Interrogating the Myths of Education: Dorothy Bryant'sElla Price's JournalandMiss Giardino

Abstract

A prolific writer in various genres, Dorothy Bryant (1930–2017) has earned a notable place in the literary tradition of Italian American women. Leading scholars including Mary Jo Bona (1999, 2010), Edvige Giunta (2002), and Mary Frances Pipino (2000) have produced excellent criticism exploring Bryant's engagement with ethnic identity—the recovery and re-creation of italianità, family relatedness, cultural trauma, and survival—as well as with gender and feminism, both of which are connected with immigration, ethnicity, and class. The scholarly focus has been on complex representations of Italian American women in Bryant's novels and her early contributions to the ongoing collective literary project of “questioning and redefining, in unexpected and probing ways, traditional representations of Italian American women” (Giunta 2002, 33). The scholarship addresses teaching and learning in Bryant's writing insofar as it relates to these subjects. In this article, I shift the focus more directly onto this theme in her writing, which I believe provides a powerful and broadly relevant lens through which to examine today's pressing issues of equity, transformation, and race in American education.Almost fifty years ago in Ella Price's Journal ([1972] 1997) and Miss Giardino ([1978] 1997), Bryant shone light on the complex workings and troubling consequences of the mythology of education as a means to self-improvement. In Ella Price's Journal, we read: Educate: “related to Latin educere—to lead forth.” . . . To lead forth—it sounds like taking you by the hand and guiding you out of some dark place. “The systematic development and cultivation of the mental and moral powers. Syn. Train, discipline, teach, instruct. . . . Those synonyms don't seem to have much to do with the word—a person could be trained, disciplined, taught, and instructed, but not be educated. And you could tell if a person was trained or instructed, but how can you tell if a person is educated? (xx)Echoing Plato's “Allegory of the Cave,” Bryant suggests that education, however slow and painful, is achievable through both individual attributes and effort and transformation. In Plato's allegory, the soul “cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body” (1992, 189–190). The belief in education as an upward journey is foundational to notions of American success and equality, but it ignores two features that Bryant foregrounds in her writing. First, the mythology of knowledge as improvement is explicitly undemocratic: As in Plato's case, only the select few can and should be educated in order to assume leadership of the rest. Second, shaped as it is by fictions of individual will, egalitarianism, and meritocracy, this mythology disguises the fact that its purpose is not to embrace difference but to assimilate.In Myths to Lie By, Bryant argues that by challenging a false myth, “a commonly held but mistaken belief,” authors can “recreate or rediscover an expression of reality—a true myth” (1984, i). In this article, I will explore how Bryant seeks “an expression of reality” beneath the myths of education as an agent of wholly positive transformation in relation to both individual betterment and social advancement. The two novels I discuss take readers through a critical consideration of foundational myths of education through the fictional narratives of Ella Price and Anna Giardino, respectively, who exemplify the idealized notions of education. They are the ones who, after being led forth from Plato's allegorical cave, deem the effort and sacrifices worthwhile because they are liberated from their chains. Yet, I will also argue that Bryant complicates their narratives by interrogating education's meanings for those from racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups other than white middle-class America and those able and willing to assimilate to it.Ella Price's Journal was inspired by the older women, wives and mothers mostly, who began appearing in Bryant's community college classes in the late 1960s (Bryant 2002). The novel has been persuasively interpreted as depicting the process of feminist consciousness-raising and emphasizing personal as opposed to political change, a shift that Lisa Hogeland argues helped to popularize the women's liberation movement of the time (1998, 40). But Bryant's novel also quite specifically depicts the process of education. Written as Ella's journal for her composition course at the fictional Bay Junior College in California, the text chronicles her fraught initiation into a world of ideas and social engagement as her conventional life falls apart and she begins anew as an empowered woman and critical thinker.In the late 1960s, white suburban housewife Ella Price envisions her return to college at age thirty-four as a way to find “new interests” (Bryant [1972] 1997, 28), a remedy prescribed by her doctor for a nameless