maureentuthill

Don’t feel free to call me Anne

November 28, 2018 maureentuthill

Many of my students have trouble referring to women by their last names. When we write English papers (or news articles and other reports), we typically refer to someone at first reference by first and last name, and for every reference thereafter, by last name only. It is efficient and professional to do so. But when it comes to referring to women, there is great resistance to this practice on the parts of both male and female students.

I first noticed this resistance when I began teaching freshman writing almost two decades ago, and nothing has changed, regardless of the class. For instance, when I teach early American literature, students have no problem referring to John Smith as “Smith” or William Bradford as “Bradford.” But for some reason, when we encounter Anne Bradstreet, she is forever “Anne” in the students’ hearts and minds (and papers). Nevermind that her famous poetry collection, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) did not even publish her name on its title page.

I do not believe that students hold onto the first names of women because they are withholding respect from them. They almost universally rate Bradstreet’s poetry and her perspective on the New World as extremely valuable to our understanding of early America. But they assume a level of familiarity with her that they do not deem appropriate for Smith and Bradford. They accept that significant male figures, whether they are civic leaders or writers, are detached beings set apart to do a particular job; hence, a last name reference feels correct and even deferential.

Female leaders or writers, on the other hand, dwell among us, in the minds of my students. They are accessible. Certainly, Bradstreet writes about motherhood, love, household concerns, and sickness—all topics that pertain to the home. But she also writes about God and Queen Elizabeth and the philosophy of art. She was highly educated, albeit informally, and was the first American poet to be published. She was ambitious and savvy about her identity as a poet.

When I teach writing, I am extremely clear about the protocol of using last names when referring to writers and critics. There is something gravely unequal about referring to a major American woman writer as “Anne” while her male counterparts are known by their surnames. Complicating this issue is the fact that “Bradstreet” is not even Anne Bradstreet’s given name. She was born Anne Dudley. So, one could argue that the first name reference is more of a nod to her true self, and not to the legacy of the family into which she married at the age of 16. But that is not what is happening.

When a woman has chosen a last name, it should become the professional moniker by which others refer to her. Our resistance to doing so may reflect the assumption of familiarity that feels generous to the one who assumes, while in reality it disregards the identity of the woman with no last name.

Humanistic Writing

The best end result of writing

April 14, 2018April 14, 2018 maureentuthill

I asked my freshman writing students today what the best possible outcome would be for their research papers. Most of their responses had to do with the practical benefits they might gain:

“We’ll be better writers.”

“We’ll figure out how to apply our writing skills to other situations.”

“We’ll know how to do research.”

All true, but the response I was hoping for was, “I learned something about myself.” The practical ends of writing instruction are important. We need to communicate clearly and effectively if we expect to relate to others. And yet, when I am reading student papers, I always search for moments of insight that can only come from deep contemplation.

My students are writing about Malcolm Gladwell’s theory of the Power of Context, which proposes that our behavior is dictated by our environment. Gladwell suggests that positive surroundings create positive human behaviors; conversely, negative environments engender unsavory behaviors, including crime.

It’s a liberating idea, Gladwell argues, because it means that changing things for the better is within our control. We do not have to shrug our shoulders and passively attribute crime to sociopathic personality or genetic predisposition. We are not at the mercy of someone else’s inherent destructive tendencies.

As my students do their research and apply these ideas to different kinds of environments—schools, nursing homes, urban areas, workplaces—they are energized by how right Gladwell is.

At the same time, I ask them to consider what Gladwell is also saying about human nature: “Character isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits . . . Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstances and context.” (The Tipping Point).

I posed this question to the class: “What if I tell you that your thoughts are irrelevant, that the feelings in your heart don’t matter, that everything about you is only shaped by your surroundings? How do you feel?”

After a silence, one student replied, “Helpless.”

This is not a piece of wisdom that we find through research. It only comes from the effort of meditating on the research and articulating how our minds respond to it. If my students are digging deeply enough into the topic as they write, and struggling to make sense of it in clear language, I think they will feel a natural resistance to the idea that our character is just a bundle of habits that can be dismantled in chaotic circumstances. They may discover that there is something intangible, and perhaps ineffable, about being a person. And maybe—just maybe—they will take note of such insights in their papers.

That is what I want them to learn through their writing. Not how to write a topic sentence or to integrate a quotation, but to struggle through the structure of the paper to reach the best possible outcome: to discover in themselves their own original view of human nature.

Therapeutic Writing

Healing Words

January 8, 2018January 8, 2018 maureentuthill

Writing through an illness can help bring one back to the familiar. Illness tends to separate us from others, creating a rift between the healthy and the unhealthy.

Pain, especially, can be deeply jarring as it removes us from the present. Elaine Scarry, in her meditation on the body in pain, observes that pain brings about “an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”*

How then do we stay connected to the world through pain and illness?

