Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 6; October 1999

"White Rabbits : Method based Literature Teaching"

By John R. Yamamoto Wilson

Page 2 of 2

A few minutes' discussion in groups is usually sufficient for most students to conclude that they have absolutely no idea. What could I possibly be talking about?

So I give them a few basic pointers, reminding them that the parameters we are looking at here are those of sexual politics.

'Complete this sentence: “This story was written by a…”'

'…man.'

'And this one: “The central character is a…”'

'…man.' (However crucial Mrs Carter is to the story, Mr Carter is nevertheless clearly the main character.)

'OK. One more: “Female characters in this story are seen through the eyes of a…”'

By this time they have got the idea, and we are ready to do some more close analysis of the text. If women are seen through the eyes of a man, precisely how are they seen? With a bit of discussion, and some guidance from me, students will come up with such points as:

• Mr Carter compares his wife unflatteringly to a bird ('When he looked at her neck he was reminded of how difficult it was to unstring a turkey'; 'Her thin bare legs reminded him of a heron waiting for fish'; 'she screamed like a hurt and angry bird'), that is, to something less than human.

• The phrase, 'there is no company more cheerless than that of a woman who is not desired,' makes it clear that a woman's worth is defined in terms of her attractiveness to men. This impression is conveyed elsewhere in the text (for example, when Carter says of the young woman in the film, 'I thought she looked lovely'), and even Mrs Carter colludes, dismissing the Japanese strip-teasers as 'Ugly women in bras'.

• Women are seen in economic terms, that is, as a kind of commodity, or merchandise ('He thought of the money he had spent to take his wife with him'; 'They paid her [the young woman in the film]. Fifty pounds. She needed the money badly').

• One of the very few specific references to what people are wearing (the others are to the strip-teasers' bras and the hat worn by the young girl in the film) is to Mrs Carter's slave bangles, which are mentioned twice. It is as if the writer wishes to draw attention in this oblique way to the status of the woman.

• These observations all cut only one way; Mr Carter is defined on his own terms, not in terms of economics or dress or his attractiveness to his wife (we do not get to learn what he was wearing, or what she thought of his neck!). At the end of the story, though, this general principle is violated – Carter redefines himself (negatively) as a result of his wife's attraction to him. This leads to the observation that the sexual contract is itself conventionally a one-way deal. The young woman was paid to appear in the film, whereas the young Mr Carter was not, because women have to be rewarded for appeasing male desire. When this conventional paradigm is overturned, when it is the woman who feels the desire, as in Mrs Carter's case at the end of the story, the man feels threatened and uncomfortable; 'She was dry and hot and implacable in her desire'. It is as if the 'natural' order has been subverted.

The message for students is clear. There are all kinds of things going on in this text which they didn't notice, simply because they weren't looking for them. Practically every text they've ever looked at probably has something to say about the feminist question; finding out just what is a matter of asking the appropriate questions.

By now, I have covered a lot of the ground I was aiming for. However, like a magician who still has one more white rabbit to pull out of a hat, I end by asking students what meaning the text might have for me if I was a Marxist, approaching literature from the point of view of the struggle between rich and poor, privileged and underprivileged.

Again, only a few minutes conferring among themselves is usually sufficient for students to confirm that they do not have a clue about this. To help them, I ask them to make a list of the characters, and try to place them in their appropriate social class or grouping. They usually reason that, since Mr and Mrs Carter are rich enough to go on holiday in Asia and go everywhere by taxi, they are at least comfortably off. They also deduce that, since the young woman in the film needed money badly, she must have been poor. And then, in many cases, they lean back satisfied that they have completed the task. It sometimes takes quite a lot of prompting before they acknowledge the little boy who comes up offering sexual services as a character at all. When they do, though, they of course have no hesitation in assigning him to the ranks of the poor and underprivileged.

I ask them to think about that little boy.

'How old do you think he is?'

They look at the text, but the text doesn't say.

'Do you think he's three years old?'

No, that's too young.

'Eighteen?'

Too old. They settle for about ten years old, give or take a couple of years.

'And what time of day is it when he comes up to Mr Carter?'

Again, the text doesn't say explicitly, but it is clearly after dark.

'So, we've got a little boy, about ten years old, out after dark selling sex and pornography on the streets of a big city. Do any of you have a little brother or sister? How would you feel if they were doing what this little boy's doing?'

It goes without saying. They'd be horrified. Now I ask them to make the connection.

The fact that the answer is obvious to me doesn't mean that it's obvious to my students. It may take several minutes conferring in their groups before I hear someone say, 'He's there because there are people like the Carters who are willing to buy what he's offering.'

It's not just a lesson about literature. It's a lesson about life. Because there are people like the Carters – rich, bored and decadent – there are little boys out on the streets, corrupted and compromised, pandering to them in the hope of earning a pittance.

The first lesson homes in on the idea that literature may be offering new perspectives, not simply trotting out old truisms. The second illustrates how those perspectives are two-way, depending as much on the reader, and what questions the reader asks about the text as on the text itself. And, finally, it all has direct relevance to the world we live in and the life we lead. I might follow the lesson up by asking students to take a look at another short story (for example Greene's 'The Innocent'), and comment on it along similar lines to the work done above, or I might simply ask students to look again at any text they thought they understood and see what new understandings emerged by adopting a new approach.

('The Blue Film' and 'The Innocent' are both to be found in Graham Greene, Collected Short Stories, Penguin Books, 1986.)