Spring break, that glorious marathon of paper grading and housework that should’ve been done long ago, has come and gone, and left me with my second case of strep throat this year.  Strep throat, I must admit, is definitely Not A Good Time.  I’ve spent much of the break eating Popsicles and coating every surface of my household in some kind of anti-bacterial spray, scrub, and/or foam.  I’ve also begun a stint as sitter for Pinky, the mustachio’d kitty (photographs provided, in part, for those who keep finding my blog by Googling “cat with mustache” — which, by the way, is awesome):

Pinky with Unicorn and Ho-Ho Frog

This means that I’ve been watching scene after scene like this one:

Gertrude Stein stakes her claim as owner of the laundry basket.

A sneak attack! Pinky lays siege upon Gertrude Stein's laundry basket stronghold.

Pinky succeeds in capturing the laundry basket.

Today, however, meant my return to campus, away from the world of dueling cats (seriously, must everything be a territory battle?  Does it really matter who owns my left tennis shoe?).  Tomorrow, sadly, is our last class on The Golden Notebook.  I could probably go on talking about the book for the rest of the semester, mostly because my students have shown me a whole new way of reading and seeing it.  I’ve been especially interested in their conversations about the roles we play, and how Lessing presents them.  In the novel, Anna, at first, cannot help but fall into roles: in relationships, she becomes the submissive caretaker; she is also the doting mother and the empathetic friend.  Even when Anna seeks to break outside of these more traditional roles, she finds herself simply playing non-traditional roles which, while not mainstream, come with no less of a rigid set of rules: The Communist, The Ex-Communist, The Free Woman, The Mistress, The Writer, The Successful Writer, The Failed Writer.  This has led me to think a great deal about the roles we — well, I, really — play in every-day life, and the roles we are expected to play, and how this all affects us.  Take, for instance, myself.  As an unmarried woman approaching thirty, I find myself constantly faced with a series of assumptions about Who I Am, or, rather, which role I play: people tend to assume I am The Fanatic Careerist, or, if not that, then The Sex and The City Character, which is about as far from Who I Am as possible, or The Crazy Cat Lady (though I must admit that this post seems to shore up that assumption).  Though these assumptions upset and disturb me, I must admit that I play a thousand roles a day: Daughter, Poet, Teacher, Friend — it’s endless.  And should I do something outside of my role, it can be dangerous, or at least A Bit Upsetting.  For instance: the title of this blog entry comes from a Britney Spears song; Emma Bolden admits that she loves Britney Spears, but Professor Bolden has a hard time saying so.

But what interests me particularly about Lessing is that she does not stop at this — she is not simply exposing the roles that we play and how much they damage ourselves.  Instead, she goes on to show how damaging these roles are to those around us, and to our world.  Lessing seems to suggest that one of the things that makes playing a role appealing and safe is that it not only gives us a set of rules for our own behavior, but it provides us with a lens through which to view other people: as a student to be dealt with, or a child to be protected, or as a social outcast to be protected at all costs. This is, however, just another way to avoid seeing another person as a person – playing a role, then, not only dehumanizes us, it dehumanizes others, as a way to make our lives and our relationships easier.

This seems to suggest that only when we step out of our respective roles — mother, daughter, teacher, student, father, son, girlfriend, boyfriend — are we fully human, and able to see others as fully human.

I admit that this is a terrifying prospect, especially when it comes to many of the roles I play every day.  I mean, from the very beginning, teachers are trained to be teachers (I hear, over and over, teachers saying that they’ve finally found their “classroom persona,” and it seems to me sometimes that this is what all of those pedagogy papers are about — learning how to play a role, learning what role fits one best in the classroom) and for the love of God not people, and to see their students as students and not teachers.  But what would it mean to be a person in the classroom, a person talking to other people, grappling and struggling and striving with other people about The Really Big Things That Matter?  What would it mean to break down the roles and not “play” anything or anyone?  Anna’s experience in The Golden Notebook suggests that this may mean chaos — at first.  In the end, though, this may be the thing that saves us and keeps ourselves and our socities whole.