, there’s her mother as Demeter. That one is, as I suggested, pretty obvious, once the flowers and food and children and couples are considered. Moreover, we should recall that they live on this Olympian height, towering geographically and in class terms over the ordinary mortals in the hollow below. In this divine world the summer’s day is perfect, ideal, as the world was before the loss of her daughter plunged Demeter into mourning and outrage. Then there is the trip down the hill and into a self-contained world full of shadows and smoke and darkness. She crosses the broad road as if it were the
River Styx, which one has to cross to enter Hades. No entry is possible without two things: one must pass by Cerberus, the three-headed dog who stands guard, and one must have the admission ticket (Aeneas’s Golden Bough). Oh, and a guide wouldn’t hurt. Laura has her confrontation with the dog just outside her garden gate, and her Golden Bough turns out to be the gold daisies on her hat. As for guides (and no traveler to the underworld should be without one), Dante in the
Divine Comedy
(1321
A.D.
) has the Roman poet Virgil; in Virgil’s epic,
The Aeneid
(19
B.C.
), Aeneas has the Cumaean Sibyl as his guide. Laura’s Sibyl is that very old woman with the queer smile: her manner is no stranger than that of the Cumaean version, and the newspaper under her feet suggests the oracles written on leaves in the Sibyl’s cave, where, when the visitor entered, winds whipped the leaves around, scrambling the messages. Aeneas is told to only accept the message from her own lips. As for the knot of unspeaking people who make way for Laura, every visitor to the lower world finds that the shadows pay him or her very little mind, the living having nothing to offer those whose living is done. Admittedly, these elements of the trip to Hades are not native to the Persephone myth, but they have become part and parcel of our understanding of such a trip. Her admiration for the deceased man’s form, her identification with the grieving wife, and her audible sob all suggest a symbolic marriage. That world is dangerous, though; her mother has started to warn her before she sets out, as Demeter warns her daughter against eating anything in some versions of the original. Moreover, Mrs. Sheridan sends Laurie, a latter-day Hermes, to escort Laura back from this world of the dead.

Okay, so
why
all this business from three or four thousand years ago? That’s what you’re wondering, right? There are a couple of reasons, it seems to me, or perhaps a couple of major ones out of many possibilities. Remember, as many commentators have said about the Persephone myth, it encompasses the
youthful female experience, the archetypal acquisition of knowledge of sexuality and of death. Our entry into adulthood, the myth suggests, depends on our understanding of our sexual natures and of our mortality. These modes of knowledge are part of Laura’s day in the story. She admires the workmen, comparing them favorably to the young men who come to Sunday supper, presumably as prospective beaux for one or another of the sisters, and later she finds the dead man beautiful—a response encompassing both sex and death. Her inability at the very end of the story to articulate what life is—as caught in the repeated fragment of speech, “Isn’t life”—suggests an involvement with death so strong that she cannot at this moment formulate any statement about life. This pattern of entry into adult life, Mansfield intimates, has been a recognizable part of our culture for thousands of years; of course it has always been there, but the myth embodying the archetype has continued unbroken through Western culture since the very early Greeks. In tapping into this ancient tale of initiation, she invests the story of Laura’s initiation with the accumulated power of the prevailing myth. The second reason is perhaps less exalted. When Persephone returns from the underworld, she has in a sense become her mother; in fact, some Greek rituals did not distinguish between mother and daughter. That may be a good thing if your mother is really Demeter, less so if she is Mrs. Sheridan. In wearing her mother’s hat and carrying her basket, she also takes on her mother’s views. Although Laura struggles against the unconscious arrogance of her family throughout the story, she cannot finally break away from their Olympian attitudes toward the merely mortal who reside below the hill. That she is relieved to be rescued by Laurie, even though she has found the experience “marvelous,” suggests that her efforts to become her own person have been only partially successful. We must surely recognize our own incomplete autonomy in hers, for how many
of us can deny that there is a great deal of our parents, for good or ill, in us?

What if you don’t see all this going on in the story, if you read it simply as a narrative of a young woman making an ill-advised trip on which she learns something about her world, if you don’t see Persephone or Eve or any other mythic figures in the imagery? The modernist poet Ezra Pound said that a poem has to work first of all on the level of the reader for whom “a hawk is simply a hawk.” The same goes for stories. An understanding of the story in terms of what literally happens, if the story is as good as this one, is a great starting point. From there, if you consider the pattern of images and allusions, you’ll begin to see more going on. Your conclusions may not resemble mine or Diane’s, but if you’re observing carefully and meditating on the possibilities, you’ll reach valid conclusions of your own that will enrich and deepen your experience of the story.

So what does the story signify, then? Many things. It offers a critique of the class system, a story of initiation into the adult world of sex and death, an amusing examination of family dynamics, and a touching portrait of a child struggling to establish herself as an independent entity in the face of nearly overwhelming parental influence.

