The ThinkND Podcast
The ThinkND Podcast
Women's Work, Part 5: Lessons in Chemistry
Episode Topic: Lessons in Chemistry
Have you read Bonnie Garmus’s bestselling novel Lessons in Chemistry (2022)? Are there elements of the novel – say, Elizabeth Zott’s headstrong character, the “mysterious benefactor” plot line, or the book’s treatment of religion – that you’d like to learn more about? Join Notre Dame professor and assistant director of the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise, and Society Chris Hedlin for an interactive live virtual event aimed at deepening your understanding and appreciation of the text. Chris will answer readers’ questions, share insights from students in her undergraduate course “Women’s Work” and alumni in the Notre Dame Women Connect Shared Read program.
Featured Speakers:
- Grace Lynch '26, University of Notre Dame
Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/c308c0.
This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Women's Work.
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Welcome to this discussion of Bonnie Gareth's, lessons in Chemistry. I'm just so glad that you're here, that we can talk and learn together about this wonderful text. for those who I haven't met yet, my name is Professor Chris Hedland. I teach here at Notre Dame. I say here, I'm currently sitting in my office in O'Shaughnessy, shout out to osha. and I'm in a relatively new program called the shei Family Program in Economy, enterprise and Society. so this wonderful program serves students who have interests in both something in business and something in liberal arts. So it's very interdisciplinary. My own background is my PhD is in English. I'm trained as a 19th century literary historian. and so my role in the classroom is largely helping students see how things like literature, and literary methods like close reading or dialogue. can contribute to students' personal and professional growth. so I just, I love what I do and I'm so grateful that I'm getting a chance to share a glimpse of that with you tonight. so yeah, that's, a little bit about me, I should say. that's my paid labor. I'm also a full-time mom to a rambunctious toddler. so yeah, I'm just so glad that you took the time to be here with me tonight. I'd love to know kind of who's in the room. I don't get to see you with this webinar style, which is a shame. but I'm hoping that through the chat we can kind of, be in dialogue with one and another. so some of you I know are in this room who have been participating all along with a, a online forum through Facebook, with the Notre Dame Women Connect shared read program. So I would love if you are in, if you participated in the shared read and were contributing either to the online Facebook group or you were in a local discussion group, it would be amazing if you could in the chat, just be like, hi, it's me. share who you are and like maybe what your graduation year was, or hey, tuning in from whatever your location was. just so we can, kind of get warm up the chat, see where people are coming in from. I see Aaron. Hi Aaron. the, I know also some of you have been watching with, think and the ThinkND series that I've been hosting. so I put together, I've been interviewing cool experts on the history of women's labor and women's literature. some of you I know have been, following that series. so if you've been following along the ThinkND series, I would love for you to join the chat and let us know, hey, where you're from, your year. And then fun group. I'm seeing them already kind of jumping into the chat. I have, there's students here who, have been taking an undergraduate course with me called Women's Work. and so these students have been sitting every Tuesday, Thursday morning, to talk with me about literature, about women's work. so kind of thought within the context of the course, I'm gonna draw some insights from the course for you, as part of our conversation about lessons in chemistry. So just to give you a little bit of background, the, we thought about women's work in three senses of that work. so the first was a history of the idea of gendered separate spheres. Like how did we get the idea that some kinds of labor say care work, domestic, chores teaching are properly the concern of women. I. Other forms of labor business, scholarly pursuits, are coded masculine. so that's the first sense. The second one was thinking about work as in works of literature. so throughout the course we read popular contemporary fiction about working women, like lessons in chemistry. Got my copy here, ready to go. like lessons in chemistry and probed, how do fictional representations of work working women relate to women's actual lived experiences? And then third, we use women's work as a starting place for purpose-driven career discernment. So students taking up questions like, what will be meaningful work for me? or, you know, how do I wanna balance career and family in my life? and we saw gender then as an always present variable in those kinds of real life conversations. I know for me personally, it was just an, this is the first time I was teaching that course an absolute joy to teach. I'm grateful to the Office of Digital Learning for giving me a grant to help develop the course, for Shei as always, for giving me the freedom. In order to like, think these kinds of big ideas alongside students. and then last but not least, the students. it's just been an absolute honor to teach with you this semester. Think alongside you. and I'm grateful that you're all here tonight to help con converse with the alumni too. Okay. speaking of students, so one student from Women's work, grace Junior Grace Lynch, volunteered to, signed on to be willing to be co-host with me tonight. I'm so grateful, grace, that you were willing. So I thought maybe Grace, you could just introduce yourself, and maybe share like a favorite part of the course for you, and your student experience.
3:Sure. So thank you guys so much for joining. It's amazing to see that there's 80 people in the podcast in the live right now. That's amazing. So my name is Grace, as Dr. Headland said. I'm a junior majoring in political science. I'm minors in public service and poverty studies. I live in Ryan Hall, go Bra. I can see some Ryan alumni in the chat right now. I'm from the state of Illinois. And then one of my favorite aspects of the course came from the informational interviews. So one of our tasks was to take two women who volunteered their time to be interviewed and go through and see where our interest slide, what questions we could have about them and talk to them. Both the women I interviewed were in the field of law, very different. And so I got to ask them for advice, ask them about their career path, ask them about either having a dog or having kids, however they chose to live their life. And it was just so inspirational. And then with those interview transcripts, we made poetry out of it. So it really taught me the importance of paying attention to words. Really cool exercise.
