IIan Ellis James has been electric for years.

LIGHTNING BOLT earrings dangle from both ears. His ideas cast shockwaves around the room when he speaks. He can’t sit still and at any moment has five different projects he wants to develop. Coming up in the theater world in the 1970s, he declared it in his name, christening himself William Electric Black. He chose William for his beloved Shakespeare, his literary hero. He selected Black for the period’s Black is Beautiful movement, and Electric because it’s “cosmic,” something else.

Around the dramatic writing department office at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where he now teaches and we met to talk about his work, James is known solely as Electric. He brings to campus––to faculty meetings and his classes––the energy and inspiration from his long career in the arts, studded with seven Emmys for his writing on Sesame Street from 1992 to 2002. He’s written for Nickelodeon and produced shows at experimental theaters around New York City.

Born in Oyster Bay, New York, Electric went to Bowdoin in the 1970s with different ambitions: he was going to study economics. Yet, as he applied himself to the ideas of microeconomics and sunk cost, he felt a pull back to the characters he’d loved becoming throughout high school, while performing in summer stock theater. Because the College did not have the robust theater program and arts and performance community it does today, he felt he needed to transfer, first enrolling at Nassau Community College in his native New York before completing a four-year drama program at Brockport State College.

invited him to come along to a graduate program at Southern Illinois University for playwriting, he moved to Carbondale. There, he found immense pleasure in creating worlds of his own on stage. He started the Blacks Open Laboratory Theater––similarly electric, nicknamed BOLT––out of the student center and put on a couple of plays in Chicago. One thing led to another, and he was asked to start a theater company in Carbondale. Yet, as his classmates moved to Los Angeles and other places, he felt a pull back to his home state.

When he returned to New York, he got involved with La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, an innovative theater on 4th Street, founded by the late Ellen Stewart in the 1960s. In its mission, the theater recognizes the role audiences can play in the formation of art, and it sees the power of art as a force for change.

“I realized what I had taught myself was to really produce my own work. That was the journey, and I really had that skill,” says Electric. “So when I came back to New York, I didn’t have to wait and hand somebody a script. I had a space.”

He began producing plays at both La MaMa and Theater for the New City, where just this spring he staged a production of Romeo and Juliet: Tribal Rock Musical, in which he set the words of his favorite bard to rock, rap, pop, soul, blues, and gospel. Before Stewart passed away, she gave Electric a corner of the theater to produce his work and spoken word poetry.

Opposite page:

Electric

He quickly made a name for himself there. The school had a strong theater department, and he began to direct, write, and produce his own material. After years performing, he was amazed to see other people bringing his worlds––and the characters from inside his head––to life. When the department chair

His training in theater ultimately brought him to Sesame Street. He got his feet wet writing scripts, telling stories about how Zoe wanted a pet or how Baby Bear needed a break from playtime with Big Bird. Through his persistence, he got the chance to do what he was really excited about: write music for the show. He worked with the late Gail Sky King and wrote the “Gospel Alphabet” for Patti Labelle and “The Letter O” for Queen Latifah. He even had The Count send up Elvis as The King of Counting.

“I’ve always loved music. Everyone knows it’s so powerful. It can be fabulous especially in terms of working with kids,” he says. “You have music, you have puppets, you’re singing, you have something else to offer to the kids. You’re not dumbing down to them.

“Sesame Street and these other shows are helping kids deal with these emotions that a lot of times they can’t verbalize. That’s a home run.”

One of the key lessons he took from the show was how much planning and research a season required. The work was arduous. Marrying a curriculum to various storylines, he felt like he was in graduate school all over again. In his office, he still has a series of fat, coil-bound research guides: African American Research 1992, Asian American Research Guide 1993. Through the research and collaboration of several people, the writers sought to understand what they knew and identify their blind spots. To offer kids such a robust and culturally engaged education, to help them learn and understand everything from the alphabet to counting, conflict resolution to the trials of the world they’re living in, he says, requires a true ensemble effort.

As much as he’s known in the theater world by his mononym, Electric has become famous for something else too, what he now describes as his “white whale.” Since 2012, he’s been using his writing acumen and love of experimental and participatory theater to address a burning issue: gun violence.

