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Why can’t my male students identify with a single heroine?

(This is from a letter to some fellow faculty, but I’d be greatful to hear from anyone!)

This semester I’m teaching three sections of World Lit. I, which explore texts from the ancient world to 1750 (in addition to Comp. I: Rewriting America). We began the semester by reading & discussing the oldest selection in our anthology, “Descent of Inanna,” within the context of what anthropologists believe were agricultural, female-centered, goddess-worshipping communities that evolved into what is commonly referred to as the “cradle of civilization”—Mesopotamia, the area we know as Iraq. Of course, Mesopotamia’s fate was the fate of most of the world—the transition to patriarchy, empire building & a world literary history that reflects this in it’s abundance of narratives about male gods, kings, warriors, adventurers & other heroes. At the end of class, I presented the following questions based on the anthology’s discussion of the topic & its editors’ statement that “role models in religion & literature are important for girls as well as boys”:

1. Do you think that popular culture (comics, novels, cartoons, movies, song lyrics, video games, etc) has provided more or better female heroes?
2. Have you identified with any of them (regardless of your gender)?
3. Who are the heroic women—real or fictional—who have inspired you (as a child, youth & now)?

Students were particularly engaged & verbal during this discussion, which felt rather informal & lively with frequent laughter. Their complex & varied responses to the first question can be summed up as an overwhelming “no.” For the third question, they primarily named actual women. In response to the second question, many female students answered in the affirmative but no male students did. For my last section, I added the example of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” as most students claimed to have read the book or seen the film (& I thought it might reduce some of the gender/sexuality issues). I asked if any of the male students could identify with Scout, the courageous tomboy who looked, spoke & probably smelled like a boy. Not a single male raised his hand. I asked if they could imagine being a kid & liking or playing with someone like Scout, getting in trouble, throwing rocks at windows & such. They couldn’t.

Perhaps I could have stated the question differently, spent more time defining what it means to “identify” with a heroic character, or used an example other than Scout, as it may be hard for a young man to connect with his perspective as a child—in front of a college class. However, I’ve never had male students who couldn’t talk about their childhood experiences in relation to other subjects & about half of my students are juniors & seniors, who are often a little less intimated in discussions.

I am left with several questions: Do our students understand what it means to “identify” with a heroic character? To what degree do girls & women identify with male versus female heroes? To what degree do boys & men identify with male versus female heroes? How do these questions relate to those of us who identify as GLBTQQ? How might my students respond to the same questions in writing, especially if they know I’m the only reader? To what degree might the notable abundance of male heroes & rarer heroines contribute to my male students claiming that they can’t identify with a single heroine from literature/film/popular culture? How do issues of class, race & ethnicity complicate things? How might such an ability/inability to relate & imagine (or even discuss the issue) affect us?

As I begin researching these initial questions (& many others popping up!) with hopes of supporting my students as they write & talk about their experiences of numerous heroes & a few heroines, your thoughts, experiences, resources &/or references would be greatly appreciated! Perhaps part of my challenge is that I have often identified with characters/heroes of both genders & apparently I tend to associate with others like myself. It never occurred to me that all of my male students would draw a blank on this.

I am acutely aware that there is a vast amount of scholarship on this topic & I’m specifically looking for resources that our students might find accessible & clear. Thanks in advance for any comments you can share!

Silver

[Most of what I post here are first drafts. What follows is especially raw, early material, which I share now for those who have asked. Thanks for taking your time to visit.]

From the door, I could see the change. Her mouth was gone. In its place, an open hole served one purpose: to breathe. Or try. By the time I returned from up north one month later, Opal appeared to have aged two decades and no longer drank, ate, spoke or even swallowed. She appeared deep in sleep. Approaching the bed—and I did so quickly, yet remember it in stopped frames—I saw that her jaw stayed fully open, never to close again, at least not while she lived, and her lips had almost entirely receded into her mouth, leaving only thin, barely visible seams of faint, rosy-brown flesh, seams more like the inside of her mouth. From this dark opening, vertical lines smoothed out into the fragile field of her sweet face. Her teeth tucked safely in bed-stand drawer, jaw wide, tongue flat behind gums, she fought for each breath—gasping in short, quick, raspy inhales, each exhale a submissive downbeat, almost a frustrated sigh. Few things could help now: her head tilted upwards on the pillow, the steeply raised bed, a standing fan and morphine. Her femurs visible through the sheet, her newly too-thin body lay motionless, shaped in the last position that hospice staff, and then I, had placed her in. It seemed as if all that was left of her focused on trying to breath. Or trying to die. And her lipless, toothless, gaping mouth was the most alive part of her—yet also the part of her aging with every breath, closest to death.

