On Digital Technology and the Generation Gap

So last week I started preparing my freshman composition classes for the documented essay they will have to write. Teaching research and documentation has always been my least favorite part of teaching writing, primarily because I find so much resistance among my students. It’s hard enough to get them to see the value of doing the work that writing requires when they are not researching, but to get them to value research, or even just to begin to value research (under the assumption that they will grow to appreciate its value as they progress through their academic careers) is a challenge that I have often found more debilitating than rewarding.

Several years ago, though, I started introducing the research and documentation by giving students a sample documented essay, something that I originally wrote as part of the introduction for an encyclopedia on marriage I was developing with a book packager that, slightly edited, fit almost precisely the model of the documented essay freshman composition students at my college are required to write. The one significant way in which my essay, “A Short, Personal History of Courtship in the United States,” differs from the documented essay as my students were taught it in previous writing classes they have taken is that I introduce the essay with a personal story and use the first-person pronoun throughout, two things that writing teachers traditionally–or maybe I mean traditional writing teachers–insist are completely taboo. (The thesis statement also doesn’t show up until the middle of the conclusion, but that is not a difference that is relevant to this post.)

The pedagogical value in using something I have written, something personal that was originally intended for publication in a book and that breaks some of the rules, lies of course in making the notion of research “real” for students in a way that other kinds of sample essays might not, providing them with an example of how research works in a real-world writing situation, as opposed to the inescapably artificial situation of the classroom. What I want to write about, though, has less to do with pedagogy than with the reaction my students had to the story I use as an introduction. Here it is:

Shortly before we broke up for good, Beth asked for her letters back. At first, I didn’t want to give them up. I knew if our relationship ended while she still had them—and I knew our relationship would be ending soon—I’d probably never see them again. But when she told me that she needed them, that she wanted to read them next to my letters to try and understand how she had come to be as angry at me as she was, I found it impossible to refuse. Part of me hoped she was looking for a way to patch things up. Still, it took me a long time to seal the letters into the envelope that would carry them back to her. I picked out pages at random, read passages aloud and was surprised over and over again by how immediately they conjured for me the time and place where I first held them in my hands; and also how, even reading them nearly seven years after she’d first written them, I still imagined I could feel her breath on my cheek as she spoke her words into my ear.

When Beth and I met, we were working at a summer camp in Cold Spring, New York—she was nineteen; I was twenty—and she was involved with two other men, the one she planned to marry and the one she was seeing to make sure that the one she planned to marry really was the one. I had no interest in turning that triangle into a square, but I liked Beth immediately, and she liked me, and we soon were spending as much time together as our work schedules and her other relationships allowed. We never thought of ourselves as a couple, but our friendship soon eclipsed Beth’s connection to the guy she was seeing to confirm her desire to marry the other man in her life. At the end of the summer we exchanged addresses, promising to write as soon as we were able.

I don’t remember whose letter started our correspondence, but over time, the letters we exchanged grew more and more intimate, becoming a deeply personal conversation of the sort few people ever have face-to-face. Through the mail, we could talk openly about our friendship and ourselves, about who we wanted to be for each other and our hopes and fears for the lives we wanted to lead. We wrote about love and identity (I was Jewish; she was Catholic), commitment and fidelity (she was still involved with the potential husband; I didn’t have a girlfriend on campus), and through what we wrote I felt with an intensity I had never felt before. The honesty we shared in our letters was as complete as I’d known, and it was both exhilarating and frightening. On the one hand, our relationship felt more real to me than the ones I saw my friends on campus slipping in and out of, almost like they were trying on and discarding new clothes. On the other hand, the people in those relationships could see and touch each other whenever they wanted, as Beth and I could not, and I was afraid that if she got married, our letter-writing would stop and I’d be left with nothing.

My friends thought I was crazy giving up the chance to be with women on campus to sit in my room and write letters to a woman I never saw, but I was hooked, and so was Beth, and eventually, as we told and retold on paper the story of what was happening between us, the story itself became more compelling to her than the life she saw herself having with her near-fiancé, and she broke up with him to be with me. Our relationship lasted nearly seven years.

We couldn’t have known it at the time, but our relationship was the result of a perfectly conventional nineteenth-century middle-class courtship, even the fact that Beth asked for her letters back when she was ready to break up with me. For the letters represented a commitment she no longer felt and so she felt it was inappropriate for me to have them, just as Mary Pearson in 1808 did not want Ephraim Abbott to keep her letters if he thought it was time for them to marry. “[F]orming a connexion [sic] for life,” she wrote when she asked for them back, required “great deliberation,” ((Quoted in Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America, by Ellen K. Rothman, 18)) and she was concerned he would find in her words unwarranted evidence that her reservations were not as great as they were.

In fact, nearly everything I experienced in my correspondence with Beth is attested to in the letters written by the middle-class lovers of a hundred and two hundred years ago. For Eldred Simkins, to take one example, reading a letter from his beloved was an experience of her physical presence not so different from mine when I read Beth’s. It was, he wrote, “as if we were talking together and that you were…sitting by me….” ((Quoted in Searching the Heart: Women, Men and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America, by Karen Lystra, 21)) Indeed, for the men and women of the 1800s, letters served not as substitutes for, but rather as extensions of, their lovers’ physical presence. Courtship was a process of revealing mind and body through words on the page, for while the lovers of the time certainly expressed their feelings for each other physically, it was in their letters that what they expressed became transformed into love and commitment. Or in which they discovered that love and commitment sufficient for marriage did not exist between them.

“Wait. You wrote letters?” one of my students asked. “How could you wait that long for a response?”

“Damn!” another one chimed in. “You two must really have had focus.”

“No, seriously,” still another one couldn’t help but ask, “you spent all that time at your desk writing her? Why couldn’t you just pick up a phone?”

I explained that all I had was a rotary phone on the wall in my dorm and so it was not like today when you can pick up your cell phone and walk outside to get some privacy. That explanation my students understood, but some of them–maybe more than some; it was hard to judge how many were agreeing with those who spoke up–just could not imagine sending a message to someone that you knew was not going to get there before a couple of days had passed and to which you knew you would not get a response until maybe a week later at best.

“But so much will have happened between the time the letter was sent and the time it was read. How did you remember what you wrote about?” Discussion ensued about the value of being able to send a quick text message and get a quick response. Some students pointed out that you really can’t communicate in a text message with quite the same depth that you can in a letter, or even in a long email, but most said that was what phone calls and face-to-face conversations were for.

I am not a Luddite; I value digital technology as much as anyone, I suppose, but this discussion made more aware than I have ever been not only of the age difference between myself and my students, but also of the cultural differences that have arisen as a result of digital technology.

It’s good to be back!

Cross-posted on The Poetry in the Politics and the Politics in the Poetry.