A Vindication

I just finished reading Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. I'm still not entirely sure what specific rights Wollstonecraft thinks women should have—other than education, which is her primary focus—but overall I found the book very interesting.

Mostly, I was surprised: I was not expecting her to base her foundation of rights on theological grounds. Given her interest in Rousseau, I was expecting a more naturalistic argument, but that's definitely not her take. She argues that if women, like men, were endowed by God with both immortal souls and reason, then they are equally capable of virtue and independence. (In Wollstonecraft's words: "If woman be allowed to have an immortal soul, she must have, as the employment of life, an understanding to improve.") A simple and persuasive argument, in my opinion. Vindication does not have a nuanced theology, though, and on my (cursory) reading, Wollstonecraft seems to be a deist, though a sincere one. Whatever her religious convictions, in her book it's clear that a higher good forms the basis upon which equality (all types of equality) rest.  

I was further surprised by how many of Wollstonecraft's points are still relevant to today's sexual politics. Throughout the book she takes aim at the common 18th century idea that women hold a sexual power over men that lends them greater sway than any political enfranchisement possibly could. This idea seems to come really close to the 21st century vision of the henpecked husband, catering to his wife's irrational whims in exchange for a place in the marriage bed. Just as in the 18th century, the idea of men being in thrall to their wives undercuts the need for women's rights: after all, why do women need to keep pushing for equality, when they already wield so much power over their husbands? 

Wollstonecraft also zeroes in on the vapidity of the marriage market in a way that still rings really true. Since women are taught that attracting a husband is of paramount importance, Wollstonecraft argues, they can't help but grow up valuing beauty and artifice over virtue and education:

Men, for whom we are told women were made, have too much occupied the thoughts of women; and this association has so entangled love with all their motives of action; and...having been solely employed either to prepare themselves to excite love, or actually putting their lessons in practice, they cannot live without love...They want a lover, a protector; and behold him kneeling before them—bravery prostrate to beauty!

We've come a long way since 1792, and yet, judging by this description, things have not changed all that much. (See: The Bachelor.) I guess the lesson here is that no amount of education or equality can correct for the shallowness of humanity. 

Wollstonecraft & Shelley

I recently finished reading a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter, Mary Shelley. The book is somewhat histrionically titled Romantic Outlaws but, given the unorthodox lives that both Wollstonecraft and Shelley lived, histrionics don't seem altogether unwarranted. 

Wollstonecraft died only 10 days after Shelley was born, so chronologically their lives did not overlap for long, but Charlotte Gordon alternates the book chapters between mother and daughter, which highlights the influence of Wollstonecraft's legacy on Shelley's life.  

For some reason, though, I was particularly struck by a peripheral tidbit about Wollstonecraft's relationship with William Godwin, Mary Shelley's father:

They relied on the birth control system of the time: no sex for three days after menstruation, and then, since everyone believed that frequent intercourse lowered the possibility of conception, a lot of sex for the rest of the month.

Given that she was using this method: 1) with a man who was not her husband at the time, and 2) while already the unwed mother of a small child, this seems like utter lunacy to me. Couldn't she put together that sex = babies, and therefore more sex = more babies? People had been reproducing for thousands of years by 1797—had no one figured this out?! Even blood-letting seems more logical.

In any event, the book achieved exactly what I imagine the author wanted: I am now in the process of reading Wollstonecraft, and I have every intention of finally getting around to finally reading Frankenstein, too. I am overdue for both, but particularly Wollstonecraft, given that she's the only female political theorist of note born before 1900. I avoided reading her because I assumed she was added to the canon only because she was a woman. While I still think this is probably true, I've realized it doesn't matter much. She wrote the first modern argument for women's equality, and it's possible that only a woman would have written such a book.  

the dialogue of thought

"Aristotle, speaking of friendship, remarked: 'the friend is another self'—meaning: you can carry on the dialogue of thought with him just as well as with yourself. This is still in the Socratic tradition, except that Socrates would have said: The self, too, is a kind of friend...The common point, however, is that the dialogue of thought can be carried out only among friends, and its basic criterion, its supreme law, as it were, says: Do not contradict yourself."

—Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

a grammatical lament

As I mentioned in my last post, I have a problem with semi-colons and colons. This realization didn't just come to me out of the blue, though. I've been feeling ashamed of myself because I've been reading Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris, who is a long-time proofreader at The New Yorker. There are parts of this book that are laugh-out-loud funny, which I was not at all expecting in a book about grammar. Titles of chapters include, "Comma Comma Comma Comma, Chameleon" and "F*ck This Sh*t." Here is a sample insight, from my favorite chapter, which is on dashes, semicolons and colons:

Americans can do without the semicolon, just as they can give Marmite a pass...We are a plainspoken, cheerfully vulgar people. Which is not to say that Mark Twain couldn't or didn't use semicolons--only that Huck Finn would find them fancy.

