An Introvert in an Extrovert World : Essays on the Quiet Ones [1 ed.] 9781443872966, 9781443870665

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An Introvert in an Extrovert World

An Introvert in an Extrovert World Essays on the Quiet Ones Edited by

Myrna Santos

An Introvert in an Extrovert World: Essays on the Quiet Ones Edited by Myrna Santos This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Myrna Santos and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7066-8 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7066-5

To my beloved Mom, Frieda Keidan, who passed away on March 1, 2014, and sadly was never able to see this book in print… and To Lisi Rose, without whom this book would not be possible. Truly!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Myrna J. Santos Part I: The Quiet Ones in Literature, Film, and Television Chapter One ................................................................................................. 8 The Quiet Zoo: The Learned Introversion of Suburban Domesticity in Franzen’s Freedom and The Corrections Megan E. Cannella Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 21 No Man’s Land: Henry David Thoreau’s Wild Defense of Introverted Masculinity Edmund R. Goode Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 32 Elizabeth Inchbald and the College Professor: Reflections on Introversion Ben P. Robertson Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 44 The Coliseum is Not for Introverts: The Case of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator Artur Skweres Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 57 Coerced Introverts: The Forced Introversion of Minority Women Rebecca Karimi Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 80 On Values, Interests, and Rewards: Fleda Vetch’s Quiet Victory in Henry James’ The Spoils of Poynton Nevena Stojanovic

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Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 89 Pushing Boundaries: Introversion and Social Commentary in Pushing Daisies Jeannetta Vermeulen Part II: The Quiet Ones around Us Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 106 Blatant Self-Promotion: Marketing and the Modern (Introverted) Author Tamara Girardi Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 117 Quiet People, or How to Agonize the Educational Institution Andrew Grossman Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 135 When the Need Arises: Acting the Extrovert in Order to Teach Lauren Smith Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 147 An Introvert in an Extrovert’s Online Playground Ron Rizzi Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 154 Overcoming the Seating Chart Curse: How Being an Introvert Student Challenged Me to Become a Better Teacher Lisa Whalen Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 168 Friendship in an Age of Social Networking, or How I Became a Loner Dena Marks Contributors ............................................................................................. 176

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It all began when a friend gave me Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking to read. He wanted me to better understand the frustrations and difficulties that he was going through as an introvert in the corporate world. I was thoroughly engrossed by the content of Ms. Cain’s book and her research in arriving at her conclusions. I then became able to articulate many of my own deepest thoughts and feelings. As I wanted to pursue the psychology of introversion even more, I subsequently decided that this topic would be my panel focus at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association’s Conference in November, 2013. I usually chair a panel each year at this conference, and I wanted to extend the subject matter to broaden the thoughts on An Introvert in an Extrovert World. I was most fortunate to have Megan Cannella and Edmund Goode presenting on my panel. They have been with me from the beginning of this project and their writing talent and dedication has been an enormous asset. My deepest appreciation goes to them and to my other contributors, each one individually adding enthusiasm and specific insight and dimension to the dynamics of this book. A Special Thank You to Carol Koulikourdi, my CSP Author Liaison, who was always only a moment away in responding to my questions and concerns. My deepest gratitude to Ben Young, who provided outstanding proof reading knowledge and expertise, as well as, great compassion and kindness. My son-in-law, Randy Burling, a publishing professional has always availed himself to me with great support and encouragement, and my daughter-in law, Denia Fonseca, has extended her keen sense of detail to my work. Without the encouragement of my children this book would not exist. They are and have been my inspiration and a constant beacon of light in a sometimes bleak world. My son, Radleigh Grandon Santos, is the reason that my first panel presentation came to be. It was his belief in me that has spurred me on to ‘be all that I could be.’ My daughter, Marlisa Rose Santos, is my best friend and it is impossible to count the ways in which she has always been there for me. Her professional expertise as a published author, and her patience and support in sharing her knowledge and wisdom, are attributes the significance of which is immeasurable to me. My children have both earned doctorates and are highly respected in

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their chosen fields of study; I am so proud of them! I am so blessed to have them, their love, and support. They are my world.

INTRODUCTION MYRNA J. SANTOS

We often seem to be living in an extrovert world—it is the route to attention. We teach our children to speak up, not to be shy, and we encourage them to be bold. Even our parents would tell us that “the squeaky wheel gets the oil!” Media tells us that the person willing to be the loudest will win the reality show, get the recording contract, get hits on YouTube… Growing up, we were encouraged to find our voice, choose a research area, and set the framework for a lifetime profession. Some years ago I attended a workshop sponsored by my university. We discussed how different outcomes on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test affect how people make decisions, and how these differences can manifest themselves when working together with other people. One thing that our facilitator told us was that a big difference between introverts and extroverts is not how they interact with people, but whether being around many people drains energy (introvert) or gives energy (extrovert). This premise was explored in Susan Cain’s Quiet, a landmark book that showcased the strengths of introverts—those who prefer reading to partying, listening to speaking. They are innovative and make significant contributions, but are uncomfortable with self-promotion. They are often labeled “quiet” and sometimes this description suggests negative connotations. Perhaps their being quiet is a personality characteristic or a product of their environment; perhaps their reserved nature is due to the hesitation of self-expression. However, from Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” to the invention of the personal computer, the “quiet ones” have made immeasurable and invaluable contributions to our society, and life as we know it. Maybe we have been “over media-ed” to death and are used to seeing the bubbly, shining, outgoing people on the TV and on the Internet, giving no recognition to the folks that help get them there. It might be time in our society and culture to start celebrating the quiet, the respectful—the character of introverts. Is it so that we are forcing everyone to be an extrovert as a measure of success?

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Introduction

Academia, in some ways, was made for introverts. We go home to our families, pets, and life each day and it gives us time to do something else. We lock ourselves away to write, meet submission deadlines, and put ourselves up for judgment when we teach, face colleagues, or approach tenure. Academia helps the introvert by letting him or her “escape away” and technology exacerbates the issue because we don’t have to see people unless we need or want to. Do we all have to put on our extrovert face from time to time? Of course. Perhaps that is why everyone loves the weekends so much, introverts and extroverts alike—we get to be ourselves. As the country song from Steve Azar proclaims, “I don’t have to be me ’til Monday,” and maybe that’s the secret. From Monday to Friday, we have to be more extroverted, and more assertive, but on Saturday and Sunday, a person gets to be who he or she really is. Extroverts are typically easier to understand universally, since extroverts live “out loud” a bit more than introverts. But introverts can be unfathomable to extroverts, and since there are more extroverts than introverts in the world, there is pressure on introverts to act like extroverts in order to be “normal.” What do introverts look like to other people? Many people get the impression that an introvert is aloof or unfriendly, but not shy. This is because many times they do not have a problem speaking up when they have something to say, so the observer then might think that the “introvert” parts of a personality must just be unfriendliness. They also get called “serious” a lot too, with the implication that being “serious” is more of a malady than a marvel. According to The Introvert Advantage: Making the Most of Your Inner Strengths by Marti Olsen Laney, introverts also tend to keep their comments to themselves until they have really thought things through, and often do not like to start new projects without doing a lot of thinking and planning first. This means that they could appear to be slow movers to extroverts. The book also points out that introverts tend to enjoy serious discussions about real topics, and don’t enjoy chit-chat very much. A strategy for being an introvert in an extrovert world, proposed by The Introvert Advantage, is that introverts should view introversion as a positive strength, rather than teaching introverts how to “fix” themselves to become extroverts. The relative strengths of the introvert can be illuminated by the comparison between the culture of character vs. the culture of personality. The former, according to Susan Cain, was valued more prior to the 20th century when urban migration and corporate culture became synonymous with the American dream. According to Cain, “Suddenly, people were flocking to the cities, and they needed to prove themselves in big

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corporations, at job interviews and on sales calls … We moved from what cultural historians call a culture of character to a culture of personality. During the culture of character, what was important was the good deeds that you performed when nobody was looking … . But at the turn of the century, when we moved into this culture of personality, suddenly what was admired was to be magnetic and charismatic.”1 Indeed, today’s workplaces seem particularly designed for extroverts, being, according to Cain, “increasingly set up for maximum group interaction.” More and more of our offices are set up as open-plan offices where there are no walls and there’s very little privacy. … The average amount of space per employee actually shrunk from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet today. In this extrovert-privileged workplace culture, introverts are rarely groomed for leadership positions, even though there is really fascinating research, such as that recently from Adam Grant at The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, finding that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes when their employees are more proactive. They are more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extroverted leader might be more dominant and almost unwittingly be putting his or her own stamp on things. Thus, this may cause some good introvert ideas to become submerged, never coming to the fore.2

Teamwork is valuable and group work can often generate productive creativity, but as Cain notes, working alone also has its value: “None of this is to say that it would be a good thing to get rid of teamwork and get rid of group work altogether. It is more just to say that we are at a point in our culture, and in our workplace culture, where we have become too lopsided. We tend to believe that all creativity and all productivity come from the group, when in fact, there really is a benefit to solitude and to being able to go off and focus and put your head down.”3 Extroversion and introversion are typically viewed as on a single continuum. Thus, to be high on one, it is necessary to be low on the other. Rather than focusing on interpersonal behavior, however, Jung defined introversion as an “attitude-type characterized by orientation in life through subjective psychic contents” (focus on one’s inner psychic activity); and extroversion as “an attitude type characterized by concentration of interest on the external object” (the outside world).4 In any case, people fluctuate in their behavior all the time, and even extreme introverts and extroverts do not always act according to their type. Ambiversion is falling more or less directly in the middle. An ambivert is moderately comfortable with groups and social interaction, but also can enjoy time alone, away from a crowd. Many of us like to think of

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Introduction

ourselves in this capacity, but usually we tend to lean more to one side than the other. Many claim that Americans live in an “extroverted society,” one that rewards extroverted behavior and rejects introversion. This is because the United States is currently a culture of personality, whereas other cultures are cultures of character. These cultures, such as Central Europe, Japan, or regions where Buddhism prevail, prize introversion. These cultural differences predict individuals’ happiness in their environment; for example, extroverts are happier, on average, in particularly extroverted cultures and vice versa. Researchers have found that people who live on islands tend to be more introverted than those living on the mainland and that people whose ancestors had inhabited the island for twenty generations tend to be less extroverted than more recent arrivals. Furthermore, people who emigrate from islands to the mainland tend to be more extroverted than people who stay on islands and people who immigrate to islands. Ironically, introverts may be among the most confident, which seems counterintuitive to conventional wisdom related to “shyness” and the often conflated association between the two. Dharmesh Shah argues that qualities of truly confident people reinforce the strengths that might be paramount in the introvert personality: Confidence is not bravado or an overt pretense of bravery. Confidence is quiet: It is a natural expression of ability, expertise, and self-regard. Confident people do not think that they are always right … but they are not afraid to be wrong. They ask open-ended questions that give other people the freedom to be thoughtful and introspective: They ask what you do, how you do it, what you like about it, what you learned from it … Confident people seek approval from the people who really matter, those whose opinion they respect and whom they know they can count on for support. They do not require the applause of those who are not significant to them.5

Being an introvert in an extrovert’s world is doable—maybe even pleasant. And maybe the world does not truly belong to one or the other, but the symbiosis between the two. The most important point to remember is that both types are equally important in their worth and contributions to society—the introvert should not be viewed as the “underdog” or disadvantaged one because he or she is less outgoing or verbal. We have all heard of famous introverts such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, J. K. Rowling, Albert Einstein, Jane Austen, Thomas Jefferson, and Mahatma Ghandi—individuals who, through their quiet ways, have made a tremendous impact on human culture. Parents often apologize for shyness in their child in a classroom setting, and the volume of a person’s voice is sometimes more important than the quality of their work at the office. It

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might be time in our society and culture to start celebrating the quiet, respectful character of introverts; but as with all changes in societal outlook, it will take time. Let us look beyond labels and into the horizon of the benefits each can provide to the other.

Notes 1

Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (New York: Broadway Books, 2013). 2 National Public Radio, “Quiet, Please: Unleashing the Power of Introverts.” Interview with Susan Cain by Audie Cornish. January 30, 2012. http://www.npr.org/2012/01/30/145930229/quiet-please-unleashing-the-power-ofintroverts. 3 NPR, interview with Susan Cain. 4 Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (London: Fontana Press, 1995), 414– 15. 5 Dharmesh Shah, http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130606150641658789-9-qualities-of-truly-confident-people.

PART I: THE QUIET ONES IN LITERATURE, FILM, AND TELEVISION

CHAPTER ONE THE QUIET ZOO: THE LEARNED INTROVERSION OF SUBURBAN DOMESTICITY IN FRANZEN’S FREEDOM AND THE CORRECTIONS MEGAN E. CANNELLA

For generations, wives have explicitly or implicitly been expected to honor and obey their husbands. More modern wives may be less inclined to verbalize the “obey” facet of their vows, but, hyphenated last name or not, it is still a commonly held belief that wives are at least somewhat submissive to their husbands. As women become mothers, they make sacrifices for the well-being of their children. From an early age, women are indoctrinated with their culture’s idea of how to be a good mother and wife. To submit to this societal expectation, she must sacrifice or silence at least part of herself. The ideal mother and wife silences herself in order to acquiesce to the cultural requirements placed upon her. This may seem like an extreme view of reality, but through Jonathan Franzen’s carefully crafted narrative lens in both The Corrections and Freedom, it is clear that the suburban tranquility silences the natural matriarchal voice. On the surface, Enid Lambert, of The Corrections, and Patty Berglund, of Freedom, appear to be typical suburban moms. Their focus is on their families, specifically their children. Their personalities are docile and reserved. They are introverts, but upon further exploration it becomes possible that they may be situational introverts, only displaying introverted tendencies in regard to their domestic realities. Peter Lovenheim, author of In the Neighborhood, explores the isolation of suburbia and in his introduction states, “I’m talking about the property lines that isolate us from the people we are physically closest to: our neighbors.”1 Enid and Patty have chosen a life that requires them to be introverts and have molded their personalities and actions accordingly. While there is no way for Franzen’s readers to ever truly know if Enid and Patty are natural

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introverts, it is clear that after years of fastidiously choreographing domestic minutia, that is what Enid and Patty have become. Enid and Patty are not anomalies. They are women who accepted the roles of wife and mother with little understanding of what that all entailed. They knew it would involve sacrifice, but the magnitude of the sacrifice was an unknown secret that ultimately defines each woman’s midlife coming of age, which Franzen so skillfully captures within his narratives. Enid and Patty are taking on more than the expectations of their individual husbands, children, and miscellaneous suburban spectators. They are players in the gendered expectations that were designated to women generations before them. Cindy Meston and David Buss explore the ramifications of these expectations in their book, Why Women Have Sex, explaining: In addition, many women have been taught by their parents, grandparents, teachers, or religious leaders that when it comes to sex, there are distinct gender roles to be followed: Men are the initiators of sex and “proper” women let them lead. It is not uncommon for women who rely on their partner to figure out what pleases them to remain sexually unfulfilled for years.2

Patty and Enid struggle with their search for fulfillment, which Franzen does not limit to sexuality. Their unwillingness to abandon their culturally approved roles as savants of suburbia silences their voices, rendering them, at the very least, amateur introverts. Lauded for his ability to capture Midwestern Americana within the pages of his novels, Jonathan Franzen unravels the myths of Americana and Suburbia. In The Corrections, Franzen explores the broken narratives of the Lambert family. Throughout the novel, it is clear that the suburban setting of St. Jude is as much a character as any member of the Lambert family. For Enid, the matriarch of the Lambert clan, St. Jude is a monument to the perfection she has always strived for, and now, through the lens of nostalgia, believes that she once had. The Corrections centers on Enid trying to get her children to come home to St. Jude for one last Christmas in the family home, in a desperate attempt to create the Rockwellian reality for which she has always striven. For her children, specifically her daughter Denise, St. Jude is a pillar of conformity and the antithesis of who she truly is. Still, when called upon, Denise falls into the ranks of family obligation and becomes the version of herself that is permissible in St. Jude. Within the context of this novel, suburbia is a character that stifles and suffocates. Each of the women in the Lambert family suppresses her instincts, her wants, and her desires so

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as to fulfill the role that has seemingly been put upon her. While this loss of identity, or, perhaps, misplaced identity, can be attributed to the patriarchal nature of Western society, it is more than just a woman knowing her proverbial place and having dinner on the table by 5 p.m. for her husband. Enid and Denise, under Enid’s influence, willingly displace their identities and suppress their true natures and desires. This displacement and suppression of identity was initially a pragmatic move of a savvy woman looking to achieve her respective goals at any cost, even if it means sacrificing herself; but over the years, Franzen illustrates, Enid and Denise both fall victim to the forced introversion of the suburban female, a silence that their actions serve to create. In his article, “Assessing the Promise of Jonathan Franzen’s First Three Novels: A Reflection of ‘Refuge’,” Ty Hawkins explains, “In The Corrections, Franzen again offers a sweeping portrayal of American society … St. Jude [is] a fictionalized version of St. Louis, and [the Lamberts] constitute a traditional, nuclear WASP family coming apart at every seam.”3 Enid and Denise, individually, seem like ordinary women, exemplifying a typical mother–daughter dynamic. Enid is a homemaker who thrives on the perceived success of her children; and while she is continually shut out of the lives of her children and her husband, she clamors to be accepted by her family. When she married Alfred, she did so in a strategic move to create the life she wanted. Her actions were more tactical than romantic, yet they were still tainted by idealism. Ellen Willis, author of No More Nice Girls, suggests, For the first time in history, marriage has become, for masses of people, a voluntary association rather than a social and economic necessity … It is still the common sense of our culture that divorce is tragic, that we should be happily married for a lifetime, and that most of us could be, if only— well, if only we were different.4

Enid married for practical reasons and stayed married in a decadeslong fit of determined idealism. “She’d always wanted three children. The longer nature denied her a third, the less fulfilled she felt in comparison to her neighbors.”5 Enid knew what she wanted, and over time she used the characteristics of suburbia to validate her myopic quest. She does not obsessively mother and domestically compete with her neighbors because it is the thing to do. When her family mocks or belittles her, she seeks refuge under the veil of suburbia, citing it as the cause of her actions. Her family confirms this: “She loves that house. That house is her quality of life.”6 She is merely filling the role that is expected of her, but what she

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does not explain is that this is the role she has always sought. Her suburban introversion prohibits Enid from explaining her actions and domestic passions beyond simply trying to create matriarchal perfection. As time goes on, cracks in the foundation of her marriage become glaringly obvious, and she fights hard to maintain that all is well, because, after all, she has what she wanted. She has a family. However, within the microcosm of suburban St. Jude, simply having a family is not collectively deemed to be enough. Regardless of the opinions of her peers, it could have been enough for Enid. Having her three children could have outweighed her perfunctory marriage, if only they had fit into the suburban mold that Enid championed. Her family, including her husband, refuses to submit to her dream and vision for them. It frightened and shamed Enid, the loving-kindness of other couples. She was a bright girl with good business skills who had gone directly from ironing sheets and tablecloths at her mother’s boardinghouse to ironing sheets and shirts chez Lambert. In every neighbor woman’s eyes she saw the tacit question: Did Al at least make her feel super-special in that special way?7

The fear and shame that Enid feels contribute to her displaced identity and learned silence. Unable to reconcile what she dreamed of and what she ended up with, Enid becomes a flawed matriarch and a difficult role model for her daughter, Denise, to accept. Franzen showcases this: “[Denise] could not remember a time when she had loved her mother.”8 Still Franzen acknowledges that Denise’s perception of her mother is skewed, [It is] possible that Enid wasn’t entirely the embarrassing nag and pestilence that Denise for twenty years had made her out to be, possible that Alfred’s problem went deeper than having the wrong wife, possible that Enid’s problems did not go much deeper than having the wrong husband, possible that Denise is more like Enid than she had ever dreamed.9

The collective fear of women all over the world is that they are turning into their mothers. Denise is no different, and from a young age, her actions can all be identified as moving towards one goal: Becoming anything but Enid. Hawkins asserts: “the shaping of individual identity becomes an act of negation—dependent for its terms on what it is not, which is to say, dependent on the System for its own definition.”10 In continuation of this thought, Denise’s younger brother, Chip, suggests early on, “Your parents are not supposed to be your best friends. There’s supposed to be some element of rebellion. That’s how you define yourself

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as a person.”11 To that end, Denise largely becomes a testament to who Enid is not and, in that way, is still defined by the expectations of suburbia. Denise represents the voice of a generation that is very different from that of her mother, Enid’s. As her generation differs in its view of sexual identity, so it also differs in its view of marital bliss. In this Denise resembles the real-life Judy Blume, one of the champions and guardians of this change in gender-role expectation, who in a recent interview with Lena Dunham related how, as a young woman, she was not satisfied with the path that was laid out for her by society. She would not be satisfied with the forced introversion that accompanied her assigned gender role. Blume explains, “I wasn’t happy following my mother’s prescription for me. The ’50s-mother prescription for the daughter is: you go to college to meet a husband, because if you don’t find him in college, you’re never going to find him.”12 Similar to Blume, Denise rejected Enid’s prescription for feminine existence. Despite her efforts, Denise’s quest for family is staggeringly different from that of her mother’s, yet absurdly similar. Denise never subscribed to the marriage myth to which her mother so dearly clung. Enid struggles with her daughter’s approach to sexuality and commitment: Even Enid cannot fully reconcile her dreams for Denise and scrambles to adapt them as best she can: Like a toothbrush in the toilet bowl, like a dead cricket in a salad, like a diaper on the dinner table, this sickening conundrum confronted Enid: that it might actually be preferable for Denise to go ahead and commit adultery; better to sully herself with a momentary selfish pleasure, better to waste a purity that every decent young man had the right to expect from a prospective bride, than to marry Emile.13

To the simultaneous dismay and joy of her mother, Denise’s first marriage, her marriage to Emile, does not work out. It is in the wake of her divorce that she begins what starts off as an emotional affair with her boss, yet evolves into a torrid love affair with her boss’s wife. Denise becomes a part of her boss’s family structure. His children adore her, and his wife, at first standoffish, soon enough becomes Denise’s lover. Denise adds herself to this picturesque family, and in turn creates a ghoulish representation of the family her mother had always wanted—a loving, passionate partner, and perfect children. In the end, however, Denise is left just as disillusioned as her mother is: Without realizing it, Denise had let herself imagine that Brian and Robin had no sex life anymore. So on New Year’s Eve, when … she saw Brian and Robin necking in the kitchen after midnight, she pulled her coat from the bottom of the coat pile and ran from the house. For more than a week

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she was too ripped up to call Robin or see the girls. She had a thing for a straight woman who was married to a man whom she herself might have liked to marry. It was a reasonably hopeless case. And St. Jude gave and St. Jude took away.14

St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, seems to be the perfect home for the Lambert family, if not specifically the Lambert women. Willis writes, “As our cultural myth would have it, the family is not only a haven in a heartless world but a benign Rumpelstiltskin spinning the straw of lust into the gold of love. Sometimes, though, the alchemy goes awry.”15 Both Enid and Denise wage a subdued struggle to become the women they think they ought to be, the women they are determined to be. Yet each is swallowed by the introverted suburbia that Enid praises and Denise adoringly vilifies. It is not until the end of the novel that both women come to terms with the fact that what they had been chasing exists only in nostalgic fantasy. The world in the windows looked less real than Enid would have liked. The spotlight of sunshine coming in under the ceiling of cloud was the dream light of no familiar hour of the day. She had an intimation that the family she’d tried to bring together was no longer the family she remembered—that this Christmas would be nothing at all like the Christmases of old.16

When we leave the Lambert family at the end of the novel, Enid and Denise are not where they had expected to be. Enid had subscribed to the promise of suburbia and lost herself as an undisclosed side effect. Denise defined herself in terms of her mother. As the novel progresses and Enid’s identity becomes increasingly muddled, Denise’s sense of identity unravels. For years, Enid fed into what can be seen as the machine of suburbia, expecting suburban bliss as the return on her investment. Instead she is left alone, with a despondent, deteriorating husband who at best tolerates her and at worst is completely apathetic. Nobody told her that it might not work out. She never considers that possibility. Having been fed this misguided destiny by her mother, Denise works her whole life to escape what she sees as Enid’s simpleton dream, leading her directly into a distorted version of what her mother had fantasized. Denise reflects, “You see a person with kids … and you see how happy they are to be a parent, and you’re attracted to their happiness. Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.”17 In the end, Denise is alone and her identity is mangled beyond recognition. Neither woman has the love or family that she set out for or thought that she had. But in their introversion, neither has the voice to demand what she wants.

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In the lives of Enid and Denise, suburbia is not the culprit. Both women had mismanaged expectations, which ultimately leads to mismanaged identities. Once they lose themselves in the suburban lives that they were fighting for and against, respectively, they are silenced. After losing their voice, Franzen shows how each of the Lambert women dissolve into the silence, not because of the patriarchal hierarchy that is so often blindly blamed for the misfortune of others. No outside force holds Enid and Denise back. No one forces them to conform. They act of their own accord. They are active in their suffocation. As if entering an ominous deal with a menacing sea witch, Enid and Denise sacrifice their voices for the lives they are striving to attain. In the end, as an idyllic reality eludes the Lamberts, mother and daughter are left without definitive identities and without voices. The aspect of her domestic dream of suburban bliss that silences Enid the most may be her marriage. As is clear in Franzen’s depiction of Enid’s marriage to Alfred, modern marriage seems to be less and less about the couple that is married and more about the interests of their children. Franzen offers his readers countless scenes of Enid and Alfred tolerating each other, perhaps for the children, leaving their union void of any sincere intimacy. “A decade-plus marriage had turned him into one of those overly civilized predators you hear about in zoos, the Bengal tiger that forgets how to kill, the lion lazy with depression. To exert attraction, Enid had to be a still, unbloody carcass.”18 Parenthood is often held as a primary priority while marriage fights for second place with one’s career. When did marriage become a means to an end? This lack of intimacy or priority in the Lambert’s marriage does not get resolved, and remains as a question that Jonathan Franzen explores in depth in his novel Freedom. Freedom explores the Berglund family and makes the reader a captive witness to the dissolving of the marriage of Patty and Walter Berglund. Patty and Walter sacrifice everything in their efforts to create the prototypical family life that they think they should have. Franzen allows the reader to see what happens when one’s marriage is not a priority. Patty and Walter both set off to create a different life than the ones they endured as children, and they did this myopically, blinding themselves to their supposed partnership as husband and wife. In trying to create the ideal family unit, Patty and Walter Berglund not only ostracize their children, but they destroy their already neglected marriage, leaving nothing for them to cling to but a shell of familiarity. Franzen first introduces his readers to Patty and Walter by writing, “Walter and Patty were the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill—the first college grads to buy a house on Barrier Street since the old heart of St.

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Paul had fallen on hard times three decades earlier.”19 They were an ambitious young couple living in an ambitious young neighborhood. Patty and Walter start off as a wholesome couple, beginning a life together in a small Midwestern town. This is easily the quintessential image of young married life—working hard to remodel their first home, raise their young children, and make all the correct choices, based on the information they absorb from NPR. They had gone to college and gotten married, thus the next step is to start creating a smart, energetic, successful new generation, and what better place to do this than the Midwest. While the young Berglund family was seeped in Americana, Ralph J. Poole asks in his article, “Serving the Fruitcake, or Jonathan Franzen’s Midwestern Poetics,” “Why would the Midwest act as backdrop for depicting the tragic version of contemporary American life?”20 The answer to Poole’s question is evident as the reader becomes further acquainted with the Berglunds, specifically Patty, and realizes the tone of Shakespearean tragedy that is intrinsic to every movement the family makes. Patty, who documents her troubled childhood for the reader, endeavors to be the perfect mother: “It was obvious that the only things that mattered to her were her children and her house—not her neighbors, not the poor, not her country, not her parents, not even her own husband.”21 However, even that description is not entirely truthful, as her feelings for her children are not uniform. And Patty was undeniably very into her son. Though Jessica was the more obvious credit to her parents … Joey was the child Patty could not shut up about … She was like a woman bemoaning her gorgeous jerky boyfriend. As if she were proud of having her heart trampled by him: as if her openness to this trampling were the main thing, maybe the only thing she cared to have the world know about.22

From early on in the novel, when the reader learns of Patty’s affinity toward Joey, it is clear that there is something imperfect in the Berglund family. Alliances are misplaced, and thus outcomes are not what are expected or hoped. Patty’s unstable and unequal distribution of affection wields uneasy influence over the well-being of her family, as she continues attempting to fulfil her matriarchal role. In their article “Family Instability and Children’s Early Problem Behavior,” Shannon Cavanagh and Aletha C. Huston write, “Other important family circumstances include maternal depression, maternal sensitivity, material and emotional resources in the home environment, and the family’s income-to-needs.”23 The emotional state of the mother has a significant impact on the emotional state and

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overall well-being of the family. This is illuminated in Freedom. Walter does not have much of a presence in the first portion of the novel. The focus is largely on Joey and on Patty, as she exists in terms of her family. This is easily explained by the fact that the largest portion of the novel is entitled, “Mistakes were Made: Autobiography by Patty Berglund (Composed at Her Therapist’s Suggestion).” Throughout the bulk of the novel, the reader learns about Patty and her family. The point must be made that the reader learns primarily about Patty’s family, as opposed to learning about Walter’s family or about the family of Patty and Walter. As Patty’s autobiography accelerates, she truly delves into her broken family, explicating how shaky the foundation is on which Patty and Walter built their family, and on which Patty established her own identity. For the defense: Patty had tried, at the outset, to warn Walter about the kind of person was. She told him there was something wrong with her … For the prosecution: Her motives were bad. She was competing with her mom and sister. She wanted her kids to be a reproach to them … For the defense: She loved her kids! For the prosecution: She loved Jessica an appropriate amount, but Joey she loved way too much. She knew what she was doing and she didn’t stop, because she was mad at Walter for not being what she really wanted, and because she had a bad character and felt she deserved compensation for being a star and a competitor who was trapped in a housewife’s life … For the prosecution: … Unfortunately for Patty he [Walter] didn’t marry her in spite of who she was, he married her because of it. Nice people don’t necessarily fall in love with nice people.24

Walter never made any great effort to stabilize his hemorrhaging relationship with his wife, and after years of putting their children before their marriage, Patty has an affair with Walter’s best friend. Walter falls in love with his coworker, experiencing a love that he never knew with his wife. Tragically, his lover dies, yet still Walter does not reunite with Patty, nor does he divorce her. While their family is irreparably broken, Patty and Walter reject the idea of divorce, and at times it is hard to tell if this is out of stubborn determination not to completely destroy their illusion of a family unit or a result of genuine compassion and companionship. In Chapter Four, “Correcting The Corrections,” of his book Jane Smiley, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo: Narratives of Everyday Justice, Jason Polley observes, Before Freedom, [Franzen’s] families always grew bigger by one member and older by half a generation. The threat to the stability of the family unit increases with number as with time. Family members develop their own

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personal narratives as they age. Individual storylines counteract the cohesiveness of the family.25

In Freedom, the family unit does not increase, and to be fair, it does not decrease so much as fade. The Berglund family is still composed of four people at the end of the novel: mother, father, son, daughter. Nevertheless, despite quantitatively being the same, by the end of the novel the Berglund family is a diminished shadow of what they had set out to become, perhaps following the example of their matriarch. Patty and Walter fall into each other at the end of the novel as if out of habit. At the end of the novel, Patty goes to Walter to try and reconcile. When he refuses to let her into his home, instead of leaving, she passively sits in the cold, waiting for him. Out of a compulsive sense of worry, he checks on the near frozen Patty and brings her into his home and into his bed to warm her. At the end of the novel, Patty and Walter have stumbled their way back together. Still, they are not a fairytale married couple. Marriages like the Berglunds’ are not idyllic. Even when asked by a neighbor why she and Patty had not yet met, “Patty laughed trillingly and said, ‘Oh, well, Walter and I were taking a little breather from each other.’ This was an odd and rather clever formulation, difficult to find clear moral fault with.”26 From this exchange, and by those that follow on the remaining few pages of the novel, it is clear that Patty and Walter are not in love in the traditional sense, or perhaps in any sense at all. Poole writes, “The end is cruelly—‘perversely’—optimistic in the sense that the move from tragic depression to the recognition of tragic reality has been accomplished.”27 The end of the novel brings the reader right back to where the novel started. Patty and Walter are alone and moving. Whether they are moving out of the life they once knew or moving on to a better life is unclear. In February, the two Berglunds went door to door along the street one final time, taking leave with polite formality, Walter asking after everybody’s children and conveying his very best wishes for each of them, Patty saying little but looking strangely youthful again, like the girl who’d pushed her stroller down the street before the neighborhood was even a neighborhood.28

A neighbor, seeing this couple still together, as much as these two people can be a union, observes, “I don’t think they’ve figured out yet how to live.”29 This observation could not be any more accurate. This entire novel is built upon a relationship that is easily defined as unstable. Walter and Patty have an unsteady marriage because they are not true partners. They did not get married for love or to form a union better than

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themselves. Walter and Patty were each adrift and seemed to have clung to each other for fear of drowning. Being unable to stay afloat on their own inherently makes them unable to stay afloat once they have entered into an uneven marriage. Marriage as an institution has devolved because people are entering into marriage with misplaced and disproportionate expectations and priorities. Patty put her children before her marriage. Walter allowed himself to not be a priority of his wife. Patty and Walter each allowed themselves not to be seen by the other person. Patty and Walter each allowed themselves not to care about the fact that they were invisible to their spouse for one reason or the other. Patty is more married to her children than she is to Walter. Walter is married to his work and loves his children very much, but ultimately feels like he has lost them to the woman who he calls his wife. The more obsessed Patty becomes with Joey, and then, secondarily with her daughter Jessica, the more her marriage dissolves. Walter, the quiet, dedicated breadwinner, does not seem to know how to save his marriage, possibly because he knew it was broken from the start. Franzen’s novel is crucial to today’s definition of the family unit. Freedom speaks to the fact that families today have destructive priorities when compared to the priorities of families a few decades ago. The desire for children to have a better life than their parents is amplified into a steroid-enhanced version of itself as parents sacrifice their personalities and identities to cater to their offspring. Freedom exemplifies parenting that has no boundaries but rather seeks approval from the children, who should be disciplined instead of impressed. Parents are sacrificing themselves, their marriages, and intimacy so that their children will love them. The Berglunds are easily representative of real families, and sadly, there is no concrete way to prevent marriages from sacrificing intimacy for the perceived good of their children. That intimacy is lost when individuals, like Patty or Enid, silence their voices and desires so that they can comply with an image they are expected to maintain. Patty strives to be the perfect mother and loses any semblance of individual identity. With the exception of ferociously championing her children, she lives a fairly passive life. She keeps to herself, and she lives a relatively cold existence. Enid wants a perfect family and a perfect image. She thrusts herself upon social acquaintances in order to create the illusion of existing in an idyllic domestic state, which she has labored for her entire adult life. Patty pours all her energy into her children so that she can provide them with an upbringing superior to her own. Both of these women become introverts, to one degree or another, so as to be who they

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think they should be. Both of them spend their lives punctiliously preparing for domestic success and bliss. Enid and Patty are not abstract concepts or exceptions to a rule. They are accurate representations of real women. Women are often accused or judged because they change their personalities to be accepted. This is what Franzen is illustrating throughout his novels. Enid and Patty each become introverts to fulfill their image of the ideal matriarch. This is a representation of many women across the world who are expected to be the quintessential matriarchs, by either themselves or others. Whether Franzen’s characters become introverts or simply amplify natural tendencies of introversion is unclear. However, both of these women fight a battle against the silence of suburbia, which they allow to dictate what motherhood should look like. They silence natural instincts and submit to the refined jungles of gated communities and big box stores, where they parade their regulated, PTA-approved brand of motherhood. Both of these matriarchs manifest and manipulate the suburban silence of their respective lives with an eerie mastery. The introversion that suburban life lays upon Patty and Enid is something with which these women continue to fight a silent war. Through Patty and Enid, Franzen exposes the loss of autonomy and the true emotional asphyxiation that comes from a lifetime of scrambling to maintain an image and a lifestyle that does not come naturally and never quite feels like home.

Notes 1

Peter Lovenheim, In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time (New York: Penguin, 2010), xv. 2 Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between) (New York: Times, 2009), 43. 3 Ty Hawkins, “Assessing the Promise of Jonathan Franzen’s First Three Novels: A Rejection of ‘Refuge’,” College Literature 37, no. 4 (2010): 77, http://www.jstor .org/stable/27917765. 4 Ellen Willis, No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2012), 64. 5 Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 243. 6 Franzen, The Corrections, 214. 7 Franzen, The Corrections, 243. 8 Franzen, The Corrections, 427. 9 Franzen, The Corrections.

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Hawkins, “Assessing the Promise,” 77. Franzen, The Corrections, 59. 12 Sheila Heti and Ross Simonini, ed., Judy Blume and Lena Dunham in Conversation (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2013), 17. 13 Franzen, The Corrections, 122. 14 Franzen, The Corrections, 409. 15 Willis, No More Nice Girls, 219. 16 Franzen, The Corrections, 476. 17 Franzen, The Corrections, 219. 18 Franzen, The Corrections, 243. 19 Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 3. 20 Ralph J. Poole, “Serving the Fruitcake, or Jonathan Franzen’s Midwestern Poetics,” Midwest Quarterly 49, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 263, http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.jjc.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN= 31890828&site=ehost-live&scope=site. 21 Franzen, Freedom, 8. 22 Franzen, Freedom, 23 Shannon Cavanagh and Aletha C. Huston, “Family Instability and Children’s Early Problem Behavior,” Social Forces 85, no. 1 (2006): 555, http://www.jstor.org /stable/38844427. 24 Franzen, Freedom, 156–57. 25 Jason S. Polley, Jane Smiley, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo: Narratives of Everyday Justice (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 123. 26 Franzen, Freedom, 595. 27 Poole, “Serving the Fruitcake,” 280. 28 Franzen, Freedom, 28. 29 Franzen, Freedom. 11

CHAPTER TWO NO MAN’S LAND: HENRY DAVID THOREAU’S WILD DEFENSE OF INTROVERTED MASCULINITY EDMUND R. GOODE

Grow wild according to thy nature —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

By now, the story is a familiar one. On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau retired to a cabin at Walden Pond, a kettle-hole lake on the outskirts of Concord, Massachusetts, twenty miles west of Boston. Using freshly cut wood and boards scavenged from a nearby shanty, Thoreau built a solitary cabin—or “hut,” as he also called it, an allusion to the island home of Robinson Crusoe—on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a close friend and mentor. For Thoreau, who was nearing his twenty-eighth birthday, the sojourn was largely a writer’s retreat. For a time at Walden, Thoreau was working on drafts for three separate works, including what would become Walden: A Life in the Woods. When Thoreau left his secluded cabin in September, 1847, he had lived there for two years and two months, thus ending perhaps the most famous, and fabled, act of self-exile in American literature.1 Nineteenth-century American literature is replete with reclusive figures, from Emily Dickinson and Nathaniel Hawthorne to the haunted narrators of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories and the “Isolatoes” of Herman Melville’s fiction. Yet few of these figures, real or imaginary, have inspired the degree of personal animus so often directed at Thoreau. Since the publication of Walden: A Life in the Woods in 1854, Thoreau has been dismissed as a crank, curmudgeon, malcontent, misanthrope—and worse.2 At issue, invariably, is Thoreau’s habit of finding inspiration in solitude instead of society, of building his most incisive writings around liberating departures from the social realm. Almost all of Thoreau’s major works,

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and not just Walden, coalesce around acts of withdrawal, whether a twoweek boating excursion into the New England backwoods (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers), a meditation on the joys of wandering in the wilderness (“Walking”), or a fulminating retreat into a jail cell to protest the US war with Mexico (Civil Disobedience). For many of Thoreau’s readers, this habit of pivoting away from a proximal life with others has seemed like an adolescent refusal to be bound by any communal identity, even a sulking retreat from reality itself. The resurgent interest in introversion, sparked by writers such as Susan Cain, provides a less fractious, more affirmative way of grasping Thoreau’s zeal for seclusion: that he was simply—or not so simply— acting out his deepest needs as an introvert, time and again. Walden was published almost seventy years before Carl Jung popularized the term “introvert.”3 And in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, Cain mentions Thoreau only once, in a passing reference, in her 368-page book.4 As a largely antebellum US writer—dying, at 45, in 1862—Thoreau predates the cultural shift so important to Cain’s thesis, that in the 20th century the United States moved from a society of character to a society of personality, a shift that coincided with the rise of celebrity culture and visual media, such as film and television. Yet if we use Cain’s descriptions of the introverted type as a kind of field guide to Thoreau’s Walden, we not only find a fascinating specimen of midnineteenth-century introversion. But we can also draw closer to Thoreau’s complex engagement with the perils and possibilities of being an introvert, especially in connection with masculinity in the antebellum United States. In the pages of Walden, we usually see Thoreau as a champion of environmental conservation, of thrift and simplicity, of non-conformity and hard-nosed individualism. Perhaps that last term, individualism— lyrically Romantic, pragmatically Yankee, and somehow indelibly American—is Thoreau’s signature claim to our attention. But in Walden, as in his other major writings, Thoreau scrupulously avoids the gregarious and outgoing. He does not extol the virtues of the back-slapping citypolitician, the spell-binding preacher, the barking captain at the prow of the ship, to name just a few extroverted types that populated the cultural imaginary of the mid-century United States. Instead, Thoreau reserves his deepest interest for the contemplative, the poet, the solitary observer, the nonconformist. He vigorously defends their obsessions and manners, and he does so in the teeth of derogatory, gendered criticism of his antebellum age—which, in many ways, still casts a shadow on our own. Namely, that an introverted male who prefers solitude to society is not really a man at all.