In 2020, gun violence surpassed automobile accidents as the leading cause of death in children in the United States. The New York Times Magazine reported that, as of December 2022, the “gun-death rate for children is nearly five in every 100,000.” Approximately two-thirds of those deaths have been homicides, mostly involving Black children, “who make up a small share of all children but shoulder the burden of gun violence more than any others, a disparity that is growing sharply.”

Throughout his career, Electric has worked to engage his audiences in storytelling and learning through theater and music. Believing that the government was not going to enact meaningful change, he turned to what he knew best: participatory theater. This work began with his series Gunplays, a collection of five plays that approach violence in the city from different angles.

In The Death of a Black Man (A Walk By), Electric thrust the audience into the position of a community in the wake of a shooting. Seats were removed from the theater, and the audience gathered behind police rope, passing through a scene with bullet casings littering the floor.

“They were asking, ‘Did you see anything?’ ‘Do you know anybody––the shooter––that stood out?’ I had news crews coming in with cameras,” says Electric. “And they started to talk about the shooting. I walked the audience around to different sites of the shooting. Then I made a church scene. I rolled in pews, and they sat, and I rolled in a coffin. I took them through the whole experience of a shooting in the community.”

Handed candles, the audience members walked to the steps of the victim’s house, where they laid their candles and the boy’s mother appeared. A crew of twenty worked their magic to transform the theater around them. “A live wire of outrage runs through almost every moment” of the play, wrote The New York Times in its review.

In The Faculty Room, Electric brings the issue to a school, where James Baldwin High School goes into lockdown after a rivalry between two girls on the basketball team escalates and one brings a gun to school. His plays have garnered reviews from The New York Times and NPR, and the collection is being compiled into a book, Gunplays: Five Plays on Inner City Violence and Guns, to be published by Applause this fall.

“After I finished those plays, gun violence and control were worse than ever,” says Electric. “Because I worked for Sesame Street for ten years and for Nickelodeon, I started to think, ‘We really need to do something for kids and get them aware––prevention, awareness—what can I do à la Sesame Street?’

“If the kids are dying, it’s the kids who have to learn how to protect themselves and save themselves. That’s what I’m trying to do; if I teach a kid, we don’t have to depend on somebody going, ‘Well, you know, AR-15s, we’re raising age…’ Hello! That’s not going to save those nine-year-olds. Something else has to happen. If I get these kids on board from an early age, and they learn that guns ruin a family or community, if I can instill that in a kid when they’re four or five, it’ll stick with them.”

Marrying the kinds of stories he’d been telling with his training from children’s TV, Electric piloted a program that uses the arts to educate children on the dangers of guns. He has partnered with several groups throughout New York: the Lower Eastside Girls Club on 8th Street, Avenue D. At PS155 in East Harlem, he got Chauncey Parker of the New York Police Department on board.

Initially, some parents and community members responded to his project with skepticism, saying that children were too young. Yet Electric could see that gun violence was so prevalent that children were already aware of it around them. A colleague of his was walking with his child, who asked him why there were

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Reviewing the cover of Electric’s soon-to-be-released book, Gunplays: Five Plays on Inner City Violence and Guns (Applause Books, August 2023) candles and photos clustered on the sidewalk. Middle-schoolers come to school with guns in their backpacks. A six-year-old recently shot his teacher in Virginia.

Opposite page: La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club was founded by director Ellen Stewart, the first Off-Off-Broadway producer to be inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Electric is the series director of poetry there.

Kids are perceptive. Rather than call lockdowns “stranger danger” drills, Electric wants to meet kids where they are and speak to them honestly about what he knows they’re seeing.

To open the door, he uses the tools he found so effective through his career in television: storytelling and songs. He puts dreads and a little outfit on his index finger, and his voice rises to the screech of a Muppet. At the end of a recent school visit, students were begging their teacher to let Mr. Finger stay. He adapts songs familiar to kids, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” to teach them that a gun is not fun. He goes through what items belong in a backpack. He hopes that, after a day singing in school, students will bring those lessons home, and the message will osmose into the community—to younger siblings and friends. His colleague at the Lower Eastside Girls Club told him that they sang his songs the whole trip home. Electric’s hope is that when, years later, these children are confronted with the reality he knows is increasingly prevalent, they’ll be more likely to remember that Electric man who visited their school and sang with them.