On this particularly point I must quarrel with you, Mary. If you read my dissertation, you would know that this particular American loves semicolons (and colons, too!). Marmite I'm not so keen on, but semicolons are delicious. Perhaps I like them precisely because Huck Finn would find them fancy?

This problem I have with grammar goes back a long, long time. In fact, the only test I ever failed was an 8th grade English exam on grammar. (I got a D, actually, which was basically as low as you could go in my supportive and very expensive private middle school.) I was mostly indignant about this failure--I thought my teacher was an idiot. Not an idiot overall, because otherwise I rather liked him, but I thought that anyone who actually expected me to know this arbitrary grammatical nonsense had no common sense. I got As on most of my papers, so why did I need to know about direct and indirect clauses, or the proper use of the subjective case?

I went home complaining about the idiocy of my English teacher, and I expected some sympathy, since my mother had instructed me on more than one occasion to ignore my teachers if I thought they were being stupid. In this instance, though, she surprised me by insisting that to be a good writer I would need to know proper grammar. And then she sat me down and began diagramming sentences and explaining various types of predicates.

As it stands, and despite my mother's efforts, I have a blunderers knowledge of grammar--if it sounds right to me, I just go with it. And whenever my mother reads something I've written, she invariably points out all of the infinitives I've split along the way. I sent my mother a copy of my dissertation months ago and I'm secretly hoping she never reads it. If she does, she'll be horrified. Mary Norris would be too.

Throughout her book, Norris mentions certain New Yorker writers with immaculate prose and she hints about those who needed a lot of help. Learning that some authors published in The New Yorker actually needed help gave me a twinge of hope. I'm not necessarily doomed. I just need to find someone who enjoys diagramming sentences--but do they even teach that in school anymore?

a smorgasbord

It's been a while. Some things have happened.

1. I got a job! I started on Wednesday! I don't think blogging about work is ever a great idea, so I will just say this: the promise of a decent paycheck is a beautiful and wonderful thing. 

2. I re-read the beginning of my dissertation the other day, for reasons totally unclear to me now. I do not recommend the experience. The content is pretty ok, but I went totally nuts on the colons and semi-colons. I want to use them all the time (see the previous paragraph for evidence!) and I just can't stop. Yes, my name is Julia, and I am a (semi-)colon addict.* I need to go to punctuation rehab. Surely the Chicago Manual of Style runs such an establishment?

3. I enjoyed this essay a great deal. I'm not very hip to the whole evolution debate, so this was an eye-opener. And his reflections on teaching are wonderful.

The thing about teaching is we are never sure we are making a difference. We never know how many students have been reached. What I have never come to grips with is that no matter how hard I try to be the best teacher I can, I will fail to connect with some students.

4. And this is another excellent essay. (Yes, work has been slow today.) I don't know much about Terry Eagleton, but the free will vs. neurology question has bugged me for a long time. (There was a particularly freaky RadioLab on the topic a while back, too.) Eagleton distills the salient points of the issue in a way that is eye-opening. I was going to quote from the essay, but I liked so many parts of it I couldn't choose just one. You should really just go read it!

*Incidentally, how is it that a part of the human anatomy and a punctuation mark go by the same name? The colon in my body looks nothing like the colon in my writing. I need to find the etymology on this.  

Party Foul

I turned 30 on Saturday. I have a general policy of not celebrating my birthday, either on this blog or in real life, but a person only turns 30 once, right? Not only that, but I turned 30 on a Saturday, which is statistically unlikely enough that I felt cosmically obligated to throw a party.

Confession: threw a birthday party once where no one showed up. You are probably feeling sorry for me now, but wait! You'll feel even worse in a second, when I admit that this was not even the first time I'd thrown a party where no one came. The first time it happened was in college: Alex and I tried to meet our neighbors by inviting them to our house for snacks and drinks (at the time I think we called them hors d'oeuvres, but mini pizza bagels don't count as hors d'oeuvres to me anymore). There were 6 units in the building, with a combined occupancy of approximately 22. No one showed up. Was this because we invited them via flyers shoved under doors? Perhaps. In any event, we ended up eating a lot of mini pizza bagel bites by ourselves and then practically forcing our upstairs neighbors (who we actually already knew, but who still didn't show up) to come hang out with us.

