Reflective Reading and the Power of Narrative

Front matter

REFLECTIVE READING AND THE POWER OF NARRATIVE

PRODUCING THE READER

Karyn Sproles

Contents

Acknowledgements ix PART 1

Why we need stories and the stability of the subject 1

1 Quilted quotations and the pleasure of the text 3

PART 2 History as méconnaissance 75

5 Modernist biography and méconnaissance: The Bloomsbury Group’s Oedipal resolution 77 The English biographical tradition 78 viii Contents

Bloomsbury’s public and private spaces: Modernist biography as personal and political 88

Appendix: Biographical writing by members of the Bloomsbury Group (first and second generation) 100

6 The quilting point: Vita Sackville-West's secular Joan of Arc 105 Biographical research: a Sissinghurst journal 105 Cross-dressing for (imaginary) battle: Vita Sackville-West s fantasy of Joan of Arc 113

PART 3 Narrative instability 133

7 Reflective reading, faith, and transformation in Susan Howatch's Church of England novels 135 Transference of faith 135 Working-through to forgiveness: learning to read yourself 138 Reading aloud to God 142 Exorcising trauma 146

8 Walking contradiction: Johnny Cash and the instability of the subject 153 Reflective reading and the return of the Man in Black 153 Interventions: destabilizing the icon 159 Transformations: the middle of nowhere 162

9 Depicting the undepictable: The reflective analysis of Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? 169 Girls are horny too: why would this be confusing? 169 Dykes to Watch Out For: the self-conscious cartoonist 171 Quilting points: Bechdel and Woolf reproduce mothering 173 Are You My Mother? as self-analysis 178 Mise en abyme 184 Outlaw narrators: representing women’s desire 186

Afterword: A twisted wrench and a sunbonnet quilt 191

Index 193

Acknowledgements

Thanks to early readers Julia Galbus and Michael Kearns. Julia: the original title is still there, thanks to you. Michael: I owe you a great debt for encouraging me to keep telling the personal narratives that ultimately give shape to this book.

Thanks to my writing partner, Irene Lieiz; my research partner, Rich O’Brien; my journaling partner, Karen Flack; my Brief Daily Sessions writing group, including Chloe Hogg, Linh Hua, Irene Lietz, Maggie Rehm, Sara Poor, and especially (with oceans of how), Katie Hogan; my lunch partners Mary Alice Ross and Angela Yu.

A hundred thank yous to Marlene Kirshenbaum and Susan Facknitz for taking care of me.

My gratitude without limit goes to Susan Facknitz (for reading) and Jason Shaffer (for rereading), two dear friends who have more confidence in me than I have in myself.

Permission has been granted to reprint versions of previously published material:

“Cross-Dressing for (Imaginary Battle): Vita Sackville-West's Biography of Joan of Arc” [Title of revised essay/essay chapter] was originally published in a slightly different form in Biography, vol. 19, no. 2, 1996, as “Cross- Dressing for Imaginary Battle: Vita Sackville-West's Biography of Joan of Arc,” pp. 158-77.

“Reading, Faith, and the Analytic Process of the Starbridge Novels” in Scandalous Truths: Essays by and about Susan Howatch, Bruce Johnson and Charles A. Huttar, eds. Susquehanna UP, 2005. 100-121.

A final tribute goes to Max R. Sproles (1934-2015), who taught me to tell stories.

Part 1 Why we need stories and the stability of the subject

1 Quilted quotations and the pleasure of the text

While hunting through the stacks of a university library, I came upon the three-volume edition of Leslie Stephen’s Hours in a Library (1874-1879). While he is a relatively obscure Victorian man of letters today, Stephen (1832-1904) was well regarded in his day. His first wife was the daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray. His second was the mother of Virginia Woolf. When I opened the last volume to the table of contents, I immediately recognized it as the predecessor of Virginia Woolf's Common Reader. Just as she revised her father's template for life writing by transforming the Dictionary of National Biography into A Room of One's Own, so, too, is her father's own room, the library in which she had (unusually for that time) free rein, the model for her own transformation from the “daughter of [an] educated man” (to paraphrase Three Guineas) into a “common reader.” Father and daughter published essays of their personal responses to literature that mirror one another, even in the titles:

Table 1.1 Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf’s published essays

Leslie Stephen Virginia Woolf?