“It’s natural,” he says. “People want to be part of something. If it’s devised and set up that way, where there is this sort of give and take, you’re not just the audience, you’re going to participate and be on board with it. And you’re gonna sing along.”

Just as Sesame Street collapses the distance between its cast and its audience, Electric wants to be there with kids in schools. This work builds off an old tradition, the Bread and Puppet Theater, a troop of performers established in New York’s Lower East Side in the 1960s. German emigrant Peter Schumann—a sculptor, dancer, and baker—made sourdough bread, which the audience would eat during weekly performances. Through food and engaging theater, the company politically organized against the war in Vietnam, and was a center of the ’60s counterculture.

With Gunplays, Electric ended performances with talkbacks following the show, in order for the audience to discuss the material, and he continually adapted the script to reference current events. In The Faculty Room, one of the characters writes an essay imagining a world with Trayvon Martin and the children from Sandy Hook. Talkbacks provided an important moment for dialogue on the play’s commentary and the current state of affairs. Whether through Gunplays, “The Letter O,” or his children’s book A Gun Is Not Fun, the arts— books and songs and puppetry—give people an entryway for conversations. “They open up conversations about things that kids want to do or conflict that kids are dealing with,” he says.

At his last school visit, he brought along a full team to engage the audience.

“I had a piano player. I had a mime artist come in and mime out things: if they see a gun, what do they do. And I had Mr. Finger, and we’re singing the songs, and we’re looking at books. Parents and teachers ask, ‘Can this really work?’ I’ve done it so many times. They’re talking about gun violence, and they get it and understand it. I always knew if you find the right way in using techniques of children’s TV, they’ll be with you.”

He aims to replicate the collaborative spirit of Sesame Street and scale the project. The research involved with Sesame Street sought out parents, asking what they needed, whether support with counting or bedtime routines. With such apparent need for action to prevent gun violence, he wants to continue this in his own work today.

“It’s got to be a think tank. I want to bring different people together,” he says. “You can’t do it by yourself. If I learned anything from Sesame Street, you need the community involved. You need certain scholars involved, childhood educators, the gun violence community, people that have been trying to do things, the violence interrupters, or people who are aware of addiction.”

With funding, he would like to develop the project’s research component to see how theater and education can transform communities. He wants to return to schools every year, building out a curriculum that stays with kids. His dream is to give one million kids backpacks emblazoned with “A gun is not fun,” so that when they reach middle and high school, those lessons will resonate with them.

Combing through Electric’s work, I can see him in the architecture of my childhood––from Sesame Street to Puzzle Place. When I think back on my childhood in the ’90s, I can’t help but see the connections to Electric’s work today. What if gun violence prevention were as prevalent in schools as the “Got Milk?” campaign once was? Those ads had me drinking milk like it was my civic duty to support the dairy industry. I knew from preschool not to play with matches. Those messages stick. What could happen if kids passed by a poster saying “A Gun Is Not Fun” every day in their cafeteria?

THOUGH HE TRANSFERRED from Bowdoin, Electric stayed in touch with his friends from the College. While his time as a student in Brunswick was short, he saw “the Bowdoin guys were fabulous.”

When Kenneth I. Chenault ’73, H’96 was awarded The Bowdoin Prize in New York City last fall, Electric attended the ceremony.

“They rocked it, and I rocked it in another way,” he says.

He wants kids to see how they rock it too. If a twelve-year-old can pick up a gun and think to use it against another child, he sees that the problem runs deeper. He wants to emphasize the value of the lives of the people around them.

“They’re pretty pure, but kids go through a lot, and sometimes they don’t have the words to express what they’ve gone through,” he says. “I’ve found that Sesame Street and these other shows are very smart about trying to get in there with the kid on their level, to help the kid figure out those emotions, to help a kid stop and think first.

“I’ve been on this journey. The creative journey has been great. And, you know, sometimes it’s not just about that; it’s not just about loving Hollywood or being on the road. Something else calls you to do something. Some of my friends go, ‘Man, you’ve been on that gun violence thing for a long time. You kind of knew.’ It’s not a good thing. I just felt, you know, kids are dying. People have died. What is that? It breaks my heart.”

