Yesterday was spent ushering freshmen through a second day of the Don Juan in Hell section from Man and Superman and upper-division students through Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present (which, besides striking the students as a hellish experience, includes a famous snark about the modern English version of "hell"). The freshmen, while much relieved by the prospect of escaping hell, had a rather better grasp of Shaw than the older students had of Carlyle--which, given Carlyle's grand Old Testament prophet mode, is understandable. Still, it was difficult to get the second group away from thinking about Carlyle's style as "too wordy." As a practical matter, I think it's important to teach students how to turn stumbling blocks into productive questions: not "too many words!" but "what are the words doing?" It's very easy for students to fall into the trap of thinking that a difficult literary work doesn't want them to read it, as it were, and I don't want them to feel that studying Victorian literature is some sort of adversarial activity; Carlyle, after all, isn't out to torture us, and we aren't here to "interrogate" him.
Next week, the older students start reading Villette, which I've never taught before. (Unfortunately, I can't rely on anyone having read Jane Eyre, one student aside.) Rereading it myself, I'm struck again by the odd opening chapters, in which Lucy Snowe not only doesn't do anything, but also seems shunted off to the margins of what is purportedly her own narrative. And yet, her observations of the figures around her establish the shape of her character very quickly indeed. It's no wonder that she's amused by Madame Beck; the two of them have more in common than Lucy acknowledges! On a different note, I'm not sure how the students will respond to the novel's blatant anti-Catholicism. When I teach Jane Eyre, the students (including the Catholic students) usually don't notice the novel's mostly figurative anti-Catholic language until I point it out to them; here, though, it's right out in the open.