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If we take Cain as a guide, there are at least three ways in which Thoreau’s writing in Walden could be said to reflect the defining traits of introversion. First, Cain emphasizes how introverts value “territoriality” instead of “sociability.” Introverts, unlike their extroverted peers, will guard their personal space, keen to ward off the encroachments of other people. In a well-known passage from the “Visitors” chapter of Walden, Thoreau explains that he had only three chairs in his cabin: one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society.5 These chairs not only reflect frugality and the realities of dwelling in a small cabin. They also help Thoreau regulate who—and how many people—can get physically close to him in his own home. Thoreau talks bluntly about how proximity can affect the quality of a conversation. “If we are merely loquacious and loud talkers,” he explains, “then we can afford to stand very near together, cheek by jowl, and feel each other’s breath.” “But,” he adds, “if we speak reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate” (136). For Thoreau, a “thoughtful” conversation requires a respectful distance between participants, enough space for them to feel the separateness of their identities. An over-familiar closeness, on the other hand, only lends itself to a kind of heated, herd-like babbling. A second key trait identified by Cain is that introverts have a clear preference for “depth” over “breadth.” That is, an introvert would much rather plunge deeper into a single question, problem, or project instead of merely skimming the surface, multiplying projects, further broadening the scope of an analysis. On this point, the introverted tendencies of Thoreau can be found not only in his concrete behavior, for example, working assiduously for nine years on the manuscript for Walden, going through a handful of drafts in the process. Thoreau’s fascination with “depth” is also revealed in his literary obsessions with bodies of water, such as the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden Pond. “I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live [a] mean life,” Thoreau complains, “because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things” (94). To his neighbors, Thoreau points to the waterways that surround them, how they appear to be only of functional value from a distance, of primarily commercial interest, perhaps as a commodity for the ice-trade or for transporting goods. But at close range, water will always disclose its depths to the careful observer. And as Thoreau demonstrates, a carefully observed river or pond will also disclose the observer’s depths as well, like a mirror for the invisible parts of the soul. It is in this context that Thoreau describes Walden Pond as a “lower heaven,” one that is “much the more important” than the higher one (84). The pond is here with us, a teeming

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depth to be explored, instead of faraway in the sky, another distraction from our own earthbound selves. Finally, Cain also points out that introverts are fatigued by small-talk, only able to remain in group conversations for short periods of time. After a while, an introvert’s psychic reserves become depleted, their sense of themselves begins to feel smothered. In the “Village” chapter of Walden, Thoreau takes up this issue in connection with the gossiping “news” that percolates through the town of Concord. Thoreau, who approaches the town like a wildlife biologist might a lemur colony, compares walking down Concord’s wending Main Street to the act of running the gauntlet (163). Instead of being physically struck, however, Thoreau is trapped by so many suffocating conversations. He says that he would often “[bolt] suddenly” from these interactions, disappearing so that no one would know his whereabouts (164). Thoreau, the well-practiced allegorist, also describes Concord’s streets as a kind of digestive tract, a winding intestine in which its inhabitants crack open, break down, and work over by the labor of their mouths the random kernels of “news” that arrive to town, like so many nuts and grains. Thoreau gleans whatever sustenance he can from this news, in the grocery store, the post office, and the street, but he steadily pushes onwards, finally ejecting himself out the “rear avenues” of the town (164). It is an evacuation from the bowels of Concord, as it were, and it affords Thoreau a palpable sense of relief. Dating to the nineteenth century, critics have derided Thoreau’s habit of social withdrawal. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the New England physician and poet, dismissed the wayward Thoreau as a “nullifier of civilization,” and the esteemed—and now, largely forgotten—writer James Russell Lowell reframed Thoreau’s itinerant life as a sickly “search for a doctor.” At different turns, this criticism has focused on the masculinity of Thoreau. The historian Perry Miller accused Thoreau, a lifelong bachelor, of “[flouting] the highest, the most sacred, duty of masculinity: he was not interested in women.” And Robert Louis Stevenson, the British Victorian writer, compared Thoreau’s reclusive life to “a plant that [Thoreau] watered and tended with womanish solicitude.” Stevenson insisted that there was “something unmanly” about Thoreau because he “[feared] bracing contact with the world.”6 Other writers have portrayed the retiring Thoreau as underdeveloped, merely a man-child, or hyper-refined, a vaporous shadow of a man.7 In the mid twentieth century, for example, some critics wondered whether Herman Melville was satirizing Thoreau in stories such as “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” and “Cock-a-Doodle-Do or, The Crowing of the Nobel Cock Beneventano.”8 In “Bartleby,” an elderly

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lawyer recounts the story of a scrivener, or law copyist, who began to refrain from doing tasks in an office on Wall Street, saying simply that he “would prefer not to.” The copyist, Bartleby, is fired and then thrown in jail after he refuses to vacate the law office building. “Bartleby” ends with the scrivener rejecting the barest contact with the outside world, which never meets the threshold of his “preferences.” He dies alone in a jail cell, refusing food, the victim of a kind of existential anorexia. Thoreau’s practice of retiring from social settings is supposed to find its satiric parallel in Bartleby’s preference to pull ever further away—from work, intelligibility, and finally, life itself. This comparison, however, hinges on a dubious, if revealing premise: that social withdrawal is only a negative act, only a refusal of circumstances, instead of also an affirmation, an embrace of a vital alternative. Stated in positive terms, Thoreau was not just avoiding crowds when he went to Walden Pond, but also trying to focus on things better pursued—and discovered—in solitude. And although Thoreau proudly did less work at Walden with respect to conventional labor (as he says, he only needed to work for others one day out of each week to sustain himself), he also worked more at the pursuits that called to him, such as writing, contemplating, engaging the natural world (66). For Thoreau, these pursuits were not emaciating but invigorating, not so many acts of self-starvation but self-fulfillment. With Melville’s “Cock-a-Doodle-Do! Or the Crowing of the Noble Benevantano,” the subtext of emasculation takes a bawdy turn. In Melville’s story, the narrator is a country gentlemen, depressed and hounded by debt. The narrator finds his spirits lifted, however, when he hears the crowing of a mysterious cock. He pursues the bird, only to find that its owner, a wood-sawyer named Merrymusk, refuses to sell the prized cock, named Beneventano. Merrymusk and his family are impoverished, and yet the wood-sawyer values Beneventano’s capacity for spiritual uplift over the material well-being of his family. The narrator plunges deeper—and somewhat manically—into debt, while Merrymusk’s family withers. In the story’s climax, Beneventano crows majestically as Merrymusk and his family die one by one, in an etherealized state of poverty, and then the cock himself dies. According to critics, Melville was seizing on the trumpeting roosters that Thoreau describes in Walden and the essay “Walking” to make a satirical point about the necessities of life. In short, the pursuit of transcendent moments does not erase the need for food or money. One of these scholarly pieces, published in the 1950s, was entitled, “Melville Roasts Thoreau’s Cock.” The title turns, knowingly, on a double entendre of the word “cock”—first, as a rooster, and second, as a phallus, or more

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precisely, a symbol of masculine virility. Although Thoreau published Walden and “Walking” after Melville’s stories appeared in print, thus debunking their supposed relationship, the thrust of the critique is all too clear: Thoreau’s crowing acts of withdrawal from social settings are really acts of self-emasculation. To be sure, this tension between introversion and masculinity in Walden was there from the beginning, in some ways even a catalyst for the work itself. As a literary work, Walden emerged in response to needling questions raised by Thoreau’s friends and neighbors as he took up residence at the pond (1). By local standards, relocating to the shores of Walden was not entirely bizarre. Thoreau’s college roommate, Charles Wheeler, had built his own shanty at Flints Pond, a mere mile away from Walden Pond. Thoreau himself stayed with Wheeler for about six weeks and was inspired by the experience to build his cabin at Walden. Also, in the 1840s, a number of utopian communities sprang up in Massachusetts, such as Brook Farm and Fruitlands, in which small groups of people, some of whom had strong connections to Concord, tried to remake themselves beyond the reaches of conventional society (xv–xxii). Yet among his Concord peers, skepticism remained about Thoreau’s life at the pond. As Thoreau says in the opening pages of Walden, his neighbors accused him of being “impertinent.” By “impertinent,” Thoreau’s critics surely meant “brash” and “impudent,” a person who refused to abide by convention. For those, like Thoreau—and, surely, many in Concord—who can hear the Latin root of “impertinent,” however, there is also the connotation of “not belonging.”9 To say that Thoreau was not where he belonged, out of order, or defying the normal scheme of things, is to make claims about where he should have been. And those ideas could hardly escape, even in Concord, the spatialization of gender in the antebellum United States. When Thoreau retired to his cabin at Walden Pond in the 1840s, gender roles among the white, middle-class, and native-born in the Northeast were mapped according to the ideology of the separate spheres.10 During the Industrial Revolution, men increasingly left their homes to perform wage-labor in the factory system, and women performed unpaid domestic labor in the household. In this way, strong gender division arose along the lines of the “public” and the “private.” The private or domestic sphere, centered around the household, was defined by the presence and labor of women: cooking and cleaning, the rearing of children, and often also religious education. The public sphere—the business, courthouse, the market, the factory—was defined by men and masculine pursuits: commerce, economics, law. As Alexis de Tocqueville

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observed in the 1830s, the United States did not invent this ideological separation of the spheres, but it embraced, and enforced, this division, in ways unrivaled in Western Europe. Thoreau’s decision to dwell in a cabin a mile from his nearest neighbor was, in view of the economy of gendered space, “impertinent,” a place where he did not belong. The problem with Thoreau’s life at the cabin was two-fold. First, Thoreau created a household unanchored by a female presence: no doting sister or spinster aunt, much less an attentive wife. As Thoreau recounts in the “Visitors” chapter of Walden, “uneasy housekeepers” would “[pry] into my cupboard and bed when I was out,” anxious to see how he was managing alone, and in one case, even inspecting Thoreau’s sheets to see if they “were not as clean as hers” (147). After all, if Thoreau had wanted to live alone, why not a bachelor’s room in a boarding house in town? A second problem with Thoreau’s remote cabin was that it was outside of the public sphere. Thoreau had cut himself off from the networks of mutual responsibility, cooperation, and— just as importantly—overt competition that a middle-class New England Protestant would normally submit to. As Thoreau explained, when “[m]en of business” visited him in the woods, they “thought only of solitude and employment,” puzzling over “the great distance at which [Thoreau] dwelt from something or other” (147). For Thoreau, the business of an introverted male was located in the woods; for the business man, it was hard to grasp an identity secluded from everything and everyone else. As Donald Yacovone has pointed out, a white American male in the antebellum period could exit the town and enter the wilderness. But the dominant model of masculinity would have been the rough-hewn Andrew Jackson, whom James Fenimore Cooper colorfully described as “Tough as a day in February. All fins, gills, and bones.”11 This Jacksonian model of masculinity finds its embodiment in the frontiersman, the mountain man, the Indian fighter. What happens, however, when the white male does not go to the woods to fight the Native American, but rather to emulate how native cultures sought harmony with the natural world? How should we understand the white male who enters the woods to read, to meditate on his porch on a summer’s day, or to write in his journal? As Leo Marx has observed, the test of masculinity, in 19th and 20th-century American culture, has been to destroy the natural world, not live in it. In Walden, Thoreau addresses this gap between the Jacksonian wildman and the nature-seeking recluse in a distinctly literary way. Using himself as an exemplar, he describes his own introverted pursuits in nature—grandly, ironically—in heroic terms, which is to say, in mockheroic terms. In doing so, Thoreau concedes how unusual his claims to

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heroism are while also insisting on their unlikely aptness. As we know from Thoreau’s journals, he began his retreat at Walden sensing that his aspirations deserved a genuinely heroic framework. Writing on July 7, 1845, he mused: I am glad to remember tonight as I sit by my door that I too am at least a remote descendent of that heroic race of men of whom there is a tradition. I too sit here on the shore of my Ithaca, a fellow-wanderer and survivor of Ulysses. How Symbolical, significant of I know not what the pitch pine stands here before my door unlike any glyph I have seen sculptured or painted yet—One of nature’s later designs. Yet perfect as her Grecian art. There it is, a done tree. Who can mend it? And now where is the generation of heroes whose lives are to pass amid these our northern pines. Whose exploits shall appear to posterity pictured amid these strong and shaggy forms?12

Thoreau lays claim to a “heroic tradition” that dates to ancient Greece. And just as “he too” is part of this ancient tradition, he asks, who else will discover this heroic possibility in the “glyphs” of nature? What new “generation of heroes” will perform feats in the wild forest that will survive into posterity? Implicit in Thoreau’s questions is a call for a new type of “old” heroism, one not to be found in teeming streets, political assemblies, sprawling armies, or over-stuffed parlors. Instead it is one of poetic and philosophical pursuits in the natural world, which is to say, it is the work of so many “wild” introverts: solitary, searching, and socially unselfconscious in their single-minded pursuits. These “wild” introverts test their mettle in the wilderness instead of the usual heroic proving-ground, the battlefield. In the “Beanfield” chapter, Thoreau explicitly reframes this kind of introversion as a form of classical heroism. He compares his attempts at weeding to combat, explaining how, like a champion, he protected his beans from eruptions of wormwood, pig weed, sorrel, and piper grass. “Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue,” he writes, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowing comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust. (156).

The learned hyperbole in this description is an example of the mockepic or mock-heroic form. As a literary mode, the mock-heroic is a kind of satire. It recalls the heroic epics of ancient Greece and Rome—the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid—and yet instead of focusing on remarkable events, it trades in seemingly trivial ones. In Walden, the best-known example is

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Thoreau’s account in the “Brute Neighbors” chapter of a battle between red and black ants. Thoreau describes the pismire war, which he discovers by his woodpile, by drawing analogies to the American, Napoleonic, and Trojan Wars (the battling ants, black and red, are “legions of Myrmidons”; two combatants, locked in a death embrace, remind him of Achilles and Patroclus, etc.) (218). In this mock-heroic meditation, Thoreau highlights the “brutish” violence of the natural world, which is at once epic and inconspicuous; even a woodpile, or a bean field, is neither as staid nor peaceful as it might first appear. And so it is with Thoreau’s introvert in the wilderness. His pursuits might seem negligible and self-centered and thus anti-heroic. But that is precisely why Thoreau adopts a mock-heroic mode. Thoreau is not oblivious to the absurdity of comparing ants and errant weeds to ravaging armies. And yet there is a deeper insight, even revelation, in the conceit. The wild introvert dares to cross the gendered commercial and social lines of his day, braving the scorn of his peers. He works to carve out a private space in which to cultivate his idiosyncratic interests, attuned to higher standards than praise or popularity. And he is among the few who can bear witness to the ancient drama of struggle, conflict, and death that suffuses the natural world, in no small part because it is often belittled and obscured by modern society. He is, from afar, a self-involved fool; and yet the fact of his life is proof of a kind of heroism. In Thoreau’s Walden, a true thought is not fragile or gaseous, but a “bullet” capable of piercing and wounding (136). A true reader is not a weakling or a pushover but an “athlete” (99). And an introvert, enjoying his thoughts and books in solitude, is truly a man, with the potential to be a hero. Walden is often read as a testament to simplicity and selfsufficiency, with Thoreau exemplary of the self-made man, ascendant in the mid-nineteenth century. But Thoreau is also doing more than that: defending pursuits, traits, and interests that are not conventionally thought of as “masculine” and that, in fact, triggered anxieties about masculinity, including the act of social withdrawal itself. Taking inspiration from Susan Cain’s book, perhaps we might think of Thoreau not just as an introvert who valued solitude and wanted to brag about it as lustily as a chanticleer. But we might also think of him as a defender of introversion, someone who insisted that male introverts in particular do not abdicate their full identities as men when they are alone, but instead are perhaps heeding different drummers, fulfilling deeper callings.

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Notes 1

There is a broad scholarly consensus about the historical facts surrounding Thoreau’s retreat to Walden Pond. For example, see Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 148–56; Richard J. Schneider, “Walden,” in Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau, ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 92–93; Henry David Thoreau, Walden, A Fully Annotated Edition, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), xiii–xxv. 2 For a useful overview of early Thoreau criticism, see Wendell Glick, ed., The Recognition of Henry David Thoreau; Selected Criticism since 1848 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969). Glick’s anthology includes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s eulogy for Thoreau, published in the August 1862 edition of The Atlantic. It is widely accepted that Emerson’s incisive yet critical account of Thoreau’s life, which also touched on his introverted tendencies, cast a negative light on Thoreau that persisted for decades. In Thoreau in His Own Time, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis counters descriptions of Thoreau that emphasize “the misanthrope, the hermit, the non-conformist—extremes that elide his membership in the community of Concord.” Petrulionis criticizes Emerson for popularizing the phrase “that terrible Thoreau” and observes that “blanket assertions … have morphed over the years into absolutes, even in critical discourse, such as ‘Henry David Thoreau was not an easy man to like’ and Thoreau ‘didn’t like his neighbors.” Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, ed., Thoreau in His Own Time (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), xi–xliv. 3 See C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 6) (Bollingen Series XX), ed., R. F. C. Hull, trans., H. G. Baynes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 373–403. 4 Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (New York: Crown Publishers, 2013), 31. 5 Walden, 135. Quotations from Thoreau’s Walden, A Fully Annotated Edition will be cited in the text as page numbers. 6 Holmes’s dismissal of Thoreau appears in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Lothrope Motley, Two Memoirs (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1892), 66. Lowell’s assessment is part of a searing critique of Thoreau: see James Russell Lowell, “Thoreau,” The North American Review 101 (October 1865), 597– 608. Perry Miller, the noted historian of New England, is quoted in Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989), 167, n. 36. 7 One reason Thoreau was described in child-like terms was that he was seen as a half-measure pupil of Ralph Waldo Emerson. See James Russell Lowell, “A Fable for Critics,” The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell, Riverside Edition, Vol. 3 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1890), 41–42. 8 For Melville’s two short stories, see Herman Melville, Great Short Works of Herman Melville, ed., Warner Berthoff (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2004) 39–74, 75–97. For the critical debate about Melville satirizing Thoreau, as well as Emerson and New England Transcendentalism, see Egbert S.

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Oliver, “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! And Transcendental Hocus-Pocus,” New England Quarterly 21, no. 2 (June 1948), 204–16; William Bysshe Stein, “Melville Roasts Thoreau’s Cock,” Modern Language Notes 74 (March 1959), 218–19; Sidney Moss, “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! And Some Legends in Melville Scholarship,” American Literature 40, no. 2 (May 1968), 192–210; Hershel Parker, “Melville’s Satire of Emerson and Thoreau: An Evaluation of the Evidence,” American Transcendental Quarterly 7, no. 2 (1970), 65. 9 Collins English Dictionary Complete & Unabridged, 10th ed., s.v. “impertinent.” 10 For a useful discussion of the “separation of spheres,” see Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America, A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 38–39. 11 Donald Yacovne, “Abolitionists and the ‘Language of Fraternal Love” in Meanings for Manhood, eds., Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 85. 12 Henry David Thoreau, Journal Volume 2, 1842–48, ed. Robert Sattlemeyer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 156–57.

CHAPTER THREE ELIZABETH INCHBALD AND THE COLLEGE PROFESSOR: REFLECTIONS ON INTROVERSION BEN P. ROBERTSON

An article posted recently on Yahoo! Education suggests six career paths that might offer meaningful employment for introverted individuals.1 Amy Chang, the author of “Six Careers that Are Great for Introverts,” lists accountant, graphic designer, medical records and health information technician, financial analyst, computer programmer, and technical writer among the possibilities. Chang borrows from Susan Cain’s recent book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, to compile this short list of occupations that involve spending large blocks of time alone—often unsupervised.2 Chang’s article is not particularly unusual. In fact, a quick Google search for the exact string “jobs for introverts” nets more than 22,000 results, and as recently as 2008 a writer named Laurence Shatkin published a book entitled 200 Best Jobs for Introverts.3 The problem of pairing introverts with suitable careers is hardly new. Interestingly, one career that never appears on such job lists is that of teaching—not even in Shatkin’s lengthy catalogue of professions. Logically speaking, one might primarily expect teachers to be extroverts, and many certainly are. The demands of the job involve interacting with dozens—nay, hundreds—of people during each academic semester, and the teacher’s role encompasses both classroom interaction with large groups and one-on-one conversations with individuals on a daily basis. The very definition of teaching seems to suggest that introverts would find pedagogical tasks too onerous to sustain. However, a surprising number of teachers—especially at the college level—would classify themselves as introverts. One question that naturally arises in response to these facts is,

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How can such an apparently paradoxical entity as an introverted professor even exist? The very idea may seem absurd. However, despite any apparent absurdity in the term, the introverted professor is not a rare species. In fact, in an introvert’s hands, teaching can become a thriving performance act that is highly beneficial to both the students and the teacher. It can provide meaningful social interaction that can feed even the extroverted students’ desires for attention while simultaneously preserving the introverted teacher’s desire for solitude. Introversion thus becomes a professional asset that can foster success. While occupying a teaching role, the introvert assumes some of the qualities of the professional actor who offers regular performances in a theater. Indeed, the life experiences of Romantic-era author and actor Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821) present intriguing parallels when compared with the experiences of a college professor in ways that suggest that the term introverted professor is not paradoxical at all. The continuum of personality that places introversion on one end and extroversion on the other has long fascinated people interested in human psychology. Susan Cain credits Carl Jung with increasing the notoriety of this continuum with his 1921 book entitled Psychological Types.4 In general terms, the introvert is the person who exhibits a penchant for quiet solitude, while the extrovert seeks social interaction as an energizing element of daily life. While the extrovert craves attention from others, the introvert is more likely to find social interaction draining. Unfortunately, despite studies that suggest at least half of all Americans are introverts,5 American culture has demonized introversion as an almost pathological flaw. In a conversation overheard recently at a physician’s office, a young medical assistant confessed to her colleague that she had always been introverted. “Do you know what that means?” she then asked very directly. “I’ve always heard it means you’re really selfish,” her colleague responded unabashedly. The prevalence of such negative stereotypes is clear in the young woman’s lack of surprise at her colleague’s response. Rather than exhibiting anger or frustration, the young woman patiently explained the idea of introversion in plain terms that her colleague could understand. Obviously she had had similar conversations in the past. But the fact that such a conversation could take place at all indicates the high level of ignorance with which many people approach the idea of introversion. Introverts are told repeatedly that they must “come out of their shells” or “live in the world” and work to “overcome their shyness.” Parents worry when their children seem withdrawn from their peers, and the quieter professional may be ignored in favor of the more sociable

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when promotions are at stake. Sometimes well-intentioned extroverts will even “adopt” introverts in an effort to facilitate the development of the introvert’s stunted—from the extrovert’s viewpoint—social life. Again and again, the introvert is told that something is wrong with the way he or she manages interactions with other human beings. Susan Cain goes so far as to use the term closet introverts to describe many people who must adapt to living in a world that privileges gregariousness and communal activities, and a recent Wall Street Journal article outright asserts—based on studies done by psychologists William Fleeson and John Zelenski— that introverts who simply act like extroverts are happier people.6 Given the complex social interactions that pervade the teaching profession, one might expect introverts to shun such an occupation. However—and this statement admittedly is based primarily on anecdotal evidence—a large number of professors would classify themselves as introverts. In fact, in a 2005 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, writer Ben Tryon states rather bluntly, “Most academics, it turns out, are introverts.”7 If introversion really were as negative a personality trait as many people believe, then one might expect to see significant conflict between professors and their many students—especially the extroverted ones. Conversely, one might expect extroverted professors to be more capable in carrying out their job functions in comparison with their introverted colleagues. A small study whose results were published in 2010 explored this very issue to determine, in part, whether extroversion in an instructor’s personality would be an asset. Four researchers at Northwestern State University examined instructor personality traits as correlated with the results of a university’s instructor-evaluation survey completed by students at the end of each semester.8 Focusing on sixty-three professors over a period of two years, the researchers hypothesized that the level of “Extraversion” (their spelling) that they measured in the professors would be “significantly predictive” in terms of the students’ perceptions of the teachers’ effectiveness.9 The study determined, however, that “Agreeableness” trumped all other personality characteristics measured, including the professors’ levels of extroversion. The implication is that introverts could be just as effective as extroverts in the professorial role. The question that remains to be answered is why an introvert would choose to be a professor in the first place. For a few hints at possible responses to this conundrum, the life of Romantic-era writer and actor Elizabeth Inchbald can offer a few tantalizing possibilities. In her diaries and letters, Inchbald never refers to herself as an introvert. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary confirms Susan Cain’s assertion that Carl Jung

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popularized the term introversion in the early twentieth century even though the idea itself had been around in the English language as early as the mid-seventeenth century.10 Inchbald would not have thought of her own personality in terms of the introversion–extroversion continuum that modern psychology recognizes, but a close perusal of her biography and diaries does suggest high levels of introversion. Inchbald was an unusual woman. As a teenager, while she was still Miss Simpson, she ran away from home in rural England and made her way to the city of London, where she hoped to become an actor. She had developed an early appreciation for the stage (one of her brothers was an actor) and wanted to try her fortune before an audience. However, she labored under two significant handicaps. First, her very gender proved to be problematic. Eighteenth-century Britons did not approve of headstrong young women who slipped away from home as she had done, and women who associated themselves with theatrical society often were stereotyped as having loose morals and questionable chastity. Second, Inchbald stuttered. The stutter was perhaps the easier of the two obstacles for Inchbald to overcome. Her first biographer, James Boaden, suggests that performing was a therapeutic activity for her.11 In a time before microphones and speakers had been invented, actors had to declaim their roles from the stage. They had to project their voices to be heard, and Boaden argues that practicing her roles for the theater actually helped the young woman to control the speech impediment. That same stutter, however, may have contributed to fostering introverted behavior in her childhood. Denied formal schooling like most other girls, Inchbald learned at home and was largely an autodidact. She read extensively, and she seems to have started keeping a diary in 1770 at the age of sixteen. This solitary activity kept her busy frequently and apparently continued uninterrupted until her death in 1821. While the stutter may have kept Inchbald isolated from many of her peers as a child, the gender handicap was a far more difficult challenge. Besides assuring a lack of formal schooling, Inchbald’s gender also made her a particularly vulnerable target in later years for the predatory lust of some of the men she encountered. She was a beautiful young woman, so she attracted many admirers. An oft-repeated anecdote from Boaden’s biography has Inchbald throwing a basin of hot water into the face of theater manager James Dodd to escape his crude sexual advances when she sought his help for an acting job.12 Moreover, when she married Joseph Inchbald only a few months later, she apparently did so under the mercenary apprehension that she needed a male protector.

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Despite these challenges—and many others—Inchbald managed to craft a successful acting career for herself. She and her husband Joseph toured the provinces, performing a wide variety of roles from the most popular plays of the time. But after Joseph died suddenly in 1779, Inchbald never remarried. Several men expressed interest in marriage in subsequent years, but Inchbald established a staunchly independent role for herself, and, as her most recent biographer Annibel Jenkins comments, “she guarded her private life fiercely.”13 The height of Inchbald’s acting career would come from 1780 to 1789, when she acted regularly at the Covent Garden Theatre in London. She retired from acting in the summer of 1789 and then focused her energies on a burgeoning writing career that had its roots in early attempts at novel writing from the late 1770s. Writing can be a decidedly difficult task, and given Inchbald’s lack of formal education, the challenge certainly must have seemed even more daunting. Indeed, her belief that she could write a novel or play that the public would enjoy implies extreme audacity for a woman of her time and of her socioeconomic and educational background. The fact that she actually attempted both indicates a surprising level of courage, and her eventual success as novelist and playwright vindicates her from any charges of having unrealistic expectations for herself. Inchbald probably started working on a novel as early as 1777, and only three years later she submitted a play to theater manager George Colman to be considered for the Covent Garden stage.14 Colman apparently was not impressed with Inchbald’s first attempts at writing drama and refused the work, but four years later, in 1784, he finally accepted what would be her first successful play—for performance at the Haymarket Theatre. Audiences loved Inchbald’s witty dialogue, and the success of A Mogul Tale, as the play was called, encouraged the fledgling playwright to write even more. By the turn of the century, sixteen years later, London theaters had produced more than a dozen of her plays for a total of more than 500 performances, and her work also had gained notoriety provincially in the British Isles and internationally in places like France and the United States.15 Interestingly, it is in Inchbald’s records of her writing efforts that her apparently introverted nature truly becomes visible. Only eleven of her diaries are known to have survived into the twenty-first century, but the ones that are available record massive amounts of time spent isolated from the outside world as she worked. The 1788 diary—the only full surviving diary from Inchbald’s most active writing years—is perhaps the most instructive of the eleven for what it reveals about Inchbald’s writing practices. The 19 January entry,

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for example, begins, “translating all the morning and denied to every one” (Diaries, 2:220). By this time, she had managed to acquire passable French-language skills and was using that ability to adapt French plays for English audiences. Nearly half of her successful plays were freely adapted from French originals. The key words at the beginning of this diary entry, however, are “denied to every one” (2:220). This phrase indicates that Inchbald refused all visitors during that morning. Regardless of the person’s identity—friend, colleague, relative—anyone who came to visit was denied access to the writer. She needed the time alone to concentrate on her work. During the afternoon that day, she accepted two visitors, accompanying one to the theater in the evening to see a performance of one of her own plays but then returning to her solitary writing task later in the night (2:220). Similarly, the following day, she was “all the morning translating & denied to every body” (2:220). Inchbald’s diary entries show that she was “denied” to visitors frequently. She lived in a boarding house and probably would tell the maid or her fellow boarders that she simply would not accept visitors at certain times of the day. On 24 January of the same year, she records sending an excuse to the theater to avoid rehearsals that day (despite having to perform that evening) so that she could work at home alone on her writing tasks (2:221). Again, she was “denied” to visitors that morning (2:221). A month later, on 23 February, she was again “denied,” this time when her good friend Sir Charles Bunbury dropped by for a visit (2:226). Sometimes Inchbald extended her morning’s isolation to the rest of the day. On 19 March, for example, she was “denied to every one all day” so that she could work on the fair copy of her new play Animal Magnetism (2:231). On occasion Inchbald’s self-isolation went so far that she did not even open her window shutters during the day. On the rainy third day of April 1788, she records, “was denied to every body[;] did up my Shutters and read all day” (2:234). She followed the same pattern the following two days, and that Sunday she “worked & […] read all the Evening” (2:234). In fact, during the year 1788 alone, Inchbald reports being “denied” no fewer than thirty-three times in her diary, and in several other instances, she records that she “did not see” or “could not see” visitors, including some of her closest friends and colleagues.16 She even records denying her company to theater manager Thomas Harris, the man on whom she depended primarily to purchase the production rights to her plays (2:251). On 21 September, she seems not even to have dressed for the day, or at least, the greater part of the day. Her diary entry contains the note, “denied

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[…] to every body[;] wore my night cap, and wrote for my Comedy in the dining room [with …] the shutters up” (2:268). None of the evidence in Inchbald’s diaries offers definitive proof that the actor and writer was an introvert. Her writing habits, however, suggest a strong possibility. By the year of her death, she had written more than twenty plays, most of which attained international popularity, and she had published two internationally successful novels. Moreover, she contributed to journals and undertook three large editorial projects in the early years of the nineteenth century. The biggest of those editorial projects was The British Theatre, a twenty-five-volume series that reprinted 125 popular plays from British playwrights.17 Inchbald wrote a preface to each of those plays. With such an impressive corpus of published works, Inchbald certainly did spend large amounts of time alone out of necessity. To complete her tasks, she had no choice. In the preface to her 1791 novel A Simple Story, Inchbald writes that she has devoted “a tedious seven years to the unremitting labour of literary productions.”18 Writing of herself in the third person, she claims to have done so despite “the utmost detestation to the fatigue of inventing, a constitution suffering under a sedentary life, and an education confined to the narrow boundaries prescribed her sex.”19 She claims to have become a writer despite that profession’s being “least suited either [to] her inclination or capacity.”20 Nevertheless, she continued to write drama for more than a decade after A Simple Story was published; she composed a second successful novel for publication in 1796 entitled Nature and Art; and she undertook the aforementioned editorial projects during the first years of the following century. These continued efforts do not appear to be those of a person who detests writing. In fact, Inchbald is being disingenuous in her preface by assuming the humble persona of an unskilled, ignorant woman who writes for money instead of for artistic purposes—although the money certainly was an incentive. In assuming this persona, Inchbald simply was following the example of her contemporaries. Many critics of the time considered women writers to be presumptuous in trying to foist their supposedly inadequate, uneducated drivel onto the public.21 For this reason, women writers often assumed apologetic stances like that from Inchbald’s preface and claimed they were writing because they had no choice and needed money to survive. To claim to write for artistic purposes or for selfexpression was to court disaster. Most literary reviewers had no patience for such temerity in a woman. As a result, many women authors simply published anonymously or assumed male pseudonyms so that their writing would receive attention as legitimate literary works rather than being

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instantly denigrated as frivolous trash. Indeed, women still struggled with such attitudes well into the nineteenth century, during the middle of which the three Brontë sisters, for example, first published under male pseudonyms. The comments Inchbald makes in her diary do suggest a high level of introversion, and in some ways her experiences parallel those of the college professor. Like Inchbald as a writer, a professor must spend large blocks of time alone. The professor’s education is preparatory for such a lifestyle since the work for master’s degrees and doctorates involves such extensive reading and writing. A person who is extroverted may actually have difficulty completing many of these tasks since they involve such isolation, and perhaps the apparently high number of introverted professors is due to that very fact. The introvert simply has an advantage in completing student work at the university level—especially graduate work. Beyond graduate school, a professor’s responsibilities continue to demand extended periods of isolation. Reading material for classes, preparing and grading exams, grading student essays, creating instructional modules for courses, writing assignments, assessing curricula, and a plethora of other responsibilities involve significant blocks of time spent alone. At many educational institutions, professors also are expected to write—sometimes extensively—for publication in journals and books. The most recent guidelines for tenure and promotion in the English Department at Troy University, for example, suggest a minimum of three published articles (or equivalent projects) for promotion from assistant to associate professor.22 For the next promotion—to professor—the guidelines require “a book or equivalent.”23 Extroverts certainly are capable of meeting these types of guidelines, and they often do, but the introvert will have the advantage of not feeling so oppressed by the required isolation. The introvert will be more likely to enjoy the tasks at hand and may actually complete them more efficiently and more competently as a result. In fact, Susan Cain’s Atlantic Monthly article from late summer 2012 points out that studies suggest introverts usually “deliver better outcomes than extroverts” because of their style of social interaction and their willingness to work in isolation.24 In contrast, unlike their extroverted colleagues, introverted professors may face more of a challenge in their interactions with students. While the extrovert may find teaching to be exciting and energizing, the introvert may find it stressful and exhausting. Managing a classroom involves the use of social skills that are likely to tax an introvert’s stamina.

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Nevertheless, in what may seem to be a paradoxical decision, a large number of introverts choose to become professors. To return to Inchbald’s example, assuming that she was introverted, her choice of an acting career may seem as paradoxical as that of the introvert who chooses to become a professor. The preface in which Inchbald appears to complain about her writing career also includes a complaint about the acting career that she sustained for so long. She writes, “It has been the destiny of the writer of this Story, to be occupied throughout her life, in what has the least suited either her inclination or capacity—with an invincible impediment in her speech, it was her lot for thirteen years to gain a subsistence by public speaking.”25 The public speaking in question refers to Inchbald’s acting career, and although thirteen years would take her back to 1776, she had, in fact, been acting since 1772—for a period of seventeen years. But just as Inchbald’s humility about her writing is part of an assumed persona, her expressed attitude about acting in the preface to A Simple Story is equally disingenuous. Inchbald actively chose her first career of acting. In a move that was both courageous and extremely dangerous, she ran away from home as a teenager to pursue her dream in London, and she stayed in the same profession for nearly two decades. While she was far from being the leading woman of her time (a role her good friend Sarah Siddons could claim), she maintained a respectable acting reputation that kept her on the stage until 1789. Derogating her own acting experience in the preface reinforced an overt attitude of humility but simultaneously reminded readers that this new novel was written by an actor with whom theater patrons were very familiar. Her apparent humility thus can be read as a species of sophisticated self-promotion. Proud of her time on the stage, she is reminding her readers that they already know her, and she is consciously using her celebrity status from the stage to promote her new book. Assuming that Inchbald was an introvert and assuming that she was nevertheless proud of her acting career, her experiences on the stage can help to clarify how an introverted professor can achieve similar success. “They think I’m television,” a professor colleague once complained. Her frustration came from the fact that her students sometimes would come to class without having read the assignment and would simply stare at her as they might a television screen without even attempting to engage in meaningful interaction. Instead of leading a thought-provoking discussion about Thomas Middleton, she would find herself taking the role of the lecturer—a performer who offers a kind of “show” to a classroom mostly full of unmotivated students.

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While most professors would prefer the thought-provoking discussion and certainly would encourage student engagement, there are times in almost any class in which the lecture model seems to be the only recourse available to the instructor. If the students have not read the assignment one day, a professor might simply cancel the class. However, cancelling the class reinforces a sense of student apathy. On the other hand, if the professor engages the class with the lecture model—at least to begin the class period—then that instructor has the chance to inspire the students, to challenge their thinking, to share his or her own enthusiasm for the material at hand. As a result, the students may become more motivated to learn and may become more willing to participate. The classroom itself, whether being used for a lecture or for a more engaged discussion, functions as a sort of stage for the professor, who engages in a performance act as teacher. Like the actor—like Inchbald— the professor may have daily or weekly “shows” in which to interact with groups of students. Some of the shows will be inspiring and will encourage learning, while other ones will be dismal failures. Regardless of the outcome, however, the show is of limited duration—fifty minutes, an hour and a quarter, three hours. If class goes badly on Monday, then perhaps Wednesday will bring an improvement, and even if the entire semester goes badly for a class, then the prospect of a better class the next semester is always available. This ability to “start over,” whether during a semester or from one semester to the next, gives the introvert a sense of control over the social interaction of the classroom just as an actor like Inchbald can view a theatrical performance as simply one of a long series of performances. On some nights, the audience will be charmed by the play and the actors, while on other nights, the performance will fail, and while some plays will see smashing success, others will be cancelled after the first night and will soon be forgotten. Either way, both actors and professors have the luxury of being able to start again, in a sense. Contrary to what one might expect, then, the classroom actually can be the ideal venue for the introverted professor to thrive. First, each class period is a discrete set of time, so that the professor knows when the social interaction will come to an end. An introvert is far more likely to be comfortable in a set time period of interaction than in a period that can drag on much longer than expected—such as a dinner party. Second, the interaction with the students has a definite purpose that goes beyond purely social engagement. Whether the instructor uses the lecture model, the discussion model, both, or something else altogether, the students ostensibly are in the class to learn, and the professor is present to facilitate that learning. An introvert who disdains “small talk” and can seem

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awkward in less structured social situations can attain a high level of functionality in social situations that have specific purposes—such as teaching. The limited time of a class period allows the introverted professor to give students (both the extroverted and the introverted) the attention that they need while preserving the instructor’s own sense of introversion in the knowledge that the class will end at a certain time. Interactions with students outside class have similar characteristics in that they usually are of limited duration and usually have specific purposes. Most students are unlikely to drop by the professor’s office just to chat (though, of course, many do), but any number of them might drop by to inquire about an assignment, to pose questions about the semester’s readings, or to ask for help with advising. These types of purpose-driven interactions are ideal for the introvert, who can take pleasure in helping a student without feeling the burden of extending the social interaction purely for its own sake. In a sense, then, professors are television. Regardless of the person’s teaching style, the professor engages in a number of “shows” per week—a number of performance acts much in the same vein as those practiced in the theater. The amount of “audience” interaction will vary from professor to professor and from one class period to the next, but the professor is present to act as facilitator for the duration of the discrete period of time used for each class meeting. Between those meetings, and outside office hours, the professor can indulge in more introverted activities at will. Hence, the term introverted professor is not at all paradoxical. Despite the visibility associated with professorial roles, and despite the constant social interaction associated with those same roles, an introvert can thrive as a professor in much the same way that an introvert like Inchbald might thrive as an actor.

Notes 1

Amy Chang, “Six Careers That Are Great For Introverts,” Yahoo! Education, http://education.yahoo.net/articles/introvert-friendly_careers_2.htm, accessed 17 April 2014. 2 Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012). 3 Laurence Shatkin, 200 Best Jobs for Introverts (Indianapolis: JIST Publishing, 2008). 4 Cain, Quiet, 10. 5 See Laurie Helgoe, “Revenge of the Introvert,” Psychology Today 43, no. 5 (2010), 54–61, Academic Search Complete (52975703), accessed 12 May 2014. 6 Cain, Quiet, 4; Sumathi Reddy, “How an Introvert Can Be Happier: Act Like an

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Extrovert,” Wall Street Journal (Eastern Ed.) 262, no. 19 (23 July 2013), D1–2, Academic Search Complete (89229313), accessed 12 May 2014. 7 Ben Tryon, “Lessons for the Academic Introvert,” Chronicle of Higher Education 51, no. 17 (2005), C2–3, Academic Search Complete (19190268), accessed 12 May 2014. 8 Lee B. Kneipp, Kathryn E. Kelly, Joseph D. Briscoe, and Brandon Richard, “The Impact of Instructor’s Personality Characteristics on Quality of Instruction,” College Student Journal 44, no. 4 (2010), 901–905, Academic Search Complete (58002455), accessed 24 April 2014. 9 Kneipp et al., “The Impact.” 10 Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com, s.v. “introversion,” accessed 10 May 2014. 11 James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, 2 vols. (London: Bentley, 1833), 1:7. 12 Boaden, Memoirs, 1:29; Annibel Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What: The Life of Elizabeth Inchbald (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 2. 13 Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What, 12. 14 Elizabeth Inchbald, The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, 3 vols., edited by Ben P. Robertson (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), 1:xxviii–xxix. References to Inchbald, Diaries, in the text are given as volume:page. 15 See Ben P. Robertson, Elizabeth Inchbald’s Reputation: A Publishing and Reception History (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013). 16 Inchbald, Diaries, 2:220–21, 226, 230–31, 234, 236, 238, 245, 249–56, 258, 265, 268, 270–71 282. 17 Elizabeth Inchbald, ed., The British Theatre; or, A Collection of Plays, which Are Acted at the Theatres Royal, Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and Haymarket. With Biographical and Critical Remarks, by Mrs. Inchbald, 125 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808). 18 Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 2. 19 Inchbald, A Simple Story. 20 Inchbald, A Simple Story. 21 Ben P. Robertson, Inchbald, Hawthorne and the Romantic Moral Romance: Little Histories and Neutral Territories (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), 48– 50. 22 “Tenure and Promotion Guidelines: Troy University’s Department of English,” pers. comm., 7 January 2014. 23 Ibid. 24 Susan Cain, “Hire Introverts,” Atlantic Monthly, 310, no. 1 (2012), 68, Academic Search Complete (77341815), accessed 12 May 2014. 25 Inchbald, A Simple Story, 2.

CHAPTER FOUR THE COLISEUM IS NOT FOR INTROVERTS: THE CASE OF RIDLEY SCOTT’S GLADIATOR ARTUR SKWERES

Epic historical drama movie Gladiator (2000) can be seen as a commentary on the unchanging nature of man despite the passage of time. The film has taken considerable liberties with some historical records, as has been demonstrated by numerous researchers,1 while successfully representing other historical facts, such as the love of gladiatorial combats by Emperor Commodus, who while not killed in the arena did compete as a gladiator himself. It can be argued that Ridley Scott’s film rejuvenated the Hollywood genre of historical epic. Yet Gladiator became a hit in no small part because of its relevance for the contemporary viewers, demonstrating that the filmmakers were sensitive not only to the peculiarities of the Ancient Roman but also contemporary American society. This has not escaped the notice of scholars and has given rise to interpretations of the film in terms of analogies to American culture or politics.2 The present article will focus on neither the historicity nor the social situation presented in the movie. Instead it will center on the film’s two antagonists, whose qualities of character are particularly well presented. While the traits of the film’s introvert Maximus Decimus Meridius and extrovert Emperor Commodus are timeless, the article will set them against the moral paradigms of both ancient Rome and contemporary America, since the film contains commentary on both cultures.

Give me a Coliseum and I shall move your world Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is a film in which two characters collide— that of an introvert, reflective general-turned-gladiator Maximus, and the extrovert, excitable, and impulsive Commodus. While neither relinquishes

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the company of others, their approaches to the role of other people in their lives are at complete variance. To apply the concept of introversion and extroversion to Gladiator one should first return to one of the aspects on which Carl Gustav Jung based this distinction of psychological types. As he argues, the difference lies in the the peculiarity of the extravert, which constantly urges him to spend and propagate himself in every way, and, on the other, to the tendency of the introvert to defend himself against external claims, to conserve himself from any expenditure of energy directly related to the object, thus consolidating for himself the most secure and impregnable position.3

Hence, introversion is a more economical and safer position, whereas extroversion allows one to spread one’s influence in an attempt to imprint one’s personality on others. The first of those psychological modes is more defensive, the other more aggressive. Jung’s distinction between introversion and extroversion—preferring solitude over company, listening over talking, and possessing a more reserved rather than exuberant nature—still applies here, yet in the context of the film this distinction is best seen in terms of both characters’ relation to Rome’s great hub of popular entertainment, which is the Coliseum. The Latin etymology of the word “introvert” (intro-vertere, meaning to turn inside) and “extrovert” (to turn to the outside) fixes the main point of reference on the outer or the inner life of a person respectively. In Gladiator, this outer and inner point of reference is visualized by the gladiator arena, in its most spectacular form, in the Roman Coliseum. As the lanista Antonius Proximo reminisces with fascination, Coliseum is the place where under the watchful eye of the audience gladiators achieve their moments of greatest glory, reaching the heights of fame and popular admiration: we are finally going back to where we belong, the Coliseum. Oh you should see the Coliseum, Spaniard. Fifty-thousand Romans watching every movement of your sword, willing you to make that killer blow. The silence before you strike, and the noise afterwards, it rises, rises like a storm, as if you were the Thunder God himself.4

The place he refers to seems to be almost transcendental in nature, creating astounding possibilities. It is where a human can reach the heights of the gods, a Pantheon in which one can build one’s own statue as a newly established deity. It is hard to believe that those words of a lanista, formerly a gladiator himself, are uttered in a society where both occupations, despite their popularity, are met with disdain and contempt.