Human value is as important in messaging as it is in the artistic process. Electric was awed by his peers on TV. He saw magic in the puppeteers’ work, bringing his favorites like Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch to life. His family––his wife, Lucille, and three daughters––have been in his corner, cheering him on at his shows over the years.

Still today, Electric is chasing something— that white whale. Having seen the impact made by the puppeteers he has collaborated with for decades, he wants to turn Moby Dick into a puppet. Contorting his hands, he animates the motion. Puppeteers rise from a swell of the ocean and animate a massive sperm whale, Melville’s obsession and a representation of Electric’s. He rises with a majestic flourish of fabric and looms over the stage. With a whoosh, it disperses. We can feel the electricity leave the room.

Bowdoin professors Barbara Weiden Boyd and Marilyn Reizbaum teach in different disciplines, and they are very different scholars. Professor Boyd, Henry Winkley Professor of Latin and Greek, teaches courses in Greek and Latin languages and literatures, ancient epic, Rome in the age of Augustus and as a site of cultural memory and identity, and the Ovidian tradition. Professor Reizbaum, Harrison King McCann Professor of English, works in the areas of modernist studies, contemporary Scottish and Irish literatures and film, Jewish cultural studies, and the history of ideas. Although there are millennia between the material they teach, they circle around many of the same stories— to be an expert on James Joyce’s Ulysses, it helps to know Homer’s Odyssey; knowing what Virginia Woolf means when she calls Clytemnestra and Antigone women who “burnt like beacons” in A Room of One’s Own is best understood by a reader who knows those classical tales. In this semester and last, both professors dove deeply into women’s writing—the word choices the authors and translators make, the stories they tell, the gendered lens through which they are viewed, and the opportunity for imagination left by the gaps and silences themselves.

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Titus Andronicus and Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, retell the stories of Philomela, and Pyramus and Thisbe, respectively.

2.

BOWDOIN: What made you decide to teach these classes?

PROFESSOR BOYD: My area of specialization is the Latin poet Ovid. And there’s been an explosion of Ovidian reception in the past couple of decades. I mean, there has been Ovidian reception since the Middle Ages—meaning people have used Ovid’s poetry and reused it and reinterpreted it and so forth. I had started teaching fifteen years ago on the reception of Ovid. And we read Shakespeare1

There’s this whole thing happening now with books like Madeline Miller’s Circe and Pat Barker’s amazingly beautiful The Silence of the Girls 2. I realized at one point that I had a bunch of students who’d read Circe even though they weren’t necessarily interested in classics per se, and I hadn’t read Circe [laughs]. And I thought, “You know, this is so interesting, that we have a whole series of creative works, coming primarily from women, about the women of antiquity, including the women of classical myth in particular.” That’s sort of the point of contact with Ovid, and where the idea for the class came from.

It’s about the continuing interest, fascination, relevance, and searching for identity issues that people are still finding in these ancient texts.

PROFESSOR REIZBAUM: My course stems from the book I’m writing on Muriel Spark3, which is about her aesthetics of ridicule and the way that is perceived. Spark—who was a very prolific and I think important writer—has only recently received her due. People have been coming back to her in the last part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

I think when you look at the ways in which she has been critiqued over the years, one thing that’s outstanding is that people write about her as mean, as cruel, as killing off her characters. Part of what I’m writing about is, “What does it mean to have an aesthetic of ridicule and what is the function of that?” One cannot help but think about it in terms of gender.

So, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to use that idea with a number of women writers who might have suffered the same fate at the hands of many male critics who, as I say in my introductory note to the syllabus, will have lauded male writers for a very similar kind of writing while they critique and diminish women writers who are hard-edged?” Somebody like [James] Joyce, who is this figure of scrupulous meanness4, but with him it’s said to be audaciousness. In Muriel Spark it’s cruelty, and there’s something prohibitive about it, as if you need to close your eyes and run away.

So, for me, it was less about the way feminism tried to change the Western canon and what we were therefore teaching and more about testing this idea and bringing a gendered view to certain ways that we critique fiction writing. So I thought about other women who would have suffered a similar kind of fate, who have suffered criticism in similar kinds of terms.

