class 7

1. ELIT 48C: Class 7

2. What is the difference?
 Peek
 Peak
 Pique

3. "I knew a peek at the peak would pique my curiosity.” While
that's not something anyone would ever say, it does illustrate
proper usage of three of the most commonly confused
homophones.
"Peek" (a verb and a noun) denotes a stolen glance: "I have a
present for you, so close your eyes and don't peek.”
"Peak" (also a verb and a noun) signifies the top of something: a
mountain peak, or the peak of popularity.
"Pique,” (French) (also a verb and a noun) : As a verb it means to
stimulate (interest or curiosity). As a noun, it suggests a feeling of
irritation or resentment resulting from a slight, esp. to one's pride.

4. AGENDA
 Gatsby and Af. Am Criticism
 Lecture: Trifles
 Historical Context and Style
 Discussion:
 QHQs,
 Themes
 Symbols
 Author introduction:
 Willa Cather and My Antonia

5. F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s grave
Courtesy of
Lindsay King

7. The Great Gatsby
 Q: Certain literary theories lend themselves to certain works
more effectively than others, but is it possible for a literary
theory to be entirely incompatible with a work of literature? For
example, if one were to make the argument that The Great
Gatsby does not have any underlying themes of race, would it
be appropriate to apply African American literary theory to the
work?
 Q: According to Tyson, one of the basic tenets of critical race
theory is that racism stems from an “interest convergence,”
which is an overlapping interest over “something needed or
desired” between two groups; often, it manifests as “material
determinism” or the struggle to “advance oneself in the
material world.” Given that its characters are highly
materialistic, can this concept be applied to The Great Gatsby?

8. Author: Susan Glaspell
On July 1, 1882, Susan Glaspell was
born in Davenport, Iowa. She excelled in
academics as a student, studying Latin
and journalism. After graduation from
high school, she worked as a
newspaper reporter for the Davenport
Morning Republican, then as the society
editor for the Weekly Outlook. From
1897-1899 she attended Drake
University and received a Ph.D. in
Philosophy.

9. At the time of her death in 1948, she
had written fifty short stories, nine
novels, and fourteen plays; most of
these works feature strong female
protagonists and stories that focus
on the experiences of women.
Perhaps not surprisingly, her work
faded from public interest during the
conservative1950s, and practically
disappeared from bookshelves and
the stages of amateur theatres. Yet
in the past few decades, her work is
being reexamined and celebrated
by a new group of critics and
audiences.

10. Lecture: Trifles
Historical Context
and Style

11. Historical Context:
Women’s Issues
In many ways, Susan Glaspell’s success at the turn of the
century signaled a new age for women, and Trifles, still her
best-known play, represents the struggles women of her era
faced.
In 1916, the year Glaspell wrote Trifles for the Provincetown
Players, some of the important issues of the day were
women’s suffrage, birth control, socialism, union organizing,
and the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud.
Women had not yet achieved the right to vote (19th
Amendment 1920), and in most states women could not sit
on juries.

12. 1914: Margaret Sanger publishes the first text on birth control.
1916: Sanger arrested for opening America’s first birth control
clinic.
City life: Manufacturing jobs pay little for long days of work.
Pre-teens constitute a sizable portion of America’s workforce.
The factory system creates earning opportunities for women, yet
women earn significantly less than men, and most are relegated
to jobs in domestic service, textile factories, or offices.
Life for rural women was not much better. A large portion of
America’s population was still scattered in rural towns, ranches,
and farmsteads. Women were responsible for the maintenance of
the family.

13. Style: One-Act Play
The structure of a play affects all of its most important elements—
the plot, characters, and themes. The one-act play is restrictive
and difficult. With playing times of fifteen to forty-five minutes,
the number of characters introduced is limited, and they must be
developed quickly.
The one-act format tends to focus on a single location and a tight
plot. The Wright farmhouse, located in the countryside and set
back from the road, is a lonely, desolate place. The plot involves
seeking clues to suggest a motive for the murder of John Wright.
Note that everything that is said and done, from the way the
characters enter Mrs. Wright’s kitchen to the discovery of her
dead canary, relates in some way to the mystery at hand.

