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In this lecture, the speaker discusses the itinerary for the week, including the readings that need to be done. They mention that the two stories being read were written by early feminists and discuss the concept of literary criticism. They explain that literary criticism involves interpreting and analyzing a work of art, looking at different lenses such as historical or feminist. They also mention that a text can have multiple interpretations and that readers may have different opinions. The speaker gives an example of looking at The Lion King through a feminist lens and points out potential stereotypes and gender roles. Overall, the lecture introduces the concept of literary criticism and how it applies to the readings for the week. Hello, this is the first lecture for week three. So, let's take a look at the itinerary for week three. Let's get your book out, let's get whatever you're going to write notes on out. If we look at our itinerary for this week, there are several readings that you need to do. Hopefully you already read the story of an hour, and hopefully you did the other readings from the book that worked for today. The readings that you need to have done by our next meeting will be the yellow wallpapers. And be prepared to answer some questions from that story. It's a much longer and complex story than the one we just read, but they do have a lot of similarities. We also need to read Writing Literary Arguments, which is on pages sixty-two through seventy-seven. And pages thirty-eight through forty-three. There's more on the back. I'm going to be giving you a prompt this week. Either the end of this week or the beginning of next week. I don't know yet. And there will be a quiz when you guys come back for the second meeting. Because I did give you a lot of reading to do. We're going to start out our lecture today with an introduction to literary theories. It sounds like scary words, and certainly the words that they use to describe literary theories can be intimidating. But really all it is, is a way of looking at a piece of literature through a certain lens. For instance, we might be looking just at the historical context of a piece. Or we might be looking at the psychological aspects of a piece. And in this case, we're going to be using the lens of feminism. And I don't mean like the feminazis that you've seen lately. I mean real feminism, the original type of feminism. And the reason is because these two stories were written by, the two that we're reading, The Story of an Hour and The Yellow Wallpaper, were written by some of the earliest feminists. Yes, they are stories, but they are also making a political statement, if you will. Let me just give you some different definitions of literary criticism and what it is, what it entails. There are professional literary critics, of course, and that's one way to understand how a story is coming together. If you're really not understanding a story, when you look up something, that's literary criticism. It's not the same as a summary, okay? It's not like something you would look up on Sparknotes. Those are summaries. That's not literary criticism. Okay, let me just give you some definitions. First of all, you have to ask yourself, can a text have more than one interpretation? Can it have more than one interpretation, depending on who's reading it? And I think that the answer to that is definitely yes. And it would depend upon what experiences that person's bringing to the table, right? And that's why it's always really good to talk about the literature that you're reading, because people are going to have different opinions. And are they necessarily wrong? Are they necessarily right? No, again, it goes back to how they support their argument or their claims. Okay, so not all readers are going to interpret text in the same way, okay? But what you're asking yourself when you're reading, or you should be when you're reading a story, because we're going beyond just the plot here, right? This is college. We're going just beyond the plot and the theme and those kinds of things. You know, we're asking ourselves, what is the writer trying to tell us through and in the story? And, of course, there's going to be more than one answer to that, depending on what you look at. They are multifaceted. They have many different characteristics that can be looked at. Whenever you make a personal interpretation of a text, you are becoming a literary critic. So, you know, one way to conduct literary criticism is by a simple reader's response. You know, you're responding to it on an individual level. That's probably the simplest kind of literary criticism. But, again, we're going to be talking about looking through a feminist lens. Again, I just want to make sure that you understand literary criticism because it's something that can be very daunting. What is literary criticism? It is an activity that attempts to describe, study, analyze, or interpret a work of art because that's what literature is. It is a work of art. And it can be any literature. It can be poems, short stories, novels, whatever. Let me give you that definition again. Literary criticism is an activity that attempts to describe, study, analyze, or interpret a work of art. Okay, so it's all those words that are, you know, a higher level of Bloom's Taxonomy. It goes up. Describe, study, analyze, interpret, evaluate. It does all of those things. Okay. I thought it was interesting that the first recorded literary criticism, it comes from, I mean, it probably happened before that, but the first time it was ever actually recorded that we can read about it, we can read about literary criticism, was in the fourth century. And it was whoever was tutoring Ptolemy II. And so that was in Alexandria