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February 13, 2006
Kaleo Conference on Gender and the Chuch: Gender and the Arts
The "faculty forum" on Gender and the Arts brought together art professors Jeff Morton and Kaybe Carpenter with English professors Pat Ralston, Gwen Macallister, Clif Foreman, and Jim Wildeman. Each gave a brief (okay, so Morty's wasn't that brief) statement and then the panel entertained questions from the audience.
Morton began by giving a brief visual history of 20th century feminist art. During a time when "pure form," minimalism, and literalism was all the rage, women artists reintroduced the body and the personal to art. Feminism, Morton argued, "can teach us something about how the Word became flesh." We have a God who is both God and human, and there is something significant in how that affirms the body. There is something about being human and exploring our differences.
Wildeman barked, "Imagine a life that you can live." When pressed to expand on this idea, he explained his fascination with Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre and how, in his view, it allows young women to imagine a life that they could live, a life where the heroine turns down two different men, once for moral reasons and once because her suitor "could not love her as she deserved to be loved." Reading such things, Wildeman argued, allows a young woman to say, "I can choose a path that is unpopular in my circles, but the important thing in the end is my integrity."
Ralston related some of her experiences in teaching Medieval and Renaissance Writers for the first time. Students, male and female, were amazed and skeptical that there were actually enough quality female authors during this time period to merit an entire course on their work. Through the course of the semester, Ralston was encouraged, however, by her students willingness to open the canon and to explore and champion these "hidden" writers. Too many students, Ralston said, think that feminism began in the 1960s and that it is a four letter word. The reality, though, is that many women throughout history have championed the cause of free speech and expression and development for women. We can all be taught by and find delight in these writings. The common notion is that we read in order to join the human race. If we want a clearer picture of the human race and hope to understand it in its wholeness, we need to be listening to the voices of men and women from the past and encouraging the publishing of women's voices from the past.
Carpenter began by framing the value of art. We know things by our experience, she said, and writers and artists give us a picture of experiences that we ourselves may never have. Thus, we need to hear (or see) women speak because it gives us a fuller picture of the human experience. Furthermore, the images that artists are creating affect what we expect of ourselves as men and women. The arts, whether we realize it or not, affects our views of gender and identity.
Macallister echoed Ralston and Carpenter, relating her own story of teaching 20th Century American literature and having a male student complain over how "many" female authors he had been required to read. (Four). She emphasized, too, the significance of reconsidering the canon.
Foreman mused on the strange contradiction that appears when we consider male and female writers: if women are generally considered to have superior verbal skills to men, then why have there been so many great male writers, given the fact that they are handicapped? He answered his own question. "Mainly because of a longstanding affirmative action program. We men engineered it so that we men got a better education than the women had... But, as we all know, affirmative action really doesn't work well." There have been a number of women writers that have snuck through and established themselves at being important in the American tradition (Anne Bradstreet, Phyllis Wheatly, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, etc.) So what do men do with the fact that some women have slipped through? They redefine literature so that writing by women can no longer considered "literary." For example, sentimentalism was painted as a cardinal sin of true literature. Women were essentially defined-out of the American canon. Foreman also made an interesting connection between our American "frontier culture" and American writer's inordinate fondness for writing about men. Thus, you have the likes of Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain, among others. Nathaniel Hawthore is an exception to this tendency, but his female characters were still tightly contained within the traditions of the "pure white maiden" or the "evil temptress." Not until Edith Wharton and Willa Cather did we begin to get great female characters. These characters are important because of what they teach us about ourselves as humans.
Though only a few of the questions that followed these statements were directly related to questions of the arts, one did stand out. A young woman asked, "How would you advise young women who are hoping to engage or become successful in the arts?" Carpenter answered, frankly, that sacrifice will be demanded. It's necessary, then, to define what success means to you. Is it being shown at the Whitney or balancing a productive career with motherhood? Most of the women at the top of the arts are either divorced or single and they rarely have children. Dr. Kapic, from the audience, made the helpful point here that men who are at the top of their disciplines often also sacrifice (or ignore) a family life. The issue of sacrificing marriage and family for the sake of career is not a question only for women. It is complicated, however, by the fact that motherhood is tied so closely to womanhood, while fatherhood is not considered a major component of masculinity. (I have more thoughts on this that will likely develop in a later post...)
Art , Culture, Yo , Faith , Woman, Woman, Woah-man , Writing | By elissa | 04:27 PM
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