Eros and Education

Leah R. Vande Berg

Jo Keroes. Tales Out of School: Gender, Longing and the Teacher in Fiction and Film. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 164 pages. Notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.

Early blue morning is an erotic time, the commencement of school term’s an erotic season; little’s to be done but nod to Freud on such a day. (John Barth, The End of the Road)

So begins Keroes’ engaging and provocative exploration of the notion that at its most fundamental, teaching/learning is “the process of wooing and being wooed” (ix.). “The erotic,” she argues, “always involves an instinct toward and a longing for connection that goes beyond a desire for mere sexual gratification” (15) and the erotic pleasures of the teaching/learning exchange involve.

[F]or the student the promise of a more powerful self, for the teacher not just the further exercise of power already claimed but also the possibility of a lost innocence, a prior state momentarily retrieved; for both, in other words, the pleasures of reinvention . . . [and] bound up in this is the desire for intellectual partnership. The student’s desire for knowledge and its pleasures, to know and at the same time be known, is drawn to the one who possesses that knowledge, a figure construed all at once as parent, mentor, and lover. By offering his or her knowledge in response to the student’s reach for relationship, the teacher testifies to an implicit link between knowing and loving. (3)

Keroes utilizes concepts from diverse psychoanalytic (Freud, Chodorow, Lacan) and feminist theorists (including Showalter, Gallop, Sedgwick) to examine the erotic component of the teacher/student relationship as it has been articulated in popular film and fiction, but also the very different ways in which this aspect of the teaching encounter is enacted when the teacher is a woman and when the teacher is a man. Recognition of these differences, Keroes argues, attests not only to what it means to be a teacher in U.S. American culture, but also to American society’s ongoing discomfort with women who wield power.

The book’s introductory chapter opens with a very brief historical overview of the notion of teaching as seduction. Beginning with the serpent’s seduction of Eve and Adam into worldly and sexual knowledge (and the link this Edenic “primal scene of instruction” established between teaching and deviltry), Keroes traces the eros of teaching from Socrates’ assertion that an erotic dance between teacher and student is essential for learning to Rousseau’s (1791) tale of a teacher’s seduction of his pupil. As she does so, Keroes introduces several leitmotifs that chain throughout the book’s later chapters: the tantalizing tension between authority and desire in the teacher/student relationship, the inevitably incestuous implications of teachers acting in loco parentis, and the marked contrast between the repression, distortion or destruction of the erotic component of teaching for female teachers and the unremarked, tolerated, or reified renderings of the erotic potential in male teachers’ interactions with their students. In each of the subsequent six chapters, Keroes uses a pair (sometimes a trio) of texts to illustrate her interpretive conclusions about the ways female and male teacher/student relationships have been depicted in popular film and fiction.

Chapter 1 explores Peter Abelard’s scandalous twelfth-century affair with his student Heloise. Keroes contrasts Abelard’s public historical account of the calamitous political, spiritual, and physical consequences of their affair, subsequent marriage, and separation against the exchange of letters the still-passionate Heloise initiates with the castrated, repentant Abelard ten years after she is cloistered in a convent. Moving from Freudian to feminist interpretations of the trope of the veil, Keroes reads this teacher-student scandal as one of the first literary articulations of the themes of the seductiveness and oedipal implications of the teacher/student relationship, the consequences of female desire, and the fear inspired by links between female sexuality and intelligence.

As the proleptic title of chapter 2, “The Crime of Miss Jean Brodie,” indicates, this chapter demonstrates most forcefully the author’s thesis that society fears and strives to contain the intellectual power, independence, and sexuality of female teachers. Using the trope of the gaze, Keroes contrasts the figuration of desire in Muriel Sparks’ novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with the film Dead Poets Society. Keroes argues that in contrast to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which questions the “cult of the electrifying teacher,” complicates the act of teaching, and explicitly acknowledges the homoerotic subtext of pedagogical interactions, the Dead Poets Society romanticizes, simplifies, and denies these aspects of teaching. As Keroes searingly points out, the charismatic Keating and Brodie both inspire their students, and both are responsible for a student’s death, but only Brodie’s career is terminated. While Dead Poets celebrates the seductive power of teaching, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie punishes this power as “intellectual molestation” when it is made explicit by a woman teacher. Thus, Keroes argues, despite Dead Poets’ apparent rebellion, it remains complicit and not subversive of patriarchal values.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore two images of male teachers in popular film and literature: the rebellious idealist who struggles to break down institutional or social barriers to “true learning,” and the beleaguered neophyte who determinedly struggles to connect with a group of hostile students. According to Keroes, despite their concern with social problems, both of these teacher narratives posit individual, not systemic solutions to cultural problems. As she summarily characterizes the ideological force of these stories, “If just the right teacher is put in charge, he (only occasionally she) can undo the damage incurred by decades of poverty, bigotry, and neglect” (72).

In Chapter 3 Keroes uses two idealistic narratives that substitute violence for desire—The Blackboard Jungle and Up the Down Staircase to explore the destabilizing threat that the juvenile phallus poses to the authority of patriarchal social institutions and American cultural anxieties about masculinity and multiculturalism. In chapter 4, she analyzes three idealistic narratives—To Sir With Love, Conrack, and A Lesson Before Dying—whose knight-errant teacher protagonists rescue members of oppressed groups. Here Keroes again uses the trope of the gaze, but not the feminist formulation of this concept. Rather, she uses W. E. B. du Bois’s notion of the black man as veiled to demonstrate how the gaze functions as a form of subaltern resistance in Sir and Lesson.

