Address at 1992 Opening Convocation
Lee Piepho, Professor of English

Not since the late 1960s does there seem to me to have been such turmoil within academe or between the colleges and universities and the society at large as we have seen during the last decade. In view of the changing multiracial balance of the United States and, perhaps more important for Sweet Briar, the changing role of women in American society, we are being asked as never before within my memory to consider what texts we should teach and how to approach them so as to equip our students to be successful citizens of the twenty-first century world. Such discussion is on the whole healthy, a sign of higher education's serious commitment to its students and to the nation. I worry a bit, however, about intolerance and polarization. There is a good poem by the English poet Phillip Larkin in which he describes how the "salt rebuff" of an Irishman's speech on a trip to Dublin, "insisting so on difference, made me welcome: / Once that was recognized, we were in touch." So too, only after we have understood ourselves as Americans -- increasingly the children of immigrants from Central America and the Pacific Rim, but also descendants of the English, Irish, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and other European nationalities -- can we hope to understand something of the other peoples of the earth. This is no simple thing. Enough attention has been devoted to African-American culture and the culture of the newer minorities that it is perhaps understandable how in recent years a corresponding insistence has developed that has stressed the centrality of Western writers and thought within American culture. Nevertheless, the attitudes associated with "political correctness" are no more reprehensible than the assumptions underlying the term and of those who wield it like a club. Each camp can work to exclude the other, a treacherous situation at a time when we are faced with the challenge of finally and truly living up to our claim that in the United States all races can work together constructively and (more or less) in harmony. And worse than this, each set of attitudes can harden into a point of view that rejects whatever it doesn't understand. To my mind, this position undermines the complicated, civilizing effect that reading must be allowed to have on our students.

I began thinking about this problem when I was teaching the Milton course again at Sweet Briar last spring. Along with James Joyce, Milton is the capstone of the classic curriculum in English literature: difficult and notoriously demanding of the energies and background of any student who undertakes to read him. It is not a course eagerly sought by English professors. But there is a second reason why Paradise Lost in particular is a hard text to teach at Sweet Briar. When in the fourth book of his epic the Narrator introduces us to Adam and Eve, he is careful to note that they were both

Need I say that these are not wildly popular words in a classroom full of late twentieth-century women? One can go some way towards softening the blow by noting that "equal" carries for Milton its Latin meaning of "the same." Men and women, he is saying, are qualitatively not "the same": men are framed predominately for contemplation and valor, women for softness and sweet attractive grace. One can then go on to observe that in setting forth the relation between God, Adam, and Eve, Milton is echoing an age-old formulation that has its origins (like so many vexing problems in the relations between men and women in Western culture) in the epistles of Saint Paul. Finally -- and most important -- one can note that in Milton's poem Eve is a complete human being, with reason and free will as well as emotions. Thus, although she is the first to fall, she is also in Milton's version the first to show the true repentance that will eventually lead both Adam and Eve to freely choose to confess their sins and seek forgiveness. The English Romantic poets insisted on Milton's rebelliousness, and it is true that in Paradise Lost he goes well beyond traditional, older ideas of women that had been inherited by his society. For Chaucer's Parson in The Canterbury Tales Adam is, for instance, the embodiment of reason, Eve the quintessence of passion. That Eve fell was something to be expected; the Fall can only be accounted to have taken place when Adam's reason freely consented to choose the apple. In contrast, Milton has seemed to some readers a kind of seventeenth-century feminist and Eve, in her role as the initiator of their regeneration, the real hero (or heroine) of Paradise Lost. Such a reading seriously distorts, however, the balances of Milton's epic and, more important, the deeper connections between his imaginative world and that of his twentieth-century readers. Eve is to obey Adam just as the Church is to follow the spirit and teachings of Christ. In echoing the Pauline hierarchy, Milton is reaffirming the relationship between husbands and wives that was universally endorsed by his age. Moreover, although Eve has reason and free will, for Milton she is, like all women, predominantly characterized by (richly connotative words) "softness" and "sweet attractive Grace." Milton isn't writing in the late twentieth-century; rather, he is a seventeenth-century, classically-educated, Protestant Englishman.

Beyond this, however, he is writing as an extraordinarily articulate, richly imaginative poet -- one of the most gifted the English language can show. Hardly ever does he simply accept the ideology of his society. "Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it, and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language." So Paul Grey, the writer in Don DeLillo's remarkable novel, Mao II. The works I come back to -- Shakespeare's plays, the epics of Milton and Virgil -- almost all of them answer to DeLillo's description. I can always hear John Milton in his lines, even when I like him least.

In the final analysis, the problem raised here with respect to literature is really the problem of any human relationship. Shall we understand another person on his or her terms or on our own? In understanding another human being or reading an author we are faced, as the American poet J. V. Cunningham has observed, with "the problem of affection and truth, of appreciation and scholarship.... It is common experience that affection begins in misunderstanding. We see our own meanings in what we love and we misconstrue for our own purposes. But life won't leave us there, and not only because of external pressures. What concerns us is naturally an object of study. We sit across the room and trace the lineaments of experience on the face of concern, and we find it was not what we thought it was. We come to see that what Shakespeare [or Milton or the black American playwright August Wilson] is saying is not what we thought [they] were saying, and we come to appreciate that for what it is. Where before we had constructed the fact from our feeling, we now construct our feeling from the fact. The end of affection and concern is accuracy and truth, with an alteration but no diminution of feeling." If I am doing my job, my students will be touched and changed by everything they read. My ambition is for an alteration with no diminuation of feeling, my hope is that my students will become not simply better readers but more mature, fuller human beings.

I am thinking now of a remark that Cleanth Brooks, Professor of English at Yale and the foremost spokesman for the so-called New Criticism, once made to me when, as Phi Beta Kappa speaker, he came to the College. Quite unexpectedly in the middle of a conversation, he urged that Sweet Briar must "keep the light burning" -- remarkable language for a reader as sensitive to images as Brooks was -- since (his words again) "Sweet Briar is one of the schools that count." Sweet Briar is one of the schools that count. Those of you who enter this institution as students tonight are about to join a remarkable community. In the twenty-eight years I have taught here I have grown increasingly impressed not only by the intelligence, curiosity, and sheer energy of its graduates but by their deep wisdom, their sympathy, their kindness and compassion. All these qualities abide at Sweet Briar -- in the students drawn to her, in what they learn here, and in the spirit that, after graduating, they bequeath to the College - and so long as they do, I have faith that Sweet Briar will continue to fulfill its educational role in the years to come.