in about 300 B.C. So I think that's kind of interesting. You know, we've been doing it for a long time. Aristotle was very into literary criticism and making his students think about not just what a text said, but why did the author present it in a certain way. Okay. So, again, does a text have only one meaning? No. Does a text affect each reader in the same way? No. These are some questions you might ask when you're conducting literary criticism. How is the text influenced by the culture in which it's written? That's the cultural context. Some people just look at the cultural context, and so they are doing a literary criticism through the lens of cultural context or a historical lens. And then the one we're looking at today is what part or function does gender play in the writing or the reading of a text? What part does gender play? What are the gender roles? Are they typical? Are they obvious? Are they less obvious? Okay. What are the gender roles? That's what we're going to be looking at specifically with these two stories that we are reading this week or discussing this week. Okay. And then the reason that we call it literary theory or literary, yeah, literary theory is, and people get confused between literary criticism and literary theory. The criticism is just the actual works that different critics write. And then the theory is the lens that they're looking through. Okay. So don't let it confuse you. It's not really a big deal. The theory came about because eventually, like, let's say the first person started writing about, through a feminist lens, I'm sorry. Let's say the first person started writing through a feminist lens in the 1960s. And then let's say someone else saw that and was like, oh, that's interesting. I want to look at a piece of literature in the same way she did. And eventually enough people get together that have the same kind of ideas that it becomes a theory. Okay. And so, okay, so let me try to explain that a little bit better. So groups of readers and critics that have a similar set of beliefs, they get together. And this is where we get literary theory. Okay. So if the critics all believe that social and historical concerns are what are important, then they become what are known as Marxist critics. We're going to study that later. And if they think that gender roles are important, then they become feminist critics or they will criticize something using a feminist lens. Okay. I don't want that to confuse you too much. As undergrads, you don't really need to understand the difference between literary criticism and literary theory too much, just to know that it's out there. Okay. I'm going to use something that hopefully you all are familiar with, The Lion King, as an example of how to look at something through a feminist lens. And let me just tell you that I love The Lion King, and I don't think that it is biased too much. But when you look at it, you can find something that is stereotypical in everything that you read if you look hard enough. Hold on one second. Okay. So we're going to be looking at The Lion King. All right. Again, I love The Lion King, don't get me wrong. And it's not a feminist movie at all. But if we look at the main characters, they are all male, right? The whole movie is centered around the journey of Simba and about how he's going to become king of the pride, right? And then we also have Simba's bride. Well, the one that's going to become his bride. I can't think of her name right now. I probably watched the movie a million times when my son was little. Okay. So Simba's future bride, you know who I'm talking about. She doesn't really do very much to overcome the role that she takes in the movie. She's already been promised to him as a wife, right? And she doesn't really do anything about that. She just stands by his side as a dutiful queen and produces an heir, right, like she's supposed to do. So you could say that that is kind of stereotypical, right? Again, I like The Lion King. But if you really wanted to look at it like that, you could. Of course, you could also say that it's not sexist in any way because, well, you can say in any way. But you could say that it has strong female characters. I think the hyena was a female. Yeah, I think it was. She was a female. But, again, it's the evil character, right? The woman, the only strong female character, really strong female character is the hyena, which is seen as evil. So you could also point that out in feminist criticism. Okay. So, again, in feminist criticism, we are looking at gender. We are looking at what roles gender plays. We're looking for stereotypes. And, yeah, we're just looking, you know, do the women stay at home? Are they passive? Are they treated inferior by the men? And I think you can start to see how this is going to play into the stories that we're reading this – discussing this week if you've already read – some of you have already read both of them. The first one is not hard to understand at all. The second one a little more. But I'm going to give you some background on the author in a little while, and it might make a little bit more sense as to what's happening there. Okay. So, again, feminist criticism, we're looking for sexual stereotypes would probably be the best way for you to remember it. Okay. Looking for sexual stereotypes. Okay. And, guys, it often helps if you can imagine yourself as the opposite gender reading the text. Okay. So, we did the Little Red Riding Hood. All right. As another example for you, I have Little Red Riding Hood. Okay. I don't know how many of you realize that Little Red Riding Hood is very, very sexist. And it actually has a lot to do with a warning to women in general, a warning to women not to go off the path where they're supposed to go, not to do anything outside of