{"id":84500,"date":"2015-04-08T14:00:08","date_gmt":"2015-04-08T18:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=84500"},"modified":"2015-04-08T12:39:47","modified_gmt":"2015-04-08T16:39:47","slug":"teaching-twin-peaks-at-sweet-briar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/08\/teaching-twin-peaks-at-sweet-briar\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Twin Peaks<\/i> at Sweet Briar"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remembering a momentous semester as <\/em>Twin Peaks turns twenty-five and Sweet Briar closes its doors.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"sweetbriarhouse\"<\/a>

The Sweet Briar House.<\/p><\/div>\n

In 2012, I taught a freshman comp class called Myths About Women. The primary texts were Antigone <\/em>and Twin Peaks<\/em>. This was at Sweet Briar College, and as it happens, the students from that class will be among the last to graduate from the 114-year-old women\u2019s college this May. Last month, the school\u2019s board of directors voted to close it at the end of this academic year<\/a> because of \u201cinsurmountable financial challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019d been trying for a few semesters to arrive at a reading list that would help the students think critically about gender\u2014this was a women\u2019s college, after all. But Sweet Briar, in Virginia, is not like its northern counterparts Bryn Mawr and Mount Holyoke. Sweet Briar\u2019s official mascot is the vixen; its official colors are pink and green, a color scheme long synonymous with preppy fashion. And everywhere there are the trappings of wealthy, white Southern culture: among the student body, pearls are imbued with an almost totemic power. The campus bookstore sells Lilly Pulitzer handbags. <\/p>\n

I usually recycled my syllabus for this class, but the previous year I\u2019d tried teaching Lolita <\/em>alongside Azar Nafisi\u2019s Reading Lolita in Tehran<\/em>, which went over like the proverbial fart in church. One student called the novel an \u201cimmoral book.\u201d What\u2019s wrong with this Nabokov guy, the students wondered, and why does this Iranian woman love him?<\/p>\n

And yet I still hoped to challenge them. I\u2019d recently watched, for the fourth or fifth time, Twin Peaks<\/em>, which turns twenty-five today. Past the dancing, backward-talking midget, the black coffee, and the cherry pie, I was starting to see some deeper issues that I thought might make for good classroom conversation.<\/p>\n

Sure enough, Twin Peaks<\/em> was a hit. My students looked forward to it, often asking as they entered the classroom if we were watching it that day. What emerged through our conversations and on the pages of their essays was an uneasy and fraught relationship with what it means to be a feminist in the twenty-first century. <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The battle to save Sweet Briar is now being waged on three fronts. Lawyers representing #SaveSweetbriar, a grassroots alumnae group, have filed suit against the College, as has a firm representing the faculty and staff pro bono. Even the county prosecutor of Amherst, the rural county where Sweet Briar is nestled, is filing suit, alleging that the closing violates Virginia state laws governing nonprofits. It is, in short, a complete and total shit-storm. Though it\u2019s been almost two years since I left, I\u2019ve been having a hard time concentrating on anything else.<\/p>\n

Twin Peaks<\/em> begins, of course, with the mysterious death of a young woman, seventeen-year-old Laura Palmer. A beauty queen, tutor to a developmentally disabled child, and a volunteer for the local Meals on Wheels program, Laura\u2019s death sends the community into a deep and angst-ridden mourning.<\/p>\n

Sweet Briar, too, began with the death of a beloved young woman, Daisy Fletcher Williams, the sixteen-year-old only child of Indiana Fletcher and her husband James Henry Williams, an Irish \u00e9migr\u00e9. Daisy died from a genetically inherited disease that attacks the lungs and liver, a condition that also killed her father. As a memorial to her daughter, Fletcher willed her plantation and her wealth to create a women\u2019s college.<\/p>\n

Sweet Briar opened in 1901, and any student will tell you the campus is haunted. Daisy shifts furniture and appears in mirrors. The founder\u2019s brother, Lucian\u2014the black sheep of the family, enraged by his sister\u2019s decision to sink the family\u2019s inheritance into the college\u2014has appeared before terrified girls in their dorm rooms. And some believe the place is haunted by its plantation past\u2014at one time about a\u00a0hundred slaves worked the earth on which the college now sits. A few years ago, the Sci-Fi channel did a special on ghost sightings there.<\/p>\n

Perhaps fittingly, in my six years at Sweet Briar the campus felt increasingly stressed, anxious, and precarious. There were no raises for nearly five years; our pension benefits were reduced and then suspended altogether for several months. Two students performed in blackface in the middle of the dining hall at the tail end of the lunch rush. One of my colleagues in the English department committed suicide. And the attrition rate for students between freshman and sophomore year hovered between 20 and 30 percent\u2014concerning, for a school dependent on tuition.<\/p>\n

