Kate Chopin, Sylvia Plath, & the Feminine Mystique

Full Tuition: $300 — Scholarship Options in Drop-Down Menu

Instructor: Andrews | 5 weeks | Sundays May 7-June 11 (no class May 28) | 7:00-9:00 PM ET | ONLINE

In her 1963 treatise, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan gave a name to the secret suffering of women who supposedly had it all. Friedan described the titular ailment as the belief that “the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity,” resulting in personal and social dissatisfaction, depression, and worse. That same year, Sylvia Plath published The Bell Jar, which resonated with similar themes of discontent caused by  the limitations of compulsory women’s roles. But the critiques launched by Friedan and Plath weren’t new to 1963. More than half a century earlier, Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening, explored these same issues, showing the pervasiveness and perniciousness of patriarchal gendering and the psychic damage it wreaks–interestingly, this 1899 novel which had been in relative obscurity for the first half of the twentieth century was rediscovered by critics just a year before Plath and Friedan’s important works, in 1962!

Across five weeks, we’ll contextualize our understanding of “the feminine mystique” read these two famous novels in their entirety–The Awakening (1899) and The Bell Jar (1963)–in order to ask questions about the medicalization and institutionalization of femininity, sexual and reproductive trauma and its diminishment, women’s suicide, and how whiteness and class positions (of the authors and their characters) structure relationships to patriarchy. In doing so, we’ll traverse two major cities–New Orleans and New York–and get a glimpse into both what changes and what stays the same across 20th century life. We’ll engage with the work of literary scholars such as Edmund Wilson and Jaqueline Rose to historicize the novels, and read the work of cultural theorists such as Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, and Silvia Federici to understand more about the construction of gender, the role of whiteness in literature, the importance of reproductive control (and violence) to capitalist accumulation. But we’ll attend first and foremost to the novels themselves, and the beautiful writing, wild humor, and sharp insights that structure both!

Classes are recorded to allow for students to participate asynchronously. If you want to take a class but cannot make the class time, sign up for the asynchronous audit option to follow along on your own. Recordings are password protected and will only be available for the duration of the class and two weeks after it ends.

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All tuition goes to paying instructors and staff a living wage. We encourage you to pick the payment tier that corresponds with your needs, but ask that you please consider our commitment to fair labor practices when doing so. We are currently able to offer three full scholarships per class, and one full scholarship per person per term. If the scholarship tier you need is sold out or you would like to pay tuition on an installment basis, please email us directly, and we will work with you.

If at any point up to 48 hours before your first class session you realize you will be unable to take the class, please email us and we will reallocate your funds to a future class, to another student’s scholarship, or refund it. After classes begin, we are only able to make partial refunds and adjustments.