My deceased father’s mother, a second mother to me, Opal did not appear to be in pain and everything in her face and body had utterly surrendered to this place. Hers seemed a kind of peace that I imagine having tasted for only seconds at a time, like the sensation of first gliding under clear, warm water in an empty pool, sight gone, sound muffled, body weightless, face expressionless. We cannot know, but I want to believe that what she felt was peace, that we did not construe this in our own tired minds to ease the pain of watching her die. I am told by the family—family who had always been there for her while I lived half a continent away—that in her last weeks, she said, “Help me.” Looked at you and said it again. Said it repeatedly.

And there was nothing anyone could do but raise her higher on the pillow, raise the bed’s angle, check the fan’s direction and ask the nurse to administer the morphine. Because of those few drops in the side of her cheek, drops that are immediately absorbed into the bloodstream whether or not one can swallow, she would sleep all day. In fact, she rarely opened her eyes or spoke lucidly in those last days. Then, twenty-four hours before I could arrive, they stopped giving her food or water. To do so would force her systems to continue working, force her body to do the opposite of what it was trying to do. And to force fluids of any kind would overwhelm her organs while depriving her of endorphins. After losing nine of the people I have loved the most in this world, there I was, reading the blue hospice booklet cover to cover, trying to understand something about which I knew too much and nothing—how we die.

She made me write her obituary several years ago, a request that I struggled with, procrastinating until she could wait no longer. In the beginning, we worked on it together, Opal telling me what to put in, what to take out. Finally, one night I read it to her. “Opal was an optimist who loved to laugh. Born June 14, 1919 in Tishomingo, Oklahoma…” I tried to keep my voice from breaking. She listened intently with her chin propped up on her thumb, a darkly polished index finger covering her mouth. “Opal worked as supervisor for the clothing manufacturer Kellwood Company for 31 years before retiring in 1979. She volunteered for the V.A. Hospital, Old Baptist Hospital and was a member of the Disabled American Veterans and Auxiliary, serving in a number of positions and finally as President for the State of Arkansas.” As she had instructed, I had reduced her life to a list of names, titles, places and numbers, and there I was, reading that list to her while the house slept and we sat in easy chairs wearing our nightgowns, well, wearing her nightgowns. “I don’t mean to interrupt you but,” and then she would interrupt, correcting the details of just what she’d lived. “In 1935, she married Carl Sandage with whom she had three children. Two were lost as babies and Larry Sandage, former Vietnam combat photographer, died in 1982 at 38.” She blinked. Nodded. Our uncontrollable laughter over old stories about Dad told only a half hour earlier had entirely evaporated from the air around us.

“In 1975, she married Fay New of Little Rock. For 25 years, they enjoyed a happy life together in the home he built.” She stared straight ahead, then looked at me and nodded. “Opal ran a small home quilting and alterations business for twenty years, sewing 1,705 quilts, 1,108 baby quilts, and crocheting 67 afghans. After Fay’s death in 2000, his large family remained very close to her.” That last sentence was important to her. Her husband’s family made up most of the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren, numbering forty-five in all. Words cannot approximate the way that family was there for her—at the door to pick her up for doctor’s appointments and for dinner, for the holiday feast and the errand, or just to sit and visit. In fact, that one sentence describing the gift they gave her was not enough. For years, Opal asked me to write a letter to them on her behalf and I steadfastly procrastinated because I knew all along what that letter might mean, and I had not been ready to face it.

