Cowboys, Language, Power

Maybe it’s the effects of sitting in an airport on two hours of plane sleep, but the “language and power” section seems inappropriately named. Maybe it’s because language and power are pretty much the specialty of all English majors – whatever our subdisciplines – but this section, of all we’ve looked at so far in WLMA, has a title that’s too far-reaching. It needs narrowing. I realized after I finished all of the pieces in it that they’re really all about gender and language and power – a still-massive topic, but at least there’s one more circle thrown into this particular Venn diagram.

One question I could see tying these pieces together under would be: How do men use language to attempt assert power over women? “My Last Duchess” is full of that, of course, as is “Sweat” and of course Hamlet. However, the obvious corollary question – How do women resist men’s linguistic (and physical, and psychological, etc.) control over men? – is equally present in “Sweat” and “Gertrude Talks Back.” I especially liked how Hurston’s Delia essentially defeated Sykes through silence: she stands back, says nothing, and lets him bumble his way into the snake. (Couldn’t help but think of the trailer sequence in Kill Bill II, though I’m not sure if it relates significantly.) I really see Delia’s well timed silence resonating with Lorde’s arguments about speaking up. “Gertrude Talks Back” was hilarious. It’d be fun to bounce that off of Mel Gibson’s way Oedipal version of the Hamlet/Gertrude relationship.

Jane Tompkins’ essay was spectacular. There are so many good things to play with here, from the ways history is written (a new historicist could have a ball with this piece), to the ways museums either do or don’t culturally resonate, to the simultaneous love-and-dominance-of-nature, to genocide. Her passage on page 880 about hunters who are also conservationists described an interesting ideological paradox, and thanks to CNN’s incessant braying in the Houston airport,* I found out that this ideology still obtains today: as I was reading this passage, Mike Huckabee was giving a speech of Republican hunter types, claiming his subscription to this very belief. That speech would be a perfect little text to bounce off Tompkins’, though I’m not sure if the fact that Huckabee is soon to be a historical relic himself would make it more or less poignant. Back to Tompkins, the passage on the p. 881 about how, in museums, we “look at the objects in the glass cases and at the paintings on the wall, as if by standing there we could absorb in to ourselves some of the energy that flowed once through the bodies of the live things represented” rang very true to me, and reminded me of the Holocaust Museum. Which would resonate with Tompkins’ essay perfectly for a class, if one had the means to take them to it. Alas… what happened to field trips?

I liked “Jimmy Yellow Hawk” as a touching coming-of-age story, though of course it presents an entirely different cultural attitude about animals than the one described by Tompkins. Another text that might be interesting if one were inclined to explore peoples’ relationships with animals is “The Carnivore’s Credo,” an essay in2007’s Best American Essays that argues that the most respectful thing us meat eaters can do to animals is not to stop eating them altogether, but to 1) make sure they’re humanely treated until slaughter, and then 2) eat them with care and reverence in social settings. That’s not a very good summary, but I don’t have the essay with me. Suffice it to say it’s an unusual argument, one I’d not heard.

Last thing, as the plane’s landing: I applaud “Stewed Beans” heartily, and recommend teaching a unit around this question: What is the social function of farts?

Then you could watch Blazing Saddles.

*where, unlike Sea-Tac, I was reminded every ten minutes that the Threat Level was Orange, and that jokes or inappropriate comments about security could get me arrested.