Eight lessons in love
Eight lessons in love: a domestic violence reader Mark Spilka
Publisher: Columbia : University of Missouri Press, c1997.
ISBN: 0826211232
DDC: 813.0108355
LCC: PS374
Edition: (alk. paper)
Summary:
The title of this book is deliberately ironic. Domestic violence is
not about love as we understand it, but about the need for men to
reassert their threatened or lost command in a relationship. Eight
Lessons in Love is a critical study of fictional treatments of that
ironic problem, offering a radical new way of reading and teaching
those works as drastic lessons in power and control.
Drawing on his recent experience as a volunteer group co-counselor of
male batterers, and on his lifelong experiences as a scholar, editor,
and critic in the field of fiction studies, Mark Spilka has developed
a way to apply present professional understanding of domestic
violence to fictional attempts to cope with the theme.
This critical sampler includes Spilka's essays on the stories
included: James Joyce's "Counterparts," Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows
of Kilimanjaro," John Cheever's "Torch Song," George Eliot's early
novella Janet's Repentance, D. H.
Lawrence's "The White Stocking," Ann Petry's "Like a Winding Sheet,"
John Steinbeck's "The Murder," and Isaac Bashevis Singer's "The Wife
Killer," Each critical assessment of these stories is followed by the
text of the relevant tale or novella so that readers can move
comfortably from one to the other.
Using such professional devices as the Anger Iceberg Chart and the
Power Ladder, and such key professional concepts as "male
accountability" and "female collusion," Spilka asks new questions
about these stories and sheds surprising new light on both their
literary and their current social implications.
He asks why Hemingway rewards his dying protagonist with heaven, for
instance, in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," when that bravely
self-critical man has spent most of his dying days verbally abusing
his safari wife; or why Joyce primes his buffeted male protagonist
for vengeful domestic violence in "Counterparts," but whisks the
man's wife out to evening chapel service so that a child receives the
abuse that was surely meant for her.
Spilka shows how all these writers are keenly aware of domestic abuse
as it affects themselves and their characters, and how they struggle
honestly to cope with the issues of violence and sometimes overcome
or assuage them in later fictions. The stakes in domestic violence
are extraordinarily high: life or death. What better place to gain
new awareness of their implications than in the depths of Eight
Lessons In Love, where we can investigate the specific and dramatic
ramifications of each story.
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (p. 363-369) and index.
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