Given the charged atmosphere, I was eager to see what my students would make of Myths About Women. The course began with Antigone<\/em>, along with commentaries on the role of women in Greek society. Was Sophocles writing to caution the men of Athens about what would happen if women ran amok? Some of my students saw Antigone as tragically noble; others judged her to be a \u201ccrazy bitch with a death wish.\u201d Their first essay asked them to choose which character they\u2019d most identified with, and to my surprise, several students chose Jocasta, Antigone\u2019s sister, who famously says at the play\u2019s outset, \u201cwe are not born to contend with men.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before Twin Peaks<\/em>, I wanted to immerse them in the history of feminism\u2014tough sledding. No one knew that feminism had \u201cwaves\u201d; they were aware of the suffrage movement, but unaware that suffragettes has been some of the fiercest opponents of slavery; they believed in equal pay for equal work, but they also believed that somewhere along the way the message had been perverted. The term feminist <\/em>conjured angry man-haters and bra burnings. They felt not that they\u2019d been divested of an inheritance, but that feminism was something they simply wanted nothing to do with.<\/p>\n

Things began to shift after we watched the pilot and read \u201cLynching Women,\u201d a 1991 essay by Diana Hume George in which she admits to being \u201cseriously addicted,\u201d so much so that she programmed her VCR to tape the show, allowing her to rewatch the episodes for clues she might have missed. Fans treated the series like it was a novel, something to be riffled in pursuit of secret connections. After the show was canceled, though, George realized that its sexual politics were \u201creptilian\u201d; contrary to third-wave feminists who saw it as empowering, she thought it perpetuated misogyny. Her claim is founded on one of the biggest controversies of the digital age: Does media violence against women create an atmosphere that encourages or minimizes it?<\/p>\n

The essay got my students\u2019 attention. Since many of them were wary of feminism, period, the idea that a television show could be blamed for violence against women was difficult to stomach. \u201cIf you looked at the world in that way all the time,\u201d one student said,\u00a0\u201cyou would be really sad.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another student took issue with George\u2019s critique, especially when it came to the show\u2019s bitchy, manipulative, rich girl, Audrey Horne. She writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Could it be that Twin Peaks<\/em> has created a character capable of both saddle shoes and red heels? George argues that a flaw of Twin Peaks<\/em> is that it \u201cbreaks women in half.\u201d On the contrary, I believe that the ability of Twin Peaks<\/em> to cast light on the different and drastic layers of its female\u2019s desires, drives, ambitions, intentions, and expectations, depending on the situation, is one of its greatest strengths. That Donna can switch from \u201cing\u00e9nue to seductress overnight\u201d adds to the depth of the show because it was not a move that we the viewers had been able to preempt.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019d had the students read about transversity, Charlotte Krolokke\u2019s term, which has something to do with transgressing or crossing over boundaries\u2014but the catch is, not permanently. Transversity is, Krolokke believes, a post\u2013Third Wave phenomenon, a way of being that allows women to inhabit more than one seemingly mutually exclusive role at a time. There\u2019s a spirit of playfulness and subversion about it: you can be a stay-at-home mom and a political revolutionary; a saddle-shoe-, knee-length-plaid-skirt\u2013wearing school girl in the morning and a cigarette-smoking, red-high-heel-, little-black-dress\u2013wearing woman in the evening. What my students were seeing in Audrey wasn\u2019t contradiction but willfulness. This was not an empty-headed surrender to behave in whatever ways will best attract men, but the expression of a modern, multifaceted person.<\/p>\n

\"Donna_at_Laura`s_funeral\"<\/a>

Lara Flynn Boyle as Donna Hayward.<\/p><\/div>\n

This was the kind of discourse I\u2019d expected to find at Sweet Briar when I arrived, but frankly up until that semester my impression had been that the Pink Bubble\u2014as students and faculty alike refer to Sweet Briar\u2014was hostile to feminist thinking. The dining hall was often the scene of embarrassing skits put on by newly initiated members of the Tap Clubs, semi-secret societies with elaborate induction rituals and complex lineages. The newly initiated \u201cbabies\u201d would parade through the dining room under the approving eye of their \u201cmoms\u201d and \u201cgrandmas\u201d wearing poster-board signs around their necks with their new club-given nicknames and rhyming odes describing their personalities. Mostly they were silly; sometimes they alluded to impressive or unimpressive alcohol tolerance and sexual prowess.<\/p>\n

There were students who seemed to live for nothing more than this culture of sequined hats, ornately decorated robes, and puffy-painted cups\u2014but then you\u2019d hear from a colleague what dedicated students they were, or you would have them in class and see that there was much more going on beneath the costuming.<\/p>\n

Watching Twin Peaks<\/em> with my students made me rethink my perceptions. They were fascinated, and even cheered, Donna Hayward\u2019s transformation from Laura Palmer\u2019s goody-two-shoes best friend to canny detective and beguiling seductress. They shouted at the screen imploring Shelly, a young waitress at the Double R Diner in Twin Peaks, to get her shit together and leave Leo, her abusive boyfriend. And they expressed genuine empathy for Laura Palmer when her dark past was uncovered. They seemed to see the tragedy of her situation more easily than they had Antigone\u2019s.<\/p>\n