BOWDOIN: Who else do you read?

REIZBAUM: We started with [Virginia] Woolf, of course. And, when I teach Woolf, I always begin by saying, “Okay. Everybody knows who Virginia Woolf is, right? What’s the first thing you would say if somebody said, ‘Tell me something about Virginia Woolf.’” And guess what they say?

BOWDOIN: That she drowned herself.

REIZBAUM: That she committed suicide. So let’s talk about that as a gendered idea. David Foster Wallace5, nobody’s going to say first thing that he committed suicide. Infinite Jest is probably going to be the first thing. And then we talk about that, about what it means to have a profile that is determined by that one factor, one that goes also to the idea, the kind of romantic characterization, in a perverse way, of women writers like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Virginia Woolf. That somehow they die for their art, or that they’re deranged. And although there is a correlation made between madness and genius that is not gender-based, it has a particular expression when it comes to women—it’s “hysteria,” which then accrues to the aesthetic in which it’s perceived.

So we start with Woolf’s “The Mark On The Wall.” Because it’s there that she’s taking up that idea. What is male writing? What is female writing? What does it mean to interpret something in a particular way? What are the conventions that one feels overwhelmed by? And that piece is a great way to start, to take this canonical writer and to look at the way she’s also been treated.

I based the course on Muriel Spark, so we did The Girls of Slender Means. I was worried, because with Spark, her affect, her tone, you have to work to be able to really get it. She’s satirical. She’s ironic. And she can be mean. Although, what do we mean by “mean”? I spent the whole first part of the class talking about meanness and all the meanings that meanness has.

BOWDOIN: There is voice, which is what you’ve just been talking about, and then voices— what a woman sounds like and how that’s interpreted, and the fact that she gets to tell her story at all. I’m interested to know what you think about the intersection for those two things. What intersections do you think students see? They must bring a lot of contemporary politics into the classroom with them. What is their response?

BOYD: It’s interesting. As Marilyn was speaking, I was thinking about the luxury of reading [modern] texts written by women. In my course we are also reading texts written by women, but what they’re all doing is essentially filling this massive gap from all of classical antiquity. There’s a famous line in the history of Thucydides6, where the Athenian general is commemorating the death of many warriors in war and talking about how men, the warriors, have the renown that their families will carry forward, but the women—the widows—their job and the way they achieve their glory is to be as little spoken about as possible and to be as silent as possible.

A lot of scholars in the field have written things that play with that—the silent women of this, that, and the other thing. And that inspired my course title. But the reality is that we have very, very little—I mean, truly fragments— remaining from classical antiquity of anything written by women. The main name, of course, is Sappho7

Their latest paper assignment is to write a fragment. They have to write something that has holes in it, that a scholar would have to struggle to figure out, “What’s going on here?” [laughs] “Who’s this character? What is she saying or what is he saying about this woman?” and so forth.

So we have Sappho, but everything else is just representation and ventriloquization, you might say, of women. But there’s also this fascinating phenomenon where, particularly in places like Greek tragedy, you have these incredibly powerful women. I have them read Medea 8, for example. And one of my favorite students said about it, “You know, I think she’s really badass.”

But then we talked about, “Okay. So why do we have these male playwrights featuring females as the center of critical action on stage? Why does so much revolve around them and why are they the doers—why do they have so much agency and yet their audience is probably all men?” So we’ve had some great conversations about the ancient texts, and now I’m asking them to read contemporary works by female authors, such as (Margaret) Atwood, Barker, and Miller.

And it’s going to be interesting to see how my students think about it. Connecting to what Marilyn was saying, do they think there’s something distinctively female or male about the way these writers write?

BOWDOIN: These books are giving voices to women who didn’t have voices. It’s allowing them to speak and to tell their story. But in many cases it’s a very distinct woman author’s voice doing that. Does that matter?

BOYD: When I first read The Penelopiad 9 I really didn’t like it. But it was interesting, because the students in my class really liked it. A lot of them wrote papers about it. They actually made me rethink my feelings about it.