14. Style: Local Color (Regionalism)
In the late nineteenth century, a style of writing known as ‘‘local
color’’ emerged. It is characterized by its vivid description of
some of the more idiosyncratic communities in the American
landscape. Writers such as Mark Twain created characters whose
speech and attitudes reflected the deep South These stories and
novels appealed to people in larger cities, who found these
descriptions of faraway places exotic and entertaining.
Susan Glaspell began writing during this age of regionalism, and
Trifles incorporates many of the elements of local color: regional
dialect, appropriate costuming, and characters influenced by a
specific locale.

15. Trifles is filled with a strong sense of place. The characters in the play are
deeply rooted in their rural environment. Lewis Hale was on his way into town
with a load of potatoes when he stopped by the Wright’s house to see about
sharing a party line telephone, a common way for people in small communities
to afford phone service during the first few decades of the century.
The lives of the women seem to consist of housekeeping chores, food
preparation, sewing, and raising children, with little time left for socializing.
The characters’ manner of speech reveals their limited education and rural,
Midwestern environment. They use a colloquial grammar peppered with
country slang. ‘‘I don’t think a place’d be any cheerfuller for John Wright’s
being in it,’’ Mrs. Hale tells Henderson.
Still, at the same time that she provides these carefully crafted details of
country life, Glaspell provides her audience with ideas that transcend local
color. The struggle between the sexes, loneliness, and the elusive nature of
truth are all experiences shared by people across cultures and boundaries of
geography.

16. Themes:
Gender Differences
Perhaps the single most important theme in Trifles is the
difference between men and women, distinguished by the roles
they play in society, their physicality, their methods of
communication and—vital to the plot of the play— their powers
of observation.
In simple terms, Trifles suggests that men tend to be aggressive,
brash, rough, analytical and self-centered; in contrast, women are
more circumspect, deliberative, intuitive, and sensitive to the
needs of others. These differences allow Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale
to find the clues needed to solve the crime, while their husbands
miss the same clues.

17. Themes:
Isolation
The devastating effects of isolation—especially on women—is another
theme of the play.
The men seem better suited to the loneliness and isolation of rural
farming. John Wright, for example, is described as a hard-working
farmer who kept to himself. He did not share a telephone line, and no
one other than his wife knew him very well.
The women, on the other hand, are deeply affected by isolation. Mrs.
Peters remembers with dread when she and her husband were
homesteading in the Dakota countryside and her only child died,
leaving her alone in the house all day while her husband was out
working the farm. Mrs. Hale, who has several children of her own,
imagines how terrible it would be to have to live in an empty house, like
Minnie, with nothing but a canary and a taciturn man for company.

18. Trifles: QHQs, Symbols, Criticism, and
Manifestos
Take 5 minutes to discuss

19. Symbols
 The Title
 The Home
 The Kitchen
 The Dirty Towel
 The Apron
 What is the significance of pleating
an apron or knotting a quilt?
 The Fruit Preserves
 The Bird
 The Bird Cage
 The Quilt
 The Knot
 At the end of the play,
Mrs. Hale says that
they would “knot” the
quilt. What is the
significance behind
knotting vs. quilting?

20. QHQs
1. Q: Mrs. Wright, the central character
of the short play, makes no
appearance over the course of events.
In some ways, this makes her an
object. What does Mrs. Wright
symbolize?
2. What is the importance of Glaspell
choosing to explicitly state Minnie
Foster’s name, as opposed to just
keeping her known as Mrs. Wright”?
3. Q: John Wright is describe as a “good
man,” but also a “hard man.” What is
the meaning and significance behind
this description?
4. Q: What role do the women in
the play have, how do they
reverse roles, if at all?
5. Is Mrs. Hale’s decision of hiding
the truth from Mrs. Wright the
right decision?
6. Q: Why does Mrs. Wright want
her apron at a time when she’s
being accused of murder, and
why does Mrs. Hale tell the men
that a cat killed the bird when she
knew that there was no cat to
begin with?

21. QHQs
4. Q: Why would the
women decide not to
give crucial evidence to
the men?
5. Do you think the murder
of Mr. Wright was just?
And if so, would that
mean that we, in turn,
found his life to be a
trifle that wasn’t of any
worth?
3. Why is the act of taking on the
husband’s last name often seen as a
symbol of the patriarchy?
4. Q: How do gender
roles/expectations deprive women
of their liberty and conscience?