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The Coliseum must have earned Proximo’s reverence because it allowed for this instantaneous and momentary transformation from one who is the most loathsome to one who is the most revered. Coliseum is clearly a stage, its elliptical shape resembling an eye and betraying its purpose—that of facilitating seeing. In fact, the great ellipsis of the arena seems to symbolize the eye of Rome, watching the fighters’ “every movement.” At the same time it is a mouth, whose jagged crown of spikes on the top of the walls together with the rows of audience seats tellingly resemble rows of teeth. As such Coliseum is an open mouth awaiting a sumptuous feast. It is without a doubt a place where the public and the gladiators interact in a rather one-sided act of communication, with the fighters stopping at nothing to survive, please the crowds, and receive their approbation. It is with reference to the Coliseum, Rome’s center of the cultural institution of gladiator fights, that both main characters assert their individual differences. The film highlights the distinction between their inner- and outer-focused decision-making. As will be demonstrated, Maximus concentrates on his inner life and prefers to fulfil his duties in silence, without trying to be unduly noticed. His actions are sparse and well thought-through. To Commodus, on the other hand, the arena supplies a thriving environment in which he can relish his participation in the violence of the spectacle. In light of the extensive research that the filmmakers, especially script writer David Franzoni, performed before and during the production of the film, it should not surprise that the philosophy followed by the filmic Marcus Aurelius and his most faithful general and friend, Maximus, are in keeping with the former’s philosophical stance of Stoicism. His reserved thoughtfulness and consideration for the consequences of his actions perfectly applies to both the filmic Emperor Marcus Aurelius and to Maximus. As Marcus Aurelius wrote in in his Meditations, one of his goals is to be free of the reliance on the opinions of others: Do nothing with reluctance, or forgetting the kind social bond, or without full enquiry, or hurried into it by passion. Seek not to set off your thoughts with studied elegance. Be neither a great talker, nor undertaker of many things. And let the God within thee find he rules a man of courage, an aged man, a good citizen, a Roman, who regulates his life, as waiting for the signal to retreat out of it, without reluctance at his dissolution; who needs not for a bond of obedience, either the tie of an oath, or the observation of others. Join also a chearful [sic] countenance, an independence on [sic] the services of others, a mind which needs not retirement from the world, to obtain tranquility; but can maintain it without the assistance of others. One

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should rather appear to have been always straight and right, and not as amended or rectified.5

To Marcus Aurelius, wisdom as well as tranquility should be found not in the opinions that others hold of him, but within himself. Nothing he does should be done for the praise of others or to make an impression. The only external authority which he should try to please is God; he can achieve this by showing that as a person he is a whole, complete, accomplished human being. By basing his principles on that which is not changeable and fickle, as are human humors or passing pleasures of the human flesh, he withdraws from many of life’s pursuits and instead commits himself to the absolute truths and understanding of the laws which govern the world. It is important to stress that he sees dependence on the influence of other people as a form of enslavement. The film Gladiator offers an interesting test of such an attitude in the person of its proponent, Maximus, who is literally enslaved and forced to adopt the role of an entertainer, completely dependent on the impression others form of him. As will be illustrated in the following pages, Maximus follows the essentially introvert attitude promoted in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. As a general, he is accustomed to the sight of death and is not afraid of it. Before the battle he jokingly instructs his soldiers: “If you find yourself alone, riding in green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium and you are already dead!”6 As the film frequently illustrates, Maximus imagines the heavenly Elysium as similar to the fields covered with wheat in his Spanish homeland, about which he reminisces in moments of danger. As an avowed farmer, he adheres to practical principles which are quite literally down to earth—before each fight he picks up a fistful of earth and smells it as if to remind himself of his mortality. At the same time there is nothing pretentious or vainglorious about his small gestures—as he reminds Quintus after the bloody battle against the Germanic tribes, “dirt cleans off a lot easier than blood.”7 He is well aware that the victory comes at a price paid in blood and suffering. When he spits in anger at the crowds who adore him in the seats of the arena, he all too explicitly shows that he requires no reassurance from the opinions of other people and that neither is he willing to accept their flattery or assistance. Instead of basing his views on such fickle circumstances as the favor of the crowd, he chooses to rely on the spiritual rather than physical reality. It is visible in his speech to the soldiers when he reminds them that they should be brave because their actions will find their reflection in the afterlife. The priorities of the general are even more directly expressed in the course of the film when politics invades and

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shatters his private life. In the beginning of the film, Maximus manages to save himself but not his wife and son from the vengeful Commodus. Once he loses his family, he turns to prayer in anticipation of meeting them in the true reality which is not subject to transience. His religiousness allows him to achieve inner peace in anticipation of reuniting with his family in the afterlife.

Maximus, the silent champion who defied the Emperor but defended the Empire Romans associated the act of forcing an honorable citizen to join the ranks of the gladiators with immoral, evil emperors such as Domitian or Nero.8 In the film, Commodus continually strives to win the favor of the people of Rome, not just as a ruler, but perhaps more so as an individual. As such he fails to understand the reason why Roman rulers enjoyed enduring fame—for, above all, they were celebrated as men of state. According to Rojek, the distinguishing feature of the Roman tradition of celebrity is the subsumption of individual vanity under the higher authority of the state. Caligula and Nero were notorious figures in Roman culture because they sought personal aggrandizement above their responsibility to the state. In Ancient Rome the celebrity was viewed as the perfect representation of the values of his class and all that was honorable in the imperial capital. … The pomp and splendour of the Emperor reflected the might and glory of Rome. Public accountability was implicitly part of celebrity status. By flaunting public accountability, Caligula and Nero invited recrimination.9

It is Maximus and not Commodus who personifies the best Roman traditions of a responsible leader. He is seen as someone who can help Rome in the moment of need, not only by Marcus Aurelius but also by the Emperor’s political enemies. His qualities of loving the stability and comfort of home but being able to abandon them for the sake of public service are exemplary for the virtues of a typical Roman celebrity, visibly taking after the model of the perfect citizen, statesman, and leader, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (519–430 BC). Also a farmer and an outstanding general, Cincinnatus was given the limitless authority of a dictator, only to step down without regret after he had defeated the enemy of the Romans. Such modesty and unwillingness to pursue the lowly goals of political career are reflected in Maximus. After fulfilling his civic duty, he wishes to reject honors conferred on him, deeming them unnecessary and even troublesome.

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After Maximus announces to Proximo that he will show the crowd “something they have never seen before,”10 he demonstrates much more than a show. He introduces into gladiatorial fights military order, discipline, and tactics. He conquers the opposition not just with his brawn but above all with his intellect and the ability to command other men. As such he gains his strength from the time-honored traditions of the Roman military, whose methodical, nay mechanical military tactics were shown in the film’s opening sequence as triumphing over the valorous but insufficiently organized Germanic tribes. To survive in battle, he relies not only on his own strength, but also on that of his soldiers, gladiators, and even his dog.11 Maximus’s rival, Commodus, refuses to act selflessly in the interest of the Roman Empire. This tendency is noticeable already at the film’s beginning. Commodus is publicly criticized by his father for not venturing to the northern woods to take part in the warfare until the time of the final battle. Maximus and Marcus Aurelius, on the other hand, have accompanied their soldiers in all the discomforts and dangers, the former going as far as plunging with the front lines of cavalry into the heat of the battle. Commodus’s unwillingness to follow their example, but instead to try and gain undeserved glory, is the first hint at his nature— individualistic, yet highly dependent on the praise of others. It is not with his father, but with the Germanic people, considered by Romans to be primitive and uncivilized, that Commodus symbolically aligns himself. In a gesture of defiance against Roman control, the Germans decapitate a Roman messenger and send back the headless corpse on horseback. The removal of the head can be read as an attempt to stop the Roman line of reasoning, which must have been uttered by the emissary. When Commodus smothers his father by squeezing his head against his chest, he thereby affiliates himself with the barbarians by the sheer similarity of his crime—he kills by the removal of the “talking head.” In the act of murder he eliminates the controlling mind of his father and the rule of reason. Hence, Commodus chooses violence and passion instead of the stoic, intellectual stance of Marcus Aurelius and Maximus. From that moment onward he will seek reassurance for his actions, not within his own reason, but in the quickly gained support of his inferiors. As has been stated, Maximus used traditional Roman tactics during his battles in the arena. His control allowed the gladiators who listened to his command to triumph, even against charioted soldiers. This is achieved only because Maximus relinquishes the individual show of strength and instead allows the other gladiators to gain protection within the miniature military units. Commodus, on the other hand, seems to follow the

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individualistic mindset akin to the nations which Romans considered brave, but barbaric, as in the case of the capable, individualist warriors of the Celtic and Germanic tribes. At different stages of Roman history, Celtic and Germanic armies were formidable opponents of Rome who relied on the strength of the individual warriors attacking all out en masse, but also tried to best each other in the individual show of bravery and strength. When one considers Commodus’s immodest behavior and his desire to put himself before others, proving his prowess in the shameful act of entering the Coliseum as a gladiator, one can clearly see that his behavior can be perceived as alien to the very notion of Roman civilization. As is evident in his conversation with his sister, Lucilla, he mocks the Roman traditions: LUCILLA: Commodus, the senate has its uses. COMMODUS: What uses? All they do is talk. Talk. It should have been only me, and you, and Rome. LUCILLA: Don’t even think that, Commodus. There has always been a senate— COMMODUS: Rome has changed. It takes an Emperor to rule an empire. LUCILLA: Of course, but leave the people their— COMMODUS: Illusions? LUCILLA: —traditions. COMMODUS: My father’s war against the barbarians, he said himself it achieved nothing. But people still loved him. LUCILLA: People always love victories. COMMODUS: But why? They don’t see the battles? What do they care about Germania? LUCILLA: They care about the greatness of Rome. COMMODUS: Greatness of Rome? But what is that? LUCILLA: It’s an idea, greatness. Greatness is a vision. COMMODUS: Exactly. A vision. I will give the people a vision and they will love me for it. They will soon forget the tedious sermonizing of a few dry old men. I will give them the greatest vision of their lives.12

Commodus leaves no doubt about his disrespect towards the senators or the customs they advocate. Instead, he wants all of Rome to reflect his personality, and to propagate himself. His self-absorbed stance seems to provide a commentary on the modern-day, narcissistic celebrity to whom social concerns are alien.13 Commodus’s reliance on the opinions of others seems to epitomize a contemporary, democratic politician rather than a Roman Emperor. His careful politics constantly stress how much he is swayed by the will of the public. Although he is an Emperor and scorns the Senate, he weighs each decision to make sure that there would be no popular backlash, lest he lose

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his popularity. He also makes sure that all his efforts are noticed—he arrives in Germania at the moment when the conflict is resolved. When he practices his swordsmanship, he does so in plain sight, surrounded by many weaker opponents, thus making sure that his skill and valor is witnessed by many. This tendency finds its ultimate expression in his own appearance in the arena with a weakened opponent. Shortly beforehand, he mortally stabs Maximus and masks his wound. Even though they are alone, he does not want to lose face in front of his rival, masking his deed with the hypocritical question, “Am I not merciful?”14 It should be added that the film goes beyond the allusions to democratic rulers, weary of fluctuations in the opinion polls. In the visual portrayal of Commodus’s affinity for pomp and spectacle, the film goes as far as subtly alluding to a similarity between his love of political spectacle and Nazi propaganda in film, such as Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935). As such, in spite of its visual and aural opulence the film offers a critique of spectacle, revealing its links to despotism and its abolition as a necessary condition for the tyrant Commodus’s overthrow.15 Alongside the critique of political spectacle, the film can be read as a commentary on the process of formation of contemporary celebrity, requiring the abolishment of the private sphere. As has been suggested, Maximus’s statesmanship is in keeping with the traditional Roman notion of heroism. However, the film shows that his personal qualities are also pertinent to the image of celebrity created in contemporary America. The general’s personal drama, which resonates with today’s audiences, is that to achieve his aims he needs to “win the crowd.” Proximo’s advice rings true although it does violence to Maximus’s nature. He has to accept that his laudable qualities and professionalism are not enough and that to survive he needs to abandon his silent, introvert qualities. Yet as he begins his act as a showman, he makes one last attempt to protect his integrity— he dons a mask to protect his identity.

Mask as a shield of dignity Maximus uses a mask to protect his identity for a practical reason—if he were spotted and recognized, he would have been in danger and would probably never have been able to approach the Emperor. However, one should also recognize that the mask also serves a different function. Through it, the humiliated general expresses his defiance and shields his ego. By hiding his face and not revealing his identity, he is protecting his good name and the distinction he is loath to forget.

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In ancient Rome, the status of gladiators was extremely low. Despite their popularity, they were put in the same category as actors or prostitutes. A gladiator had to take an oath (sacramentum gladiatorium) that he would submit to any punishment and that he relinquished the rights and status of a citizen. This resulted in infamia, loss of dignity and honor constituting a complete social exclusion, a dishonor automatically ascribed to the lowest-ranking professions of gladiator, prostitute, or actor.16 For ancient critics of gladiators, the profession was emasculating and cowardly (Seneca) or worthy of an idler, bandit, or a murderer (Tatian).17 Such stigma and degradation caused an understandably vehement revulsion in Maximus, who at first solemnly refused to fight in the arena. In doing so, he manifested his indignation at such debasement of a war hero who was to become the Emperor’s successor. Convinced by his lanista, Proximo, that he would be granted an audience with Commodus if he were successful, Maximus reluctantly accepts the rules of the gladiator fights and quickly becomes the crowd’s idol. As he assumes this role he first dons a costume—Proximo’s body shield—and then a helmet which hides his true identity. Only then does he allow himself to act against his own conviction which previously stopped him from making a spectacle out of a life-and-death situation. Instead, he starts to perform as a showman, pledging to deliver the crowds “something they have never seen before.”18 The mask which Maximus wears is rich in meaning. According to Kavett, a mask always carries a message, whether it is threatening, pleasant, or simply conveying a sense of mystery.19 Yet the mask worn by Maximus in the arena is expressionless, it does not horrify. Moreover, its top is covered with spikes which resemble a hedgehog’s spines. The spikes stand for the hero’s desire to protect himself, signaling a nonaggressive nature. At the same time, they can discourage potential attackers by indicating that, as in the case of hedgehog’s spines, aggression could have painful consequences. One of the most striking sequences in the film is the instance in which the angered emperor demands of Maximus to unmask himself: COMMODUS: Your fame is well deserved, Spaniard. I don’t think there’s ever been a gladiator to match you. As for this young man, he insists you are Hector reborn. Or was it Hercules? Why doesn’t the hero reveal himself and tell us all your real name? You do have a name. MAXIMUS: My name is Gladiator. COMMODUS: How dare you show your back to me! Slave, you will remove your helmet and tell me your name.

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MAXIMUS: [removing his helmet and turning around] My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions and loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.20

Commodus cannot stand the anonymity of the celebrated Spaniard and is anxious to give him a label: a Hector or Hercules. Yet like in the case of today’s tabloid press and television programs, the official image of a celebrity is not enough. Stars are required to shed their official masks and admit the public access to intimate secrets, their true identity. This necessity is uttered by Commodus who, always remaining under the overwhelming influence of the crowds gathered in the Coliseum, voices the desire of the vox populi. The abolishment of such personal pockets of resistance and forcing Maximus to abandon his introvert ways is a thoroughly contemporary commentary on today’s treatment of people who have achieved star status. It is no accident that the unmasking is done in public despite the fact that Commodus seems the strongest when he acts in private. This is the case when he treacherously kills his father, threatens his sister not to take any political action against him, suppresses Maximus’s rebellion, or when he mortally wounds Maximus before the film’s final, public duel. Despite the effectiveness of his covert actions, Commodus seems to be unable to refrain from relying on the coliseum’s public, as if he were enslaved by the allure of its favorable gaze. Whatever he does, he does for show and for his violent efforts to be recognized, a premise revealed in his honest confession to Marcus Aurelius during the act of murder: “Father, I would have butchered the whole world if you would have only loved me.”21 Commodus’s dependence on the spectacle to reassert himself exemplifies the vanity which was unworthy of a celebrity and a statesman in Ancient Rome. His confused efforts bring the opposite results, revealing his misconception of the relationship between the ruler and his people. Yet his dependence on his people shows that he is trapped in his role, a fate shared by other Roman Emperors. According to Wiedemann, attendance at munera subjected emperors to pressure from the people, rather than diverting potential expressions of political will in other directions. Tiberius preferred to keep away altogether to avoid such pressure; but the unpopularity which this brought upon him shows that it was a mistake which later emperors knew they could not afford to repeat. … When an emperor was at Rome, then his personal presence at munera was expected. An emperor who was unpopular might be criticised either for being too interested in these games, or not interested enough: the

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Chapter Four tightrope which each emperor had to walk was a necessary consequence of the ambiguous position of the emperor as both autocrat and servant of the Roman people.22

The pressure of the public demanding entertainment under the guise of tradition was so considerable that it was difficult to reconcile with the political ambitions of the Emperors. Yet one can also see very contemporary echoes of the position of celebrities in the age of mass media. The portrayal of Commodus in Gladiator presents him as unable to oppose the will of the people. His redemptive quality can be seen in the fact that his extroversion is an externalization of his plight as a contemporary celebrity, even if in the film he is wearing the costume of a Roman emperor.

Gladiator as a modest spectacle in praise of the silent ones Gladiator offers an insightful image of introversion and extroversion which can be seen not only as an expression of personal qualities, but also as a critical interpretation of the culture of the spectacle and celebrity. The film warns against the danger of relying on the changeable and unpredictable public opinion instead of one’s own, time-honored, and fixed values. This is visible not only in the portrayal of the film’s protagonists, but also in its use of film techniques. Although certain scenes have the potential to awe the audience, they are infrequent and fleeting, as if the filmmakers did not want to disturb the drama’s reception by flaunting visual effects and action sequences. As Rushton asserts, “[f]or Gladiator, the spectacle no longer wishes to draw attention to itself, the screen is no longer proudly proclaiming to the audience ‘look what I can do!’ … such exhibitionism is absent from Gladiator.”23 Hence, the film itself resembles Maximus, silent and introvert, only very unwillingly showing its spectacular qualities. One can argue that therein lies the enduring allure of Gladiator. Like its protagonist, the film remains allusive, preferring to hint at its possibilities rather than boastfully flourish them like the tyrannical Commodus. Instead of a loud and pompous blockbuster, the film resembles its modest protagonist in its almost unintentional and unwilling succumbing to the requirements of providing visual spectacle for the masses. Although it is an action film which can be enjoyed for its action sequences and relatively simple premise, its strength lies in the unwillingness to bend to the employment of cheap tricks giving rise to quick emotions. Instead, the construction of the film and the character of its protagonist in conjunction provide a laudation of silent heroism,

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introversion, and modesty. While Gladiator does provide the audiences with thrill and excitement, it simultaneously shows that it does not need the support of the action-oriented mass audience. Like Maximus, it seems to reassert its worth, shouting in ironic defiance: “Are you not entertained?”24

Notes 1

See Allen Ward, “The Movie ‘Gladiator’ in Historical Perspective” (2001), accessed May 19, 2014, doi: http://ablemedia.com/ctcweb/showcase/ wardgladiator1.html; M. W. Winkler, ed., Gladiator: Film and History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). 2 See Rob Wilson, “Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and the Spectacle of Empire: Global/local Rumblings inside the Pax Americana,” European Journal of American Culture 21, no. 2 (2002): 64; Monica S. Cyrino. “Gladiator and Contemporary American Society,” in Winkler, Gladiator. 3 C. G. Jung, Psychological Types, trans. H. Godwyn Baynes (New York: Pantheon, 1921 [1953]), 414. 4 Gladiator: Extended Edition, directed by Ridley Scott (2000; Universal City, CA: Dreamworks, 2005), DVD. 5 Francis Hutcheson and James Moore, trans., The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), 42. 6 Gladiator, dir. Ridley Scott. 7 Gladiator, dir. Ridley Scott. 8 Thomas Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (London: Routledge, 2002), 130. 9 Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 30. 10 Gladiator, dir. Ridley Scott. 11 The inclusion of a German Shepherd has been criticized as an anachronism, although the script refers to the animal as Wolf of Rome. Such phrasing used in Franzoni’s script carries connotations of the she-wolf who fed and nurtured the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, and as such reinforces Maximus’s status as a Roman hero. (See “Gladiator by David Franzoni, revised by John Logan, transcribed from the film,” accessed May 29, 2014, doi: http://sfy.ru/sfy.html?script=gladiator_ts.) 12 Gladiator, dir. Ridley Scott. 13 Compare Rojek, Celebrity, 97–98. 14 Gladiator, dir. Ridley Scott. 15 Richard Rushton, “Narrative and Spectacle in Gladiator,” CineAction (September 2001). 16 Catherine Edwards, “Unspeakable Professions: Public Performance and Prostitution in Ancient Rome,” in Roman Sexualities, ed. Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 72. 17 Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 130. 18 Gladiator, dir. Ridley Scott. 19 Hyman Kavett, “Masks: Escape to/from Reality,” Social Studies (January/February 1981), 11.

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Gladiator, dir. Ridley Scott. Gladiator, dir. Ridley Scott. 22 Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 169, 171. 23 Rushton, “Narrative and spectacle in Gladiator.” 24 Gladiator, dir. Ridley Scott. 21

CHAPTER FIVE COERCED INTROVERTS: THE FORCED INTROVERSION OF MINORITY WOMEN REBECCA KARIMI

Susan Cain’s Quiet explores the value of introverts and the advances made by them in the arts, technology, and other areas. Cain argues against the idealization of extroverts and the significant influence they possess in modern society. With the onslaught of the ideology of Dale Carnegie, extroverts rule society—according to Cain. Cain’s examples support the view that extroverts exhibit several distinct features: they enjoy being surrounded by people, they relish being the center of attention, and they dominate social/business settings and conversations. According to studies that Cain cites, apparently extroverts can’t write as well as they speak. Introverts, on the other hand, possess the ability to function on their own—are less needy, express themselves better in writing, and “think before they speak.”1 Exploring the halls of academia by visiting Harvard Business School, she demonizes most students and professors at the school for emulating the formula for developing successful CEOs. Their interactions consist of an inordinate amount of social networking, socializing, and group work—activities that most extroverts excel at. Among the ranks of the Harvard extroverts she discovers an introverted Chinese American—one who originates from a different socio-cultural paradigm—that practices the virtue of quiet respect and fulfills the model of introversion she promotes. Cain validates her assumptions by unearthing research data that proves her point that talking and insight are not direct correlates. She argues that extroverted students may appear highly intelligent and may possess the correct answers due to their self-confidence and ability to speak out, but few differences arise if judged by SAT scores. Creativity and analytical abilities remain equal, but when asked for input in problem-solving

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situations, the answers of introverts are discarded and judged less meritorious than their more vocal counterparts, revealing Cain’s thorn in the side.2 Vocalized group work or brainstorming favors the personalities of extroverts, while introverts are ignored or silenced within this type of public forum. By asserting that the articulation of ideas doesn’t guarantee success in generating creative solutions, Cain advances her case for the value of introverts. She corroborates her assertion by quoting organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham on the importance of quiet work: “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”3 Cain advocates the importance of people retreating from the margins of society into “silence and solitude” to “practice on their own” rather than being tied to the more public, vocal cooperative group interaction where one can voice one’s ideas and opinions.4 At first glance, the act of retreating to the margins appears admirable, but from a feminist standpoint one recognizes how Cain’s form of introverted marginalization bodes ill for women, especially women of color. Patriarchal societies throughout history ignored the thoughts, ideas, and opinions of women—the subaltern sex—subjugating and overpowering them into silence or what I call a “state of marginalized introversion.” Despite sharing in the personality types of introvert/extrovert, women have lost their voices since men forced them to retire into the sphere of domesticity to accomplish their “quiet work,” turning them into pseudointroverts. In this manner men effectively silenced their voices. While Cain encourages both genders of introverts to solicit time for solitude, introverts, according to Cain’s ideology, may return to the conversation without consequences and voice their opinions. Traditionally, this reality existed for a select few. Whether a woman’s personality was introverted or extroverted, this banishment silenced5 them by subjugating them to the sphere of domesticity, turning them into what I call “coerced introverts.” They stayed quiet, rarely if ever being allowed back into the maledominated public sphere to articulate their thoughts, opinions, or ideas. Furthermore, as I point out, women of color confront different challenges in their quest to achieve voice, and thus a multiplicity of factors restricted them from entering the public sphere. In effect, this essay examines the role of women of color, focusing on the life stories of several theorists and the oral histories of working-class women. I highlight the voices that have been overpowered and driven into a “state of marginalized introversion” by the norms of White male-dominated society, but I underscore how the voices of these “coerced introverts” negotiated the limits placed upon them and re-entered the conversation.

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A Public Sphere for Coerced Introverts Sociologist Jurgen Habermas’s core principles of the public sphere, as elucidated in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, denote a utopian ideal of a public space within a democratic society. This space should be accessible to all, grant access to a multitude of voices, encourage engagement in rational-critical discourse, and serve as a catalyst for change within the political/economical system.6 Within a community, Habermas locates two spheres: the private and the public. The private sphere encompasses the patriarchal, conjugal, intimate family. However, because of the nature of Western thought and mores from the time of antiquity until the present, male-dominated societies confined women and children to the private domestic sphere: a space of marginalized introversion. By subduing women and restricting them to the private realm, men forced them into introversion, effectively silencing them by denying them a public voice. This male hegemony shackled them and dumped them on the margins—into marginalized introversion. Conversely, the public sphere represented the locus of the masculine domain: a place of male power, dominance, and authority, where men voiced their opinions and were heard, be they introvert or extrovert. This exclusive club catered to men only and remained inaccessible to women. It should be noted that for our purposes, the public sphere can be likened to Cain’s group work model where extroverts and introverts articulate ideas, thoughts, and opinions, whereas the private sphere parallels Cain’s arena of solitude. This represents a place where introverts perform their quiet work or “deliberate practice” 7 in the hope they’ll be invited back into the conversation or, in this case, invited back into the dialogue with extroverts—or the public sphere. Habermas’s ideal public sphere allows a plurality of private voices to access the public sphere within a democracy; this sphere allows debate on public matters through the use of reason where “political domination is effectively subjected to the mandate of democratic publicity.”8 In other words, this Enlightenment principle that Habermas idealizes grants access to a multitude of voices within a democratic society whereby ordinary citizens (introverts or extroverts) may engage in rational-critical discourse to voice their ideas, opinions, or thoughts on how to effect change within the political/economic system. In contrast to Cain’s premise that introverts should retreat from the public arena of group work, Habermas’s pluralistic concept encourages all citizens (introverts, extroverts, all races of men and women) to voice their opinions, since the public sphere should be a space accessible to all.

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Unfortunately for coerced introverts, particularly women of color, gaining access to the public sphere is not an easy task. Women must discover ways to break the hegemonic barriers of silence imposed upon them to enter the public sphere. Habermas’s solution musters the citizenry to substantiate their qualifications as mature people “capable of enlightenment … who are adept in the public use of reason.”9 Women must oppose the despotic sphere of marginalized introversion, enter the public sphere, voice their opinions and authenticate their public use of reason. Within the modern-day rhetorical realms of White patriarchal society, the ideas of many women, particularly women of color, remain hidden and the gendered viewpoints of elite White Anglo-Saxon males dominate most facets of the public sphere. For example, in Public Radio and Television, Ralph Engelman cites a study done by Charlotte Ryan on both commercial and public radio. It appears that both NPR and commercial radio select their news and opinions in deference to the misogynistic elite which governs in Washington, rather than offering a representative reflection of the American public.10 In effect, the climate for equal access retains most of its barricades, allowing few female voices. Those voices that manage to gain access simply parrot the opinions of the ruling class. That said, the Aristotles, Quintillians, and St. Augustines of modern society still limit public discourse to only those rhetors they deem worthy. Cain’s premise about the rejection of introverts’ ideas gains credence from Ryan’s study of political elites. In this case the ideas of both introverts and extroverts run the risk of repudiation if ideologically they run counter to the dominant discourse. This fact may indeed characterize how society underrates the ideas and opinions of some people (introvert or extrovert) over others. Cain highlights the life story of one person whose ideas, opinions, and actions opposed the dominant discourse by resisting the concretized social mores of the segregated South. Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks impacted society through her monumental contribution of refusing to obey the demands of a White man.11 Characterized as a reserved woman with a gentle nature, Parks seemed the unlikely heroine of the Civil Rights Movement, especially in comparison to the charismatic, extrovert Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Cain says that when the Supreme Court ruling outlawed the segregation of Montgomery Alabama’s buses, the press invited Dr. King to speak in the public forum, but ignored Parks altogether. Cain also cites how The New York Times ran several articles illuminating Dr. King, but failed to mention Parks, commenting on Parks’s introversion and dislike for the limelight: “Other papers photographed the boycott leaders sitting in front of buses, but Parks was not invited to sit for

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these pictures. She didn’t mind. On the day the buses were integrated, she preferred to stay home and take care of her mother.”12 Cain paints Parks as an introvert, but clearly her courage to stand up for her rights never faltered. One can view Parks’s story from Cain’s introvert/extrovert perspective, but one can also view it from a feminist perspective. In a male-dominated society, men of color—like King—are invited and granted access to the public sphere and gain voice. Meanwhile, White patriarchal society ignores courageous women of color such as Parks—silencing them by not inviting them back into the conversation. In Parks’s case, she accessed the public sphere under the auspices of groups like the NAACP and leaders like King. Had it not been for her group membership, Parks could have been forgotten despite being the catalyst for change. Nevertheless, based upon Cain’s premise, Parks represents the classic marginalized introvert— literally coerced into the silence of a jail cell by White society. The unfair treatment of minority women by the dominant White majority calls attention to a time when some participants of the National Women’s Studies Association held a conference on racism. This sector of the White feminist movement considered only their perspectives as cogent and subdued the voices of minority women.13 Feminists of color accused White feminists of racism and classism—thus creating rifts within the feminist movement because the parties failed to establish a dialogue. From the ashes of this firestorm, feminists of color created a body of impressive theoretical work, lectures, conferences, and writings. These women discovered several distinct issues affecting subaltern women. First, unlike White women, introvert/extrovert minority women suffered exclusion as a result of race. Secondly, like their White female counterparts, introvert/extrovert women of color were forced into introversion by class, gender, and patriarchy. Lastly, four powerful forces—race, class, gender, and patriarchy—effectively combined to maintain the confinement of introvert/extrovert women of color within marginalized introversion. Few, if any, minority women voiced their thoughts in the male-dominated public sphere; however, these women created an alternative public that acknowledged their thoughts, ideas, and opinions. Cain argues that society undervalues the ideas of introverts—but picture being a woman of color in a society that judges the validity of one’s ideas based upon gendered racial lines. Three minority feminist theorists—bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, and Patricia Hill Collins—who practiced the public use of reason within their alternative public spheres, eventually pummeled their way through the concretized boundaries of race, class, gender, and patriarchy into the

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mainstream public sphere. These intellectuals broke free of the realm of coerced introversion where the prejudiced patriarchal system confined them. Undertaking an exploration of their marginalized status in their theoretical work, much of their theory resulted from the previously mentioned conference. It should be mentioned that thus far in our analysis, class differences have been lurking near the surface in each discussion and should be mentioned. Formerly, only elite women—primarily White— could afford the privilege of receiving an education.14 Unlike the elite class, authors bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, and Gloria Anzaldua originated from working-class roots, attended college on scholarships or work-study programs, and were from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Pierced by the stigmas associated with White ethnocentrism, these feminists of color relate their life-long battle with social injustice through personal narratives.15 One feels pathos for their plight as they remark how they weathered marginalization by the dominant society. African American author/activist/social critic bell hooks narrates her life story as one riddled with hardships from living in poverty to enduring the segregated society of Kentucky. She remarks how the institutions of the church and her dedicated schoolteachers protected and insulated her from some of the traumas of racism. hooks earned a scholarship to Stanford University and it was there that she experienced the barbs of classism and racism. Often asked by students and professors if she attended Stanford on a scholarship, the constant reminder of her workingclass background effectively excluded her from discussions and social activities—these covert acts of oppression forced her into silence.16 She reflects on her experiences of imposed quietness: “Now when I ponder the silences, the voices that are not heard, the voices of those wounded and/or oppressed individuals who do not speak or write, I contemplate the acts of persecution, torture—the terrorism that breaks spirits, that makes creativity impossible.”17 For hooks, it is the terrorism of coerced introversion—and not group work, as Cain argues—that scalds creative spirits. Despite what Cain says about the neediness of extroverts to be the center of attention and their inability to function on their own, extroverts and introverts alike fail to operate under repressive conditions like those to which hooks alludes. One wonders how many voices have been silenced under this type of despotism and how some of these voices—those of everyday individuals—can reach the public sphere?18 I might add that Cain primarily discusses the perspectives of or gives voice to those elite individuals within society, whereas hooks, Collins, and Anzaldua represent the voices of the working class.

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In Teaching to Transgress, hooks recounts the oppressive racism she encountered: “school was a political place, since we were always having to counter white racist assumptions that we were genetically inferior, never as capable as white peers, even unable to learn.”19 This dehumanization by Whites sought to rob hooks of her humanity, and ultimately led to her theoretical work. hooks advocates the practice of “critical thinking or consciousness,” that observes one’s reality and seeks transformation through dialogical thinking in an effort to shed the yoke of dehumanization suffered at the hand of White oppressors. This cognitive process represents the movement from an objective state to one of subjectivity, thereby gaining voice.20 hooks acknowledges the critical responses the dominant group imposes upon colonized, oppressed writers when attempting to access the public sphere to gain voice. Several of her books received overly critical remarks from the dominant society; these reviews affected her, but did not deter her from continuing to write. Noting how writing represents not only a creative act, but also an act of resistance, she perceives it as a threat to the status quo. Writing in this sense challenges the dominant powers that seek to silence or destroy those in opposition. This form of “talking back” promotes the power of resistance, it moves one from object to subject, from dehumanized to humanized, from exploited to authoritative and heals the scars caused by silencing.21 Similar to hooks, feminist theorist/sociologist Patricia Hill Collins shares her story of repression and how it affected her life work. Patricia Hill Collins grew up in Philadelphia. Taking advantage of the public education system available to working-class families in the 1960s, her diligence paid off and she moved to Boston to pursue her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Sociology at Brandeis and Harvard Universities. Hill Collins mentions in Black Feminist Thought that as one of the handful of Blacks in her community, she traveled in White circles. Unfortunately, her close interaction bothered many Whites, and she felt the sting of racism. I tried to disappear into myself in order to deflect the painful, daily assaults designed to teach me that being an African American, working-class woman made me lesser than those who were not. And as I felt smaller, I become quieter and eventually was virtually silenced … I now know that my experiences are far from unique. Like African-American women, many others who occupy societally denigrated categories have been similarly silenced. So the voice that I now seek is both individual and collective, personal and political.22

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Like bell hooks, Hill Collins was silenced by the dominant society for being different—in color, class, and gender—and forced into the margins to fill the space of a quiet woman. As one can see, Hill Collins resisted, refusing silence and instead choosing to find her voice and speak for others who were similarly silenced by oppression. As a feminist theorist, Hill Collins contributed important theoretical work on the interlocking power structures of society. Her theory has great merit for my purposes. Called the Matrix of Domination, this concept analyzes the influence of patriarchy, race, class, and gender as an interwoven system of organization that governs society on the individual and group level and restricts the oppressed from accessing power structures and privilege. This schema weaves a web of relationships affecting all facets of social interactions in diverse ways. Hill Collins reminds us that race is a social construct with slippery subtexts, constantly morphing, and, because those with minority group status are often silenced, she acknowledges that the “inclusion of silenced people is one of the goals of multicultural work.”23 Through her observations regarding the Matrix of Domination, Hill Collins thwarts the purpose of what Cain proposes: that introverts (or what I call coerced introverts) retreat from the margins of society into silence, take some quiet time for introspection, and then rejoin the conversation later. In a society that values meritocracy based upon its own White standards, women of color are often perceived by the dominant group as espousing what they deem as worthless ideas or opinions that are contrary to their beliefs. Thus minority women remain voiceless and are never asked to rejoin the conversation as Cain presupposes. Hill Collins’s theory advocates an altogether new way of seeing things: that of “shifting the center,”24 which calls for placing the excluded individuals/groups centerstage and viewing the world through their lenses. Typically marginalized groups have been brow-beaten into quiescence and invisibility by the dominant social order. Whites judge them by White cultural standards rather than the minority group’s cultural standards. Biased cultural mores are a form of exclusionary thinking that fail to perceive the experiences of others outside the small circle. By “shifting the center,” groups perceive, recognize, analyze, and understand the restrictive framework of the Matrix of Domination that undergirds society’s institutions, shaping lives. This inclusionary thinking allows silenced groups to gain access to the public sphere, and the goal of multicultural work is achieved.25 Another theorist who resisted White oppression was lesbian feminist Gloria Anzaldua. Born in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, her family owned their lands for generations—when Texas was still a part of

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Mexico. When the United States annexed Texas in 1845, the family’s lands were stolen by unscrupulous Americans and corrupt political/business practices. Her parents worked the fields as migrant workers, even traveling across the United States to labor. Anzaldua and her siblings worked the fields alongside their parents and missed a lot of school. Her parents moved to Hargill, Texas where the children began attending school regularly. Unfortunately, Anzaldua experienced the dehumanization of prejudice in the South Texas schools: “I walk through the elementary school I attended so long ago, that remained segregated until recently. I remember how the white teachers used to punish us for being Mexican.”26 Stigmatized for her ethnicity, Anzaldua’s theoretical concept of racial, cultural, and ethnic identity arose from a psyche traumatized by racism. Anzaldua’s “mestiza consciousness” consists of negotiating between three cultures: the White, the Mexican, and the Aztec in order to gain voice. A schizophrenic chasm erupts as each culture strives to dominate, but the key to reconnection involves breaking free from the oppressor to develop the mestiza consciousness. The Chicano or Spanish language complicates the issue for Anzaldua as she says: “If you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language … I am my language.”27 She identifies her persona with her native tongue because it symbolizes the essence of her being—a victim of colonization, a Chicana, a woman. She validates herself by denouncing her oppressor: “I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue—my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.”28 The coerced introvert gains her voice in an act of resistance to the dominant power structures of a White patriarchal society. This revelatory epiphany confirms the Habermasian ideal of the public use of reason. Anzaldua found her voice. Gloria Anzaldua looked and sounded like what the media portrays as a typical looking Mexican—a dark skinned indigenous-looking individual with a thick Spanish accent. Suffering the consequences of this stereotyping, the Mexican-American author narrates her experiences of working the fields as a migrant farm worker to pay her way through college. Furthermore, while in the Ph.D. program at UT Austin in 1976– 77, she decided to focus on Feminist Studies/Chicana literature, but her committee did not consider it a “legitimate discipline” and shoved her into silence. 29 She failed the standards set by the dominant White discourse to write the Ph.D. Anzaldua moved to San Francisco where she lectured, wrote, and published her greatest works in numerous disciplines. Universities across the nation employed her as a Distinguished Visiting

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Professor. She eventually finished her dissertation at the University of Santa Cruz, where she also taught, but died before it was awarded to her. Anzaldua’s life story vividly recounts the oppression she suffered at the hands of White society and her lifelong struggle to resist silencing. In Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s speech “The Solitude of Self,” her argument about women’s rights encases the logos or rational critical logic of the preceding feminists’ messages: women require basic human rights, as individuals and citizens to foster self-sufficiency. In each case these women of color experienced a breach of their rights and subsequent victimization by what cultural theorist Stuart Hall calls a dominant representational paradigm.30 Based upon a constructionist representation, in this case by White society, this paradigm denotes a unique perspective of a certain group as viewed by that society. While this judgment relies solely upon the lens of White people and their view of reality—the reasoning may be inaccurate. Clearly, White discourse represents people of color through pre-existing schema. Not only is tokenism at work here, but something much deeper: class and racial stereotyping.31 Education, though hard won, afforded the path for these minority women to break free and gain cultural capital, thus they negotiated and superseded the limitations binding them to the dominant representational paradigm. For hooks, Hill Collins, and Anzaldua, their ethos or credibility stems from higher education and the ability it imparts to operate as intellectuals. Gloria Anzaldua’s theory on ethos incorporates a more inclusive model since she discovers and re-envisions a “strength of character” in diversity, celebrating it.32 hooks’s theory on logos underscores the critical responses received by colonized, oppressed writers attempting to have their voice heard—and how their writing represents not only a creative act, but also an act of resistance, a threat to the status quo. Writing in this sense challenges the dominant powers. Patricia Hill Collins’s theory on logos visualizes the oppressed group through a new lens—their own—to validate their worth individually and collectively, no longer silenced, and to enter the public sphere as valued members of society—despite their difference. All three feminists narrate compelling tales filled with pathos about the hardships they endured, and we, the audience, identify with their stories. In all three instances, their theoretical work arose from a synthesis of their experiences of class and racial stereotyping coupled with theory— the phoenix arising from these ashes looks much different. Until now, I have refrained from referring to the oral histories because I wanted to establish a feminist canon for reference. I now relate the theories of hooks, Hill Collins, and Anzaldua to the rhetorical work within the oral histories. Each of these feminist’s theories employs an array of

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rhetorical options, but the ones that strike a familiar chord with the oral histories are these: ethos, logos, and pathos. Through the oral histories, one envisions those considered unworthy by the dominant group—women of color from poor families—one the granddaughter of freed slaves, whose working-class parents lived in racially segregated Summerville, South Carolina, the other the daughter of Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrants living in the de facto segregated area of San Antonio, Texas. Typically these voices would not merit inclusion, analysis, or relevance for scholars since the practice of oral history was relegated to the elite and famous of society. Thanks to a shift in paradigm, similar to Hill Collins’s theory of “shifting the center,” oral historians consider the voices of oppressed, marginalized individuals/groups as worthy of study. Thus these women of color move from a state of invisibility to visibility and from being silenced and not having a voice to acquiring one. Like Hill Collins, I seek the “inclusion of silenced people” as one “of the goals” that drive my “multicultural work,” and for this reason I include the following voices because I am shifting the center and, as an act of resistance, am giving them voice.33

The Silenced Voices Background—Judy Varner: Born in 1937, Judy Varner came from a working class family. Varner grew up in Summerville, SC, a small, picturesque town located in the mountains outside of Charleston. Unfortunately the idyllic serenity was oftentimes broken by the activity of the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan. Of special interest is the fact that her uncle owned a barbershop that only the white men of Summerville were allowed to use. She attended segregated schools, never had any textbooks, and Summerville lacked a library; yet despite these hardships, she managed to graduate summa cum laude from Claflin College. During her Claflin College years, she made the pages of the local newspapers for attaining a 4.0 GPA. The University of South Carolina saw the news release containing her photo, and thinking she was White, offered her admission to their institution. When she appeared for the interview, they realized she was Black and immediately withdrew the offer. The NAACP’s college chapter encouraged her to take legal action, but her parents feared retribution from the KKK. Upon graduation, Varner was hired by the NAACP as a Field Secretary where she labored tirelessly from 1960–63 alongside Civil Rights martyr Medgar Evers during the most turbulent era of the Civil Rights Movement. Suffering from the effects of PTSD, she resigned her post, received a grant

