I know where the student's coming from: brand-spanking-new freshperson trying to protect her virgin eyeballs from anything untoward, but I fear this will end up like the time I taught Jose Saramago's Blindness and a student wrote a long comment on my course evaluations excoriating me for forcing students to read pornography. (Which Blindness isn't--not by any stretch of the imagination.)
Among the many ways in which Cold Mountain differs from Fifty Shades of Grey is the sheer number of sex scenes: two in Cold Mountain, both fairly discreet. In fact, one of the sex scenes reminds me of the "Squeal like a pig" scene in Deliverance: more terrifying than titillating. But then if you stretch your definition of sex scenes, you might come up with a third--the story Stobrod tells about Ruby's mother being ravished by a great blue heron:
The tale Ruby's mother told, as recounted by Stobrod, was that the heron strode up on its long back-hinged legs and looked her eye to eye. She claimed, Stobrod said, that the look was unmistakable, not open to but one interpretation. She turned and ran, but the heron chased her into the house, where, as she hunkered on hands and knees trying to squeeze under the bedstead to hide, the heron came upon her from behind. She described what ensued as like a flogging of dreadful scope."A flogging of dreadful scope"--if that's all it takes to make Cold Mountain is the Civil War version of Fifty Shades of Grey, then all I can say is, guilty as charged.
4 comments:
I don't know how you restrained yourself. It reminds me of an incident my daughter, a college sophomore, told me about from her Ottoman History class last week. The professor was discussing certain current events in Turkey as preparation for relating it to the history of the Ottomans. Well, one student raised his hand and told the professor to stop wasting their time talking about current events since this was a history class. The professor began to say that he had plenty of time set aside in his lecture to cover the history but then, apparently about to say something he might regret, sat down, went quiet for a minute, then let out a loud sigh and began the discussion again. All of you professors are to be commended not only for the knowledge and insight you provide, but for being able to do so in an environment where it appears some students just don't get it.
Yes, and one of the most important things we have to learn if we want to stay sane is when to sit down and shut up. (But then it's nice to be able to vent later about what we could have said.)
I've had that student, except that it wasn't even a description of, shall we say, procreative acts, but instead a certain term for procreative acts used solely as an intensifier in a Sherman Alexie poem. All I could think was "well, I'm glad I didn't assign the excerpts from 'Howl' " (which were also in the -- very standard, not at all edgy - anthology I was using).
Honestly, for a student who is (in an entirely age-appropriate manner) trying to figure out what role her sexuality, and expressions of same, might play in her life, now that she is, most likely, being exposed to a wider range of possibilities than she had encountered before, at least presented in a positive or at least neutral manner, almost any piece of literature can invite wanderings of the mind in directions in which it was already inclined to wander. This is proverbially true of young men (in fact, more conservative cultures, within the U.S. and elsewhere, have a tendency to accept such tendencies in young men to the extent that they make young women responsible for policing, or at least not exacerbating, them -- which, of course, doesn't work), but/and it is also true of young women.
And plenty of Shakespeare is at least as titillating as _Cold Mountain_ (just couched in somewhat more archaic/allusive language, which admittedly provides a bit of distance, or at least deniability).
I remember finding _Tess of the D'Ubervilles_ quite titillating at a certain age (younger than college). That admittedly took some effort, since the allusions are pretty allusive, and the ending quite discouraging.
This is so true: "almost any piece of literature can invite wanderings of the mind in directions in which it was already inclined to wander." I try to be sensitive to my students' concerns so far as it is feasible, but at some point we need to all just try to be adults and admit that sex happens and war happens and life isn't always a field of daffodils, although a truly determined reader could probably find offensive content in a field of daffodils.
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