See, first she had asked me to write her epitaph, then her obituary, and finally the letter. I worked on the epitaph. I figured I could handle one sentence. After an astonishing amount of thought & numerous drafts, I ended up with six words: She lives in our hearts forever. Then, I managed to work on the obituary with her. That was hard, but the fact of her remarkable aliveness made it possible. However, a farewell letter—that is something a person writes before they let go. Perhaps I waited to write it because it was the last thing I had to keep her here, as if she couldn’t leave until I wrote it.

Nevertheless, she pushed, instructing me in what to say and adding, “Have the preacher give it to them.” The first time she asked me to write it, she was sitting in her reclining chair drinking a cup of coffee, adjusting her glasses at one side with a polished mauve nail. She looked right at me with those alert brown eyes and said, “Tell them I’ve loved them like my own blood.” Simple and true, her words hung in the air. As I wrote them down, she started to talk about dating Faye back when and how he asked her to marry him while driving down the highway. Considering the way Grandpa drove, I imagined she was too terrified to say no. And they lived happily ever after. How often do we get to say that in real life? And a great part of that happiness was because of Fay’s family who filled their home and lives with stories and laughter, the family she’d always longed for—consistently coming through the door. Family is not bound by blood as much as by hearts and small acts of kindness, by jokes that ring in the mind years later, infectious laughter that grips you when alone, sitting in silence remembering.

“You’ve got to tell them I’ve loved them like my own blood.”

She said that to me again, recently, after she asked and I admitted that I still had not written her farewell. Finally, she began to plan her funeral and I began to write about how she loved cooking chicken and dumplings and chocolate pie for us, loved watching us grow up and older over the years, listening to our stories and jokes, our voices calling through her home, sometimes laughing so hard we cried. She said, “Tell them, tell them thank you so much for everything, forever.”

I studied Opal’s closed eyes, swollen, flushed and ringed in pale brown, her lashes laced with gray. Studied her thin eyebrows, perfectly shaped as always. The fine, blue veins behind her temples. Her wide, open forehead, speckled with a few brownish age spots, remarkably clear of lines, luminescent in the lamplight, and from which her short, beautiful, silver hair was brushed away from her face, for once uncurled, luxurious, still growing, positively elegant. Silver spilled onto the pillow. I wanted to show the beauty I saw. Wanted to remember. And so I did what might be seen as an irreverent act—took photos with a small, digital camera. I think she would have understood. I want to believe that she would. Because I needed some way to hold on to her.

“You’ve always been like a daughter to me,” she would say, her steady eyes gazing straight into mine, “The little girl I lost.”

I took several photos of her silver hair against plain, white cotton. Three of her in profile, photos that reveal the degree of her open jaw and the deepening of death in her face, photos I felt I had to take. Not to do so would be a lie. The other photos were of her arms and hands folded. The light green gown with pale pink roses at the neck—my favorite photos framed at the top with her gently scooping rose neckline, and framed on the sides and bottom edge by her arms and hands, arms that should be pale from being inside all the time, yet seemed to have color, almost a tan. Why would her arms have such color? One hand crossed over the other wrist, her hands were the most heartbreaking of all. There were her nails, long, shaped, and strong, polish taken from every nail but two. I had never seen her beautiful nails so nude. And rarely without her rings. Now, she wore only one—a wide, yellow gold wedding band.

I recognized her gown instantly, as it was the one I would always ask to borrow when I visited her, even purposefully not packing anything to sleep in so that I could wear it. No other colors could look so lovely on her. The embroidered roses. Four small, sweetheart sized pale pink roses in the gentlest full bloom, the two outer roses being slightly smaller, cradled by delicate, pale green leaves, its petals and leaves forming her gowns irregular, scooping, wavelike neckline. From this necklace of roses, mint green fabric fell gracefully over her chest like water easing toward its shore, these shores being the thinner parts of her, the formerly fleshy places that had been most vulnerable to the powers of cancer. The waves of her gown lessened as they made their way over her still ample breasts, below which her hands rested, her thumbs with their notable joints that bent easily in ways most thumbs refuse. We had the same thumbs, she would always tell me, holding my hand, working my thumb like a small toy. Now, her fingers swollen and immobile, I held her hands in mine. I gently stroked their backs, the delicate wrists, lovely arms. I tell you she was beautiful. But to describe that beauty, I use words such as veined and spotted. I fear that you, reader, will not see the beauty I saw.

