How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

Author:Thomas C. Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Don’t Read with Your Eyes

IN THE SECRET Garden, Mary makes friends, sort of, with her maid, Martha. It’s Martha’s cheerful chatter and stories of life with her family that first help Mary become interested in something outside herself. And that sets her on a journey that will lead her to becoming a happy, healthy child.

Well, nice for Mary. But what about Martha? What about her many brothers and sisters, who live in a tiny cottage with not enough to eat? Are we worried about them?

You can worry if you want to. But Mary doesn’t. Not even Martha does. Martha’s quite matter-of-fact about the idea that her brothers and sisters go hungry every now and then. She also doesn’t grumble about lighting fires and cleaning the house and getting one day off a month, while Mary jumps rope and plays in the garden.

None of this probably bothered Frances Hodgson Burnett, either. It seemed reasonable to her for a maid to work while a child of a rich family plays. That’s the way things were. She didn’t mean to make Mary seem heartless or Martha seem stupid for not getting worked up about it.

We don’t have to agree with Mary or Martha or Burnett. We can think that Martha (who’s probably not that much older than Mary) shouldn’t have to work so hard. We can think something should be done about those children in that tiny cottage without enough to eat. But we probably shouldn’t decide that the characters who don’t think that way are villains.

It seems to me that if we want to get the most out of our reading, we have to try to take the works as they were meant to be taken. This is what I usually say: don’t read with your eyes.

What I really mean is, don’t read only from your own fixed position in the year two thousand and some. Instead, try to find a place to read from that allows you to understand the moment in time when the story was written.

When Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote The Secret Garden, many people believed that the poor were poor and the rich were rich because that’s the way God planned it. Since it was God’s plan, it couldn’t be changed, so there was no point in getting all upset about it. That’s the attitude that the characters in the book act out.

But more importantly, Burnett did not write The Secret Garden about the class differences between Mary and Martha. She wrote it about a sullen, selfish girl and a spoiled, miserable boy who have nothing in their lives to love. When they find friendship and a garden to care for, they find happiness and health together.

To notice that Mary has a better life than Martha is fine. To make that difference the most important thing in our reading would be to miss the point. That would mean we were reading the book with the wrong set of eyes.

And this is not such an old book. What about, say, The Iliad? All that violence.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.