Don't Wait Until Mother's Day

My mom, Joyce Wiertelak,
about age 3

I've gotten some messages from readers who were wondering what happened to Rhonda.  Unfortunately, she had to take a "bereavement withdrawal," I guess you'd call it, for the semester.  She'll be back next month, taking English 101 over the summer.  Her withdrawal from the course may be a fictional event, but it springs from something that happened to me (her creator) in real life.

On April 8, my mother died.  Not long after Rhonda's last post (on 3/10/14), Mom went into the hospital because of an infection, and over the next 3 weeks, she had innumerable tests, scans, x-rays, etc., of every part of her body as they tried to figure out what was causing the pain she had been experiencing.  The upshot of all this was that while she was finally getting medication for the pain (and the infection, which did clear up), they discovered that she had cancer of the spine.  The prognosis was as bad as possible:  4 weeks (or 6 months, if she were to continue her kidney dialysis).  She chose to forgo the dialysis-- she hated it -- and so she was put under hospice care and we brought her home. 

I cannot say enough good things about the hospice and the help they gave us, so I won't try, but looking back on it now, a month later, I find that I am very glad that we went that route.  You might think that doing all the things that have to be done for a person in that situation would be . . . well, pick your adjective-- disgusting, gross, whatever, but when it's someone you love, that aspect of it doesn't even come into play.  You're just happy you can do something to make her more comfortable.  Really, it was a privilege to take care of her and help her during this time; we're all agreed on that.  From the moment of the diagnosis, our primary concern was that Mom would get whatever she wanted (obviously, she would also get whatever she needed, too), and my four siblings and I did everything to make that happen.  Unfortunately, her condition worsened so rapidly that there wasn't time to do all the things she wanted to do.

So, on Mother's Day this year, the family will gather the way we always did.  In the hospital, she told me she wanted the chilled cucumber soup I make every summer.  When she came home, I bought the cucumbers, but the next day she wasn't up to eating much, and it just went downhill from there.  We'll be having the soup on Sunday, along with some of her other favorites, and I know I'm still going to feel guilty that I didn't make it while she could enjoy it, but I also know that she would tell me it was not my fault and that I shouldn't feel badly about it.

What I want to say right now is this:  don't wait to make the cucumber soup.  Don't wait for Mother's Day.  Do it now.

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The Things you Can Learn in a Book Review

Such a shame 2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Well, I guess my instincts about the Fox book (see my last post) were pretty good.  We have to have at least two book reviews on our bibliography, so after I finished writing about Class Fictions, I went searching for a review.  I was kind of surprised at how many there were, because I only found a couple for my other books.  

It seems that Pamela Fox got a lot of people going besides me, although the others are mostly concerned with the book overall rather than her take on shame theory.  I read a review by Neil Nehring that was in Studies in the Novel in 1998.  Nehring is a cultural studies scholar, not a shame guy, and he found a lot of things in Fox's book to disagree with other than her use of shame.  What I got out of reading his review and my examination of the book is that Fox seems to be just generalizing about shame and assuming that her working-class writers feel it as sort of an ongoing embarrassment about lacking middle- or upper-class advantages.  My final take on it is that she hasn't got enough to go on in terms of a shame approach, so whatever she comes up with from the books she is analyzing is bound to be kind of superficial.  Of course, I don't know that much about it myself -- yet-- but that's my impression.

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A Different Shame Model

Shame (Photo credit: Joe Gatling)

I'm supposed to be describing one of the sources I am using for my bibliography and for my literature review, and I think I'm going to do this as a kind of draft for this book's section of the lit review, just to save some time.  Please bear with me:  I will be taking out most references to myself when I revise it.  And, I apologize for not being able to figure out how to do a hanging indentation.

Fox, Pamela.  Class Fictions:  Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890-1945.  Durham:  Duke UP, 1994.

I was immediately surprised by this book:  I looked in the index for "script theory" or some variation thereof, but there was nothing about it at all.  There was an entry for shame theory, so I went to that and discovered the reason for the earlier omission, which is that Pamela Fox a. is only interested in people in large numbers (like the working class, for example), and b. does not think that script theory has anything to offer in such cases or does not know it exists, which seems unlikely, as she writes, "[shame theory] has offered little to contemporary scholars searching for nuanced, respectful approaches to class cultural forms.  And in its traditional guises, it has little to offer me here" (10).  Yes, that's right.  She's written a book about shame in literature based entirely on a model that ignores a fairly large body of theory, dismissing it as "notoriously out of favor" (10), a status that has changed dramatically since the time that she published her book.  However, her model (definitely anti-psychoanalytic, sort of pro-anthropological) is not quite specific enough to stand in for all the ideas she has rejected, and it shows when she gets down to analyzing novels of the period in question.

In the years since 1994, a number of important examinations of shame in literature have been published, adding to the body of theory and opening new possiblities of shame theory as a critical approach to literature.  None of these follow Fox's model; nor will I, as her approach does not add anything useful to the model I am constructing.

I guess this shows you how I write a first draft-- lots of repetition and rethinking in the middle, so I have to edit a lot.  On the other hand, I think I've gotten out a lot of what I want to say about her book, so I'll consider it useful. 

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