Finally, after several wrong turns, I arrived at my destination in splendid isolation. The administration had located me in the Girls' Auxiliary Gym--far from any regular classroom. Why was I being placed in quarantine? Did I already have that contagious disease, "noisy class"? "Well, all right," I thought to myself, "let's get on with it." After unlocking the door, I walked in and stared in amazement: wherever I looked, all I could see was myself. In more prosperous and forward looking times, the room had been designed to accommodate dance instruction--full-length mirrors lined every wall.
What a disorienting environment, at least according to those more experienced than I. "How can you stand it?" I was asked time and again. After the initial shock wore off, however, it became business as usual. Knowing no other surroundings for teaching, I soon felt quite at home; in fact, I began expecting to find mirrors in every classroom.
Not that the experience wasn't disconcerting at times. Meeting myself everyday, living with my reflection continually bouncing back at me--talk about feedback! From certain angles the classroom appeared awash with student faces; I could sense them to my right, to my left, even behind me staring out from the walls--I couldn't hide from them, or myself. Self-conscious, I frequently caught myself glancing at my appearance: was my hair combed properly, my tie straight, my face animated; was I gesturing too much or not enough?
Only later did all this self-absorption come to seem purposeful. The students and I, intently returning the gazes from those mirrors, admiring our reflection from every angle, were, in fact, creating and recreating ourselves. What impact were we having on others? In gesturing before those mirrors each day, we were trying to find out who we were. How might we recognize and acknowledge ourselves? And I very much empathized with these kids because I had yet to establish myself as a teacher. On more than one occasion, minus my jacket and tie, I was stopped by some lady on the hall patrol and asked to identify myself. It reminded me of the time Gracie Allen went to the bank to cask a check and the teller asked her if she could identify herself. "I think so," Gracie replied, and began fumbling around in her purse. Finally, she pulled out a make-up mirror, looked in it and said, "Yes, that's me."
Every day in school I saw students reflecting their performed accomplishments off the eyes of others as they jockeyed for peer acceptance and leadership. The judgments returned served an important mirroring function in shaping attitudes and behaviors, in allowing students to seek their place in the scheme of the school. And, of course, the images I and other teachers were sending out added to the students' repertoire of what it might mean to be an adult: not always readily accepted, but, still, hovering as a benchmark. This may be one reason why students often feel compelled to return to their schools after graduation, to call attention to how and where they have moved and changed. What better way to do this than by contrasting themselves with teachers who have stayed put, continuing to teach the things that they do. In returning to see the adults whom they had worked with in school, former students are using them as mirrors to sanction what has been altered in the new selves they have become and wish to project to others.
My challenge was to make the English classroom serve some significant role in each student's desire to grow and change. In my hall of mirrors, however, something often went dead when we marched through the inherited procedures for reading literature. Whether it was book reports or thematic analyses or even open-ended discussions, there seemed little connection with what must have been foremost on their minds--their quest for identity, their attempt to develop some sense of personal power. What disturbed me about the undercurrent of student dissatisfaction I felt was that I believed myself to be on their side, believed we were exploring the world together. Having taken on responsibility for improving their reading and writing, for encouraging their critical appreciation of literature, I didn't think I deserved their standoffish ways. If adults believed literacy such an important educational goal, why was it so hard to connect my passion for the subject with the students' pursuit of identity and esteem?
Often I felt extraneous to the natural course of their development--on the wrong side of an inevitable generation gap. With the endless interruptions and distractions of popular culture--let alone the public address system--they appeared to be little interested in me or the books I was supposed to get them to read. But perhaps it was my method that was interfering with their ability to join me in playing seriously with poems and stories. It took me a long time, even safely ensconced as I was in my haven of mirrors, to realize how this room, so full of reflections and responses, was curiously missing openness and community. What I had to understand was how I was contradicting my belief in democratic procedures by granting prior status to my responses and meanings when it came to the reading of literature. Yet, it was painful to give up this privilege; indeed, I may never be able to do so completely.
