Last December, I posted about teaching an essay by Christopher Hamilton. It’s the last reading in this unit on sexual ethics, and since some new folks are following along this year, I thought I would draw attention to it.
Happy Monday!
Archive for: October, 2011
How to Use a Harlequin Presents to Teach Sexual Ethics
In Contemporary Moral Problems we’re in the middle of a unit on ethical issues relating to sexuality. Our reading for today was Thomas Mappes, “Sexual Morality and the Concept of Using Another Person.” Mappes’s basic claim is that sex is immoral when it involves using someone as a mere means, or without their informed consent. His actual formulation is:
A immorally uses B if and only if A intentionally acts in a way that violates the requirement that B’s involvement with A’s ends be based on B’s voluntary informed consent.
Mappes says there are two major types of using: deception and coercion. Deception can include lies, like “I’m on birth control”, “I’m single.”, “I’m clean”, “Yes, I love you.”, omissions, equivocations, etc. Coercion can be “occurrent” or “dispositional.” Occurent coercion is basically the use of force (physically forcing someone, as in tying them down and shoving something somewhere), and dispositional involves the use of threats of harm (for example, raping someone at knifepoint).
But, Mappes adds, there is a third type, a kind of coercion that seems problematic yet does not involves the use of force or the threat of harm. It is the coercive offer. To get at this concept, Mappes distinguishes a threat from an offer:
Gesturing to a rough and ready distinction between “wants” and “needs”, Mappes then gives an example of a coercive offer, which I will paraphrase as follows:
Mr. Troubled is a widower with three young children. He wants to stay in his home, in his town, where his extended family lives, but he has lost his job and cannot make his mortgage payment. No one can help him. Ms. Opportunistic is sexually attracted to Mr. Troubled. She offers to make his mortgage payments if he agrees to an affair. Mr. Troubled is not attracted to Ms. Opportunistic.
Mappes claims that Ms. Opportunistic is attempting to use Mr. Troubled in the immoral manner defined above. Mr. Troubled has a genuine need, and Ms. Opportunistic is attempting to exploit it for her sexual gain. She is making a “coercive offer.” To be precise, it is not so much that she coerces him (and nothing hangs on our use of the word “coercion” here), but that she takes advantage of the fact that he is already “under coercion.” If Mr. Troubled accepts, he is likely to say something like, “I had no choice.” and that response would, Mappes asserts, make some sense to most people. Ms. Opportunistic is taking advantage of Mr. Troubled’s desperate situation, a situation in which his consent is so constrained by his desperate need, that it would not be fully voluntary.
Contrast this with another case (from Mappes), one in which a movie mogul offers a starlet a big movie part for a sexual favor. There may be other immoral aspects of the offer (perhaps the mogul is married), but the offer itself is not coercive. It is the starlet’s want, but not her need to have the big part. Her acceptance, if it happens, is voluntary.
My students had a good discussion of the question of whether it is fair to say Mr. Troubled has a “need” while The Starlet only has a “want.” Many of them seemed to want to say either they both have wants, or they both have needs.
At any rate, being a romance reader, I was sure I had seen a plot like the Mr. Troubled/Ms. Opportunistic one, only way sexier, and it took about .0008 seconds to find several Harlequin Presents that fit the bill. I chose The Italian’s Mistress, a 2005 Harlequin Presents by Melanie Milburn.
Here’s the blurb:
Back in his bed…with a vengeance!
When it comes to Anna Stockton, Lucio Ventressi knows he has an offer she can’t refuse….
Anna needs money — Lucio has it! His deal? Become his mistress for three months and he’ll pay for her son’s operation. Anna has no choice but to agree to being bedded by Lucio. But she finds that his passion is sweet — even if it is born of revenge….
Now, knowing that sometimes the blurb is misleading, I actually purchased and read this book. And … it is not misleading.
Here’s how it all goes down: Anna is in her native Melbourne, working a day shift as a hotel housekeeper (and a night shift as a dishwasher), and Lucio, who normally lives in Rome, is occupying the penthouse. Anna had been engaged to Lucio years ago, but ended up in bed with his brother, who took pictures to prove it. Anna was kicked to the curb, pregnant. She now lives in poverty with her gravely ill son and her deaf sister. Anna, in housekeeper mode, happens to walk in on Lucio, and they have this exchange.
