Saturday, September 16, 2017

A Second Chance

It has been a crazy month.  With the new school year kicking off, I have been drowning in summer reading assignments and letters of recommendation for my seniors.  My soul has been thirsting for writing, but time has not yielded the space for it.  It is with a grateful heart that I sit down today with my computer, a bowl of granola, and (a little) quiet while the kids are upstairs getting ready for the day.

I've already learned a few lessons myself this school year.  That's one of the perks of teaching: if you're someone who loves learning, you continue to learn.  I think of my classroom as a cooperative.  After all, a mind is never so saturated that it doesn't have room for more knowledge and creative thought.

A couple of weeks ago I was waxing poetic about Wuthering Heights when Jane Eyre came up and, of course, Wide Sargasso Sea.  My relationship with the latter goes back about fifteen years, back to my undergraduate days.  I was a hesitant student, often shy in class, and I received lower overall grades than I earned on written assignments due to my "lack of participation".  However, I was participating silently.  For example, if a professor or student used a word with which I was unfamiliar, I would write it phonetically in my notebook and then seek it out when I returned to my dorm room.  This is how "recalcitrant" became one of my favorite words.  Thank you, Jessica-with-the-amazing-vocabulary!  I would also note the titles of books professors mentioned or loudly and repetitively claimed their love for.  One title that I wrote down repeatedly was Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.

I finally read the novel fresh out of graduate school (where once again everyone seemed enamoured with the text).  I remember checking it out from the library and being astounded that such an impactful book could come in such a slim volume of one hundred-twelve pages.  So I dove in, barely moving from my bed as I immersed myself in the backstory of Bertha Rochester.

And I hated it.

I despised the book.  I found it underdeveloped, scattered, untrue to the original characters, and overall, a bore.  I felt bamboozled by every professor who ever sang its praises.  But worst of all, I felt as if perhaps something was wrong with me.  After all, these men and women I so admired and held in such high esteems adored the book.  Maybe I wasn't the intellectual I thought myself to be.  The only other book I'd ever felt this way about was Revolutionary Road, and I'd thrown it across the room upon completion, yelling, "I want this book out of my house!"

For years I would cringe whenever anyone mentioned Wide Sargasso Sea, though secretly I wondered if the problem were actually me.

And so a couple of weeks ago, my students gave me an assignment (well, actually they gave me two, but you don't want to be subjected to the lemur-inspired villanelle they asked me to compose!).  My assignment was to give Wide Sargasso Sea another chance.  They held me accountable, and I did it.

I loved the read.  The prose was, in fact, beautiful.  The complexity of Bertha (Antoinette) hurt my heart and elicited my sympathy.  The criticism of colonialism was realistic and scathing. And Rochester...well, I don't like him very much right now.

This experience was a lesson for me.  And interestingly, it's a lesson I teach my students all the time.  Books affect us differently at different times in our lives.  While I identified with the young tomboy, Scout, when I read To Kill a Mockingbird as a middle schooler, I now find myself in Atticus, both in his work for justice and especially in his longings for his children's happiness and goodness.

While I will probably not be picking up Revolutionary Road again anytime soon, I'm grateful my students persuaded me to give Wide Sargasso Sea another chance.  I'll be purchasing ti for my personal library soon. And so I leave you with this question: what book should you give a second chance to move you?