Physicians and therapists have long acknowledged the power of language to keep us grounded in our realities, even as we suffer physically and emotionally. But writing through pain is clearly not always possible. Even putting it into spoken words may be beyond our capabilities. As Scarry notes,

“physical pain does not only resist language but actively destroys it.”

But if, somewhere on the edge of pain, it is possible to write about it, the process can help to reduce the anxiety and anger that often comes with it.

Dr. David A. Hanscom, and orthopaedic surgeon in Seattle, Washington, writes about managing chronic pain through journaling. He explains that the pathways of pain and emotion are so closely linked that they often aggravate one another. By writing about chronic pain, Dr. Hanscom says, we become aware of how we react to it, and then we can detach ourselves from it long enough to figure out more positive responses to it.

Writing about our pain and illness also builds connections between the known self and the new self that is emerging through the medical experience. Rather than feel a loss of identity, we can decide how this new reality will be absorbed into the familiar.

Sometimes called narrative medicine, this storytelling process often includes the health care providers and the caregivers who work with the patient. When they all narrate their experiences, the web of the patient’s story becomes tighter, more secure.

Writing builds communities, and when there is sickness, those communities are critical to healing.

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4.

Grammar

Grammatica

January 5, 2018January 6, 2018 maureentuthill

This year, for the first time in almost two decades as an English professor, I taught grammar. The experience energized me in ways I did not anticipate. The questions alone shifted my perception of language as I began to see the philosophy behind the rules.

For instance, why do we say, “the rich chocolate layer cake” instead of “the layer chocolate rich cake”? And why don’t we need commas to separate that series of adjectives?

The answer lies in the logic of the description: the adjectives are cumulative, building upon one another until the final word in the phrase (“cake”) appears. And because the adjectives are different in nature, they are not separated by commas.

When we place a word in a specific slot in a sentence, we order reality. We discern how English speakers construct their worlds. We don’t say “the cat black” because English speakers over a thousand years ago agreed that words that named things (nouns) would appear after words that described them (adjectives). Hence, “the black cat.”

It is no surprise that grammatica was one of the original three liberal arts subjects of the medieval trivium. Consider how essential grammar is to everything we do with one another as human beings. If we cannot communicate, we cannot build things together. Understanding the infinite shades of meaning in a language builds social cohesion.

The entire spectrum of arts and sciences—or, as the medievals classed them, the language arts and the numerical arts—completes human intelligence, producing what Thomas Aquinas called the “lively mind.” Such a mind has a panoramic view of existence and recognizes its own responsibility to find a meaningful place within it.

Perhaps grammar still lies at the core of the liberal arts. Lately, the term has been bandied about to describe the implicit rules of diverse systems (the grammar of science, the grammar of society, the grammar of happiness, and even—the grammar of God). Studying the order and function of words in a sentence is one way to begin knowing the self in relation to others, to understanding the structure of how things work.

writing habits

Walking, Thinking, Writing

January 4, 2018January 4, 2018 maureentuthill

Writers’ habits have always intrigued me—not superstitious ones that are unique to the individual, but ones that have an actual impact on the creative process. One of the greatest writer’s habits of all time is walking.

When Agatha Christie had gotten halfway through her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), she seemed stuck, so her mother encouraged her to go away for a couple of weeks to finish it off. It was the middle of World War I, and she went to Dartmoor, a ragged, wild stretch of moorland in the south of England. She stayed in a dreary, old hotel that was sparsely occupied. She spoke to no one and spent her time three ways: writing, sleeping, and walking.

Here is how she describes her routine:

“I used to write laboriously all morning till my hand ached. Then I would have lunch, reading a book. Afterwards I would go out for a good walk on the moor, perhaps for a couple of hours.”

A couple of hours? This is some serious walking, and I cannot think of one person I know who does such a thing today. But in another era, it was commonplace. James Joyce used to walk 8 miles at a clip, sometimes as a way to spend time in conversation with friends.

On her walks, Christie had conversations with herself, in the guise of her characters:

“As I walked I muttered to myself, enacting the chapter that I was next going to write; speaking as John to Mary, and as Mary to John; as Evelyn to her employer, and so on. I would become quite excited by this. I would come home, have dinner, fall into bed and sleep for about twelve hours. Then I would get up and write passionately again all morning.”*

Walking improves cognitive function, working memory, and reasoning ability. It’s no wonder that writers find it a great release and a boon to creativity.

As for me, I’m a runner. The benefits of walking accrue to me as well (I hope), even if I am moving at a swifter pace. Many times, I must choose between writing or running, simply because the day is short and my plans are long. But on a good day, I accomplish both. On a great day, the two complement one another. I will write for a while, and then put on my running shoes and hit the pavement while I work out a snag in the process.

Whether I am in the middle of a writing project or not, running calms my mind. When I leave for a run, I am thinking about a million things, all battling against each other. When I return, perhaps three of them are left, floating around in peaceful co-existence. And everything else seems manageable.

*Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1977): 245.