1:Thanks so much, grace. Yeah. That I know there's people who are, I can recognize from the chat who I know volunteered for those informational interviews. So again, what a gift to be able to have the alumni community, rally around stu, these students. we really benefited from that, portion of the course. I know I did Grace and I think I could speak for all the students. We really valued that. Should we, I'm seeking some shitty alums. Hello, shitty alums. let's talk lessons in chemistry. I'm gonna try to bring a little bit of the conversations we had in the course to bear on the discussion that we're gonna have for the next 42 minutes or so. the how I'm organizing or how Grace and I are organizing tonight, in the lead up for tonight's event, I asked you, some of you people who are on the shared read Facebook group, conversations I had with alumni one-on-one, certainly with the students in the class, to generate a list of questions that they might want to think through with the book. so Grace has volunteered kind of fireside chat style to team me up with those questions. and then I'll share some thoughts in response to that. the goal here is to give you little snapshots of multiple different conversations as opposed to just giving you like one lecture about a single topic related to the book. so hopefully we'll touch on a lot of people's interests. Grace and I have 10 questions on our list, but we hope that we don't get to all of them because the ideal thing here is that you're in the, either in the chat or you can see along the bottom of your screen, there's a question and answer like a q and a button. If you hit that button, you can submit questions to us live that I will then respond to. it's a little scary for me, but making challenge me, that's a good thing. I welcome your questions. one of the cool things about doing an event live as compared to just like listening to a podcast or something, some of you'll listen to it later, no shade, but if you're here live, like what a gift to be able to discuss something in community, right? We've talked in the class a lot about the way texts bring people together, so I would love for this to be a conversation where you're asking the questions that are on your mind and letting me answer them. In addition to that q and a feature, the chat itself, I hope we can keep the chat hot. so if you're listening to something and you have a response, like no response is too small. So get there in the chat and let us know what's on your mind. comment. Oh yeah, I thought so too. Or, oh, here's a good example of that. If you have your book around, the students, besides racist classmates are in charge of manning, or I should say woman manning. We were all women in the class, woman manning the chat. and so there'll be, this is taking the place of their final exam, make them work for it, helping you out, responding to your things in the chat. Alright, so before we jump into questions that we, I would love to know, kind of just gauge your responses to the book, people who have read it, who are in the room. so I had Kelsey, RIE, who's our ThinkND mastermind behind this event is going to queue up a poll question. and I would love for you to respond to, just let me know, did you like the book? If you read it? there's a few different responses
2:fast. Good.
1:I think you can see the chat. you can see it on your, and, but we've got, five stars from a lot of people. about 51% said five stars. 33% at mostly yes. Mostly you liked it. a about 6% of people had either mixed feelings, men, not my favorite few people who haven't read yet. I'm gonna warn you, we're gonna do a few spoilers, so when we get, if we start talking about the ending, maybe just la to yourself so that we don't ruin anything for you. Yeah, good. This is helpful to me. one of the things that, I mean, literary study has a lot of things going for it and has enhanced people's appreciation te of texts in a lot of ways. One thing that we're guilty of is often hierarchizing intellectual response to text above emotional response. And that's something that I always kind of try to counteract. Like I think it's important to acknowledge first, how is it that you felt about the book? and then we can probe into, okay, why did you feel that way? so the questions that Grace and I have teed up or thought through together first have to do with emotional responses. I'd be curious to, if you're willing in the chat, like if you said you liked it, what did you like about it? If you didn't like it, what didn't you like? If you were mixed, you know, I would love to hear in the chat, like sort of likes and dislikes. and then Grace and I will start talking through kind of some responses that we heard in advance about these kinds of things. Grace, do you wanna tee up first question?
3:Perfect. Let's go ahead with the first question. So the first question does relate a lot to liking the book or not liking the book. so this speaks to not liking the book. It seems like one of the critiques of the book was centered on believability one alum, I, Rita wrote that I found it annoying slash implausible that Elizabeth was so exceptional at everything she did without effort or training. And then another person wrote, quote, the TV show is where everything fell apart from me. A live TV show with no rehearsals. Where's all the prep time? This is the worst kind of plot device. Dr. Had, what should we make of these implausibilities?
1:Good. yeah, so I'd be curious, I'm trying to read through in the chat whether, we're gonna get to things we like in a bit, but we thought we'd start with critique, whether this is something that people who are in the room also felt. but going through the Facebook group, going through, in class, it seemed like when there were critiques, it was off. Believability. and so I think if you had these concerns, my like, first question back to you would be like, sort of a self interrogation of why do I expect this text to be believable? and so one, one kind of simple answer I guess I could give to this question is to say it's fiction. of course it's not believable, right? you're concerned about a TV show rehearsal, like there's a talking dog, or you know, a thinking, human thinking like dog. of course it's not believable. you know, just enjoy the rag and stop questioning whether it can really happen. but I don't think that kind of response is particularly helpful. so instead I wanna talk. For a couple of minutes, about the relationship between realism and romance. and I'm using the term romance here with a capital R. so not romance isn't about love, but romance as in something larger than life. and so pulling us back a little bit, we're gonna do a teeny history of the novel here. so just think for a second, have you ever questioned why a novel is called a novel? the words suggest something new and in fact, the novel is something new. so today novels are so ubiquitous that it can be, hard for us to remember how recent they were in sort of the history of the written language. So novels only began in English, depends on the scholar you ask, but between 1600 and 1800. and so one question that you might ask, and maybe this is one for the chat, it's like a little. Quiz question. What what do you think people read for pleasure, fun before there were novels.