malaise easily identifiable as Betty Friedan's “problem that has no name” ([1963] 1997, 15–32). Born in Nebraska to a farm worker and a domestic worker, Ella migrated with her parents to California during World War II. Considered an Okie and looked down upon, Ella excelled in high school academically but not socially. Soon after graduation, she married Joe Price, a Catholic war vet who was content to be a middling civil servant; she gave birth to her first and only child at age nineteen. Maintaining their marginally middle-class lifestyle becomes a continual struggle and priority for the Price family, often requiring Ella to take temporary office jobs to help pay bills or accumulating debt. And while returning to school is intended to quell a growing sense of dissatisfaction, the conflict between the physical and intellectual demands of studying and those of family, social norms, financial burdens, and housekeeping takes its toll on Ella, as does the new perspective she gains on the conventional beliefs and norms of her life.At the onset of her studies, Ella is disappointed and even insulted by her experiences at college. She feels isolated and ignored by other students due to her age and misunderstood by her professors, especially her English professor, Don Harkan. Like many students, Ella believes that her composition course should be devoted to learning grammar and correctness. She objects to the readings assigned, such as Malcolm X's autobiography, and to her professor's insistence that the students learn to “think straight” (Bryant [1972] 1997, 20), support assertions, and “say something” (22) in their writing. His attempts to push students to “get in touch with their real thoughts” are perceived by Ella as an insult meant to undermine her “clean and respectable” life (20). As Mary Frances Pipino points out, Ella rightly fears the changes to “a way of thinking and living that she considers decent, moral, and above all, safe” (2000, 71).However, when Ella spitefully commits to writing in her journal and responding to all the prompts Harkan has given, she nonetheless engages in the kind of reflection that many traditionally would consider the goal of education. Through reading, discussion, and most importantly journal writing, Ella undergoes and ultimately embraces metamorphosis. She has been led forth, partly by her professor (and temporary lover) Harkan and partly through her own engagement with literature, into the realm of thinking, questioning, and, in a turning point of the novel, acting on her beliefs.1 Ella comes to exemplify the intellectual, questioning individual who reaffirms the value of a liberal education, every educator's dream student, as Barbara Horn notes in her afterword to the Feminist Press reissue of the novel (1997, 243).Yet Bryant's celebration of educational transformation is qualified by other aspects of Ella's fate. Ella's new beginning runs counter to the understanding of education as social advancement among lower- to working-class society that focuses more on changing one's material situation. From this perspective, Ella's education has the opposite effect. Ella may be intellectually stimulated and a bold critical thinker, but she is also a soon-to-be-divorced woman with no home, savings, or income, and minimal marketable skills. She is in danger of slipping back from the marginally middle-class existence she had with Joe and will be penalized by social and gender norms of the period that limit her options for economic and social independence.In fact, considering the example of her friend Laura, who recently underwent the same journey from being a dissatisfied housewife through intellectual awakening at the junior college, we know that much heartache and social alienation await Ella, who will be judged harshly by her daughter and mother alike, ostracized by other women, and preyed upon by men. Barbara Horn identifies Laura as a model of success for Ella because by the end Laura is studying at Berkeley, mending her relationships with her children, working full time, and energetically involved in the women's and peace movements (1997, 257). Laura's success minimizes the intensely difficult period that precedes it but from another perspective is naïvely optimistic. Both women have definitively broken off from their former communities, relationships, and selves. Even if their new perspective offers them intellectual satisfaction, they still need to eat, find shelter, and find new communities, a process that Laura demonstrates can be slow and tenuous. If Laura is a model, Bryant refuses to tell us if Ella is able to follow her example: The novel's ending—mid-sentence, before Ella must begin her new life—signifies uncertainty and doubt, as Hogeland argues, drawing upon literary theorist Rachel DuPlessis's notion of writing beyond the ending, which refuses stasis and a happily-ever-after resolution (1998, 44). Thus, Bryant calls attention to the complex reality of many for whom education's