‘Sammy needs…an operation,’ she said. ‘I don’t have private insurance but if I wait until it’s his turn on the public waiting list…it might be too late.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘He has a heart condition.’
‘Serious?’
She took a painful breath. ‘He needs the surgery to survive into adulthood.’
He swore again. ‘How much is this…operation?’ he asked after a short pause.
She told him and he didn’t even flinch, which somehow annoyed her. It was such a pittance to someone like him, pin money really, and yet it could save a child’s life. Her child’s life. She watched him out of the corner of her eye. He was thinking…no—calculating…planning.
‘I might be able to help you,’ he said after another one of his strategically timed pauses.
‘Why would you want to do that?’ Suspicion crept into her tone as she lifted her eyes back to his.
‘I have my reasons.’ His expression gave nothing away.
‘A loan, you mean?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘What, then?’ Her stomach tightened.
‘I will pay for Sammy’s health care, but I have some conditions on the deal.’
‘Conditions?’ She swallowed the restriction in her throat. ‘What sort of conditions?’
His eyes held hers determinedly. ‘You can save your son’s life but you must agree to do something for me in return.’
‘I will do anything to save my son’s life,’ she said. ‘Anything.’
The corner of his hard mouth lifted in a slight smile. ‘I’m very glad to hear that as I was expecting much more resistance on your part.’
The fingertips of fear tickled along her spine. ‘What do you want me to do?’
He gave her another contemplative look. ‘I thought you would have guessed by now, cara.’
His eyes burned as they came back to hers, the line of his normally firm mouth now so tight it hinted at cruelty.
***
‘I will pay for my nephew’s surgery but in exchange I want you back in my bed.’
Her eyes widened in alarm. ‘No!’ ‘
No?’ The eyebrow rose once more. ‘I didn’t think that was a word you were accustomed to using a great deal.’
She closed her eyes so she didn’t have to see his derision. ‘I can’t do it.’
‘All right.’ He dismissed her with a step away.
‘Finish the room and get out.’
He was halfway out of the door when she came to her senses. This was about Sammy, not her.
‘Lucio…’
‘Yes?’ He turned to face her, his expression one of extreme boredom. She found it hard to hold his gaze and lowered her eyes to the floor at his feet, the collapse of her pride making her shoulders slump in defeat.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said hollowly. ‘I’ll do what you ask.’
‘Good.’
Giving Lucio the benefit of the doubt — because he so clearly deserves it — I read on, to see if he indeed would exact his sexy revenge. Maybe it’s an idle threat, and he’s really a big ‘ol softie? But no, he does. Over and over and over. Lucio is obviously a complete fucking asshole making a coercive offer here. But what makes this situation different from Ms. Opportunistic and Mr. Troubled is that Anna is sexually attracted to Lucio, and still kind of in love with him. Well, ok, Anna’s mind hates him, but her body — oh treacherous flesh! — can’t resist him.
So, it makes a good case to discuss on the topic of immoral sexual coercion.
Now, for romance readers curious about this book, I do understand the allure of the over the top Presents line, but even so, I can’t recommend this one. To take just one example, Anna and Lucio are both convinced the child is his brother’s (because Lucio always wore a glove). Despite this, a nanosecond after the above chat, with absolutely no discussion of how they are going to present this little arrangement to the child, here is what happens (click to enlarge):
There is no development whatsoever in the relationship, Anna is a doormat, Lucio is a complete jerk, and the whole thing is based on a Big Misunderstanding which gets resolved in the last paragraph. See, Anna did not actually have sex with Lucio’s brother. The brother just gave her a roofie, stripped her naked, and took pictures, to make it look like they had sex. Why? Don’t ask stupid questions. They are Italian magnates! This is what they do.
Are We Having Sex Yet?
Tomorrow in my contemporary moral problem class, we begin a new unit, on sexual ethics. Before getting into the ethical questions, we’re spending some time, first, trying to define sex. It’s not as easy as one might think.