That was back in 2007. Three years later, I threw that birthday party where no one showed up. Actually, this is an exaggeration: three people showed up. [Correction: Alex has brought to my attention that she was there too that night. I had no memory of her being there (sorry, Alex!) but after extensively combing through old emails and blogs, she has confirmed it. She even lost her coat at DC9 that night, and claims she had a lot of fun anyway. So: 4 people showed up, and my memory is faulty.]  They are three [four] people I really like, but when you invite 20 and only three [four] come, it's a serious blow to the ego. I was turning 25 and I had been in DC for only five months. This was the second semester of my first year of grad school, and I was miserable. Being miserable, I was feeling the need to celebrate myself. It didn't work.

It was an embarrassing but formative moment in my life. I did learn a lesson: only throw parties when you're feeling okay about yourself, because as it turns out, when you're a sad sack very few people want to hang out with you. I also developed some anxiety about parties, however, and what happens to one's self-esteem when no one shows up to them. So when it began to snow really heavily on Saturday morning, 10 hours before my party, I became rather nervous. When that snow developed into a full-blown storm and then morphed into sleet and freezing rain--making the whole city a cold, slushy ice mess--I became very nervous.

But: people came! I wore ugly snow boots and ratty jeans*, the cake decorations were forgotten in the rush to secure an UberXL, and some of the guests were scared away by the weather but...people came! They were often a bit frozen and grumpy upon arrival, but once they had a drink in their hand and some cake in their mouth, we all had a good time.

So my party-giving anxiety has been somewhat alleviated. I hope that this bodes well for my 30th decade. Maybe I will become a regular party thrower! (Possible.) The next Martha Stewart! (Unlikely.) Or I could even start enjoying planning my wedding! (Extremely unlikely.) You never know. There is always room for change.

*I left the house to get brunch at 11am, but the roads got so bad so fast that I didn't want to keep driving around. So we parked the car at a friend's house nearby and camped out there until it was time for the party. Hence the sad, non-festive attire. 

Mary Stuart

Josh and I went to the Folger Theater last night to see Mary Stuart, Friedrich Schiller's play about Mary, Queen of Scots. Neither of us could keep our Marys straight--we kept confusing Bloody Mary with Mary Queen of Scots--so we did some highly refined historical research beforehand. (By which I mean that we watched The Tudors and that HBO miniseries with Helen Mirren as Elizabeth I.) Now I think I finally have it straight: Mary Queen of Scots was the cousin of Elizabeth I and (Bloody) Mary I. She's the lucky lady who was married for a minute to the King of France, then later arranged for her noble Scottish husband to be killed and then married his murderer. Because this all got kind of messy, she was forced to abdicate her throne to her infant son, James, who would later become King of England after Elizabeth's death. I love European history; not convoluted at all.

I've never read Schiller, but the play is quite good, and the acting in this production was wonderful. So was the set design, which was very imposing and some of the best I've ever seen at the Folger. The play centers on the final days of Mary's life, in which Elizabeth agonizes over the decision to chop off her head while Mary's Catholic supporters frantically attempt to get her out of prison and out of Protestant England. There is a convoluted love story in there somewhere too, but that part was much less interesting than the power-struggle that plays out between the two Queens.

In short, Mary refuses to concede that she has been defeated, and the play explores what happens when two uncompromising sides try to get what they want. Even though she has been stripped of her crown, expelled by her country and thrown into an English prison, she still thinks of herself as a monarch anointed by God. So when it comes time to try and convince the conflicted Elizabeth to spare her life, she fails miserably; she calls Elizabeth a bastard and basically tells her to get lost.

Everything I read about Mary Stuart insists that is an anti-Elizabethan play, and that the whole point is to expose how deeply misunderstood Mary was by her Tudor enemies. I disagree with this reading, though; by the end, I had more sympathy for Elizabeth than Mary. Yes, Mary is thrown into prison and convicted of a crime which she did not commit, but she was still a traitor who had no intention of obeying the laws of England or recognizing Elizabeth as Queen. She also arranged the murder of her husband and then married his killer! Why wouldn't you want to get rid of such a person? Elizabeth may have overstepped the rule of law, but she wasn't wrong to cross Mary off her list of enemies.

The more I think about it, the more I have to conclude that Hobbes would have really liked this play. Elizabeth is not a perfect illustration of the sovereign, but she's close. Her own conscience tells her not to order Mary's execution, but she does it anyway because she knows that while Mary is alive the commonwealth will remain divided; two Queens cannot occupy the same space. She doesn't fully own the decision, which the sovereign definitely would have, but she still gets the deed done. Maybe this is why everyone thinks Elizabeth is the villain of this story--they haven't yet read Hobbes and come around, as I have, to the idea that a Leviathan might be kind of swell, if only we could pull it off.