Although the teacher-protagonists in these texts eschew romantic/sexual involvement with their students, Keroes demonstrates that in all three of these texts “teaching, resistance, and heroism are linked inextricably to manhood” (85). The countertexts in this chapter compare and contrast cinematic depictions of White and Black male teachers because, as Keroes pointedly notes, no comparable films feature nonwhite female teachers.

In Conrack blond, blue-eyed teacher Pat Conroy is fired for “rescuing” a group of Black children isolated on a South Carolina island, thereby reaffirming the “master narrative” of race relations in which the role of Black characters as change agents is subordinated while White characters’ involvement in racial politics is lauded as noble rescue. Concomitantly, To Sir With Love—in which a cultured Black man educates lower class White teenagers—illustrates the cinematic containment of the threat posed by Black male sexuality to white patriarchy. Both of these films, according to Keroes, articulate a discourse of masculinity that stands in contrast to the discourse of manhood expressed in Ernest Gaines’ novel, A Lesson Before Dying. The discourse of manhood articulates an alternative vision of Black masculinity—one that is more complex, more problematized, and more reciprocal than Poitier’s “Sir” on several dimensions: both the teacher protagonist and the rescued student(s) are African American, and the learning exchange is reciprocal. However, despite Lesson’s recognition of alterity, Keroes concludes that Gaines’ novel, like the films, seriously questions the power of teaching to transform society.

The similarity between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fin de siècle anxieties about sexual anarchy and the attendant impetus toward controlling sexual, racial, class, and national borders underlies chapter 5’s examination of Henry James’s (1898) short story, Turn of the Screw, Joyce Carol Oates’ retelling of this story in “Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly,” and Jodie Foster’s (1991) film, Little Man Tate. Keroes’ analysis of these texts concludes that even ostensibly feminist representations of women teachers ultimately reinscribe traditional patriarchal patterns (91). As she reads James’s story and Oates’ reprise of it, these tales about the struggle over reciprocal erotic desires between children and their teacher/governess present the female teacher as the embodiment of “the maternal and the corrupt woman, the maternal gone monstrous all by herself” (99). In contrast, Little Man Tate concerns the struggle between two women (an emotionally stunted intellectual achiever/teacher and an earthy, street-smart caregiver/mom—the typical feminist/feminine dichotomy) over the child prodigy, Fred. However, both sets of narratives express persistent cultural fears and ambivalence about female power and concomitant attempts to contain the power of females through the reaffirmation of myths of feminine nurturing, domesticity, and true womanhood.

In chapter 6 Keroes contrasts two filmic enactments of the Pygmalion myth: Educating Rita and Children of a Lesser God. The Pygmalion myth allegorically enacts women’s subordination; consequently, Keroes argues, it “has always been a natural metaphor for romantic renderings of the pedagogical exchange, the power of teacher and teaching to transform” (106). While both of these films belong to a subgenre of teacher films Keroes labels “literacy narratives,” the films present contrasting views of the empowerment and loss entailed in becoming literate, in moving from one intellectual, social, and emotional world to another. Rita accepts teacher Frank Bryant’s tutelage in the “public language” of educated persons, but she refuses to let him become her lover. Sarah Norman, on the other hand, actively accepts the role of Galatea and develops a sexual relationship with her teacher James Leeds, but she refuses his efforts to teach her to speak. Keroes concludes that these two films reaffirm the myth of the transformative power of teaching and the potential for reciprocity in student teacher interactions; however, she fails to explicate the relationship between the reciprocal “education” enabled in these films and that enacted in Gaines’ novel.

In the book’s final chapter, Keroes briefly reviews several recent examples of explicitly erotic teacher/student relationships in film (Dangerous Minds), in the theatre (Oleanna), and in news reports (the 1968 Rossi/Russier case, the 1995 Karen Cross case, the 1992 Pamela Smart case, the 1998 Mary Kay Le Tourneau story) in terms of the questions they raise about the borders between sexuality and sexual harassment. She cautions that while Socrates may have been right about the erotic as an essential component all good transformative teacher/student interchanges, “it is one thing to observe that seduction is part of the essence of the pedagogical relation, that erotic attraction of one sort or another contributes to the dynamic of the pedagogical encounter; it is quite another to claim that seduction is or ought to be its purpose” (125). To illustrate these concerns, she examines David Mamet’s play Oleanna. The play, she argues, “is all about power, . . . about foolish teaching and the desire that teaching engenders . . . about the abuse of power” and the consequences of a professor’s failure to touch a student, not physically, but with his teaching (126, 129).

Keroes’ exploration of recurring patterns in mediated depictions of teachers and teaching is, as the author herself admits, illustrative, not comprehensive. Some chapters (2, 5, and 6) fulfill the book’s promise to explore gender differences in the portrayals of male and female teachers and the social implications of these differential depictions better than do others. On the other hand, several chapters (notably 3 and 4) offer unexpected and powerful examinations of the treatment of race and class in popular film and literary teacher/student narratives. Overall, Keroes’ pellucid style elegantly illustrates the insights psychoanalytic criticism can provide, and raises questions about the erotic dimension of education—about the implications of the desire to know and be known—that all of us who regard education as our vocation would be well advised to contemplate seriously.

Leah R. Vande Berg is Professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Sacramento.