35) La Symphonie Pastorale 36) My Ántonia

35) La Symphonie Pastorale by André Gide

Another book from my course on blindness and vision, this presents a very different perspective on blindness than Husson's Reflections. Most notably,  it is told from the pastor's point of view, so we do not get direct insight into Gertrude's mind as we do with Husson, instead we "see" blindness through the pastor's eyes, as he models Gertrude into his "blind ideal".  As with all texts exploring blindness, there are ethical implications to the fact that Gide (himself sighted) has chosen to use it in his plot. I cannot help thinking that much as the pastor manipulates Gertrude, Gide manipulates blindness in order to further his narrative. However, interestingly, the operation that restores Gertrude's sight is ultimately presented as something negative that should not have been taken for granted as having a positive effect on Gertude's life, thus undermining our preconceived notions about blindness and vision: blindness is not necessarily a bad thing, and those with fully functioning eyes  can be just as "blind" (I've put this in speech-marks as using blindness as a negative metaphor is not constructive) as those who cannot see. Indeed, this text presents a theme that has resonated to a greater or lesser extent with all of the texts that we've studied so far: it is not blind people that need to be cured, but society. 



36) My Ántonia by  Willa Cather

This is an intriguing novel  about growing up. Though it is part of my "The Girl in the Book" course, it is told through Jim Burden's eyes, and so we get very little interiority from Ántonia, or "Tony". Their relationship is quite ambiguous: Jim shows little interest in pursuing a romantic relationship with Ántonia  while growing up, and yet tells her children at the end that he loved her. This ambivalence could be interpreted as a representation of Cather's own feelings; now publicly acknowledged as a lesbian, some critics see Jim as representing Cather in the novel, and thus his strange relationship with Ántonia is a product of Cather's fear of stigmitisation. Whether or not this is the case, it is not something that I picked up on myself when reading the novel; I was more interested in the lacunae of the text, which led me to believe that Jim is an unreliable narrator, as he seems to omit some things, even to himself.