At twenty-one in that particular hall of mirrors, I was unaware of having any special authority over the students. In fact, unprepared as I was, it didn't seem as though I was pursuing any restrictive agenda--except to keep a little order. Presumably, the conversation was free to move in ways beyond my control, and I felt no longing or compulsion to cover any canon. Still, I didn't get it. Without any articulated theory, I couldn't see the hidden structures that I was walking into and unconsciously reproducing. Simply "allowing" students the "privilege" of owning their own literary responses was not enough to capture their full interest, for they hungered, most of them, to be part of a constructive social enterprise. The actual workings of my classroom remained a mystery to me. I had no suspicion that unequal status relationships determine subtly the ways literary texts are handled in teaching situations, even when the parties are enlightened, experienced, committed. All I had at my disposal were some warmed-over homilies about clarity, critical thinking, and the examined life. Not enough to put into practice a democratic approach to reading literature.
What did seem obvious, however, was that English majors tended to assume prior custodial rights to
literature--to its joys and interpretations. Yet stories and their pleasures are for everyone. We share a
common bond in needing to actively receive and interpret the endless swirl of cultural texts that
surround us. Seemingly, many of my fellow English teachers had either forgotten or never perceived
that literature should serve all citizens in a democracy. While other teachers were staring across a
classroom full of students, I dwelt in a space full of mirrors and reverberating images. This made me
question the usual predispositions of those English teachers who had grown accustomed to placing
LITERATURE on a pedestal. In protest, I struggled to see literature as an ongoing initiation, an
induction into a common conversation, a way of being with others, even those who have come from
elsewhere and would rather be elsewhere. My hope was to entertain a vision of English teaching that
combined coherence with uncertainty, thus validating the reading of literature as an ongoing social
process and not as the transmission of someone else's knowledge.
Exploring the Sources of My Authority
But how to relax, when, as a teacher, my identity, my feeling of self-worth, depends upon the ways my authority is recognized by those I teach. Indeed, with literature as my subject, I keep finding myself in a paradoxical position with respect to authority: in the classroom my principal claim to authority frequently consists in my having to give it up. This has nothing to do with discipline; rather, it arises whenever I take seriously the reality of how poems and stories are created and interpreted.
It is not difficult to affirm that the pleasures of reading literature go beyond merely recording the chronology of what happens in a story or a poem. The indeterminate confusions of lived-through emotions and motives, involving as they do conflicting aesthetic and ethical concerns, is what really matters. Such things, of course, can never be reduced to multiple choice questions. But once the answer is clear that no single answer will do when readers are intensely engaged in reading and talking about poems, I still am unsure of where to place my allegiances. I could view the stories we are reading together in the classroom, both the students' and the ones in the books, from the perspective of received wisdom. Then again I might open these stories up as occasions for new possibilities, for disagreements about what these stories might entail or where they might lead us. This would mean relinquishing my immediate authority over each text and sharing openly with students the inconsistencies, the contradictions, of response and interpretation. Still, it is difficult to be secure and flexible when contrary responses actually begin cropping up in the classroom.
In being too open or tentative with students, one basis of my authority--my knowledge of literature--is threatened. Indeed, some deep issue of "ownership" and "control" marks my undeniable anxiety: what I'm ostensibly being paid for as a professional are the "facts" that I know about stories and poems and also the specific strategies for reading them. This is what I'm supposed to pass on to students. My identity, it sometimes seems, is tied up in being the best reader in class--fortunately what "best" means (the most knowledgeable? the most agile? the most open?) continues to elude me.
Who's in charge? What am I doing? These issues of authority seemed especially salient my first year of teaching. Barely older than my students, I was ambivalent about having just crossed the barrier between teacher and taught. Indeed, on any given day my sympathies seemed located more on the student side of the desk. Gradually, as I came to see the English class as a place for swapping and comparing stories of all sorts, I began to understand how tied up with authority was the question of my identity and the identities of my students. Openly exploring the works of literature before us, we were trying hard to determine who we were. Our disagreements reflected alternate stances toward experience, while suggesting the range of human relationships we were trying to sort out. Our comments about the stories we were reading and the stories we were telling became ways to embody and enact the choices that constituted our identities.
