Literature―Before, Behind, and Beyond

by Cher Orebaugh, Writing Resources

A few years ago, I attended a workshop by Larry Johannessen in which he advised framing our classroom invitations to write about texts in terms of prepositions―write before literature... write into literature... write behindliterature. Around ... across ... along with―well, you get the idea. I liked thinking about writing this way. I understood what he meant, and I thought it was as true for reading as it was for writing. For example, to read (and write) beforeliterature is what some now call frontloading. The word into suggests constructing meaning while reading and writing. And usually assessments of some kind follow behind literacy events.

I was thinking about these prepositions as I planned for my English students' reading of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, a novel that I had taught each fall for the past half dozen years. This was a challenging read for my seniors. The book is long, the interwoven family relationships confusing, and the vocabulary, the dialogue, and even the syntax are unfamiliar and difficult.

I thought of the ways I usually prepared my students with an opinionnaire, a documentary film about the Brontes and Haworth in the nineteenth century, and a presentation by my colleague, a Scots-born history teacher who had lived in northern England. We also made journal entries on dating, on lost loves, and in response to a recording by Kate Bush about someone named "Heathcliff." Then I recalled the assessments that followed our study of the novel. Students wrote web-based research reports, poems, short essays, and a literary analysis.

Reviewing Johannessen's framework of prepositions, I realized that I had created many before and behind strategies for Wuthering Heights. What was lacking was the into. The real difficulty for my students was reading through the book. Study guide questions and journal writes just weren't enough. How could I sustain their interest and encourage their persistent effort to read and engage in a 300+ page novel filled with passages such as:

With that concluding word the whole assembly, exalting their pilgrim's staves, rushed round me in a body; and I, having no weapon to raise in self-defence, commenced grappling with Joseph, my nearest and most ferocious assailant, for his. In the confluence of the multitude, several clubs crossed; blows, aimed at me, fell on other sconces. Presently the whole chapel resounded with rappings and counter-rappings; every man's hand was against his neighbour; and Branderham, unwilling to remain idle, poured forth his zeal in a shower of loud taps on the boards of the pulpit, which responded so smartly that, at last, to my unspeakable relief, they woke me. (p. 29)

Or:

Aw wonder hagh yah can faishion tuh stand there i' idleness un war, when all on 'em 's goan aght! Bud yah 're a nowt, and it 's noa use talking--yah'll niver mend uh yer ill ways; bud, goa raight tuh t' devil, like yer mother afore ye! (p. 20)

Just a few weeks earlier at NCTE's annual convention, I had attended two teacher-led workshops on using literary theory to enrich literature instruction. I had been trained in the era of the New Critics (explication and close reading). I often defaulted to historical criticism (applying historical information about the time in which an author wrote), and I was experimenting with more current reader-response approaches (focusing on the connection between the reader and the text). But my repertoire was limited, and I had never overtly taught my students about literary theory by naming and explaining the theoretical contexts that we were using to explore and understand text.

In one of the workshops a teacher demonstrated how she had employed psychological critical theory to teach a novel, using "the psychology of a character...to figure out the meaning of a text" (Appleman, 2000, p. 157). This was an ah-ha! moment for me. The characters in Wuthering Heights―tempestuous Catherine, brooding Heathcliff, nosy Nellie, resentful Hindley, and sniveling Linton―had always fascinated my students. This was the approach I was looking for.

To introduce literary theory and multiple perspectives, I brought to class a clear glass prism and a pair of 3-D glasses. When my students peered through the prism at any object, they saw one image, the same image, repeated over and over within the range of view. No matter what was targeted through the prism, only one flat aspect, cloned a hundred times, was visible. While the view was momentarily interesting to students, when I asked them what it would be like to see the world all the time in such a way, most felt it would be a limited way to exist.

Next, they tried out the 3-D glasses. These lenses altered what they saw, bringing some parts of the image closer, lending hues of red and green to portions, making them stand out, highlighting what was there. What 3-D glasses did for the view, I explained, is what literary theory does for reading. Donning the different lenses of literary theories, among them Marxist criticism, feminist criticism, structuralism, deconstruction, and reader response, helps us see a novel or play or poem from different perspectives, guides us in ways to think about texts, and adds depth to our perceptions and understandings of those texts.

And so began our psychological study of Wuthering Heights. We invited our school psychologist to class to discuss the background and development of the field of psychology, including the theories of Carl Jung. Jung was the first to propose that every person has a personality type. Personality typing is not meant to simply label individuals; rather it is a tool for self-discovery. Jung proposed three categories of personality, and, later, Myers-Briggs proposed a fourth:

• Our flow of energy―how we are focused
  I (introvert)?
  E (extrovert)?
• How we take in information/do we trust...
  S (sensing)?
  N (intuition)?
• How we make decisions/do we use...
  T (thinking and logic)?
  F (feelings)?
• How we deal with the world, day to day
  J (judging, meaning organized/structured)?
  P (perceiving, meaning casual/flexible)?

