Yesterday I talked about Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and male shyness. Today I discuss another Neo-Restoration comedy, Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem (1780), and how it addresses an equally thorny relationship problem: low self-esteem. In the play Letetia and Doricourt are to marry, even though they haven’t seen each other since they […]
Monthly Archives: November 2009
She Stoops to Circumvent Inhibitions
Oliver Goldsmith Discussions in my 18th Century Couples Comedy class are proving to be a lot of fun because, almost seamlessly, we move between the 18th courtship scene, challenges faced by young people today, and contemporary movies and television shows. Comedy rushes in where wise men fear to tread, giving us a way to talk […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged adolescence, Oliver Goldsmith, Relationships, She Stoops to Conquer Comments closed
Aphra Behn, Relationship Counselor
I’ve been reading essays for my Restoration and 18th Century Couples Comedy class and, as always, am finding new dimensions in the works as I look at them through the students’ eyes. Aprha Behn’s comedy The Rover has proved particularly illuminating. Three essays written on the play focused on its romantic relationships. Florinda and Belvile […]
Austen, Not Byron or Scott, for Strength
My final post in this four-part series shows how my student Mary used Persuasion in her Jane Austen senior project to validate her growing self-confidence. She focused in that novel on the reading scenes involving the sensitive Captain Benwick, who is shattered by the death of his fiancé Fanny Harville. To console himself, Benwick plunges […]
Heroic Reading When All Are against You
While it made sense that my student Mary would be drawn to Northanger Abbey (see my Thursday and Friday posts), Mansfield Park was the Jane Austen novel that brought out her best. She identified with the heroine Fanny Price for very understandable reasons. With her speech impairment, Mary, like Fanny, grew up feeling marginalized as […]
Grendel’s Invasion of Fort Hood
I interrupt my Jane Austen series in honor of the soldiers killed by the army psychologist at Ford Hood. Facts are sketchy as I write this, but Beowulf, particularly the monster Grendel, may give us some insights into the tragedy. Think of Grendel as a warrior that goes bad. In the epic, Grendel lives on […]
Moving beyond Gothics to Reality
For a student who had spent her life hiding out in literature (see yesterday’s post), Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey struck a chord. Although it’s the most lightweight of Austen’s six great novels, Mary learned a lot about herself when she studied it. Northanger Abbey is a coming-of-age novel about young Catherine Morland. In a visit […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Coming of age novel, Jane Austen, Maturation, Northanger Abbey Comments closed
Reading Austen to Handle Adversity
In recent posts I have been writing about how young people in the 18th century found moral guidance in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, even though the novel was attacked for corrupting them. Over the next four posts I will tell an inspirational story about one of my students who found guidance in the novels of […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Adversity, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, reading, Sense and Sensibility Comments closed