We start with a conservative religious definition:
sex … refers “either to the biological aspects of being male or female (i.e., a synonym for one’s gender) or to the expressions of sexuality, which have physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions, particularly genital actions resulting in sexual intercourse and/or orgasm” (“Human Sexuality: A Catholic Perspective for Education and Lifelong Learning”, US Conference of Catholic Bishops, (1990,9)).
Lovemaking is an expression of vulnerability and intimacy, a two-in-one-flesh encounter, demanding a deep level of commitment and love for its natural fulfillment.
“Prior to or separated from the marital commitment, sexual intercourse ceases to be an expression of total self-giving” (Human Sexuality, 33). The bishops conclude that “outside of this ‘definitive community of life’ called marriage, however personally gratifying or well intended, genital sexual intimacy is objectively morally wrong” (Human Sexuality, 33).
Review: Cinderella Ate My Daughter, by Peggy Orenstein
Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (Harper Collins, 2011) was sent to me by the publisher for possible adoption in a women’s studies course. I read it very quickly (a rare feat for me) and thought I would share a few thoughts.
Orenstein is a very successful writer. Here’s a bit of her bio:
Her previous books include The New York Times best-selling memoir, Waiting for Daisy; Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids, Love and Life in a Half-Changed World; and the best-selling SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap. A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Peggy has also written for such publications as The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Vogue, Elle, Discover, More, Mother Jones, Salon, O: The Oprah Magazine, and The New Yorker, and has contributed commentaries to NPR’s All Things Considered. Her articles have been anthologized multiple times, including in The Best American Science Writing. She has been a keynote speaker at numerous colleges and conferences and has been featured on, among other programs, Nightline, Good Morning America, The Today Show, NPR’s Fresh Air and Morning Edition and CBC’s As It Happens.
Cinderella Ate My Daughter is a breezy, relatively short (179 pages) and entertaining read, taking the reader through the maze of girlhood, from the dreaded princess phase, through Bratz, Disney tween sensations like Miley Cyrus, and older girls’ online diversions like Facebook. Orenstein writes self-consciously as the loving mother of a young daughter and as a feminist steeped in Second Wave liberal feminist ideals. Much of the book describes her own struggle to raise her daughter Daisy, in a way that avoids the horns of that old tyme dilemma: how to be a strong, confident girl without, on the one hand, falling prey to the worst feminine stereotypes, the kind that say only pretty and sweet and sexy girls are valuable, and on the other, rejecting femininity altogether for a masculine ideal.
It’s hard for me to judge, because, given my occupation, I may have read more of this stuff than the average reader, but I saw little in this book that I had not seen somewhere before, and I don’t mean peer reviewed journals, but in Jezebel, Feministe and other online venues. I think sometimes writers, especially those who write in a casual autobiographical way, as Orenstein does here, confuse “new to me”, with “new.” Is there anyone who doesn’t know that “tween” is a marketing gimmick and not a psychologically significant developmental stage? Is there anyone on the planet who has missed all the critiques of Bella Swan as boy crazy and bland? Or who is not aware that, with the advent of the internet, “rumors can spread faster” and “The anonymity of the screen may also embolden bullies”?
Orenstein is highly critical of contemporary culture, especially its technological nature (the Internet, video and computer games, TV and film). Despite protesting that “I don’t mean to demonize the new technology”, that’s exactly what she does. Nostalgia for an earlier time, when, in her view, femininity, and the value of girls, was not so closely tied to good looks, saturates the pages of the book. Orenstein reserves her highest praise (wan though it is) for The Daring Book for Girls, which tells its young readers how to play croquet, host a horseshoe throwing contest and use Kool-Aid to dye hair.
She also writes, unselfconsciously, as a privileged, highly educated, white, married heterosexual woman. There is very little discussion in the book of the way beauty ideals are racist, classist, sexist, and ableist, an omission made a bit more surprising by the fact that she has (apparently, given my perusal of her bio) a biracial daughter (at one point, the author berates herself for buying a Barbie with “an ankh pendant and peculiar tan [as if that] made it all ok”). The unhappy marriage of nostalgia and unselfconscious privilege produces some very scary textual progeny, as in this passage:
As in the American Girl books, it seems as though the nineteenth century girl may have lived in a more repressive era — before women could vote, when girls’ sights were set solely on marriage and motherhood — her sense of self-worth was enviably internal, a matter of deed over dress. Whatever other constraints she felt, he femininity was not defined by the pursuit of physical perfection; it was about character. I wonder why we adult women, with all our economic, political and personal freedoms, have let this happen to our daughters.
