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<p>I agree with this too. In fact, I had an English teacher that used to point out to us that good literature doesn’t need to be dark.</p>
<p>apprenticeprof #175, I did not mean to complain that you did not know QMP’s gender, although in fairness it would be an unusual young man who was virtually brought to tears by the scene that I mentioned.</p>
<p>There have been other threads where it has been assumed that QMP is male, or that I am male–neither is true. I have let it slide where it is irrelevant to the discussion topic. In fact, sometimes I have tried to obscure it. Once I got into a real linguistic tangle while trying to avoid the pronoun “she,” to the point that someone else asked what my native language was.</p>
<p>With this particular book, I think it is close to inevitable that reactions would be at least somewhat gender-linked.</p>
<p>The fact of the matter is that, unfortunately, you are going to get gender-linked responses to any of the canonical African-American novels. Sex and race were so interlinked for so many years that it was next to impossible to write a serious novel about the African-American experience without addressing some element of sexual violence. The Invisible Man probably has less of it than most of the others. Rape is a significant element in Native Son, Song of Solomon, Go Tell It On The Mountain, The Color Purple, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, The Middle Passage, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, Dutchman, and most of August Wilson’s plays . . . .</p>
<p>I appreciate the complexity of the issue, based on your post #183, JHS. I think that the discussion of the novels you have mentioned (at least, the ones I have read) takes a skilled and sensitive teacher, and ideally a group of students who can trust each other. Unfortunately, that situation did not exist locally. With the local high school group, I think the only way to have a discussion would have been in a teacher-moderated online forum.</p>
<p>Reading is a solitary activity.</p>
<p>Let’s remember that the propagation of African-Americans, as a people, for some 200 years or so was based upon rape (by white folks). It is impossible to understand African-American history and culture without this central fact.</p>
<p>James Baldwin in a television debate with mainstream white conservative James J. Kilpatrick:</p>
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<p>(p. 39) Bood Done Sign My Name by Timothy Tyson</p>
<p>I do understand the complexity of the situation, especially in light of African-American history, as mentioned at several points on the thread.</p>
<p>As I have thought further, I have recognized that personal history can definitely influence one’s reading of this and other books–in the case of my family, not with regard to incest, but definitely with regard to rape. Current events and reports of the campus climate, which high-schoolers have yet to encounter, can influence one’s reading also.</p>
<p>At 16, my closest childhood friend was raped by an armed stranger. This affected her, and all of her friends, for many years later. QMP was aware of this crime, by the time she was in high school.</p>
<p>The local schools had a module on “roofies,” taught to all of the girls either in 6th or 7th grade. The first time that QMP was the target of a rape “joke” (similar to the more recent ones at Harvard Business School) in her hearing, mentioning her name, and directed specifically at her occurred when she was 12. In school. In the most advanced math class offered to 7th graders, a single section. She accelerated radically in mathematics after that–I encouraged it partly because she was genuinely mathematically gifted, but in some small part because I figured that she could leave a few of the boys behind by doing it.</p>
<p>Then the news: Elizabeth Smart. Jaycee Dugard. Hannah Anderson. Amanda Berry. Georgina DeJesus. Michelle Knight. It is pretty much inevitable that I would think of them when I read the line “–although maybe sometimes a man can look at a little ole pigtail gal and see him a wh***–you’all know that?” (Chapter 2, where the word is not asterisked out). Ellison had no way to know what would happen to those women, and I am not suggesting that his book or any other contributed in any way to their plights. I hope this is clear. However, I think that news 50+ years after the publication of Ellison’s book does affect the reading of it. </p>
<p>And how long does one have to wait between times that a serial rapist is featured on the local news?</p>
<p>Where exactly is the line between rational and irrational fear, and how does that affect the reading of the book by a woman? I think it is different in multiple ways for a woman of my age and a young woman in high school, and worse for the high schooler.</p>
<p>There have been months (at least) of my life when I have modified my work pattern in order to avoid walking home alone at night. This often meant that I worked at home, rather than in the lab, at night. The nature of my work made this only slightly inconvenient, as opposed to really restrictive. My experimental colleagues had a much harder time of it. I also had one glorious period when I lived in a place where I could actually walk home alone at 2 am and feel perfectly safe.</p>
<p>I have advised college women who have been raped, and have seen the impact of it on their lives. It takes years for most to recover. </p>
<p>This consciousness inevitably affects my reading of any book with a rape scene.</p>
