Hiroshima moms?

We started the semester talking (albeit briefly) about Tiger Moms, thanks to the media storm Amy Chua stirred up. This morning, courtesy of Yahoo! news, we have the Hiroshima mom:
http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/parenting/the-opposite-of-a-tiger-mother-leaving-your-children-behind-2460982/
I hope that by the midpoint of the semester, we're getting very uncomfortable with judging women-as-mothers' choices (and it's my sense that we are). That said, this article is perfect for leading into our post-Spring Break readings: A Doll's House, The South, and The Hours!

On a related note, I'm more than a little disturbed by our propensity for discussing these very difficult parenting/mothering issues ONLY through a lens that relies on Asian labels -- I think that says something very telling about our own culture's inability to discuss honestly what it means to parent/mother a child.

Mommy Blogging

In class yesterday, we talked about the phenomenon of Mommy blogs -- and then mere hours later, Lisa Belkin, of The New York Times' Motherlode blog, posted about her article on Mommy blogs in last weekend's Magazine:
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/queens-of-the-mom-blog-kingdom/

And here's the article she wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/magazine/27armstrong-t.html?_r=1

How did I manage to time yesterday's discussion so perfectly for this article?

#3 - Baird: Why Mothers Should Lower the Bar - Newsweek

Baird: Why Mothers Should Lower the Bar - Newsweek

[note that I've apparently learned how to embed a link!]

Here's an interesting nod to Ms. Lessing, our author of the week. I read this piece last spring when Baird published it, and then filed it away for when I'd be teaching this course -- and promptly forgot it until a Google Search sent it my way again. Anyway -- some food for thought as we keep thinking about what makes a mother "bad". We'll come back to Lessing's comments when we read Toibin's The South.

#2 -- Things a professor likes to see -- and other pedagogical ruminations

I just wandered through my building and saw in several different nooks and crannies students of mine reading for our late afternoon class -- so fun to see their total absorption in the novel (Me Dying Trial)!

Which leads me to wonder again (as I did yesterday when I finished it) what they'll all think of the ending of the novel. I personally found the plot compelling and was totally sucked into Gwennie's perspective each time the narrative voice aligned with her. BUT... I found the ending a bit of a letdown: we got just enough of Peppy for me to be disappointed that we hadn't gotten more throughout the novel. It'll be really interesting to go into today's discussion with that reaction fresh in my mind.

As I explained to the class on Tuesday, in any literature-based course that I design and teach, I try to include 2-3 novels on the syllabus that are brand-new to me. I read a lot about them, to try to ensure they fit thematically, but I don't read them ahead of time. That way, when we discuss them in class, I can model for the students the experience of reading for the first time. I've read Frankenstein, for instance, a dozen times -- and I've read the 1818 edition, the 1831 one, the compendium of all the versions -- you get the picture. It's a novel I love, but I am far removed from the students who are experiencing it for the first time. And I think it's really important that there be moments when I literally don't have all of the answers for them, which this practice creates.

Frankenstein

So, after our discussion of Victor and our attempts to assess the morality of his decisions/actions was cut short yesterday by the beginning of the blizzard (thank you, half-mile visibility!), I've been thinking a lot about they ways that Frankenstein can serve as a cautionary tale. There's the semi-obvious (at least it feels obvious to me) issue of ART (assisted reproductive technology), which we've already discussed some in class: How far are you willing to go to have a child ("create life")? How far should people in general be allowed to go?

But there's another sticky point that Victor's actions raise: once he's created the creature (i.e., made a VERY BAD CHOICE, to use the terminology my daughter understands), what are his obligations to fix it? This dilemma is salient for mothers (I might mean those doing maternal thinking, but I definitely mean mothers) because so much of raising a child seems to be trial-and-error. How far can you backtrack? How much can you re-do? So you try one thing and it's a disaster -- how can you rectify the mistake? Is it even a mistake? Is it just an experiment that didn't work out?

#1 -- In homage to Sara Ruddick

Today I will teach Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking to my "Monstrous Mothers of Literature" class -- though if the past week and a half of meetings has been any indication, they'll teach me as much as I teach them through the wonderful conversation I'm anticpating from them!
One of the assignments I've given them this semetser is to keep a blog as a site for them to react to and reflect on the readings we're doing. In solidarity, I'll be blogging, too :) And maybe this blog will help keep me accountable, as well, as I work on my current book project (tentative title: Daughterless Mothers: Complicating Images of Mother Ireland and Mother Africa).