promise of a better life is limited or deceptive.There is no denying that Ella's growing determination to expand her intellectual horizons runs counter to the goals of education voiced by others in the novel, a fact that serves to challenge the myth of education as a social equalizer. Although operating solely through Ella's first-person narration, Bryant presents various points of view, namely those of the general student population of Bay Junior College and of Professor Dan Harkan, that articulate visions of education that differ from Ella's. Initially more comfortable and protected by her status as a white, suburban housewife, Ella does not share the myth of education as a means of social advancement that motivates many of her fellow students. Ella's classmates attend junior college to “get a better job” with which to support their families or to “help [their] people” (Bryant [1972] 1997, 65). As a classmate tells her: “I don't have the luxury of ‘just learning.’ I have a family to support” (65). Ella is disappointed by her classmates’ solely pragmatic attitudes toward the college and is quick to judge them for the shuffling of books that begins minutes before the end of class. She wonders: “Is that all they can do, sit and wait for the time when they can leave? Why do they come to college? No one's forcing them” (62). Ella blames the students for their apathy at the same time that they reject her as another bored housewife. She doesn't see how college might be more difficult for students who do not have support or resources and who are contending with the discrimination and racism of 1960s America to embrace opportunities for the deep reflection that would lead to intellectual transformation. Nor does she understand how this transformation might demand a denial of the lived knowledge they already possess. In Moving Up Without Losing Your Way, philosopher of education Jennifer Morton elucidates how lower-income students, whom she calls strivers, seek education not primarily for individual betterment but rather “to transform life circumstances”; yet, as they seek entry to a new environment that holds out promise of advancement and belonging, they must also grapple with emotional, psychological, and ethical challenges for which they have not been prepared (2019, 4).Bryant employs the larger population and environment of the fictional college as a necessary counterpoint to Ella's point of view and story regarding education. Composed primarily of those newly admitted to higher education at the time (women, African Americans, working-class men on the GI Bill), Bay Junior College is described by one student as “a high school with ash trays” (Bryant [1972] 1997, 63). “There's no school here,” Ella's classmate continues, “no atmosphere of learning” (63). Scholars including Pierre Bourdieu (1973), Michael Apple (1979), and Jean Anyon (1980) have convincingly demonstrated that education is enacted in various ways for different populations with the goal of social and cultural reproduction and the consequence of reproducing social inequalities. Their studies, published in the years just following the publication of Ella Price's Journal, have established that the knowledge and skills related to social power are made available in the schooling of the upper classes and advantaged social groups while working-class students are provided “practical” skills to prepare them as ideal workers in manual or middle-management jobs. The environment of the college, with music blasting in the cafeteria and the library that serves “mostly as a pick-up station” (Bryant [1972] 1997, 63), reveals the value that both the school (and implicitly the city/state that fund it) and many of the students place on their education there.Repeatedly Bryant presents her readers with indications of a bleak landscape—multiple dropouts; students who come and go over a decade; those stalled in years of remedial classes still barely able to express their ideas articulately; and those who skip classes while staking a claim to a form of entitlement rooted in the legacy of American racism. Behind this portrait, Bryant implies the possible reasons for such disaffection by illustrating students’ feelings of insecurity, exclusion, anger, shame, and fear. In light of the persistence of such inequalities and their consequences,2 current educational scholarship attempts to identify and tackle low rates of student achievement and graduation as well as to develop curricula and pedagogies that respect and value cultural characteristics and types of knowledge that do not correspond to the dominant norms considered signifiers of educated people.3Through Dan Harkan, Bryant confronts the disturbing contention that, ultimately, the junior college is a place where students come to pursue meaningful change, often related to social class, that they know, deep down, is out of reach. The myths of education promise social mobility and equality but then channel students’ desires and efforts into