society, the social norms expected of women to be nice little girls and to follow orders and to go to grandma's house. And if they don't follow what society tells them to do, they're going to be put in danger. Right. And they're going to literally, like, be in bed with the wolf. Okay. And then the wolf could eat them and they die in some versions. And in other versions, even when the woodsman comes and rescues her, you know, it takes a man to rescue her. So, it's very, very sexist, very stereotypical. A lot of people say it's actually a warning to young women against infidelity, like literally getting into bed with a wolf. So, yeah, there's a lot of sexual innuendos as well as sexism in the story. Okay. So, if we take the story, and I'm going to be looking at a very old version of the story. Okay. So, I'm going to read a little part to you and then I'm going to show you how it could be considered feminist. Or feminist, how we could critically analyze it through a feminist lens. Okay. Here's one part. A long time ago in a house near a wood, as most pretty histories go, a nice little girl lived called Red Riding Hood, as some of us already know. One day, said her mother, get ready, my dear, and take to your granny some cakes and a bottle of wine. We don't know that version, do we? To soothe her and ask after her pains and aches. Set out before it gets hot, and when you are on your journey, walk nicely and quietly. Do not run off the path along the way, or you may end up falling and breaking the wine. We didn't hear it that way, right? I like this version better. Okay. So, we see there's a picture in the book, the old storybook. And she's in her cape and she's carrying this little basket and she looks very dainty. And the mother has an apron on. Oh, and she has an apron on, too, which kind of, oh, yeah, I hadn't noticed that. It kind of shows that they are supposed to be cleaning and cooking, right, aprons. And that they are supposed to be attractive because they both look very attractive in the picture. There's no male presence here, but the mother, whose job it is, right, to teach her daughter how to be a lady, is telling her, you know, stay on the path. Don't stray out of the outside world that's full of dangerous males. And so she's giving these instructions on how to walk nicely and quietly and stay on the path. So it's kind of interesting there. Let me see if there's another. Yeah. No, I don't want to use that one, I don't think. There. That one's not as good as an example. Okay, let me give you another passage. Okay, this is right after she meets up with the wolf. And remember, she wasn't supposed to talk to anybody, and she wasn't supposed to go off this path, and she does. And she takes flowers. So she's being a rebel, right? And what happens to women who don't follow society's rules? Bad things happen to them, right? That's what the story is reinforcing. Okay, so this is the part of the text where the wolf has just left. Off he ran, and Red Riding Hood went on her way. But often she lingered and played, and made, as she went, quite a pretty nosegay with the wildflowers that grew in the glade. So as she ran from the path against which she had been warned, looking for flowers farther than she should, with each one she saw a still prettier one for which she yearned, and so got deeper and deeper into the woods. So the woods here can be seen as an analogy to life, right? And she's just getting more and more in trouble. It's the temptation of women. We cannot resist. I mean, from the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve, it's Eve's fault, right? He only ate the apple because she tempted him. So here again, the woman is weak. She cannot resist pretty things. She cannot resist going off the trail. But again, she is going to be making her own decisions, but they're not good, are they? So she's being kind of shown in a silly light, like she's a silly girl. She's not very wise, and she's going off the path, and society wants her to be a good girl, and she's not. Okay? So another one. This is when she gets to her grandmother's, and oh, wait. There was a really good one. I don't know what I did with it. I had copied it down. Well, the part where she gets into bed with the wolf, and she says, oh, my, how big your eyes are, and oh, my, how big your teeth are. And the wolf is responding to her. And it's like she's so stupid. She can't even notice that she's in bed with a wolf. And you can take that figuratively and literally. She doesn't even notice that she's in bed with a wolf, with an evil person or a man or someone she shouldn't be with. And he has, he, the wolf, has all these strong features, and she's very, very weak. But then she is saved. In one version of the story, she's saved by a woodsman, and here's the part where that happens. Red Riding Hood shrieked and banged off with a gun and shot the old wolf through the head. One howl and one moan, one kick and one groan, and the wicked old rascal was dead. Some sportsman, he certainly was a good shot, had aimed at the wolf when she cried. So Red Riding Hood got safe home and lived happily there until she died. Okay, so we have, you know, she's not even able to fight her own battles, right? She's been saved at the last minute by a man, and, you know, she's vulnerable. She screams, you know, like women do. She's learned her lesson, obviously, though, because she goes home and she lives happily there until she dies. So that indicates, I guess, that she would stay on the right path. And, of course, the path is dictated by a patriarchal society, by men. Patriarch is men. The Greek root pat, like paternal, it means male or father. So she is happy because she decides to live the way she's supposed to from now on, right? So the moral of the story could be that even though Red Riding Hood