INTRODUCTION TO THE CASE STUDIES
The primary purpose of Part II: Case studies in character is to provide an annotated passage study and questions for reflection designed to elicit moral insights yielded by the protagonist’s development and the novel as a whole. I have selected passages from the novel, excerpts that highlight the evolving moral development of the protagonist.
Moreover, each case study raises both explicit and implicit questions relevant to students’
own character development: What can we learn from the characters’ conflicts and challenges? What conclusions can we draw from the novel about how pride, naїveté, self-hate, and blind ambition, for example, influence our own judgment and character?
STRUCTURE OF THE CASE STUDIES
The four case studies proceed in the following manner. Each is introduced with a brief commentary on the book’s literary significance and context. The Tapping the moral imagination section highlights the resonances between the protagonist’s experience and our students’, encouraging them to look at the novel not just as another burdensome homework assignment, but as a means of gaining insight into their own lives and the issues that concern them most deeply. Approaching the novels in this way primes students to engage in an aesthetic and morally sensitive reading.1
The case study itself, Fostering ethical reflection, places morally pivotal points and challenge points in sharp relief. The bulleted questions for reflection inserted at key dramatic junctures are addressed to the students and support focused engagement with the novel. They may be used as prompts for readers’ journals, classroom discussion and small group presentations, or to create writing assignments for students. These questions and the passages are, of course, not exhaustive, and they vary in depth and analytical complexity. As a teacher, you can tailor these studies to the needs and skill zv54 level of students, choosing the most appropriate questions, crafting new ones, and supplementing the analysis with other related passages. Each case study concludes with Summary reflections on the character’s journey and a set of Extension questions for follow-up discussion, writing, or research assignments.
I envision numerous uses for these case studies. If you are a literature teacher teaching any of these novels for the first time, the cases will acquaint you with the protagonist’s
moral growth (or decline). If you are a veteran teacher looking for new insights and approaches to a novel, you can test these passages and questions for reflection with students and see what they yield. If you are using other novels with your students, you will find a framework that you can adapt to those works. If you are a student of English education or a teacher educator, you can use these case studies as a springboard for the creation of lessons and units. In short, these case studies will prompt you and your students to bring additional passages and questions to the study of each character’s moral development.
As the context of each character’s life is central to understanding and evaluating the choices he or she makes, the case studies draw heavily from the novels to help illustrate how each individual’s moral drama unfolds. Each case study provides a narrative context for guiding students’ exploration of the evolving telos or multiple tele of each protagonist. This context provides rich evidence the reader can use to evaluate the characters’ choices.
Each character possesses his or her own unique temperament and dispositions. Gatsby is highly imaginative and erotic, whereas Carton is seemingly indifferent and cynical.
Janie is naїve and romantic, and Elizabeth is self-assured yet judgmental. While these characterizations may be a bit over-simplified, it bears noting that each protagonist has also developed (or failed to develop) certain virtues; they are at different stages in their schooling of desire when we meet them in the novel. These moral starting points are important to take into account, because the characters are not empty slates when we first encounter them in the novel.
Like real people whom we encounter for the first time in the middle of their lives, they have already developed good and bad habits, nurtured or suppressed certain dispositions and character traits, and formed more or less conscious goals and visions for their lives.
This moral “baggage” profoundly shapes the characters’ reactions and choices. The traits acquired “before” the novel, however, are as mysterious in their origin as those we observe in real life individuals. We can guess about the formation of these traits based on clues, but cannot actually trace their development in detail. In fact, what we are looking at in the context of these case studies are examples of mature virtues or bad habits. What evolves in these studies is the development of practical wisdom. The characters’ virtues or lack thereof zv55 help or hinder this development.2 One would imagine, however, that those previously-acquired habits developed in much the same way as those that we can examine in the novel. Therefore we have to take these dispositions as a given, considering their influence on the characters’ abilities to make moral progress but focusing primarily on the changes that actually unfold throughout the novel.
The successful schooling of desire ultimately leads to a character’s determined pursuit of an ideal that is both worthwhile and compelling. The questions and activities throughout these case studies help students discover that the schooling of desire is not achieved through a detached intellectual grasp of an ideal or goal that fails to inspire commitment. In the successful schooling of desire, the characters’ tele not only become clearer at each morally pivotal point, but each turn provides them with new impetus to lead a more flourishing life. Elizabeth Bennet’s case study shows how stubborn prejudice can be corrected to embrace a truer understanding of oneself and others. The next case
study, Janie Crawford, demonstrates how a naїve desire for marriage can mature into a profound understanding of love. Sydney Carton’s story exemplifies how conflicted desires—recognizing what is right but being incapable of choosing it—can be harmonized and ultimately liberate him from the baser habits that enslave him. Finally, Jay Gatsby’s case study illustrates, by contrast, what happens when desires are incorrectly schooled and blind eros impels a soul.
Naturally, all of the characters in a novel are affected or influenced on some level by the other characters that animate the fictional world in which they live. In other words, other characters—both minor and major—often experience morally pivotal points and challenge points. Some characters provide a dramatic foil to the protagonist or help to highlight important relationships among and between characters. By focusing on the protagonists in each of these novels, I do not mean to downplay the moral growth and change of the other characters. Nor do I mean to diminish their influence on the protagonist’s development. In this book I have chosen to focus primarily on the characters named, although as a teacher you may wish to draw out more fully the moral growth of other characters in these novels.
The case studies are not substitutes for the rich and varied ways to bring Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to life. Rather, they serve as points of entry in your efforts to guide students’ ethical reflection. They should not exclude important considerations about authorial and historic context, or the range of conflicts, themes, and questions raised by the work as a whole. These case studies can be used as a resource to prepare lectures and to engage students in any number of exercises: discussion, debate, dramatic interpretation, formal literary analysis, and creative or expository writing. In short, they are a means to help zv56 students to become more adept at ethical reflection, while at the same time achieving the teaching and learning goals articulated in the broader English curriculum.
All too often the teaching of English remains at the level of formal analysis of plot, symbol, mood, and irony, excluding existential questions. Many times the discussion of literature is either devoid of any serious reflection, or at the other extreme, too quickly or too superficially reduced to simple moral lessons and shibboleths that ignore the complexity of a narrative.3 The case studies that follow in Chapters 4 through 7 explore the ways we can prompt genuine conversation about four novels and the protagonists that animate them. Examining morally pivotal points in the lives of fictional characters helps us to remind students of the importance of subjecting life’s experiences, both great and small, to ethical reflection. This kind of analysis yields rich data that give students an opportunity to reflect on the moral dimensions of experience, on morally pivotal points in individual lives. What factors help to bring these moments about? How does the schooling of desire reveal moral progress? What is ultimately achieved in an individual’s soul by successfully schooling desire? By exploring these questions in the context of literature study, we are inviting students to engage in a parallel inquiry about their own lives.