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to study library science, and attained a Master’s degree from Clark Atlanta University. She opened the second and third African American Libraries in the nation, in Atlanta and Ft. Lauderdale, and received numerous awards for her outstanding leadership. Varner often speaks to schools about her early career with the NAACP. Background—Marisela Delgado: Marisela Delgado was born in San Antonio, TX in 1925. The daughter of Mexican immigrants who migrated to the United States during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Delgado’s father worked as a tailor and her family lived a life of penury. Institutions like the Spanish-speaking Methodist Church, mutual aid societies, and clubs as well as friends and family sheltered the family from most of the racism hurled from White Texan society. Delgado grew up on San Antonio’s Westside—the area partitioned for Mexican immigrant families through racially restrictive housing covenants34 that kept minority groups in their own sections, denying them access into White areas. Few public services such as heating, plumbing, sewers, street paving, or drainage existed in the neighborhoods, and oftentimes minority children attended schools that were segregated due to language rather than race (as in the African American case).35 Because of the racial climate in San Antonio, Delgado was branded by White Texans as a “Mexican”36 and treated correspondingly—as outside the margins. During the 1930s–40s, educators railroaded Mexican American students into agricultural/technical schools to learn a trade—denying them the opportunity to prepare for college despite academic excellence. Few were granted admission to the White-only publicly funded college prep schools. Because Delgado did not stay silent, she was admitted to the prep school and graduated, but her dreams of college faded due to her family’s poverty. She married, but never left the shelter of the Mexican American ethnic enclave and remained active in the Methodist church. Although Delgado’s dream was deferred, she taught Sunday school for many years, fulfilling her goal of teaching children. As minority women, Varner and Delgado lived under oppressive conditions for most of their lives and stayed within the confines of their ethnic enclaves. Though their paths took different trajectories, they both remembered the agonizing pain caused by racism that they experienced at the hands of White society and how it helped them gain a voice, rather than forced them into silence. Ethos: Judy Varner is from the South and dwells in the margins. As Gloria Anzaldua’s theory on ethos asserts, Varner discovers in her multiculturalism a strong person with insight that reimagines the concept

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of ethos. Through her oral history, she confirms to the audience she has valid credentials as a former civil rights worker, research librarian, and Director of Library Operations for Broward County—these verify her worth as a rhetor. Her credibility displays itself openly, especially as she gives speeches to schoolchildren about her experiences:37 During the four years I was at Claflin College, I worked with NAACP. We marched—I went to jail, had water hoses that hosed us down. [pauses and sighs] Sat at [a] lunch counter—almost got hit with a baseball bat. One young White fella grabbed the bat from the back and he just fought in Kress.38

Varner’s courage to participate in the demonstrations and her refusal to be relegated to introversion is apparent in her life story. In her case, the silencing might have been permanent since she ran a great risk. This fact evidences itself when she speaks to a group of children, as one youngster asked if she wasn’t afraid: “Yes. I was afraid,” she answers, “but you didn’t let fear stop you. Somehow the issue of freedom for everybody was something that drove you.”39 The desire for collective freedom from repression inspired Varner with fervor and fearlessness to continue attending rallies, sit-ins, and marches. Rather than retreating into a corner in silence as Cain suggests, Varner chose the extrovert’s route—to voice her opposition and resist the dominant White patriarchal system that kept her minority group chained. Though not as dramatic a story as Varner’s, Delgado’s narrative nonetheless displays her feisty spirit. Delgado gains her ethos in several ways: as a victim of racial bias and by distinguishing herself first as a Hispanic, then a Mexican. Toxic racism marginalized this minority group, as Delgado’s words attest when she notes: “Well, we knew that a lot of the school kids didn’t like Hispanics, or Mexicans—how they used to call us then.”40 In this instance she yields to the oppressor’s domination by accepting their aversion towards her group and by accepting their naming her as “Mexican” rather than choosing the term for herself. The dominant representational paradigm concretizes Delgado and places her in a cell from which she cannot escape until she shifts the center and views her situation through new lenses. Many within this toxic racial situation accept the oppressor’s judgment as truth. Clearly, White patriarchal laws and practices codify people of color, silencing them into acceptance. Initially, Delgado accepts the racist label quietly, without resistance, but later during her interview when speaking about a fellow student from Mexico, she asserts her voice when she self-identifies with the Mexican national by saying, “I guess she felt good because she wasn’t the only

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Mexican there.”41 At this juncture of the interview, Delgado has shared poignant memories of her Mexican grandparents, the Mexican Methodist Church, and her family. Her perspective on her cultural group has shifted center and she views the issues through a new framing: that of a proud Mexican American woman. Shortly thereafter, she admits strong positive feelings about being of Mexican heritage: We weren’t just Mexicans, where you could say, “Oh they’re Mexicans, they don’t know anything, they’re no good.” We knew we were good! Well some of the Anglos thought that they were better than every body else. Which they were not. I didn’t feel like we were ignorant. Maybe we didn’t speak as good English.42

Her words reveal several legitimate issues, one—that the term “Mexicans” was used pejoratively in her day and the term referred to the group that was, regardless of citizenship, viewed as illegal aliens; two— that Anglos (another term for Whites) perceived Mexicans as no good, as ignorant folks that couldn’t speak English very well. Rather than accept the stereotype, Delgado utilizes her rational-critical thinking to counter the charges—by insisting on the worthiness of her minority group. In her shift to the center, she reasons that Mexicans merit respect because of their culture, language, and community, disrupting the dominant representational paradigm. By voicing her disagreement with the previous paradigm, she no longer feels bound or silenced by this schema and finds her voice. In the end, both narratives testify to the ill treatment of minorities by the dominant society—through its laws, ordinances, and customs, and both women possess the courage to resist the dominant discourse to gain voice rather than being silenced into subservience. Logos/Pathos: Everyone deserves basic human rights as individuals, and citizens to foster self-sufficiency, according to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s feminist theory. Delgado’s narrative reflects her battle with this concept as the logos works under institutional racist practices. Delgado recounts how she received an appointment to an agricultural school many miles away from her home. A National Honor Society member, she desires to attend the nearby public college prep school, Brackenridge, that happens to be All White. In a bold move, she walks to this school, which lies less than one mile away from her home, alone and without her parents. One questions her motivation for this action: neither of her parents spoke English well enough to communicate. She recounts her experience: “I went to the Dean’s office at Brackenridge and told them, ‘I can’t go to Burbank. It’s too far for me, Brackenridge is closer.’ The Principal—was a

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woman—I think she didn’t like Hispanics and said that I couldn’t go. She didn’t tell me they didn’t accept Hispanics.” Delgado persists in her queries, especially when the Dean denies her requests. Courageously, she refuses to be silenced into submission and retreat to the margins, a move hoped for by the dominant White educational system: “And I said, ‘Why cain’t I come here? I graduated from Harris. Call the school and find out for sure.’ She just kept stalling; she just didn’t know what else to tell me.” The Dean obviously did not anticipate Delgado’s resistance and was at a loss at how to offset the unwavering youngster’s stand. In an act of defiance similar to that of Rosa Parks, Delgado persists, refusing to budge: “And then I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to go to Burbank.’ And she insisted I couldn’t come, but I was very stubborn. So finally, I don’t know who she talked to, but then she said, ‘Okay. You can come to Brackenridge.’ When I think back—maybe it was because I was Hispanic.”43 The gravity of the situation hits Delgado head-on as she reflects on the incident, realizing after so many years that the causative factor for attempting to restrict her entrance into Brackenridge was racially motivated. If one analyzes the narrative, one visualizes the change in Delgado’s attitude. Her perspective travels from an oppressed state to one of freedom as she reflects on her speaking out, on how she resisted the dominant society, on how she insisted upon her basic human rights and on her rights as an American citizen: I’m glad that I went and talked. There was nobody else to talk for me, but I knew what to say … what to do … because I felt—well—I have a right to learn and to go to any school I want. I’m an American. We’re here to learn and it doesn’t matter what color I am. I said, ‘I don’t think I’m so black that I (breaks out in nervous laughter) cain’t come—if you think I’m too black or too dark—I mean what’s the difference? I’m gonna learn just like anybody else is. So, I’m gonna come to Brackenridge.’ I felt it’s a public school … anybody can come. We don’t have to pay, because the government pays. It’s for everybody. We were here to learn—no matter what color is sitting next to me—we’re gonna learn. And I just felt that I had to say everything I did, because I had a right. I’m an American.44

As hooks’s theory asserts, one’s “critical thinking or consciousness” permits one to discerns one’s reality in the transformative process through dialogical thinking. In turn, this re-centering, once focused solely through the lens of the oppressor’s, shifts, and like a snake shedding its skin, discards the dehumanization suffered at the hand of White oppressors. This cognitive process represents the movement from an objective state to one of subjectivity, thereby gaining voice.

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One can readily visualize how these oral histories present storytelling and confession, dialectical interchange, and cultural criticism, but Delgado bravely calls the oppression by its name. No longer confined to silence, she calls the Dean out. When Delgado asks the Dean why skin color equates with one’s ability or desire to learn, she confronts the racism headon. Most importantly, Delgado is part of the vanguard, and her act resonates on a collective as well as individual level, possibly allowing others to scale the walls and gain admittance as well. Delgado’s words intimately identify her readers with her, achieving a high degree of interconnectedness on a human level, for her narrative pertains to universal themes.45 Delgado’s words also aptly convey the logos of Cady Stanton’s argument: all of us deserve core human rights on an individual/collective basis to encourage self-dependency—regardless of our ethnic/racial background. She takes the mantle of her American citizenship to proclaim her rights, causing others to question the validity of the segregated system. Furthermore, she courageously utilizes her voice to challenge the unjust system, and most importantly the oppressive institution then itself validates her claim, allowing her admittance. Delgado refused to be coerced into introversion and silenced by the Dean. She refused to withdraw into silence and perform quiet work. Instead, her extroverted self voiced truth to power. Varner relates similar instances where Whites deny people of color their basic human rights—and the logos of Varner’s message seeks shelter in this premise. In the 1960s, during the pre–Civil Rights era, human rights for African Americans remained almost non-existent. Varner’s narrative recounts one particular incident, while working for the NAACP, when she toiled alongside the famous martyr Medgar Evers. The NAACP dispatched them on assignment to Jackson, Mississippi to provide representation for some students arrested for participating in a Civil Rights sit-in at a library. Her words are resonant: There were four or six young people on trial and we tried to get to the court. Medgar took me with him. We got out and we faced officers at the top of the steps going up to the courthouse. Well, clear across that top step were canine dogs held by officers. When we got to the bottom step, they turned-loose-those-dogs. We had to run across the street to our car. Medgar pushed me in the car—but the dog—you know how—how they—they jump at you—scraped his back, but he got in the car too. It was something.46

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Varner fought for basic human rights individually and collectively—as she represented the NAACP in an attempt to speak truth to power—in this case the Mississippi courts. Unwilling to listen to reason, to the NAACP, or to protestors’ demands, White institutions silenced Varner and Evers through intimidation and lethal force. The persistence of the Civil Rights movement proved itself as Varner and Evers continued to work in the dangerous regions of the South. Varner’s pathos reveals itself in the previous incident but reaches its zenith when she shares her story of traveling back from Civil Rights rallies with Medgar Evers through the back roads of Mississippi in the 1960s: When we would go to mass meetings, Medgar drove his car with no lights from Gulfport—at midnight at night—when we got off from the meetings—all the way to Jackson—some 200 miles. With no car lights … ’cause he didn’t want to be seen by the Klan or by a group in Mississippi. I’m surprised he lived as long as he did. I was hurt when he was assassinated, but … these were some bad times. These were some bad times. Young people don’t understand what we had to go through.47

Varner stops and starts during this portion of the interview, visibly shaken. One feels the pain of what she experienced through her words— her voice—her feelings—as she appeals to our emotion, imploring us to share in her heartache. She voices the severity of the situation—fear of the Klan, fear of Whites, fear of reprisal, fear of death—perhaps her words evoke guilt for those of us who never acted on their behalf in fighting against these gross injustices. Interestingly, she comments on the youth of today and their failure to comprehend the tragedy that faced her every day. Both Varner and Delgado chose the way of the extrovert by refusing to be coerced into silence. By choosing to voice their narratives for inclusion into an archive, they open another door for scholars to explore the experiences of the everyday folk—the “inclusion of silenced people.” Through the inclusion of silenced people, the stereotyping of minorities for various reasons may be lessened. Varner’s and Delgado’s linguistic patterns, accent, and dialect dislocate the listener’s preconceived notions about what African Americans and Mexican Americans should sound like, since they retain a slight ethnic accent. Perhaps they “didn’t speak as good English” as Whites could, as Delgado proclaims, but they manage to disrupt the stereotype. Dodds asserts in Dynamics of Intercultural Communication, “Evidence indicates speech patterns, dialect, and accent cause some people to stereotype others based upon their accent … Studies show that those individuals exhibiting Spanish, African American, and southern U.S. accents are rated negatively.”48 Lack of an

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accent oftentimes lends more credibility to a person, as Dodds argues, and based upon this premise the narrators gain the voices of authority. Feminine rhetorical styles developed over time, also gaining in trustworthiness and so opening up their access to the public sphere. According to feminist rhetorician Karlyn Campbell, a feminine rhetorical style evolved from the early women’s movement which contained the following features: a personal tone, a personal nature such as stories and personal experiences, the use of inductive reasoning, a spirit of equality for all, and a sense of empowerment.49 These oral histories exhibit the characteristics of this feminine rhetorical style. Both adopt a personal intimate tone that immediately draws the audience in. Furthermore they elicit personal experiences that follow inductive reasoning, allowing the audience to reach a conclusion. Lastly, they illustrate Varner’s and Delgado’s empowerment in the process, while advocating universal equality for all. Campbell labels “these stylistic qualities” as forms of “consciousness-raising” practiced by oppressed groups, saying that because oppressed groups tend to develop passive personality traits, consciousnessraising is an attractive communication style to people working for social change. Consciousness-raising invites audience members to participate in the persuasive process, it empowers them, especially if they share common values and experiences.50

Varner’s and Delgado’s oral histories contain these stylistic qualities of consciousness-raising as they repeat certain phrases as would a preacher on Sunday. Varner repeats several phrases: “these were some bad times. These were some bad times,” while Delgado reiterates “We’re here to learn … I’m gonna learn … We were here to learn—no matter what color is sitting next to me—we’re gonna learn.”51 True to the tenets of feminine rhetorical style that Gloria Anzaldua and bell hooks advocate, these women empower readers/listeners to self-realization/actualization so they too can be agents of change.52 These narrators do not desire to replace the power structure and transform themselves into agents of hegemony. Instead, these narrators aspire to increase societal awareness to prevent the recurrence of injustices. Looking back, both narrators gained access to the public sphere by resisting, debating, and speaking truth to power, as Habermas asserts. The back-grounded message of these two narratives is rooted in Habermasian theory, namely that the “public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public … to engage them in a debate … [for] people’s public use of their reason.” 53 These oral histories

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afford the audience an opportunity for engagement in the creation of transformative understandings that unite them with the narrators’ points of view. At times, the message presented confronts the audience with the detrimental effects of White racism. Possibly the audience may feel uncomfortable about the topic of racism and the group responsible for the injustices. Through these once-silenced voices, I hope readers will question their value system to uncover and visualize the hegemonic system deeply embedded within the White patriarchal society and to “perceive the reality of oppression” as philosopher Paolo Freire notes, “not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform.”54

Conclusion In her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain encourages both genders of introverts to solicit time for solitude, away from the crowd. All introverts, according to Cain’s ideology, may re-enter the conversation without consequences; but in truth, this rarely occurs. Racist patriarchal educational systems like Stanford, Harvard, or the University of Texas, Austin ignored the thoughts, ideas, and opinions of women of color—such as bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, and Gloria Anzaldua. These racist White patriarchal societies verbally whipped and forced minority women into silence, into a “state of marginalized introversion,” disallowing and preventing by any means possible their access into the public sphere. In this manner, White society effectively silenced their voices and turned them into coerced introverts—for a time. As this essay demonstrates, through the acts of writing, theory, lecturing, and conferences, minority women resisted, forming their own alternative public spheres. Patricia Hill Collins’s concept of the Matrix of Domination elucidates how patriarchy, gender, race, class, and ethnicity subdue women of color into silence, and one visualizes how the feminist theorized the Matrix of Domination in reaction to racism. I believe feminist rhetorical theory represents the antithesis to Cain’s ideology and serves as a means of hope for those voices still in the margins. Fraught with many twists and turns, the genesis and evolution of the alternative public spheres still poses multiple challenges for women as they seek access. By utilizing Jurgen Habermas’s principle of the public sphere, one visualizes the difficulty women face entering it, especially those women living in societies that repress women’s voices. My core belief remains: the public sphere must be a space accessible to all, not just

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a select few; and women coerced into introversion must not yield and accept silence. But the question still remains: How can society increase the number of feminine voices in the public sphere, so that they will no longer be quiet women? This work remains an ongoing project, for because of the common practice of erasure, modern-day male-dominated societies marginalize, murder, kidnap, detain, obscure, and bury feminine voices. One common thread I discovered in my investigation was that too few women’s voices also exist outside Western culture, and far too many female voices are waiting to be discovered. Though I enjoyed researching about White women rhetors of the past, I questioned why minority voices were missing. Did too many minority women of the past follow Cain’s advice and simply retreat into a closet to quietly watch the world, or did they attempt to voice their perspectives, but were coerced into introversion? Although this area holds great possibility for scholarly pursuit, I firmly believe we must instead rally together like Judy Varner did during the Civil Rights era and actively demonstrate against forced marginalized introversion and human rights abuses of women in countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Turkey, and Nigeria. We must provide a space for the coerced introverts (girls/women) of today, who are living through the hell of coerced introversion, and allow them to voice their stories of injustice.

Notes 1

Susan Cain, Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (New York: Broadway Books, 2012), 10–11. 2 Cain, Quiet, 47–50. 3 Cain, Quiet, 89. 4 Cain, Quiet, 94. 5 One only need look at cases in some repressive modern-day cultures such as the Taliban in Afghanistan or Boko Haram in Nigeria to view the forced silencing of women. Regardless of introvert/extrovert personality, they are forced into a permanent state of silence—a state of coerced introversion. 6 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1991), 104–106. 7 Cain, Quiet, 80–81. 8 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 94, 104–106, 244. 9 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 105. 10 Ralph Engelman, Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996), 111. 11 Cain, Quiet, 58–60. Cain recounts the story of Rosa Parks and the bus boycott,

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calling her an introvert who allowed Martin Luther King to speak for her instead. This story brings to forefront my argument about a patriarchal society where women are silenced. 12 Cain, Quiet, 60; Peter Applebome, New York Times, “Our Towns; The Man Behind Rosa Parks,” December 7, 2005, http: www.nytimes.com. On December 21, 1956 a photo was taken of Parks sitting alone on the bus with a White man in a nearby seat. It was staged and photographed by two UP photographers the actual day that the Montgomery bus boycott ended and bus desegregation began. 13 Chela Sandoval, “Feminism and Racism: A Report on the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, 1981,” in Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldua (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990), 55–71. From 1972–80 fractures existed within the Feminist movement between white feminists and women of color. Feminists of color accused White feminists of demonstrating racism and classism towards them. In 1981 the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) held its 3rd annual meeting with the topic of “Women Respond to Racism.” Feminists of color responded to the call with some trepidation because of the uncertainty about who was responding to racism. But the question remained: Which women’s views held the most credence? Would it be those women of color that experienced racism on a daily basis or those who only desired to give it lip service so that they would be taken seriously as an academic discipline? 14 Glenn, Rhetoric Retold, 22, 36–37. 15 Dodd, Dynamics, 1. 16 Karen Foss, Sonja Foss, and Cindy Griffin, Feminist Rhetorical Theories (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1999), 81, 96; bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 181; Ondine Le Blanc, “hooks, bell 1952– ,” Contemporary Black Biography, 1994, Encyclopedia.com (August 7, 2014), http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc /1G2-2870700039.html. 17 bell hooks. “Talking Back,” in Making Face, Making Soul, ed. Gloria Anzaldua (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1994), 209. 18 Cain, Quiet, 10–11. 19 hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 4. 20 hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 4–5; bell hooks, “Talking Back” in Making Face, Anzaldua, ed., 211. 21 hooks, “Talking Back,” 210–11. 22 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd edition (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), vi. 23 Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins, eds., Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology (New York: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1998), 6. 24 Andersen and Collins, Race, Class, and Gender, 10–11. 25 Andersen and Collins, Race, Class, and Gender, 10–11. 26 Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999), 111. 27 Anzaldua, Borderlands, 81. 28 Anzaldua, Borderlands, 81.

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29 Anzaldua, Borderlands, 31, 99–112, 227, 230; Dodd, Dynamics, 13–14, 124–25; Foss, Foss, and Griffin, Feminist Rhetorical Theories, 86, 94, 108. 30 Hall, Representation, 76–78. 31 Hall, Representation, 21–25; Dodd, Dynamics, 5–8. 32 Foss, Foss, and Griffin, Feminist Rhetorical Theories,122. 33 Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins ed. Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology (New York: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1998), 6. 34 Clifton et al. v. Puente et al. 11891 Court of Civil Appeals of Texas, San Antonio 218 S.W. 2d 272. This property contained a racially restrictive covenant that prohibited the sale or lease of said property to people of Mexican descent. The property was sold to Mr. Puente, a person of Mexican descent, and when the possessor of the property realized it had been sold to a person of Mexican descent, he erected a fence on the property to prevent the new owner from occupying the land. The suit was tried and Puente prevailed. This covenant is only one of many found in Texas. 35 Plessy v. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537 (1896). This Supreme Court case occurred when Homer Adolph Plessy resisted sitting in a separate “Jim Crow” railroad compartment because of his 1/8 Negro ancestry. The Supreme Court sustained the ruling arguing that laws could not remove racial bias. This “Jim Crow” law remained in effect until the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1954 and the congressional Civil Rights Act of 1964 struck the discriminatory law down. Del Rio Independent School District v. Salvatierra. 33 Texas Civil Appeals S.W. 2d 790–96 (1930). This ruling legally segregated children of Mexican descent in schools until the third grade based upon speaking the Spanish language. In reality, Whites contrived this ploy to prevent the mixing of their children with children of Mexican heritage. Mexican children were routinely segregated into sub-standard schools or were placed in “Mexican” schools under abhorrent conditions. See George I. Sánchez Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, General Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. 36 “Mexican” was used by White Texans in a pejorative sense to demarcate this minority group, despite citizenship status. The term continues in use today. 37 Foss, Foss, and Griffin, Feminist Rhetorical Theories, 1999, 122. Judy Varner, interview by author, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, February 7, 2008. 38 Varner, interview. 39 Varner, interview. 40 Varner, interview. 41 Delgado, interview. 42 Delgado, interview. 43 Delgado, interview. 44 Delgado, interview. 45 Dodd, Dynamics, 230. 46 Varner, interview. 47 Varner, interview. 48 Dodd, Dynamics, 124–25. 49 Karen Foss and Sonja Foss, Women Speak: The Eloquence of Women’s Lives (Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1991), 12–13; Dodd, Dynamics, 183.

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Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, vol. 1, 12–13. Varner, interview; Delgado, interview. 52 Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands, 31, 99–112, 227, 230; Foss, Women Speak, 92; hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 11. 53 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 27 54 Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2005), 49. 51

CHAPTER SIX ON VALUES, INTERESTS, AND REWARDS: FLEDA VETCH’S QUIET VICTORY IN HENRY JAMES’S THE SPOILS OF POYNTON NEVENA STOJANOVIC

Since the time of its initial publication as a serial novel in the Atlantic Monthly in 1896 and then in a single-volume format in 1897, Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton has elicited various responses from literary critics. Richard S. Lyons and Charles Palliser have admired James’s portrayal of the society in a moral crisis, Thomas J. Otten and Kurt M. Koenigsberger have examined the realist aesthetics in the novel, Sean O’Toole and Deborah Wynne have investigated the issues of sexuality and female emancipation, Robyn R. Warhol and Christine McBride have focused on the stylistic tensions in the novel, whereas Karen Leibowitz and Bonita Rhoads have explored the roles of reticence and announcements of modernism respectively.1 This essay, however, focuses on protagonist Fleda Vetch’s introversion—the quality that has remained neglected and overlooked in critical studies of the novel—and the empowerment that she gains from it. Fleda has a unique mission in the novel: she is the mediator between Mrs. Adele Gereth and her son Owen, who has inherited the beautifully decorated house of Poynton from his late father and who wants to live in it with his unsophisticated soon-to-be wife Mona Brigstock. Circulating between the two Gereths’ residences—the pompous Poynton and the modest Ricks—Fleda tries to negotiate the truce between the two parties and is the only one who truly appreciates the family’s collection of artistic objects located at Poynton. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s work on the presentation of self in everyday situations, I argue that owing to her introversion, Fleda remains dramaturgically loyal, disciplined, and circumspect in her performances as a mediator between Mrs. Gereth and Owen and a curator of their art collection.

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James wrote The Spoils of Poynton in the mid-1890s, the decade that witnessed the decline of English social values. As Richard S. Lyons effectively argues, similar to James’s other novels of the period such as What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Awkward Age (1899), The Spoils of Poynton reflects the author’s concern for the deterioration of the English family and its increasingly materialistic preoccupations.2 In James’s notebook entry that deals with The Spoils and in his preface to the novel, the author confesses that he heard a true story about the exacerbation of the relationship between an English aristocratic widow and her son over the collection of artistic objects that her late husband left behind. This unpleasant incident motivated him to paint “a little social and psychological picture” of the same kind in The Spoils.3 As James explains in the notebook entry, “It is all rather sordid and fearfully ugly, but there is surely a story in it. It presents a very fine case of the situation in which, in England, there has always seemed to me to be a story—the situation of the mother deposed, by the ugly English custom, turned out of the big house on the son’s marriage and relegated.”4 That is how the story of the Gereths and the Brigstocks of The Spoils emerged: Mrs. Gereth and her soon-tobe-married son are loosely based on the individuals from the true story that James heard. However, James makes a significant addition to his plot: Fleda Vetch, a wise and sensitive mediator between the parties at war. In order to highlight Fleda’s mission in the novel, James casts her as a central character, whose purpose is to illuminate and direct the course of the events using her superb mind. As James eloquently puts it, “Fleda’s ingratiating stroke, for importance, on the threshold, had been that she would understand; and positively, from that moment, the progress and march of my tale became and remained that of her understanding” (215). James points out that Fleda’s “intelligence” had to be combined “with sufficient freedom and ease, or call it with the right grace” in order to provide the reader with “that quantum of the impression of beauty which is the most fixed of the possible advantages of our producible effect” (30). This combination of qualities works particularly well in an introverted character such as Fleda whose profound and quiet reflections that emerge in the moments of her solitude shed the light on the course of the plot. As James explains, “It may fail, as a positive presence, on other sides and in other connexions; but more or less of the treasure is stored safe from the moment such a quality of inward life is distilled, or in other words from the moment so fine an interpretation and criticism as that of Fleda Vetch’s—to cite the present case—is applied without waste to the surrounding tangle” (30). James highlights the value of Fleda’s deep

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analyses in the social circle tormented by the superficial materialistic interests. The most remarkable quality of Fleda’s incisive reflections is her “appreciation” of the objects displayed at Poynton and Ricks, which singles her out as more ethical than and intellectually superior to the others. As James emphasizes, “From beginning to end, in The Spoils of Poynton, appreciation, even to that of the very whole, lives in Fleda; which is precisely why, as a consequence rather grandly imposed, everyone else shows for comparatively stupid” (30). Since The Spoils revolves largely around the destiny of the inherited works of art, Fleda’s appreciation of their aesthetic qualities and histories makes her a caring connoisseur of the things. James states that “The ‘things’ are radiant, shedding afar, with a merciless monotony, all their light, exerting their ravage without remorse; and Fleda almost demonically both sees and feels, while the others but feel without seeing” (30). This quality of attaining the pith of the things and events and the underlying motives of the other characters makes Fleda stand out in the social milieu depicted in the novel. Fleda’s independence of spirit, which stems from her not having any possessions, is what differentiates her from the Gereths and the Brigstocks. James explains that “The fools are interesting by contrast, by the salience they acquire, and by a hundred other of their advantages; and the free spirit, always much tormented, and by no means always triumphant, is heroic, ironic, pathetic or whatever, and, as exemplified in the record of Fleda Vetch, for instance, ‘successful,’ only through having remained free” (30). In other words, while the others are engrossed in marking their economic territories, Fleda is immersed in the ethical problems related to the events that involve the things at Poynton and Ricks. Her inclination to introspect, analyze, and aim at the solutions congruent with her high moral standards makes her spirit free and her mission successful. Fleda generates the brightest ideas and achieves magnificent successes in solitude, and her introversion is her major tool in mediation, planning, and revisions of her actions. As Susan Cain points out, “solitude” is “so magical” since “it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice,” a quiet training activity that, according to research psychologist Anders Ericsson, leads “to exceptional achievement.”5 Cain emphasizes that “When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly.”6 Any deliberate exercise is most fruitful when it is undertaken in solitude since “It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It

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requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally.”7 In the most critical moments in the plot, when Fleda awaits the outcomes of her past actions and plans the future ones, she engages in deliberate practices that challenge her mentally and strengthen her character. Sociologist Erving Goffman’s concepts of “dramaturgical loyalty,” “dramaturgical discipline,” and “dramaturgical circumspection” are particularly beneficial for our understanding of the role of Fleda’s introversion in her role as a facilitator of the Gereths and Brigstocks’ affairs. According to Goffman, “dramaturgical loyalty” is the performer’s determination not to disclose her team members’ secrets “whether from self-interest, principle, or lack of discretion.”8 “Dramaturgical discipline” requires the performer’s skills so that the performance is impeccable, without the “unmeant gestures or faux pas,” and it often implies that the performer should be an individual with “self-control.”9 “Dramaturgical circumspection” implies the performer’s “foresight and design in determining in advance how best to stage a show.”10 As the forthcoming analysis of the novel will demonstrate, Fleda excels in her diplomatic performances, appearing as loyal, disciplined, and circumspect, and drawing her inner strength and wisdom from the art of introversion. When James writes of Fleda’s background and current situation in society, he highlights the discrepancy between her class status and intellect. He describes Fleda as a person “who hadn’t a penny in the world nor anything nice at home, and whose only treasure was her subtle mind” (42). Having a father who is not supportive or welcoming, Fleda’s only prospect is her artistic career since “she had lately, in Paris, with several hundred other young women, spent a year at a studio, arming herself for the battle of life by a course with an impressionist painter” (42). However, as James points out, Fleda is at the beginning of her development as a painter since “her impressions, or somebody else’s, were as yet her only material” (42). Casting Fleda as a creative nature, who interacts with the surroundings by gathering vivid imprints, James subtly initiates the reader into a series of Fleda’s impressions about the others as well as her actions arising from such impressions. Fleda’s freedom, ease, and intelligence enable her to be perceived as a good mediator and communicator. One of the crucial reasons why Mrs. Gereth considers Fleda reliable and trustworthy is Fleda’s gift for the appreciation of works of art, particularly those at Poynton. James notes that Fleda “had a sense partly exultant and partly alarmed of having quickly become necessary to her imperious friend, who indeed gave a reason quite sufficient for it in telling her there was nobody else who

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understood” (42). At the beginning of the family drama, when Mrs. Gereth invites Fleda to a gathering that includes the Brigstocks, Fleda realizes that Mrs. Gereth considers her “a good agent,” who, owing to her independence and good judgment, could negotiate a favorable deal between her and her son (57). Furthermore, aware of the fact that Mrs. Gereth would like to insert her in her world of artistic collectibles, the protagonist realizes that she is considered “a priestess of the altar” in the temple of the precious things (57–58). Once again, James reminds us of Fleda’s penchant for perception of other people’s motives and of her capability to appreciate aesthetic values. The fact that he labels her “a priestess” of Mrs. Gereth’s sanctuary testifies to Fleda’s reverence towards the collected objects. Later on, when Fleda gets conversant with the things at Poynton, her memory of and instincts about them make her a reliable curator of the collection. As James notes, “She knew them each by every inch of their surface and every charm of their character—knew them by the personal name their distinctive sign or story had given them” (82). Fleda’s natural ability to gather her impressions and categorize them in her brain makes her a capable guardian of the collection. The crucial testimony to Fleda’s dramaturgical discipline in the role of the priestess of Mrs. Gereth’s “altar” is James’s description of her first encounter with Poynton. James specifies that Fleda responds to the pompous mansion as if it were a textual document. In other words, with her gift of artistic perception, Fleda successfully reads Poynton. As James notes, “Wandering through clear chambers where the general effect made preferences almost as impossible as if they had been shocks, pausing at open doors where vistas were long and bland, she would, even hadn’t she already known, have discovered for herself that Poynton was the record of life. It was written in great syllables of color and form, the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists. It was all France and Italy with their ages composed to rest” (47–48). James casts Fleda as a connoisseur of fine arts, multilingual in reading and interpreting the values of all the pieces in Mrs. Gereth’s collection. This helps James establish the image of the protagonist as a dedicated worshipper and curator of the place. Fleda’s dramaturgical discipline in the same role is evident in James’s depiction of her first encounter with Ricks as well. Through her first observations of the things at Ricks, Fleda gets the impression of the character of the maiden-aunt who left all the exhibited objects to Mrs. Gereth. James writes that “The more she looked about the surer she felt of the character of the maiden-aunt, the sense of whose dim presence urged her to pacification: the maiden-aunt had been a dear; she should have

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adored the maiden-aunt. The poor lady had passed shyly, yet with some bruises, through life; had been sensitive and ignorant and exquisite: that too was a sort of origin, a sort of atmosphere for relics and rarities, though different from the sorts most prized at Poynton” (68–69). Fleda is reminiscent of a clairvoyant interpreter of ancient documents, who by getting the impressions from the remnants and relics paints a portrait of an entire dynasty or a ruler. Whenever she is overwhelmed with a dilemma that threatens to destabilize her equilibrium as the central intelligence in the novel, Fleda regains her dramaturgical discipline through circumspection that anchors itself in her introversion. When Fleda notices Owen’s attention to her in their accidental meeting at the market, she ponders over the causes of such behavior. She recalls all the stories about young gentlemen who right before their weddings decide to return to their previous sweethearts. However, Fleda acknowledges that she has never been Owen’s love interest and specifies that she has always found the joy of life in herself. In James’s words: “She wasn’t a former tie, she wasn’t any tie at all; she was only a deep little person for whom happiness was a kind of pearl-diving plunge” (76). Trying to assess Owen’s interest in her, Fleda reveals that she is aware of her profundity and of building her personal happiness through introspection. This, at least at the moment, helps her disperse her fantasies about Owen and focus on the facilitation between him and his mother. Similarly, when Mrs. Gereth takes away all the precious objects of Poynton in order to deter Mona from Owen, Fleda, embarrassed by her friend’s gesture and determined to assist Owen, finds consolation and wisdom in her introversion. As James notes, “Until in some way Poynton should return the blow and give her a cue she must keep nervousness down; and she called herself a fool for having forgotten, however briefly, that her one safety was in silence” (87). This silence helps Fleda remain loyal in her devotion to both Mrs. Gereth and Owen and avoid sharing the secrets that they confided in her. Finally, once Fleda understands that Owen is attracted to her, she analyzes his fiancée Mona, and James, yet again, underscores Fleda’s instinct for one’s character: “Her type was misleading only to the superficial, and no one in the world was less superficial than Fleda” (95). In the moment of deep uncertainty, Fleda tries to find the solution to the unexpected turn of the events through her introversion: “with the telescope of her long thought, Fleda saw what might bring her out of the wood. Mona herself would bring her out; at the least Mona possibly might” (105). In other words, Fleda’s quiet and detailed analysis helps her discern Mona’s propensity for cutting off and nurturing the relationships depending on how much she can benefit them,

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which, as Fleda believes, will help her reinstall her dramaturgical discipline in the role of the unbiased curator of the things and mediator between the parties at war. Fleda’s introversion is conspicuous in the moments of her deliberate practices. After she posts a letter to Owen, inquiring about his further proceedings with Mona, Fleda chooses introversion as a performance of selfhood that will guard her against the intrusions of the outside world while important decisions are being shaped. James informs us that upon posting a letter, Fleda withdraws into the peace and quiet of her sister’s home. In James’s words, “She neither wrote notes nor received them; she indulged in no reminders nor knocked on any doors; she wandered vaguely in the western wilderness or cultivated shy forms of that ‘household art’ for which she had had a respect before tasting the bitter tree of knowledge. Her only plan was to be as quiet as a mouse, and when she failed in the attempt to lose herself in the flat suburb she resembled— or thought she did—a lonely fly crawling over a dusty chart” (131). The selected quotation reveals Fleda’s patient relationship with silence and solitude, highlighting her decision to plunge into them in order to regain her inner strength and later perform her roles successfully. Indeed, after Fleda hears that Owen has married Mona, it is in introversion that she establishes her dramaturgical discipline again. In silence and solitude, she reaches “an equilibrium to which she couldn’t have given a name: indifference, resignation, despair were the terms of a forgotten tongue” (193). As an introvert, Fleda experiences the aforesaid emotions intensively, but through such a process she regains her stability as well. However, even though she feels disappointed since she has lost her privileged position at Poynton, she simultaneously feels thrilled that the things have been returned to the shrine to which they belong. As James explains, “The part of her loss that she could think of was the reconstituted splendor of Poynton … But the loss was a gain to memory and love; it was to her too at last that, in condonation of her treachery, the spoils had crept back” (193). As a true worshipper of arts, Fleda finds consolation and inspiration for future life in the fact that the things are harmoniously placed in their original habitation. James writes, “That they might have been, that they might still be hers, that they were perhaps already another’s, were ideas that had too little to say to her. They were nobody’s at all—too proud, unlike base animals and humans, to be reducible to anything so narrow. It was Poynton that was theirs; they had simply recovered their own. The joy of that for them was the source of the strange peace that had descended like a charm” (194). Attaining the pith of this truth through her isolation and introspection, Fleda strengthens her

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dramaturgical loyalty in the roles of the facilitator and connoisseur of the precious objects even though they ended up in Mona’s hands. Fleda’s impressionistic perceptual skills help her strengthen her dramaturgical loyalty when she moves to Ricks and assumes the role of its curator. Even though Ricks is not Poynton, Fleda finds unique beauty in its objects. She pays a special tribute to the maiden-aunt and to Mrs. Gereth’s decoration skills, claiming that “This is a voice so gentle, so human, so feminine—a faint faraway voice with the little quaver of a heart-break” (202). Her impressionistic affinities help her define the charms of the maiden-aunt’s things. Fleda emphasizes the collection’s beauty in all its imperfection and lack: “If there were more there would be too many to convey the impression in which half the beauty resides—the impression somehow of something dreamed and missed, something reduced, relinquished, resigned: the poetry, as it were, of something sensibly gone” (203). She invents different names for the collection, all of which highlight its esoteric qualities: “I can give it a dozen. It’s a kind of fourth dimension. It’s a presence, a perfume, a touch. It’s a soul, a story, a life. There’s ever so much more here than you and I. We’re in fact just three!” (203). The third presence invoked and acknowledged is that of the maiden-aunt, whose keen eyes detected all the objects. This arcane presence is what makes Ricks distinct from Poynton: “Of course I count the ghosts … It seems to me that ghosts count double—for what they were and for what they are. Somehow there were no ghosts at Poynton” (203). The presence of ghosts at Ricks, or the distinct taste and background of the maiden-aunt, is what makes this temple different from the abundant Poynton. A lack, an imperfection, and the maiden-aunt’s suffering mark this collection worthy of attention and living with. The final chapter of the novel is the apex of the contrast between possession and appreciation. When Owen asks Fleda to go to Poynton and take the thing dearest to her, she refers to herself as a religious worshipper of the place: “She would go down to Poynton as a pilgrim might go to a shrine, and as to this she might look out for her chance” (209). Poynton is for Fleda an old landmark worth revisiting. However, her uncanny intuition, a valuable gift of all the introverts, alerts her. James explains that “Something, in a dire degree at this last hour, had begun to press on her heart: it was the sudden imagination of a disaster, or at least a check before her errand was achieved” (209). Fleda apparently has a premonition that something unexpected will happen and prevent her from enjoying her visit to the old shrine. Once she sees the smoke from the train, and once the station-master informs her that the mansion is in combustion, Fleda realizes that the precious artistic collection is lost forever. In James’s

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words, “Mixed with the horror, with the kindness of the station-master, with the smell of cinders and the riot of sound was the raw bitterness of a hope that she might never again in life have to give up so much at such short notice” (213). Fleda has given up the temple with relics, her prior place of work and objects of worship, but she has not lost them. Owen, Mona, and Mrs. Gereth—the unscrupulous owners of everything—are the actual losers of the collection and the financial security that it provided for them. Unlike the Gereths and the Brigstocks, Fleda will always cherish her impressionistic memories of the spoils of Poynton.

Notes 1

Kurt M. Koenigsberger, “Alchemy and Appreciation: The Spoiling of the Real in Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton,” Studies in the Novel 30, no. 1 (1998): 35– 50; Karen Leibowitz, “Legible Reticence: Unspoken Dialogues in Henry James,” Henry James Review 29, no. 1 (2008): 19–35; Christine McBride, “The Plot against Narration: Disavowal in The Spoils of Poynton,” Henry James Review 28, no. 1 (2007): 249–58; Sean O’Toole, “Queer Properties: Passion and Possession in The Spoils of Poynton,” Henry James Review 33, no. 1 (2012): 30–52; Thomas J. Otten, “The Spoils of Poynton and the Properties of Touch,” American Literature 71, no. 2 (1999): 263–91; Charles Palliser, “‘A Conscious Prize’: Moral and Aesthetic Value in The Spoils of Poynton,” Modern Language Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1979): 37–53; Bonita Rhoads, “Henry James and the Plunder of Sentiment: Building the House of Modernism from The Spoils of Poynton,” Henry James Review 33, no. 2 (2012): 147–64; Robyn R. Warhol, “Narrative Refusals and Generic Transformation in Austen and James: What Doesn’t Happen in Northanger Abbey and The Spoils of Poynton,” Henry James Review 28, no. 3 (2007): 259–68. 2 Richard S. Lyons, “The Social Vision of The Spoils of Poynton,” American Literature 61, no. 1 (1989): 63. 3 Lyons, “The Social Vision,” 63. 4 Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (London and New York: Penguin, 1987), 214. References in text to James, Spoils, are given as page numbers. 5 Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012), 81. 6 Cain, Quiet, 81. 7 Cain, Quiet, 81. 8 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: The Overlook Press, 1973), 212. 9 Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 216. 10 Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 218.