2:Uhhuh got lot, lots of
3:uhhuh, lot of Bible.
1:Yeah. Uhhuh. Exactly. Lots of Bible. Yeah. And that's right. so lots of religious text, Bibles, sermons, tracks. somebody put poetry in That's right. Plays, yes. Going to see plays. Certainly that was, something, absolutely. but the one that maybe hasn't come up yet. That is very relevant to this story is epics. So like thinking about epic poetry or, epics as a form of narrative. So epics are romantic capital are, so we're following characters who are almost like types in these larger than life plots as they're jumping from one big adventure to the next. so think about something like classic the Odyssey or the Iliad, but more familiar probably to most people, star Wars is an epic, right? nobody's watching Star Wars and being like, how do those characters have such good teeth? They never brush their teeth, right? we don't expect the job of the huts like brushing's teeth in between scenes, right? that would be silly. We're jumping from one big event to the next. That's what defines like in the epic form, the romance. So the novel when it entered the scene in like in the English language in 16 to 18 hundreds. We're starting to introduce something that, scholars call formal realism. so novels are new in representing characters' everyday sensory experiences. We're on a 24 hour time clock now. Characters have last names. we're by the mid 18 hundreds. We have characters who have interior lives that we're following. all of this is as opposed to that romance jumping from one big event to the next is realist. this everyday sensory experiences. so when you're reading stories, when we're reading stories, one of the things we can pay attention to is the balance or the jump back and forth between realism and romance, right? so think about something like Harry Potter. When are you at having big event, larger than life events? Romance. And when are you following, some very angsty preteens with their like. Circle, Dr. You know, peer drama realism, right? that those tensions between those are, a source of entertainment. There's a sense source often of humor to, we bring different expectations to each plot line, depending on which of those two buckets we're putting it in, realism versus romance. So to tie this back around to lessons in chemistry, one of the cool and challenging things about lessons in chemistry as a text is that it mixes realism and romance. so in general, this is a realist text. We're following a character in their everydayness. We can imagine them in inhabiting the 24 hour time clock, but. We get larger than life events thrown in. so destroying a kitchen to make a lab, a dog that speaks in hu full human sentences. somebody who is randomly discovered because she's pursuing, her daughter's lunch and then becomes a TV star, right? Like those kinds of larger than life things, then we're in the bucket of romance. so for me, I don't mind as much that's, I don't have as many questions about believability, because I'm like, oh, that's just doing something different. We're in the romance bucket now.
2:yeah. Grace, do you wanna grab the second one?
3:Sure. I was just looking through the chat and it looked like a lot of the unbelievability came from the humor and which was enjoyable for a lot of people, it seemed That's an interesting thing to consider as well. is there a benefit from having a believability in, like how the readers gonna consume.
1:Yeah. Good, good. we can talk about humor, and then maybe we can come back to thinking, thinking a little bit more. I do wanna talk about the engine when it comes to believability. but let's talk about humor a bit because I do see a lot of folks in the chat who are mentioning humor as something that they like and that's amazing. the, I'm also seeing a couple comments, people who have interest in the ending. So yeah. We'll get to the ending in a second. But, thinking about humor, yeah. To me, this is one of the joys of this text, is that, the, we can have something that is such a serious topic, right? Thinking about like sexism and misogyny in the workplace. not at all a light topic, and yet there's this, whimsy to it, right? Like this, one of the reviewers I remember calling an utter delight, right? And usually I don't associate the words utter delight with. Sexism in the workplace, right? so how do these two things, how do they square together? And I think that's part of the, sort of masterclass of the text. I think usually when people are asked, what do you like about a book? Our first instincts are the plot and the characters. And certainly I'm seeing in the chat, that Elizabeth Zat has a lot of fans out there. Me too. but I think I would argue that it's the narrative voice that often makes or breaks your relationship with a text. And certainly for me, that was true here. to just tease out a couple of details about that narrative voice to together as a group. this is going to flashbacks to high school English third person omniscient narration. so that means we have an, a narrator who's talking about characters with he, she, they, it's not an I narrator, omniscient. That means that they can see into all characters thoughts and feelings. Their perspective isn't limited to just what one character knows. that does not mean that omni mission does not mean a narrator has to show us equally every character's perspective. They can be selective and that's a lot of times where the drama comes from. but they can show us, parts of each. And a great example, I saw a lot of fans of six 30, six 30 is a great example of yeah, we're inside of different characters had been Elizabeth, It's a, a side note to that the narrator's not the author and those two things shouldn't be conflated. so we can talk about what, like the text is saying, what the narrator's saying. We don't know necessarily that's what the author believes. so in this text we have a narrator who has a very different voice than Elizabeth. and I thought we could look at a passage together. Lemme see if I can, let's see. I know I can share my screen. Let me bring it up.