My own views on Twin Peaks<\/em> and Lynch have definitely changed since my first encounter with the show, as a high school student in the nineties. Feminism then was a word I associated mainly with Rush Limbaugh, whose radio program I\u2019d listen to while painting houses in the summer. High up on a thirty-two-foot ladder, too lazy to come down and change the station, I soaked in Rush\u2019s rants about \u201cfeminazis\u201d who were trying to undermine the moral fabric of America. Watching Twin Peaks<\/em> it never occurred to me to think of David Lynch, or any director for that matter, as misogynistic\u2014and yet twenty-some years later, having watched nearly all of his work, I do find something troubling in his vision of women. Women are constantly being driven to duplicity in order to succeed, or even just to survive. Then again, the men of Twin Peaks<\/em> all have hidden lives they try desperately to conceal. Even the beloved Agent Cooper has skeletons in his closet. Ultimately, what keeps me returning to Twin Peaks<\/em> and Lynch is that his vision of the world, while at times cruel and perverted, is accurate in so many ways. I don\u2019t mean that duplicity is the nature of all women, or that all men are led to violence and emotional unavailability because they divert their energy to hiding their other lives\u2014but as with all great fictions, there are kernels of truths here.<\/p>\n

The moment that sticks out for me most that semester was when an international-studies student likened BOB\u2014that demonic entity from the Black Lodge\u2014to a rogue state harboring terrorists. There is something out there that wants to harm us, and it will not go away even if we ignore it\u2014especially if we ignore it. That something, as Agent Cooper\u2019s forensics expert theorizes, is \u201cthe evil that men do.\u201d My student wrote,<\/p>\n

\n

Here, in rural Sweet Briar, Virginia, most of us do not feel threats from the outside world. Certainly not from a world as far abstracted and removed as Twin Peaks is. And yet we find ourselves \u2026 sitting a little bit closer to the edge of our seats because, as [Diana Hume] George says, \u201csweetness and light cannot quite maintain their power in the face of this other reality below the garden, the flowers, the picket fence\u2014or \u2018out there\u2019 in \u2018these old woods\u2019 of Twin Peaks.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Reading this paragraph in the late fall of 2012, I was impressed by her recognition that she and her classmates at Sweet Briar were privileged and protected. It seemed to me that for this student the plight of the women in Twin Peaks<\/em> had begun a larger conversation about the need for feminism, even in places where we feel otherwise safe.<\/p>\n

Rereading my students\u2019 words one month removed from the announcement that Sweet Briar will close, I think of the photos posted by hundreds of alums: the pink and green spray-painted banners draped across the front of the campus bell tower that read SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS<\/small> and LEAVE IT TO A MAN TO DESTROY SOMETHING A WOMAN MADE<\/small>.<\/p>\n

If Sweet Briar somehow remains open, then its leaders will have real work to do in figuring out what it offers and how it\u2019s unique. Many colleges can claim that they prepare young women to be leaders in the twenty-first century\u2014but it’s not clear that Sweet Briar is doing this better than its competitors, women\u2019s colleges or otherwise. This was what was so frustrating about my time there. It often seemed that the college saw the successful education of women as something that only required a beautiful campus and promises that a women\u2019s-only environment would make you, somehow, a leader.<\/p>\n

The controversy and conspiracy theories around the impending closure threaten to obscure deep tensions and contradictions within the college, tensions that tie it to old views of a woman\u2019s place in society. The crisis suggests an awakening that\u2019s been a long time\u2014outside observers would say late<\/em>\u2014in coming: a sudden awareness that the Pink Bubble, though a safe and nurturing place, must do more than hang banners to argue for its moral necessity. It has to become a place where every student is expected to think about why a women\u2019s-only education is not a relic of the past, but a crucial asset to a world that\u2019s still safer for men than for women.<\/p>\n

Dave Griffith is the author of <\/em>A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America. He lives in Northern Michigan, where he directs the creative-writing program at Interlochen Center for the Arts. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remembering a momentous semester as Twin Peaks turns twenty-five and Sweet Briar closes its doors. In 2012, I taught a freshman comp class called Myths About Women. The primary texts were Antigone and Twin Peaks. This was at Sweet Briar College, and as it happens, the students from that class will be among the last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":816,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[17712,17711,1102,14184,15924,17710,1457,6688,13144,17713],"class_list":["post-84500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-audrey-horne","tag-donna-hayward","tag-feminism","tag-pedagogy","tag-schools","tag-sweet-briar","tag-teaching","tag-twin-peaks","tag-universities","tag-womens-colleges"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTeaching \u201cTwin Peaks\u201d at Sweet Briar<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On the show's twenty-fifth anniversary, David Griffith reflects on its value as a teaching tool at a women's college.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/08\/teaching-twin-peaks-at-sweet-briar\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Teaching Twin Peaks at Sweet Briar by David Griffith\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 8, 2015 \u2013 Remembering a momentous semester as Twin Peaks turns twenty-five and Sweet Briar closes its doors. 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