Charlotte Bronté Jane Austen

Charles Kingsley Lewis Carroll

Gray and His School Donne after Three Centuries Sterne Sterne

Country Books Gothic Romance

George Eliot Trials George Eliot Autobiography The Art of Biography Carlyle's Ethics Lockhart's Criticism

The State Trials The Narrow Bridge of Art Coleridge Sara Coleridge

DOI: 10.4324/9780429467370-2 This Chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

This uncanny family resemblance suggests the extent of Leslie Stephen's literary influence on his daughter. I have exaggerated it by selecting titles from among her essays, but nevertheless, their shared pleasure in reading is powerfully apparent. Woolf borrows from the shelves of her father’s own work on reading and pays her respects to Stephen with a direct reference to his work by entitling one of her own essays “Hours in a Library.” Her homage is more overt in the essay, “Leslie Stephen,” in which she writes:

Even today there may be parents who would doubt the wisdom of allowing a girl of fifteen the free run of a large and quite unexpurgated library. But my father allowed it....“Read what you like,” he said, and all his books...were to be had without asking. To read what one liked because one liked it, never to pretend to admire what one did not—that was his only lesson in the art of reading.

Woolf’s essay about her father is carefully composed for public consumption. More eulogy than memoir, it is full of the faint praise that in private tended toward bitter scorn. After censoring her own feelings about her father, the best she can do is to quote others:

the praise he would have valued most, for though he was an agnostic nobody believed more profoundly in the worth of human relationships, was [George] Meredith’s tribute after his death: “He was the one man to my knowledge worthy to have married your mother.”

Regardless of her ambivalence for her father, the link between them is clear. The titles of their essays reveal the passionate engagement with reading that led them both to spend hours in a library. This is the link—the quilting point*—that stitches together father and daughter: both were transformed by reading. They shared that safe space of the library where they spent hours listening to the whisper of pages.

The first volume of Stephen’s Hours in a Library begins with “Opinions of Authors,” six pages of quotations from writers attesting to the power of reading. They describe themselves as outsiders—protected from the noise and expectations of society. They pre-figure Woolf’s Outsider’s Society of Three Guineas, and just as in Woolf’s description, they represent a contradiction in terms—a collection of people gathered together to avoid contact with collections of people. Woolf surrounded herself by a safe community in the Bloomsbury Group, a collection of outsiders. To be sure, it is not company that Woolf’s outsiders and Stephen’s authors are avoiding, but judgment and the pressure to conform and support social institutions that perpetuate violence and oppression. Stephen’s authors note this tension between seeking solitude and craving company: “My neighbours think me often alone, and yet

Quilted quotations 5 at such time I am in company with more than five hundred [books]” (Laurence Sterne, quoted in Stephen, 1892, vol. 1: vii). Stephen also quotes Emerson: “In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes” (ibid.: vii). And Tennyson: “I will bury myself in my books and the devil may pipe to his own” (ibid.: xiii). Stephen, an eminent Victorian, denounced the hypocrisy of religion and state and reveled in the sublime of books and nature. Woolf, a good Modernist, followed in her father’s footsteps by reading and walking, even as she denounced him privately and all he stood for publicly. In her writing, she consistently challenges his practice, as the founding editor of the 63 volume Dictionary of National Biography, to create stable subjects who are held up as models of virtue.

If libraries are safe places for outsiders, then Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels are safe places for readers. Beginning with The Eyre Affair (2001), Fforde creates an entire series of metacognitive reading events.* Therein resides the pleasure of these texts. A variation on the popular British sub-genre, alternative history,” the “what if” question Fforde poses is: what if literature was the most important thing in society? This wonderfully affirming supposition is enough to make any English major’s heart skip a beat. In a world in which literature is the most important thing, the theft of the manuscript of Jane Eyre is a national emergency. The literature branch of the police and literary detective, Thursday Next, are called upon to solve the crime. The novel quickly moves from alternative history to fantasy cum literary satire in a mixture that is equal parts Alice in Wonderland and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, unrelenting bad puns included. The evil villain is Acheron Hades and Thursday’s love interest is Landen Parke-Laine, for example. The real joy for a reader like me begins in the next book in the series, Lost in a Good Book, when Thursday refines her ability to read herself into books:

I relaxed, took a deep breath, cleared my throat and read in a clear, strong and confident voice, expressive and expansive. I added pauses and inflections and raised the tone of my voice where the text required it. I read like I had never read before.

