I’m never prepared to what students might throw at me. Many of them chose Emilia Pardo Bazán’s short story “Red Stockings” for their final essay. I’m now grading the essays, and I think I should have prohibited them to write about it.
In the story, a father brutalizes his daughter, knocking her eye out and disfiguring her.
I was not prepared for every essay on this story to concentrate on excusing the father’s behavior along the lines of, “The father may have hit her too badly, but he wanted the best for her, his intentions were good, and anyway, everybody was like that at the time.” At least, nobody has wondered if the poor guy hurt his fist while beating the daughter. Yet.
We discussed the story in class, talked about the patriarchal family, analyzed the text. But the result is what it is.
I obviously suck at teaching literature.
Well, at least, I get published.
You can read the story in English here, if you want: Pardo Bazán, Las medias rojas. It’s very short.
Clarissa's Blog 
Historically, were one eyed women prohibited from entering USA, or is it purely symbolic (breaking her spirit)?
Don’t understand how somebody can write “wanted the best for her” when the text says he wanted to kill her rather than let her have a better life. 😦
Reminded me of “Eveline” from “Dubliners” by James Joyce, even though here Eveline is afraid to take the step to liberty herself.
http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/959/
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The only possession she had to barter for a better life was her face and her body. Now she had nothing. The boat owner would have no incentive to take her on the boat once she became disfigured.
“Don’t understand how somebody can write “wanted the best for her” when the text says he wanted to kill her rather than let her have a better life.”
– I know. Hence my utter shock.
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I’m guessing that’s why your students had such a for-her-own-good reaction. Perhaps (and especially since this is the Bible belt) they think there’s no worse fate for a woman than prostitution, so anything her father does to her, even if it leads to her death, is considered better than that.
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And wanted to recommend (if you haven’t already read) a male coming of age story:
A Summer’s Reading by Bernard Malamud
http://vera.leobaeck.net/grade-11-u/literature/a-summer-s-reading
Last but not the least, one of my favorite short stories ever:
The Enemy by Pearl S. Buck
http://tlc.cet.ac.il/ShowItem.aspx?ItemID=36ccb108-d73c-4db3-ad15-4112881f0c74&lang=EN
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It has nothing to do with your teaching.
Some people are deeply indoctrinated to see clipping a woman’s wings as doing what’s best for them. One class in one semester won’t necessarily change that view.
What was the essay prompt?
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This was a free topic. There is such a graphic scene of violence in the story that I have no idea what could possess anybody to excuse it.
One student shared in the essay a story of how his father once prohibited him from going to a party, and that turned out to be a good thing because the police came to the party and arrested people for drunk and rowdy behavior. The student wrote that he now realizes that his father had done the right thing. I wonder if the student writes this because he thinks I will like it or if he seriously thinks this way. Obviously, I’d much rather prefer to believe he doesn’t think this way.
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Of course, he thinks ths way. Almost afraid to admit I think so too.
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Some of my former classmates went to parties, but one has to have an understanding where to go and with whom. For instance, which pubs are good and which attract dangerous, violent people. Whether your supposed friends know how to have fun in a normal, responsible way, or will they bring drugs and even attract police’s attention!
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Those sudden outbursts of Christian sentiments is why I am glad to teach only Japanese. I could not stand it either. I would fear that student would become violent against me or professionally undermine me, just because he could.
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All of these students but one are female. Which is too sad for words.
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Yes, that is a bit strange, but actually I would fear a lot less from a female masochist than from a male sadist.
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Can you believe the degree to which patriarchal norms have been interiorized? I find this terrifying. These are not small children. How is this even possible?
They can’t be trying to please me because in class I was transmitting my shock with the story with every means at my disposal.
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Yes, I can believe it, very much so. The christian kind of patriarchy is pernicious indeed. It’s violent and hard to weed out. Cultural differences do make some things more obvious than others.
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Yes, this is the Bible belt. It’s just that here we are, on this blog, talking about sophisticated, complex stuff, while most people haven’t even figured out that it isn’t OK to brutalize women, even if you have GOOD INTENTIONS.
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Christian society is very backward. Christianity forms the historical and ideological bedrock underneath any form of secularism in Western cultures. So you can always expect some breathtaking idiocy to make its appearance. By contrast, Japanese culture is like breathing clean air. Everything is just remarkably charming and psychologically normal. But the Westerners usually get around to accusing me of manipulating them in some way, just because they cannot understand all the ins and outs of something I may have done. They start attacking me as an evil, “feminine” principle and I have to duck for cover. I’m really tired of this, but that is their fall back position when they cannot immediately understand everything about everything. They resort to Christian metaphysics as an explanatory mechanism. The more different you are from them, it seems, the more they resort to it. They’re such turkeys.
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// All of these students but one are female. […] One student shared in the essay a story of how his father …
So it was the only male student. Interesting that some fathers control sons too, not only daughters.