an arrangement that reproduces the same structures of inequality they initially sought to overcome. As Harkan cynically explains to Ella, her classmates areHarkan does not specify that race and ethnicity are defining characteristics of the “they” he describes, but the implication is clear. He contradicts the belief that education, particularly at the open-admissions community college, leads to a better life. He portrays it as a holding pen, a place where those relegated to the “outside” are lulled into acceptance of their position through the lingering allure of deferred dreams. His sentiments evoke Burton Clark's “The ‘Cooling Out’ Function in Higher Education.” Clark wrote, “The wide gap found in many democratic institutions between culturally encouraged aspiration and institutionally provided means of achievement leads to the failure of many participants. Such a situation exists in higher education. Certain social units, such as the junior college, ameliorate the consequent stress by redefining failure and providing for a ‘soft’ denial; they perform a cooling out function” (1960, 569). The cooling out function, in other words, is the implicit, informal role of community colleges, to transform aspiring but “unpromising” students who sought access to baccalaureate colleges into terminal students who had been redirected toward alternative occupational training.4 Though we are not encouraged as readers to trust or identify with Harkan, Bryant does invite us to consider this provocation in light of the contrast between Ella and her classmates, a difference that is shaped by more than a generational divide.In Miss Giardino, the question of equity as it runs up against the myth of equality is foregrounded in another paradoxical celebration and critique of education. Like Ella's, Anna's educational success story comes at a significant cost that she can only belatedly acknowledge and is similarly juxtaposed against a student body of mostly young people of color. Miss Giardino begins when sixty-eight-year-old Anna Giardino, a retired schoolteacher, awakens in a hospital room with amnesia after a presumed late-night assault around her home in San Francisco. As Mary Jo Bona notes, illness serves as a “symbol for Anna's despair” (1999, 113); the amnesia compels remembering and sets Anna on a necessary emotional journey to reconnect with her past and gain self-awareness (115). The book is structured with each chapter presenting a day full of flashbacks and recollections over the course of a week as Anna both seeks and dreads the knowledge of what happened to her. Eventually, by reenacting her midnight walk, she recalls the blocked memory that she fell and hit her head while fighting off an attempted mugging by an African American former student while Anna was on a crazed quest to burn down the school so central to most of her life. Confronting her memories, Anna comes to the realization of what Bona calls the “spiritual death” that resulted from forgetting her cultural past (1999, 20). Anna also realizes her implication in a system, educational and ideological, that exploited the disjuncture between her identities as the daughter of downtrodden Italian immigrants and as a high school English teacher devoted to a belief in progress through education. She was unable, despite her best intentions and efforts, to convey this belief—much less the fact of social advancement—to her students.Anna's bildungsroman in Miss Giardino begins in childhood but follows a path similar to Ella's, a literacy narrative through literature and schooling. Anna is the youngest daughter of early twentieth-century Italian immigrants, physically and emotionally ravaged by discrimination and an exploitative American system of labor. Memories of her parents are the first to return to Anna in the hospital. Her father, whose health and quality of life were greatly impaired by years of working in mines across the country, resorts to alcohol and violent tyranny within the home to compensate for the dissatisfaction he continuously experiences in the world outside. Here a young Anna finds refuge in education and the English language, which protect her from her father and provide an entrée into an American world beyond his reach. English, then, enacts a distinction from her father, who calls her “the American” and curses her for “thriving in the air that strangles him” (Bryant [1978] 1997, 13). Anna embraces this identity as leverage against his threats. It is here that the promise of educational betterment and advancement also works, but only in part as Anna leans into values she believes are Anglo (Bona 1999, 116) but remains trapped between these and her ethnic heritage, a condition that undermines achievement of the unified assimilated self she mistakenly presumes she has achieved (Scambray 2007, 88–90).Feeling that she has saved herself through education, Anna sets out to save others. She becomes an unwitting missionary in the service of the white middle-class values