According to the theory of personality type, individuals have natural preferences in these four categories which indicate ways they are likely to deal with life situations. Sixteen possible combinations can be formed using these preferences. The letters that represent the preferences combine to provide the Myers-Briggs personality types, such as ENTP (extrovert, intuition, thinking, perceiving) or ISFJ (introvert, sensing, feeling, judging). (If you're not familiar with Myers-Briggs or just want to refresh your memory, see Box 1 to view the version of the Myers-Briggs chart I use with a class assignment. More detailed information about Myers-Briggs and personality types is available on the web at Wikipedia.com and many other sites―search under the name Myers-Briggs.)

My students and I answered questions on a short temperament sorter offered online at Humanmetrics.com and AdvisorTeam.org. Students were enthusiastic when they came to class with the results and were eager to share and compare. We began by sorting ourselves, physically, by category. Introverts moved to one end of the room while extroverts gathered at the other. There were both exclamations of surprise and murmurs of agreement as they regarded each other. Lots of discussion ensued. We moved from one side of the room to the other as we revealed our categories. Every student participated, and their lively discussion continued, even as they left the room at the end of class. In the weeks that followed, students continued to look at and talk about their personality preferences, considering how those proposed tendencies might relate to their learning styles, career choices, or, someday, marriage partners. I cautioned them that these preferences were based on a very abbreviated form of the real temperament sorter. Yet even I, a supposed INFJ, began to examine how my apparent preferences could influence my teaching style and, in turn, how that style could affect the learning of my variably typed students.

Interwoven with these explorations into personality types were regular class discussions about Wuthering Heights and its strange and conflicted characters. Each of us attempted to type the main characters, Catherine and Heathcliff. All classes agreed that Catherine was an EFP but could not reach consensus on S/N. Conversely, one class overwhelmingly saw Heathcliff as an ISTJ. A second class, however, was evenly split between I and E, S and N, T and F, and J and P. All their decisions, of course, grew out of the text, based on the actions of characters and their relationships, on the points of view of the narrators, and on the rich dialogue and what it revealed. For the first time in teaching this novel, I had students keeping up on the reading schedule, thinking carefully and thoughtfully about the book, and ready for our class discussions. In tandem, students continued to talk about their own preferences and how those apparent leanings might affect their own relationships in family settings, in school, and in life. I now had students not only reading the novel but also reading the world and their place in it.

Proof of student engagement in Wuthering Heights was evidenced in the final assessment I gave―an out-of-class paper that required students to overlay their knowledge of the characters with their new-found insights about personality and temperament. These were the instructions:

Every student had an opinion. Almost every student used detailed textual support to prove that opinion. Above all, their papers showed an extraordinary depth of understanding.

The value of exploring multiple perspectives in literature revealed itself to me in another extraordinary way. One of the many writing options offered to students (poems, character obituaries, imaginary newspaper articles about the story, book buddy journaling, and quick-writes) invited them to submit an original fictional piece related to the novel. The paper in Box 2 shows how one student explored the mysterious origins of Heathcliff, a waif found by Mr. Earnshaw in the gutters of Liverpool. Bronte never reveals Heathcliff's lineage or his history. But this student's masterful use of dialogue modeled after the dialect of North Yorkshire used in the novel, her fictional characterization of the parenting that Heathcliff received (and the implication of how that parenting affected the boy), and her surprising plot twist at the end of her story all told me she had journeyed not only into this text but actually beyond it.

In her book Critical Encounters in High School English, Deborah Appleman (2000) states that using literary theory as an approach in our classes helps us "consider multiple perspectives as we find our place in the texts we read and the lives we lead" (p. 147). Using the tools of Carl Jung and Isabel Briggs Myers enabled my students to actually walk with Catherine and Heathcliff over those bleak and blustery moors surrounding Wuthering Heights. Ultimately, this is what every English teacher hopes her students will experience through literature.

References

AdvisorTeam. Accessed December 7, 2005, at www.advisorteam.com/temperament_sorter/about/.

Appleman, Deborah.(2000). Critical encounters in high school English. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.

Bronte, Emily. (1993, originally published 1847). Wuthering Heights. New York. Signet Classic.

Humanmetrics. Accessed December 7, 2005, at http://www.humanmetrics.com.

Wikipedia Foundation. (2005, December). Myers-Briggs type indicator. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator.

Cher Orebaugh, a former middle and high school teacher, earned her master of arts in English education at The Ohio State University. She has served as a cognitive coach for teachers and is president of Writing Resources, a consulting firm that conducts staff development workshops for Ohio teachers K-12.

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