wanted her independence, she couldn't handle it because she couldn't make the right choices and she needed help. She needed masculine help and strength to get her through her bad decisions, okay? So that would be how, and I'm not saying that that's how I look at it. Certainly, I think that story is more, you can find a lot more material in it than you could The Lion King. But I wanted to show you how some people can really take something and twist it. And, yeah, you know, we can kind of see how The Lion King could be a little stereotypical, sexist. But this one, definitely so. If you look at all the fairy tales, you know, most of them have weak women characters that make a silly mistake, like eating an apple, like she couldn't tell it was a witch, Snow White. She couldn't tell it was a witch, you know, and just, they do silly things, they do stupid things, and the men have to rescue them, right? So, yeah, that's what looking through something with a feminist lens entails. Now, you could also look at these through a historical lens, which might have some of the same things, because historically, women have been treated inferior, right? And, of course, now you have your feminazis, who I don't even know what they want, really. Okay, so now we are going to talk a little bit about Kate Chopin, who is the one that wrote Story of an Hour. Kate Chopin? Chopin? Not Chopin, Chopin is kind of a softer S sound, but not quite S-H. Kate Chopin. A little bit about her. She, let me see, she was born in 1850, and she had a lot of brothers and sisters, but they all died, but her. And then her father died as well when she was fairly young. So she was raised by her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother, and they were all very intelligent women, and they encouraged her to be educated. So they probably had more money to spend on her because all the other children died, and so she was able to receive pretty decent education for the time, for being a woman. Plus, she was around women who were strong figures for her, and there really weren't any male figures. So she was one of the first, what people now call feminist writers. I don't think she called herself that at the time, but she certainly was making a statement, I think. She was married for a while, but her husband also died. She just didn't have luck with men, did she? And so she moved back home as an adult, and she began to write to try to make some extra money, and she was very good at it, obviously, and she was very successful. A lot of authors are not successful in their lifetime, but she was. Well, as successful as a woman could be as a writer. She wrote The Awakening, which is a story about a New Orleans woman. She lived in New Orleans, so it was actually one of those stories that was based on a true event. And then she wrote several short stories about the area in which she lived. And probably one of the most famous is The Story of an Hour because so much happened in one hour, and she captures the very essence of what every woman probably felt at that time but was afraid to say, and that is that they did not have freedom to make choices, and they couldn't just go and ask for a divorce. It just wasn't that way. There were only two ways to get out of a marriage, and that was divorce, which would give you a really bad stigma for the rest of your life, or death. In The Story of an Hour, it was written in 1894, so she would have been pretty old, like 50. Not old to me, but old to you. And again, this is a time when women didn't really have much power or say in anything that went on, and they didn't speak out about their feelings or their rights, so she kind of gave them a voice. And they liked that. The women liked that. She wrote mainly her characters were women, and they dealt with those kinds of issues with men. And a major theme in her stories is freedom, as you probably know from reading The Story of an Hour, freedom and the importance of it to women as well. I hope you read the story, but I do want to talk about it a little bit. I'm not here physically to gauge whether or not you actually read it, but I'm assuming that since it was only a couple of pages that most of you did, and I hope that you will read The Yellow Wallpaper as well. I mean, like I said, if you don't understand it, that's okay. If you don't understand all of it, but at least read it. I will explain it to you, but I'm not going to read it to you, okay? But we are going to talk about The Story of an Hour a little bit, okay? Mrs. Mallard has been told at the beginning of the story that her husband is dead, right? And so she reacts like pretty much any wife would, I guess. She's upset, and so she excuses herself and runs off to her bedroom to be alone. And here's where we see a completely different side of Mrs. Mallard. And so it's kind of symbolic of we show one side to people publicly, and we all have our real self that we don't always show to people, right? And so it's kind of symbolic when she shuts that door and she's alone that, you know, she's now a new person. And we see a whole new side of her. In fact, she's happy that her husband has died. She doesn't—it doesn't come out—well, it does kind of come out and say that. She's upset a little bit, but she's happy because she has this freedom that she's never had before, right? And she even says, you know, free, free, you know, from her husband. And so she's standing there in front of the window, which is also a very strong symbol in the story, a window, you know, a symbol for freedom. And it's interesting that it's springtime because often in literature, the seasons have a deeper meaning. Winter often symbolizes death, especially in poetry. When we get to poetry, you're going to see that the seasons play a big role in symbolism and imagery. So we have winter