Notes for 21 January 2016

LITCS 114
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Bldg. 494, room 160B
Winter 2016

• Admin things
  • Next week's reading schedule has been slightly altered. Short version: Tuesday and Thursday have been switched.
  • Our school email service has been having some problems.
  • I will be out of town this weekend. Please schedule emails accordingly.
• The end of The Awakening
  • Notes here.
• Stein's The Good Anna
  • What can you say about the structure and style of the piece?
  • What about Anna's relationship with Mrs. Lehntman? with Miss Mathilda?
  • Power dynamics in the story:
    • Anna's forcing of her will on Mathilda in domestic management of the household. (e.g., 40)
    • Also in matters of fashion (45)
    • And, previously, on Mary (49)
    • In such a household [i.e., one run by Jane after her marriage] Anna was certain that she would never take a place. (52)
    • With Mrs. Lehntman, Anna gradually had come to lead. Nor really lead, of course, for Mrs. Lehntman never could be led, she was so very devious in her ways; but Anna had come to have direction whenever she could learn what Mrs. Lehntman meant to do before the deed was done. (58)
    • In friendship, power always has its downward curve. (66)
  • What about socioeconomic class?
    • Old Katy leaving the household for another place where they gave her some more money (42).
    • A girl was a a girl and should always act like a girl, both as to giving all respect and has to what she had to eat. (46) (Note significance here of girl.)
    • The economics of poverty and mutual support: 75–76.
    • It is wonderful how poor people love to take advice from people who are friendly and above hem, from people who read in books and who are good. (78)
  • Gendered understandings of morals:
    • Sallie and the butcher boy (43–44)
    • it must never be that a young girl growing up should have no one to make her learn to do things right (56)
    • Mrs. Lehntman delinquent in her responsibilities as a mother: it ain't right, Mrs. Lehntman, to do so (59)
    • Mrs. Lehntman victimized by an evil doctor (74ff.); it had been a very hard thing for this german woman to do what everybody knew and thought was wrong (79)
    • she [Julia] just said in her silly, giggling way, perhaps they won't have any children. I told her she ought to be ashamed of talkng so, but I don't know, Mss Mathilda, the young people nowadays have no sense at all of what's the right way for them to do (80)
  • Other ways of biologizing behavior?
    • Anna found her place with large, abundant women, for such were always lazy, careless or all helpless (47)
  • What makes Anna good?
• Today's whiteboard snapshots