(Continued)

Eclipse

A girl, no, a young woman, lazily walks into the surf,
relaxed as the long afternoon, walks directly toward me—
sun setting behind her in a cloudless pale pink and orange sky
over Galveston fields, weeds, debris, surviving palm trees,
the abandoned, stair-less bathhouse and miles of soft, almost
powdery pale gray sand—she walks away from the landscape
that briefly held her, through the water, eclipsing
the sun, her body in complete silhouette, and I know
that I know the black construction paper stranger
who I emerge out of warm waves into breeze for, know
the new shape of her, for I have watched that form blooming
for thirteen years, have studied the newborn’s dance
in my arms, the girl’s gait as she trots and gallops in the yard, runs
for the school bus in flip flops, walks away from the house,
fingers in shallow jean pockets; I walk toward the woman
she is becoming, everything
and nothing like the girl
she is now—
a grown woman approaches me
until her path veers, just a little in my direction
and light floods the silhouette of her, erases
the woman, reveals the astonishing complexity of angle,
joint, dimension, motion, texture and color of long-waisted curves, solid muscled legs, bony shoulders, loose hair
and too-heavily lined brown eyes
arriving just to say Hi.

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this recent revision was submitted for publication (hd)

Persistence

White paint splattered across a canvas
of high grass, clusters of daisies
glow at dusk, their infinite bright faces
like galaxies of fat stars
punctuated by buttercups—
pools of semicolons and ellipses.

The field’s flowers become light spilled
and scattered amongst impenetrable layers
and shades of green—bushes and trees climbing
the hill behind a yellow house, gathering
strength in late May beneath a Technicolor
Magritte evening sky. Under the front porch light,

on the stoop’s stage, a moth drags heavy,
cream-colored wings of tissue
striped with the palest pink
along a notebook’s edge, oblivious
to the poem being written around it.
In spite of it. Suddenly about it. Claws

along the horizontal ladder of metal
spiral and all three edges of thin paper
then follows the faint blue tracks
of black script. Climbs onto the pen
that is writing it. Traces
the pen’s length then paces. Declines

to the poem again, circles a stanza
before abandoning the poem
altogether and settling on the copper
beer mug, orange body folding
beneath draping wings like a miniature aircraft
parked without fanfare.

The world does not ask us to write it
or paint it. We persist, century
after century, asking pigment
and syllable to bring us closer
to the world’s body, like a lover
longing to describe the beloved.

We work the oil to remember
how the field sways, seducing
us to enter. We unwind the line
to catch the moth that is already gone.

Her Words

Silent, the girl holds a pale blue cigar box.
She stands in thick dusk, both hands holding
the closed coffin at heart level, ready,
offering it to the ground. It has been lightly raining
on and off for days. Early May, layers of yellow-green
lighten the quick, darkening air.
That small body was still soft when she found him,
pliable when she gently folded him into a torn, white t-shirt—
the innocent out of pain.
This ground does not resist the shovel.
Yet, digging still takes longer
than I want it to take, for the longer we wait
the more we’ll remember.
She hands me the box
covered with her words
written with marker. I should
bend down, offer
the dead to damp earth
but I hesitate, trying to read my daughter’s words.
While her body has bloomed overnight,
her voice has grown rare, painfully
rare. Too dark, I struggle to decipher
the shapes her fingers worked
to form, feeling like I’m reading
someone else’s love
letter. My gaze lingers too long on her writing,
as if I could read my daughter’s heart—this lovely stranger
I raised, this child, this woman who has become,
is becoming, was—the minute she was born, is—the moment,
in the moment, a force that cannot be contained yet must
be, even as she longs for what she hates.
The box’s blue cardboard
lifts her letters away from its surface, makes
them hover, luminescent. After one line
I stop reading. Suddenly, what matters
is that she wrote
across the entire face of the box. Her hand
kept moving. She said it.
Her words glowing in my hands,
I stoop and give them
to the grave. The sound
of dirt hitting
a coffin of any kind
sounds the same.
As my right arm embraces her,
she leans into me.