Yes, because slavery was so liberating for the black gals!
A similarly surprising moment comes when Orenstein puzzles over why her daughter assumes that Lotte, the white sidekick, and not the black Tiana, is the titular character in The Princess and the Frog. It’s because Lotte swooned, wished on stars, dreamed of marrying a prince … everything but the, to me, screamingly obvious point that until Tiana, there had never been a black Disney princess.
Perhaps the most annoying tendency in the book is Orenstein’s failure to take a stand, despite all of the handwringing. She makes the case that femininity is defined more and more by looks, and not just looks, but a certain studied sexiness. That girls’ self-image is tied so closely to their appearance that they can’t even answer a question about how they feel without referring to how they look. And that the sexuality of girls (as opposed to their sexualization), their ability to feel and enjoy real sexual desire, gets subsumed by a culturally-induced focus on whether and how they are desired by others. This is not an academic study, so I guess I can’t take her to task for not asking why women have experienced educational, economic and political gains at the same time all of this other bad stuff is happening. But if this is a quasi-self-help read, then how about some help? She recognizes, “Now, this is where I should step in and give advice … about how to combat the outrageous expectations foisted on our daughters … and believe me, after twenty years of writing and talking about girls, I know what to say…”. And yet, now she has her own daughter, “it’s complicated”. And that’s where it, pretty much, ends.
The openness to options comes through most clearly in the chapter on toddler beauty pageants. Orenstein notes that self-objectification and sexualization are related to higher rates of “eating disorders, depression, low self-esteeem and impaired academic performance”, “undermine healthy sexuality”, and a cause host of other ills. But then writes both that the toddler and tiara set are just doing what everyday moms are doing, only a little more enthusiastically, and that she “was starting to see the girls as their parents did — as engaging in a little healthy fun, merely playing an elaborate version of dressup.” It’s not that she abandons her critique, it’s that she papers it over with a pastiche of backtracking, pseudo-empathizing, and wistful confusion that really don’t mesh well with the dire tones of the book.
Perhaps that’s the appeal of the book to the many women who seem to love it. Identifying and describing a problem readers already recognize well, while at the same time leaving its solution up to every individual mom, possibly alleviates anxiety. And it is moms. I was shocked at how non-present the menfolk were in this book. In one chapter, Orenstein is working herself into a lather about whether to buy her daughter a Fairytopia Barbie, and her spouse’s one contribution is to say, “You’re confusing her.” It’s not that I doubt mothers have unique gendered challenges with respect to raising girls, it’s just that I would have liked to have the absence of the men at the parties, the dress ups, the shopping trips, the pageants, and in general their (apparent) failure to see the problem of raising girls as their problem too, noted and discussed.
There’s some fun stuff on princesses, actually. Orenstein goes back to the Grimms tales, and does some interesting comparisons between those and the Disney versions. The scene where she reads the original, and horrifically violent, Rumpelstilskin to her daughter is laugh out loud funny. And the emphasis on the way consumerism drives the gendering of our boys and girls culture is important (why make blue bats and pink bats? Because then every family with a boy and a girl needs to buy two!). She also drops some fun tidbits, like the fact that the whole Disney Princess empire was launched when a Disney exec saw girls wearing homemade costumes to a Disney on Ice show, and realized a marketing opportunity had been missed.
But overall, especially given my perspective as a potential course adopter, I can’t recommend this book. Feminism has come a long way since the days of nature or nurture, femininity or masculinity. Cinderella Ate My Daughter is certainly well-written, and makes for a breezy read, but assigning this book would be taking my students back, and not in a good way, to the time before feminists recognized the multiplicity of not just genders but sexes, of the complex relationships between the US and other countries (not one mention of the child labor that probably went into the making of many of those princess products), of the the way gender and sexual identities are inseparable from other aspects of identity, etc.
