They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow
I don't have the time to do this justice, but better something short than nothing at all.
When I got back from Paris, I heard from a friend that one of my old Berkeley professors had passed away. Her name was Janet Adelman, and she was amazing. I took 45A with her, and spent a semester finding new literary love in strange places, from Chaucer to Spenser to -- wait for it -- Milton. Yes, this is the woman who first introduced me to Paradise Lost and started me off on something so much larger than her, or me, or probably even Milton himself.
She was fiery. She was old, and it wasn't like she was trying to hide it: she wore her white hair long, and dressed with an eclectic fashion only allowed to those who are conscious of their own age and milking it for all its worth (when I picture her now, she's wearing crazy-awesome robelike garments that no one in the universe should be allowed to pull off, and yet she does).
She was old but she showed you that didn't really mean much. She wasn't that quivering Victorian grandmother who blushed at the slightest sign of indecency. She was a dyed-in-the-wool feminist and considering dates and ages she was probably a part of the second-wave feminism of the 60s and 70s, and also part of the resurgence of psychoanalytic theory in English departments/studies at the time. She gave a powerful reading of Satan's sense of indebtedness to God that shifted into anger and the desire to destroy, all based on (vaguely feminist) psychoanalysis. And she made a powerful argument for Milton as a feminist (though I'm not entirely sure how much modern critics would agree). In fact, rather than being angry with these old works by men who wrote in a time when pretty much only men wrote, she took them and combed them through for signs of understanding of women and an attempt to fairly portray them. She might have been a feminist but she never got righteously angry about it, at least not in the classroom.
But it wasn't just in the classroom where she mattered. I still remember the first time I went to visit her in office hours. I wasn't really liking Chaucer and not quite sure what to say, but I walked in, sat down, and said something lame like, "So. Chaucer." To which she responded, "Oh, not him yet, I still don't know you!" When I came back from spring break after Rick broke up with me and went to her office hours again she asked me how break had gone and I mumbled something before starting in on Spenser, which was greatly preferable to a discussion of my own emotional unrest. And yet a month or so later it came up in our office hours discussion and she told me she'd thought that something was wrong back then, but that she knew I was dealing with it and that I could always come to her with problems.
She wrote me one of the letters of recommendation that got me here, studying abroad in London. The last time I saw her -- at least, the last time I really remember -- was when I walked by her office and picked up that letter. She hadn't sealed it yet when I arrived -- she wanted me to read it over first -- and though I don't remember exactly what it said now, I just remember that it reinforced my feeling that she really somehow understood. She was such a gift.
Janet Adelman is not a woman that I, or anyone, will easily forget. But me especially. She continues to make it into my fiction, lending sometimes her name and sometimes her appearance to a series of benevolent grandmotherly figures who nonetheless know when to shove their children out into the world and help them face it. She is the kind witch of my Printer's Tale who gives Noelle shelter and asks no questions until the time is right -- with her robes and her long white hair and her kind and deep brown eyes. She is a figure of power. And though I'm sad to know that she's gone, I'm full of a certainty that "gone" isn't really too final, and that somewhere out there she's arguing feminism with Milton (and winning).
When I got back from Paris, I heard from a friend that one of my old Berkeley professors had passed away. Her name was Janet Adelman, and she was amazing. I took 45A with her, and spent a semester finding new literary love in strange places, from Chaucer to Spenser to -- wait for it -- Milton. Yes, this is the woman who first introduced me to Paradise Lost and started me off on something so much larger than her, or me, or probably even Milton himself.
She was fiery. She was old, and it wasn't like she was trying to hide it: she wore her white hair long, and dressed with an eclectic fashion only allowed to those who are conscious of their own age and milking it for all its worth (when I picture her now, she's wearing crazy-awesome robelike garments that no one in the universe should be allowed to pull off, and yet she does).
She was old but she showed you that didn't really mean much. She wasn't that quivering Victorian grandmother who blushed at the slightest sign of indecency. She was a dyed-in-the-wool feminist and considering dates and ages she was probably a part of the second-wave feminism of the 60s and 70s, and also part of the resurgence of psychoanalytic theory in English departments/studies at the time. She gave a powerful reading of Satan's sense of indebtedness to God that shifted into anger and the desire to destroy, all based on (vaguely feminist) psychoanalysis. And she made a powerful argument for Milton as a feminist (though I'm not entirely sure how much modern critics would agree). In fact, rather than being angry with these old works by men who wrote in a time when pretty much only men wrote, she took them and combed them through for signs of understanding of women and an attempt to fairly portray them. She might have been a feminist but she never got righteously angry about it, at least not in the classroom.
But it wasn't just in the classroom where she mattered. I still remember the first time I went to visit her in office hours. I wasn't really liking Chaucer and not quite sure what to say, but I walked in, sat down, and said something lame like, "So. Chaucer." To which she responded, "Oh, not him yet, I still don't know you!" When I came back from spring break after Rick broke up with me and went to her office hours again she asked me how break had gone and I mumbled something before starting in on Spenser, which was greatly preferable to a discussion of my own emotional unrest. And yet a month or so later it came up in our office hours discussion and she told me she'd thought that something was wrong back then, but that she knew I was dealing with it and that I could always come to her with problems.
She wrote me one of the letters of recommendation that got me here, studying abroad in London. The last time I saw her -- at least, the last time I really remember -- was when I walked by her office and picked up that letter. She hadn't sealed it yet when I arrived -- she wanted me to read it over first -- and though I don't remember exactly what it said now, I just remember that it reinforced my feeling that she really somehow understood. She was such a gift.
Janet Adelman is not a woman that I, or anyone, will easily forget. But me especially. She continues to make it into my fiction, lending sometimes her name and sometimes her appearance to a series of benevolent grandmotherly figures who nonetheless know when to shove their children out into the world and help them face it. She is the kind witch of my Printer's Tale who gives Noelle shelter and asks no questions until the time is right -- with her robes and her long white hair and her kind and deep brown eyes. She is a figure of power. And though I'm sad to know that she's gone, I'm full of a certainty that "gone" isn't really too final, and that somewhere out there she's arguing feminism with Milton (and winning).