Monthly Archives: November 2009

Bumpkin by Day, Enchantress by Night

By Robin Bates | Published: November 17, 2009

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 […]

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She Stoops to Circumvent Inhibitions

By Robin Bates | Published: November 16, 2009

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 […]

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Aphra Behn, Relationship Counselor

By Robin Bates | Published: November 13, 2009

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 […]

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Finding Peace for War’s Wandering Souls

By Robin Bates | Published: November 12, 2009

Wayne Karlin  In honor of Veterans Day, I attended a fascinating talk by novelist Wayne Karlin on his new book Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead the Living in Viet Nam (Nation Books, 2009). In addition to being a top-flight writer, Wayne, a neighbor and friend, is a Vietnam vet who regularly journeys to Vietnam […]

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Austen, Not Byron or Scott, for Strength

By Robin Bates | Published: November 11, 2009

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 […]

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Heroic Reading When All Are against You

By Robin Bates | Published: November 10, 2009

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 […]

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Grendel’s Invasion of Fort Hood

By Robin Bates | Published: November 9, 2009

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 […]

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Moving beyond Gothics to Reality

By Robin Bates | Published: November 6, 2009

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 […]

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Reading Austen to Handle Adversity

By Robin Bates | Published: November 5, 2009

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 […]

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