2:so that you can follow along. Okay, are folks looking at my screen now?
1:Okay, good. oh, here, I, I brought in a picture of the students. There's the students in the class. hooray. Our class. But, here's the, an example. These are the very opening lines of texts. always important to pay attention to. What are the opening lines'cause it does so much work for our relationship to the whole book. this passage reads back in 1961 when women wore shirt dresses and joined garden clubs and drove legions of children around and seatbelt list cars. Without giving it a second thought back before anyone even knew there'd be a sixties movement, much one much less, one that its participants would spend the next 60 years chronically, back when the big wars were over and the Secret Wars had just begun. And people were starting to think fresh and believe everything was possible. The 30-year-old mother of Madeline Zott rose before dawn every morning and felt certain of just one thing. Her life was over. Despite that certainty, she made her way to the lab to pack her daughter's lunch. I'd love to see in the, chat, like how would you describe, share some observations. What are you noticing about this passage? or about the tone of this passage?
3:I can say while people are responding, the last sentence is just so strong for life was over. It's just so dramatic. Sometimes I feel like that it's final season right now for Susan Notre Dame, so I'm like, oh, I have a final, I'm just not gonna make it through. And so I just can relate to her so much in that over dramatization of just but then it goes back to normal. Like it's just a part of the humor.
1:Yeah. Good, good. Yeah. Good. And I see people in the chat that are backing you up there. The, I think the, I'm seeing people, Anne-Marie put rye in. that's a word that stands out to me. the, I'm looking like dramatic and humorous. mix of light and heavy. Good. funny, witty. Yes. Good. So the subject matter, is something, it's different than the voice entirely, right? I love the line. back before anyone knew, there'd even be a sixties movement, much less one than its participants would spend the next 60 years chronically. Like it's making fun a little bit, right? it's not in a mean way, not in a critical way, but just in sort of an appreciation of human's way. and we see that throughout this text. I'll stop sharing my screen so that you're seeing me again. We see that this throughout the text, right? That there's, A narrator who has a warm, ironic distance from things. again, ra I think is a good word there. and that is different than Elizabeth. so I'm struck by how many times during the text Elizabeth says of herself, I'm always serious. Or they say, you know, she didn't joke, she didn't smile. The producers are asking her to smile and she says, I'm not gonna do. Elizabeth should not be confused with the narrator. and part of the reason I think that this text speaks to so many of us are so appealing to us is'cause we have this like witty, rye warm narrator who's speaking alongside than Elizabeth, who provides that pricklier, version of what it means to be a woman in the world. the contrast between them I think is why this book works. we might wanna talk about the TV show more in a little bit, but I think this is one of the oversights in the TV show, that we don't have this narrator. And so they have to then the, they've chosen to soften Elizabeth to make her a little bit warmer, a little bit funnier. And I think we lose what makes Elizabeth so distinctive because we can't conflate those two roles. We need those two to be inta position to each other. so yeah, I love the, the narrative voice, big fan. I'll stop there.
3:I feel kind of jumping to next question related to juxtaposition Throughout the book, we had a huge focus on Elizabeth Zo. Then at the ending we had a rich, long lost relative show up at the Hastings fires, all the supposedly bad people and promises to give Elizabeth this unlimited funding and ultimate freedom to pursue her own research. It goes back to Unbelievability, but is this a satisfying ending?
1:Yeah. Good, good. I'm, yeah, I'm curious in the chat, I saw a few people already commented on the ending, grace, thanks for then she, asking this, I think the ending, like when it, I said in general, I didn't have as critiques about believability, but there's one exception to that rule. and that is what I call the mysterious benefactor plot. my husband and I, the first time I read this, I, or I listened to it as an audiobook when it first came out with my husband on a road trip. He's a chemist. I'm a literary 19th century literary scholar, so we both had our bones to pick. for those who wanna know, he was concerned because he's no chemist would actually call things like sodium chloride. We would just be annoyed with that person. Why are they trying to make her seem smart by naming chemicals, by their like, chemistry name? Fair point. my concern as I was reading, so I was really loving it. and then when we got to the end, I was like, I feel like I'm reading something or listening to something out of the 19th century. Like I feel like I'm reading a Charles Dickens novel. and like that sense of this as Dickensian, like a characteristic of, Charles Dickens just stuck with me. and so I decided as I was prepping for the force to try to kind of follow up on this thread a little bit more. and I don't know if any of you have read Charles Dickens at some point. but, I, I asked generative ai, if any of you have questions about generative AI and how we used it in this course. I asked generative AI to, generate for me a list of 10 of the most common plot tropes within Charles Dickens fiction. and I'm gonna bring that list up on the screen here so that you can see it. let's see, and I'll read it too in case people are listening to this podcast later. lemme see. Good. Okay. Tap 10 Pot tropes in Charles Dickens fiction. One, the orphaned or abandoned protagonist. Two, A rags to riches transformation, three hidden or mistaken identities, characters whose true identities are concealed and then revealed in dramatic plot twists. Secondary characters. So memorable, supporting characters with unique names like Mrs. Gamp and exaggerated traits. five. Institutional critique pointed criticism of social institutions including religious institutions. Coincidental connections, seemingly random characters turn out to be connected in complex ways. Redemption, narrators, narratives, fog and weather as metaphor. Rowing out on the early morning anyone. Class divides and social commentary. And then last but not least, Victorian sentimentality emotional scenes designed to evoke strong feelings. so in class we went through and we identified and, some people are guessing