CHAPTER SEVEN PUSHING BOUNDARIES: INTROVERSION AND SOCIAL COMMENTARY IN PUSHING DAISIES JEANETTA VERMEULEN

The perception of personality traits is a tricky thing. When we think about what introversion means at its most superficial level, what comes to mind? I conducted an impromptu poll of my colleagues and received the kind of predictable sound bites one expects to hear when it comes to this topic—introverts are shy, introverts are anti-social, they hate going out, they just like being alone all the time. There is a very particular view in the public imagination of what being an introvert, and an extrovert, actually entails, and it’s this kind of misconception that makes representation in popular culture so important. Introverted characters are rarely the main protagonists in television shows, usually relegated to the background. They’re the tech gurus, the profilers, and the supportive best friends. It seems introverts, through the very act of being introverted, don’t get to lead their own stories. But personality is not a binary concept. Being an introvert does not necessarily equal being shy, reticent, or anti-social, just as being an extrovert does not equal being loud, brash, or necessarily outgoing. The shades of these concepts are often lost in their representation in popular culture, just as the understanding of the concept is often lost within mainstream society. As Susan Cain notes, “we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles. We’re told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable … we’ve lost sight of who we really are.”1 This trend to generalize in popular media is one of the things that made Pushing Daisies stand out. Part fantasy, part mystery, and part romantic comedy, the show challenged conventions both through its stylistic approach and through the particular characterization of its ensemble cast. Pushing Daisies premiered on the American television network ABC in

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2007 and centered on a pie-maker named Ned who had the unusual gift of bringing the dead back to life with a mere touch … with a catch, of course. The quirky comedy-drama created by Bryan Fuller, writer and producer of critically-acclaimed series such as Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, and Hannibal, proved short-lived, however, and was cancelled after just two seasons. It received critical acclaim during its run and was nominated for 17 Primetime Emmy Awards, of which it won 7. It is routinely included on various lists of shows that were cancelled before their time by publications such as Entertainment Weekly2 and Huffington Post.3 The unique premise of being able to wake the dead certainly positioned its main protagonist in a very introverted position from the start, with the relationships he formed always being framed by intense self-reflection. In a way, his special ability acts as a magnifier of the interior landscape of the introvert and transforms it into an exterior issue, where it is exposed to the world to interact with. A close reading of this text allows for a unique perspective on the introvert/extrovert dynamic in terms of representation in popular culture, and by reflecting upon the show’s reception one can certainly draw parallels to the challenges faced by introverts in a world that often feels shaped by more outgoing personalities.

“My name is Ned, I live a simple life. I make pies and wake the dead.”4 It all starts when nine-year-old Ned discovers that he has the power to bring dead creatures back to life when his pet dog, Digby, is run over by a truck. With a mere touch, Digby springs back to life and bounds away, leaving Ned confused but elated. His mother shortly afterwards suffers from a fatal brain hemorrhage while baking a pie in their kitchen, leading him to perform this miraculous feat again, but he soon realizes that unfortunately things aren’t quite as simple as he may have thought. While his mother is back on her feet and acting none the wiser, his next door neighbor, and father of his childhood sweetheart Charlotte “Chuck” Charles, promptly collapses while watering his lawn. This introduces the first rule of his special ability: another person in the near vicinity must die in the place of the person that had been revived. Furthermore, Ned can never touch the person he brought back to life again or that person will die again for good. He makes this grisly discovery the very same evening when his mother kisses him goodnight. His father promptly packs him off to boarding school where Ned learns to navigate his gift, and the fraught emotions it entails, on his own. It becomes a case of trial and error as experiments with flies and insects, eventually discovering that there is a

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grace period of sixty seconds before a life must be exchanged for another life. All these events lead young Ned to withdraw socially, with his only real outlet being baking pies like his mother used to make. He is also reunited with Digby who proves to be his only real friend and companion into adulthood. When we meet Ned as a twenty-eight-year-old, he has become the pie-maker, owner of the quaint restaurant The Pie Hole, and is generally quiet, reserved, and fond of his own company, much to the frustration of vivacious waitress Olive Snook. All of this is conveyed to the viewer through clever use of classic fairy-tale storytelling techniques, namely flashbacks and third-person narration. The tone is set from the very first second as the voiceover of the allknowing narrator supplies the necessary context for a flashback sequence, before rushing us into the present. It’s all done in a very storybook fashion, occasionally involving rhyme, providing the viewer with an anchor in the story, grounding them in the reality the show projects, while the opening upbeat opening credits in their brightly colored picture-book style further cement the show’s aesthetic as one vaguely fantastical and whimsical. Overall, the viewer is presented with a heavily stylized reality, a “self-contained world, somewhere between a comic book and a fairy tale, a little nostalgic but bursting with colour.”5 The set design and locations really enforce the storybook, fairy-tale feel, as these are often quite exaggerated. For example, The Pie Hole is actually shaped like a giant pie complete with overhanging crust for an awning, recalling the gingerbread house from Hansel and Gretel; one episode centers on a windmill in a very Don Quixote way, and Olive escapes to a convent straight out of the Sound of Music in the second season. The distinct miseen-scène draws on vintage designs for bright, cheery sets and retro style costumes, and incorporates fast dialogue, distinctive music, and cutting between past and present. The technical approach to creating the world of Pushing Daisies was itself quite old-school with matte paintings often being used for the background rather than CGI. Special Effects Supervisor William Powloski remarked that “[I]t’s so much easier for a matte artist to go in there, and with a few strokes of the paint brush, create something that looks a lot more complex than it really is.”6 In the world of Pushing Daisies, the real world itself just isn’t enough as it “rejects realism as verisimilitude, signaled by the heightened nature of everything from color to language.”7 The use of a detached narrator, in a typical fairy-tale style, is given deeper impact through the show’s unique use of camera angles, such as zipping from one location to another rather than simply cutting between them. For example, when the narrator remarks “[o]ne mile to the west, Emerson Cod was also not thrilled,”8 the camera actually zooms

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across to where the character is. This lends an authentic omniscience to the viewer experience, a sense of being shown everything, while also instilling a familiarity with the landscape of the narrative. The overall effect of these techniques is one of nostalgic congruence, creating a recognizably modern world that idealizes an era of society where things may have seemed more simple, elegant, and innocent. This is further enhanced by the noir sensibilities brought to the show by the murder mystery aspect. Ned inadvertently resurrects a criminal in front of private investigator Emerson Cod, who immediately sees the potential this gift has for solving crimes. As the narrator explains, “murders are much easier to solve when you can ask the victim who killed them.”9 Emerson is consistently referred to as a gumshoe, a term common in film noir detective films from the 1940s, and he is often shown sitting alone in his darkened office, a distinctive visual call-back to the hard-boiled detective genre. These visual cues are backed up by Emerson’s tetchy, cynical personality, a common element with hard-boiled detectives and something I will elaborate on later. Ned’s involvement with Emerson Cod and his foray into private investigation is what brings Chuck back into his life after she is murdered during a luxury cruise ship holiday. Emerson can’t resist the lure of the reward offered for solving the case of “Lonely Tourist Charlotte Charles” and Ned can’t resist the chance to say goodbye to his first love. Once reunited, however, he can’t bear to “re-dead” her and so their quirky romance begins at the cost of the thieving funeral director’s life. Chuck becomes part of the crime-solving team, much to Emerson and waitress Olive’s displeasure. The former simply because Chuck’s seemingly endless cheer clashes with his cynical style and her presence threatens his share of the reward money, and the latter because of her unrequited love for Ned. With these four quirky characters thrown together, the main ensemble is complete and the action is firmly centered on their adventures and interactions with one another, supplemented with recurring appearances from Chuck’s eccentric aunts, Lily and Vivian. While the show may not stylistically or narratively be located in realism, the “often symbolic or allegorical nature of the fantastic” means that characters are still exposed to an emotional realism that resonates beyond the show’s genre-defying habits.10

“What makes me unique has brought every person I love into my life.”11 Ned acts as the catalyst of the narrative. While his unique gift is not really the key to solving the cases, which mostly require solid, old-

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fashioned detective work, it does provide most of the show’s dramatic and emotional tension, particularly when it comes to his romance with Chuck. Ned’s childhood was particularly traumatic. Not only did he witness his mother and neighbor die on the same day, he also feels responsible and it’s something he laments upon often during the first few episodes: .

EMERSON: You know what? We all have childhood issues. Okay? Believe me. I got the full subscription, okay? Horror stories. NED: I kind of killed her dad when I was ten. EMERSON: Maybe not horror stories. NED: She doesn’t know. But I wanted to make it better or different than what it was, because what it was, was her dead and I didn’t want that to be my fault too.12

He is abandoned by his father, who makes no effort to contact young Ned at boarding school. The only correspondence he receives is a generic “We’ve moved!” postcard and, upon investigating, he discovers that his dad has started a new family with a new wife and two sons. The betrayal scars him for life, a theme that’s explored further in the latter half of season two when Chuck and Olive discover the existence of his halfbrothers and drag them into Ned’s life. In the episode “Oh Oh Oh…It’s Magic,”13 Ned experiences anxiety-related acid reflux due to being at a magic show, an event he equates with his father. While at boarding school, he briefly makes a friend but in his childish glee he jumps into a pile of dead leaves, forgetting about his special ability. The new friend is promptly scared off by the leaves suddenly turning a vibrant green and Ned is left feeling deflated and alone yet again as the narrator observes, “Eugene would eventually forget Young Ned’s mistake and chalk it up to magic leaves. But Young Ned would never forget that happiness born of passion is always short-lived.”14 His attempts at making friends and connecting with others seem to continually lead to “ostracization, rejection and resentment.”15 The only consistent presence in his life is that of Digby, the golden retriever Ned revived and who is now seemingly immortal, but as he can never touch the dog again, there is still a sense of isolation to Ned’s world. This isolation is curiously enhanced by a narrative technique where adult Ned is first introduced as “the piemaker.” The omniscient narrator continues to refer to Ned as such throughout the show, and his halfbrothers pick up the trend by calling him “frere piemaker.”16 The overall effect of this type of naming is one of mythmaking, in keeping with the fairy-tale style of the show. In stories, names are power and so this use of a signifier is also representative of a distancing, mirroring the way Ned

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distances himself from life. This is supplemented further by the fact that Ned is the only character not given a last name. The unique premise of being able to wake the dead essentially positions Ned in a very introverted position. It makes him wary of social contact, fearing rejection and judgment, and indeed the relationships he forms are always framed with intense self-reflection. He struggles to understand the desire to constantly connect with others, as evidenced in the narrator’s observation in the first episode that Olive’s “desperate attempts to connect to someone so disconnected terrified him.”17 There is also a lifelong aversion to physical contact that stems directly from his talent and his abandonment as a child, something Olive thinks attributes to Digby being needy and neurotic: OLIVE: Your dog needs to be touched. We all need to be touched. NED: You touch him, other people have touched him. OLIVE: He’s your dog. Do you touch anything? NED: Of course. I touch lots of things. OLIVE: With affection? When was the last time someone touched you with affection? NED: I get touched. Could you get Digby’s leash now? OLIVE: Hmmmmmmmm… NED: [to Digby] You don’t mind that I don’t touch you, do you?18

If we consider a most basic definition of introversion as behavior that is “withdrawn and reclusive … often cautious and secretive when dealing with others,”19 then Ned easily falls into the category. In general, Ned is mild-mannered and well-meaning with a tendency to stick to his own company. He is not anti-social per se, but when it comes to his customers he usually prefers observing and lets Olive do the small talk. This is supported by Susan Cain’s examination of the difference between personality types, where she proposes that introverts “may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while they wish they were home in their pajamas.”20 He hides his ability from the world, convinced that he’d be ostracized for it, and as a result he is secretive about everything that relates to it. For example, he is hesitant to tell Chuck that he’s responsible for her father’s death and that someone else had to die in order for her to stay alive. There is the suggestion that lots of socialization exhausts him, and he certainly prefers keeping a certain emotional distance from people. When Chuck reprimands him, saying, “You can’t just touch somebody’s life and be done with it,” Ned seems confused and refuses to budge from the position he’s assumed all his life: “Yes I can. That’s how I roll.”21 He is very aware of social conventions and is conscious of staying within them.22 As he likes to know

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what’s expected of him and plan his behavior accordingly, he does not like surprises. CHUCK: You know you could do with loosening up a bit. NED: I don’t do loose. I prefer tightly wound, not shapeless with extra room for surprises.23

Above all, Ned is terrified of being abandoned. In the exchange above where he addresses Digby, there’s a real neediness to his questioning whether the dog minds not being touched. He craves reassurance that he, because of his special ability, won’t drive people away. It must be noted, however, that his fear of rejection marks him as shy, but that shyness and introversion do not always overlap. Rather Ned fits the bill of a shy introvert who turns inward “partly as a refuge from the socializing that causes them such anxiety.”24 When the reality of making room for Chuck in his life starts to sink in, he is not so much challenged by having another person in his personal space as by the potential vacuum that person will create if they left. That is to say, “the act of opening his world to include Chuck, difficult as it is, pales in comparison to the fear that she might not be content to remain fully enclosed in that world.”25 The ongoing romantic tension driven by their inability to ever touch constantly reinforces this insecurity, and as he has tried to overcome the physical obstacle through an emotional openness contrary to his usual habits, it leaves him particularly vulnerable. As introverts commonly internalize their thoughts and emotions before sharing them with others, the anxiety caused by this kind of intimacy that “emphasizes emotional contact over physical contact,”26 as expounded by psychologists Richard E. Sexton and Virginia Staudt Sexton, is further evidence of Ned’s introverted nature. Ned may be the obvious choice, but he is not the show’s only introvert. Emerson Cod arguably also exhibits characteristics usually attributed to introverts. As mentioned previously, Emerson has qualities similar to those of the classic hard-boiled film noir detective. The narrator refers to Emerson as “the Private Eye” and this reinforces the noir aesthetic by adding a gritty realism to his character in accordance with his cynical personality. He is shamelessly cynical, often taking great pleasure in puncturing other characters’ optimism or cheer where “his pragmatic attitude is frequently used to deflate the mood when it verges on sentimentality or schmaltzy romance.”27 In the episode “Oh Oh Oh…It’s Magic” for example, he enjoys rumbling the magic trick Ned’s halfbrothers perform and refuses to enjoy taking part in any part of the magic show charade, while in “Bad Habits” Ned and Chuck use him to “byproxy high-five” causing him to respond with a threat to “by-proxy

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vomit.”28 There is also an element of Schadenfreude to Emerson’s reaction, although his “pleasure in others’ misfortune usually derives from his sense of justice”29 where justice plays into a distinct trope of hardboiled detective fiction. That is to say, the detective is often without real compassion or perceived morality but ascribes to his own code of loyalty and integrity, who “lives on the borderline between the world of criminals and the world of law, the only thing he abides is his own set of rules, the hard-boiled moral code.”30 Like the classic noir lead Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon,31 Emerson is a private investigator not a police detective, a status that allows him to operate in a more lenient fashion where he can break rules as he sees fit, like continually bribing the coroner for access to recent murder victims. He accepts Ned’s ability to wake the dead only as a means to financial gain, sticking to another noir trope of “being in it for the money.”32 The arrival of his mother in the episode “Frescorts” as a mysterious, recalcitrant stranger simply turning up at The Pie Hole is another clear stylistic nod to the hard-boiled detective genre. We are also given an insight into his unusual childhood as it is revealed that Emerson has been investigating crimes, alongside his mother, practically since birth. His gruff exterior is not what signals him as an introvert, rather it’s his love of routine, process, and solitude. A point of difference between introverts and extroverts is often said to be energy creation through personal interaction. Extroverts thrive through social interaction while introverts need periods of solitude to pause and reflect. That is to say, introverts tend to be: energized by the internal world—by ideas, impressions, and emotions. Counter to our stereotypes of introverts, they are not necessarily quiet or withdrawn, but their focus is inside their heads. They need a quiet, reflective place where they can think things through and recharge themselves.33

Emerson’s quiet place is his office, which he generally likes to keep to himself. He always seems put out when other people turn up there, preferring to meet with Ned and the others at The Pie Hole. It is revealed that he enjoys knitting, especially during times of stress and anxiety, but he keeps this a secret and never does it in public.34 It is also revealed in the episode “Corpsicle” that he has a daughter, but he doesn’t want anyone to know about it. This desire to keep things private and maintain space for his own solitude marks him as an introvert. Unlike Ned, he is not shy and while he does not particularly like outside stimulation from other people, evidenced through his reluctance to let Chuck or Olive join his investigative

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team, he does “enjoy the ‘thrill of the chase’ for rewards like money and status” which Susan Cain classes as a more extroverted trait.35 He is also unfailingly confident when it comes to solving crimes, whether that’s questioning suspects or appearing on television as a witness but first advertising his P.I. business.36 When Emerson isn’t speaking, it’s not because he’s overwhelmed by external stimuli in the way it’s suggested introverts often are,37 but rather it’s because he thinks everyone is being stupid and he won’t dignify it with a response: “I was just about to tell you all to shut the hell up, and then you stopped talking so I didn’t have to.”38 In that sense, there’s a touch of the misanthrope about him. Emerson’s experience reveals that there is variety to the introvert experience, however, and shows that it is not something that can be easily defined as consisting of one quality or another, and this is further given more credence by its contrast against Ned’s more anxious experience. The introvert experience is supplemented by the extroverted behavior of Olive and Chuck. Both girls are arguably socially driven, are more prone to action before thought and “spend energy freely and often have trouble slowing down.”39 Their eagerness to jump to action is best shown in the episode “Bitter Sweets” when the two retaliate against the sabotage of a rival sweet shop by breaking into the shop. It’s a rash decision that fits perfectly with both their predisposition to action, without real thought for consequence. Chuck similarly shows a disregard for consequence and secrets when she first leaves Ned’s apartment to hang out at The Pie Hole, disregarding Ned’s fear that someone would discover she’s no longer dead.40 Chuck’s withdrawal from the world at large is thus not voluntary, rather a result of her “alive-again” condition. Her insistence at helping Ned and Emerson solve cases, and asking victims if they have any last requests, is a further sign of her outgoing nature, her extroverted capacity to “enjoy the extra bang that comes from activities like meeting new people.”41 Prior to her death, her life was a self-imposed hermitism that stemmed from her desire to look after her two aunts, Lily and Vivian, whose “personality disorders blossomed into incapacitating social phobias, which made it difficult for them to leave the house.”42 She lived vicariously through books until she eventually decided to leave the proverbial nest and travel … only to be murdered. Her desire to engage with the outside world, to participate and be active, is often at odds with Ned’s desire to remain insular. The fact that she was finally going to get a chance to explore the world only to have it snatched away and be confined to The Pie Hole is something she struggles with throughout the show. CHUCK: What is so terrible about starting fresh?

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Chapter Seven NED: Because starting fresh means something else is ending stale. Chuck, who I destroyed Play-Doh cities with; Chuck, my best friend, my first kiss; I don’t want that to change. CHUCK: Yeah, and I’m also Chuck, who went on a pleasure cruise and got a plastic bag put over her head. NED: That’s not as much fun to remember. CHUCK: But it happened, and when it was happening I was thinking … well, actually I was thinking “Son of a bitch, why did I have to go get ice for my ginger ale?” but, really I was thinking “I finally get to live my own life and it’s already over.” And then you, you came and you gave me another chance. NED: So it’s my fault. CHUCK: My first time around I was terrified of change and I’m not going to make that mistake again. I can’t.43

Even after her death, Chuck can’t let go of her desire to look after her aunts and maintain their well-being. She does so by baking special pies for them with homeopathic mood enhancers baked into the crust, which Olive invariably ends up delivering. Eventually Olive is completely entrenched in Chuck’s attempt to restore emotional stability to her aunts and get them out of the house. The fact that Olive allows this and develops genuine affection for aunts Lily and Vivian speaks to her own extroverted nature. She too loves interacting with people, making a point to “chit-chat” with customers.44 Olive appears caught in unintended seclusion through her unrequited love for Ned. The narrator tells us that she is “endowed with a tenacious spirit and the inability to accept negative statements,”45 and so it is not all that surprising that she continues to make advances on Ned despite his oblivious response. When Chuck arrives on the scene, Olive is of course jealous of how quickly this new girl wormed her way into Ned’s affections. She doesn’t know about Ned’s ability to wake the dead, even though Chuck tells her the truth in the episode “Corpsicle,” and when she is baffled by the discovery that they can’t touch. For someone so outgoing as Olive, the idea of a connection remaining internal seems impossible. OLIVE: Can I ask you a question? If you loved me … ALFREDO ALDARISIO: Yes? OLIVE: And we could never, ever, ever touch, wouldn’t you eventually get over it and move on letting someone else have the slightest hope that you might move on to them? ALFREDO ALDARISIO: If I loved you? OLIVE: Yeah. ALFREDO ALDARISIO: Then I would love you in any way I could. And if we could not touch, then I would draw strength from your beauty. And if I

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went blind, then I would fill my soul with the sound of your voice and the contents of your thoughts until the last spark of my love for you lit the shabby darkness of my dying mind. OLIVE: Eh, forget it.46

Olive is not fixated on Ned because he’s the only man in her life; rather her inability to move on seems to stem directly from her refusal to accept failure as an option. Olive’s assertive and giving extroverted nature is in direct conflict to the secretive behavior of the others, and it becomes a real point of difference for her character. While Ned often struggles with his secrets and notions of truth, as the narrator observes he “considered how not telling Chuck the truth about her father was a lot like being locked in a prison,”47 Olive is physically incapable of containing all the secrets that her friends share with her, for example that Chuck is still alive and that aunt Lily is actually Chuck’s mother. This culminates in her having a meltdown in the first episode of the second season and retreating to a nunnery where she feels safe and in control. As a result we are treated to a spoof of The Sound of Music, as she spins around in a beautiful green field surrounded by mountains in an instantly recognizable copy of the film’s well-known opening shot.48 Her penchant for musical numbers is another thing that defines Olive’s personality, and she is shown having musical theatre moments a number of times, such as the stirring rendition of “Hopelessly Devoted to You”49 and “Eternal Flame.”50 This habit of externalizing her emotions when they become overwhelming is further evidence of her outgoing nature. She has a remarkable flexibility in character, perhaps best expressed through her relationship with Emerson. Although he is often dismissive, she persists in interacting with him and even acts as his sole assistant in “The Legend of Merle McQuoddy.” She shows a real aptitude and street-smart sensibility when it comes to investigative work, highlighting her ability to embrace different aspects of her personality when required. “[I]t is not that her innocent waitress persona is fake or that her savvy P.I. lingo is misplaced, but that her identity encompasses her many voices.”51 In that sense, Olive shines as the character most in tune with who she is, and most at ease with the different elements of her personality.

“For endings, as it is known, are where we begin”52 Pushing Daisies not only made an introvert the catalyst for action, the show also represented a full scale of introverts and extroverts throughout its main cast of characters. While it borrowed heavily from fairy-tale and film noir tropes and sensibilities, it delivered characters with nuance and

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emotional depth, projecting the notion that personalities are not static. Their various quirks were not just there for cheap laughs or as onedimensional signifiers of their personalities; they were always explained and so offered the audience an access point to their individuality. The fact that they are so very different and yet accept each other, forming their own community and support network, is the real victory of the narrative. This is best exemplified when Ned has a crisis of identity late in the second season and refuses to use his ability, wanting to establish his personality for what he is rather than for what he can do: “I want to lead a normal life, a guy who just makes pies. Who wants to be Superman? Not me. I say no to super and yes to man!”53 It marks a significant change in Ned coming to terms with himself as he even starts baking with live fruit, as opposed to the dead fruit he’d been touching and rejuvenating in the past, which means he can eat his own pies for the first time. He’s allowing himself a type of comfort he’s never really considered before. Through his self-reflection and realizing that his ability allows him to help his friends when they are in need, he finally accepts that it isn’t just something he can do, but actually forms a crucial part of his sense of individuality; “[n]o more pretending to be normal. The best way I can help anyone is by being a pie-making dead-waker. Pretending to be something I’m not is a recipe for disaster.”54 It’s a significant moment where the show seems to say that you don’t need to change who you are to fit into the world, you just need to accept who you are. That is the true charm of Pushing Daisies. The show promotes being part of a social community but it recommends doing so on your own terms. You community will accept you for who you are, as long as you accept who you are. As Ned explains to Randy Man in the episode “Frescort”: You don’t have to pay for it. Friendship. The truth is, there are a lot of people like you, us, with strange hobbies or talents, or gifts that we try to hide because we’re afraid it makes us seem weird, or turns people off, but … but that’s a mistake. What makes me unique has brought every person I love into my life. And it can be the same for you.55

He goes a step further by inviting Randy and all the other clients of a friend’s escort agency and encouraging them to mingle. Even through his own inclination for privacy and isolation, he’s beginning to understand the need and benefits of sociality. Being an introvert in a world dominated by what Susan Cain termed “the Extroverted Ideal” can be tough, a world where “the ideal self is gregarious, alpha and comfortable in the spotlight” and where introversion starts to feel like “a second class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.”56 It’s a world that

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seems to allow for very little range in personality, and often it feels like everyone is an extrovert, or at least pretending to be. But shows like Pushing Daisies that feature characters who are distinct from each other and have multi-faceted personalities of their own help to bring a little diversity into the world, and give hope to everyone who may have felt ostracized due to their particular preferences at one time or another. Personality is not a binary concept. There are no set rules for being an introvert, or an extrovert. Just as with Ned’s gift, there is no manual to use and support you along the way. It’s a big world out there and Pushing Daisies, like a good fairy tale, promises an optimistic ending that shows it’s how you contextualize yourself within your own world that ultimately matters most.

Notes 1 Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012), 3. 2 “Gone, Not Forgotten: 16 TV Shows Axed Too Soon,” EW.com, accessed April 23, 2014, www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20593459_20691282_21316120,00.html. 3 “12 Shows That Should Have Never Been Canceled,” The Huffington Post, accessed April 23, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/04/canceledshows_n_4032155.html. 4 Pushing Daisies, “Circus, Circus,” Season 2, Episode 2. 5 William Powloski, “Pushing the Limits on Pushing Daisies,” Creative COW Magazine, accessed March 15, 2014, http://library.creativecow.net/powloski _william/magazine_pushing_daisies/1. 6 Powloski, “Pushing the Limits on Pushing Daisies.” 7 Lorna Jowett, “Spectacular Collision/Collusion: Genre, ‘Quality,’ and Contemporary Drama,” in The Television World of Pushing Daisies: Critical Essays on the Bryan Fuller Series, ed. Alissa Burger (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2011), 16. 8 Pushing Daisies, “Dummy,” Season 1, Episode 2. 9 Pushing Daisies, “Pie-lette”, Season 1, Episode 1. 10 Jowett, “Spectacular Collision/Collusion,” 13. 11 Pushing Daisies, “Frescorts,” Season 2, Episode 4. 12 Pushing Daisies,“Pie-lette,” Season 1, Episode 1. 13 Pushing Daisies, “Oh Oh Oh…It’s Magic,” Season 2, Episode 6. 14 Pushing Daisies, “Bitter Sweets,” Season 1, Episode 8. 15 Matt Dauphin, “Pushing Daisies Away: Community Through Isolation,” in Burger, ed., The Television World Of Pushing Daisies, 40. 16 “Oh Oh Oh…It’s Magic,” Season 2, Episode 6. 17 “Pie-lette,” Season 1, Episode 1. 18 “Pie-lette,” Season 1, Episode 1.

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Clifford T. Morgan, Richard A. King, and Nancy M. Robinson, Introduction To Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 646. 20 Cain, Quiet, 11. 21 “Pie-lette,” Season 1, Episode 1. 22 In the first episode, “Pie-lette,” Ned takes Chuck to his home after reviving her and makes an excuse for almost instantly falling asleep, “I hate to be a bad host, but I’m sort of exhausted from chasing your coffin.” 23 Pushing Daisies, “Smell of Success,” Season 1, Episode 7. 24 Cain, Quiet, 12. 25 Matt Dauphin, “Pushing Daisies Away: Community Through Isolation,” in Burger, ed., The Television World Of Pushing Daisies, 38. 26 Tara K. Parmiter, “Sweet Talk in the Pie Hole: Language, Intimacy and Public Space,” in Burger, ed., The Television World Of Pushing Daisies, 155. 27 Jowett, “Spectacular Collision/Collusion,” 18. 28 Pushing Daisies, “Bad Habits,” Season 2, Episode 3. 29 Christine A. Knoop, “‘Here Lies Dwight. Here Lies His Gun. He Was Bad, Now He’s Done’: On Justice and Schadenfreude,” in Burger, ed., The Television World Of Pushing Daisies, 96. 30 Veronika Pituková, “Clash of Desires: Detective Vs. Femme Fatale,” Journal of Arts and Humanities 1 (2012): 26. 31 The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston (1941; USA: Warner Bros, 2010), DVD. 32 Jowett, “Spectacular Collision/Collusion,” 18. 33 Marti O. Laney, The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extroverted World (New York: Workman Publishing, 2002), 21. 34 “Dummy,” Season 1, Episode 2. 35 Cain, Quiet, 11. 36 “Smell of Success,” Season 1, Episode 7. 37 Cain, Quiet, 12. 38 “Oh Oh Oh…It’s Magic,” Season 2, Episode 6. 39 Laney, The Introvert Advantage, 21. 40 “Pie-lette,” Season 1, Episode 1. 41 Cain, Quiet, 11. 42 “Pie-lette,” Season 1, Episode 1. 43 “Circus, Circus,” Season 2, Episode 2. 44 “Dummy,” Season 1, Episode 2. 45 “Bad Habits,” Season 2, Episode 3. 46 “Bitter Sweets,” Season 1, Episode 8. 47 “Bitter Sweets,” Season 1, Episode 8. 48 Pushing Daisies, “Bzzzzzzzzz!,” Season 2, Episode 1. 49 “Dummy,” Season 1, Episode 2. 50 Pushing Daisies, “Comfort Food,” Season 2, Episode 8. 51 Tara K. Parmiter, “Sweet Talk In The Pie Hole: Language, Intimacy And Public Space,” in Burger, ed., The Television World Of Pushing Daisies, 165. 52 Pushing Daisies, “Kerplunk,” Season 2, Episode 13.

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Pushing Daisies, “Window Dressed to Kill,” Season 2, Episode 11. Pushing Daisies, “Window Dressed to Kill,” Season 2, Episode 11. 55 “Frescorts,” Season 2, Episode 4. 56 Cain, Quiet, 4. 54

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PART II: THE QUIET ONES AROUND US

CHAPTER EIGHT BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION: MARKETING AND THE MODERN (INTROVERTED) AUTHOR TAMARA GIRARDI

As a writer of young adult fiction, I attend writing conferences a couple of times each year. The conferences are usually three-day, jampacked events with workshops on craft and marketing, and they’re geared to writers of fiction and non-fiction at different stages of their careers. The marketing workshops hosted at such conferences are imperative for writers because to be successful in the current publishing climate, authors must not only be good writers but good self-promoters. Ironically, the writers who pile into the marketing workshops at conferences such as the one I attended also enjoy retreating to their hotel rooms for some quiet time during breaks between sessions and meals. Why? They are introverts who gain their energy from solitude. Of course, this is a generalization. Not every writer is introverted, but the message around the conference is often: every writer must self-promote if they want to build a career in publishing. Therefore, even those introverted writers who might not be as comfortable with self-promotion as their extroverted counterparts are expected to market, market, market. The distinction caused me to wonder whether writers who are centroverted or extroverted are at an advantage when it comes to promotion in the rich social networking world of the 21st century. Societal expectations have not often distinguished between the two personality types in the workplace. In fact, recent literature on introversion has argued that our society prefers extrovert qualities to introvert qualities, which is problematic for writers who are predominantly a group of introverts. Former corporate lawyer Susan Cain argues in her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, that America is a culture biased against introverts.1 “Instead of embracing their serious, often quiet and reflective style, they are encouraged to act like extroverts

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—those assertive, outgoing types that love teamwork, brainstorming, networking and thinking out loud.”2 As is the case with many situations of bias, the bias against introverts in business environments flourishes from ignorance of what it means to be an introvert. Introverts are often perceived as anti-social individuals because they prefer a more solitary environment with less stimulation than extroverts. Further illustrating this point, self-proclaimed introvert Devora Zack, a consultant and author who jokes in her book’s bio that “her editors forcibly ordered her to ‘join’ Facebook under much duress,”3 has surveyed thousands of individuals, asking all of them the same question: “What traits does the term introvert bring to mind for you?”4 The most common responses were quiet, shy, insecure, detached, awkward, not team player, private, secretive, stubborn, standoffish, antisocial, boring, rude, unfriendly, distant, aloof, slow, low energy, spacey, nerdy, dull, sedentary, self-engrossed, isolated, uninteresting, elusive, negative, and moody. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that the majority of these descriptors are commonly perceived as negative in our society.”5 Introverts’ personality tendencies, therefore, can be perceived as the actions of standoffish individuals, which in turn leads to the aforementioned attempt at encouraging introverts to behave like extroverts. “This leads to a colossal waste of talent and of energy and of happiness … we encourage introverts to act more like extroverts instead of acting like their best selves.”6 Although Cain is primarily referring to corporate environments, the situation of writers being forced into the behavior of extroverts to market their work is a similar situation. Interestingly, the craft of writing encourages writers to act “like their best selves.” They often write in low stimulation environments and escape into their own minds to plot, plan, and develop their ideas. It is truly the ultimate experience for introverts. However, writers are also often driven by the desire to share their work with readers, which is where the complication comes in. Their introverted tendencies are now challenged when they attend writing conferences to meet literary agents and editors and market their books once they’re published. Although introverted writers might have to work against their own instincts and perhaps even their comfort to promote their work, in an industry where self-promotion is necessary there are approaches that can work for this often misunderstood personality type. Typing personalities is a long-standing tradition in the field of psychology and even deeper in history, reaching back to the teachings of Hippocrates in the fifth century BC.7 In the 1920s, psychologist Carl Jung presented three types, two of which have been the subject of proliferating research ever since. He identified extroverts, whose motivation derives

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from external factors, introverts, whose motivation derives from within, and “normal men” who fall along the middle of the spectrum, with no strong tendency toward extroversion or introversion.8 In the near century since Jung’s work was published, research on introversion and extroversion has refined and expanded. Additionally, more detailed definitions of each type have flourished. Zack differentiates the types according to three primary characteristics, arguing that introverts are reflective, focused, and self-reliant while extroverts are verbal, expansive, and social.9 “Introverts think to talk. Introverts go deep. Introverts energize alone. Extroverts talk to think. Extroverts go wide. Extroverts energize with others.”10 More broadly, Zack notes that introverts prefer one-on-one interactions, privacy, and environments with less stimuli while extroverts prefer group discussion, public sharing, and environments with simultaneous stimuli. While the differences between introverts and extroverts are obvious in the many popular and scholarly publications discussing the phenomenon, Zack addresses the fact that “distinctions are most easily understood when examining the strongest examples.”11 In other words, discussions of introversion and extroversion are often polarizing for the purposes of understanding; however, this might be one of the exact causes of misunderstanding and stigma when it comes to the traits introverts possess. If people understand the seemingly positive attributes of extroversion that society applauds, social personalities at ease around others, the opposite of that falsely becomes introversion. But the terms are not necessarily opposites; nor are they mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, despite significant research and widespread discussion on introversion and extroversion, the former remains stigmatized. Scholars on introversion often cite a similar spark for their inquiry: My youth was characterized by people around me who assumed my seeming isolationism was unnatural and required correction. Because of this misunderstanding of my personality, I suffered from repeated attempts to cure my “shyness” and force me to be more social. Even my peers on the playground believed that my quietness and recluse status made me an excellent target for bullying. Only when I was an adult and was capable of turning to resources that could truly help me to understand why I was different was I comfortable being myself—an introvert.12

Collins’ experience serves as an example for many others noted during the research process for this essay. As argued by Cain earlier, the misunderstood nature of introversion is problematic for productivity and personal growth in several realms of our society—from childhood to adulthood. However, among writers, introversion is often a punchline

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rather than an enigma. Writers at cocktail parties often joke about the fact they much prefer being back in their hotel rooms working on their essays, stories, and novels than making the dreaded small talk in hotel bars with complete strangers. But if that is the case, why do they do it? The answer is simple. Writers are told if they want to be successful, they must network. If they want to sell their work, they must have a social networking platform, know people who might review and promote their work, and overall be willing to market a book that a publisher might not spend much time marketing for them. In other words, the often introverted writer is told that to engage the publishing world, they must behave more like extroverts. While the discussion of challenges introverts face is at the heart of this discussion, it must be reiterated that not all writers identify as introverts. For those who do identify as introverts, there are varying degrees of introverted personalities. Additionally, some writers are centroverts or even extroverts. “Centroverts are a sizable community originating from the border regions of Introville and Extroland — simultaneously at home in both and neither of the two aforementioned nations.”13 While the introverts’ focus on the internal is an obvious benefit to the craft of writing, the extroverts’ ease in social situations and eagerness to interact with several people at once has been the ideal for marketing in corporate America. Despite the common misconception that once authors are published, they make a lot of money and are promoted by major publishing houses, writers in fact take on much of their own promotion. An author who asked not to be named secured a publishing contract with a small press in the Fall of 2013.14 As part of the author’s contract, she was asked to list each of the major social networking sites detailing how many likes, followers, and friends she had for each. Additionally, she was asked for the web addresses of her blog and web site. The implication is that as a published author, she should be active on social networking sites and have a significant web presence in general. “I knew up front there were expectations,” the author said. “In the production schedule of my first book, there was a space on the timeline for ‘Expanding Social Networking Presence’.”15 To be fair, she openly admits that her publisher is “fabulous” at promotion, and all of the authors at her publishing house support each other by re-tweeting and sharing each other’s posts online. As a selfproclaimed introvert, the author admits to “thriving” on time “inside her head” and although she enjoys speaking and connecting with authors and readers, “by the end of the day, I’m mentally exhausted and need solitude to recharge my batteries.”16 She believes that the prominence of social networking is actually a benefit for introverts. Social networks have often

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been criticized as promoting the importance of more friends rather than quality friends, which is likewise a criticism of traditional self-promotion ideals, but the author argues that while extroverts might be more comfortable in crowds, she is more at ease with online interactions. Susan Meier, an author of more than sixty books for Entangled, Harlequin, Silhouette, and Guideposts’ Grace Chapel Inn series, has been publishing for more than twenty-five years.17 Her longevity in the business gave her unique insight into the changes in self-promotion trends for writers over the years. According to Meier, her publisher rarely promotes individual authors. “Oddly, when they do, they promote the authors they KNOW will sell many books. They don’t promote the authors who need help getting out their name and message. It seems that publishers promote the people who don’t need promoting while their authors who could benefit from help don’t get any.”18 Since the promotion is often incumbent upon authors themselves, Meier argues that authors actually have a worthwhile tool in recent years—the Internet. In the days before the internet, there weren’t many outlets for advertising books or for author public relations. Typical advertising outlets were financially out of reach for most of us whose advances didn’t give us enough money to buy newspaper, magazine, radio or television ads. Ads we could afford, in local papers for instance, weren’t cost effective. Those of us seeking to increase our exposure frequently went to writer’s conferences because writers are readers. Book signings were our second outlet. Neither was an efficient way to increase exposure but the theory was every person you won over to your side counted. However at $500 to $1,500 per conference, it was a very expensive way to find “a reader or two.” The Internet, especially the rise in blogging sites, reader sites, and personal websites finally gave us an inexpensive way to get our message out.19

Meier said that her publisher created classes to train its authors how to use social networking sites and “if they didn’t want us to use social media, they wouldn’t have given the classes.”20 And although the networks provide an opportunity for self-promotion that previously did not exist in her career, she commented on the fact that as an introvert, she values her privacy. “Putting your thoughts out on Facebook is like exposing your underwear.”21 After a few years on the sites, she admits to liking her interactions with readers as long as she maintains an awareness of what’s personal and what’s worth sharing. For another author interviewed, Kathryn Craft, a lot is worth sharing at nearly any time.22 Craft’s novel The Art of Falling was released in January 2014 and her next book, The Far End of Happy, is scheduled for a May

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2015 release date. Of the three authors interviewed, Craft was the only one who is not a self-proclaimed introvert. On the contrary, she identified as “both an extrovert and an introvert.”23 In fact, how Craft describes her conference experiences and need for alone time to recharge and write aligns more with introverted tendencies. However, she is incredibly comfortable talking about her book and leaving a business card “for anyone who expresses the slightest interest.”24 One day, buying olive oil at a specialty shop in town, I met an employee who was reading my novel in her book club. Such interactions are utterly delightful to me. In addition, I leave no interpersonal stone unturned. Attending my launch event: my car mechanic from before I moved an hour away, my hairdresser, two of my bank tellers (who continue to talk about my book all the time), my former pastor, women who have come to my writing retreats, the waiter from New Year’s Eve and the couple (strangers) at the table beside us, and more than a hundred more. I invited everyone— who am I to try to divine the reasons why someone might enjoy supporting me or buying my book?25

Craft’s promotional efforts are highly creative, and of the three authors interviewed, she seems the most eager to self-promote. To her, social networks exist for the purposes of self-promotion, but face-to-face interactions are excellent opportunities to share the news as well. Craft’s responses to the list of questions distributed to all authors provided a wider variety, by comparison, of promotional options. Perhaps that is due to her roles as an introvert and an extrovert. In other words, could those writers who possess some extrovert tendencies in addition to introverted traits be at an advantage when it comes to their writing careers? It is certainly possible. However, one truth is certain. All three of the interviewed authors agree that self-promotion is a necessity for writers, no matter their personality styles. Publishing professionals further discuss why authors such as those mentioned above find themselves spending much of their time selfpromoting. Literary Agent Rachelle Gardner writes on her blog, which is popular with fiction writers, that publishers do market, but not as much as they used to: “[P]ublishers’ marketing activities vary widely from house to house. In addition, the ‘bigger’ the author (i.e., the more money they expect to make on you), the more they’ll spend on marketing.”26 In the climate of self-publishing, self-promotion is even more important as there is no official publisher to contribute to an author’s marketing efforts. Despite an author’s situation, top marketing expert Michael Hyatt argues that authors cannot afford to leave their marketing to anyone else. “You must take responsibility for it yourself,” he argues.27 Among several points

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he makes illustrating why authors must take ownership of their marketing, he argues that nobody has more to gain or lose than the individual author. So if publishers are not marketing like they once did, and authors are becoming more and more responsible for promoting their work, what does that mean for the population of introverts who are also authors? The traditional commandments of self-promotion noted by Zack, including: “Promote yourself constantly; More contacts = higher probability of success; Never eat alone; Create non-stop touch points; Get out there as much as possible”28 don’t necessarily work for introverted personality types. “Standard networking advice is extrovert-centric and fails most introverts and centroverts. Many of these folks proceed to interpret this disconnect as their own shortcoming … Typical advice isn’t inherently flawed; it’s just geared to a subgroup of the population.”29 While an extrovert might believe in the networking approach of “acquiring lots of contacts, meeting as many people as possible, and filling your calendar with events,”30 those activities are enough to diminish the energy of most introverts. On the contrary, self-promotion for introverts requires a different approach. Two recent texts boast the answers for introverts, although the authors’ theories illustrate two very different approaches. In Self-Promotion for Introverts: The Quiet Guide to Getting Ahead, Nancy Ancowitz provides tips to facilitate introverts’ entry into the marketing approaches that often come more easily to extroverts.31 On the contrary, Zack argues in Networking for People Who Hate Networking that introverts should look at marketing from an entirely different perspective than the traditional extrovert-focused approaches.32 To further discuss Ancowitz’s approach, the author admittedly differentiates between introverts and extroverts, saying, “Self-promotion may work best for you as an introvert when you get to know people over time, and when you welcome them to get to know you. It’s from a place that you’ll want to help each other and spread the word about your respective talents.”33 The author further encourages introverts to believe in their potential, which is an interesting point for writers who are so often in their own minds. Many of my writer friends will discuss the odd phenomenon of the love–hate relationships they have with their manuscripts. One day, they love what they’ve written. They read it back and think they are the most brilliant writer that has ever existed. Or close. The next day, they open the same document on their computers and feel the only possible solution is to hit the delete button and rid the world of such awful gibberish. Yet, Ancowitz notes the flaw in negative thinking relevant to self-promotion, and it is a point Craft addressed in her interview discussed above. Craft said “who am I to try to

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divine the reasons why someone might enjoy supporting me or buying my book?” which is why she opted to invite everyone and let them decide whether they were interested. The self-doubt Ancowitz discourages could have led to an approach very different from Craft’s. Furthermore, Ancowitz embraces the introvert’s skills of thinking and planning as part of executing effective marketing strategies. In her text, she provides a twopage list of self-promotion activities and asks introverts to rank each. From there, she recommends introverts “focus on what you can do best with the least effort for the biggest payoff, rather than on what makes you cringe.”34 What makes introverted writers cringe could be the kinds of networking opportunities that extroverts adore, such as attending parties with complete strangers that have the potential of becoming future business contacts. Additionally, Ancowitz urges introverts that selfpromotion might not be as dreaded as expected if a few recommendations aligned with introverted personalities are followed. For instance, she recommends to “plan on downtime between social interactions.”35 In the introduction to this chapter, I noted that writers who attend conferences often disappear to their hotel rooms between sessions and meals for a few minutes of recharging time. This would be an example of networking (attending a writing conference where you will meet other writers, agents, and editors) but keeping true to your introverted personality (sneaking away for quiet time when the opportunity presents itself). Likewise, Ancowitz discourages planning several social events or meetings close together and comparing yourselves to extroverts.36 As noted earlier in the chapter, introverts are not extroverts. Although the two personality types are not polar opposites, and there are several shades of both types, the fact remains that the traditional rules of marketing that experts have argued are extrovert-centric are likely to stress introverts beyond what is necessary or potentially healthy. Extroverts might have the ease of attending three parties in one night and working the rooms, collecting a stack of business cards too large for their pockets, but introverts have other preferences. That same night, an introvert might spend five hours sitting with three or four other writers, talking and building relationships that will last far beyond that first interaction. Such a strength should not be understated; in fact, it should be embraced. Like Ancowitz, Zack recommends introverts think about marketing in terms of what works for them. For instance, she argues that introverts might “prefer programs and events with a clear format or purpose.”37 She posits: “Good choices for them? Take a class, attend professional development seminars, coordinate a brown bag event, sign up for a lecture series, join a task force, volunteer for a non-profit board, or attend an

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educational outing. An introverted colleague told me she will attend only structured programs, avoiding all loosely configured networking gatherings.”38 For writers, such recommendations translate to taking a class, attending a conference and any author launch parties or events near your home, volunteering for any writing organization or activity, joining a writing group, and so on. In general, though, Zack offers some practical guidelines for introverts as they engage self-promotion in any of the above environments. First, she suggests to pre-register for events as that secures a place, gives introverts much-desired time to plan and prepare, and also prevents them from choosing not to attend at the last minute. Similar to Ancowitz’s recommendation, Zack suggests scheduling “recharge breaks”39 into all social activities. Ultimately, one of the keys for introverts is to note relevant information such as personal information on the back of business cards. Later, when the introvert is in a quiet, comfortable space, he or she can take the time to develop a fitting email or letter that reflects their personal strengths—the written word and the ability to develop longlasting relationships. Both Ancowitz and Zack’s texts are lengthier and more in-depth than what is represented here, but their messages are identical: introverts living in an extrovert society, particularly one that values extrovert-centric approaches to self-promotion, would do well to honor their personalities and approach marketing differently than perhaps previously envisioned. For instance, whereas extroverts gain energy from others, introverts need more time on their own. Therefore, they might not be able to expend as much effort or market as widely as extroverts. The distinction then is that introverts must embrace their strengths of thinking through situations and planning effectively so that they are using their time as best as they can. Realizing that they might have to limit their marketing efforts and not necessarily compete with extroverts could be their greatest lesson. Nevertheless, to be successful in their writing careers, self-promotion is key, as established earlier in this chapter. They might have a greater challenge to self-promote than some extroverts, but if they remember to stay true to their own personalities and preferences, ideally, they will be more successful and less exhausted and stressed as they would be if they attempt to market themselves in the ways often proposed in our extrovertcentric society. The specifics of such an approach are not entirely known; perhaps it is impossible to know them due to the variations of personality types even within the introvert umbrella. In fact, a specific formula for introvert success in self-promotion would be contrary to the message presented in this chapter and the scholarship discussed within it. The intention is to facilitate a transformation in thinking in terms of introverts

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in an extrovert society. Introverts are not quiet, lazy, standoffish, or egotistical, as is sometimes assumed. Their abilities should not be shunned and replaced by extrovert traits. On the contrary, introverts and those around them should work to understand the best ways in which they work and self-promote. In a corporate environment, the implications are quite different than those for writers. Writers are not completely isolated, but they do spend a lot of time alone. They might plan their marketing efforts alone. They might even execute them alone via social networks. Nevertheless, as writers engage the publishing community, they should be comforted by the idea that their marketing efforts do not have to follow the traditional rules of reaching more people in less time. On the contrary, writers should trust the instincts and work ethic that led them to their publishing contracts in the first place and theorize the most appropriate self-promotion efforts for them.