<p>My daughter often complained that the readings in high school were too “despairing,” and I agree that sometimes the reading lists are too stacked in that direction. On the other hand, I think exposure to and discussion of some of these difficult topics is part of the maturing process of high school students. Sure, 16-year-olds aren’t mature, but part of the way they get more mature is by being taught. I remember a couple of examples from my own high school which I’ll mention (although it may invoke Godwin’s law): we were shown a film with gruesome real-life images of Nazi death camps after their liberation, and we were also shown real-life films of gruesome traffic accident victims. In both cases, the images were very upsetting, and probably traumatic for some kids. In both cases, there was a reason for showing them to us, and I think it was a good reason. I recognize the need to be sensitive to students’ sensibilities, but sometimes facing such things is a vital part of growing up.</p>
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<p>For many years A Room of One’s Own has been a pretty standard birthday/Christmas gift to my nieces and other young women close to me. Recently you have made me stop and wonder if that has been inappropriate. Is it too grim? It is about women being silenced. Some think Woolf is a rape and incest survivor.</p>
<p>You are describing harassment, rape culture and the silencing of young women in high school classrooms. That is unacceptable. For me, the main problem is the school allowing this situation. I am trying to relate to the dilemma. One of my sons is gay and my husband and I had him moved out of two classes the first couple of weeks of the first year of high school because he was uncomfortable with the teachers. He felt harassed. We requested the change for academic reasons, legitimately questioning the academic content of the course (abysmal), and also made clear we thought teacher and student were a terrible fit personality-wise. There was a lot of coded language because our son wasn’t out yet. At the end of the year, I looked at both class materials and potential teachers for the next year. It didn’t look too promising. Son had already read all the books on the next years reading list. School said it was possible to get something out of a re-reading (absolutely true but clearly not in that particular classroom environment) and that it was a useful social experience. My husband asked if they would suggest a student who had accelerated in math take a low level math class for the social experience. I told the school he was dropping out and would just continue homeschooling. The school responded we could pick classes and teachers as long as we didn’t advertise this was happening. It was a very small school and I think they really wanted all my sons’ stats on their published records. I do not ascribe to the idea students just need to toughen up and learn how to deal with bullying. I think they should be able to count on a safe “work place.” I don’t have any idea how to fix public schools. Probably Mini does. I just did the best I could. I think allowing that son to stay in that school was probably a mistake. He did start taking classes at the local college through a cooperative program already in place with local high schools.</p>
<p>All that of course is not addressing whether Invisible Man is an appropriate classroom assignment. I am still reading. I am very tired of all the stories told from a male point of view. I think we are going to have to keep some of them in the canon. If we have a canon.</p>
<p>QM. I appreciate your perspective on this immensely. I’m personally worn out on rape scenes in tv and movies and books. </p>
<p>I honestly won’t be a consumer. But I’m older and I won’t eat mashed potatoes anymore either. </p>
<p>I’ve had more than enough perspectives on both.</p>
<p>The thing about rape in The Invisible Man is that . . . there isn’t any, at least not unless you adopt a very expansive definition of “rape”. There is a bunch of upsetting sexual material, but it’s not exactly rape:</p>
<p>-- Black male teens including the narrator are forced to watch a white female stripper, who has presumably been paid, in the presence of many wealthy white adult males. The description of the woman’s body has the most explicit language in the book. It is absolutely clear that this is a form of torturing the boys, who are being paid to beat each other up. The text gives no regard at all to what the stripper might be thinking; she is completely objectified. It’s a vivid, shocking, upsetting scene, early in the book.</p>
<p>-- A long, second-hand story is recited. It’s a profoundly weird story, in which a middle-aged man describes sleeping in a bed with his wife and adult (late teens) daughter, and basically waking up to find that he is having sex with his daughter, apparently initiated by her in her sleep. They try to stop but find they can’t, and the wife/mother wakes up in the middle of it and gets very upset. The whole thing is set up in the style of a Stepin Fetchit monologue or similar minstrel-show comedy routine around the shiftlessness and oversexed nature of Negros. The story, the style in which it is told, and the point of view which it represents are all clearly criticized and rejected by the text.</p>
<p>-- The narrator (a Black man) and the (white) wife of one of his superiors in the Communist Party meet for consensual sex, although the man is really interested only in pumping the woman for information. The woman gets drunk and wants him to pretend to rape her as part of her fantasy-play, something he does not want to do. Her request goes beyond that to something even more disgusting to the narrator – probably anal sex – but the text is completely unclear about that. He plays along somewhat, but by then it’s clear that she doesn’t know anything he wants to know, and he tries to get her to pass out or leave. At one point she does pass out. He uses her own lipstick to write across her belly: “You have been raped by Santa Claus.” He imagines her husband seeing that the next day. Then he thinks better of it and cleans the writing off. The woman wakes and starts to kiss him . . . and the next thing we know it’s morning and she’s still there. This is near the end of the book, and is presented as something of a rock-bottom moment for the narrator.</p>