in the chat. We indeed found all 10 of these Dickensian plot troves present within this mysterious benefactor plot line, in the novel. Now, what do we do about that? my first instinct was to complain. To be like, this is a realist story. Why do we, when we need to resolve it at the end, turn to this larger than life. kind of over the top 19th century cliche to go about it. we don't need the realm of abandoned orphans and hidden identities in order to have this be meaningful. but I shared this in class and this is an example of why teaching is so amazing because students help me change my mind all the time. And that's learning. I shared this in class and some students in there, as they were kind of debriefing the class said things basically oh, I thought it was good, and now I realize it's stupid. You know, like they didn't say the but that gist it. Oh no, I've done exactly the opposite of what I wanna do. I don't on things. Perhaps I'm just a contrarian, but like through conversations with students as they were moving towards more critical, based on my comments, I was moving towards more generous based on theirs. they had such interesting and important things that were helpful for my thinking, so I'm gonna share what they were, the kind of the way they helped redeem this ending for me. and that is said, this book, as we were just talking about with the narrator, it mixes whimsy and serious all the time. And in fact, that's why this works. this is why so many people are drawn to this and it's become a bestseller. and the ending continues that like we get that happy ending that realism might not permit. if we can't, if we're picturing like a realistic world in which Elizabeth sat would get that happy ending, that's hard. And I think any attempt to go that route, Bonnie Garma would've run into folks who were like, that's not realistic. It wouldn't have actually happened. But if a happy ending can't play out here, where can it, I think there's something so cathartic about watching justice be served. Like I think about that quote about the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice, right? that want for justice to be served, in such a clear cut way. and so that's one reason, or one way that I think that this romantic, mysterious benefactor plot line actually does help us in the end. the second. And it would take someone with a lot of money and power to overturn the systems that are in place at Hastings. and I, and the other thing I would say is that, like the book seemed very aware, self-aware of what it was doing. and the reason that I originally, I was like, is the book aware? is it, is Monte Garma thinking about Dickens? you know,'cause it seems so obvious to me. but the way that she had MAD's Family Tree talk about a, Fairy godmother, right? Like that exact language of a fairy godmother comes in. It's okay, she knows we're in the realm of larger than life of once upon a time when we get to this particular plot line. so that helped me. yeah, I have come around. I also, I just, I feel like the line, oh, I didn't, like the ending is so cliche that I just don't even like to go there. yeah, landing the plane for a book is so hard, right? Because if it's a happy ending, people will critique you as too neat. And if it's a sad ending, people will be like, do you want a sad ending? How depressing. And if it's ambiguous, people are like, oh, you should have tied all the ends together. You left it too open-ended. I compliments, I think, I've been won over.
3:I wanna shout out a comment in the chat as well from Theresa. She said that I feel like the mysterious benefactor was affected because you were led to believe it was a man. And then at last it was a woman with her own hardship slash history, which is another way of thinking about it as well.
1:That's lovely. Good. Yeah, absolutely. That does absolutely add to it. cool.
3:Yeah. Kind of relating to like thoughtfulness or this is switching to like more positive thinking about it, finding the positive light. A professional reviewer said that the book was what you referred to Dr. Headland and Utter Delight, Ry and Vibrant. A lot of us in this class, as you just mentioned, did really enjoy the book. It seemed like in the Facebook forum too. They also enjoyed it. But this is a very heavy book with heavy topics about sexism in the workplace, not light at all. So how is it true that we can enjoy this book that's about something so heavy. Yeah. Good.
1:good. I think the, I mean what we already talked about, a little bit about the narrator and the role of the narrator in helping us be able to, like sort of turn that, lighter. Like sort of warm eye on serious topics. I think that's a big part of it. another thing that's coming to mind, is the way that, so there's a term that's used within narrative. and this might get a little in the weeds for a second, so if you're like, not here for it, just tune out for a sec. But, there's a technique called free indirect discourse. So if we're thinking about how people are narrating texts, direct discourse means that we're giving them, giving people direct quotes. You know, Chris said, I actually turned out to the mysterious benefactor plot line period, end quote. indirect discourse is reporting what someone says without quoting them. So Chris said that she liked the indirect dis, or she liked the mysterious benefactor plot line in the end. Free and direct discourse is when the third person narration blends with the character's thoughts. and so it strikes me that one of the ways that we're able to bring this, light and serious together is that the narrator is willing to let us inside different heads who are having different perspectives. And so think about something like six 30, right? what a role that character plays in, the ability for the thing, the book to be enjoyable, to feel light at points without being dismissive of Elizabeth's very real pain that in some ways he's witnessing, right? and so our ability to align with different characters', thoughts and feelings in turn, I think is part of what lets us to have this back and forth between light and heavy that makes the book so successful.
3:Someone said in the chat that like the lightness makes life tolerable and that like we can follow like her lead in it even though she's going through these really difficult things that we can follow how she treats it within the book. That's great. Neat. Also, speaking to also heavy as well, religion is something that seemed to come up a bit less than this chat. I think this will open the doors though that the novel is, seems to be very critical of religion, at least from what we seem to talk about Dr. Headland within the class. So I'm curious, what do you think religion plays within the plot?
