Rousseau's Wandering Mind
Philip Newman Lawton
9.1
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Both Montaigne and Rousseau were privileged to have the necessary time and solitude for writing, the former because he inherited his father’s house and fortune, the latter because he was often unemployed. Montaigne was settled, especially during the seven-year period when he wrote Essays. He suffered intensely from renal colic (another legacy from his father), and he was subject to motion sickness, which made coaches, litters, and boats intolerable. However, Montaigne rode horses with relative comfort—he said he could ride for eight or ten hours without dismounting—and, when he left his library, he had long conversations with himself on horseback. For his part, Rousseau occasionally accepted the loan of a horse (he said he was almost as pleased to be on a horse as on foot), but he preferred to walk. “The ambulatory life,” he said, “is the life I need.” He thought while walking, whether on one of his many long trips across the continent or on an afternoon hike wherever he happened to land. “Walking,” he writes, “has something that animates and enlivens my ideas; I can hardly think when I stay in place; my body has to be in motion to get my mind moving.” Click here to continue reading.
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Bodily Dissociation as a Female Coping Mechanism in The Shapeless Unease, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, and Girlhood
Claire Salinda
9.1
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In a patriarchal society, where the female body is viewed as both dangerous and desirable, women not listening to their bodies has become something of a coping strategy. This is often because bodies tell us something that we cannot or do not want to hear; to listen would be to jeopardize some version of safety, especially if the bodily desire is contradictory to expectations and norms. Each of the female first-person narrators in Samantha Harvey’ss’ The Shapeless Unease, Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, and Melissa Febos’ Girlhood experiences this tension between the mind and the body as she grapples with her version of safety at stake in her respective narrative. While all three narrators protect a different, personal definition of safety by muting their body’s physical realities, they share the instinct to prioritize thinking over feeling in each of their stories. In other words, throughout their narratives, they each wage their own war of mind versus body. This strategy of choosing the psychological over the somatic is a well-honed technique for these narrators: each is a writer and also a professor who has learned to stake her value, both publicly and privately, in her intellect. This professional and cultural dependency on their acumen helps to contextualize the apparent seemingly-reflexivity of the narrators’s choice to disassociate from their bodies and to reside instead within their thoughts. All three women have decided to write a kind of self-analysis about their somatic power struggle, which adds a meta quality to their accounts, too. Click here to continue reading.
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“Which sounds bad and maybe was”:
A Study of Narrative in Beth Nguyen’s “Apparent”
Hannah White
9.1
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In “Apparent,” which was reprinted in Best American Essays 2021, Beth Nguyen tells a specific story of a woman’s experience as a daughter with a distanced relationship with her mother, and her own experience as a mother herself. But Nguyen uses this personal story as a basis for telling a larger story about what it means to be a mother, which she concludes is about “help[ing] them leave” (162). What is most striking and exemplary about this particular essay is how Nguyen's narrative structure and conversational voice works so well to tell this messy and complicated story—one that she admits she once avoided telling because of its messiness. Click here to continue reading.
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