I have to confess that I take a great deal of delight in teaching “A Rose for Emily” to my introduction to literature students. It’s a wonderful story to talk about sequence versus chronology, foreshadowing, and concepts of time. But it’s getting to the shocking ending that’s most fun for me.
It’s one of the few stories where I walk students through everything piece-by-piece, mapping out the major plot points on the board. I do this, in part, because it’s helpful to have all those disparate plot points in visual form (the students figure out that the arsenic and the smell are connected once they see everything written up on the board). I also do this because I typically teach the story at a time in the semester when the students are worn out and class participation has dropped off.
We walk through the sequence of the story, and then we read the final section of the story aloud (okay, I read it). I love to pause at the line “The man himself lay in the bed.” And we get to that closing sentence about the iron gray hair.
I almost always end class with some line about the fun of studying English because we get to talk about things like necrophilia and cannibalism and bodily functions. It’s a habit of mine, but one I’m a bit ambivalent about. On the one hand, I’m a bit concerned that it trivializes what we do. There’s something about going for shock value that feels a little bit like the reasons that middle schoolers end up reading so much Poe. It gets students into it (whatever that means) – especially students who are already reading those schlocky paperback horror novels (okay, maybe it was just me reading those).
At the same time, as students of literature, we read things that are, to one degree or another, supposed to genuinely entice and shock us. I do have a preference for the macabre and the weird, though my preferences are now more for Faulkner and Melville than for Poe. My students, I think, find “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “The Death of Ivan Ilych” as weird as I do, though likely for different reasons.
That last point occurred to me as I was teaching my summer students Tolstoy’s novella: these works, no matter whether they cover the grotesque or not, are received by students in our introductory courses as weird. They’re weird because they’re unfamiliar. Whether the text deals with extremes of human behavior (cannibalism, necrophilia), uncomfortable truths about the world (we will all die someday), or philosophical views (“I would prefer not to”), they all confront our students with new ideas – startling ideas.
That’s the very point of what we do, as educators. I wrote in a previous post about creating that cognitive dissonance for our students – and that’s just generally, I think, what good literature does for us. It confronts us with new ideas and worlds beyond what we’ve imagined, whether those worlds are akin to the one we inhabit or are completely alien to us. As the authorities in our classrooms, we can revel in that with our students, even when they’re a bit uncomfortable with what confronts them on the page.
Still, while I aspire to noble purposes behind confronting students with new ideas, I admit to appreciating the way shock value can draw students in through good advertising. I am, after all, the professor who advertised the upcoming Shakespeare class with a sign that reads: “Tricking people into cannibalism. Smothering your wife. Causing a storm to destroy your enemies. And these are the good guys.”