But to take this position, that stories were central to what I was trying to be as an English teacher, was also to take on much more of a burden for the lives of my students. The more I encouraged them to come forward with their own responses, the less secure I became about assessing their achievements. I was bewildered when their responses not only didn't match mine but seemed to come from a world totally foreign to me. On the other hand, it didn't take a genius to see that they were struggling with issues that really meant something to them. And the big problem that subsumed all the others came down to their relation to authority. We were still kids together. How were we going to receive the traditional patterns of social conduct being forced on us? What kind of adults might we become? On what basis were we going to establish our own autonomy and authority in the world?
The personal and social margins that students explored, when I had the courage to permit it in the classroom--which was still "mine," not "ours"--were naturally filled with contradictions and ambiguities. In seeking friendship and fairness, for example, students were discovering that contrary feelings might reverse the best of intentions, that being outspoken wasn't always rewarded. Having opened up all this conflict for the purposes of literary inquiry, I saw that I had a special responsibility to support my students in their quest for maturity. Such a quest involved nothing less than learning to understand and live with the flaws of surrounding authority--defects and deceits, cruelty and greed--that literature was forever bringing to light, even as it was celebrating our potentially better selves. We needed to avoid becoming disillusioned when human frailty and weakness hinder efforts to create a more caring world. Accordingly, I believed the students might be better prepared to cope with the pretensions and hypocrisies of adult life if they began to uncover similar tendencies within themselves.
Should discovering the inconsistencies of authority, I wondered, be tantamount to rejecting it in whatever form? My authority was perhaps in doubt, but this didn't imply that anything goes. In those free-wheeling, confrontational 1960s, I felt we needed to learn together how to confront limitations and disappointments without yielding to despair or alienation, without turning skepticism into cynicism. Might we become more subtle in our perspectives and not simply dichotomize good and evil as a prelude to our own dogmatisms? Would frequenting the stories of literature, and writing their own, encourage these students to adopt a positive ironic sensibility toward the ambiguities and uncertainties of existence? With these concerns in mind, one particular story, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, kept coming back to me. How might the crisis of human development faced by Young Goodman Brown help the students and me in our own struggle to keep in balance the shortcomings and the virtues of the human community?
Conversing with Young Goodman Brown
In the story of "Young Goodman Brown," first published in April 1835 in the New-England Magazine, Hawthorne invited his Puritan ancestors to speak across two centuries as a way of informing his own contemporary New England experience. Through Goodman Brown, Hawthorne archetypically dramatized that moment each of us faces while growing up, our loss of innocence. How will we react upon discovering that our idealized image of the adult world diverges drastically from reality? This is not just a matter of losing our belief in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy; rather, we find ourselves trying to cope with our emerging knowledge of danger in the world, danger from which parents can no longer protect us. And unfortunately, too many children face this harsh reality without ever having experienced safety and security. In a land of freedom where slavery once reigned, hunger and homelessness continue to exist side by side with extremes of wealth and luxury. And of every four persons who are homeless in our cities, one is a child. Abuse, injustice, inequity--for too many people this is the tangible substance of their lives. They never reach that point in the American dream where all citizens are free and equal to pursue their own ends for themselves. Given such conditions, is it possible for Goodman Brown's experience to speak across yet another century and reveal it's relevance to us?
At the beginning of the story, Goodman Brown sets off on a mysterious journey into the darkness of the forest. Significantly, his wife, Faith, desires that he not go, lamenting, "A lone woman is troubled by such dreams and such thoughts that she's afeard of herself sometimes." In her plea, and in the contrast of their given names, reside the thematic tension of the tale. Goodman, in focusing on good deeds, emphasizes the outer appearance of things. Remaining safely on the surface leads to literal-mindedness. Such consciousness means being stuck in the head and out of contact with any knowledge of the body and its desires. Gradually, staying hidden in this way, Good is converted to denial, rejecting--in doubting-Thomas fashion--all that cannot be seen. Contradictory feelings are to be avoided at all costs. Finally, Good turns into piety and righteousness.
