The Gentleman Scholar and Other Archetypes, Part 1

I’ve been looking around my apartment lately, at the furniture, at the books, and at my as-yet unrealized internal vision of the book furniture (oh, come on, tell me that you don’t envision bookcases all along your longest wall!). And I’ve come to the strange realization that I apparently have an internal self-image mirroring the British Gentleman Scholar. Now, this would be okay, I suppose, if, in fact, I were British and/or belonging to the upper class and/or male.

I’m not.

I realize that this is, potentially, a problem. Here I am: an American (liberal), middle class (and more bourgeois than I like to admit), female (feminist), well-traveled-antiquarian-English-professor-type. My deepest instinct tells me that the breadth of my experience, the width of my mind, the rigor of my training and the shear pain of my having spent the last fifteen (15) years trying to teach college students (who are, every year, worse at basic spelling) how to write, argue, and think critically—surely all this is much more important than extraneous identifiers such as nationality, class, or sex. Surely.

I guess it would depend on whom you ask and when you asked them. Andrew Lang, in his otherwise lovely little book The Library, says,

Almost all women are the inveterate foes, not of novels, of course, nor peerages and popular volumes of history, but of books worthy of the name. …[B]roadly speaking, women detest the books which the collector desires and admires. First, they don’t understand them; second, they are jealous of their mysterious charms; third, books cost money; and it really is a hard thing for a lady to see money expended on what seems a dingy old binding, or yellow paper scored with crabbed characters. (61)

Naturally, Lang does not spend any time considering that the very education that men got in his time (and women didn’t) might offer the key to the differing views of the value the two sexes placed upon money and its use, or books and their use or lack of use. We all can only speak from our worldviews. Lang (1844-1912) could not help being a man of his time. A Victorian like Lang naturally could not imagine that, within less than a century of his book’s publication in 1881, an entire rethinking of the relations between the sexes might occur.

Sometimes, when I am feeling optimistic in the extreme, I wonder what utopian wonders the next fifty or hundred years might bring. Might women start earning 90 cents to a man’s dollar, as opposed to the 76 cents we earn now? Might more marriages turn out like my brother’s? I was practically in the ether back in late June when I watched him starting to cook dinner while his wife sat tensely watching the opening of a Red Sox game. Dinner was quite good. The ballgame, while not great per se, taught me a lot about baseball and marriage in the 21st century: my brother tried (manfully?) to explain the offside rule (or something like that) while his wife kindly corrected his minor errors. I wanted to dance. The ballgame was—well, it was 21st century Red Sox, which is to say they actually had a chance of winning; whether they did or not I don’t recall. Eighty-six years of not winning the World Series has become trivial since they finally won again. Now that they have won twice, the whole thing is, as they say, “academic,” which tends to mean unimportant except in terms of statistical analysis.

And this brings me back to the idea of the scholar. When people talk about scholars, the topic of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake” frequently comes up. Now this topic could go two ways, although it rarely does. Usually, what people mean when they use this phrase is that somebody (probably a white male of the upper classes) is getting paid good money to think about thinking about thinking, which seems to the speakers like a waste of good money on someone who probably already has good money and can’t be bothered to do a real job. (Whereas I myself would only use this definition for “philosopher,” these speakers also include historians, linguists, anthropologists, sociologists and literary critics. I might have to reconsider about literary critics.) What is interesting here is that the phrase “art for art’s sake” gets a little more sympathy from such speakers. At first glance that seems odd, because presumably the same elite who decide what constitutes Knowledge are also the elite who decide what constitutes Art. Still, within a given society, pretty much everybody agrees on what constitutes Money, and artists are assumed not to come from money, have money, earn money, or know what to do with money, unless buying more Burnt Sienna counts. So there’s less resentment involved.

But there is another sort of idea that comes along with “knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” Not too surprisingly, I have mostly heard this idea expounded by individuals who have doctoral degrees in the humanities and jobs in apparently unrelated fields, and from those who were in doctoral programs in humanities until they realized that jobs would not be forthcoming if they actually finished the program and thus sidled out with a Masters degree and a really good sense of how to do research. Both groups say the same thing, and what they say reminds me of what I was told in high school about the Necessity to Learn Algebra: “It Will Teach You How to Think.”

Now as a general rule, I would rather be taught how to think than what to think, and I have experienced both states of learning in different ways, having spent eleven years in Catholic school (where my siblings and I stood a much smaller chance of getting beat up than we did in the public schools of our town in that time). Since I began teaching college freshman composition in 1993, I have seen an astronomical need for the teaching of critical thinking; what I learned in junior high and high school, students might learn in college if they are lucky and/or possessed of enough curiosity; for many, these things are never taught or learned. Where socio-economic class fits into this equation, I’m not quite sure, since I’ve seen kids from struggling families excel out of shear cussedness (and I mean that in a good way). I came from a family that was, in terms of education, upper middle class, and in terms of economics, ranging from lower to upper middle class (and back again) back and forth over the years, as the national economy carved switchbacks in the national experience.

But here’s the thing: I lived on the corner of a block that, if we labeled the corners A, B, C, and D as they do in geometry classes, meant our house was at point A and the local library was at point B. From second grade on, I could borrow books about anything without ever having to even cross a street. And that’s power, regardless of social class or economics.

Lang, Andrew. The Library. The Art at Home Series. London: MacMillan, 1881.