Notes 1

Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (New York: Random House, 2012). 2 Jenna Goudreau, “So Begins a Quiet Revolution of the 50 Percent,” Forbes, January 30, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2012/01/30/quietrevolution-of-the-50-percent-introverts-susan-cain/. 3 Devora Zack, Networking for People Who Hate Networking (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2010), 169. 4 Zack, Networking, 23. 5 Zack, Networking, 24. 6 “The Secret Power of Introverts: A Quiet Revolution,” Youtube video, 4:09, posted by Forbes, January 30, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =hYn6NeWemVw. 7 Carl Jung, “Personality types,” in Personality: Critical Concepts in Psychology, ed. Cary L. Cooper and Lawrence A. Pervin (London: Routledge, 1998), 28. 8 Jung, “Personality types,” 32–33. 9 Zack, Networking, 10. 10 Zack, Networking. 11 Zack, Networking, 18. 12 Tonia Collins, Celebrating Introversion: Unwrapping Your True Presence (Mustang: Tate, 2009), 13. 13 Zack, Networking, 23. 14 Anonymous Author, Interview by Tamara Girardi, Email, May 23, 2014. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Susan Meier, Interview by Tamara Girardi, Email, May 20, 2014. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid.

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Ibid. Ibid. 22 Kathryn Craft, Interview by Tamara Girardi, Email, May 25, 2014. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Rachelle Gardner, “Do Publishers Market Books?,” Last modified June 30/ 2011, http://www.rachellegardner.com/do-publishers-market-books/. 27 Michael Hyatt, “Four Reasons Why You Must Take Responsibility for Your Own Marketing,” Michael Hyatt: Helping Leaders Leverage Influence. Accessed June 15, 2014, http://michaelhyatt.com/four-reasons-why-you-must-take-responsibilityfor-your-own-marketing.html. 28 Zack, Networking, 3. 29 Zack, Networking, 48. 30 Zack, Networking, 49. 31 Nancy Ancowitz, Self-Promotion for Introverts: The Quiet Guide to Getting Ahead (New York: McGraw Hill, 2010). 32 Zack, Networking. 33 Ancowitz, Self-Promotion, 246. 34 Ancowitz, Self-Promotion, 70. 35 Ancowitz, Self-Promotion, 72. 36 Ancowitz, Self-Promotion. 37 Zack, Networking, 89. 38 Zack, Networking. 39 Zack, Networking, 66. 21

CHAPTER NINE QUIET PEOPLE, OR HOW TO AGONIZE THE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION ANDREW GROSSMAN

As a preternaturally shy, private student, I became skeptical at a young age of coercive, authoritarian institutions, whether educational, religious, militaristic, or familial. Once ejected from a municipal Gifted and Talented program and barred from Advanced Placement English for my “excessive” creativity (yes, this was the official explanation), I soon realized institutional education mainly ensured stasis, self-preservation, and social reproduction, with individual expression an occasional afterthought. As my schoolboy aspirations to write creatively were answered only with pitiless trudges through five-paragraph formulae, my illusions died early and acrimoniously. Within a public school system, an unimaginative curriculum becomes as deadening and tyrannical as an unjust teacher or boorish classmates. Regularly receiving poor marks in “class participation,” I realized, too, that my introversion and quietude were sources of shame and reasons for punishment. The templates for both American capitalism and extroversion are jointly forged in public school systems, of course, where self-promotional behavior is deemed meritorious and quantified with the academic capital of grades. The rewarded behaviors, furthermore, are conformist and averse to risk: for all their aggressive competitiveness, successful students must suppress or negate the precious rebellions that introverts enact silently. For Jung, introversion is a characterological cum spiritual disposition. In a postindustrial age that primarily rewards extroverted entrepreneurialism (and sheer noisiness), introversion becomes not merely a learned inclination or inborn trait but an existential revolt against capitalism’s spirit of conquest and domination. Yet the shy student is rarely understood as a rebel—he is more generally misunderstood as a failed extrovert. At the age of nineteen, my views were validated by hearing Noam Chomsky describe curricular education as a system of imposed ignorance,1

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for every text taught negatively signifies infinite texts discounted. The system, however, ignores odd people as much as odd texts, and clearly schools conspiratorially neglect the introvert. The history in which we are schooled is that of heedless extroversion, a textbook march of emperors, presidents, generals, and other masculinized self-promoters, many of them requiring the stimuli of egotistic violence. Introspective disciplines are at best elective and ancillary, or are demonized as queer, effeminate, or unusable. As the reality principle (to use Freud’s term) constructs a world in which shyness, like all social alienation, is pathologized, the introvert comes to believe his pathology is “real” and not merely “performed” in the manner of Erving Goffman’s sociology. But if we no longer see extroversion as merely a Jungian paradigm, neither is it just a banal social construction. Extroversion is an ideology that advances a paradoxical fascism, as one master extrovert exhorts many littler extroverts, confident in their rugged individualism, to join his cult of authority and become outgoing “team players” (introverts, of course, either refuse or are first refused by the team). The egotistic extrovert is allowed and rewarded for his extroversion only insofar as it conforms to the reality principle—that is, becoming as successful a team player as possible. The egoistic introvert, engaged if often discontent with his private fantasy, rejects the constructed reality of the “team,” even if he knows his silence will be perceived as passivity or an incomprehensible disease. In its present state, capitalistic education is unapologetically stained with extrovert bias. There is no education for education’s sake, as Impressionists, without any regard for human prejudice, once insisted on l’art pour l’art. Dewey, building upon Montaigne and Rousseau, claimed idealistically that “education as such has no aims,”2 for only people target fixed goals, and we cannot conflate abstractions and actors. Though it’s now a hoary cliché to speak of the “process” of education, Dewey describes the learning process as a true historical evolution without predictable ends: It is not of course a question whether education should prepare for the future. If education is growth, it must progressively realize present possibilities, and thus make individuals better fitted to cope with later requirements. Growing is not something which is completed in odd moments; it is a continuous leading into the future … The mistake is not in attaching importance to preparation for future need, but in making it the mainspring of present effort.3

While this seems at first like trite sermonizing, Dewey’s claim is actually quite revolutionary, for our “extroverted” system of education

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assumes that only what is visible indicates growth and future promise (the growths the introvert keeps to himself remain unknown quantities). For Dewey, however, the future never really arrives—education is ideally a process of “unfolding,” not a movement “toward a definite goal”4 but a burgeoning of ever-incomplete consciousness. Foreseeing the future becomes a built-in limitation, a false prophecy of predetermined social roles. Sadly, the very non-Deweyan (and anti-Platonic) term “completion” has become the primary focus of American high schools and collegiate diploma mills, even though completing a declassed degree guarantees increasingly little in an unpredictable economy. Paradoxically, the movement toward homeschooling—and what some suburban dissidents now call quasi-Rousseauean “unschooling”—has been spearheaded more by Christian evangelicals and itinerant military families. Self-professed liberals too often yield to the illiberal coercions of public education and state mandates for completion, lest their children, left to their own devices, slip back into some frighteningly primitive, non-reproductive, and introverted state. Such were the anti-institutional ideals I dragged with me as I arrived a twenty-six-year-old graduate student at Rutgers University-Newark, four square blocks of peeling architectural brutalism that (correctly) advertise themselves as North America’s most ethnically diverse campus, nearly equal parts African-American, Asian, Latino, and white. I also dragged with me my undying, often crippling shyness and introversion. At the risk of raising the ire of some introverts or orthodox Jungians, I do not make much distinction between the two terms, for in my experience shyness and introversion are not only equally irresistible but also indistinguishable in the performative terms of worldly action. Introversion and shyness mainly differ in that shyness is a painful condition, whereas introversion is often a neutral state or one of pleasant contentment. In any case, I would forgo any academic or pseudo-medical distinctions among types of shyness, social phobias, panic disorders, and so on—I’ve known them all, and they feel like experiences on the same spectrum, not categorically discrete experiences. As part of my graduate study in English and Creative Writing, I was awarded in my second year a part-time Adjunct professorship, grossing an annual salary of about $13,000. Though I often harbored some perverse desire to perform before classrooms of impressionable students, I was usually sabotaged by stage fright, my will to enlighten weakened by an ingrained self-doubt and timidity that, to a near observer, might be mistaken for masochism. At that point, I’d never taught a class in any subject and remained freighted with every unrepressed bitterness,

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frustration, and betrayal from my high school years. Indeed, it was my bitterness—leavened with an oddly Rousseauean optimism and an unconcealed unconventionality—that partly shaped my pedagogical strategies. Remembering well my prison of a public high school and knowing that my mostly freshmen undergraduates had themselves just escaped similar shackles, I silently swore to become a different kind of teacher, the sort I always wished I had. I envisioned my own iconoclastic pedagogy as a corrective to and elixir for every wrong I suffered as a victim of America’s greatest failure of the imagination, the suburban secondary school. I say these philosophies “partly” shaped my strategies because, in truth, the other part was symptomatic of my introversion. How could I overcome my stage fright and performance anxiety? Admitting that all my introverted impulses and actions were performative and not essentialized might gratify postmodernists and disciples of Goffman, but theorizing would do me little good—my introversion remained insurmountable, impervious to rationalizations or academic framing devices. Only through a pseudo-Nietzschean exercise of will, I thought, could I leap past my reticence, and only by shocking and provoking my students could I shatter the bourgeois boundaries that separate active pedagogue and passive student. Because only quixotic daring can conquer shyness, I would, like Socrates, play the eiron, the clown who exposes and deflates pretention— and yet, this clowning had to transpire within the citadel of institutional bureaucracy. Indeed, I was painfully aware of my newfound institutionality, planted in a position anathema to me intellectually and constitutionally—that of authority. But my highfalutin ideals about antiinstitutional education were about to meet their match. These were underprivileged, inner-city students, not aristocrats like Rousseau’s Emile, and I was a novice graduate student, not a private tutor servicing elite gentry. My superiors in the Rutgers-Newark English department gave their adjuncts unexpected latitude and curricular freedom, which came as a great relief at first. I could not only experiment with unconventional texts but also armor my shyness with an agonistic-surrealistic curriculum, one that would not reiterate the Freudian reality principle, exacerbate what Marx called alienation, emphasize what the Frankfurt School called the culture industry, reinforce what Paolo Freire called “narration sickness,” or magnify what normal folk call hopelessness. Beneath all that accumulated philosophy, who could notice my shyness? Partly because introverts prefer the freedom of intimate fantasy, I made realism, the extrovert’s truth, the villain of my curriculum. Besides, students have been

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so conditioned to render aesthetic judgments on realist criteria alone (“That’s, like, so fake!” and so forth) that they sorely need a respite from realism’s tyranny. But I should first explain what I meant above by an “agonistic” curriculum, for agonism begins from Socratic premises but aims differently, for distant, unforeseen effects. The Socratic Method illustrated by Plato is a temporally compressed ideal, of course, a microcosm of the intellectual syntheses that Hegel spreads across accumulative centuries of history. Few Platonic exchanges reach their solutions—or “completions”—without some time-saving intellectual bullying on Socrates’ part, as myriad interlocutors acquiesce stepwise to Socrates’ didactic, contrived endings. Bullheaded Callicles in the Gorgias notably refuses to accept Socrates’ ethical definitions of pain and pleasure, but Gorgias also ends with Socrates resorting to mythos, not logos, to complete his argument, as if tidy syntheses require the convenient, crowdpleasing assistance of myth. Agonism, on the other hand, assumes that the dialectic should not logically achieve expedient, foregone resolutions, even when a discourse has been circumscribed spatiotemporally, whether by a classroom or one’s lifespan. There is no prearranged “script” to work from, love does not always conquer, and tense, fluctuating pluralism is prized over the compelled, diluted, or inauthentic consensus that often masquerades as dialectical closure.5 An agonistic ethic understands that consensus is generally crafted through authoritarian and cultural coercions, erasing difference and thinning pluralistic voices into a sludgy status quo that benefits state and corporate interests. (Genuine, voluntary consensus is certainly desirable but statistically unlikely, given the diversity of an uncensored democracy.) In a pedagogical context, agonism asks that students confront their own preconceptions rather than win the praise of authority, thus forestalling the classroom’s standard binary of extolled extrovert and misunderstood introvert. Though old Dewey was no agonist, his process-oriented approach shares with agonism a subversive definition of rationality, a definition not grounded in the goal-directedness of sociological and economic theory, but in an organic struggle for selfrealization, much like the jihad in its original, uncorrupted sense. But before I could agonize anyone, I, a virgin pedagogue, was obliged to take a required graduate seminar in teaching method. Employing usual suspects like Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Smitherman’s Talkin and Testifyin, the seminar aimed to whip us graduate students into usable academic shape. To a twenty-six-year-old, Freire was especially galvanizing: though America’s urban poor are a far cry from Freire’s campesinos, they are equally removed from Ivy citadels, and have as little cultural capital as subjugated peasants have political capital. Moreover,

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my students—most of whom were not humanities majors and who dreaded compulsory English—had an arguably greater false consciousness than do downtrodden peasants. The underclasses of the Third World know too well that they suffer. My Newark students, contrarily, had been so beguiled by capitalism’s glittering promise—ironically mirrored in the passivity that Freire calls the “banking model” of education—that they truly believed a B.A. alone would mystically deliver them from the inner city and into the monied classes, where extroversion sheds its upstart arrogance and acquires real capital. In this sense, they were literally extroverted, preoccupied with extrinsically manufactured ends; yet they, never encouraged to oppose authority, suffered their own timidities, and I, who knew only intrinsic shyness, was dismayed to see otherwise outgoing people voluntarily submit to fated social roles. Shyness might be genetic, but passivity is political. When I asked my Asian students why they were pursuing engineering degrees (as so many were), they were unable to explain what engineers actually did. I learned only that Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani parents were much convinced that American engineering degrees ensured easy economic victory and instant upward mobility. When I asked students seeking business degrees what kinds of businesses they wished to pursue, they could imagine “business” only as a magic ticket admitting them to reified entrepreneurial glories: “I just wanna make money” was the customary response. Their unexamined extroversion was not a Jungian predisposition but an inherited and groundless prejudice—they believed a mere pretense at extroverted exertion would automatically entitle them to success. Nevertheless, I knew the real villain was not the gullibility of groping adolescents but the ceaseless homogenizations their minds suffered in public high schools, where, despite allegedly multicultural curricula, only American capitalism is ultimately sanctioned. Some of my students were already upperclassmen in their early 20s, and I was afraid their false consciousnesses were so deeply ingrained that only violent intellectual confrontation could liberate them. Only then, through “critical awareness of oppression through the praxis of … struggle,” as Freire claims,6 could alienated students see education not as dehumanized drudgery but as a cautious pathway toward self-actualization. My superiors in the English Department suggested beforehand that I assign the easiest of introductory critical readers, lest anything intellectually taxing terrorize low achievers and jeopardize anticipated graduation rates. But I’d have nothing of such elitist condescension. After all, self-actualization should be painful—a splinter in the eye is the best magnifying glass, as Adorno says—and I wasn’t about to treat my students

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like the Yahoos of Gulliver’s Travels, whose original sin is their ineducability. I recall beginning my very first class by suggesting that my students kill me and destroy Rutgers University if they truly desired freedom—to my surprise, they didn’t laugh and merely blinked incredulously. Perhaps the joke wasn’t terribly funny, just a shy and artless attempt at extroverted satire. Nevertheless, it mattered little to me that many Newark students were the first in their families to endure college—all the more reason, I thought, to commence with the razor-slashed eye of BuĖuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1928), always a good surrealist riposte to our realist visual biases. Against the backdrop of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal that then dominated mainstream media, I proceeded with The Communist Manifesto, the anarcho-syndicalist critique of Noam Chomsky, the feminisms of Emma Goldman and Carol Clover, and my own quizzical, occasionally lewd investigations of political partisanship, the unspoken class system, and enduring American Puritanism. Perhaps my favorite text was Ionesco’s one-act absurdist drama The Lesson (1951), in which a middle-aged professor molests a reticent female student with the memorization of useless information—not only a peerless, spot-on satire of Freire’s “banking model” of education, but a scenario in which shyness accrues expressly political themes. Here, the laconic student’s timidity is both the end result of a sadistic education and the sign of a universalized victimhood. (Admittedly, in Ionesco’s scenario there is no extroverted competition among a society of students—human relations are reduced to a neat sadist–masochist dyad.) The beleaguered student is totally naïve, able to add but not subtract (that is, destroy), adept at rote learning and entirely oblivious to her impending erasure. The tyrannical professor is deaf to the student’s cries of pain (she suffers from a mysterious toothache) and, in the finale, comes to personify the sadism we know undergirds authoritarian education. Pulling a knife from the drawer, he stabs her to death, achieves orgasm, and, as a means to exculpate himself from the crime, dons a convenient Nazi armband. As in Freire, authoritarianism is an inherent, even undisguised act of aggression sanctioned and legitimized by institutional imprimatur. Though Ionesco’s triangulation of fascism, sadistic impulse, and the corruption of language is perhaps too tidy, I hoped this very clarity would reveal to the students their own absurd positions as passive, victimized vessels in a sadistic game. Unsurprisingly, literature had its limits; a few students “got it,” but I ultimately had to spell out the sadomasochistic scenario to the rest and insist to them that their own senses of educational disempowerment were not, in fact, merely subjective.

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My curriculum was sound enough, but my shyness and inability to perform posed a greater obstacle than I’d imagined. In a sense, I was attempting a double performance, adopting both the façade of knowing institutional professor and the persona of an iconoclast out to upset the institutional status quo. Needless to say, my shyness impeded the performance of either role, let alone a deftly simultaneous performance of both. Those who are not shy will never understand the crippling condition’s treble sense of pain: first, a passionate desire to communicate undone by sickened nerves; second, a claustrophobic sense of confinement within one’s own timorousness; and finally, the knowledge that these feelings are overwhelmingly irrational but still indomitable. As a result, my novice lectures were disjointed and stumbling, and, at twenty-six, I admittedly knew somewhat less than I pretended to. My oratory was sometimes provocative but often ineffectual, unable to sufficiently counter students’ careerist attitudes and typically American fear of introspection. Unlike students at elite liberal arts colleges, they had little desire to cast off the coercions and conformities of secondary school and engage, at long last, in blessed cultural critique. Besides, Expository Writing 101 was a thirteen-week course whose oft-postponed pains were supposed to produce minimal proficiency, not autodidactic revelation. Yet my sworn duty was to foment cultural resistance among these too-compliant students, and, like any decent-minded teacher, I believed a touch of humor could prod them in more enlightened directions. Recalling my love of Chuang Tzu as an undergraduate, I thought a Taoist shock might cheerfully upset their preconceptions, much as the puzzling Buddhist koan disrupts the disciple into newfound clarity. After assigning them “A Discussion on Making All Things Equal,” often regarded as the crown jewel of all Taoist philosophy (in Burton Watson’s translation), we plunged into esoteric riddle and paradox, Chuang Tzu’s satires of Confucian stolidity, and, as Watson says, the Taoist’s rhetorical attempts to “awaken the reader to the essential meaninglessness of conventional values and to free him from their bondage.”7 The ne plus ultra of literary introversion, Chuang Tzu’s world of dreamt and dreaming butterflies prioritizes subjectivity and demonizes the extroverted world of political ambition and treachery. I then asked my students to imagine a jokey scenario in which they were passionately in love with a tender pig and had to defend their bestial practice on grounds of Taoistic liberality and asociality. At least, I thought, a dose of irreverence would refresh them, and, despite the assignment’s mild bawdiness, it was actually less agonizing than the Ionesco, for Chuang Tzu’s metaphysics were being placed in the service of a fairly obvious political metaphor.

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Then one day, as I blithely peered into my faculty mailbox, utterly convinced of my pedagogical correctness, I saw a sealed, sinister envelope bearing official stamps. I tore open the letter, and within seconds could barely contain myself. My head felt flushed and my heart pounded manically—within a few hours, the pounding would subside into a leaden weightiness, a heart-stopping sense of betrayal, a little death. Six of the forty-six students in my small lecture class had filed an official complaint against me, my amorous swine, and my intellectually and morally offensive class. The lusty pig, apparently, was the final straw. Though I gladly admit to over-agonizing my students—and sometimes just playfully antagonizing them—I’d no idea their worldviews could be so easily upset. I’d imagined the culture industry’s crassness had already inured them to any possible moral shock. Besides, if the students were so offended, why didn’t they object during class? Most of them were characteristically stoic, sitting in the back row, rarely raising questions or their eyes from immobilized rows of desks. Hell, I couldn’t read their minds! Obviously, some were too shy to speak out, but surely one of the six complainants was extroverted (or brave?) enough to see me during office hours. Yet every week I waited in my office alone, dumbly gazing at the clock, never receiving a single visitor apart from the first and (especially) final week, when frantic students would beg for fractionally better grades. High school had impeccably conditioned these students not only to avoid asking questions directly but to flee when confronted with discomfiture, strangeness, or anything that might catalyze self-examination. Had they not suffered public high school, they might’ve realized that their administrative solution was no solution at all. The letter of censure summoned me to a series of meetings the following day, first with my immediate supervisors and then with the Chair of the English Department. Of my two supervisors, one was sympathetic to my pedagogical intent, the other nearly livid that I dared give such an assignment without first requesting departmental consent. My meeting with the Chair was awkward and unpleasant, to say the least, and though I falteringly tried to defend myself, all of my childhood reticence and insecurity bubbled to the surface. I entered his office unable to imagine the severity of my reprimand. “The students who filed the official complaint have a number of objections to your class,” he said.8 “I’m actually quite surprised … I had no idea there were serious objections.” My reply was sincere—many students were often wide-eyed or incredulous, but I’d no idea some harbored censorious outrage.

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“You understand that many Newark students come from immigrant families with very religious backgrounds. Some of these students are Muslim. You not only upset these students, but their parents called the English department to complain.” “Their parents?” I muttered, surprised that college students would defer to parental authority. “Do you realize what the problem was with your assignment?” he continued. “I’m not sure.” “In the scenario you assigned”—and here he was referring directly to my printed document—“you were presumptively forcing students into an uncomfortable, even embarrassing position that they had no choice but to defend.” “They could have taken the opposite side of the argument, suggesting that the right to bestiality not be upheld … ” “I don’t see that option in your written directions.” “I thought it was understood.” At this point, I was sheepish and not entirely candid—I dared not mention my secret delight in disorienting religious dogmatists of whatever age or background. “No, that option isn’t clearly indicated here at all. Besides, the point is that you were forcing them into a scenario that is obviously offensive to anyone who has religious convictions. The assignment is amazingly insensitive—and it’s just an assignment you made up, rather than an assignment from the textbook.” “Would it have been more acceptable to replace ‘pig’ with ‘human’ and ‘bestiality’ with ‘homosexuality?’” I countered, with a nervous mix of sarcasm and hesitancy. “Yes, if such an assignment came from one of the approved textbooks.” I remained silent. “Some students also took offense at your use of the term getting laid,” he continued. “It was one of the items enumerated in the complaint.” “I was only repeating a story I had recalled from one of my undergraduate philosophy professors. He was trying to emphasize that the examined life is an ongoing struggle—a struggle with oneself—whereas the life of pleasure is too easy, since any fool can get drunk or get laid. I was trying to impress upon them that college’s main purpose is not the exercise of the libido.” “Well, I see no harm in that. But the complaint’s other main point is that the class is too difficult. This is supposed to be a required ‘Intro’ class for non-English majors.”

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“I had already started to adjust the syllabus after the first two weeks of class,” I replied. “I decided to drop Plato … ” “I see you’re still having them read Martin Buber … ” “Selections from I and Thou are in the textbook,” I said, hoping to placate him. “Even my daughter, who goes to a top university,9 wouldn’t understand Martin Buber,” he laughed. “Some of these assignments might be appropriate for underclassmen at Harvard, but not at Rutgers.” I remained momentary silent, wishing I were courageous enough to rebuke his cynicism and facile elitism.10 I eventually mustered some explanation. “Well, I don’t expect them to fully understand Martin Buber … after all, who does? They simply need to be confronted with challenging texts, especially since this is one of the only humanities classes many of these students will ever have. And then, considering the difficulty, I had planned on grading them leniently. I’d rather humanely grade challenging assignments than harshly grade easy ones.” “I don’t necessarily disagree with that in theory, but it’s not a realistic way to teach these classes.” “Still,” I protested, “I had no idea about any of this. No one ever complained during classes or spoke to me during my office hours. In fact, no one comes during office hours at all.” “You must have intimidated them so much that they felt they couldn’t speak to you.” That last point cut right through me. I was so preoccupied with creating what I saw as “free” discourse in the classroom that I failed to appreciate the bullying nature of my own de facto authority, which I’d never entirely dispelled. This oversight was a fatal error on my part, especially as I tend to assume others see me as I see myself—insecure, detached, and pathologically shy. In my desire to fearlessly “leap” over a history of shyness, I had created a façade intended as nonchalant and facetious, but which struck my students as heartless and aloof. My perception of my own introversion was about forty percent romantic and about sixty percent blind. I left my meeting with the Chair only slightly less disoriented. Despite my admitted miscalculations—themselves a symptom of my introversion—I believed (and still do) that at least some of the complaining students were using religious or moral objections as a pretext to protest a class they believed should be unchallenging. Surely they’d have preferred a less laborious route through Expository Writing 101— perhaps that class their friends were taking, the one with the “easy”

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professor who assigned Thomas Friedman and bloviating editorials from The New York Times. In retrospect, I realize that the administration was probably in its own bind, particularly as an early 1990s law designed to promote minority enrollment was funneling in tragically unprepared students from New Jersey’s community colleges, watering down the reputation Rutgers had enjoyed in prior generations. But this was a problem of institutionality, of little concern to me. As it turned out, I would be allowed to finish teaching the semester but obviously would not be rehired the following year or ever hired by Rutgers again in any capacity. I stubbornly returned to my class, still fuming, telling the students publicly of my betrayal and reprimand—I had nothing to hide. I admitted the “swine” assignment was a bit invasive, but, rather artlessly, went on to ask them if they believed the class should be subject to censorship. Admittedly, this was a stupid question on my part, another sign of my social awkwardness—who would possibly say “yes”? Still, I insisted to them that I was no authority figure, that I did not believe in grades, that they had every right and ethical duty to contradict me, prove me wrong, suggest readings of their own, and disparage any writing prompt—but also that they must do these things openly, without timidity, subterfuge, or fear of reprisal. I assured them that they’d be rewarded for any sincere oppositionality—they would be rewarded, in a sense, for expressing not the conformist doctrines expected of the extrovert, but the rebellious truths the introvert otherwise keeps to himself. They nodded as sheepishly to me as I had nodded to the Chair; I remained unwittingly authoritarian, unable to demystify my own position. When I told them their collective silence wasn’t helping anyone, they only blinked silently. How fearful they were! I was reminded of Voltaire’s well-known aphorism: “God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.” Yet Voltaire remained a deist, still admitting to the need for a cosmic authority, however aloof, indifferent, or undefined. We’d be better off exiling the director of the comedy and have the audience take up the reins—then, at least, the audience could laugh at itself. While I believe my overall ideas were philosophically correct, in retrospect it’s painfully obvious that I failed to appreciate the stagecraft of teaching, foolishly believing that artless agonism alone could break the conspiracy of rank institutionalism, myopic careerism, and unthinking civil obedience. I would have done well to observe Stanislavski’s advice to the novice actor: only reveal yourself bit by bit (perhaps as Rousseau’s “naturally” educated Emile learns of the world bit by bit), and be flexible enough to play every part—from hero to foil, sage to fool—and not just the lead role.11 As a neophyte, however, I couldn’t really pull off the

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enlightened foolery of Socrates and was too naïve to know the liberation of joyously exposing my own ignorance. Impatient with subtle devices, I believed any pretense on my part would betray my mission; after all, I was in the business of consciousness-raising, not mystification. On principle, I still believe in the possibility of agonistic catharsis, but will grudgingly admit that non-agonistic teaching (or teaching-asperformance) is a far more delicate craft than I suspected. The effective teacher’s art is, in fact, a more spontaneous performance than that undertaken by the Stanislavskian method actor, who organically peppers a rehearsed script with ad-libs and reveals action by projecting and publicizing facets of his own psychology. While teachers inevitably have their own scripts—bad ones may memorize moldy lectures—the good teacher’s art is equal parts script and ad-lib, and rather than methodically summoning strands of his own experience, the teacher weaves together the disparate experiences of dozens of students who, over the course of a year and not a single evening, become something quite other than strangers in an audience. The teacher, of course, has one distinct advantage: whereas the actor is expected to be nearly note-perfect night after night, the teacher—precisely because his empathies are more personalized, varied, and morally complex—is held to far lower standards of perfection. Perhaps this is why teaching and failure go hand in hand—and why teaching is arguably more than just another art form. Still recovering from my institutional heartbreak and still trying to rationalize my tactlessness, I was charged in my final semester with a remedial seminar of students culled from a big lecture class. I was to provide the group with guidance, explain lecture readings, and otherwise remedy their academic pains. As luck would have it, they’d been assigned Pedagogy of the Oppressed and were struggling especially with Chapter 3, in which Freire denounces the sadism of the “banking model” and speaks idealistically of the universal love in true discourse’s heart. Interestingly, the students seemed confounded more by the possibility of love in education than by Freire’s descents into social science jargon. Remembering the pig fiasco, I decided to play it a little more coyly this time. “What does love have to do with education?” one freshman asked. “What exactly is education,” I responded, “such that it seems so totally different from love?” “Becoming more mature … developing your mind … learning things … but no one has to love you,” he said. “Would you describe your old high school as a loving environment?” “No,” he laughed.

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“Did that lack of love help you develop your mind?” I asked, expecting no response. “I had a teacher in high school who really loved all her students,” another student chimed in. “She would do anything for us.” “But Freire isn’t taking about individual love,” I responded. “We’ve all had a ‘good’ teacher who cared about us, but an individual teacher’s love doesn’t justify an uncaring system. In fact, an empathetic teacher only makes tolerable and even excuses an institution that, on the whole, remains coercive and rather sadistic.” “So what can you do?” the first student asked. “Me personally, as an instructor at Rutgers?” I responded, slightly taken aback. “Yup,” he said with self-satisfaction. “Talking about it openly is a good start,” I said, before realizing my answer was a feeble cop-out. “But Freire is probably wrong to use the word ‘love,’” I continued. “He really means justice, but he’s trying to define justice as a kind of universal love that allows people to dialogue as equals.” “But what kind of justice is he talking about?” “It’s the justice of civil disobedience. It comes from rejecting what you are taught.” “What if what I’m taught is correct?” “How often does that happen?” I responded. “Okay, but if he means justice, then why does he say love? Are they the same thing?” “He’s trying be a humanist … but if he’s using the two terms interchangeably, he’s probably wrong. One doesn’t need love to be just, but one needs justice in order to love.” “Um … is that really true?” he asked. “Do you really believe that?” “Honestly, at the moment I don’t really know.” And truly, I didn’t know—whatever I believed was fast unraveling, and I feared claiming any moral or philosophical certainty, especially regarding any definitions of justice. But what else could I say? Had I myself acted unjustly toward my impressionable, too-obedient students? Had they, in their adolescent myopia, been unjust to me? Did the institution make both parties unwittingly, unconsciously unjust—or does such a sociological explanation too conveniently absolve us all of responsibility? If justice was temporarily inaccessible to me and my students, it was eventually difficult for Freire himself, who in his later, less popular Pedagogy of the City lamented the impracticability of replacing sadism with love on a rational, national scale. Nevertheless, elective affinities are

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no substitute for justice, and we cannot continue the Christian fallacy of redeeming an automatic institutional injustice (i.e., original sin) with a perverse, anthropomorphic love. Educational institutions—at least the big ones—harbor their own capitalistic original sin, sacrificing moral education for the material world of careerism, sold at a price that far outstrips inflation. Ultimately, we learn morality only so we can more knowingly compromise and betray it. English departments that encourage graduate students to read Freire couldn’t possibly desire Freire’s subversive pedagogy, just as multicultural curricula never really expect American students to exchange capitalism for the strange communisms of the kibbutz or Native American societies. I am reminded of a passage in Civilization and its Discontents in which Freud remarks that psychoanalysis, ironically, has no understanding of beauty, even though psychoanalysis obsesses with aesthetic sensibilities and revelations. Our educational institutions betray an analogous paradox, for while large universities have given up on moral teaching, they claim their economic pragmatism ultimately serves an America founded on exceptional, “moral” principles. Regardless, Rutgers had no love for me, and after receiving a terminal Master’s degree in Creative Writing, I sought refuge in editorial jobs, itinerant instructorships, and medium-grade depression. Whatever academic dreams I harbored drifted away—there would be no Ph.D., no doctoral exams, no fervid attempts to secure tenure at a second-rate university, no jargon-laden articles on subalternized subjectivities dispatched to journals no one wants to read. I hadn’t the constitution to tempt further academia’s unforgiving heart, even though I did well enough as a student—I was, in fact, the only graduate student in the department to have edited a scholarly monograph before receiving his degree. But the whole affair shattered my confidence irreparably, and I, ever the introvert, hadn’t the guts to fight institutional windmills. I read my final student evaluations as though they were bittersweet parting gifts. Some were humorous and unexpectedly gratifying: “This guy’s hilarious … you should give him a raise,” one said. Most evaluations, however, repeated the obstinate protests I expected: “I don’t think we should be forced to read philosophy in an English 101 class.” Of course, the protesters never deigned to suggest what they should read, and the absence of any moral protest in the evaluations confirmed my prior suspicion that many complainants actually found beginner’s philosophy more objectionable than advanced bestiality. Though the events described happened thirteen years ago, they still stand starkly in my memory, refusing to retreat obediently into my

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unconscious. To this day, I am frequented by a recurring nightmare in which I am in my late twenties, hold a Master’s degree, and yet am still stuck embarrassedly in high school, forever unable to complete my old math requirements (make of this what you will). In recent, more silverlined years, however, I’ve been able to allay these lingering anxieties in my new calling as a private tutor. It’s a lonely, sometimes perfunctory business—I’ve no colleagues, no conferences to attend, no campus to traverse, and none of the borrowed prestige institutional affiliation imparts. Unintendedly, I have resumed my societally constructed cum appointed role as reticent outsider. Yet I am free: I am self-employed, I answer only to my own conscience, I provoke students without fear of institutional reprisal, and no one cares which acronyms follow my surname. My happiest moments are with local homeschoolers, especially those “misunderstood” introverts and nonconformists who had suffered at the hands of high school’s extroverted heroes. I can teach them whatever I want, and there are no grades. My homeschooling—or, if you prefer, “unschooling”—classes allow students previously numbed by school curricula to plunge directly into college-level texts and realize that an infantilizing system, not themselves, had created prior shortcomings. Not too long ago, I asked one of my homeschoolers which books he’d read in his final year of high school, before becoming a homeschooler at sixteen. Like many pot-smoking underachievers, he couldn’t remember a single title or author, but he did stammer out an answer at once nebulous and familiar. “There was this book about two guys.” “Of Mice and Men!” I retorted. “Yeah … that’s it! How’d you know?” “In high school, everything is the same. There’s only one book about two guys, just as there’s only one book about kids on an island and one book about a teenager who hates everyone. But now let’s try something different.” So our homeschool group read Freire, Walter Benjamin, Sergei Eisenstein, Noam Chomsky, and Victor Klemperer’s terrific, sardonic The Language of the Third Reich. We watched Jan Svankmajer’s surrealistic, grotesque animated short Darkness, Light, Darkness12 (1990) and, without any prompting or missing a beat, one student—let’s call him Jonny— blurted out, “This is really amazing.” Eureka! As an imperiled high school sophomore, Jonny had been nearly flunking his classes, habitually smoking pot, and, as a budding if misguided naturalist, once tried boiling lawn grass into a health potion. He’d read no books in his first two years of high school (only Spark Notes), but curious, skeptical, and now

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emancipated, he started to branch out on his own. Inspired by Chomsky and possibly by Paddy Chayefsky’s Network, he took a fast interest in the politics of mass behavior and read French sociologist Gustav Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895)—a book I’d never read. Now he was educating me—what more could I ask for? Understandably, Jonny still struggles mightily, and recently he rightfully agonized over BuĖuel’s Un Chien Andalou, unwilling to accept the notion that the film’s surreal imagery was not symbolic but in fact subversively empty of all meaning. “Yes,” I acknowledged, “the film gives us what seems to be ordinary symbolism—the severed hand, the Christ-like stigmata, the dead horses … but the uncanny imagery is a mere temptation. You can read into it what you like, but the meaning is in you, not the film.” “But the film itself has to mean something,” Jonny said. “BuĖuel always claimed the film was meaningless … but admittedly, artists are usually liars.” “I don’t know if I feel comfortable imposing my own meaning on the film,” he continued. “I’d rather pull some meaning out from it.” “What if there’s no meaning to pull out? What if meaning, theme, narrative, closure—all those things your high school English teacher emphasized—didn’t really exist?” “I still want to find the meaning,” he said, confused and frustrated. “Good enough,” I replied. “Don’t be so concerned with the meaning per se … what’s important is your desire for meaning.” “But if there’s no meaning, I could be desiring something that doesn’t exist.” “That’s BuĖuel’s point—don’t be coerced into looking for meaning. Create your own meaning, don’t borrow someone else’s.” To be sure, it’s often tough getting the homeschoolers to develop their desires and theses beyond whatever our chosen texts (or I myself) imply. Suffering residually from the rubric-based education they’d known in the institution, the students commonly have writer’s block when asked to formulate their own hypotheses—that is, their own desires. But I don’t want to offer too much guidance. Remembering the fiasco of my pig prompt, I no longer assign specific writing topics based on our readings and provide prompts only under extreme duress—when my students coerce me. “You know why I hate to give you writing prompts,” I tell them. Recalling our readings of Freire, they jokingly respond, “Because you don’t want to oppress us.” “Exactly,” I reply, smiling on the outside, but really not joking at all.

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Notes 1

I had at the time seen the documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992). 2 John Dewey, The Middle Works, Vol. 9: Democracy and Education (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press), 114. 3 Dewey, The Middle Works, Vol. 9, 61. 4 Dewey, The Middle Works, Vol. 9, 61. 5 This essay is not the place to delve into the complex history of agonistic thought, which begins at least with Diogenes. I mainly wish to stress that educational environments provide a “safe” and ideally non-politicized space in which to enact agonistic procedures. Obviously, expressly political agonism in the manner of 20th century German political scientist Carl Schmitt holds more dangerous ramifications. 6 Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum Publishing), 33. 7 Burton Watson, Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press), 5. 8 I have reconstructed a condensed version of the conversation to the best of my memory. Even if I have misremembered some snatches of dialogue, the overall tenor and content are faithful. 9 I forget which university he mentioned—perhaps it was Cornell. 10 I had hoped the Chair would’ve been more sanguine about the prospects of working-class students, as he had just written a book about Martin Ritt, the director of The Molly Maguires (1970), Norma Rae (1979), and other films espousing working-class politics. 11 Konstantin Stanislavski,“Why and When Play Melodrama?” Stanislavksi’s Legacy (New York: Theater Arts Books), 138–47. 12 Like all Svankmajer’s clay-animated films, Darkness Light Darkness has no narrative, only allegory and symbolism that defy realist interpretation.

