There is a job opening in our department this year for a "20th Century Americanist," a position which I someday hope to be qualified to fill. This means that after sifting through hundreds of applications and conducting preliminary interviews, our department is hosting visits from the top three candidates. During their visits, each candidate has to present a lecture on his/her current scholarship, and those of us in the department are supposed to attend so we can share our opinions of each applicant. Those of us who are graduate students can also benefit from seeing how the candidates handle the job talk since we should be giving our own job talks when we go on the market.
Attending today's talk meant I had to renegotiate my entire Monday schedule in order to drop Nora off early, fight traffic, and arrive on campus before 10am. Just getting there felt like an accomplishment. But before the the candidate's introduction was even finished, I was already thinking "Well. If this is the type of person I am going to have to compete against, I am never going to get a job in this field." The longer the candidate talked, the more I realized I am many light years away from being prepared to perform the role of "job candidate for a tenure-track professorship."
But there was one flicker of hope midway through her talk. She referred to something as the "emblem of an aborted dream." I haven't read the book she was discussing, but unless I misunderstood her explanation of the novel's events, she should have said it was the "emblem of a miscarried dream." This is a significant difference, not only on the level of language. And at this moment, a lightbulb went off in my head. I remembered: "I think you will find that this enhances your scholarship," my mentor professor told me when I told him I was expecting a baby. Love, work, and having a baby mutually inform one another, argues Mary Austin in "The Walking Woman."
When this woman said "aborted" instead of "miscarried," and I began thinking about what a significant difference that is, it occurred to me that maybe Mary Austin and my professor are right-- maybe being a mother is the thing that will make it possible for me to contribute something unique to the academic conversation. I looked around the room and could only find one other mother in attendance. This might be the only thing that sets me apart, actually, in a room where every single person has degrees from more prestigious institutions than I do. (Valpo is many good things, but a literary studies powerhouse it is not.)
Being a mom could actually be an explicit advantage, given my research interests. For years I have been trying to figure out why I am so fascinated by American women's writing of the First World War. I have known they had something to say which still doesn't register in public consciousness because male narratives of the war have always been privileged. What unique thing(s) are expressed in these women's works, I still don't know. Sometime in the past two years I began to think it has something to do with how knowledge of conception and reproduction help us to make sense of the war differently. Male and female writers alike refer to the war in terms of conception and birth all the time. They suggest that the war was a difficult period, like pregnancy or labor, but it was necessary and noble to endure because they believed it would deliver new ideas into the world. When the events of the war destroyed this optimistic view, and writers started mourning the loss of the idea the war was supposed to represent, they began comparing the war to miscarriage and stillbirth. Maybe, now that I've conceived, carried, and delivered a baby, I'll eventually be able to make sense of these comparisons in a way I wouldn't have been able to do if I wasn't a mother. I guess time will tell.
But for right now, I am trying to be encouraged by the fact that my reaction to a single comment during today's talk helped me to realize that, at the very least, being a mother has given me a new, more interesting academic perspective than I had before. This is the second time this has happened to me, actually, so now it's a trend. (I won't go into it here, but if you're curious, ask me sometime about the epiphany I had regarding Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath after I learned how breastfeeding really works.)
I had a good day as a mom today, too. Nora was thisclose to rolling over for me and Billy! I've been trying to help her with this for a while. At first, when I'd roll her, she'd push back against the motion. The other day she started rolling into it. Today, I was putting a little ring in her hand and she was using it to pull herself over. While practicing this back-to-tummy roll with my help, she flopped from her tummy onto her back all by herself a few times. The video of her rolling over all on her own cannot be far off!
No comments:
Post a Comment