REIZBAUM: That really was the nub of my course: that there are certain qualities of writing—characteristics, conventions, dynamics, and so on—that sometimes become gendered. The example I use compares Clarice Lispector10 with Joyce. What Clarice Lispector is doing with a certain kind of stream of consciousness, with having characters have a brusqueness, a quality to the writing that seems compressed, dense—with Joyce, that made him into one of the great writers of all time.

In women writers, that often becomes their opacity or “hysteria.” And in the case of somebody like Muriel Spark, people will say she’s heartless. She kills off her characters, which she does: “So-and-so was found strangled the next day.” It’s horrible, yes, in some ways. But with Spark, it’s seen as ruthlessness or a kind of unavailability. In Joyce it becomes innovative, edgy.

BOWDOIN: At the beginning of coeducation at Bowdoin, in classes like the ones you two are teaching, you’d probably have predominantly women interested in the subject. Now young men don’t seem to think, “This material isn’t for me.” Do you see that?

REIZBAUM: I still think they struggle with some of these questions, as we all do. And that is, “What does it mean to write like a woman or write like a man? And if there is such a thing, then what does it mean to read like a woman or read like a man?” And that’s very complex. My way of approaching that is to give them critical voices that address those questions and not try to foreclose on the answers for them.

And I think, increasingly, binarism becomes an even more complicated question. And that should be brought into the conversation. Like, the last text we looked at was Are You My Mother, by Alison Bechdel11, which addresses the question of gender binaries, and it was great that Bechdel came to speak around the same time.

Barbara, have you ever encountered Liz Lochhead, a Scottish writer, her version of Medea?

BOYD: No.

REIZBAUM: She has the murders take place off stage. But Medea comes out, and when she comes out she’s blood-drenched.

BOYD: So it’s a drama?

REIZBAUM: It’s Medea, but it’s in Scots. And it’s also her spin on the play. I would really recommend her to you. She’s great.

BOYD: Just as we’re trading—there’s also 15 Heroines. Do you know this?

REIZBAUM: No.

BOYD: It’s a performance that was done by the Jermyn Street Theatre in London (and broadcast online in November 2020). Ovid wrote fifteen poems called, in English, “Heroines,” which are written as fifteen great characters from classical myth who write letters to the men who have abandoned them.

This theatrical group did this 15 Heroines with very broad reinterpretations. In many cases they kind of walk away from Ovid entirely. These reinterpretations are monologues… they’re no longer letters. And they’re really, really interesting. Some of them are better than others. Different actors and different writers for each one. Including a bunch of Scottish writers. But that’s interesting as well. It’s another way of always going back to the voice. There’s something they’re getting at that is interesting.

BOWDOIN: Do you think part of what’s going on is just what always goes on? Which is, Shakespeare shows up in all kinds of places. The Bible shows up in all kinds of places. Is it just a way to get at telling a story, by reinterpreting a story? Or do you think it is something more, to note specifically that it is women’s stories and voices that were left out?

REIZBAUM: You made a distinction between giving voice and having voice. And I think that the thing you’re asking is really answered by the first—it’s by giving voice. These days, talking about women’s writing is not the same. You don’t have that dimorphism, that kind of opposition—male, female. I was therefore a little concerned about making it into a course on women’s writing. So for me it was all about the style, all about the writing, and less about the canon. Interestingly, though, students in the class, including men, were just so thrilled to be reading all women. I think you’re saying a similar thing. We still have a sense that there’s something missing, that the default isn’t everything.

BOYD: Right. That’s still true.

REIZBAUM: That’s giving voice. But having voice is something slightly different. And by virtue of all these things, it’s much more complicated.

BOYD: And the way I hear what you’re saying is having that voice can be interpreted as a mean thing.

REIZBAUM: Well, if the woman is harsh or angry, then often it’s critiqued or framed in a gendered way. And what constitutes anger rather than…How shall I put this? A kind of combativeness or a sort of noble resistance. What I’m interested in is how the language that’s used will give you an indication of these gendered ideas. That language is used to critique writers, and their voice is revealing. And that’s part of what I try to bring through in a number of different critical essays, like Hélène Cixous in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” which was very controversial when it emerged in 1975. Because she was, as many critics were in that time, trying to carve out what was called l’écriture feminine, a woman’s voice, a woman’s kind of writing. And the debate was, Do you write like a woman? Do you write like a man? What does that mean?

