Dangerous Liaisons? Freshmen in a Gender Class in the San Francisco Bay Area React to a Ten-Week Romp Through French Literary Relationships

132 Simone de Beauvoir Studies Volume 23 2006-2007

DANGEROUS LIAISONS? FRESHMEN IN A GENDER CLASS IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA REACT TO A TEN-WEEK ROMP THROUGH FRENCH LITERARY RELATIONSHIPS

YOLANDA ASTARITA PATTERSON

For almost a decade, I was part of a teaching team at California State University Hayward/ East Bay that worked together to introduce freshmen, who are generally about 18 years old and just out of high school, to the theme of “Gender in the Arts, Literature, and Society.” I team-taught the course with colleagues in Philosophy and Theatre. My section was called “Gender in French Literature and Culture.” As you may well imagine, Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas about gender issues were an integral part of class discussions. The excerpts I put together for the class Reader focused on relationships portrayed in French literature throughout the centuries. During Spring quarter of 2006,1 gave the students the following assignment for their term papers: they were to choose relationships in the Reader from two different centuries, analyze them, and discuss why or why not they would like to find a similar relationship for themselves one day. The Hayward campus of California State University, East Bay is about a half-hour south of the infamous U.C. Berkeley. We have about 13,000 students of a dizzying array of backgrounds, many of them the first in their family to attend college, or sometimes even high school. For quite a few of them, English is a second language, and customs from “the old country,” no matter which country that might be, dominate their upbringing at home. These demographics have always been fascinating to me, because I grew up in a completely Italian neighborhood in New York City, where my father was a doctor who spoke an Italian dialect to most of his patients, and my mother, who taught French, Italian, and Spanish at a public high school, would call down the hall when I tried to pick up some of his vocabulary to caution, “Don’t say it that way. That’s dialect!” My paternal grandmother, who lived with us and spoke very little English, did learn enough English to keep urging me as I grew older to find “a nice-a Italian-a boy” and just settle down and get married. Subtheme: “Forget all about that Ph.D. nonsense.” Instead, I found myself the perfect mate, to whom I have been happily married for 45 years. He hasn’t a drop of Italian blood in him but does have a small percentage of French heritage. No arranged marriage for me! Now that I think of it, only one of the cousins of my generation did end up marrying a “nice-a Italian-a boy” and remaining closely Yolanda Astarita Patterson 133 tied to Italian, or rather Italo-American culture. Her four children and virtually every other family member of their generation became part of the great American melting pot. Dealing with issues of gender and couple relationships is a sometimes daunting part of becoming acclimated to a new culture and environment. This was vividly reflected in the comments made by my students in their term papers. Here were young people from a vast variety of cultural and national backgrounds discussing excerpts from classic texts from French literature and articulating how what they had been reading might influence the choices they would eventually be making about how to live their own lives. The first excerpt in the Reader was from “Le Jeu d’Adam,” the scene in which God talks to Adam and Eve and spells out very clearly the pecking order as to who obeys whom. As Simone de Beauvoir remarks in Le Deuxième Sexe: “Eve n’a pas été façonnée en même temps que l’homme [. . .] elle a été tirée du flanc du premier mâle. Sa naissance même n’a pas été autonome; Dieu [. . .] l’a destinée à l’homme; c’est pour sauver Adam de sa solitude qu’il la lui a donnée, elle a dans son époux son origine et sa fin” (DS 1: 190). How do 21st century students at a California state university feel about this 12th century French portrayal of the creation of Adam and Eve? Not surprisingly, a number of the women in the class reacted with indignation: “I would never want to be in a relationship with a person like Adam, because he would think that he owned me and would want me to obey him always just because of his gender,” said one. Another proclaimed: “It is doubtful that any woman who had not been conditioned from birth to serve, as Eve was, would choose such a servile situation for herself. I could not truly love a person whom I fear. A partner should incite feelings of happiness and security, not fear and inferiority. I don’t blame Eve for eating the apple. I certainly would have wanted out of Eden.” Some, however, found mitigating circumstances in the couple’s relationship: “Adam showed the masculine trait of taking charge and giving orders. Although times have changed and men and women are supposedly equal, it is still common for women to seek direction from their partners. I don’t have a problem with this as long as the commands are given in a kind way, are reasonable, and contribute to the overall benefit of the relationship. At one point Adam says to Eve, T believe you, since you are my wife.’ If more married people had that kind of faith in their spouses, the divorce rate would not be so high.” A male student decided he would not want to be in such a lopsided relationship: “I do not agree with Adam’s way of treating Eve. Women today want to be treated as equals. They are more intelligent and better educated now than they ever were back in ancient times. Adam thinks he is superior to Eve simply because he is a male. I would rather have a relationship based upon equality than one where my wife had to be submissive to me. Submissiveness would take all the fun and mystery out of the relationship.”