Never Tell

This is what I don’t want to tell you. Am afraid to say. Shouldn’t. Don’t. Won’t. Want to. Have to. Need you to know. Cannot tell. I want to tell you. What it is. To work. To really work. Work sitting. Sitting so long in an office chair that nothing eases the ache down the right side of your spine, not even straightening your back, creatively slumping or taking too many Ibuprofen. And you cannot stop sitting in that chair. Your knees ache with inconsolable premature arthritis and you cannot straighten them for long because to do so makes you look like you’re not working hard, makes you look like you’re even lazy or don’t take your job seriously. And working overtime all the time is just the nature of the job. As is eating lunch at your desk. And you need this job. Everything and I mean everything depends on it. Your head pounds, sure, the eyestrain feeds it, but your aching neck is worse than all the other varieties of discomfort and pain because hour by hour it is becoming more uncomfortable to hold up your head. Last week your neck ached until you became nauseous and needed to excuse yourself and couldn’t. You were on deadline. As usual. And you were still on the three months of probation because your supervisor reported you to her boss because she was not able to get all of her work done and therefore needed you to take on far more than your job description implied when she hired you. I want to tell you how good it feels to almost make your deadline and be freed from the skyscraper that holds you prisoner in its dungeon and to then walk as fast as you can down Madison Avenue in old heels that need reheeling through the streets of a city where you are anonymous and the finer the clothes the courser the manner. You ask a suited woman for the time and she asks you why you don’t have a watch, sneering as she passes. At that moment, you realize that you’re bleeding through your pants crotch seam. Your heavy bag presses your bones a little harder against cement. Yes, it’s almost cliché, isn’t it? Or just boring. What’s my point? My point is that the job you are working so hard to keep is an improvement over the one before it and the one before it. Now you are asked to think! Though your body is suffering, slowly aging, even dying, your mind is active! Remember the old days of scrubbing slate tables with Brillo pads at 3 a.m. so that patrons could write with chalk on their tabletops while drinking red wine, eating lamb, listening to Moroccan music and laughing at Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times flickering against a wall? Remember that your mother never made as much as you make now at this job you’re not complaining about because to do so is to lose it, so even if you can’t pay your rent, which is due tomorrow, I mean today, you graduated from college and have health insurance. Remember that your grandmother worked in a factory all of her life and as a child picked one hundred pounds of cotton per summer day so that she could buy her own clothes, shoes and a coat for the school year. My, how things have changed, she says when you tell her about your kids’ extracurricular horseback riding, music and dance lessons, how they won’t do their chores and want their own cell phones. She remembers bits of blood on every finger, beads of sweat sliding down her legs under heavy dungarees and hiding the money she made under her mattress at the age of nine.

There. I said it. That’s it.
No. There’s more. One more thing.
This is what I don’t want to tell you:

The check did not arrive.
The job’s filled. Position aborted.
No vacancies. Your card has been rejected. The deadline
was yesterday. You did not
qualify. It’s time
to pack your room.
We are getting a divorce.
I have cancer.
He is dead. She
gone. I left him
for another man. For a woman.
She left me. It is over. Done.
Your puppy is gone.
The good guy turned bad. The buildings
collapsed. We are at war.
Your daddy is going away.
We are broke. You’ll live
with your grandparents. This may
be goodbye. Your daddy
is dead. We have to move
again. She has perished.
The plane—

I am sorry. Your only hope

is for all you still love
to be enough
to keep you going when bone tired
you hold the baby
in darkness, her tiny, innocent mouth
working at your breast. As you struggle

to carry the cold, metal end
you are not strong enough to carry.

As you straighten your back
and adjust the height of your chair.

As you stare at the typed page in your veined hand
because you do

have a choice. And you want.
You are hungry

to prove me wrong and that makes you strong.

On Sweetheart Mountain

for V.

Raw garnet in the rock beneath our feet,
we stand separate yet together—wordless,
witness to the vast valley, aching snow and silence.
Rare, stunning silence.
The kind that reminds us we’re bone clothed
in flesh, small creatures given breath.
Specks on top of a mountain, balancing on a ledge.
A bird calls out. We do not know what bird it is.
Then a Black-capped Chickadee stirs the air—
its small, plucking call leaves
an absence of sound so penetrating
and complete we can only whisper.

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submitted for publication (lyl)