Classic English Literature
Glaspell, A Jury of her Peers; Woolf, A Society (online or in Dover text)Susan Glaspell had a strong interest in drama. Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was born and raised in Davenport, Iowa. This was very close to mybirthplace so I have special interest in her.She graduated from Drake University in 1899 at a time when few women achieved this education. As a result, she was able to start out injournalism and switched to full time writing as soon as she sold stories. Our story, Jury was included in THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1917. Shealso wrote a Pulitizer Prize-winning drama, ALISONS HOUSE in 1930.She married twice-a theater director (he died) and then she married a novelist and playwright. As you can see, for most of her life she wasinvolved with theater through marriage and her writing in both Provinceton and in Greenwich Village.She wrote the story you are reading as both a one act play and as a story. Both forms appear in many texts of American literature. Her lifetimethemes related to the limitations of both environment and gender on an individual. This story clearly shows that1. The title, Jury of her Peers has an equally popular and appropriate subtitle, Trifles. Explain why each title fits the subject matter.
2. What did Minnie Wright face that apparently caused her to snap and kill Mr. Wright? (note the play on the name)
3. The two women, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, both do something of a very serious nature and very out of character for them. What motivates them?What do you think will happen to Mrs. Wright?
4. How is the significance of gender and environment seen?
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) came from a well to do family of brilliant writers who had such famous people as Alfred Lord Tennyson to their home.Her parents were widow and widower, each with children from those marriages. When they met as neighbors and married they had their own children.In all, eleven people between 8 and 60 lived and were attended to by 7 servants! That would make large families easy to manage I imagine.They were brought up via Victorian notions, the boys went to boarding schools, the girls were tutored at first by the mother and then by tutors.Virginia deeply resented the holes that resulted in her education.As we know, women often had short life spans then. Virginia had two traumatic experiences-the death of her mother when she was 13 and thecontinuing sexual abuse of two of her stepbrothers. Her older half sister married two years later and died from her pregnancy. Her aging fatherbecame a mournful, broken man.It should not be surprising that Virginia had her first mental breakdown during this time. Today she would be labeled manic depressive. Yet, weconsider her a truly great English writer. In fact, she stated, As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you. She felt it aided hercreative processes.With the fathers death and acquaintance of a group of brilliant young Cambridge educated, iconoclastic young men, she learned sexual andintellectual freedom. Here, she met Leonard Woolf, her husband. But the sudden death of a beloved brother from typhoid fever caused a physicaland mental decline. She did not marry Leonard for 6 more years at age 29. He was devoted to her, cared for her in her breakdowns and encouragedher in her writing. It is believed their union was sexless but it seems to have suited them. By the 1920s she was one of the best knownliterary writers in England.She always felt marginal in society, that women had been suppressed and suffocated. She began a long, lesbian relationship with Vita Sackville-West, a younger married writer with two children. This has been viewed as the great passion of her life. Much of her feminist writingdeveloped during this time, such as the famous book, A ROOM OF ONES OWN (1929).When German planes started to bomb England, her fears for herself and her country were unbearable. Unable to take it any longer, in 1941,certain she was once again going mad, she put rocks in her pockets, walked into a river, and drowned herself. She was 59 years old.1. A Society is a satire on what? The ladies begin a search to find out if men produced good people and good books-the object of life. What istheir conclusion? What is the conclusion of the ladies and the meaning for themselves? for their daughters?

Classic English Literature

Assignment #6 – Rousseau’s Confessions & Wordsworth’s poems
Discussion Questions For Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1765-1770)

“Man was/is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” – Rousseau, The Social Contract

“That man intrudes into my work; he fills me with trouble, and I feel as if I were haunted by a damned soul at my side. May I never see him more; he would make me believe in devils and hell…he has buried himself at the bottom of a wood, where his soul has been soured and his moral nature has been corrupted.” –Denis Diderot, on Rousseau

Directions: In your answers to the following questions, include at least one direct quote from a relevant passages of The Confessions, and explain how the selection supports your response. When possible, explain how Rousseau’s views reflect the Romantic ideals we discussed in our last class on Blake’s poetry.

1. Rousseau opens his autobiography with the words, “I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence.” How does this assertion of his own unique nature contrast with the view of humanity propounded in Pope’s Essay on Man? Where else in the text does he assert the value of being unique?

2. Rousseau emphasizes his “passions” as defining a central aspect of his nature. He writes, “I am a man of very strong passions, and, while I am stirred by them, nothing can equal my impetuosity; I forget all discretion, all feelings of respect, fear and decency; I am cynical, impudent, violent and fearless; no feeling of shame keeps me back, no danger frightens me; with the exception of the single object which occupies my thoughts, the universe is nothing to me” (669). Why would this be a shocking statement for Rousseau’s audience, and where else in the text does he make a similar sort of claim?

3. Thinking back to eighteenth-century texts that you have read (Swift’s A Modest Proposal, Pope’s Essay On Man); compare the Enlightenment attitudes expressed toward “emotion” and “reason” with those proposed in Rousseau’s Confessions.

4. What is the significance of childhood memories for Rousseau? How are these memories tied to imagination?

5. Compare Rousseau’s view of common people with that of his view of the wealthy. Does he appear to prefer one class of people to the other? What does he say to distinguish them, and to what does he attribute the difference – if any?

6. Discuss the ideas of honesty in Confessions. Why does Rousseau reveal so much about himself, and why would he reveal details that people of his time (or even ours) would keep hidden?

7. Rousseau seems almost consumed by images of nature and the natural world. Locate one place in the text where he focuses his attention on the natural world and describe his treatment.

8. Compare the way Rousseau describes himself as a child with the character that he reveals about his mature self. Is he a different sort of person as a grown man than he was as a child?

9. Compare Wordsworth’s depiction of childhood in “We Are Seven,” and “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” to Rousseau’s in Confessions, and Blake’s poems from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Make a list of the similarities and differences that Wordsworth’s poems introduce to the idea of childhood (note at least five separate items and cite specific lines).

10. Compare Wordsworth’s depiction of nature in “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” and “The World Is Too Much with Us” to that of Rousseau and Blake. Make a list of the similarities and differences that Wordsworth’s poems introduce to the idea of childhood (note at least five separate items and cite specific lines).