What else could we ask of a simple little story?

T
HERE’S A VERY OLD TRADITION
in poetry of adding a little stanza, shorter than the rest, at the end of a long narrative poem or sometimes a book of poems. The function differed from poem to poem. Sometimes it was a very brief summation or conclusion. My favorite was the apology to the poem itself: “Well, little book, you’re not that much but you’re the best I could make you. Now you’ll just have to make your way in the world as best you can. Fare thee well.” This ritual sending-off was called the
envoi
(I told you that all the best terms are French—and the worst), meaning, more or less, to send off on a mission.

If I told you that I didn’t owe my book an apology, we’d both know it was untrue, and every author wraps up a manu
script with some trepidation as to its future welfare. That trepidation, however, becomes pointless once the manuscript becomes a book, as the old writers understood, which is why they told the poor book that it was now an orphan, that whatever parental protections the writer could offer had ended. On the other hand, I figure my little enterprise can get along without me pretty well, so I’ll spare it the send-off.

Instead I would address my
envoi
to the reader. You’ve really been very good about all this, very sporting. You’ve borne my guff and my wisecracks and my annoying mannerisms much better than I have any right to expect. A first-class audience, really. Now that it’s time for us to part, I have a few thoughts with which to send you on your way.

First, a confession and a warning. If I have given the impression somehow—by reaching an end point, for instance—that I have exhausted the codes by which literature is written and understood, I must apologize. It simply isn’t true. In fact, we’ve only scratched the surface here. It now strikes me as highly peculiar, for instance, that I could have brought you this far with no mention of fire. It’s one of the original four elements, along with water, earth, and air, yet somehow it didn’t come up in our discussion. There are dozens of other topics we could have addressed as easily and as profitably as the ones we did. In fact, my original conception was for somewhat fewer chapters, and a slightly different lineup. The chapters that wound up getting included reflect the noisiness and persistence of their topics: some ideas refused to be denied, crowding their way in and sometimes crowding out those that were less ill-mannered. Looking back over the text, it strikes me as highly idiosyncratic. To the extent that my colleagues would agree that this mode of reading is at least a strong part of what we do, they would no doubt squawk over my categories. Quite right, too. Every professor will have a unique set of emphases. I gather my thoughts into groupings that seem inevitable, but different
groupings or formulations may seem inevitable to someone else.

What this book represents is not a database of all the cultural codes by which writers create and readers understand the products of that creation, but a template, a pattern, a grammar of sorts from which you can learn to look for those codes on your own. No one could include them all, and no reader would want to plow through the resulting encyclopedia. I’m pretty sure I could have made this book, with not too much effort, twice as long. I’m also pretty sure neither of us wants that.

 

Second, a felicitation. All those other codes? You don’t need them. At least you don’t need them all spelled out. There comes a point in anyone’s reading where watching for pattern and symbol becomes almost second nature, where words and images start calling out for attention. Consider the way Diane picked up on the birds in “The Garden Party.” No one taught her to go looking for birds per se in her reading; rather, what happens is that, based on other reading experiences in a variety of courses and contexts, she learned to watch for distinctive features of a text, for repetitions of a certain kind of object or activity for resonances. One mention of birds or flight is an occurrence, two may be a coincidence, but three constitutes a definite trend. And trends, as we know, cry out for examination. You can figure out fire. Or horses. Characters in stories have ridden horses—and sometimes bemoaned their absence—for thousands of years. What does it mean to be mounted on a horse, as opposed to being on foot? Consider some examples: Diomedes and Odysseus stealing the Thracian horses in
The Iliad,
the Lone Ranger waving from astride the rearing Silver, Richard III crying out for a horse, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda roaring down the road on their choppers
in
Easy Rider
. Any three or four examples will do. What do we understand about horses and riding them or driving them—or not? See? You can do it just fine.

Third, some suggestions. In the Appendix, I offer some ideas for further reading. There’s nothing systematic or even particularly orderly about the suggestions. I’m certainly not weighing in on the culture wars, offering a prescribed reading list to make you…whatever. Mostly, these are works I’ve mentioned along the way, works I like and admire for a variety of reasons, works I think you might like as well. I hope you’ll find them even better now than you would have a number of pages ago. My main suggestion, though, is to read things you like. You’re not stuck with my list. Go to your bookstore or library and find novels, poems, plays, stories that engage your imagination and your intelligence. Read “Great Literature,” by all means, but read good writing. Much of what I like best in my reading I’ve found by accident as I poked around bookshelves. And don’t wait for writers to be dead to be read; the living ones can use the money. Your reading should be fun. We only call them literary
works
. Really, though, it’s all a form of play. So play, Dear Reader, play.

And fare thee well.

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