And of course, the best way to understand that has to do with there being a kind of idiom that, when men have dominated the scene, would be infused or informed by a patriarchal kind of vision, a way of using language, where some kinds of uses are better than others, or are upheld over others. That there are male subjects and there are female subjects—you don’t write about tea parties, you write about war12 .

So I tried to open this up. What does it mean to have a gendered language? And can we also understand it historically? In the period when Cixous was writing, that was the height of the critical challenge to the canon, to opening it up and saying what other kinds of languages, in what different ways, can we regard works as worthy of being in the canon? Why are some things dismissed?

I didn’t foreclose on any particular understanding. I said, let’s just examine the way various people have come at this question and think about it and respond to it. And the students were great. So thoughtful.

BOYD: I had a guest speaker13 just yesterday, a woman who has translated Metamorphoses. Hers is not the first modern translation by a woman, but it’s sort of the first that’s getting recognized. There have been a bunch of women translating classics recently. Her talk was so wonderful because it was all about the choice of language and how down to the tiniest little details how important it is. And, of course, reading everything in translation raises a whole other interesting set of problems. We’re reading something written two thousand years ago in a world that was so different from ours in so many ways. The language is fundamentally different. We have dozens of translations by men who will describe someone’s hair as “her flowing locks,” or something like that. And my speaker yesterday said she had chosen to translate what a male translator had translated as “flowing locks” as “messy haired [laughs].” Students loved that. That was really interesting. But it really, again, brings out these amazing challenges with reading any text.

REIZBAUM: And I think, “Why haven’t there been women translators before this?” You know? And I think part of that is the idea that language was gendered, and that academia was gendered.

BOYD: Right.

REIZBAUM: As we know. I would actually have people say to my face when I first started teaching, “Women can’t teach Romanticism. They’re incapable of it.” It was astounding. No! But when you have people saying that and it’s accepted, then of course it’s going to prevent women from approaching certain work, certain texts. Not that they wouldn’t want to but that they won’t be permitted.

BOYD: Within our own lifetimes there were women who were trying to get PhDs in classics

7. A sixth-century BCE lyric poet from the island of Lesbos whose works, many of which explore the world of women, survive almost exclusively on papyrus fragments.

8. A tragedy, by Euripides, in which Medea takes vengeance on her husband for leaving her by killing his new wife and her own two sons.

9. A novella by Margaret Atwood that reimagines the Odyssey from the point of view of Penelope, known for her fidelity to her husband, Odysseus, while he was away for twenty years fighting in the Trojan War.

10. A Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer.

11. A graphic novelist known for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and her graphic memoir Fun Home, she spoke at Bowdoin in March.

12. This is a reference to Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own at Harvard, and they had to sit in the back of the classroom and the professor said nasty things to them and they were told that they would never really be able to get jobs.

13. Stephanie McCarter, a classics professor at the University of the South, whose translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses was included in The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022 list.

REIZBAUM: In other words, it’s a very common, very long history, and it’s involuted. There is just so much at work that has produced these various outcomes. To go back to your question, at this point we see lots of people cry “postfeminism.” You were asking, “Why are these women approaching these texts in this way?” It’s very interesting. That’s 2023.

BOYD: Absolutely [laughs].

REIZBAUM: Some of it is about the current moment. Look what’s happening in social media, for instance, the way TikTok is being critiqued for how girls are represented and spoken to there. And it’s post-MeToo. And I think it’s important—I have male students in the class who are not put off, who are engaging with all of this material and all of this background too.

BOYD: If nothing else, they’re still trying to figure out where they fit and, you know, just the whole identity issue.

REIZBAUM: That never ceases.

BOYD: No. Never. Absolutely it never ceases.

BOWDOIN: In a couple of these books there’s reference to taking up space, and it struck me as so contemporary. You hear now, “Don’t be afraid to take up space.” And it seemed to me that it was part of the voice question, in that it’s an idea that feels necessary for women, specifically, to hear.