CHAPTER TEN WHEN THE NEED ARISES: ACTING THE EXTROVERT IN ORDER TO TEACH LAUREN SMITH

One morning in my classroom, I overheard a student talking. She had taken her normal spot at the top of the semicircle (my preferred seating arrangement for a class). “This is the class where we talk about big life stuff,” she said. “It’s kind of weird, but I like it.” During a meeting with another class in our college’s auditorium, an Iraq War veteran remarked that because of his PTSD, under other circumstances, he could not sit facing forward in such a big theatre. “But I know these guys,” he said, his voice brimming with warmth. Such reflections affirm that yes, sometimes I do build the kind of community I want, that my classes can be an environment where people feel safe to find meaning. As a teacher of college composition, I try to help my students master many aspects of thinking and expression; I hope they end our sixteen weeks together with new belief in their abilities as writers and more appreciation for the power of language. Usually, my students’ end-ofcourse evaluations suggest that they do perceive a change in their attitude towards reading and writing. Their evaluations also give me feedback on the day-to-day running of class. When asked for suggestions for the instructor, one student recently wrote that I should “Continue to engage students who are shy.” This comment buoyed me. I didn’t know who made it, but I hoped it was a young woman named Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn’s face caught fire whenever I asked her anything, grass-green eyes glowing above red cheeks. Through her strain and her silences, she recalled my own younger, introverted self. Early in my career, I realized that if I wanted to be a good composition teacher, I could not stay as introverted as I was. I had to craft a new persona, subdue my original, shy, loner self and bring forth someone more effervescent. I had to adapt some “culturally scripted patterns of conduct” that seemed ill-fitting to me1 and “choose and deploy” extroversion as a

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trait.2 This adaptation is conscious and ongoing, and the choices and deployments can take more effort than grading ten papers. These days, college teaching requires at least one extrovert in the classroom. For the last fourteen years, and with discovery, delight, and ambivalence, I have been shaping my version of that role. Teaching has heightened my awareness of the flexibility of personhood as a whole, and it has softened the boundary I used to draw between intro and extro. It has led me to ask if, whether at school, work, or home, the self is but a series of performing masks. A basketball game in my high school gym class. The fluorescent lights bleached my freckled arms, and I knew I looked awful in my sweatpants. An older student was taking it as a slap in the face to eight generations of her family that I could neither pass nor make a basket. “Loser,” she sneered. “Why don’t you get out of the way?” I took a few steps away; the ball was in play at the other end of the court. That I didn’t say anything seemed to gall her more. “Can’t talk either, retard?” I wondered what drove a person like this. No snappy retort came to mind, so I moved away again until I was almost off the court. Afterwards, it occurred to me that maybe I should take an “unofficial” study hall in the library instead of going to gym class. My teammates wouldn’t miss me, and I could read and write. The next day, I went directly to the library’s second floor and sat at a table, acting like someone who belonged there. I loved the quiet and the sour glue smell, and after forty-five minutes, I passed serenely on to Algebra. I was uptight the first few times, but it got easier. Then, I decided school as a whole made me needlessly anxious. I skipped two or three days in a row, wandering the city’s antique district and the harbor front. I lingered in the Renaissance room of the art museum. I didn’t talk to anyone. I learned to enjoy looking at buildings and to observe without a double-take people of different colors, ages, shapes. This was life, I thought. But society doesn’t support idle rambling for teenagers, and eventually, my mother got a phone call. Other than gym class, I wasn’t bullied, but I still preferred to keep to myself at school. During a bonding exercise, an art teacher made everyone compliment each other, and over and over, I received the same tribute: “I don’t really know you, but you seem nice.” Even with people I cared about, I could be aloof. One summer, my best friend brought me for a weekend at the beach, and about midway through, she saw me eyeing the bus schedule. Hurt, she said I always did things like this. I was surprised: I wasn’t aware I had ever done anything like this. Moreover, I didn’t think

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she would take my leaving so personally. To me, it wasn’t personal; it was cellular. I needed to be on my own again. Shy, withdrawn, and possessed of a consistent, sharp need for solitude. In short, I was an introvert. Some of the personal stories told in Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, then, offered touchstones of my experience. When I entered the adult workforce, I felt the power of the “Extrovert Ideal” Cain describes, the “omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight.”3 At eighteen, I did two shifts as a restaurant hostess before transferring to cashier. I couldn’t handle having managers tell me to smile and be welcoming to customers; I couldn’t display the necessary cheer and enthusiasm. After graduating college, I wanted to find work that allowed me to use my creativity, so I took a job in marketing. The need to be outgoing, or to at least appear that way, became clear. On the page, I produced the zippiest copy, the smartest taglines. At schmoozing with clients, I was a disaster. Trying to network at a luncheon with my boss, I was miserable and inept, unsmooth with everyone. On a site visit, when he and I were alone in a conference room, he said, “When I am with a customer, I generally try to engage them.” He referred to the appallingly dead air I would let develop. The president of our company visited and set up in a vacant office, and my boss suggested I say hi to him. Savant-like, I marched into the office, said hello, and marched right back out. I may not even have given my name. Having no desire to switch careers, I started a Master’s program in English—I just wanted to keep reading and thinking. When I took a seminar on the pedagogy of composition, everything changed. The professor asked the class to keep a journal, and early in the semester, I wrote this: Work, no matter what kind you do, should be considered a sacred activity, and should be of some type of service to the world. I guess what I do currently could be considered a service to the world indirectly. I help information get into the hands of those who seek it. But helping someone to write better. That’s definitely a service to the world. Later: Teaching is first and foremost a service, and a special environment that the students will not experience again once they have concluded their education. Teaching is a privilege. These lines show me developing what Cain and Brian Little—the psychologist whose ideas Cain uses to explain how some introverts can “pass” as extroverts—would label a “core personal project.” Little defines personal projects as “extended sets of personally salient action in context.”4 A personal project can be tangible and specific, like “wash the dog,” or vast and abstract, like “find inner peace.”5 A core personal project is one “without which the meaning of

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one’s life would become compromised.”6 In those heady seminar days, I found what I believed would give my life meaning. Next semester, I taught my first college class, and the following year, I left marketing behind. Because of its performative quality, any kind of teaching can be hard for an introvert. Whether a teacher has three or three hundred students, he or she is looked at and listened to. A professor functions as a required text for a class, another piece of material for students to read and to study. Along with facts and ideas, students absorb my appearance and demeanor, my habits and tics. Standing before them, I wonder if they are judging my vocabulary or my wardrobe, if they are smirking about the coffee stain on my sweater instead of the joke I just made. Even when one of my colleagues sees students waiting in the hallway to come in, he closes the classroom door. He says he does this to take time and space to prepare himself for the “show” that will follow. The college writing classroom involves an especially intense show for both teachers and students, and it presents my introverted self with a paradox. The cover of one composition pedagogy book, Sharing and Responding, depicts two figures sitting cross-legged in front of each other. As a subject, composition is not like economics or chemistry: whether you write in first, second, or third person, you are putting yourself on the page. In the view of educator and author Parker Palmer, all “good teaching depends on drawing students and their stories into the conversation called truth.”7 Since good prose holds a conversation between writers, readers, and ideas, a composition classroom should support many kinds of conversations. Yet, my own most blissful writing moments, the experiences I most hope I can help beginners to have, have occurred when I have been alone and quiet. I love conversing with thoughts on a page, but in order to share that love with others—fulfill my personal project—I have to have many faceto-face conversations with people. Often, we are strangers. Constructivism has reshaped higher education—today’s college students are expected to make their own meaning as opposed to receiving the meaning of a professor/expert/lecturer. The ideal college instructor acts as a “guide on the side,” not a “sage on the stage.”8 In an essay on teaching, Jane Tompkins describes an epiphany she had in her classroom: “I had been putting on a performance whose true goal was not to help students learn but to perform before them in such a way that they would have a good opinion of me.”9 She redesigned this class so that students led each meeting instead of her and moved from “teaching as performance to teaching as a maternal or coaching activity.”10 She emerges happier for this change.

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I, too, have avoided positioning myself as a lecturing luminary for students. I tell them writing, thinking, reading, and talking exist on a continuum, and we should get used to moving around on it as soon as possible. Naturally, the power dynamic between us inhibits my students, and the burden is on me to free them to speak. I must model the behaviors I want them to practice. I try to show them it feels good to open yourself up to others, to come out of your shell. For someone who likes her own shell, this is challenging. When I feel shy, it’s as though I am trying to keep a million hands off me. What I have come to understand, though, is that being handled by others is part of life. When I keep my introversion from interfering with my teaching, I am “accommodating [my]self to situational norms, rather than ‘grinding down everything to [my] own needs and concerns’.”11 As much as I dislike being looked at, I sometimes invite a sustained gaze from students to prove a point. Once, during a lesson on making inferences, I made a face that suggested the feeling of constipation. I asked students to guess what it was, scrunching up my eyes and pressing my lips together. On the first day of most classes, and to start building trust and reciprocity, students and I do an icebreaker about first names. Depending on the class, I give different versions of the same narrative. I tell most classes I was an “accident” child, and my first name was a strategy of my mother’s to get my father interested in having this unexpected family. If it is a memoir class, I add details about how my dad was in a mental hospital just before I was born. If the class is one where students will be asked to write a thesis about their own lives, I will say that I was born of my father’s fever and my mother’s patience. Shortly after the name exercise, most classes complete an “appreciative inquiry,” an activity that involves discussing favorite personal achievements, a big task for people who have just met.12 Over the course of the semester, students talk in groups and pairs often. I cold-call them, and while kind, I generally don’t take no for an answer. A common discussion-building tactic is Palmer’s index card: with no planning, students write something down on an index card and then give it to someone else to read aloud and comment on.13 The spontaneity of this exercise creates a useful frisson. Whether a professor stands behind a lectern or pulls up a chair besides the students, he or she is still giving a performance, and for an introvert who teaches, being a guide on the side can be even harder than a sage on a stage. The sage operates at a further distance than the guide, and there is less focus on interpersonal relationships. Palmer prepares teachers for students who will resist being drawn into discussion, speculating with empathy on their reticence: “Many of them do not want to suffer the

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conflict and ambiguity of external conversation.”14 These words hold for introverted professors like me, too. Outside of teaching, I have gone to great lengths to avoid the “conflict and ambiguity of external conversation.” I have psyched myself up for casual phone calls to friends, picked certain sidewalks in order to dodge neighbors. When e-mail came along, it was a boon to me because I could connect with others through words, on my own time, in my own way. Yet, my teaching methods almost guarantee that everyone in the class will feel conflict, ambiguity, or both at some point, and this can cause some tension. If teaching were not a core personal project for me, I don’t know if I could run classes that are part cocktail party, part debate, and part group therapy. In the middle of a class, sometimes my body will rebel—I will notice that I am standing behind the console a little longer than I need to, concealing and protecting myself from my students. I have also learned to seek what Brian Little refers to as “restorative niches,” places where I can rest from my extroverted performance.15 For many years, as soon as class would end, I would scurry back to my office and close the door. After teaching, I occasionally enjoy a glass of wine and a cup of French onion soup at the diner up the street, taking solace in being fed by others and not needing to utter words other than “please” and “thank you.” I rarely invite anyone to my house, and I seldom answer the phone or doorbell. Watching others teach gives me insight into my own practice, and I have gleaned some techniques from my more extroverted peers. I once visited the classroom of an outgoing, upbeat, confident woman. “I am not here to make friends with eighteen-year-olds,” she will say and laugh. Nonetheless, her classroom is a warm, happy place. During my visit, her students were sitting in pairs discussing their progress on a writing assignment. She chatted with each pair. The talk was light, often funny, probably what my marketing boss had in mind for those dead-air moments with clients. I noticed the patter only dealt with the assignment in a marginal way, and I remembered some commentary from Stephen Brookfield, author of The Skillful Teacher. If you want students to engage genuinely during small-group work, you can’t act like an inquisitor when you drop in on them: “Discussion leaders are judges of normality who signal whether or not the regime of truth is being sufficiently observed. Even when supposedly participatory approaches are used—such as the conversation circle—these are often experienced as oppressive, as people feel they are under increased surveillance.”16 As a result, the next few times I did group work, I made a “cheat sheet” of small talk topics in advance, low-stakes stuff to ask students about as I checked on them.

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Scripting all parts of the extrovert teaching performance has helped. When my students enter the room, I make a point of saying hello to different ones each time, and sometimes I have to pick names out ahead of time so I remember. My lesson plans include cues to myself like (in all caps so that I see them quickly when I look down at the paper), “SAY YOU ARE EXCITED,” “GIVE SAME AMOUNT OF FEEDBACK TO EACH GROUP,” “PRAISE,” “TELL STORY ABOUT ONE-EYED FISH,” “THANK THEM FOR THEIR HARD WORK TODAY.” Not every class has a detailed script, but I don’t usually come in without a specific blueprint for what will happen, including the off-the-cuff moments. I have accepted that I need this kind of scripting, that the “personal touch” aspect of teaching may not flow from me automatically. Still, I know I would be mortified to share these notes with anyone. To do so would be to reveal how much planning goes into something that seems easy-going. Sometimes, I worry that by using such a distinct classroom persona I am duping my students, getting them to believe in someone who doesn’t exist. In general, I find it easy to deceive people. It doesn’t escape me that my Zodiac sign is Gemini, the twins. The two-faced, the phony. As an old boyfriend and I were breaking up, he mentioned The Talented Mr. Ripley. No wonder I enjoyed the movie so much, he said, the story of a duplicitous game-player whom no one really knows. It was a reasonable comparison: I had kept my waning interest in him a secret, and I had been cheating on him. I fit the description of what Mark Snyder calls a “high self-monitor”: someone who tailors her personality to fit the needs of the current social context.17 Two of the true/false statements on Snyder’s SelfMonitoring Scale are: “I would probably make a good actor” and “I can look anyone in the eye and tell a lie with a straight face (if for a right end).”18 Also, “In different situations with different people,” the high selfmonitor “often [acts] like a very different person.”19 Even before I began teaching, I noticed I would feel shyer upon the second meeting with a new person. This is because I had to remember who I was trying to be last time, which mask I wore. Teaching has muddied my understanding of the difference between performance and reality. As Erving Goffman says, “All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.”20 Of course, I should not have told my boyfriend I still loved him, but what about the dyslexic student whose essay I feigned more excitement about than I felt? In composition and rhetoric theory, some thinkers stress the role of the “rhetorical situation,” the principle that what you say in writing is conditioned by whom you are addressing, when, and

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for what reason.21 I believe every situation is, in a way, rhetorical. Lad Tobin, a professor and composition expert, argues that it is not “as if the character [he] reveal[s] on the written page is the real [him] while [his] classroom persona is a fake. [His] point is simply that differences in goals and audiences lead [him] to different performances of self.”22 A story Liza Minnelli tells about Judy Garland (her mother) makes a similar point. While watching Garland perform, Minnelli would witness a contrast: She’d finish a concert and I’d be standing in the wings with some water and cough drops. The curtain would come down. She’d sit on the edge of the stage, her legs are dangling, and I’d think, “That poor lady! She’s so heartbreaking.” I’d walk over, she’d grab the water or drop and ask … “Do you wanna eat Chinese or Italian?” “I’d say, ‘Italian.’ She’d say, “Great. Get off the stage.” The curtain would go back up, she’d sing “Over the Rainbow” and go right back to being tragic. She knew exactly what her public needed.23

Tobin and Garland share an interest in meeting the demands of their rhetorical situations. A social artifice may not be “real” in the traditional sense, but that does mean it is not helpful. When I overheard a colleague having a conference with a student, and he mentioned he had used Wikipedia as his primary research source, she sighed and closed her eyes as though he had struck the deepest of psychic blows, her dramatic response suggesting another Self-Monitoring Scale prompt: “I sometimes appear to others to be experiencing deeper emotions than I actually am.”24 In the rhetorical situation of the classroom, I create the character of Lauren-the-Professor. She speaks in a different voice than Lauren-theMarketer or Lauren-the-Wife. For the most part, I am convinced that when I act the extrovert in class or amplify my response to certain students, I am not being dishonest but delivering a specific performance of self, doing my best to give my public what they need. Philosophers have long questioned the existence of a fundamental, stable self. What, if anything, comes “naturally” to a person remains unknown, and being yourself is not as straightforward as it seems. From a psychological perspective, Brian Little envisions three main selves or natures: the biogenic, the sociogenic, and the idiogenic.25 The biogenic is the original self, how you are before you come into contact with your environment. The sociogenic is the one you shape in response to social pressure. The idiogenic is the self you create to pursue a personal project. In Quiet, Cain describes an influential businessman named Edgar, an introvert who attends high-end charity events. To prepare himself for the necessary socializing, ahead of time, he would write up a list of anecdotes

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to share.26 Eventually, however, he stopped needing these lists because making light conversation became more instinctual.27 Like Edgar, people who know me well doubt whether a label like introvert even applies to me. Lately, it is habitual, even pleasurable, for me to talk to my peers as I unwind from class; I no longer rush back to my office. Someone asked me recently if I would revert to full introversion if I didn’t have to engage people for a living. I said I would, but I was unsure. Ultimately, the idiogenic self is still my self. In high school, I got a week of detention for my truancy, and I sat in that classroom with students more delinquent than I—smokers, vandals, libertines. I appreciated being among these rebels for a moment because I had staged a small revolt of my own. There is beauty and dignity in introversion, and while I may have come to terms with acting the extrovert when I need to, I wonder if I have gone too far, become a traitor to my biogenic self. The kind of professor I am today would have horrified sixteen-year-old me, repelled the girl who hid in the library and wandered the city. I did all I could to avoid interacting in school, and now, I’m the ringleader of communities where anonymity and reticence are signs of something wrong. In the Fishbowl, a popular active learning technique, students in groups of four or five sit in the front of the room and have a free-form discussion while the rest of the class listens and watches.28 During her class’s Fishbowl, Kaitlyn dutifully took her seat with her group-mates. Still, she said nothing until someone prompted her, and she looked absolutely miserable. At her age, I would have done the same. I would have complied with the teacher’s directions and hated every second of it. This truth is why I want her to have been the author of the “keep engaging the shy” evaluation comment. If she were the author, I could feel less nervous about the performance I give, rest more easily about playing the extrovert in the classroom. I could keep the title of “guide on the side” and not feel I had veered into “goad-er on the shoulder.” Granted, Kaitlyn and I were not in the same position: law required me to go to high school, but she took my college course by choice. Despite flashes of compassion, I caught myself finding her bothersome and tedious. Why keep coming to a class that unsettled her so? Irrationally, I resented her. Since I was willing to “act out of character,” as Cain and Little would say, I felt she should be, too. I had drunk the Extrovert KoolAid, forgotten who I was before I found my vocation. If not practiced carefully, active learning strategies can reinforce the Extrovert Ideal. Although cognition is invisible and internal, active

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learning tends to privilege the visible and external. My students occasionally do a BINGO icebreaker: they interview each other and try to get BINGO in a range of categories (who grew up in a small town, who has a brother, etc.). Once, a quiet student had collected very few Xs on her sheet. Someone else looked over her shoulder at her paper and saw how blank it was. “You’re in it to win it, aren’t you?” he said, and she gave him a pinched smile. His comment captures the enduring message of our culture: to be an extrovert is to win. Her response represents the strain introverts experience when they try to change themselves to fit in. My campus has a nature trail on it. For every Fishbowl, perhaps there should be a walk in the woods. As long as I am a teacher and remain committed to acting the extrovert when the need arises, I need to find ways to balance my biogenic, sociogenic, and idiogenic selves; I need to engage in a dance of personality that includes them all.29 Recently, I found inspiration for this dance in an unlikely place. Every year, I attend the national conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). With thousands of attendees, hundreds of readings, and dozens of trips to the hotel bar, each AWP creates a tower of cognitive and social overload——typically, I get to know the inside of my hotel room well. I read this listing in the 2014 program, then, with joy: “Dickinson Quiet Space. A dedicated quiet space for you to collect your thoughts, unwind, and escape the literary chaos.”30 The Quiet Space was near a bank of escalators, right across from the melee of the Book Fair. I sought it out on the first day. Computer in lap, coffee in hand, I breathed deeply. No one spoke while I was in the Quiet Space—everyone was willing to uphold the contract. The Quiet Space gave me hope that even under the Extrovert Ideal, balance is possible. Introvert and extrovert, even when housed within the same person, can harmonize. We need only adhere to mythologies of personality if we choose to.

Notes 1

Brian R. Little, “Free Traits and Personal Contexts: Expanding a Social Ecological Model of Well-Being,” in Person-Environment Psychology, second edition, eds. W. Bruce Walsh, Kenneth H. Craik, and Richard H. Price (Mahwah and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000), 92–93. 2 Brian R. Little and Maryann F. Joseph, “Personal Projects and Free Traits: Mutable Selves and Well Beings,” in Personal Project Pursuit: Goals, Action, and Human Flourishing, eds. Brian R. Little, Katariina Salmela-Aro, and Susan D. Phillips (Mahwah and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007), 384.

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3 Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (New York: Broadway Books, 2012). 4 Brian R. Little, “Prompt and Circumstance: The Generative Contexts of Personal Projects Analysis,” in Little, Salmela-Aro, and Phillips, eds., Personal Project Pursuit, 25. 5 Brian R. Little and Travis L. Gee, “The Methodology of Personal Projects Analysis: Four Modules and a Funnel,” in Little, Salmela-Aro, and Phillips, eds., Personal Project Pursuit, 60. 6 Brian R. Little, “Prompt and Circumstance: The Generative Contexts of Personal Projects Analysis,” in Little, Salmela-Aro, and Phillips, eds., Personal Project Pursuit, 43. 7 Parker Palmer, “Good Teaching: A Matter of Living the Mystery,” Center for Courage & Renewal, accessed May 26, 2014, http://www.couragerenewal .org/parker/writings/ good-teaching/. 8 Allison King, “From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side,” College Teaching 41 (1993): 30. 9 “Teaching Like It Matters,” Lingua Franca, August 1991, 24. 10 Ibid., 27. 11 Brian R. Little, quoted in Cain, Quiet, 215. 12 For a description of this technique, see D. L. Cooperrider, F. Barrett, and S. Srivastva, “Social Construction and Appreciative Inquiry: A Journey in Organizational Theory,” in Management and Organization: Relational Alternatives to Individualism, eds. D. Hosking, P. Dachler, and K. Gergen (Aldershot, UK: Avebury Press, 1995), 157–200. 13 Palmer, “Good Teaching: A Matter of Living the Mystery.” 14 Palmer, “Good Teaching: A Matter of Living the Mystery.” 15 Brian R. Little, “Acting Out of Character in the Immortal Profession: Toward a Free Trait Agreement,” Academic Matters, April–May 2010, accessed May 26, 2014, http://www.academicmatters.ca/2010/04/acting-out-of-character-in-theimmortal-profession-toward-a-free-trait-agreement/. See also Cain, Quiet, 219–20. 16 “Discussion as a Way of Teaching,” Stephenbrookfield.com, accessed May 26, 2014, http://www.stephenbrookfield.com/Dr._Stephen_D._Brookfield/Workshop_ Materials_files/Discussion_as_a_Way_of_Teaching_Packet.pdf, 6. 17 For a discussion of pseudo-extroversion and Snyder’s Self-Monitoring Scale, see Cain, Quiet, 212–15. 18 Mark Snyder, “Self-Monitoring Scale,” Cabrillo College, available from http://www.cabrillo.edu, accessed May 26, 2014. The scale originally appeared in Snyder’s article, “Self-Monitoring of Expressive Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 30 (1974): 526–37. 19 Snyder, “Self-Monitoring Scale.” 20 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 72. 21 See especially Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, eds. Sally Caudill, Michelle Condit, and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Guilford Press, 1998), 217–25. 22 Lad Tobin, “Self-Disclosure as a Strategic Teaching Tool: What I Do—and

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Don’t—Tell My Students,” College English 73 (2010): 202. 23 Alan W. Petrucelli, “Liza Minnelli Remembers Judy on Mother’s Day,” Examiner.com, updated May 12, 2013, accessed May 26, 2014, http://www.examiner.com/article/liza-minnelli-remembers-judy-on-mother-s-day. 24 Mark Snyder, “Self-Monitoring Scale.” 25 Little and Joseph, “Personal Projects and Free Traits,” 376–77. 26 Cain, Quiet, 213. 27 Cain, Quiet, 213. 28 For a description of the Fishbowl process, see “Fishbowl,” Active Learning Activities, Madison Area Technical College, accessed May 29, 2014, http://madisoncollege.edu/in/fishbowl. 29 Little and Joseph, “Personal Projects and Free Traits,” 396. 30 “Schedule of Events,” The Association of Writers and Writing Programs, accessed May 26, 2014, https://www.awpwriter.org/application/public/pdf/ conference/2014/2014SeattleSchedule_Web.pdf.

CHAPTER ELEVEN AN INTROVERT IN AN EXTROVERT’S ONLINE PLAYGROUND RON RIZZI

Ageless… timeless… or spineless… in a quiet place… online we reach… So from behind the screen we reach for the stars… not one of them on Hollywood boulevard, but from a picture worth a thousand words, reduced to a wink… a nudge… an IM… LOL… or AWOL… don’t you think. So was it read, what you said. How would you know? So many that escape into the ether like letters written and never sent, but then… was it meant? You’re interested, smitten by a timeless photo, young for their stated age, a non-smoker, so thin on such a stage. The dialogue is open and you send an email. They look like everything you’ve ever wanted, ever dreamed of or pined for and you wait, wonder, and ponder whether they may be so intrigued by you. Your demeanor, your snapshot, ever so real, ever so recent. Thin, slightly less hair and maybe hoping they would find you perhaps so debonair. As a day goes by, should you give it just one more… try? A poke, another wink and then you wonder… what do they really think? Back online just one more time; you look again, even if only to make a friend. So many times nothing happens, like there is no one there. Wherever there is or is it a game it seems to connect, coincide and maybe to meet in actuality, all to please leave this virtual reality. But then a surprise, a message arrives. Short and not so sweet. Terse so it is, that would make anyone nervous. So where will it go? Coffee, at least you maybe hope so. Like a tweet it’s not sweet, or 140 characters so brief, like a flash they ask. Email can be frail, let’s meet they say and you plan to do so in just a few days. A Starbuck’s or a Dunkin Donut moment, you hope and wonder what it will be like. You gaze and stare at the photos throughout the night and

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read and reread their brief profile it’s so light. Walks on the beach… a pina colada at sunset… dinner with wine… a conversation the first time. So you dress your best, so casual for a test and drive off with your GPS to one more Starbuck’s in search of the best that will end all the rest. Not even a phone call to set up a meeting. A brief email that can be so fleeting. Such a risk not to be missed. You circle around, cruising the parking lot. Wondering out loud will this one stand out from the crowd? There is no sign of ageless or timeless. You thought you’d be weak in the knees, geez… such anticipation. Will it be just another disappointment or a jubilant triumph? So you park the car. Look in the mirror and straighten what’s left of your hair… devil may care. You get up your nerve to walk inside to find that one special person with je ne sais quoi. Would they become the one? The door opens and in you go a last minute thought as you can’t see… timeless. Why you thought? So off to the bathroom to wash your hands, cold water on your face and cool off… that’s the plan. When you come out you head to a table and sit and wait even though you’re not Clark Gable. Will they arrive late or was it a lie. Wait… through the door comes someone who resembles… such pause… is that your date who could be your mate? They walk past the counter and stop with… Hello? Timeless, ageless, is this a scandal, even though that’s their handle? The smell of a cigarette and dressed like a teen with tight black leggings not even a pair of jeans. Their T-shirt would throw you… “Iron Maiden” she’s not. If it wasn’t online you would have certainly forgot. Yes the hair is blonde and the eyes may be blue, but never would they look anything like you… had imagined or saw on a profile or two. Slightly overweight they sit and say… So nice to meet you, isn’t this quite a day! Why would you lie to begin anew with someone who barely knows you and set them up for such a fall? Why? Is there any other question, no? That’s all. How many dates for both men and women begin as a nightmare and they can’t be forgiven. So are the perils of this online landscape. To be so intrepid and venture to date. One would prefer the grocery store and an aisle of crackers to look at each box and leave them on the shelf for someone else. Would a dose of healthy introspection be the prescription to all of one’s hopes and dreams come true. To think rather than wonder… to visualize… hypothesize. Rather than venture out… venture within… looking inside of you. Searching for a dream, the person who would fulfill every whimsical thought… now that would make you smile. For they,

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whether real or a figment of your wildest dream, would smile for you in your mind’s eye… for your camera obscured… by reality. But yet neatly, sweetly and perfectly protected in your mindful dream like state… there’s Romeo… and Juliet… aren’t they certainly worth the wait. Wouldn’t your perfect apparition make amends for every past perdition? Certainly you’d think, just the thought of you. But who? An introspection of an imaginary friend. Perfect inside your head. Just the right height. Never too thin… slightly over… wait, would they be blonde, brunette, a redhead? From every image. From every picture. Every photograph. A potpourri of the opposite sex… for opposites attract and in that conjured perfection all of your mind’s wishes and all that you would hope for… hold out for… could… would… meet you… in your mind for that elusive coffee and virtual conversation. For in your head and behind the screen there are no risks. No rejection. No disappointment. Perfection. Beauty in the mind’s eye. Beholden to no one but you. Creating an image that only you would wish for. Would that make the conversation great. An internal, virtual kind of date. What would you do? Where would you begin? Where would it go and just where would it end? To live vicariously would that be the Rx… just what the doctor had ordered, sign up for that subscription. Ah, and think of the savings for virtual coffee, conversation, an imaginary dinner, a vintage bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé only to fool your palate… your wallet and your mind each day. Wouldn’t that be the kind of place or kind of space to invite a lover but really without a trace? No real human interaction. Not even a transaction. Would you even need a reaction? What’s the difference one might add? But then would it be so bad. Ageless. Timeless. Speechless. Each one would fit a bill. Conform to a mold. The exact form and shape of your thoughts so deep… so pensive… never melancholy… perhaps an introverted sort of folly. To pore over profiles travelling miles and miles… behind that screen not sitting by the window or stuck on the aisle… a better place to be… would that be… what would you see… by checking out. You’ll never be hurt. Your date never curt. They would serve every purpose but one. Reality. But then online dating… could it be referred to as… an oxymoron… an introvert’s dream. Dating online is dating in your mind… until the moment you find… what it is you’re looking for. That could be just a simple metaphor and located just behind a door… in your thoughts… your hopes… your dreams… or really another ghost in your mental machine.

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So then… to read so many profiles… and over more than a million miles… where is that smile? Where is the one that changes everything… the one that answers prayers… that leaps tall edifices and crosses labyrinths in your mind that could or would never have been crossed… again? Oh the energy expended for such a paradise lost. How would one regain composure after a significant cost? To fill a void and stop the yearning and replace it with bliss. Isn’t that what they’re really selling… themselves? Yes, I’m sure of it. I saw it on… TV… a reality show, a commercial, it’s free. Really? But in such bliss where are you? Are you anywhere to be found? Have you lost yet another part of yourself so far and further down the road… of life. Interesting… a belief in marriage and the belief in divorce. Why marry to divorce? Why swim when you’ll only drown? Why consider it… again. Or just to be friends with benefits or without benefits, like an HMO instead of a PPO. At 50+ there are miles and miles of trials behind us. Some shared and navigated with a partner or so you thought—history… now… history, funny when you think… distraught. If online dating is the new norm, what can be gleaned from all of this as normal? Where will you find the energy to continue to try? In one more granola bar, then you’ll be happy or searching for the prize at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box, or are you just crackers and sifting through crumbs? Everyone online is looking, shopping, like finding a new couch or curtains. That better deal…. cheaper price… quality goods. “If you have a boat then you have the key to my heart.” Is there quality in that… where is that Tahiti ketch… anyway? After more than 22 of them… still looking. Oh, to be 22 again. To pay for some of these games requires energy. And with all of the energy vampires nipping at one’s neck have you become a vampire too, what the heck? Or would you belong in a class of drama queens, pining over what had happened, what might have been, rather than what is. Aren’t we are all damaged goods. Experience really and experience a formidable teacher. But what have we learned… you… learned. For an introvert what’s good is checking out… not checking them out and recharging to seek a refill perhaps in such an online landfill. Never to be pretentious in the land of extroverts but to be able to step away and seek some solitude to reflect, recharge and think to lose yourself in so many ways. In your own thoughts… hoping for a reverie… or an epiphany. Returning rejuvenated and gregariously as a poser with an

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infinite smile, so talkative, spontaneous and charismatic then lo and behold disguised as an extrovert. “Quiet” time, like when you were a child. You were a child once weren’t you? We all were. We were filled with hopes and dreams… expectations… great as they were. Taking quiet time to “be” quiet and recede like the hairline of a 55-year-old. Rather than be online… to read and nurture one’s inner peace to regain perspective on the view from behind a 24-inch-wide screen monitor in a book that requires no batteries. That would re-kindle you now, wouldn’t it? So what is this thing called solitude. Is it good for the soul? Is it replenishing in private and rejuvenating or exhilarating. Would you gain by disconnecting… from everything… every one and all? Would you feel renewed not depressed stepping away only to return another day? How would you explain to family and friends? Place them on hold… a do not call list… if only for a little while. “Quiet” as Susan Cain calls it, or is it to be mindful not mindless. Thinking not to think that is the question. As an introvert thinking would be some of the best activities you would do in this life… alone. Not in a workgroup in private. Abiding like a good citizen. Politically correct…. no perhaps incorrect. Taking a risk in your mind’s eye… alone… thinking through all that has gone past… love… life… time… relationships… history and leave it behind for a coffee table book. To be opened and read once there are a few circle stains on the cover from leaving behind a cup or two… of coffee on the cover. Would you regain your personal power once more… your mojo… your brass… your druthers… not ego. But to withdraw, to mull over and reconcile inside all that has transpired… one… last… time. With the hope of happiness… hope… love… life… returns once more and perhaps for the last time. Your ninth… life. Landing on your feet once more like a lithe cat tossed up in the air in fright, only to adeptly… gently return… to terra firma… landing on all fours…. unscathed. No longer battle weary from the rough ride… the potholes… the obstacles… the disappointments… filled with beguile… to be taken all with a smile and finally have a reason… to see yourself smile, be happy and alive again. While psychologists postulate a “person-situation” debate… did you come here with fixed personality traits? Or as the road twisted and turned did you just learn to accommodate… and finally realize now that the destination was clear, it’s not where you expected to be, and isn’t that queer? Where you want to be is where you should be and would that require a chameleon tendency to morph into an extrovert and change

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course. To drive instead, rather than ride, to reach the goals you set forth for yourself. Would you realize you are using both sides of your brain analyzing every move? Knight to Queen’s Bishop four… calculated in hopes of an outcome worthy of the permutation we call life. Or would you come to realize it is all an accident waiting to happen, as if that’s what has happened. Nothing planned. Would you blame the situation and wonder how to overcome it all. Sheer madness. Sheer extrovert actions when it’s not your style to leap without thinking, considering and understanding…. first. Would you become a weekend warrior of relaxation and check out to the hermitage? Expending all of the stored energy gained in a brief 48-hour period the following weekdays just to get to do it… all over again. But for what reason? Analyzing your other side. The creative side that visualizes an online dating profile and the person it represents in a whimsical way, a wishful way to fulfill a dream. Your dream. When in the final analysis the unfortunate truth and reality is that all is not what it seems. Because you chose to dream. Would that be all the more reason in further analytical review to withdraw to regroup and recharge after all. Wouldn’t that be the answer you’re truly really looking for, to be “Quiet” after all? Yes. It will be… perhaps all the more better… to be left alone… with your hopes…your dreams… and thoughts in your own… reverie. All to be reconciled in your private introspection. Then you are emailed once more and quickly and quite rightly so labeled “too intense” and perhaps that is the single most “intense” characteristic of the quintessential introvert. The average member of either sex would not delve into the details of every word, every photographic pose and nuance as only an introvert can. While poring over the details in a private quiet environment you can clarify the broader view, the bigger picture. Each minute detail is meticulously drawn from close scrutiny of every written and typed word including the typos. Illiterate, you think immediately, and discount someone from the radar screen. To label them careless or downright ignorant for not proofreading their own profile, wouldn’t you think? Their profile, that masterpiece, an online exhibit of their physical characteristics, but their intellectual prowess neglected. The introvert would surely be subjected to an additional inquisitive approach from an extrovert no less and asked if they were a writer! With that comes the time for quiet reflection allowing for the perfect response. It can be edited and clearly with the right words selected to convey exactly

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the precise response you feel that would indeed be reflective of your personality. Would there be a match made in heaven for the thinker who has been also so characterized as an introvert and an old soul? Déjà vu… you have been here before, haven’t you? But then here was there in the outer world and not the quiet inner world of your thoughts. In the outer world you must reconcile your interactions with an extrovert. But you’re also easily distracted. What then would you expect to gain from this experience in such a fantasy land and virtual realm? Clarity of thought and selection the introverts process of natural selection. It is quite clear that from behind the scenes remaining behind a screen offers an introvert the quietest place there could ever be. In your den, your living room at the coffee table or your smart phone or your laptop. Alone in control and in complete retreat from the noise and distractions found in a bar or a crowded public place. Where you can surely single out the individual you “think” will be the right one. Or field the individuals who “think” you are their right one. And perhaps they are just as introverted as you, communicating from the same exact place behind just one more flatscreened mirrored façade. An introvert would also prefer the written word over the spoken word. No confusion from nervous body language or lack of personal confidence in person. Behind the screen, introverts have more control over the dating game and situation by calculating their responses. A witty remark may be spontaneous at first, but there is ample time to have it crafted from the original thought and hone it down to perfection, or so it would seem. Rather than be pressured to respond immediately to a human interactive response in a live situation and in person, you can relax and ponder your answer to an email or wink in quiet solitude. That is the best use of an introvert’s precious time to be productive without downtime! Let it all take place an email at a time behind the computer screen, the introvert would say. An introvert operating in the virtual world of online dating derives a sense of comfort and security, screening at his/her own pace without the harsh glare of confrontation in a real, and sometimes, unforgiving world.

CHAPTER TWELVE OVERCOMING THE SEATING CHART CURSE: HOW BEING AN INTROVERT STUDENT CHALLENGED ME TO BECOME A BETTER TEACHER LISA WHALEN

Not even the straight A-grades on my transcript could damper the banging of my heart or staunch the moisture beading under my arms as I crossed the threshold to 8th-grade English. My feet, secreted in camouflage (the same brown Eastland loafers with coiled laces worn by every student who hoped to fit in), seemed to increase in mass. I fought the urge to stop mid-stride as I left the safety of the hallway’s beige tile and stepped onto the classroom’s green carpet. My stomach tingled as if I’d swallowed a box of fireworks that were now exploding; their sparks glittered and then winked out with my every breath. I didn’t have a choice, however, so I tried to appear casual as I shuffled to the furthest row while cursing the ancestors who had changed my family name from O’Phelan—a solid middle-of-the-alphabet moniker—to Whalen when they immigrated to America from Ireland. The alphabetical seating charts used by every teacher at Omaha Westside Middle School meant I ended up in the back corner of every classroom, amongst a group of boys whose names ended in V–Z and who used sitting at the outer edges of the teacher’s radar to their advantage. I decided that when I married, I’d choose a husband whose last name fell between A and O to avoid getting stuck at the end of every line. I slung my backpack to the floor, slid into my desk, and watched the door from the corner of my eye. Despite my hopes, Chris sauntered in accompanied by his personal soundtrack: the late bell. I pretended not to notice as he tossed chin nods to his buddies. He winked at me and then

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sprawled into the desk on my right, not bothering to reach for a pen or notebook because he never paid enough attention in class to need them. “So,” he said, turning to look at me from beneath the flop of shiny blond hair that hung over his eye, “You look sexy today. Didya wear that just for me?” He leered at my knees, which peeped out from beneath my denim skirt. “No way,” I replied. A slow burn lit my cheeks and radiated down my neck. I pictured the heat intensifying until I spontaneously combusted. I should be so lucky. I was a quiet, serious student. I sought nothing more than to be invisible in the classroom, which made my eventual decision to become a teacher surprising to everyone, including me. I wasn’t an outcast; I dated, went to football games and parties, competed in athletics, and played the flute in band. I talked with friends and family for hours about anything and everything, but I also needed plenty of alone time. Like other introverts, I was as happy tucked into my bedroom with a sketchbook and my favorite CD as I was comparing crushes and trading clothes with friends. Alone time allowed me to indulge in the inner life we introverts find so intriguing. Additionally, it recharged my social battery, which ran down when I spent time in large groups or with unfamiliar individuals.1 Most of my peers didn’t exhibit the same desire for alone time. In fact, they avoided it, equating “alone” with “lonely.” Unlike my peers, who tossed words like confetti, cluttering conversation unnecessarily but able to speak comfortably with anyone under any circumstances, there were few things I found less appealing and more exhausting than speaking when it wasn’t essential. I hated small talk; verbal sparring and even informal public speech terrified me, especially if I didn’t have ample time to think before opening my mouth. To me, words were currency, never to be squandered. When I had to speak, thinking time was key. I could survive any social situation if I could rehearse in my head what I wanted to say before I had to say it. Rehearsal guaranteed thoughts would emerge accurately, which I cared about intensely—perhaps too much. If I were to spend verbal capital, I wanted to invest it wisely. Consequently, I was no match for Chris. Neither of us could have explained it, but Chris and I knew introversion made me his ideal target. His antics were only amusing because I needed time to think before replying, because I hated to be the center of attention, and because I felt awkward talking to people I didn’t know well, all of which provided him with perfect opportunities to strike.2 Additionally, he sensed I’d had a crush on him previously. I was over it, but the way he narrowed one green eye or extended his slender fingers to

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move my shoulder so he could copy my quiz answers (another drawback of the seating chart curse) still made my stomach quiver. Like a snake, he could identify vulnerable prey as if tasting the air with his tongue. As a distraction from the intensity of his gaze, I reached into my purse for a stick of gum. “Hey—Is that gum or cum you’re putting in your mouth? I could give you some cum; you want it?” “What’s cum?” As soon as the words left my mouth I realized my mistake. My throat constricted, and my stomach plunged to my knees. “You don’t know what cum is?! Are you serious?!” Then he began explaining in great detail. “Shut up! I know what it is. Shut up!” I whispered. Of course I knew what it was; I’d just never heard it called that before. I pleaded with him to be quiet as my entire body overheated. Sweat broke out on the back of my neck despite a breeze from the window beside us. “Lisa!” I looked up to find Mr. B. staring at me, along with everyone else in the room. “Is there a problem?” “No.” “Good. Then stop talking and pay attention.” Chris snickered and mimed high fives with his buddies as soon as Mr. B. turned toward the board. I bit my lip and tried not to cry. At parent-teacher conferences, Mr. B. told my parents I was a pleasure to have in class. He appreciated the example I set as it helped maintain order in a rowdy class. “She handles the ornery students so well,” he assured them. When my mom told me what Mr. B. had said, I was dumbfounded. Absorbing Chris’s harassment without fighting back equated handling it well?! Mr. B’s characterization of my classroom experience isn’t unusual. Psychology professor Robert J. Coplan explains that introverts are often ignored in the classroom because teachers are compelled to focus their limited time and attention on disruptions.3 Even among well-behaved students, extroverts garner more teacher attention because they seek out interaction. Feedback from my other teachers was similar but less positive. Like Chris’s late bell, comments about being too quiet comprised my educational soundtrack. While “quiet” could be a compliment in K-6 because as it was synonymous with “obedient,” it was synonymous with “non-participatory” in middle school. My quiet nature became even more of an encumbrance when teachers called on me. Like many introverts, I’m sensitive to social and

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environmental stimulation.4 I prefer television volume set as low as possible because when cranked, it feels like sound is being mainlined into my bloodstream instead of collected by my ears. Oversensitivity to volume applies to my own voice as well. Though my voice seemed normal to me, teachers could barely hear it, and sitting in the back of the classroom exacerbated the problem. Ms. S. frequently asked me to repeat myself. Sometimes she interrupted: “Class? Can you hear her? No? Okay, Lisa, you have to speak louder. Say that again, please, and speak loudly this time.” Red-faced, I’d begin again, hoping I was loud enough that she wouldn’t tell me to “take a deep breath and really project” as occasionally happened. By the third go-round, I just wanted to escape the spotlight, so I cut my answer short. Ms. S.’s summation at parent-teacher conferences was, “Lisa has to learn to speak up if she’s going to make it in life.” Great, I thought, I’m doomed. Ninth-grade social studies seemed to foreshadow my downfall. Of all the high school teachers, none took his responsibility to prepare us for college more seriously than Dr. M. And none came closer to convincing me I’d never make it. He explained that college professors expected us to discuss texts like adults: through free-flowing exchange of ideas in which we disagreed civilly to develop complex theories. He seemed convinced we’d arrived at boot camp. His classroom was basic training, and he was the drill sergeant tasked with whipping us into shape (extroversion) or weeding us out. As an extrovert, Dr. M. had difficulty understanding introverts, something Jill D. Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig claim is characteristic.5 Because introverts spend so much time reflecting on their own experience and comparing it to what they observe, they understand non-introverts well, but the same isn’t true of extroverts, who struggle to understand their quieter counterparts. Even introvert teachers view introvert students less favorably, especially on first impression.6 Paul G. Barker, an educational leadership doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, claims that many teachers assume quiet students are less capable and intelligent than their more extroverted peers.7 Many “see the introverted student as someone with a problem, not as simply someone with a different personality type.”8 This is problematic in and of itself, but also “may lead to attempts to get [the introverted student] to be ‘friendlier,’ to work in larger groups, to talk more often and more spontaneously, and to be more outgoing and interactive.”9 Whether introverts or extroverts themselves, “teachers feel they have to turn the introvert [student] into an extrovert.”10 And that’s exactly what Dr. M. tried to do.

