The Vineyard Haven library will host a new, seven-part literary lecture series titled “Gender Dramas,” presented by Prof. Philip Weinstein, the Alexander Griswold Cummins professor emeritus of English at Swarthmore College. In this series, Weinstein will explore dramas of yearning and desire in three novels of the 19th and early 20th century: Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” (1851), Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” (1878), and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (1925).
“What does a woman want?” Freud’s famous question has been asked — and, in strikingly different ways, illuminated — by writers well before and after Freud. The heroines in these novels memorably confront and engage gender norms operative in their culture. What light does each novel shed on the struggles engaged in? How do the novels’ embodied stances toward such gender arrangements affect that light? How does their way of dramatizing these issues provoke questions of one’s own? “Gender” serves as the fulcrum in this course description, but the aim goes beyond any set of “prescriptions” or “proscriptions.” Rather, it is to do justice to each writer’s creative take on the drama of yearning and desire.
“Gender Dramas” will be hosted on Zoom. To sign up, patrons may register through the library’s event calendar. Login instructions will be sent to registered library participants prior to the first session. Lectures will be held from 7 to 8:30 pm on Tuesdays: Sept. 8 and 22, Oct. 6 and 27, Nov. 10, Dec. 1 and.15. For more information, please contact the library at vhpl_programs@clamsnet.org or 508-696-4211.