REIZBAUM: One of the things that’s always been striking is that male voices dominate female voices in the classroom. And, you know, it hadn’t really changed all that much in the time that I’ve been here. But recently there is a change. And I think it’s not just that there were more women in my mean women’s writer class. In my novel class just now it’s probably fifty-fifty. There might even be more men. But the women are not shy. They are not deferential. Now, this could be different women. I don’t know. But I have been struck by that. And I have been glad of it. So glad of it. Sometimes how they give voice might be different. That is, they might equivocate more.

BOYD: Put things in terms of questions.

REIZBAUM: Yeah, but they’re not deferring.

BOYD: I would say that’s absolutely true.

REIZBAUM: And it’s great. It’s a change. It’s a real change.

BOYD: I think you’re right, absolutely right, that women now don’t yield to men. They don’t say, “Oh. Well, he wanted to speak so I won’t speak.”

REIZBAUM: Well, I don’t even mean that. It’s more that women did not speak up and men often took the floor. I am struck by that, that that’s not going on in the same way. Glory, hallelujah.

BOWDOIN: I notice in both your reading lists the ideas of blame and comeuppance and retribution. That women are often characters used for that purpose in a story. That doesn’t seem to change, even with the women’s interpretation. I guess you can’t maybe change the story in retelling the story.

BOYD: That’s an interesting question. Because in [modern] fiction you have the luxury in a way of having this, you know, “Anything can happen [laughs].” Whereas my world is a world with boundaries—it’s not that they’re set, but there are certain expectations already.

BOWDOIN: Although, as in Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles, Achilles can be in love with Patroclus in some tellings and not in others.

BOYD: Right. Exactly.

BOWDOIN: But the women sort of don’t change [laughs]

BOYD: Well, actually, there can be some change. And I think that’s one of the interesting things. In so much of classical literature, because women are objectified, there is often very little recognition of there being an internal life for them. Of what goes on inside, of how they’re thinking about what’s happening to them. But, for example, in The Iliad, when Briseis is taken from the tent of Achilles to the tent of Agamemnon, there is one word: “unwilling.”

“She was led unwilling by the messengers who were sent to bring her.” That’s it. There’s no development. We don’t go there. But there is an opening, and I think that’s where the imagination comes in that is motivating so many of these works. Clearly there were emotions there. And there were desires and hope and, you know, whole lives that we’re losing.

It’s almost like a little opening that Homer left with that word, “unwilling.” Like he said, “Okay. I invite you, Pat Barker,” or whoever. “I invite you to think about that. I’m not going to think about that because I have too many other things to think about. And that’s not my world.” But it’s there, right? So there is something kind of great about seeing how these writers can find that point of entry.

REIZBAUM: But it’s not like they’re getting any kind of retribution—no. It wasn’t that they were trying to avenge something, you know, that had to do with gender.

BOYD: Right. It’s like, how are they being seen?

REIZBAUM: And why have they not? You get told a story the same way over and over again. And then you take a different character and look at it through their eyes, you vocalize it differently— it changes. That really lands with students.

Alison Bennie is editor of Bowdoin Magazine

Illustrator Harriet Lee-Merrion is based in Bristol, England. See more of her work at harrietleemerrion.com.

Reading List

Aeschylus

Agamemnon and Libation Bearers

Margaret Atwood

The Penelopiad

Pat Barker

The Silence of the Girls

Alison Bechdel

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama

Octavia E. Butler

Parable of the Sower

Hélène Cixous

“The Laugh of the Medusa”

Euripides

Medea and Hippolytus

Patricia Highsmith

“Under a Dark Angel’s Eye”

Homer

Illiad and Odyssey

Jamaica Kincaid

A Small Place

Yiyun Li

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

Clarice Lispector

Near to the Wild Heart

Madeline Miller

Circe

Sianne Ngai

Ugly Feelings

Ovid

Metamorphoses

Dorothy Parker

“A Telephone Call”

Ali Smith

Girl Meets Boy

Muriel Spark

The Girls of Slender Means

Virginia Woolf

“The Mark on the Wall”

Anita Heriot ’88 has turned a knowledge of art and collecting into a finely honed craft of helping collectors and investors acquire and sell fine art, furniture, jewelry, and other valuables.