22. What do you think?
Criticism
 New Criticism
 Tension, paradox, ambiguity, irony?
 African American (Minority) Criticism
 Lesbian, Gay, Queer Criticism
 Throughout the text there seems to be an underlying homosocial
bonding between Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, which is coded
through the language and subtle actions of each character.

23. What do you think?
Criticism
 Feminist Criticism
1. The men of the play see the female characters speech and
concerns as trivial and unimportant, mocking them and making
comments such as, “Well, women are used to worrying over
trifles”.
2. When the feminist theory is applied to Trifles many instances of
patriarchal oppression can be plainly seen. One such example is
how the county attorney refuses to think about any faults John
Wright might have had by changing the subject when an
unfavorable trait of his is brought up in conversation.
3. Albeit a brief vignette, it is no less a complex study of the extent
of sisterhood between women and how far women are willing to
go in patriarchal society that both dominates works against them.

24. What do you think?
Manifestos
 F.T Marinetti: “Manifesto of Futurism”
 Mina Loy: “Feminist Manifesto”
 Ezra Pound: “A Retrospect”
 Willa Cather: The Novel Démeublé
 William Carlos Williams: “Spring and All”
 Langston Hughes: “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain”

25. “A Jury of Her Peers”
 Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” is her best
short story. First published in Everyweek on March 5,
1917, the work is a faithful adaptation of her play
Trifles, produced the year before by the
Provincetown Players. Glaspell had only to make
minor changes in adapting Trifles to a short story.
As with some of her other literary work, the main
character is never seen.
Film 29 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGJTHi0rliA

26. Author Introduction:
Willa Cather
https://www.youtube.com/w
atch?v=qzjTfaqgMD4

27. Willa Cather
 Born in Virginia in 1873. Willa Cather spent the first decade of
her life on her family's farm. In 1884, her family moved to join
her father's relatives among the ethnically diverse settlers of the
Great Plains. This area would serve as the inspiration for
several of her novels, including My Ántonia
 Her father tried farming but soon settled the family in Red
Cloud, Nebraska. Cather remembered vividly both the trauma
of leaving a hill farm for a flat, empty land and the subsequent
excitement of growing up in the new country. She took intense
pleasure in riding her pony to neighboring farms and listening to
the stories of the immigrant farm women she met there.

28. At sixteen, she enrolled at the University of Nebraska in
Lincoln. Her freshman English instructor gave her essay on
Thomas Carlyle to a Lincoln newspaper for publication, and
by her junior year, she was supporting herself as a journalist.
From Lincoln, she moved to Pittsburgh as a magazine editor
and newspaper writer. She then became a high school teacher,
using summer vacations to concentrate on fiction. In 1905, she
published her first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden.
In 1906, Cather was hired to edit a leading magazine and
moved to New York City. Her older literary friend Sarah Orne
Jewett advised her to "find your own quiet centre of life, and
write from that to the world."

29. Yet, she found it difficult to give up a position as a highly successful
woman editor during a time when journalism was almost wholly
dominated by men, and did not quit her position for three years. In
1912, on a visit to her family in Red Cloud, she stood on the edge of a
wheat field and watched her first harvest in years. By then, she was
emotionally ready to use her youthful memories of Nebraska. From this
experience evolved O Pioneers!, the novel she preferred to think of as her
first. It is this long perspective that gives Cather's work about Nebraska
a rich aura of nostalgia, a poignancy also found in her next Nebraska
novel, My Ántonia.
Although Cather's 1922 novel about World War I, One of Ours, was
received with mixed critical reviews, it was a best seller and won Cather
the Pulitzer Prize. She continued to write until physical infirmities
prevented her from doing so. In 1945, she wrote that she had gotten
much of what she wanted from life and had avoided the things she most
violently had not wanted—too much money, noisy publicity, and the
bother of meeting too many people. Willa Cather died from a massive
cerebral hemorrhage on April 24, 1947.

30. HOMEWORK
Read My Antonia (1918) Book I Introduction
and Chapters 1-19
Post #7: Choose one
1. QHQ Chapters 1-19
2. Discuss why Willa Cather chose a male
narrator and why women dominate the novel.
3. Explore the story or relationship of Pavel
and Peter.
4. Compare and contrast the lives of Jim
Burden and Antonia. Explain what drew them
together and enabled them to become close
friends.
5. Compare and contrast the relationship
between Antonia and Jim in Section 1