I was teaching Wuthering Heights, trying to convince my students that when Heathcliff characterises his wife Isabella as a very dumb creature who has stupidly mistaken him for a gentleman hero of romance, Emily Brontë is actually pulling the rug under our feet –‘we’ being the women readers who, like Isabella, are mesmerised by the villain Heathcliff.
I was in the middle of ranting about the ills of clichéd romantic fiction and how it generates too many dependent, abused Isabellas in real life when I realised that my focus on the heterosexual readers of Brontë’s masterpiece was excluding a male gay student in my class. He’s openly gay, in case this clarification is necessary (um, just I am openly heterosexual…). Not that he complained at all; I did, silently and to myself, feeling suddenly self-conscious about how the heteronormative 19th century discourse was colonising my own teaching.
As a researcher I specialise in Gender Studies (yes, not Women’s Studies) and that’s how I teach. Many may disagree with this approach but I feel that as a feminist teacher of English Literature I fulfil a double mission: teaching about the texts as outstanding narrative, and teaching about their heteronormative context in order to make ours more visible, less powerful. This, of course, supposedly might also help any gay student, male or female (why are the lesbian girls so invisible??).
Actually, I am reading Wuthering Heights with a focus on how the unexpected homoerotic bonding between Heathcliff and Hareton should not blind us to Brontë’s defence, through the latter’s vindication, of a softer version of patriarchy by no means subversive. Yet, I hadn’t wondered until last week whether this is enough. I do have the training to offer passable queer readings of all the Victorian texts I’m dealing with –think what comes next: Great Expectations, Dr. Jekyll, Heart of Darkness– but I am not sure heterosexual me can be totally fair to the identities and interests of the homosexual(s) in class. I am not (hetero)queer enough no matter how hard I try not to be, at least, heteronormative straight. I do hope that my assessment is fair enough to alternative queer readings of the texts and I hope they materialise.
As happens, I’ll be teaching in a few days a seminar within Dr. Rodrigo Andrés’s exciting ‘Queer Readings’ extension course at UB. My seminar deals with Sarah Water’s lesbian novel, Tipping the Velvet. I had submitted a 20 minute paper to the conference that Prof. Andrés has organised for 4-5 November, «Noves subjectivitats/sexualitats literàries», but I was invited instead to expand that into a 3-hour-session. My panic transformed my paper on Waters’ mainstream success into an examination of how I, as a heterosexual feminist, can read a lesbian text that doesn’t address me. Can, not may, as I believe I have a right to read Waters, as much as my gay student surely can read (critically) that heterosexual novel, Wuthering Heights, and queer it. I should ask him to enlighten me about how he’s doing it, though I don’t know whether this should be privately over coffee or publicly in class. To be honest, I don’t even know how to address the issue…