Faith, in contrast, is concerned with a deeper awareness, an underlying sense of things that remains steadfast, despite the vicissitudes of immediate experience. Faith incorporates body into mind in order to accommodate discrepancy in the world. Faith holds securely beyond the surface appeals of fad and fancy. Accordingly, Goodness without Faith represents a frozen human sensibility. Alone, Goodman loses the ability to engage in good deeds because for him the intentions behind them have become sullied, and, once doubt creeps in, virtue is dispatched forever. Faith, alone, fears her condition, for without deeds the confidence of her belief remains untested. Separated, good deeds wither and faith becomes blind. "Young Goodman Brown" is about partnership, about keeping the mind in the body. Only by resisting the temptation to fragment and dichotomize can we live in conversational ambiguity with good and faith.
So here I saw a major task along the road toward maturity: I would have to negotiate a world of human motives and actions that inevitably fails to live up to my childhood expectations of perfection. Having discovered a secret consciousness of the body's claim on the emotions, I needed to find ways of integrating this knowledge into public discourse and move beyond the surface of human encounters. Goodman, appearing confident and steadfast when I first meet him in the story, resolutely rejects that a person's opposing desires might need mediation. He strongly rebukes Faith for entertaining doubts about his journey (that classic journey in search of meaning and value that is repeated so often in the nineteenth-century American literature written by men--when all they had to do was stop and look around themselves to find solace in the connections of community). Faith can only reply, "Then God bless you! and may you find all well when you come back." But as I learn, Goodman is not blessed. By sunrise, when he returns again to the real world, he is a broken man. His rite of passage during the night of his dream quest has failed to lead him toward a mature and integrated response to experience.
Although I discover that Goodman Brown knew all along of the discrepancies between his deeds and his motives, what is at issue in Hawthorne's tale is how Goodman will confront the knowledge that such discrepancies exist for all persons. Everyone is born with the capacity to represent experience for themselves, and, further, they are destined to have more thoughts than they can ever possibly act out physically. Accordingly, intentions are always multiple for any given act. This is merely another way of affirming that each and every event leads to any number of stories that might be told. The alignment of idea with act thus defies any single conclusion or generalization. Wonderfully equipped to think rather than act, it is not natural for people to immediately accept as answers to the dilemmas of life all those that authority stands ready to supply. How often the "wise" advice of parents goes unheeded. The good acts that Goodman Brown viewed in his world appear innocent when motives are ignored; trouble arises only when Goodman finds he cannot integrate the possibility of evil intentions. This is the dilemma of innocence, reconciling all those contradictory feelings that never quite align with the ideals that we wish to preserve.
Goodman Brown suspects he is journeying to sign a pact with the devil, but this knowledge is not something he can share openly with others, let alone his wife: "Methought as she spoke there was trouble in her face, as if a dream had warned her what work is to be done tonight. But no, no; 'twould kill her to think it. Well, she's a blessed angel on earth; and after this one night I'll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven." Even as he wants to explore the darkness, Goodman, not his wife, is the one who can't bear unsavory thoughts, can't assert the mutuality of partnership. Since he cannot voice and share his doubt, his fears, Goodman ends by creating his own doom. Refusing to divulge the dark secret that he too has "evil" thoughts, Goodman can never find out that such secrets are common to all persons. Goodman has no monopoly on the terror of childhood secrets, secrets carried into adulthood.
In the midst of the forrest, Goodman discovers that the Minister, Deacon Gookin, and Goody Cloyse, who taught him his catechism, are all part of the devil's band, but he resolves to stand firm against their clutches, since he believes he can always fall back on his Faith. Alas, even she deserts him at the end of the journey, for it appears that his wife that night has also come to join this underworld fellowship. As the witches gathered, "it was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints." All feelings of whatever sort must be given their due, if a person's experience is to remain whole. Finally, the dark figure presiding over this nefarious ceremony sums up the realities of the secret:
Welcome, my children, to the communion of your race. Ye have found thus young your nature and your destiny. My children, look behind you! There are all whom ye have reverenced from youth. Ye deemed them holier than yourselves and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness and prayerful aspirations heavenward. Yet here are they all in my worshipping assembly. This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds: how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton words to the young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager for widows' weeds, has given her husband a drink at bedtime and let him sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youths have made haste to inherit their fathers' wealth; and how fair damsels--blush not, sweet ones--have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest, to an infant's funeral.