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According to psychoanalyst Alice Miller, this is a typical response of the abused child: excuse the abusive parent rather than acknowledge the fact that you were abused. This student may have been abused by a parent and has now become an apologist for this type of parental behavior as a defense mechanism.
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Yes, this makes every sense. But what should I conclude, that ALL these students are victims of abuse?
This scares me.
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It’s a pat answer, though, because it doesn’t explain why people reflexively condone abusive behavior when it is happening to other people.
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“If I put up with this, then why should anybody else enjoy freedom?”
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Ressentiment, then? — the desire to perpetuate unhappiness out of envy in relation to the possibility of happiness or those who are happy?
I don’t know. Certainly, emoting is like bleeding into shark infested waters in some cultures, but the Japanese emote with ease and do not seem to feel at all embarrassed about that.
This indicates that we can only go so far with psychologizing.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD5EhAeF680
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Holy crap. There isn’t anybody saying “it’s best for her” thing is just excuse? That those excuses aren’t okay, that it just tries to cover up an act of violence? What?
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“There isn’t anybody saying “it’s best for her” thing is just excuse? That those excuses aren’t okay, that it just tries to cover up an act of violence? What?”
– Nobody so far. I will keep grading tomorrow but for today I had to stop because I find any excuses for domestic violence or abuse to be too disturbing on a personal level to continue grading for a long time. I can’t even tell you how exhausting this is to me.
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I am starting to wonder what some of your students’ homelives are like.
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Here is how deep Christian patriarchy is in Western culture. People see the male as the rational principle and assume that whatever he is doing it must be for the best. Let me explain: When you are being strongly psychologically assaulted on an ongoing basis by an ex-soldier who is used to a high degree of psychological sadism and has normalised it, and when this has been occurring since you were fifteen, you are not considered a credible witness in your own case. Why? Because you don’t know where the line SHOULD be drawn between normal behavior and craziness and because you are a bit emotionally wrecked.
This was my situation in relation to my father and ABSOLUTELY NOBODY took my side. Instead they took his. And he was playing fast and loose, trying to pass off all the blame for his obnoxoius behavior onto me. To criticise him was to be “too sensitive” and “emotional”.
And Christians lap this sort of stuff up. Even those professing atheism or secular sensibilities can’t seem to get enough of it. The only way I’ve been able to escape my trauma is to cross cultural barriers and speak exclusively to Japanese. They don’t have this same way of codifying “emotion” as a negative trait, (like a hot potato — whomever is left holding it is the loser).
Really, I IS good to know that there are normal people in the world — and I will speak to some of them today! 🙂
But here is who things were, when I was trying to figure it all out intellectually and more generally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsmNqYyV-FY
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“Here is how deep Christian patriarchy is in Western culture. People see the male as the rational principle and assume that whatever he is doing it must be for the best.”
– So, question: if in this short story the mother were the one to beat the daughter, would the reaction of the students be different? Or would they see the mother as an agent of this same guiding principle that can do no wrong?
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I would guess that the mother would come under greater suspicion for having nefarious motives, although if she were beating somebody (that is, acting sadistically in a hierarchical manner), she could still be seen to be obedient to the chain of command under God. it would really depend, then, on whether her beatings of her daughter were reflexive and without thought (hence Godly) or if there were some more thoughtful, hence idiosyncratic component underlying her tendency to beat.
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No, you don’t suck at teaching literature, they suck at reading it. Solidarity. I’m currently marking papers where I let students pick a short story (in English!) from our anthology to write about, and I am struck by the contortions students will go through to make sure ANY story has a happy ending. If they can’t squint at it enough to make it end happily, then they rummage around in it until they can locate A Message. The message is generally either Be True to Yourself or Freedom is Good or Be Nice to People. If, despite their best efforts, the story can’t be squished into either the happy-ending box or the salutary-message box, then it’s A Bad Story. Doesn’t matter how many stories and novels we’ve read, thought about, discussed in class–left on their own, they revert to their lame-ass boxes. I need to rethink this paper assignment.
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I’m nodding fiercely to every word of this comment.
I will never forget when over 30 (in a class of 50) students in my Hispanic Civ course repeatedly referred to the US as “the home of the free and the land of the brave.” I still have a panic attack whenever I hear these words.
“If, despite their best efforts, the story can’t be squished into either the happy-ending box or the salutary-message box, then it’s A Bad Story. ”
– We need to teach Hallmark card texts. This will make everybody ecstatic.
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You’ll love this one. I just read a student paper on Isabel Allende’s “An Act of Vengeance” (available in translation in the anthology I use for this course). Turns out it’s all about the importance of family (you know, that cultural thing in spanish-speaking countries). I’m at a loss for words.
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:-))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
Priceless.
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My students dislike the story because they claim it is condoning and recommending the father’s behavior and attitude. They cannot show how they know that, though.
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