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He spoke loudly, aggressively, and incessantly, and he preferred students who sparred with him. Although he delighted in ejecting students from the library for talking when they leaned over and whispered to a peer, “can I borrow your eraser?,” his debates with colleagues about whether some long-dead European historian would agree or disagree with the Supreme Court’s latest ruling on Major League Baseball salary caps (or some other equally unrealistic premise) were audible from the far end of the hallway. The louder and more confrontational an interaction, the better, as far as he was concerned. His favorite teaching technique was graded discussion. On graded discussion days, Dr. M. arrived with a spring in his step. He swung his battered leather briefcase onto the table at the front of the room, stared at us from buggy eyes framed by long lashes, blinked rapidly, and declared, “Notes check!” Then he looked to see that each of us had completed the required eight pages of notes on essays from academic journals he’d assigned. He evaluated the quality of our notes publicly, occasionally cross-examining the note-taker as to the contents to prevent copying from a friend. Sarcasm laced these public floggings, and if it wouldn’t have gotten him fired, profanity would have as well. I could always tell when he was winding up because he’d close his eyes for several seconds and take a deep breath before thundering on. After notes check, we were on our own, expected to contribute a certain number of comments before class ended or risk failing the discussion, which was worth a percentage of our final grade. Dr. M. kept score, marking pluses (intelligent comments), checkmarks (marginal comments), or minuses (asinine comments) on the seating chart when we spoke. He awarded a limited number of As, so pressure to squeeze in comments was intense. These discussions were an introvert’s nightmare: forced conversation with acquaintances under artificial circumstances, where we had to break in and remark on a topic we knew little about while subject to evaluation. William Pannapacker explains that such intense scrutiny of students’ every moment in the classroom “can aggravate tendencies toward introversion and shyness among students who formerly showed their capabilities through tests and papers and by raising their hands to answer questions in class.”11 In other words, introverts previously confident in their capabilities shut down under such circumstances and question their aptitude. Marti Olsen Laney, author of The Hidden Gifts of the Introverted Child, cites research showing that introverts are often more sensitive to scrutiny.12 That was certainly true in my case; Dr. M.’s abrasive style, combative tone, and competitive environment jangled my nerves and made it hard to think, much less speak. As such, I slept poorly

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the night before a graded discussion, especially since the school day provided almost no opportunities for the quiet “battery recharge” time introverts need. Robert Coplan points to activities like graded discussions as a factor in making school difficult for introverts. He describes the school environment as a collection of “often-crowded, high-stimulation rooms [focused] on oral performance” and asserts that “Whoever designed the context of the modern classroom was certainly not thinking of the shy or quiet kids.”13 Similarly, Burruss and Kaenzig explain that the school day is comprised almost entirely of socially demanding situations for both learning and recreation (crowded cafeterias at lunch, chaotic playgrounds at recess), which “benefit[s] extroverts” because it “match[es] their needs and learning differences.”14 Given such an environment, “it is not surprising that school is not a positive experience for many gifted introverts.”15 Still, with a few exceptions, I liked school. Like many introverts, I was comfortable socializing one-on-one and in small groups. My introversion even made me sought after as a friend because I liked listening and could maintain a confidence. Introversion also proved an advantage when entering new social situations because I preferred to observe before weighing in, thereby reducing the chances I would unintentionally create strife. I liked to read and take notes, which meant I was as prepared as possible for graded discussions, making them slightly less painful. Though I resented being required to talk whether I had something worth saying or not and envied my extrovert peers for the ease of their classroom participation, I managed to get in enough “quality” comments to do well in Dr. M.’s class. I’d like to say surviving graded discussions was a turning point, that I began participating eagerly in every class. It wasn’t. When given a choice, I still hid in the back of the classroom, where I’d become comfortable thanks to seating charts, and teachers sometimes forgot I existed. I was rarely absent, so they didn’t have to bother with makeup work. I was stone-faced, betraying nothing on my face as to what was going on inside, so I didn’t demand disciplinary attention, and I didn’t want much of any other kind of attention. As a result, mine was always the last name teachers learned. One advantage of introversion, however, was that I liked to write. I could tell when a teacher had read my first essay, even if he/she hadn’t handed it back. He/she looked at me differently, as if seeing me for the first time. I called this the “light bulb look.” So there are wheels turning in there, it marveled. From that point on, a teacher remembered my name. I’m certain I was born an introvert, and researchers agree that introversion is hardwired.16 But I wonder if being told so often that I was

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quiet created a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more teachers told me I was quiet, the more I believed it, and the quieter I became. After all, good students do what their teachers tell them. Ironically, the teacher who first showed me the gifts being an introvert bestows was an off-the-chart extrovert. My first introduction to him came weeks before my first day of high school. “Hello?” I gasped, wincing as I stubbed my toe on the metal leg of our kitchen table while diving for the phone. I hoped the call was the Homecoming dance invitation rumor predicted I would receive. “May I speak to Miss Lisa Whalen please?” Though the caller didn’t have a discernable accent, his diction conjured images of Buckingham Palace. “This is she.” “Very good, Miss Whalen! Excellent! So few people use correct grammar when answering the telephone!” “Uh … thanks.” “This is Mr. Kolterman. I will be your homeroom teacher at Westside High School for the next four years, so I’m calling to introduce myself and welcome you … ” Oh, God. I knew Mr. Kolterman. Everyone knew Mr. Kolterman. His celebrity extended beyond the narrow, locker-lined halls of Westside. For a generation, students had used the term “Kolternotes” to describe homework in his English classes. Kolternotes were word-processed, sectioned by chapter, cited by page, and highlighted to reflect a text’s literary symbols and themes. Worse, he actually graded notes instead of glancing to see they’d been completed as he walked the classroom perimeter. He underlined and starred passages he thought exceptional, checkmarked appropriate commentary, and stamped question marks beside phrases he considered questionable—at least according to gossip; few students received stars or underlines because he was the toughest grader in collective memory. I wouldn’t have to worry about that though; I was only in his homeroom … or so I thought. On the first day of homeroom, I heard a bass voice bellow, “TOOOOO-morrow, TO-morrow; I love ya, TO-morrow; you’re only a day a-way … ” The singer stopped as he passed through the glass doors of our homeroom, spread his arms in welcome, and looked at each of us before booming, “Well, hello, all! Welcome to a new school year!” The man standing before us was fifty-something years old. He wore jeans, a red sweater, a navy sport coat, and tennis shoes. He strolled to the

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large, central desk, sat down, crossed his legs, and took a healthy swig of coffee from the mug in his hand. “Hey Mr. K.,” said one of the seniors. If I hadn’t been so paralyzed by nerves my jaw would have fallen open. This was Mr. Kolterman?! “‘Hey’ is not a proper greeting in the English language, Mr. Hansen,” the man replied. He raised his eyebrows and, staring from beneath them, fixed the senior with a stony look. My bowels chilled. I couldn’t breathe. But after a beat, his face melted into a grin. The guy nodded and smiled back. Everyone laughed, and the hovering tension dissipated like fog in late-morning sunshine. Apparently, this was Mr. Kolterman. He looked nothing like any teacher I’d ever met. Because of his perfect posture, he seemed taller than the six feet, four inches he measured. His presence was even larger, filling a room the moment he entered. He was bald, except for salt-and-pepper strands gathered into a ponytail that matched his goatee. A silver hoop dangled from his left earlobe, and a large, polished-stone pendant hung from his neck. Two long, tan fingers were adorned with turquoise rings. Extrovert that he was, Mr. K. became our morning entertainment, sharing details of his life outside of school. For example, he’d earned the role of Daddy Warbucks in a community theater production of Annie, which was why he’d greeted us with its theme song. We heard about the adventures of his Terrier, Artie, whom he claimed was a genius, and his gray Suburban, which he named “The Beast” in tribute to his favorite novel, Lord of the Flies. He proudly explained that seniors in his British Literature class had created the pencil drawings of Beowulf, paper replicas of Sir Gawain’s journey, and original poems imitating Chaucer’s style that were displayed on our homeroom walls. One morning in May he entered homeroom reciting Hamlet’s graveyard soliloquy while pretending to hold Yorick’s skull. The speech was more appropriate than I initially realized, for he held our futures in his hand: class schedules for the following year. To heighten the drama, he turned doling out the precious paper into a theatrical production, handing each to its recipient with an accompanying drumroll or comment. Like seating charts, schedules were printed in alphabetical order, so mine was last. Finally, Mr. K. turned to me, cocked his eyebrow, and said in Dracula’s voice, “Heh, heh, heh … welllllcome.” I didn’t understand until I saw “Honors English, Kolterman” printed four days per week. I’d be doing Kolternotes. As with his personal appearance, Mr. K.’s teaching style wasn’t what I expected. Given his extroversion and theatrical style, I thought he’d wax eloquent in lectures and implement “stand and recite” Socratic

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questioning. Instead, he understood introverts. He abhorred seating charts, asking us to form a circle instead, which meant I no longer had to repeat myself to be heard. He mixed discussion and interactive lecture with inclass writing, which limited the amount of social participation required. And unlike Dr. M., he helped us wade into discussion one step at a time. For our first discussion of Lord of the Flies, he declared the classroom an island and handed the first speaker a conch shell. We understood the implication immediately: the conch signaled who had the floor; talking out of turn was not allowed. When a student had something to say, he/she beckoned for the conch. This got us rolling, and before long, we were holding substantive, free-flowing discussions without the conch or threats of penalized grades. I wasn’t the most talkative student in the class, but on Mr. K.’s island, I spoke. At the end of my sophomore year, Mr. K. held tight to my junior class schedule as I tried to accept it from him. “You’re going to take British Literature as a senior, right?” he asked. The thought hadn’t crossed my mind. Only the best of the best took Brit. Lit., and I didn’t consider myself among them. The fact that Mr. K. did changed my perception of myself. Unfortunately, Mr. K. died from cancer before my senior year. Without him, British Literature was rumored not to be the same. I took a different class instead, but I never forgot his suggestion and what it implied about my capability. I also never forgot his teaching style or the practice I gained speaking in his class. My quiet nature followed me through college, but in graduate school I sought opportunities to tutor undergraduates in writing. I loved coming up with new ways to explain concepts and seeing students light up with confidence when they understood. An instructor who became my mentor, Ms. Z., insisted I would like teaching and be good at it, but I knew she was wrong. Teaching involved a lot of talking: talking to classrooms full of students, talking to conference halls full of colleagues, talking to auditoriums full of experts. Although I was unfulfilled in my secretarial job, I liked its balance of brief casual conversations with coworkers followed by long stretches of independent work at my desk. Even answering the phone became tolerable because conversations had a clear purpose and rarely required more than reciting a script before transferring the call to its intended recipient. I couldn’t imagine trading that comfort for a job that seemed as exclusively suited to extroverts as teaching. But Ms. Z. uttered two statements that served as turning points in my career. The first was an offhand remark during a conversation in which I reminded her I couldn’t teach because I couldn’t speak publicly. She

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began shaking her head of frizzy black curls before I’d finished speaking and replied, “It does require a lot of energy. I’m more comfortable sitting in my office, but I love teaching.” Her remark bore the hallmarks of an introvert, and yet she was one of the most effective teachers I knew. A fierce advocate for students, she spoke as quickly as an auctioneer when excited about an idea, giggled infectiously when amused, and used her hands to illustrate ideas when speaking. She seemed entirely at ease in the classroom, as comfortable there as rustling cattle on horseback in the Montana mountains, which was her summer hobby. The second statement was part of a similar conversation that took place after I’d observed her ping-ponging with endless energy from classrooms to student conferences and from staff meetings to curriculum planning sessions. In awe of her ability to focus on the task at hand and then come to me immediately afterward with five new ideas for other projects, I could barely keep pace with the bullet train of her intellect, much less her confidence in the classroom, all of which I considered further proof I wasn’t cut out to teach. But she pointed out that many college professors are, in fact, introverts. They gained expertise in their disciplines because they enjoy reading, studying, thinking, and reflecting. She added, “Introverts often make the best teachers because they don’t seek an audience. They prefer to keep the focus on ideas, on what students are saying and learning rather than on performing.” Research and firsthand reports from academics support Ms. Z.’s observation. Henson and Chambers found that a teacher’s introversion or extroversion on the Myers-Briggs inventory is not correlated to his/her classroom effectiveness.17 I studied Ms. Z’s thorough lesson plans, which included a list of what to bring to class, what learning objectives she intended to accomplish, and what announcements about events on campus she wanted to share with students, and realized they weren’t so different from the scripts I relied on to answer phones. For the first time in my life I started to believe I could teach. My early teaching experiences were draining simply because they required fighting my intrinsic nature. Not only the night before, but the entire week before I agreed to serve as a substitute in Ms. Z.’s class—my first time as a classroom instructor—I couldn’t sleep. I dreamt of students challenging me en masse, shouting that I didn’t know what I was talking about and that I couldn’t make them do anything they didn’t want to do. I worried I wouldn’t have the charisma to convince them to buy in to what I said and follow my lead. I knew I was an imposter, so why wouldn’t they?

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Every time I conjured standing before them, I pictured high school, and my stomach clenched in fear. All I had to do that day was facilitate peer review (a process in which students gather in small groups to read and respond to each other’s essay drafts). Ms. Z. left me a detailed lesson plan and talked me through it ahead of time, but my hands shook when I wrote my name on the chalkboard. I can still picture the classroom, the arrangement of desks, the clothes I wore, the giddy shock I felt when students began sliding chairs into groups as I’d asked them to. I’m sure they could tell by the quiver in my voice that I was nervous, but Ms. Z. had prepared them so well for my appearance that everything went smoothly. After all that buildup and expending so much of my social capital, I was nearly catatonic with relief for the rest of the afternoon; every conversation that followed mined the last dredges of my energy reserve. That evening I collapsed and slept for eleven hours. Now that I’ve been teaching ten years, I still recall what Ms. Z. said when I feel I don’t have the social battery power to teach, participate in meetings, navigate the loud, crowded hallways, and then make small talk while I check my mailbox. Pannapacker also describes teaching exactly as I’ve experienced it: “The first weeks of classes are a strain … [but] my introversion fades when I become comfortable with unfamiliar people.”18 I, too, find that once my students become familiar individuals instead of a crowd of strangers, I’m comfortable. I care about them and about the content I’m teaching, which negates any apprehension about speaking publicly. Like Pannapacker and Ms. Z., I’ve learned to prolong my social battery through “careful planning, acting, and rationing my public appearances.”19 Careful planning is central to my life as a teacher, and introversion provides advantages in that regard. First, lesson planning requires contemplating a topic, anticipating students’ needs, solving problems, and developing creative approaches for applying knowledge—activities introverts enjoy and excel at. Second, although I’ve become comfortable speaking publicly, I don’t seek it, so I design lessons that ask students to think, apply, practice, talk, and write about new concepts. Instead of listening to me as passive vessels waiting to be filled with information, they fill one another by reflecting on and sharing experiences, thereby constructing knowledge actively. For example, to teach parts of speech in a developmental (remedial) composition course, I adapted the card game “UNO.” Students played according to the normal rules with one added element: each number on the cards corresponded to a part of speech. A player had to state aloud a previously unmentioned example of the part of

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speech indicated by a card’s number in order to play his/her turn. Other players could challenge the given example if they thought it was incorrect. I refereed challenges, explaining which player was correct and why. The loser of the challenge had to draw three cards, which lessened his or her chances of winning the game. I knew the activity was successful when a particularly difficult student asked for help with adjectives. I gave her the definition and added, “For example, describing my shirt will provide you with a few adjectives.” I anticipated hearing “blue” or “long-sleeved,” but as I walked away, she laid down a card and said, “old fashioned.” I had to laugh. It wasn’t how I’d like my wardrobe to be described, but she clearly understood adjectives. When planning lessons, I consider introverts’ and extroverts’ likely reactions. I strive to provide opportunities for the quiet reflection introverts prefer with the social challenge they need. I feel a responsibility to prepare them to navigate an American culture that favors extroversion.20 Therefore, when I tell them we’ll have whole-class discussions, I describe my own student experiences, adding that speaking became easier with practice. One or two quiet students in the back of the room often perk up at that point. Marti Olsen Laney acknowledges that such admissions make the classroom more comfortable for introverts: “It means so much for a teacher to admit, ‘you know, sometimes I feel kind of shy as well.’ It can do a lot to normalize everyone’s behavior and to prevent temperament differences from being made into something good or bad.”21 I also try to make introverts comfortable by beginning with small group discussions and increasing group size gradually. I provide questions in advance so each student has time to consider them and prepare responses. Before the first whole-class discussion, I ask students to write responses to the questions: “What challenges do you anticipate facing during the class discussion (e.g., shyness about talking publicly, tendency to dominate discussion, struggles with reading comprehension, etc.)?” and “How can you overcome these challenges? Describe at least two specific steps you will take to help yourself overcome them.” Then, before we begin the discussion, I allow five minutes of quiet thinking time so students can review their notes and gather their thoughts. Providing a range options for participation also helps. Students can choose to be a facilitator, timekeeper, recorder, or orator. The facilitator ensures each person speaks by asking for input from any student who hasn’t spoken. The timekeeper ensures the group spends some time on each question and moves on to the next question if conversation stalls. The recorder provides summary notes to the whole class after the discussion.

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The orator recaps the most important insights for everyone to hear at the end of the discussion. No student is allowed to fulfill the same role consecutively, so although no one is forced into leadership, everyone is encouraged to practice it at least once during the term. While I implemented most of these techniques with introverts in mind, I found they also benefit extroverts. One extrovert who dominated discussions early on discovered that by pausing to think before speaking, he contributed more thoughtful comments and better remembered discussion content later. He also began to draw out students who rarely spoke. His observations are supported by Susan Cain’s research. In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, she explains that extroverts who learn how to reflect before speaking and how to work alone perform better on standardized tests and other measures of learning.22 Although I’m not the entertainer Mr. K. was and don’t have the careermentoring expertise of Ms. Z., I’ve learned to take advantage of my own unique brand of introversion. Students come with a wide variety of learning styles and personalities, so it makes sense that they benefit by learning from teachers who are just as varied in their personalities and teaching styles. One of the most gratifying endorsements of introversion I’ve encountered came from the award-winning author of The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang, during her lecture at North Hennepin Community College on February 3, 2014.23 She told the audience that when she finished the lecture, she planned to go home and spend the rest of the day not speaking in order to recoup the energy she spent speaking publicly and to immerse herself in the quiet reflection time required for writing. My hope is that with more such acknowledgments, America will shift from favoring extroversion to seeing introversion and extroversion as equally important ingredients in a melting pot.

Notes 1

Jill D. Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig, “Introversion: The Often Forgotten Factor Impacting the Gifted,” Center for Gifted Education at the College of William and Mary, available from education.wm.edu/, accessed January 14, 2014. 2 Burruss and Kaenzig, “Introversion,” 3. 3 Quoted in Sarah D. Sparks, “Studies Highlight Classroom Plight of Quiet Students,” Education Week 31, no. 32 (2012): 1, 16. 4 Laurie Helgoe, “Revenge of the Introvert,” Psychology Today, last modified November 27, 2013, http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201008/revengethe-introvert.

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Burruss and Kaenzig, “Introversion,” 3. Hannah Trierweiler, “The Hidden Gift of Quiet Kids,” Instructor 115, no. 7 (2006): 23–25. 7 Sparks, “Studies Highlight Classroom Plight of Quiet Students,” 9. 8 Burruss and Kaenzig, “Introversion,” 4. 9 Burruss and Kaenzig, “Introversion,” 4. 10 Sparks, “Studies Highlight Classroom Plight of Quiet Students,” 16. 11 William Pannapacker, “Screening Out the Introverts,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, last modified April 15, 2014, https://chronicle.com/article/ScreeningOut-the-Introverts/131520/. 12 Marti Olsen Laney, The Hidden Gifts of the Introverted Child (New York: Workman, 2006), 189. 13 Quoted in Sparks, “Studies Highlight Classroom Plight of Quiet Students,” 8. 14 Burruss and Kaenzig, “Introversion,” 4. 15 Burruss and Kaenzig, “Introversion,” 4. 16 Trierweiler, “The Hidden Gift,” 23. 17 Robin. K. Henson and Sharon M. Chambers, “Personality Type as a Predictor of Teacher Efficacy and Classroom Control in Emergency Certification Teachers,” Education 124, no. 2 (2003): 265. 18 Pannapacker, “Screening Out,” para. 16. 19 Pannapacker, “Screening Out,” para. 16. 20 Helgoe, “Revenge,” paras. 15–18. 21 Marti Olsen Laney, The Hidden Gifts of the Introverted Child (New York: Workman, 2006), 189, quoted in Trierweiler, “The Hidden Gift,” 25. 22 Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (New York: Crown Publishing, 2013), 36. 23 Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2008). 6

CHAPTER THIRTEEN FRIENDSHIP IN AN AGE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING, OR HOW I BECAME A LONER DENA MARKS

It’s commonly accepted in popular culture that social networking is a good thing. We are encouraged to attend conferences, mixers, and other social harems for the sake of selling ourselves on the professional marketplace. As Susan Cain relates in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, a student at Harvard Business School who did not attend daily social events felt as though he had failed at his graduate experience.1 But, maybe deliberately using people for personal gain, or what Cain calls an unspoken “naked social positioning,” should not be heralded as a marker of a successful social or business practice, but rather should be regarded as a shameful activity—or maybe not.2 When someone says, “I am going to New York this summer to network at a conference” that person means to say she or he is going to run an errand. That person buckles into a plane, checks into The Roger Smith Hotel, and then enters its conference hall to collect people like cans at the grocery store. And what horrid scenes these business card charnel yards must produce: Hi, I’m David. I work in Industrial Real Estate in New Jersey. Hi David. I’m John. That sounds like something from the Sopranos. Hah. Yes, that’s what everyone says. What do you do? I work for the mob. Hah. No but seriously, I sell staplers. Oh great, we need a new staple supplier. Oh great. Here’s my card, David.

Of course, this is outdated. I heard from a friend who attended a conference recently that business cards have gone the way of the fax machine. Apparently, participants wear name tags with barcodes on them now. Barcodes. If you have the right app, you can scan your new friend’s

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barcode, and her email address will automatically import into your address book. I wonder if conference-goers scan each other with straight faces— being already so fully turned into products, their masticatory muscles barely register the disturbance—or if the scanning produces a slight wry smile. A sad-faced emoticon. Or, maybe I am making too much of this. The hyperlinked name tag is certainly preferable to the hundreds of business cards that mean felled trees and towers of trash, as if nature cares. And, the immediacy of the scan means that you are all the more likely to enter into other people’s address books, so they have you when they need something. I am told that this is how the world works. That the people you meet at conferences offer information and services that become vital in your progress up the chain of demand. This practice benefited my sister, who attended a conference and became reacquainted with an old colleague, who subsequently created a job for her. People with expansive networks are more successful. They have better jobs. Cars. They know more. They are happier. This is what Malcolm Gladwell, David Brooks, and my freshmen sociology professor all tell me. They say there is no shame in deliberately building a network to be more successful. They say this, and I don’t want to believe them. Social networking has become so normalized by sociologists, along with adding “ized” to the end of any word, that we neglect to examine how perverse the concept may be, how antithetical it is to the idea of friendship or merit-based achievement. In sociological terms, a “social network” is a form of “social capital” to be earned, spent, and otherwise associated with monetary value.3 People who advocate for social justice simultaneously employ the concept of social networking to identify the aspects of poverty that obviate class ascension. Being excluded from the suburban social networks populated by rich, white people further ghettoizes people who live in poverty. Finding ways for people to receive better opportunities is undoubtedly a good thing. Yet, what is strange about the high value placed on networking is that the same people who decry the dehumanization of the poor further commodify them by speaking of relationships solely in terms of economic value. In contrast, the great essayist Michel de Montaigne writes that such relationships based on use are antithetical to friendship: All associations that are forged and nourished by pleasure or profit, by public or private needs, are the less beautiful and noble, and the less friendships, in so far as they mix into friendship another cause and object and reward than friendship itself.4

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Instead, he defines friendship as an indivisible relationship, not to be shared, that one enters without purpose besides the desire to enjoy one’s soul-mate.5 I am so respectful of the independent value of the human being that I have two friends. One of them lives comfortably states away and the other one shares my one bedroom apartment. My poverty of friendship derives (obviously) from my parents’ own attitudes towards people outside of the family. My mother’s favorite truism on friendship echoes Montaigne’s words: it’s better to have a few close friends than a hundred shallow ones. She would say that friendship happens with only a few people you happen to connect with. Or as Montaigne writes, “So many coincidences are needed to build up such a friendship that it is a lot if fortune can do it once in three centuries.”6 Friends are people who actually enjoy your company and they might do something for you with no expectation of return. They probably share your interests or background; maybe your personalities mesh particularly well. This may be a narcissistic, idealistic, and self-defeating way of considering relationships since it closes off the possibility of connecting with people who are other than you. But in my gullibility, I took her advice as sound and strove to find those one or two people with whom I could connect. Unsurprisingly, my birthday parties were always sad affairs. When three people splash each other in an indoor pool, the undersized noise echoes in the rafters and as it reverberates, it begins to sound something like silence. But, then, I was a homeschooler for whom being socially inept has become hackneyed. My mother’s individualism developed into a belief that school kills the spirit of young children through factory-like socialization. By being forced to sit down, do the same work as everyone else, and answer to a bell, young children are not able to develop the unique and special talents that they inherently possess. Like everything else in her life—food, sleep, products—she wanted to do school the natural way. Her Rousseauian faith in individual, original, natural goodness worried her parents, who feared that we would all turn into maladjusted anthropoids. This describes me pretty well, but I cannot really blame homeschooling for my untoward behavior. Of my five brothers and sisters, I was the one who homeschooled the least and yet I am the most socially inept. I actually think it was school that aggravated any latent introversion. When I entered school in second grade, I wanted to be the perfect little student. We were told to sit silently during lessons, so I avoided chatting with my neighbors. We were told not to converse in the halls, so I didn’t

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speak a peep to those before or behind me. The lunchroom, that place of commensal communion, required hushed speaking. There, a stop light attached to an aural sensor would change colors depending on the volume of noise in the cafeteria. A yellow light would elicit shouts from the lunchroom monitors warning us to quiet down! If the light turned red, as we all knew, we would have a silent lunch (something I really didn’t mind). It’s interesting, looking back, how it was school, where, as Cain notes, parents drop their kids at younger and younger ages for the primary purpose of socialization, that I received the introversion-affirming lesson that opportunities to engage with peers are best spent in silence.7 Though, to follow Cain, perhaps I was predisposed to silence in the halls and cafeteria through a combination of nature and nurture: a neurotic temperament matched with an introversion-encouraging family life.8 Indeed my shy personality was encouraged by negative lessons about socialization, both of which I absorbed from my mother and which, notably, reflect the derogatory manner in which the term “social network” was originally used. Now lost among contemporary espousals of the benefits of networking, John Bartholomew Gough (1817–86) first coined the term when he wrote, “I again became involved in a dissipated social network” to describe a group of drinking buddies who had a damaging influence on him.9 Much like the “peer pressure” my health teachers decried in middle school, a “social network” referred to the group that causes you to behave in a way that you would otherwise abhor. The concept retained its negative connotation until the mid-1950s when social scientists began to see social network analysis as a key way to understand how ideas and other infections spread. Now, the righteousness of social networks and social networking is touted as sooth by conservatives and liberals alike. In his review of Amy Chua’s controversial book about strict parenting, David Brooks calls Chua a “wimp” because she allowed her children to complete 2,000 math problems instead of forcing them to attend sleep-overs. Brooks writes: Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group—these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.10

What I find alarming about this statement is Brooks’s assumption that, for Chua’s children, navigating human relationships will be more important than their ability to do math. Spending time cultivating a social

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network is ultimately a choice that diminishes time that could be spent cultivating the skills that might benefit society, not to mention ultimately providing rewarding employment. I imagine what kind of writer I might have been if I had focused all of my energies on the craft instead of entering boring school. But then I chose writing as a career because I thought it would allow me to communicate with the public without actually having to talk to people, which is apparently a formula for certain doom. Malcolm Gladwell’s essay “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg,” published in the New Yorker and then republished in his book Tipping Point, makes you certain that if you do not concatenate with “connectors,” people who have vast networks, then you are surely destined for failure. Gladwell notices that Lois Weisberg has thousands of friends and that she helps these people by linking them together. Gladwell writes that, although some of us troglodytes hide in the caves, most of us are connected to someone who is connected to someone like Lois; I can’t remember by the exact number of links. But, if you have “social power,” as he calls it, you are more likely to acquire a job. Moreover, it’s not the people who are closest to you, but rather it’s your weak acquaintances who will connect you to your future boss. As Gladwell writes: What matters in getting ahead is not the quality of your relationships but the quantity … The people who got their jobs from a zero chain [directly from one of these weak acquaintances, without a referral] were the most satisfied, made the most money, and were unemployed for the shortest among of time between jobs.11

The comforting aspect of such people-collecting, as Gladwell writes at the end of his essay, is that Lois really likes all these people she helps. She’s not connecting strangers for the social power. She just really enjoys people. But, I wonder about a Wendy Willrich who comes to see her looking for a job. The way Gladwell describes the encounter, Lois first tells Wendy that she has no job for her and then, at the end of the meeting, Lois gives her a job. I wonder how it must really feel to be Lois. If she feels enjoyment or a little bit annoyed that people only come to see her in the hope that she will rescue them. Perhaps I have so few friends not only because of a philosophically romantic wish for non-utilitarian mutual enjoyment but also because I am one of those awkward people who is completely unpleasant to be around. I cower at parties, perhaps because, as Cain defines the introvert, I am acutely sensitive to “the dull roar of a networking event.”12 Holding my arms in front of me in large gatherings of strangers, I long for defense

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against the hordes of people I might offend or who probably prefer spending an evening in an ear-blasting bar than in a book. Only, I suppose reading is a form of social networking, too. I find a sense of warm compatibility with Freud when he argues that love is a rare honor that must be earned and that wariness is a more natural attitude toward other humans. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud explains his own inability to experience universal love of humanity, which would make an encounter with strangers an opportunity to connect with the infinite rather than a source of dread, as he writes: “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself … a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.”13 As Freud writes, not only do meetings with other people fail to create an “indissoluble bond,” but such interactions engender the most painful source of suffering.14 Freud justifies his anti-oceanic view of humanity by arguing that such a notion, one which makes all opportunities to meet and greet other people exciting, runs contrary to the standard definition of love, for “a love that does not discriminate seems … to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.”15 The strangers one meets at networking events may not only be unworthy of the kind of love that would motivate altruistic behavior, such as helping with a job search, such strangers may most naturally have a greater claim to “hostility” and even “hatred.”16 I think this natural fear of others is what makes social networking events such uncomfortable affairs, for I have a feeling that I am not the only one to follow Freud in treating strangers with suspicion, and if so, it seems odd that we are all so willing to force these interactions, to encounter the other and ask him/her for help even if that violates our more basic animal nature, though, of course, the concept of an “essential nature” is outmoded. Not only do humans probably lack an essential nature, as the existentialists argue, but, if we did have one, it’s debatable whether it is quite as devious as Freud supposed. Our current, favorable conception of encountering the Other partially derives from Emmanuel Levinas, who argues that all human activities ultimately serve a social function and should align with the Good or ethics. Levinas, a Lithuanian Jew born in 1906, whose family was almost totally eradicated by the Nazis, was rightfully concerned by the asocial end toward which existentialist philosophy can be taken.17 Instead of arguing, as Heidegger did, that people are free and therefore, should be left alone, Levinas contends that people are originally first thrown into the sociality of existence, which demands “a movement within the Same in the face of the Other … a movement that returns us to neither violence nor fatality.”18 Heidegger’s

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“letting be” becomes dangerous because “the law of evil is the law of being” since Being is nothing but “a struggle for life without ethics.”19 While animals and nature may struggle to survive in this manner, and here we might recall Freud, he notes that humans depart from nature and, therefore, ought instead meet the other with “curiosity … sympathy or love.”20 In this way, the primary relation with the other is not one of liberated isolation but of interlocution, an exchange which has the capacity to alter both parties.21 And that, I suppose, is what networking is ideally about. You go to a party and encounter utter strangers, people who you might not naturally click with, but who nonetheless share new information with you and elicit your desire to offer aid. Faced with the stranger in your midst, you cannot help but be motivated by pure altruism, though somehow I doubt that Levinas would consider the calculated meeting of others for the sake of social advancement a paragon of ethical exchange. After all, you are only available to meet the Other for selfish reasons: wishing to climb the social ladder, build your reputation, receive a job through the favorability of a stranger who perhaps unethically bypasses the meritocratic chain of faceless resumes and cover letters because of the call of your beatific eyes. And, I am there for selfish reasons, too, but awkwardly standing outside the circles of mingling networkers, speechless and not quite sure how to engage. A vision of a network hangs outside my door. A bowed wire connects my house to the cables running down the street. An identical limp wire does the same for the building next door. Although we are both connected to the streams of entertainment news, reality TV, cartoons, soap operas, and other animal programs coming through the cable lines, we are not connected to each other. The network brings us no closer to engaging in dialogue together; it only makes us equal receivers of the trash disseminated by people who drive Mercedes in Los Angeles. Notice that in my introduction to this “vision,” I described it as a “network” rather than a “social network,” which enabled me to draw attention to the intersections between image and concept rather than incongruities. In a social network, unlike a cable network, people do communicate ideas directly to each other. But, what I wanted to show through that image is how two sets of people can be members of a social network and receive the same information from the outside without ever deeply connecting. Not that I watch TV. Not that I want to interact with my neighbors. Not that.

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Notes 1 Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (New York: Random House, 2013), 47. 2 Cain, Quiet, 40. 3 Silvia Dominguez, “Social Capital,” in Encyclopedia of Social Work, ed. Terry Mizrahi and Larry E. Davis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 34–35. 4 Michel de Montaigne, “Of Friendship,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 136. 5 Michel de Montaigne, “Of Friendship,” 137, 141. 6 Michel de Montaigne, “Of Friendship,” 136. 7 Cain, Quiet, 27. 8 Cain, Quiet, 111. 9 “Social,” in OED Online, Oxford University Press, accessed March 12, 2014, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/183739?redirectedFrom=social+network. 10 David Brooks, “Amy Chua Is a Wimp,” The New York Times, January 17, 2011, accessed March 14, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18brooks .html?_r=0. 11 Malcolm Gladwell, “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg,” Gladwell.com, last modified January 11, 1999, http://gladwell.com/six-degrees-of-lois-weisberg/. 12 Cain, Quiet, 124. 13 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 11, 12. 14 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 14. 15 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 57. 16 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 67. 17 Adriaan Peperzak, preface to Basic Philosophical Writings, by Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996), vii–ix. 18 Emmanuel Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” in Peperzak, Critchley, and Bernasconi, eds., Basic Philosophical Writings, 20. 19 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas,” trans. Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright, in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), 172, 176, 20 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Paradox of Morality,” 172, 175, 21 Emmanuel Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” in Peperzak, Critchley, and Bernasconi, eds., Basic Philosophical Writings, 6.

CONTRIBUTORS

Megan Cannella received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English Literature from Bradley University. She is currently an adjunct instructor of English at Joliet Junior College and soon hopes to begin her pursuit of a Ph.D. Megan’s research focuses primarily on ecocriticism, geocriticism, and urban studies. As a result, she is currently the Urban Studies Area Chair for the MPCA/ACA and has also served as a presiding officer over geocritically themed panels at the 2013 and 2014 PAMLA Conferences. She has published book reviews with the Journal of Ecocriticism. Currently, Megan is working on several projects regarding the ramifications of urban space, including a paper for the 2014 MMLA Conference titled, “East Coast Urban Escapism, Midwest Urban Space, and Midwest Reconciliation in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections,” as well as a few projects which explore the power of national and gendered identities. Tamara Girardi teaches literature and composition at Harrisburg Area Community College and creative writing for independent writing groups, conferences and retreats. She holds a B.A. in English and Humanities (Jacksonville University, Florida), an MLitt in Creative Writing (University of St. Andrews, Scotland), and a Ph.D. in English (Indiana University of Pennsylvania). Tamara’s doctoral dissertation, It Can Be Acquired and Learned: Building a Writer-Centered Pedagogical Approach to Creative Writing, argues for a balance of practice and theory in daily assignments and attention to student writing and reading preferences. Tamara writes young adult fiction, and her academic research interests include creative writing studies, online learning, student engagement, and writer-centeredness. Edmund R. Goode is an adjunct professor at Agnes Scott College, where he teaches first-year writing and American literature. He has published on the New England Transcendentalists, especially their interest in Asian and Middle Eastern literatures. He served as a faculty member at Villanova University, and he earned his Ph.D. in English literature at Cornell University. He graduated with a B.A. in English from Columbia College in New York City.

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Andrew Grossman is the editor of the anthology Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade (2001), a co-editor of Bright Lights Film Journal, a columnist for PopMatters, and a contributor to The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. He has contributed book chapters to numerous anthologies, including New Korean Cinema (2005), Chinese Connections: Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora (2009), Film and Literary Modernism (2013), Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (2014), The Directory of World Cinema: China, Vol. 2 (2014), Movies in the Age of Obama: The Era of Post-Racial and Neo-Racist Cinema (2014), and Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics (2014). He also produced and directed a feature documentary, Not That Kind of Christian!!, which appeared at the 2007 Montreal World Film Festival. Rebecca Karimi is finishing her doctorate in Comparative Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Her interdisciplinary work focuses on Mexican American history, oral history, communications, and transitional justice. As a primary investigator for her own research project on the Mexican American population in San Antonio, Texas, Karimi’s work culminated in two presentations for the Texas Oral History Association Meeting in 2012 and the Oral History Association National Meeting in 2006. She published a work of creative nonfiction entitled, “Café con Leche Americana” in Multicultural Reflections on “Race and Change”, by Bordighera Press. The Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded her a Research Fellowship at the African American Research Library & Cultural Center in Ft. Lauderdale, FL which resulted in several publications and presentations. Dena Marks is a doctoral candidate in English at Louisiana State University and holds a master’s degree in Liberal Studies from the New School for Social Research. She has published poetry, creative non-fiction, and scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals such as The New Sound: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art & Literature, Association for the Study of Ethical Behavior in Literature Journal, Luvah: Journal of the Creative Imagination, and Bhatter College Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies. She also co-authored a composition handbook entitled LSU’s First-Year Student Writing Guide. She plans to graduate from LSU in December 2014. Ron Rizzi shares his informative point of reference on select relevant topics daily on social media venues. He is an experienced professional in many forms of communication, including Public Relations, Advertising,

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Contributors

and Digital Media. He is a Technology Professional. A SUNY–Oswego graduate, he has worked in Public and Commercial Radio as an announcer, music producer, and program director as well as a Class A FM radio station owner. He has also been deeply involved in information technology spanning the advent of the personal computer to the age of social media and the smart phone. His technological experience includes corporate software and hardware course development and training for the American Management Association in NYC, acting as National Technical Manager for Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, as well as teaching Business Law in Atlanta, Georgia. He can be found on LinkedIn as one of the top connected members; he resides in Delray Beach, Florida. Ben P. Robertson has taught writing and literature (mostly 18th- and 19th-century British) at Troy University since 2003. His most significant publications include The Travel Writings of John Moore (4 vols., Pickering & Chatto, 2014), Elizabeth Inchbald’s Reputation (Pickering & Chatto, 2013), Inchbald, Hawthorne and the Romantic Moral Romance (Pickering & Chatto, 2010), and The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald (3 vols., Pickering & Chatto, 2007). He is the bibliographer for the Keats-Shelley Journal and recently compiled a complete digital archive of the Alabama Literary Review (http://spectrum.troy.edu/alr). Artur Skweres obtained his Ph.D. in literary studies from the School of English of Adam Mickiewicz University, PoznaĔ, Poland. He is assistant professor in the English Department of the Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts (Kalisz, Poland) of the same university. He has participated in numerous international conferences and has received the Prize of the Recto at Adam Mickiewicz University in 2011. His academic interests comprise English and American literature, media ecology, film adaptations, and film in foreign language teaching. Recently his main focus of research has centered on the interplay between the old and the new in adaptations. His hobby and passion is studying foreign languages. Lauren Smith is an assistant professor of English at Delta College in central Michigan, teaching academic, creative, and developmental writing. In the summer of 2014, she was also a visiting faculty member at Harbin Institute of Technology in China. Her essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of print and online publications, and she holds a Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction Writing from Bennington College. Her research interests include pedagogy, performance, and the self in context.

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Nevena Stojanovic is a lecturer in the English Department at West Virginia University. She teaches courses in composition and rhetoric and American literature and culture. Her research centers on presentations of Jewish identities in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American and transatlantic literatures, nomadism and displacement, rearticulations of selfhood in contact zones, and radical performance art. She has published her work in Otherness: Essays and Studies and has forthcoming publications in the Henry James Review and the Theatre Journal. She has presented her research at international conferences in the United States and the United Kingdom. She is currently working on a book that examines performances of Jewishness in non-Jewish American novels at the turn of the twentieth century. Jeannetta Vermeulen majored in writing and cultural studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. She completed an honors thesis analyzing the role of social media on personal identity and human experience, as well as gaining a Master of Creative Writing degree at the same institute. Her scholarly interests revolve around the social elements of subcultures and specialized activities, with particular regard to its effect on personal expression and identity formation. She is currently completing a Ph.D. at Curtin University that explores the perception of different fan cultures from both an internal and external position. Lisa Whalen has a Ph.D. in postsecondary and adult education from Capella University and an M.A. in creative and critical writing from Hamline University. She teaches writing and literature at North Hennepin Community College in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, and has mentored graduate students preparing to teach college composition. Her published work includes book reviews and articles on teaching writing, directing writing centers, and fostering students’ social and emotional growth through the study of narratives. Her fiction was accepted for presentation at the Writing by Degrees graduate writing conference at Binghamton University, and her creative nonfiction has been included in several edited collections as well as peer-reviewed journals. She presents regularly on teaching and assessing writing at a variety of national conferences.