Teacher Representations in Dramatic Text and Performance

Portraying the Teacher on Stage

Melanie Shoffner, Richard St. Peter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000709506
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Drama

This book examines representations of the teacher on stage - in both theatrical performances and dramatic text - in order to demonstrate how these representations have shaped society's perceptions of educators in and out of the classroom.

At the heart of this book is the interaction between theatre and teacher education. By considering how dramatic portrayals reimagine, reinforce and/or undermine our understanding of the teacher's personal and professional roles, this volume bridges the gap between truth in dramatic literature and truth in the classroom. Chapters critically explore the personas embodied by fictional teachers in well-known works such as Educating Rita, School of Rock and The History Boys and illustrate how educators might use dramatic literature and performance to interrogate entrenched ideas about the student-teacher dynamic. By bringing together a diverse set of contributors from the fields of teacher education and theatre, this book takes a critical look at performance, text, society and culture to promote a new understanding of teaching and learning.

This unique book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics and researchers in the fields of teacher education, drama and theatre education.

1 Unfit to Teach

Morality, Panic and Hazardous Teachers

James Wilson

Of the many reasons expressed by school boards and superintendents to terminate a teacher from her position, one of the most unusual might relate to the case of Marguerite S. Cunningham. In 1940, Mrs. Cunningham, a 51-year-old New York City fifth-grade teacher, was pronounced physically unfit for her job. Weighing 275 pounds and using a cane for walking, Mrs. Cunningham, according to the education board president, was “bound to slow up the exit from school in case of emergency” and, therefore, was a “fire hazard” (“275-Pound Teacher,” 1940). To demonstrate her probable obstruction in a crisis, the board conducted an unannounced fire drill, strategically placing board members as witnesses: “Before Mrs. Cunningham had limped down the stairs,” the chairman concluded, “the children in her class were a block away from her” (“Special Fire Drill,” 1940). The press did not publish the final ruling but Mrs. Cunningham became the prime symbol to root out physically and mentally unsound teachers. A year after the Cunningham-induced fire drill, Governor Herbert Lehman signed into law a bill “requiring New York City teachers to submit to an examination as to their physical and mental capacity, if such an examination was directed by the Superintendent of Schools” (“Special Fire Drill,” 1940). As Mrs. Cunningham’s case exemplifies, teaching effectiveness often had little to do with teachers’ command of subject matter or their ability to impart knowledge but with their bodily and psychological fitness.

As a result of Progressive reform in the early twentieth century, more and more students were going to (and staying in) school. Education historian Diane Ravitch (2001) explains that, in 1900, about 10 percent of all teenagers were enrolled in high school; by 1940, this number had reached about 70 percent. This increased democratization of education, along with a fixation on physical and mental suitability as an American ideal, caused a series of panics as communities turned over greater control of their young to teachers. The anxiety, in turn, triggered intensified surveillance of teacher bodies, comportment and extracurricular behavior (see, for example, Perrillo, 2004). The lives of the students, alarmists argued, depended on it.

In 1929, New York’s Board of Education reported that a teacher was “under an obligation to look after his own [physical and mental] health, not only to increase his efficiency, but to set an example of an ‘ideal of healthy adulthood’” (“Health of Teachers”). Dr. Sara Geiger reported to the American Psychiatric Association that a major cause of juvenile delinquency was related to unfit teachers, who had been attracted to the profession “because of short hours and long vacations, or a desire to dominate, which has never been gratified” (“Child Delinquency,” 1938). She also claimed administrators did not effectively weed out the large number who were morally and mentally unfit for working with youth. Therefore, in an era in which the physical and moral health of young men and women was the country’s most valued commodity, teachers were perceived as a potential national threat.

Since the 1920s, there have been many plays that reflect this obsession with unfit teachers. This chapter focuses on teacher panic plays, dramas that depict teachers who pose moral, physical or psychological dangers to students. While real-life teachers were regularly identified by their presumed physical unhealthiness and bodily excesses, stage teachers were marked by their equally presumed mental unhealthiness and sexual excesses. Historically, many plays, such as Philo Higley and Philip Dunning’s Remember the Day (1935) and John Boruff’s Bright Boy (1944), present gentle teachers; other plays, such as Clifford Goldsmith’s What a Life (1938) and Schoolhouse on the Lot (1938), portray teachers as innocuously ridiculous. There are a few heroic and self-sacrificing teachers, most notably Miss Moffatt from The Corn is Green (1940), but there are substantially more characters who typify psychological malevolence, sadism and uncontrollable sexual desires. Additionally, these plays often depict schools and colleges as corrupt and noxious environments, and many demonstrate the dangers morally unstable educators pose to students. These plays exhibit the need for managing and disciplining the morally and sexually hazardous teachers among the ranks.

“Revolting! A Scandal! A Scandal!”