Genre Trouble! Monday Links Post
I was away for the long weekend (and we’re still on break today at my uni), and busy last week, and so I missed lots of interesting posts. Here are some links:
Rohan Maitzen of Open Letters Monthly read two romance novels (Chase and Heyer) and … didn’t like ‘em. Then she read another one (Anyone But You, by Jennifer Crusie) and … sort of liked it. She talks about her foray into romance reading here. (I commented over there.)
Liz, inspired in part by Rohan’s experience of reading romance, wrote The Uses and Abuses of Purple.
There’s yet another article trying to figure out why romance readers have embraced e-books, this time at The Guardian. I know, I know, it’s insulting that romance readers’ embrace of e-books is such a confounding mystery. But this one is not quite as bad as most others, as it focuses on the covers, which I frankly do think are embarrassing and often misleading, regardless of the creative and other skills required to produce them.
Over at Smart Bitches Trashy Books, Sarah Wendell is talking about her company, Simple Progress, which offers “online administration, consulting and custom marketing strategies for online media, specializing in the book publishing industry.” Very long, very heated thread, required reading for anyone interested in the way blogging and the publishing industry is changing. New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Crusie responds at great length to Sarah Wendell’s critics.
The Phantom Tollbooth is one of the Books that Changed My Life. Adam Gopnik has a 50 year reflection at The New Yorker. (Thanks to Liz for the pointer)
I noticed a new bookish Twitter handle, Book Riot (introductory post here), and followed it, and they linked to a blog I had never heard of, called Dead White Guys: An Irreverent Guide to Classic Literature. Book Riot is a “new literary blog providing comprehensive, short-form and reader-friendly news and information about reading” and Dead White Guys is… well, the name makes it pretty obvious.
Speaking of new literary ventures. USA Today launched a new romance blog, Happy Ever After. I noticed on Twitter a lot of support for the idea that a major national newspaper is devoting part of its online activities exclusively to romance.
Is this the future of the bricks and mortar bookstore? Indigo books of Canada is now branding books as a lifestyle instead of a product.
We had a great long weekend, with my older son’s U12 soccer team taking the tournament title. We stayed in Old Orchard Beach at the kind of beach motel some of you may recall from your youth, with ancient but clean rooms, happy kids running up and down the walkways at all hours, and a passenger train rattling your windows at 3:00am every morning. But spending time with friends and family, and being able to get to the beach in 5 seconds makes it all worthwhile. Here’s a sunrise picture (and given that I am absolute shit with the camera, just think how lovely it actually must have been!):
Review: Bad Boys Do, by Victoria Dahl
Bad Boys Do Blurb:
Olivia Bishop is no fun. That’s what her ex-husband said. And that’s what her smart bob and glasses imply. So with her trademark determination, Olivia sets out to remake her life. She’s going to spend time with her girlfriends and not throw it all away for some man. But when an outing with her book club leads her to a brewery taproom, the dark-haired beauty realizes that trouble—in the form of sexy Jamie Donovan—may be too tempting to avoid.
Jamie Donovan doesn’t mean to be bad. Sure, the wild streak in his wicked green eyes has lured the ladies before. Now it’s time to grow up. He’s even ready for a serious romance. But how can that be when Olivia, the only right woman he has ever met, already has him pegged as wrong?
Bad Boys Do (September 2011, HQN) is the second book in the Donovan Brothers trilogy, contemporary romances set in Boulder, Colorado about three siblings who lost their parents in an auto accident some years ago, and are working together to grow the local watering hole established by their dad. Jamie, the youngest at age 29, is the gorgeous blond bartender. He’s trying to put his partying days behind him, but his big sister (Tessa, the heroine of Book 1) can’t see it, and keeps him pegged as the studmuffin in a kilt who can lure the ladies to the bar. (For the record, I had not read Good Girls Won’t, and had no problem jumping in with this book).
Jamie is pretty pessimistic when it comes to convincing his siblings that he’s ready to become a bigger partner in the business. The way his sister treats him — as a sex object — was wince-inducing to read. But he forges ahead, taking a business class at the local community college, where he meets Olivia Bishop. They are at completely different places in their lives, with Olivia just divorcing her overbearing, adulterous professor husband. She’s thirty-five, but because she met her older husband at a young age, her own career has been back-burnered and and is just now trying to figure out who she is and what she wants for herself.