1:Yeah, good. I'm glad this is the one's coming up. it's, so my own research interest is about religion and literature. so I think about religion when I'm reading a lot. Certainly being at a Catholic university, I think I know that a lot of. Folks in our class, and I'm imagining, here on the event, also are really interested and curious about religion. so I would say like the, yes, religion has a, gets a bad rap in this text. so we could think about things like the Catholic Boys Home where Cat Kelvin grew up, that turns out to be like a scam. You could think about, like when Kelvin's mom gets pregnant and she's sent to this Catholic home that, takes the baby away from her Elizabeth's parents or religious frauds, right? Like scamming people for money. this, it's interesting'cause I'm like, this was another moment where I found myself thinking, I've read this before in the 19th century. so the 19th century like, religious fiction in the 19th century was very concerned with religious hypocrisy. so we might think of a, like maybe a most famous example, someone like Harry Beecher Stowe talking about in the context of slavery. How can you possibly call yourself a Christian and also enslave people, right? that's, it's such a good question. Such a live question. A legitimate question. but this also, so that was like a way that, critiques of religious hypocrisy were doing really important work in the 19th century, but it also showed up in a less good way in Protestant critiques of Catholicism. so by the end of the 19th century, there was something of a trope to have, like the cool Protestant minister who's like wrestling with doubts and isn't really sure if he totally believes in things anymore compared to this, like blindly allegiant or, and or hypo, critically conniving Catholics or like evangelical revivalists. do you see how that maps onto what we've seen here? So Wakely, the Protestant manager is a type I've seen as soon as he said to Matt, you know, I have a, my own secret. I was like. Let me guess. He doesn't believe in religion, right? Like he doesn't believe in God. that's a type. it was predictable to me. so it, the fact that Elizabeth's moral growth or her moral compass comes through this Protestant minister who's discarded organized religion for a focus on just like doing the right thing, being moral, while meanwhile all in pre primarily Catholic institutions are garbage. I'm not here for that. I think if I was had one critique of the book, it would be its treatment of religion. I'm all for critiques of religious hypocrisy, but I just think the way it showed up in this book was uncareful. that's my 2 cents on that. I think the, that, yeah, again, the contrast between quote true Christian virtue or values can that often like slants Protestant compared with an organized religious dogma that skews Catholic. It's just, it's a little bit cliche for me. didn't like that.
3:It's interesting. Jumping slightly away from the cliche. yeah, there's a comment from Ed that I wanna bring out. So he brings out, apart from the book of a quote, Elizabeth is giving to mad, for advice quote is remember that we don't believe in God, but we respect those who do. And Ed actually tied this to a quote from the past late Pope Francis, and it requests to an audience in New York. And his quote is that, if you follow God, please pray for me. And if not, please wish me well. So Ed connects this to, it doesn't matter your religious background. There's this type of good doing that we have to do for each other. And recognition that the audience you're speaking to may not all come from the same religious background.
1:Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. Thanks Ed. That's really helpful. love. It's why the chat? It's perfect. This is why we're here. People live event. Great. yeah, I just think, So I was so grateful to the ways that you all in the class too. grace brought in such helpful personal perspectives thinking about this.
3:I think one more personal perspective that's interesting from the chat is, Jane from our class shared that she had like a mixed family growing up. And so it's interesting about like how you learn to tolerate other beliefs, but maybe if you didn't have that, this book shows how you can interact with people who are from religious backgrounds, may not be religious yourself, and try to balance that, which I think is super important at Notre Dame, where we're Catholic, but not every student here is Catholic. So you have to interact with people from different religious backgrounds no matter what.
1:Totally. I'm seeing a question in the chat from Alicia. what would I have written differently? it's a good putting me my place, like writing hard, props to, finding garments for anything she's written. but would the, if the minister would've been Catholic, would that have resolved the issues with the tropes? I think in some ways it would have, that we would've seen then that like within the same denomination we have, it can look negative. It can be a source of hypocrisy, it can be a source of conniving, dogma. and it can then be a source of kind of moral guidance or truth. so I think that would've been a little more nuanced. I should, yeah. I think that thinking about like the history of Protestant and Catholicism in the United States, just very cognizant, of the ways that Protestantism has historically created a hierarchy where the Protestant faith is the rational one and that Catholicism is less than that. and then certainly evangelical like Revivalists as part of that too. so I think that would've upset the Trump a little bit. Yeah.
3:Kind of speaking to the fact that there were ministers, there's not just one character, it's not just Elizabeth. So in this book, there's other people that are involved. So I wanna talk about some other people that really were involved in the novel that I think the TV show might do a good job of highlighting, but it's easy to miss sometimes in the book. So I wanna talk about Miss Bros and yeah. So what do you think the added to the narrative, if you closely read it?