of the dominant American culture. She becomes Miss Giardino, locating her identity in what she believes has rescued her. The unlikely protégée of her high school English teacher Mr. Ruggles, Anna replaces him at the school in more ways than one upon his retirement in 1929. She adopts his conservative methods, stern demeanor, and inflexible standards. Ironically, Mr. Ruggles represents the old guard that would normally bar Anna, a poor Italian girl, from education and teaching. He is the male standard bearer and gatekeeper who criticizes the influx of “lady teachers” and complains that compulsory school laws have degraded education by “crowd[ing] every ignorant fool into [his] classroom” (Bryant [1978] 1997, 32). Though Anna is aware of the hypocrisy between his opinions and his championing of her—culled as an exception—she excuses his social attitudes because he allows her into his world of learning and reason, which she thinks can make life meaningful. He has saved her, and Anna wants to do the same for the changing waves of Mission District students she teaches.However, over the course of the novel Bryant pushes beyond Anna's purported success. Through Anna, more explicitly than through Ella, she illustrates the power of education both to endow benefits and to extract costs. Anna's acceptance of the myth of education as key to social mobility fails to take into account her own losses and limited rise and places the responsibility for success or failure solely on the individual student and teacher, not on the system that responds to the needs of neither. In assimilating to values she and her father perceived as American, Anna also had to compromise or sacrifice parts of herself with unrecognized significance to her identity. Fred Gardaphé identifies this process of “moving up” through education as a “model” for Italian American intellectuals “in which alienation from one's birth community and often birth class was, more often than not, a requirement” (2004, 37). Such a model is similar for other low-income and minority students (immigrant and BIPOC), for whom educational success necessitates acculturation. As Jennifer Morton argues, education and assimilation enable social ascent into communities and opportunities previously foreclosed, but “transcending the circumstances of one's birth comes with a heavy cost felt across many aspects of our lives that we value—relationships with family and friends, our connection to our own communities, and our sense of identity” (2019, 4). Morton refers to these as the ethical costs of upward mobility, i.e., the loss of ethical goods like relationships and values that provide a sense of identity and are not easily replaced (25–28). In similar terms, Anna embraces her transformation for removing her from the misery and struggle of her parents, but the cost is paid through a disconnection from her own italianità that results in frustration, despondency, and ultimately “a repressed fury that made her unaware of herself” (Bona 1999, 115).Moreover, as a white, female schoolteacher making a nominal salary, Anna is able to support herself and, for the majority of her adult life, her mother, yet she remains on the margins of mainstream middle-class society because of her status as a single, working-class woman. She is able to buy a house, the very house where she worked as a domestic servant to the Sterns, a wealthy Jewish family, testifying to her success in escaping the material struggles of her parents. The transfer of this solitary, old house on the hill from the Sterns to Anna epitomizes the history of immigrant assimilation as first Jews and then Italians were admitted into whiteness and climbed the social ladder (Brodkin 1998; J. Gugliemo and Salerno 2003). As the example of the Sterns—with a depressive mother and a lonely son who flees to Europe at the first opportunity—indicates, “moving up” does not ensure fulfillment.Much of the literature and critical studies concerning immigration, assimilation, and whiteness demonstrates that the losses endured by those who assimilate into American culture include ancestral culture, language, history, and a sense of belonging. A less noted loss at the heart of Bryant's novel relates to an ethical self, particularly in relation to race, and distinct from Morton's ethical costs. As James Baldwin states, the “price of a ticket” for full admission into US society is to “become white” by “denying the Black presence and justifying Black oppression.” This becoming necessarily involves what Baldwin calls a “moral erosion” (1984, 90–92). For those ethnic groups and individuals for whom whiteness becomes an option, assimilation and its comrade education are key, and yet, as most works in the scholarship of racialization and whiteness argue, the ticket Baldwin describes also inescapably involves some degree of complicity, active or passive, with the structural inequalities of the American racial order and the racial/cultural discourses that underpin it (Roediger 