The attraction between Olivia and Jamie is strong, and Dahl definitely knows how to write love scenes. To celebrate Bad Boys Do making the USA Today Bestseller list, yesterday Dahl posted an excerpt from a hot tub scene on her Tumblr. As always with Dahl, these scenes are not gratuitous, but develop the characters and the relationship. It’s wonderful to read about a very self-controlled, taken-for-granted woman loosening up with a man who appreciates her, and about a man who never took sex seriously, recognizing for the first time when a tumble means more than a moment’s pleasure. It’s only in bed that Olivia can really let her true affection show through.
Dahl captures academic life perfectly. Dear Author recently posted about difficulties in appreciating books written about your own professional field. Not only does Dahl get university life down, but she captures the specific experience of teaching and working as an adjunct at a community college, which is not the same at working at State U, or Ivy League U. I usually can’t read romances about professors having relationships with students (in real life, it’s usually a middle aged man throwing over the mother of his children for a younger grad student. Not romantic.), but Dahl finessed this perfectly: it’s a non-credit night class for professionals.
Jamie is pure gold, one of my favorite kind of heroes. He’s the sexy, confident guy with the bad boy rep who is ready to step it up, and has found the woman he wants to do it with. His fun loving spirit brings Olivia out of her shell, and it’s a delight to join them for the ride. His own struggle is really with his siblings. Jamie’s fights with Tessa and Eric are intense and believable. Not every romance family has to be the Bridgertons, and I am glad for it. I’ll be very interested to see how Dahl redeems older brother Eric, because he sure came off as a jerk in this one.
Olivia is guarded. She let her identity be determined by her father-figure of a husband, and it is going to take her a while to get over her self-image as a downer. Some other readers have had a hard time with Olivia’s obsession with the age difference, but to me, that was her character. She was told over and over that her only value was in serving as a helpmeet to her husband. It’s going to take her some time to develop a sense of entitlement to her own happiness, and throwing up ridiculous excuses (like the age difference) is going to be her coping mechanism for a while.
The only real problem I had with the book was Olivia’s ex. He was a bit of a caricature, and the subplot involving his own new relationship was undercooked. The main problem was that he kept showing up, and in such an intense, stalkery way that I viewed him as a potential physical threat to Olivia. By the end, I saw his character differently, but it strikes me that it probably wasn’t Dahl’s intention to make readers waste energy worrying that Olivia was going to be held hostage by her ex, which I did. Perhaps I’ve been so conditioned by reading other romances in which, if the ex is present, he is a violent nutter, that I over-interpreted the ex’s actions in Bad Boys Do. At any rate, I found the tone of that characterization off.
That aside, from the first scene, I was completely hooked on Jamie and Olivia, both as individual characters, and as part of a developing relationship. With Dahl’s characteristic attention to detail, funny and sexy writing, and true-to-life relationships and situations, it’s another winner from one of my favorite romance writers writing today.
A Bioethics “Case” is Always A Person’s Story
I’ve been teaching and working in bioethics for over a decade now, and like any bioethicist, I can rattle off a list of canonical cases: Quinlan, Cruzan, Conroy, Elizabeth Bouvia, Tarasoff, Baby M, Baby Jane Doe, Adam and Molly Nash, Tuskegee, Willowbrook, etc. etc. They each are slotted in to a different ethical lesson, be it about patient rights, informed consent, respect for patient autonomy, or the ethics of research on human subjects.
In bioethics class this week, we discussed the “case” of Don Cowart, a Texas man who was badly burned in a propane explosion in 1973. Cowart begged to be killed or allowed to die, from the moment he was discovered lying in the dirt, third degree burns over 65% of his body, and for months and even years afterwards, during the painful intensive care and rehabilitation process. The Cowart case is usually understood in the context of patient rights. In our textbook, it appears in the section on “Decision Making for Once Competent Patients”, and indeed, it is presented as a textbook case of failure to respect patient autonomy. Cowart may not have had decision making capacity in the initial minutes or days, but surely, his right to determine the course of his own medical care should have been restored shortly thereafter.