1:Good. Yeah, good. And if you, yeah, I can try to tie in about book versus TV show in the same kind of question. I think it's so great that we have a text that has multiple, multiple examples of strong female characters, but that aren't just all 100% likable and perfect, right? showing women in their complexity and three different complexities. Beautiful. so I think thinking about Fra Ms. FRAs and Harriet, and I'm gonna talk about the book first so I can talk about the TV show in a bit. I'm struck by like the theme of the importance of female friendship. so Ms. FRA started off seeing, I think my reading to seeing Elizabeth as competition, right? so she was jealous of the success, the attention, the relationship. one of the texts that we read in a different portion of the class, was a selection from Emily and Amelia NGO's burnout. and one of their arguments is that like in a patriarchal society, it's not just that we're seeing men policing women, we're also seeing women policing other women. and we might ask why would that be? You know, women all know what we're up against. You know, like we know how hard it is out here. Like certainly women should have each other's back. but she's arguing that or they're arguing that, There can be a sense of if I'm following the rules, you should have to too. And so they use the example of, like body shaming, and the way that women will body shame other women. It's like, why would that be? but well turns out like keeping a fit body is extremely demanding, right? It requires often restrictive eating, intense exercise, expensive care routines, right? so if another, a woman sees another woman who's disregarding those rules, then her instinct is not to be like, good for you, but rather get back in line. I'm try so hard. Why don't you understand what the rules are? I think it's a really compelling argument. I know it's one that I've thought about a lot since reading that. and yeah, I recommend that book has such an interesting section on the haze movement, healthy at every size. so that's a tangent, but the part that's relevant to this relationship is I saw that with the frasco relationship. Is that Brass saw that Elizabeth wasn't following the rules and that was a threat. or we all know how this is supposed to work. but once they kind of, they connected over their traumatic experience, like that allowed them then to help each other heal and witness for each other. so I think it's really important that Elizabeth's happy ending came in part through Ms. Fs witnessing on her behalf or like speaking for her. So I, that was really meaningful to me. in terms of Harriet, then, I think at least in the book version, Harriet provides like an example of characters needing each other. Like Elizabeth needed to have help with her parenting, right? Like she was, drowning, with the, having the role of both mother and, working full time and. She needed that village and she didn't know how to ask for it, and Harriet helped her ask for it. and it's like sometimes we all need people like that in our lives, right? so that was a really important role on the flip side. And Harriet needed help getting out of her abusive relationship, and Elizabeth helped give her the strength in order to do that. So it's like they both became stronger through each other. And to have that kind of mutual support is such a cool thing to see in literature. that final scene where Elizabeth quits the show, the TV show, and that she acknowledges her friend Harriet, that felt like such a big moment for Elizabeth to acknowledge a friendship that she was like learning from relying on. so that was beautiful. it was different in the TV show, so I don't know how many of you have watched the TV show, but Harriet's an entirely different character. she's still a neighbor, but she has a family. She's younger. she's black. She has her own, plot line, where she's pursuing. They're trying the, in the show, they're trying to put a freeway through her neighborhood. She's arguing against this, like she's a community activist or organizer. so I think we get a sense of the two characters as like parallel protagonists. and she's fighting her own fights. And this is something I really liked about the TV show in general. I thought the TV show, again, I missed the narrator. There are other parts I missed. Some of you mentioned six 30, you missed less, you wanted more six 30. But I think the Harriet plot line was a really smart one because how can you possibly write a story about the 1950s or sixties and not mention the civil rights movement? and so to have that, intersectional conversation about to be a woman, to be a black woman, and what kind of fights does that raise for you? yeah, I think the novel could have benefited from that. And it was cool to see the TV show tell that story or think about that.
3:I think the comments also echo that as well. shouting out Ava, she said that she didn't really miss, like FRAs within the book, but really liked in the TV show. It seems as like a general theme that they preferred the character revolution within the TV show. Compared Harriet to the novel as well for Harriet and for FRAs with developing a more positive relationship. There's a scene in the TV show where they're like laughing together and you get a little bit more friendship within the book, but you don't have that explicitly seen.
1:Yeah. Good. Yeah. Really appreciating comments in the chat.
3:Yeah. Good. Yeah. Would you recommend people watch the TV show after everything you just said?
1:If you have an Apple TV subscription, I would be like, sure, go for it. See what you like. It's interesting always to compare TV in books, but if you don't have already have, I wouldn't be like, get it for this kind of thing. I think read the book again.
3:Lane brought out that she was thinking a lot about like civil rights movement and its tee off to the second wave feminist movement. Soon the TV show brought in a whole other consideration of the movement. That's so great. Yeah. Thanks Lane. You're totally right. Relating to the TV show, STV is like a form of entertainment. So novel also is like a form of entertainment as well. But should we take these forms of entertainment seriously or is this just a social commentary that's speaking about, or is this something that actually matters?