Like Alice, Thursday finds herself in a different world, and her wonderland is a library:

I was in a long, dark, wood-paneled corridor lined with bookshelves that reached from the richly carpeted floor to the vaulted ceiling...The library appeared endless; in both directions the corridor vanished into darkness with no definable end...[the books] felt warm to the touch, so I leaned closer and pressed my ear to the spines. I could hear a distant hum...a million sounds all happening together. And then, in a revelatory moment, the clouds slid back from my mind and a crystal-clear understanding of the very nature of books shone upon me. They weren’t just collections of words arranged neatly on a page to give the impression of reality—each of these volumes was reality. The similarity of these books to the copies I had read back home was no more than the similarity a photograph has to 1ts subject. These books were alive!

(ibid.: 175, emphasis original)

Thursday has found herself in “BookWorld,” and it is immediately recognizable as a magical version of the British Library where there is literally “nothing outside the text” (Derrida, 1988: 136). Thursday is apprenticed to Miss Havisham, who trains Thursday to read herself in and out of books in order to right literary wrongs, attend regular meetings in Sense and Sensibility, and defend herself for the literary infraction that results in giving Jane Eyre a new, happy ending (it is Thursday, in Fforde's world, who calls out under Jane's window, prompting her to return to Rochester). It goes beyond pleasure into joy to see Miss Havisham, dusty wedding dress trailing, as a brilliant daredevil who appropriates cars, drives them too fast, and takes no prisoners when there are bargains to be had at a book sale. “Come along,” she cries to a befuddled Thursday, ““I know of a very good bun shop in Little Dorrit—and Um buying!” (Fforde, 2002: 214).

Fforde recreates the British Library as a parallel world into which Thursday can escape the dangers of the real world when her day job as a literary detective leads her into danger, which it constantly does. On one occasion in which Thursday's life is threatened by henchmen of the evil Goliath Corporation, Miss Havisham reads them into the washing label on Thursday's trousers and from there into the owner's manual of Thursday's own washing machine (ibid.: 344-345). When Thursday has to get lost for a while, she hides out in an unpublished manuscript for the entirety of the third book in the series, The Well of Lost Plots. Getting lost in a good book can be taken literally in this world. Clever as they are, Fforde's novels act out the common reading fantasy of entering the world of fiction.

Another great pleasure Fforde's characters model is re-reading and speculating about books. This is also one of the pleasures of literary criticism. Getting insight and interpretation is a bonus. As Erica Hateley observes:

Thursday recounts the plot of Jane Eyre to Bowden [another literary detective], but of course, as every retelling is necessarily interpretive, certain “assumptions” about the novel, masked as conversational commentary by both Bowden and Thursday, are effectively passed off as neutral recounting where they actually represent heavily loaded assumptions about both Jane Eyre and Charlotte Bronte.

Thursday retells, and therefore interprets Jane Eyre to Bowden, so not only is literature enjoyed in this novel, its interpretation is valued and social. Reading

Quilted quotations 7

1s not isolated and marginalized but shared. Talking about literature is part of the creation of community.

Fforde prompts the reader to actively engage with the novels by liberally sprinkling them with puns and allusions the reader must decipher. Not only does this affirm the reader's sense of self-worth, but it also encourages the active, engaged reading that propels Thursday into the life of a book. The books force engagement by layering the bad puns on so thickly that the reader is always working to keep up. Like Thursday, characters throughout literature model the process of interpreting what they have read. In such moments, narratives teach us how to read them. This metacognitive process is the final (and oft omitted) step in a reflective reading experience. Fforde's Thursday Next novels are an entire series of metacognitive readings. Therein resides another pleasure of this text.

