In my school experience, teachers often assumed the “missionary” role, which Arlene Wilner describes, or the authoritarian stance in which a lecturer controls the keys to knowledge and interpretation.  Sheridan Blau demonstrates how this teacher-centered approach tends to hold students in thrall and may confuse and disempower them.  I guess I’m lucky I survived my headlong, unqualified plunge into Ernest Hemingway, which a zealous high school teacher unwittingly encouraged. 

My English teacher was a bachelor, intense, short in height, and thoroughly sincere, who paced the floor in front of our desks and monopolized the classroom.  He venerated everything Hemingway had ever written, describing the master’s narratives as the keenest canvases imaginable of life, love, and passion.  At age sixteen, I needed little convincing.  Just as Wilner depicts, I was a naïve reader who imbibed Hemingway’s characters and stories instinctively and wholeheartedly, without rational reflection.  In my mind, it was clear that I was Lady Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises.  After I saw the film version of the novel, I cut my hair (dark brown then) to look like Eva Gardner.  Then I envisioned myself as a female personification of Robert Jordan, hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls, embedded with the partisans in the mountains of Spain.  In a shop in Georgetown, I bought rope-soled sandals that proved uncomfortable to walk in.  I traveled to Spain and got into a lot of trouble. 

“Hemingway is very dangerous,” a George Mason University professor recently remarked in an MFA class.  “If you don’t understand that his writing is artifice, you might try to live his fiction.”  Without providing details, I told him that this had happened to me. 

Only decades later, have I begun to approach literature with some critical distance.  Previously I lacked the tools and insight; in school we listened wholesale to the teacher’s opinion.  The Wilner article particularly resonates because of the clarity and candor with which she depicts her efforts to fathom her students’ cultural perceptions and levels of maturity.  Sometimes she fails to engage them then she maneuvers imaginatively to help a diverse class relate to new ways of textual interpretation, enhancing their self-awareness and modes of thinking.  It is an art to be a teacher who guides students to develop their own realistic powers of analysis, and it may save them.