Avidly / LA Review of Books
6.5.15 | Lauren Rosenblum

The awkwardness of teaching a story of about sexual awakening at a religious women’s college cannot be overstated. Either I overlooked this complication when I assigned it or misjudged how awkward it would be. But there I was in front of a room of modestly dressed young women and I could not avoid the primary dramatic tension of Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Bliss:” a woman’s sudden sexual desire for her husband.

The fact is, however, I have a history of oversights related to literary sexual encounters. When I was in graduate school, I discussed the rape of the “typist at home” in the “Fire Sermon” section of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. After a dinner-time visit from “a small house agent’s clerk,” the typist is “bored and tired:”

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defence.

Finally the agent “gropes his way out.” Eliot then writes, “When lovely woman stoops to folly and / Paces about her room again, alone, / She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone.”

Immediately following my presentation, it was suggested that I re-read the poem. I was informed of my crime (against literature): in the age of no means no, there is no rape. The typist does not resist; she does not struggle. I laughed at my error. The Waste Land is notoriously difficult to follow, and I was a fresh graduate student trying to prove myself worthy of this endeavor. I enthusiastically back-pedaled. I apologized.

The next semester, we read Ulysses. In the Naussica chapter, Leopold Bloom masturbates in public while gazing at naive Gerty McDowell, who was previously having her own romantic, if not quite sexual, fantasy. In my discussion, I somehow missed the public exposure and masturbation. I must have rushed over the line that states Bloom had “drained his manhood,” (unapologetically, of course; it was merely due to the sight of the “little wretch”). Again, I laughed at myself. We were all trying to make sense of a text that was at times inscrutable, so that even the most obvious clues seemed hidden. Still, it was my oversight. But in this second instance of misreading, I was following the training I received as a result of my encounter with The Waste Land: ignore literary sexual violence against women.

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