Thursday is her own alter-ego as the Jurisfiction detective and the real-world Clark Kent version of herself who is always late with the rent, behind in her paperwork, and walking her pet dodo, Pickwick. Thursday is a resourceful, resilient, creative problem solver, and consummate escape artist. She is an excellent example of a character who uses what Barbara Fredrickson calls “broaden-and-build” in response to difficult situations, and this is another reason the books feel so good to read. Fredrickson's “broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions” elaborates on the function of the safe place that I see paralleled in reading and the psychoanalytic session. According to Fredrickson, “the positive emotions of joy, interest, contentment, pride, and love appear to have a complementary effect: They broaden people's momentary thought-action repertoires, widening the array of the thoughts and actions that come to mind” (Fredrickson, 2001: 220). Thus, in comparison to the limited focus of the fight-or-flight response to fear, feeling safe allows us to creatively expand our responses. Fredrickson's work suggests that a deliberate attempt to find (or recreate) feelings of safety during moments of stress can lead to greater resiliency, better decisions, and an overall increase in a sense of wellbeing. Expanding the realm of responses allows for the possibility of reflection and creative alternatives such as reading oneself into a washing label when no books are available to offer refuge. Reading itself, in my experience, provides a site for expanding positive emotions and engaging in alternatives to repression. Book World is the place I have been looking for. If I were there, I just might be able to invite the returned repressed into a conversation I am having with the book I am reading rather than slamming it shut and diving under the quilt for cover.

The question I want to answer about the Thursday Next novels is: why do I get so much pleasure from reading these books? If, as I will suggest, narratives allow us to re-imagine ourselves, then the Thursday Next novels allow me a fantasy that values all of the books I have read and all of the time I have spent reading. Fforde affirms my sense of myself as a reader of literature, and BookWorld, where all writing is equally valued, gives me permission to enjoy the sophomoric pun as much as the esoteric allusion. Fforde's novels value my knowledge of literature and offer me the pleasure of recognizing myself— as I am a creation of what I have read—in the text.

What makes the reading experience I have described here different from the narcissistic identification of recognizing oneself in a character in a story? There is pleasure in the identification as well, but it is limited to the personal affirmation of seeing oneself reflected in the mirror of the text. The narrative becomes a shiny surface that shows us a familiar image we already know. When we project ourselves onto a character, we are delighted by the approving smile we reflect back to ourselves. I feel energized and affirmed by Lost in a Good Book just as 1 do when wandering the stacks of a library. But my identification is not with Thursday Next, who, wonderful as she is, is more of a superhero than a fully developed character. The transference I experience is with literature, not an individual character. I do not find myself mirrored in these novels; instead, I find recognition. BookWorld is my ideal ego, the place from which I can imagine looking upon myself with approval. From this safe position I can even accept the gaps in the text of my sense of self. This is a good thing, because even as BookWorld approves of me, it also challenges me.

Fforde’ Book World is safe, but it is in no way stable. BookWorld requires a high level of comfort with ambiguity. Characters jump from book to book, and sometimes words and sentences simply fall apart. Thursday’s first assignment for Jurisfiction is to hunt a “grammasite” in the back-story of Great Expectations. As Miss Havisham explains, “grammasites” are a ““parasitic life form that live inside books and feed on grammar...They seep through the covers using a process called oozemosis...I’ve seen grammasites strip a library to nothing but indigestible nouns and page numbers. Ever read Sterne’s Tristram Shandy?” (Fforde, 2002: 312-313). The combination of silliness and erudition requires both knowledge of Tristram Shandy’s quirkiness and a willingness to make fun of it that demands a certain intellectual flexibility. A knowledge of literature is expected, but one is never allowed to take it seriously. For me, these novels offer the pleasure of jouissance, which is not just intellectual orgasmic coming, but also a sort of un-coming or undoing, when one loses oneself. BookWorld doesn’t shore up my ego but rather expands my willingness to engage in the challenges of creating a text. Reading reflectively, I recreate myself much as I do when I interpret my dreams.

We glimpse traces of the unconscious in dreams and fantasies. The repressed returns like the twist of a wrench, a knot in the throat, a word misread. Because he was not a very good hypnotist, Freud tried to get his patients to relax their censorship of associations by making them sleepy. Having them lie on a couch in a darkened room without interruptions, he teased out the unconscious, searching for the quilting point that made sense of free associations and pulled the thread of repression into light. I often reproduce this state of sleepy safety when I read, and the transferential relationships that emerge in the reading experience play the role of the analyst in calling back the repressed. If we can allow the unconscious to do its work, we can be transformed.