usually meaning death, and we have spring, which is new life. And so it's interesting that when she's looking through the window, she sees—let me see if I can find the passage. She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all a-quiver with new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below, a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which someone was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves. Okay, so she sees all this life going on, and it's like she's just now alive herself and noticing all these little things. Okay, a peddler is someone who sells things. And, oh, it's also interesting that it talks of rain. Rain is also symbolic of cleansing. So in some way, she's being cleansed of her old life, and she's being offered a new one, right? And she's looking through the window to see all these things. She's looked through the window before, obviously, but it's different this time. She's seeing it—everything she's seeing and hearing it differently. And then, of course, she's up there for a while, and they think that she's going to die from her heart condition, which is also very ironic that she has a heart condition, because if you think about it, she has two kinds of heart conditions. One is the physical, and one is the emotional, right? She has a heart condition because she has a little bit of a struggle between her love— she does seem to have loved him somewhat, but I think she loves the idea of her freedom more. Okay, so suddenly someone comes to the door after she's gone back downstairs, and then someone comes to the door, and it is her husband who is supposed to be dead, right? But he's not. They made a mistake. That could never happen today because we have cell phones, right? Cell phones ruin so many good plots now. They have to come up with other things like the cell phone dies or something because it just doesn't work any other way. So here she is, and she dies, right? And they say that she dies of a joy that kills, and, of course, hopefully you understand that that's also irony. It's a great situational irony there because of the mention of her heart condition, and we know also that she dies—I guess that would be dramatic irony, too. She dies not because of a heart condition. Well, it may be because of a heart condition, but not the kind that they think. She has a broken heart now because she is not going to be able to live her life the way that she thought. She was okay before she got a glimpse of what it would be like, right? And I don't think she was one of those—I mean, I don't know. I don't think she was one of those who sat around and thought about her husband dying. I don't think that she wished for it, but when it did happen, she saw things completely differently, okay? So some questions we can ask ourselves is, is this a statement about women's rights? We don't know. The author is not here to talk to. How does the author feel about marriage? She obviously feels that marriage is in some way choking out the life of women and that they don't have the same rights in a marriage as the man does, and they can't make decisions like the man does. And it talks in the story about him wishing his will upon her. It's not in those words, but she has to give in to what he wants, basically. Okay. So if we think about how she feels about marriage and if we think about what she's saying about women's rights, it's a very strong statement. And I think it was probably very controversial at the time. I can imagine men reading it and being appalled, but I can imagine women reading it and being like, wow, that's exactly how I feel. The seasons, again, are symbols in the story, and the heart trouble is the irony. And also notice how they treat her. You're going to see some similarities to the yellow wallpaper. They treat her like a little fragile thing. Of course, she does have a heart condition, but I don't think it's just that. I think that it has to do with her being a woman. That's why they treat her that way. Okay. I'm going to give you just a little bit of background on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wrote the yellow wallpaper, so that maybe you can understand it a little bit better. She was born in 1860, so she and Kate Chopin were contemporaries. They lived at the same time. I don't know if they knew each other. Something I probably should look up. She wrote the yellow wallpaper in 1892. When did I say that Kate wrote hers? It wasn't that far from that time period. So, yeah, they should have known each other. They were both southern. Okay. Her early life, she was a writer and a social activist, mainly a social activist before she became a writer. She was actually a relative of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, interestingly. She got married, and during her marriage, right after she'd had a child, I think. I think it was after she'd had a child. She started experiencing depression, and she went to the doctor, and they gave her some very unusual treatments. They used to do shock therapy and things like that then. But one of the things they did is they told her not to write anymore and not to stress herself, to just stay in bed and relax. She realized that that was not the thing to do. If you've ever been depressed, and I mean clinically depressed, you know that just staying in bed or just not experiencing life at all is not at all the thing to do. So she was a woman's rights activist. I'm going to just read to you what she said. Someone asked her, before she died, why she wrote the yellow wallpaper. This is what appeared in an October issue of the Forerunner in 1913. I'm just going to read it to you. These are in her words. These are in Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Charlotte, she has a lot of names, huh? They're in her own words. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Many and many a reader has asked that, of why she wrote the yellow wallpaper. When the story first came out in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in the transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said. It was enough to drive anyone mad to read it. Another physician in Kansas, I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of insanity he had ever seen and, begging my pardon, had I been there. Now the story of the story is this. For many years, I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown, tending to melancholia and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble, I went in devout faith and some faint stir of hope to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure to which a still good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much to matter with me and sent me home with solemn advice to live as domestic a life as far as possible, to have but two hours intellectual life a day, and never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again as long as I lived. This was in 1887. I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over. I don't know what that means. Then using the remnants of intelligence that remained and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again. Work, the normal life of every human being. Work in which it is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite, ultimately recovering some measure of power. Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote the yellow wallpaper with its embellishments and additions to carry out the idea. She says I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it. Okay, so she wrote it in response to that, but saying that she never was as crazy as the lady in the story. The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has, to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate, so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity, and she recovered, so it's helped other women. But the best result is this. Many years later, I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia, whatever she had, since reading the yellow wallpaper. It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it has worked. Okay, so I think that's interesting that she wrote that to let us know, you know, why she wrote it. And we get to hear from her words, you know. Let's see, I'm trying to think if there's anything else I need to share with you. You have some questions, and you can do them in a group of no more than four people. So you can do them by yourself, you can do them in a group of two, you can do them in a group of three, you can do them in a group of four, but you can't do them in a group of five. You got it? Okay, so four or less. And if you work together, you can all have the same answers. In fact, I would prefer that you do have all the same answers if you work together. But you all need to write the answers, and then when you turn it in, you need to staple them together. For instance, if there are three of you working together, please staple all three of them together so that I know all of those are the same. And then I'll just pick one to grade, you don't know which one, and you will all get that grade, okay? So that way that will really help me out, and it should help you out as well. But again, if you're doing it together, you have to write the answers. Everyone has to write the answers, and then everyone who worked together staples the papers together. And that way I can grade any of them, and they should all be the same, right? Because you all wrote the answers. I've done things like this in the past, and you all have not followed instructions. So I'm just saying, if you do it together, then turn it in together with one staple on them, okay? So there could be four papers stapled together. That would be wonderful, actually, if you did that. I would really appreciate if you did that, because that's less for me to grade, right? And it's less, you know, more fun to work together anyway. Okay, so please make sure that you finish that by the end of the period. Write in complete sentences, please. And we don't answer with fragments or run-ons. And then make sure that you read the story for next time we meet. The yellow wallpaper is a little long. But, you know, we're going to need to talk about it, and you're going to have a quiz over it. So what I want you to ask yourself as you're reading it is, what is the role of women, the woman, in the work? And how do you describe the male-female relationships in the work? How would you characterize it? Is it a healthy relationship? So those are some things for you to think about. Again, do the questions. Finish the questions. If you finish them, or if you do them together, please staple them together. Gosh, I mean, last time I had you all do something together, I think one or two people followed instructions. Okay? If you don't follow instructions, I'm probably going to give you a zero. I'm sorry. You need to learn listening is part of your grade, either directly or indirectly. Okay? So please, if you do them together, staple them together. I know I'm repeating myself, right? Because there's going to be some people who don't do it. All right. Anyway, guys, sorry I missed. And I really hate missing class. And I know you hate listening to my voice. You're like, oh, my God, you've got to listen to her. But, hey, at least you didn't have to see my face, right? Now, I hope that you all learned something. And I hope that you come to the next class meeting with questions. I hope you have questions about the yellow wallpaper or comments. If you don't have any questions or you don't have any comments, you probably didn't read it very carefully. Okay? So I'll see you next time. God bless.