Picasso, “Woman with Book”
Recently my English Department invited several alumni back to campus to share job stories. Their accounts confirmed for me that one can do practically anything with an English degree: the five students were a legal secretary, a software writer, a midwife, a technical writer, and a human resources worker. In their presentations and their answers to questions, they laid out the specific ways that their English education had prepared them for the work world.
As could be expected, they explained the value of being able to synthesize information, break it down into pieces, and set forth what one has found in a clear and cogent way that will reach different audiences. All reported loving their jobs, even though they couldn’t have imagined themselves doing such work on the day of commencement.
Nor was this all. As one of them noted, she also feels a deep sense of satisfaction knowing that she is one who loves literature and delves deeply into it. This thought comes to her both on the job and away from it. With all the emphasis on the financial payoffs, we need constant reminding that a liberal arts education is about more than a job, although it also about that.
I thought about her comment Saturday as Julia and I traveled to Staunton, Virginia to watch a production of Aphra Behn’s The Rover. Literature flooded into our lives every step of the way.
Because it’s a long trip—three and a half hours each way—we were able to listen to a considerable portion of Joyce Carol Oates’ The Gravedigger’s Daughter. We were enthralled by the story of a woman and her son in 1950s America escaping from an abusive husband and inventing new names and building a new life for themselves. I’ve been listening to the book in 15 minute segments for several weeks now so that I sometimes feel as though I am driving through upstate New York and seeing people dressed as they were when I was a child. It’s as though life around me has extra dimensions to it. Its variety and resonances seem inexhaustible.
Then we got to the theatre and left New York for 1672 London. I was struck, even more than when I teach the play, by how Behn plays a dangerous game with her audience, just as the gravedigger’s daughter does with her husband as she tries to keep him from beating herself and her son. Behn, the first woman playwright and first British woman generally to earn her living by public writing, had to keep a misogynist audience from booing her plays off the stage.
Although The Rover is a comedy, it contains angry moments. Angellica’s heart is broken by the male protagonist and Florinda is twice almost raped, once by the protagonist and once by a gang of rakes. The Staunton audience was uneasy: were we supposed to make historical allowances and laugh when Florinda gets tossed around or was it okay to feel a contemporary revulsion. Our mixed feelings were entirely appropriate because Behn herself was walking a delicate line. She couldn’t be too angry because that would alienate her mostly male audience. She plays the scenes for comedy but we sense the extra energy.
I could see exactly how her original audience might have disrupted her play had she failed to placate them. That’s because Julia and I were able to sit on stage (we were waved down from our cheap seats in the balcony). In the 17th century, these were prized seats because audience members could interact with the players. The result could be mayhem, as can be seen from a scene in Wycherley’s Country Wife. The fop Sparkish explains why he goes to plays:
Harcourt: But I thought you had gone to Plays, to laugh at the Poet’s wit, not at your own.
Sparkish: Your Servant, Sir, no I thank you; gad I go to a Play as to a Country-treat, I carry my own wine to one, and my own wit to t’other, or else I’m sure I shou’d not be merry at either; and the reason why we are so often louder than the Players is because we think we speak more wit, and so become the Poets’ Rivals in his audience: for to tell you the truth, we hate the silly Rogues; nay, so much that we find fault even with their Bawdy upon the Stage, whilst we talk nothing else in the Pit as loud.
Across the channel a few decades earlier, Cyrano de Bergerac was also interrupting a play that offends his artistic sensibilities–or so Edmund Rostand says in his 1898 play.
I imagined Behn teasing her audience but being careful not to go too far, shifting quickly to comedy when the melodrama becomes too heated. With this crowd, she couldn’t afford to appear as an angry or aggrieved woman.
All in all, we returned to St. Mary’s refreshed and invigorated. So returning to my point about the importance of encounters with literature in school: if you seek out literary experiences and have them playing in the back of your head, the world pulsates with meaning and color.