Quilted quotations 9

By remembering the role of the unconscious in the reading process we see how the production of the text is also a production of a reader—both are transformed by the reading process. As texts are by definition intertextual, so too are readers. Made up of a collage of quotations that play within us, we are what we read.

Linking together examples that don't cohere in traditional literary categories, this is not a book on the British novel or life writing, even though there are examples taken from each of those genres, among others. It is a book that seeks moments of transformation, as Woolf and Stephen and Fforde do, when examples come together to suggest a pattern larger than that of their original context. It is the pattern of the reading experience, unbounded by constructed categories, with ragged borders stitched and embroidered and frayed.

The readers I consider throughout this book grapple with the pain that occurs when reading helps them recognize the fantasy they have constructed in order to make their lives feel safe and stable. What is on the other side of this crushing realization? Often it is love and laughter and peace. But not always. These examples have in common the explicit attempt to demonstrate and support the transformation of readers by representing the process of transformation and the pain and pleasure of facing its consequences.

Here is one final transformation: During a time of many changes, I was not sleeping well. It is an old complaint. Awakening regularly at 2:30 each morning I played what I call “the sleeping game” to no avail. A version of free association, in “the sleeping game” I trace the thoughts and worries going through my mind and look for the link. In this case, all the things I thought about made me feel out of control. That was because they were all things I could not control. They were all things that made me feel isolated; because at that time I was isolated. They were all things that were unfamiliar; because they were all unfamiliar. After many weeks of this, I awoke at 2:30 and in complete irritation said to myself, “Why do you keep trying to think of things that keep you awake?” And with that angry question I fell asleep.

“You had a paradigm shift,” my colleague Jessica Friedrichs said, when I told her this story the next day. Those are hard to come by, but that is exactly what I have written this book to find. Sometimes, rather than piecing together the fragments into a quilt of unified meaning, it is more productive to fling the fabric across the room and go back to sleep. In graduate school we had a cat, Buster, who habitually knocked a copy of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure onto the floor. Art Efron, my dissertation director, said the cat knew which books were the painful ones. (Buster also hacked up a hair ball onto every dissertation that entered our house.) I, myself, once threw George Eliot’s Middlemarch against the bedroom wall. Fortunately it was a paperback copy. I can still remember the release of anger that came with that act, caused by my outrage at Dorothea for marrying that awful Casaubon. What P'm getting at is that transformations happen in any number of different ways— whether one is reading or not. They are not always pleasant, and they are easy to dismiss. I am suggesting that they are also of vital importance, and that we should seek them out by engaging in a reading practice that recognizes and encourages them.

I brought my favorite quilt into my office with the intention of hanging it on the wall behind my desk. My grandmother made the quilt in the sunbonnet pattern from the dresses my mother wore as a little girl. Squares of white and yellow cotton alternate. There is a blue border. In each of the white squares a little girl in a blue sunbonnet wears a different one of my mother's dresses— dresses my grandmother had also made. My grandmother's even stitches run in diamonds across each quilt square. My grandfather worked the night shift in the mines so that he could farm by day. My grandmother couldn't sleep until he got home. Awake with missing him and worry about the dangers of mining, she sewed all night until he returned at dawn, covered in coal dust, to sleep for a few hours before milking time. This quilt covered my bed when I was a little girl. When I was home sick I made up stories about the girls in their beautiful gingham and calico dresses. My stories lulled me back to sleep.

The office was so over-air conditioned that I never hung the quilt. I used it to stay warm as I typed, threading my way through this book. When my daughter, Sadie, came in after school, I wrapped her up in the quilt while she did her homework. Since my book about Virginia Woolf ended with a craft project (“A Mobile Biography”), it seemed appropriate to conclude this book in the same way. Sadie, wrapped in my grandmother's quilt, pointed out that this book is already a quilt of quotations. And so it is. Thus, I quilt together fragments of quotations to make a warm space to crawl into —with a good book—for a good night's sleep.

1 For my discussion of this see Sproles, 2006 (123-125).

2 Leslie Stephen's titles replicate the table of contents for Hours in a Library (vol. 3), but I have cheated fairly elaborately by selecting among all of Woolf’s essays those that match up best with Stephen’s titles. I think this makes the point beautifully as well as being in keeping with this chapter’s patchwork theme.