1991; Lipsitz 1998; Luconi 2011).5Anna's complicity begins in what, using David A. J. Richards's term, we might call the privatization of her Italian identity, reserving it only for interactions with her mother. Of course, at the time of her youth, being Italian and speaking Italian anywhere but home was not socially sanctioned; the result is a forced privatization that solidifies as she embraces the American identity that separates and protects her from her father and garners her more opportunity beyond the home. In Italian American: The Racialization of an Ethnic Identity, Richards argues that Italian Americans have largely “privatized” their ethnic difference and identity and that this decision removes them from the political/social arena, echoing Baldwin's concept of moral erosion. The resulting problem is a “silencing of one's moral powers to protest injustice” (Richards 1999, 123). Though this may be an overly dramatic statement, a compelling perspective in Italian American studies on whiteness and race similarly recognizes that entrée into the middle class and whiteness and protection of the related material and social gains required a barrier to be drawn between Italian Americans and African Americans as well as an alignment with anti-Black racial values (Gardaphé 2004; J. Gugliemo and Salerno 2003; Luconi 2011). In Bryant's novel, Anna is not racist; indeed, she identifies with and wants to help the students of various ethnic and racial identities who pass through the doors of her school. But the means she has to help them reveal that she has been, in the words of historian David Roediger, “swallowed by the lie of white supremacy” (qtd in Gardaphé 2004, 128) to the degree that she assumes Anglo values and cultural norms to be the means and measure of success. When this increasingly fails to be effective or even desirable to her students, she finds fault with herself or with them. The growing sense of suppressed guilt, frustration, and powerlessness with which Anna contends evolves into the repressed rage Bona identified as her motivation to burn down the school building.As memories of her teaching career and struggles with students of color return over the course of the novel, readers become more aware of Anna's complicated relationship to her students. In the 1950s and 1960s, Anna tries increasingly hard to teach her students, mostly Black and brown at this point, according to the standards in which she so strongly believes. She blames the greater degree of difficulty on herself, her students, school bureaucracy, and new methods of teaching, which she decries as permissive, encouraging expressions of rambling egotism and disregard for grammar and spelling. She does not consider that the increasingly challenging task of education may be related to the politics of race and education that belie the myths of positive transformation and equality. She does not recognize the potential resistance of students who balk at adapting to the values she embodies—adapting that would necessitate conceding ethical goods related to their culture and relationships—because this would require acknowledging her own ethical compromises and cultural losses. Anna feels a lingering class camaraderie with her minority students and believes she comprehends their stories and challenges; however, she is blind to the ways race and class are mutually co-constructing and how many of her Black students face far more rigid institutionalized barriers and degradation based on white hegemony. Not having recognized her ethnic identity and racial history as significantly different, she could not see how race functioned within the school system and affected her students. Without this awareness, she is incapable of the meaningful action she had envisioned her teaching to be.Literary scholar Kenneth Scambray, who reads Miss Giardino as a specifically Californian Italian American novel, effectively contrasts Anna as a teacher with Stewart Warner, a colleague of hers at the high school: Warner operates from a different educational philosophy that places priority on students’ emotional needs and cultural identity rather than on subject mastery, rigor, and assimilation, as Anna's does (2007, 7). This pedagogical approach, which Scambray notes was educational policy in California in the 1960s and ’70s, has in recent decades developed further nationwide as culturally relevant pedagogy, culturally sustaining pedagogy, and anti-racist pedagogy. These closely related pedagogies attempt to mitigate the demand, and thereby the costs, of assimilation imposed on minority students who seek betterment and advancement through education. As articulated by Gloria Ladson-Billings, culturally relevant pedagogy seeks to “maintain some cultural integrity” in the process of education by utilizing students’ cultures as vehicles for learning. It aims for a “collective, not merely individual, empowerment” (Ladson-Billings 1995, 160). A decade after Ladson-Billings, scholars incl