The most successful teacher play of the interwar period was Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, which opened in November 1934. When it closed 690 performances later, it was the ninth longest running production in Broadway’s history. The drama incorporates many of the hallmarks of a teacher panic play, especially in the alarm caused by a possible lesbian teacher amidst young girls, and, as with most plays of the period (and succeeding periods as well, for that matter), the putatively sexually deviant character is destroyed. As Schildcrout (2014) notes, for example, many plays depicted lesbian, gay, bisexual and transexual (LGBT) characters as murderers, tragic victims and objects of ridicule.

The central teacher characters are Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, who oversee a New England school for girls. Both women are unmarried but Karen is engaged to Joe Cardin, a local doctor. In the beginning, Martha is disheartened by the possible marriage since this could mean the end of their (presumably, professional) partnership. From there, the plot, which revolves around a series of threats, libelous whispers and eventual ruination of the school and teachers, is set into motion when some of the children overhear Martha’s aunt, the meddling Lily Mortar, tell Martha that her possessiveness of Karen is “unnatural. Just as unnatural as it can be” (Hellman, 1981, p. 21). At the end, Martha shoots herself after admitting she is the unmentionable and unnamed thing Mary Tilford, the malevolent child, accuses her of being.

Although fictional, the Wright-Dobie school presents a familiar portrait of a girls’ boarding school of the early twentieth century. As the curtain rises, the students are sewing, doing each other’s hair and practicing elocution. As Blount (2005) shows, schools and colleges often required students to take hygiene classes, which “reinforced traditional gender behaviors and sexual practices” (p. 72). While boarding schools trained girls to be upstanding (heterosexual) women, these institutions were also suspiciously regarded as potential sites in which same-sex crushes and passions might ignite. Girls were thought to be especially prone to homosexuality, and one of the reasons for this, as noted sociologist Willard Waller argued in 1932, had to do with a belief that female genitalia are “less complex” than males’ and, therefore, less specific in their “sexual aims” (p. 140). Physicians in the United States made similar claims, and building on the work of noted British sexologist Havelock Ellis at the turn-of-the-century, they proclaimed, “Female boarding schools and colleges are the great breeding grounds of artificial [acquired] homosexuality” (as cited in Blount, 2005, p. 34).

When The Children’s Hour opened on Broadway, several critics noted its similarities with another play that dealt with lesbianism at a girls’ boarding school, Christa Winsloe’s Girls in Uniform (1932), adapted from the German play Gersten Und Heute. Though not actually a teacher panic play, since the focus is on a student’s possible lesbianism, it is relevant here, for it reflects prevalent attitudes about teachers, students and sexual desires. Girls in Uniform tells the story of Manuela, a motherless girl who falls in love with her teacher, Fräulein von Bernburg. While the headmistress and other teachers are cruel, or at the very least cold, with the girls and other women faculty, Fräulein von Bernburg is motherly with her charges. She accuses the headmistress of fostering the school’s pervasive sadism: “You kill the soul, the spirit! This galvanised suppression is spiritual death. Only women can do such terrible things to women!” (Winsloe, 1936, p. 129) Fräulein von Bernburg, on the other hand, kisses each girl goodnight, and when she discovers that Manuela’s underwear is rife with holes (in a scene pulsating with homoeroticism), she offers one of her own chemises. Feeling empowered one evening, wearing her teacher’s chemise and having accidentally gotten drunk on spiked punch, Manuela publicly proclaims her love for her teacher in front of her schoolmates and headmistress. “Revolting! A scandal! A scandal!,” (Winsloe, 1936, p. 93), the headmistress declares, and Manuela is sentenced to permanent isolation. After a tearful goodbye with Fräulein von Bernburg, Manuela exits, and moments later she throws herself out of a window to her death.

Both The Children’s Hour and Girls in Uniform present girls’ boarding schools as breeding grounds for pestilential homosexuality. In Hellman’s play, as soon as Mrs. Tilford understands the accusation Mary whispers in her ear (because it is so horrific it cannot be mentioned aloud), the grandmother informs the other parents and guardians. Within hours, the school is evacuated, and the teachers confront Mrs. Tilford, who defiantly states, “I have done what I had to do. What [Karen and Martha] are may possibly be their own business. It becomes a great deal more than that when children are concerned in it” (Hellman, 1981, p. 47). Similarly, Fräulein von Kesten, the headmistress of Girls in Uniform, orders Manuela’s removal from physical and social contact from her peers: “The other children must run no further risk of contamination” (Winsloe, 1936, p. 105). As a result of drunken pseudo-confession and whispered accusation, Manuela, Karen and Martha are regarded as outcasts and pathological criminals. Such a response would not have been unusual in actual educational settings.

Homosexuality, according to the beliefs at the time, was considered a social disease and strong precautions were suggested for guarding oneself from contact with a known homosexual. In his classic study The Sociology of Teaching (1932), Waller states definitively, “For nothing seems more certain than that homosexuality is contagious,” and he suggests measures for strict screening of “latent or active” homosexual teachers (pp. 144–145). According to most contemporary sources, children were principally susceptible. Education leaders warned of schoolgirl crushes, which as intimated in Girls in Uniform, could result in tragedy and/or lesbianism if not nipped in the bud. Johnson (1939), a school psychologist, provided a series of pointers for dealing with teacher-student infatuations to prevent long-term social maladjustment, warning,

If the older woman is herself of the homosexual type and encourages and reciprocates the girl’s affection great harm may be done the girl by causing her to select one of her own sex as the object of her love.

