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Emphasizing experience and understanding, high school teacher Susan Arpajian Jolley uses the related novels Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre to help her students travel into unfamiliar cultural territory while gaining a fuller understanding of both texts and how they are relevant to the issues of today.
A novel is not an allegory. . . . It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.
-Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
Azar Nafisi seeks to persuade her college students, at the height of the Iranian revolution, to experience The Great Gatsby, rather than view it merely through their particular political or moralistic lenses. It is this way of reading a novel, of experiencing its world, of empathizing with its characters, that I want for my students, too, students at a small, suburban New Jersey high school.
A novel that cries out "inhale the experience" is Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, a twentieth-century writer from the West Indian island of Dominica. In the introduction, Francis Wyndham calls the work "an imaginative feat almost uncanny in its vivid intensity" (6). A retelling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of Mr. Rochester's first wife, the madwoman in the attic, Wide Sargasso Sea grabs us and throws us into another world of sights, sounds, smells and, most of all, alternate perspectives. The result for receptive students is an experience that can be challenging, rewarding, and at times disconcerting. Some love the book, some abhor it, but all are engaged by it.
In a unit for seniors in an honors class, I facilitated a visceral and intellectual understanding of Rhys's work. To help students experience the cultural aspects of this complex novel, and to help them construct meaning as they were reading, I categorized our study into three main areas: understanding the literary aspects of the work, experiencing in sensory ways the world it portrays, and doing research and writing to connect the issues in it to our contemporary world.
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