Significantly, the assembled congregation is addressed as "children," for the realm of adulthood that they are now about to enter is marked by a knowledge of good and evil. As John Milton instructs us about what is unquestionably the central mythic story of Western culture, "It was called the tree of knowledge of good and evil from the event; for since Adam tasted it, we not only know evil, but we know good only by means of evil. For it is by evil that virtue is chiefly exercised, and shines with greater brightness." Significantly, this is a patriarchal version of the story. Women will not be denied knowledge of the conflicting sensations of the body, but men seemingly must be lured into tasting the fruit. A vision of caring and integration in this sense springs from a woman's refusal to accept divine authority, which in our particular religious mythology has ended up referring to God the father.
Since men have always tried to stand in as surrogates for this "original" authority, they have had to suppress women for attempting to raise to the level of consciousness an alternative and more natural story. Goodman's crisis in this instance grows out of his inability to see that the satisfactions of wholeness are only possible when dichotomies are transcended. He would keep purity isolated from the inevitability of death and decay, but in doing so he loses his final connection to purity itself. Good can only exist in relationship to evil. Without evil, without disruption in the world, good loses its very power to discriminate. But, even within the boundaries of my own world, this paradox is never easily grasped. How often I struggle to make things appear all right on the surface and so deflect the pain and hurt of any number of primal disappointments.
Goodman's crisis of innocence turns into tragedy because in the end he never compares stories with Faith. He travels alone outside the partnership of human conversation. The thoughts that burden him, while perhaps shameful, would have begun to dissipate in the presence of open communion with others, all of whom must necessarily deal with similar devils. The power of evil in this sense derives from exclusion. Only through disclosure, might we hope to dispel its hold over us. Goodman, however, does not have enough faith to reveal the contents of his dream, of his secret desires and ambitions. He cannot function reciprocally within the human community with all its contradictions and transgressions, and after a long life thus, "they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom." How instructive to my own devils is this tale. Trouble inevitably arises when I fail to test socially my "truth" about an encounter, a truth arrived at in splendid isolation. Yet it can be terrifying to live openly amid the contradictions raised by alternative perspectives.
In reading the story with others, the pivotal questions, naturally enough, seem to be ones of motivation and intent: Why doesn't young Goodman Brown tell his wife about what happened? Why doesn't he compare "stories" with her to see if what's in his mind really happened? If everyone seemed to be there at the witches' sabbath, why does he alone prefer to sulk and treat everyone with distrust? Comparing our responses across these issues keeps us focused on how we understand the perilous dichotomy between the individual and the community. The choice that this story emphasizes thus becomes one between isolation and negotiation. Goodman Brown could not remain open to others; can we?
What Hawthorne has imagined in the experience of Goodman Brown serves to define for me what a life can be like when it fails to triumph over the loss of innocence and instead lives in fear that its own flaws will be found out by others. For I take this to be a fable about the very real consequences of not rebounding from the discovery of the fallibility of authority. The shock of revelation demands all of one's courage to stay with the unravelling of truth and perfection.
Goodman Brown could not stay the course. He became all gloom because the idealistic position he took toward others could never be commensurate with what he recognized as his own shameful contents within. Belief for him was isolating. It did not provide a caring faith, because it was finally an all-or-nothing proposition. And while such a morality tale is, like education itself, partially wasted on the young, it can be a touchstone for the major crisis of growing up: How do I live with contradiction? How do I remain committed and cheerful in the face of ambiguity and "exposed" authority? How do I tolerate the outbursts of immaturity that may strike at any age?