I started using more prompts like this in my class, an online Great Books II class since I am not teaching 1202 this semester.
For Wednesday’s post due this Wednesday the 22nd by 5 pm, write a paragraph from the point of view of a character whose opinion and perspective we do not hear.
Students then responded to each other’s paragraphs. Here’s an example of a post that noted that in The Queen of Spades by Pushkin we don’t hear much about the point of view of The Countess. This student dealt with the Countess before and after her death, as her ghost has an afterlife in the plot. These posts lead to discussions online about how and why certain characters are excluded and how we as readers imagine their experiences, what hints we get from the texts about their lives.
The character I would like to hear from is the countess. We hear about her throughout the story but not from her own point of view, especially about her early life in gambling and her drastic expenses. She says that the story of her gambling and debts was false although she really did have 3 secret cards that won her money back. I would like to see what her version of the story was and a more in depth look at her and Herrmann and if it was all really worth it in the end, him losing his mind.
A character that a few students wrote about was the nurse in Madame Bovary who raises Madame Bovary’s daughter and has few to no choices about how her life will develop. We get just a glimpse of her, but Flaubert gives us enough description that we know that she represents a reality that the novel is not addressing but one that runs parallel to the world of the plot. This approach did help students see the parallel worlds alongside the texts. In future classes, I will spend more time in discussion around these characters and follow up with the following questions – this time around I felt that I rushed along a bit too quickly to get onto the next text on the syllabus. Here are the questions that I am considering using for the next time I use this assignment:
- You wrote from the point of view of a neglected character. What hints in the text tell you about this character’s life – perhaps a life suggesting a world that shadows the world of the text?
- How does that other world, revealed to a small degree by this character, inform the text? For example, in Madame Bovary, how does the nursemaid’s existence contribute to the plot and to Madame Bovary’s life?
- List the characters whose points of views remain occluded for the reader and those who maintain the central places in the novel. Do you notice anything about what the main characters have in common as opposed to those whose perspectives we do not hear?
- This is a different, but related assignment – what do you think the character you chose would “say” about the main character? I might end this discussion, online or in person, with a description of a project like “Wide Sargasso Sea,” the novel that imagines Jane Eyre from the point of view of Bertha, the madwoman in the attic.
I found thinking about this assignment beyond the bounds of going through the weekly work in the class to be helpful.