<p>This is all strong, unpleasant stuff, and sexually charged. It’s fairly sexist in its treatment of women. But none of it involves men forcing women to have involuntary sex, and none of it glorifies or endorses rape in any way. From my standpoint, the real issue is that it presents sex as inextricably linked with tawdriness.</p>
<p>My point in all this is that QMP seems not to have been reacting to anything actually in the book. My guess is that she got upset and didn’t really read the passage carefully at all. And nothing in the book really supports the boys in her class teasing the girls about anything. Teachers should definitely control their classrooms and the discussion that happens there so it is a safe space for all students, but they can’t be held too responsible for student responses that have little or nothing to do with the text.</p>
<p>alh, I am really sorry to hear about your son’s experiences, although they are all too common.</p>
<p>One class in QMP’s school would actually have been helpful to your son, I think. (The school had some good points.) It was taught by a man who is in a stable, same-sex relationship, and who is an excellent scholar. He is also very perceptive. Regrettably he has moved out of the country a few years ago. Knowing this man, and admiring him, has strengthened my commitment to equal rights for all couples–more so than reading about the very real oppression of gays would do. In particular, I became very aware of the restrictions on adoption by same-sex couples. He never mentioned it. But I thought that he and his partner would be wonderful parents, and I would like for them to be able to adopt a child jointly. In our state, they cannot.</p>
<p>Students who are strong supporters of animal rights might dislike many passages in Moby Dick. I think they should be allowed (and encouraged) to express those views in a discussion of the book–but they shouldn’t get out of reading it for that reason.</p>
<p>Oh, wow, JHS, you thought that the intercourse between Trueblood and his daughter (in The Invisible Man) was initiated by his daughter?!!! I did not.</p>
<p>QMP is an excellent close reader. And no, I think she was quite clear on what was in the book, and what things were troubling associations called to mind by the book, but not in it. As I understand it, there is a castration scene, which I have not reached yet. She knew it for what it was, and found it repellent. A number of the boys apparently read right over it. </p>
<p>She does bring other experiences into her reading, though. One that is uncommon, I am sure: As a preschooler, she went to various small group activities, where it was common for the kids to get hand stamps (clowns, flowers, rainbows, etc.) at the end of class. The stamps were blue-black ink. My spouse reacted very strongly negatively to them, because they reminded him of Nazi concentration camp tattoos (neither of us is Jewish), and did not want to have QMP be “stamped.” So she wasn’t, and we explained why (to her, not to the teacher). But I think this made her react more strongly than practically anyone else to the violation inherent in the protagonist’s writing on Sybil’s body with lipstick. No one could have predicted this really, so it’s a “no fault” situation, in my mind. Allowing the boys to tease the girls about being “raped by Santa Claus” was just wrong, though.</p>
<p>Personally, I thought that there was some suggestion in the book that the daughter of Mr. Norton, the wealthy white donor to the school, had been the victim of incest. She died while the two of them were traveling alone in Europe. Norton’s reaction to the story told by Trueblood did not seem to me to fit with simple voyeurism nor with simple shock.</p>
<p>I could of course be misreading it.</p>
<p>Yeah. I never read that as initiated by the daughter, either. Even if it was written that way, I would have read it as I “read” any rape, incest or harassment story.</p>
<p>QM: Thanks!</p>
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<p>That is how I read it too. I also thought there was a strong possibility the boyfriend might be the father of Trueblood’s daughter’s baby. I am reading fast and already thought I needed to read more closely the incest story to decide what I thought.</p>
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<p>^^ Me, too - The problem for me is how we deal with the issue. I don’t want to give any help to this point of view:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/04/30/459881/shocks-from-the-left.html[/url]”>http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/04/30/459881/shocks-from-the-left.html</a></p>
<p>I understand QM wants to talk about the violent sexual content of the book and I think that is a very interesting and useful discussion. In NC, with everything going on politically, I don’t think it is possible to ignore the racial aspect of the banning. I think it is silencing of a different kind. ymmv</p>
<p>I agree with alh #197–I did think of the possibility that the daughter’s boyfriend was actually the father of the daughter’s (as yet unborn) child. But I don’t think that is supposed to be the case, though, partly because Trueblood’s wife was adamant (to the point of violence) that her husband was the father; she did not seem to have any uncertainty. Also, Trueblood knew about the boyfriend, but thought that he himself was the father of his daughter’s child.</p>
<p>Point well taken, alh, about seeming to offer support to people who are bigoted. That is not my intent.</p>
<p>I agree Alh. I have no interest in the banning of any books! </p>
<p>I do have some interest in teacher training on how to conduct responsible class discussions of sensitive subject matter. </p>
<p>I was just joining the book group part of the thread. :)</p>