3 This is Lacan’s elaboration on the associations that Freud follows in interpreting dreams.

4 There are seven novels in the series: The Eyre Affair (2001), Lost in a Good Book (2002), The Well of Lost Plots (2004), Something Rotten (2004), Thursday Next: First Among Sequels (2007), One of Our Thursdays is Missing (2011), and The Woman Who Died a Lot (2012).

5 A popular example of this genre is Robert Harris’ Fatherland, which takes as its enabling alternative that the Nazis have won the Second World War. For a more thorough discussion of alternative history see Alkon (1994), Hellekson (2000), and Schmunk (2011).

Alkon, Paul. “Alternate History and Post Modern Temporality.” Time, Literature and the Arts: Essays in Honor of Samuel L. Macey. Thomas Cleary, ed. U of Victoria P, 1994. 65-85.

Quilted quotations 11

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book. Penguin, 2002.

Fredrickson, Barbara. “The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology: The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions.” American Psychologist 56:3 (March 2001): 218-226.

Hateley, Erica. “The End of The Eyre Affair: Jane Eyre, Parody, and Popular Culture.” The Journal of Popular Culture. 38:6 (2005): 1022-1036.

Hellekson, Karen. “Toward a Taxonomy of the Alternate History Genre.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy. 41:3 (Fall 2000): 248-256.

Schmunk, Robert. “Uchronia: The Alternate History List.” 1991-2011. 27 July 2011. www.uchronia.net/intor.html.

Sproles, Karyn Z. Desiring Women: The Partnership of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville- West. U of Toronto Press, 2006.

Stephen, Leslie. Hours in a Library. 3 vols. Smith, Elder & Co., 1892. 1: vii.

Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays. 4 vols. Harcourt, 1967.

Woolf, Virginia. “Leslie Stephen” (first published in The Captain's Deathbed, 1950), reprinted Collected Essays, vol. 4. Harcourt, 1967: 76-80.

2 Reflective reading

Beyond reader-response to the unconscious of reading

Disruptive epiphanies: why we need stories

I recently learned something surprising about how stories have influenced me, not just as an academic, but also in the unconscious assumptions that have guided my life choices. Like many of my stories, this one has a point. Bear with me.

I was attending a workshop on the Ice House Entrepreneurship Program conducted by Gary Schoeniger. During the workshop we learned about course materials for developing an “entrepreneurial mind-set” created by the entrepreneurial learning initiative (eli) in partnership with the Kauffman Foundation. Their goal is not to create millions of new start-ups but to encourage students to think critically, solve problems creatively, and have confidence in themselves. The book Gary wrote with Clifton Taulbert, Who Owns the Ice House? (Schoeniger and Taulbert, 2010) is the foundation of this work, and the additional course materials are rich and engaging, designed to provide a framework for active learning. Among them is a series of video interviews with successful, and often unlikely, entrepreneurs. In introducing these videos, Gary made the point that people need to hear other people’s stories in order to replace the ones that are holding them back. His example is the story of Ryan Blair, whose father always said, “It takes money to make money.” Ryan believed that. His family had no money, so he assumed that he never had a chance. He turned to petty crime until he ran into someone with a different story, an entrepreneur who showed him that investors will back a good idea. This new story changed Ryan’s life: he went on to be a successful entrepreneur whose story is among those included in the course materials.

Gary’s point is that we need to give our students new stories to help them escape the internalized narratives that keep them from learning and taking chances. If they cannot see themselves as successful, they will not succeed. This struck a chord with me. I have been working throughout my career to ensure access to education, and I am frustrated when students don’t take full advantage of that chance. Gary was helping me see why they might be unable to do that. Lately I have been struck by a pattern of students deciding to leave college because they are homesick. This reason doesn’t make a lot of sense to

DOI: 10.4324/9780429467370-3 This Chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

me. Frequently these students live nearby and often do not come from homes that were ideal in the first place. Why would they long to go back? “Homesick” seems to me to be code for a more complex struggle. I have long suspected that it is a struggle over the changes the unspoken assumptions of the college environment pressure them to make. They feel like they are being pulled away from their families and asked to become someone other than the person they think they are.