The author of the case in the textbook is Dr. Robert White, the first psychiatrist to declare Cowart competent, and more importantly, the one person who was willing to find outside legal help to end Cowart’s nightmare of being treated as a nonperson.
White is one of the few good guys in the story, and his account is interesting and well-written. It’s followed by two bioethcists’ analyses. But like every clinical ethics case, the narrative reflects the viewpoint of the writer, including what he takes to be important, and omitting what he doesn’t.
For this reason, I had my students view a video of Cowart discussing his experience filmed at the University of Virginia in 2002. It’s not just that Cowart has access to a perspective on experiences others lack — which of course, he does — but the details he chooses to include add a dimension of meaning lacking in White’s account. For example,
They did not want an attorney involved so they would not allow me to use the telephone. I ask them to take me to a pay phone on the floor and they said we don’t have any on the burn ward floor. I said, okay, let’s go to the lobby. Every hospital has pay phones in the lobby. They said no. Burn patients can’t leave the burn ward. I said okay, I will use the one at the nurse’s station. I know you got a phone there because I can hear it ringing all the time. And they said, no that is just for hospital staff. Patients aren’t allowed to use it. I said fine. At my own expense I will pay for the local telephone company to put a telephone in my room. And I will call from my room. And they said no, you can’t do that.
To many of my students, who can’t imagine being out of touch for a nanosecond, this is an especially chilling part of the story (although it can’t match Cowart’s descriptions of the gruesome, excruciatingly painful, and often ineffective burn “treatments” which he was forced to undergo). It’s a small detail, the telephone, but it seems to symbolize the powerlessness and dearth of human connection he experienced for so long.
The UVa video (transcript here) is a wonderful resource, because it offers up this “case”, not as a case only, but as, first and foremost, a compelling human story. I don’t think the form of presentation dictates our ethical responses. The moderator at UVa suggested that hearing Cowart tell his own story (one of triumph over adversity, a life well lived despite great odds) might make a listener more apt to think the medical staff was right to keep him alive. It had the opposite effect on me and many of my students. But every case study is a kind of “fiction”, as Tod Chambers has written, and exposure to more perspectives can help deepen our understanding.
Wryly observing that he never thought he would take up poetry as a hobby, Cowart concludes with a poem he wrote himself:
Embrace the day -
hold it close to you -
like the fire and passion of a vibrant, beautiful woman,
feel its warmth and energy flow through you.Listen with the spirit, and you will hear the emotions of your brother’s heart.
Speak with the spirit, and your brother will hear the emotions of your heart.
And when you and your brother speak and listen to each other with the spirit,
your spirits will touch.Be real;
step into yourself.
Cling to all that is you;
release all that is not.
For it is here, in the deep blue heaven of these high places,
that we soar on wings that are our own
and ride the currents of our soul.
I’m teaching future physicians in this class. What good is a bioethics course if our case studies eschew personal meaning, push human emotion to the margins, and ignore the importance of human connection?
Popular Romance in the New Millennium Conference: Abstracts and Bios
Registration is now open for the international conference Popular Romance in the New Millennium, hosted by McDaniel College in Westminster Maryland. The conference is hosted by Pam Regis, professor of English at McDaniel, author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel, and Vice President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.
The conference is supported in part by a grant to McDaniel College from the Nora Roberts Foundation.
The conference will begin on Thursday November 10 with a keynote address by NYT best selling romance author Eloisa James, who is also Associate Professor of English at Fordham University, at 5:30 pm. followed by a dinner.
On Friday, there is a full day of panels and presentations, beginning at 9:00am, and ending with Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches Trashy Books (6:30-7:30pm).
Yours truly will be co-presenting with a colleague in the English department. Some other Romanceland names you may know are Sarah Frantz and Angela Toscano (reviewers at Dear Author; Sarah is also the President of the IASPR), Eric Selinger, An Goris, Jayashree Kamble, Jonathan A. Allan, and Amy Burge (contributors to Teach Me Tonight; Eric is also Executive Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies).
Click here to see who else is on the program, and read the abstracts.
Hope to see you there!