(p. 533)

Caution and thoughtfulness, she concludes, must be taken to assure the girl’s “normal development of heterosexuality” (p. 533).

“This Woman Is Morally Unfit for Her Position”

The figure of the immoral teacher remains an enduring image in plays of the 1920s through the 1940s. Homosexuality was not the only transgression: heterosexual teachers preying on students was also a familiar topic. These plays often show the ways in which teachers and professors use their positions of power to dominate young and vulnerable lives. Plays about heterosexual male teachers and professors behaving badly include Paul Osborn’s Hotbed (1928), which involves a college rhetoric instructor who is having a dalliance with a young co-ed; Irving Stone’s Truly Valiant (1936), which focuses on a college professor who impregnates a young student boarder, putting his textbook deal into jeopardy; and The Druid Circle (1947) by John Van Druten, a play about a bitter and cruel college professor who perversely humiliates a pair of student lovers. In all of these examples, the harm the teachers and professors inflict is secondary to the possible damage the controversies may have on their careers and schools.

Arguably the most famous morally and mentally unfit schoolteacher to appear on stage is Blanche DuBois from Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Blanche claims to have left her high school English teaching job as a result of fatigue and anxiety over losing Belle Reve, the family home. She explains to Stella, “I was so exhausted by all I’d been through my – nerves broke. […] So Mr. Graves – Mr. Graves is the high school superintendent – he suggested I take a leave of absence” (Williams, 2004, p. 14). She actually became involved with a 17-year-old male student, however, and when the superintendent finds out from the student’s father, she is terminated. As Stanley explains, “They told her she better move on to some fresh territory. Yep, it was practickly a town ordinance passed against her!” (Williams, 2004, p. 123). Her affair with the young man is, according to the characters who debase her, a symptom of her sexual insatiability and her unchecked sexual desire eventually leads to an emotional and psychological breakdown.

As Leibman (1987) argues, Blanche is a victim of her own sexuality and she is “punished with insanity for expressing [her] desire” (p. 27). Blanche is considered especially immoral because she is linked with homosexuality (having married Allen, a gay man, and impelled his suicide) and teenagers (evident in her scene with the newspaper boy). Guilt over Allen’s death and loneliness drive Blanche to moral unfitness and she uses the cover of spinsterhood. She confesses to Mitch,

Yes, I had many intimacies with strangers. After the death of Allen—intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with…I think it was panic, just panic, that drove me from one to another, hunting for some protection—here and there, in the most—unlikely places—even, at last, in a seventeen-year-old boy.

(Williams, 2004, p. 146)

Blanche epitomizes the sexually deviant school teacher trope. On the surface, she is respectable, spouting poetry and speaking pristine (southern) English. She refers to herself as an “old maid school teacher” (Williams, 2004, p. 60) and she recoils from anything reeking of commonness or prurience. However, the chinks in her armor are clear early on, such as the need for excessive alcohol to calm her nerves (Williams, 2004, p. 11), but she hides behind the cover of professional and personal respectability. Not unlike a vampire, Blanche is dependent on young people to maintain her own youthfulness. In exchange for wisdom and verses, Blanche desires emotional comfort and recaptured innocence. She tells Mitch that when she lost her job, “My youth was suddenly gone up the water-spout” (Williams, 2004, p. 147). Students and strangers offer provisional sustenance but Blanche pays a high price for satisfying her attempts to hold onto passing time.

Teachers, particularly women in the profession, were expected to be sexually inactive and disinterested, thus the legal prohibition on married teachers in many communities through the 1930s. Yet schools are often imagined as places for innocent romances and harmless crushes among the students; Blanche alludes to this when she tells Mitch that her attempts to engage her pupils in literary pursuits are often for naught:

Their literary heritage is not what most of them treasure above all else! But they’re sweet things! And i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Unfit to Teach: Morality, Panic and Hazardous Teachers
• Response to Chapter 1: Sexual Perversity in Our Dreams of Teaching
• 2 Educating Frank: Mentorship in Willy Russell’s Educating Rita
• Response to Chapter 2: Educating Rita Today
• 3 Fun Home: Representations of a Fractured Father
• Response to Chapter 3: The Complex Multiplicities of Teaching: Finding the Right Metaphor
• 4 The Teacher’s Ethos in William Mastrosimone’s Tamer of Horses
• Response to Chapter 4: The Teacher as Savior Fallacy
• 5 Teaching the Coach, Coaching the Teacher
• Response to Chapter 5: Reading Coaches Critically
• 6 A Rocker in Teacher’s Clothing: Outlandish Lessons in School of Rock: The Musical
• Response to Chapter 6: The Danger of Deweys: What Real Teachers Face
• 7 A Holey Trinity: Crises of Communion in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt
• Response to Chapter 7: Faith and Futurity: Embracing the Struggle
• Index