1:Yeah. Good, good. Sorry, I'm just, I'm looking at those shadows of Ted Lasso in the chat. Love it. but yeah, this is a question that I got from, I think Theresa, I see that you're in the chat. so shout out to Theresa who is asking sort of the relationship between is this novel just entertainment or should we be taking it seriously? is it a social commentary? and that's I think, so central to. Almost the whole theme, one of the big themes of the course I was teaching and certainly relevant for this text, my answer to that question would be that, this may be more than you bargained for Theresa, but like the, that the novel has always been within the us the novel has always been a subversive form because it do both of these things at the same time, entertainment and social commentary. so for thinking about the novel, I gave you a little history earlier for thinking about the novel in the US context. novels weren't popular until the 18 hundreds, but even before they were popular, there were cultural authorities. religious authorities were part of that, who were like denouncing the novel as like a corrupting influence. and and this was especially in gendered terms, that women should be reading, like you said in the chat, like their bibles, you know, their tracks. Instead they're reading this fluffy trash. and so it was like, it was being criticized for not being serious enough, for just being entertainment light. often, again, sexual terms that were in class. And I brought in like a quotation about, you know, your wife starts reading novels, she leaves you for another man, you know, lure women away from their husbands, the novel. but at the same time, so one of the critiques there is that yeah, it's fluffy trash, it's not serious, it's sexual, whatever. at the same time, there's also a critique. So novels are being written not just for women, but by women. It was one of the few careers in the earlier us that like women could hold. So women were using that form in order to challenge status quos. not always directly, but to question the way things were, to give women ideas for how they could be different. and Thinking about those two things going together, it's just fluffy trash. And also it's challenging the status quo that cultural authorities have an investment in. those two things go hand in hand as part of what the novel does. And so if I'm thinking about lessons in chemistry, yes and right, both entertainment and serious social commentary. Yeah. And I've seen in the chat, Susan being like, the chick lit terminology good. It's, yeah. And there's the whole ThinkND, if any of you are, haven't followed the ThinkND Women's Work series, there's a whole episode on this. But it's worth thinking about where did we get this binary of trashy women's literature checklist, like dismissive language and that there's serious literature with social commentary. and that was something. In the mid, by the mid 18 hundreds, the novels kind of socially acceptable. At that point, men are like socially acceptable. You say, maybe I should get my skin in that game. and so men get in interested in it almost right away. Then there starts to be kind of a sense of people trying to define these men, trying to define like good literature from trash, popular trash. and that was being done in gender terms right from the start. and we still see that today then. Yeah. I'm looking at the time. We probably have time for one more grace. your call. Which one? What do you, where do you wanna go?
3:Let's go ahead and talk about Calvin. We have not brought him up. Yeah. So let's talk about this as a potential love story. Good. It's not somewhere I saw this going. Uhhuh. So a question is if Elizabeth is such a strong and independent woman, why does Calvin matter so much to the flaw?
1:Yeah. Good. Good. So I think, I, one, review that was helpful for my thinking on this, the Washington Post talked about this novel as, delivering quote several love stories. and I think that's right. so having to think about the relation, the romantic relationship with Kelvin as one love story among many, I think changes my own relationship to it. and I think too, thi checking our own impulse to think that if it's a love story, we should add the word just in front. It's just a love story. It's just a romantic comedy, whatever. that's our own. Getting back to the last question, that's our own sort of historically inherited biases, right? so thinking about what she got from that Kelvin relationship, right? They challenged each other. and one of the things, oh, to draw in one other text that we talked about in class. The, human giver syndrome. So this comes from philosopher Kate Mon, or maybe it's man, I'm sorry. I dunno how to pronounce that. But, she makes, has this philosophical framework in which people can be divided into. She says, you know, society expects that there's some folks who are human beings who exist in order to achieve to self-actualize. And then there's folks in the category of human givers and they exist in order to help the human beings achieve and self-actualize to give of themselves for that. And our society thinks about women as givers and men as beings. Now, of course, this is a philosophical framework, so she's not saying this is the way it is, which you say, in our society has constructs around these two kind of polls. So what's the problem with this? if givers take anything from themselves, self-care, trying to achieve a goal, that's selfish. Like they're supposed to be the givers, they're supposed to be helping the other people. I. And then flip side of that, that you know, men have the right to take whatever they want, including in the argument that, Kate MOD's making, you know, women's bodies like sex justification for sexual assault. so this kind of, what's interesting to me about this argument about the human giver syndrome in the context of lessons in chemistry is that like we recognize the way in which both Kelvin and Elizabeth are inhabiting the role of the being and the giver and are helping each other do that. And I think it's a really cool model of how that can work. not perfectly. They each have their heirs, but they're trying to work that out, what that can look like in a society that doesn't generally value that back and forth. yeah, that, that would be my take on the love story. and just one, I guess other note, one of the things, no, I'll end there because I don't wanna stick over very. Observant, very punctual,
3:Kiki, calling out like one chat had a really good point that she was nervous that the love story, something that was gonna hold back Elizabeth or hurt the storyline. She said it wasn't until she reflected further that she realized a love story doesn't have to diminish any of her accomplishments, and it may have been Kiki's own assumptions or biases that planted the thought in her head in the first place. Cool. Neat.
1:I wanna thank folks, grace, thank you first so much for, talking with me through this, co-hosting with me tonight. Kelsey and Grace Morrison, who are behind the scenes making the tech work great. and then last but not least, of course, to all of you, thank you for spending, your, you know, 80 of you spending your Wednesday evening. Thank you. Alongside talking about books. again, it's just such a gift to talk about texts and community. and this Divisive time to, to be able to just sit together with a text and think about what it's trying to teach us is so beautiful. and yeah, thank you for being here. If you have additional questions for me, you know, my email address is on the, Notre Dame. It's easy to find online, Notre Dame website. So happy to hear from you.
2:yeah. All right. Thanks everyone.