DR. KATHERINE J. WEESE, ELLIOTT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH

Mutual Influences

In the short space I have available, I can’t discuss every instance in which my scholarly interests have influenced my teaching and vice versa, but my recent experience with one particular novel will suffice as an example. Several years ago, I developed a new course for the English Department, a seminar in the novels of Toni Morrison. Morrison’s Paradise, published in 1998, came out not long before I began teaching this course, and because it completed a trilogy of novels that began with Morrison’s Beloved, I felt that the course would be incomplete without it. However, I did not care for the first time I read it, and I dreaded teaching it: it was confusing, strange, difficult to relate to the characters, and it ended in a way that puzzled and irritated me. I was convinced that students would hate it and that teaching it would be an uphill battle.

Much to my surprise, the students loved it. They were fascinated by the complicated relationships among the characters, by the historical references to the Exoduster movement, by the novel’s treatment of African-American Christianity, and by the alternative spiritual practices of a group of women characters who take refuge in a setting called the Convent, located on the outskirts of the town of Ruby. The townsmen in Ruby hold very narrow, patriarchal interpretations of Christian doctrine and are threatened by the women’s spiritual practices.

Because very little had been published about at the time I first taught it, I had to puzzle through the novel with little to guide me, and to figure out ways to make it accessible to the students, but their enthusiasm for it certainly made that job easier. Also helpful was the fact that a student double-majoring in English and Religion was enrolled in the course, because readers do need some background in the field of religion to appreciate this novel. And the next time I taught the course, the experience was very similar: students, an English-Religion double major among them, loved the novel.

Both the work of figuring out how to approach teaching this novel and the students’ overwhelmingly enthusiastic response altered my own initial perception of Paradise. Many of the elements that I found strange when I first read it related to my interest in fantastic devices in fiction—in this novel, one character is able to raise the dead, another character is visited by the spirits of her two dead children, and a group of five women characters are apparently murdered but return to interact with their families after their deaths and appear, at the end of the novel, in an after-life realm.

In class, I had considered with the students a connection I saw between some of the spiritual elements of the novel and Gnostic beliefs held during the early Christian period, as well as a parallel between the relationship of the women to the townspeople and the relationship of Gnostics to Orthodox Christians. The English and Religion double majors’ interest in this element of the novel encouraged me to pursue this connection, and in early 2005 I presented a paper on the topic at a professional meeting. When it came time to submit a sabbatical proposal some months later, I decided to include Morrison’s in my book project on the fantastic and women’s fiction, and, after further research, I presented another scholarly paper in the fall of 2006.

Considering the Fantastic in Paradise

I’ve now produced a lengthy book chapter arguing that Morrison’s use of the fantastic in the novel is not, as many critics charge, merely palliative, nor is it primarily other-worldly. Rather, the fantastic dimension, which invokes both African religion and philosophy and Gnostic beliefs and practices, has a strong social function in that it serves as an alternative to the narrow-minded construction of the townspeople’s own history within the novel and as an alternative to their patriarchal interpretation of Christian doctrine.

In the course of my research, I came across the following quotation about Gnosticism: “If cultures define themselves not at their calm centers, but at their peripheral conflicts of inclusion and exclusion, then Gnosticism, whatever we mean by it, is more than an antiquarian curiosity. It stands as a continuing testament to difference in the face of our cultural tendencies toward closed homogeneity” (Richard Smith, “The Modern Relevance of Gnosticism,” afterword to The Nag Hammadi Library in English, p. 549).

Countering this tendency toward homogeneity is precisely the project of Morrison’s Paradise, a project accomplished in part through Morrison’s use of the fantastic, one of the ways that Gnosticism is incorporated in her novel. Her narrative technique in this novel, particularly its deferral of narrative closure and the fantastic resurrection of the five murdered women, itself furthers this project: it offers an alternative to the town’s closed narrative about its past and invites the characters and the reader to adopt a broader understanding of African-American history and of African-American women’s roles in spiritual leadership. It invites them to adopt an open-minded perspective on otherness generally.

In the course of writing this chapter on Paradise, I read dozens of scholarly articles not available when I first began teaching the novel, and the writing process itself has honed and sharpened my own approach to the novel so that

I can teach it with new knowledge and a new perspective when I offer the Toni Morrison seminar in the spring of 2008. Rather than dreading the experience, I now look forward to it eagerly.

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BEYOND THE Classroom FOR THE Classroom
Hampden-Sydney College Faculty Scholarship 2005-2008
A report by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty