The Modern Woman

           

            Tuesday morning’s ride to Philosophy class was the first real winter test of my new second hand motorcycle jacket. My neck was a little cold but that’s because I should have added the wool sweater between the sweatshirt and the long sleeved shirt, which go under my hoody before I put on the jacket. One thing about the jacket that I was doubtful about after buying it was the fact that it is longer in the back. At the front, until the hips it goes to my waist, but then it begins to slope down on either side until it looks like a leather shirttail, which isn’t all that dressy. While riding on the wet street though it literally saved my ass.

            I was going through chapter four of “Philosophical Fragments” to look for ideas for my essay when Naomi arrived. She told me she was going to sit behind me this time because she had to leave the class early and didn’t want to disturb anyone. I asked her what class she was rushing to and she told me it was “Memory and Learning”, a Psychology course. I commented that it sounds interesting and she said it is but that it’s also very difficult and very technical with lots of things to remember about memory.

            Professor Gibbs came in and sat looking at his phone. When he finally looked up I asked him about the reference to the joke he’d made on Thursday when he’d said, “Would all historians please leave the room” and then added that it was a Canadian joke. He explained that it had just been a variation on the old joke that asks, “How do you get 200 Canadians to get out of a swimming pool?” the answer being, just say, “Could everyone please get out of the swimming pool?” I nodded and said, “There’s another one that goes, ‘Why did the Canadian cross the road? To get to the middle.” His face lit up when he heard that one and he declared, “That’s good!”

            He went to the blackboard and wrote a series of numbers, and then on his way back to his desk he said, “Secret code!” I suggested that they were page numbers but he just smiled and gave a little grunt. Naomi thought they might be Fibonacci numbers. We found out later on that they were page numbers.

            He told us that this would be our last Kierkegaard lecture and that we would start Nietzsche on Thursday, adding that it’s very hard to make Nietzsche boring.

            Speaking on the final sections of “Philosophical Fragments” he told us that Kierkegaard is saying of the visitation to the earth of god in the flesh that information is irrelevant. The immediate details do not present us with the Absolute Paradox, which can only get the condition from god. If I got the condition from a contemporary of god in the flesh, the contemporary becomes my god. The contemporary can testify Socratically and speak to your faith if you already have it. I can believe the historical testimony but not the eternal.

            The fact that Christianity, Islam and Buddhism are widespread does not validate them. Capitalism is also widespread. Watching god eat breakfast does not give you faith.

            Christianity is not natural and can never be natural. It is implausible and impossible. It requires faith for it to make any sense at all. Faith must become the disciple’s second nature. Faith is the premise of the historical moment mattering. The position of the historical must be uncomfortable. If the moment is eternal then every age is equally near to it and faith is out of the picture.

            This is a thinking of history that makes the past insecure and disappropriates us of our legacies. All the wonders of our culture rest over an abyss.

             A faithful believer would prevent the learner from simply accepting. One has to get it from god and this is a very Lutheran idea.

            Climacus is a dialectician.

            Once you have a contradiction, anything can be derived from it.

            To speak against Socrates in a Socratic way is not Socratic.

            Because Kierkegaard is human, this book is a Socratic enterprise.

            The quote from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” that “many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage” is referring to the public’s marriage to the Hegelian System because the passion is unfulfilled and unconsummated.

            The goal is to use reason to disarm reason. The book in a way fits the definition of post-modern. It’s fragmentary, non-historical and anti-poetic.

            Kierkegaard wanted to make faith hard and in this way he is a stronger opponent to Christianity than Nietzsche could ever be.

            He then asked us if any of us had read all of the books that Socrates wrote. The joke, of course, is that Socrates didn’t write any books. His student, Plato, wrote many dialogues but didn’t put himself into them, thereby creating a distance between himself and what is said. We don’t really know what Plato thinks about anything. Then he professor yawned dramatically before saying the name of Plato’s student, Aristotle. Kierkegaard is like Plato here, in that he speaks through Climacus who is in dialogue with “the reader” in a Socratic moment. Authority is stripped from the author. We can’t find out what Kierkegaard thinks. With all the layers we are four steps away from god giving the condition here. Communicating the paradoxical wonder of faith by indirect communication is the best choice for Christians. Tell things that would remove impediments. Telling what Christianity isn’t. Serious thinking is stripped. Words are put in the reader’s mouth. The reader activates indirection. You couldn’t have done this and so god must have. If I accept what you say, I won’t know myself. The reader does not like the paradoxical loss of self. The paradox generates an offended consciousness sort of speech. Is Climacus using the reader to make a stand against the paradox?

            What if the hardest thing to think is the impossibility of the question?

            There is no faith without the possibility of defeat. Christianity might be totally wrong. Climacus’s strategy is to make the stakes so high as to eliminate pseudo faith from the equation. Philosophy might be very much like Christianity after all.

            I had time to go home, eat a bowl of pseudo rice crispies and to sleep for about an hour before heading out to my Short Story class.

            When I got to our classroom at University College, the other class was still occupying the room as they usually are on Tuesday. There tend to be five or six students in the room conversing with their professor in what I’d thought to be Italian, and they were there still there this time as well. I went to the washroom and when I came back I looked in again. The professor saw me and motioned me in. He apologized because he is always late. I responded, “That’s okay! It’s seems like you have lots to say to each other!” He explained that this is a Greek course. I commented that the students all seem to be able to speak the language. He said that it’s an advanced Greek class, so if they couldn’t speak the language conversationally they wouldn’t be able to take the course. He asked if I was the instructor and so I clarified that I was just a student. He wanted me to let my instructor know that the writing that is always on the blackboard after his class was not put there by him, but rather by the class before his. He explained that he could not erase it because he is allergic to chalk dust. I told him that I’d erase it. I usually do before Andrew arrives because that way he won’t be taking up lecture time by wiping the board.

            Andrew began the class by talking about “the woman question”, as it was put forward in the early 20^th Century. The question was, “What do women want?” Who was asking? Men.

            Around this time, the “new woman” emerged. She was a middle to upper class woman entering the working world (working class women were too busy working to think about any of this) and characterized by the iconic image of “the Flapper”, who was a smoking, shockingly un-chaperoned, liberated woman.

            He referred to an image of the conventionally ideal Canadian woman as lover and mother, guarding Canadian traditions, created by someone whose name sounded like J. W. Bengau. I couldn’t find it anywhere.

            The first story we looked at was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” in which the narrator with no name is given a rest cure prescribed for her by her husband, who is a physician. Her brother is also a doctor.

            “John laughed at me, but one expects that in a marriage.” She is treated like a child.

            She fights and gives way at the same time.

            The phrase “self control” is repeated several times throughout the story.

            Her bedroom in the house they are renting has “rings in the walls”. She concludes that it was previously a playroom, thus infantilising herself and not seeing that this house was once an asylum.

            The yellow wallpaper in the room and the paper on which she is writing are analogous to one another.

            The patterns on the wallpaper, in their flow, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. They are on a path of self-destruction. They have no self-control.

            She sees a woman creeping behind the wallpaper. There is something creeping behind this story. At the end, when John sees that she has become the creeping woman, he faints. The story shifts to omniscient, third person narration and she becomes pure subtext. She is liberated into madness. She tethers her self to the room with a “well hidden rope”. I suggested that the rope is imaginary.

            The second story was Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”, in which a woman with a weak heart receives the news that her husband has died. Her husband’s friend is quick to deliver the information. Andrew thinks it’s because he wants her money because whatever she inherited from her husband, if she remarried, would belong to her second husband.

            It first appears that she is grieving, but after locking herself in her bedroom, she takes in the sights and sounds of spring from the window outside. Andrew thinks that the following text of this story written in 1894 is the newly widowed woman experiencing an orgasm for the first time: “There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the colour that filled the air. Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will--as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under the breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.” An orgasm without a man is tied to freedom.

            The story ends when her husband walks in, very much alive, and she dies of a heart attack.

            The third and final story was J. G. Sime’s “Munitions”, in which a woman quits a life of servitude to work in a munitions plant during world war one. Sime emigrated from England to Montreal in the early 20^th Century and married a doctor. She observed and wrote about the lives of working and middle class women.

            Women’s writing is the articulation of inarticulate experiences.

            The woman question is really the same as the man question.

            The phrase “self respect” is repeated several times.

            These suddenly liberated women are in a state of drunken exuberance that is out of control because they are pioneers and therefore have no role models to guide them.