Dekoekkoek Blog 1

1.  To be honest, I don’t see a strong connection between the characters of Oleanna and the real world.  The dialogue is interesting, and so is the conflict created between the two characters, but is all highly artificial, primarily because Oleanna’s character and her actions are so devious and unbelievable.  I do believe that there are real criticisms to be made of “higher education,” but I’m not sure that the play addresses them.  The primary goal of Oleanna is to overthrow the professor from his position of power, and institute her “group’s” agenda.  In other words, Oleanna wants to control the curriculum of the school.  My question would be, why would you even go to school in the first place if you felt your teachers were wrong, needed to be torn down, and the curriculum replaced with your superior ideas?  Oleanna, at least in her own mind, doesn’t need a teacher.  She accuses her professor in once instance saying “You are not god.”  But she might just as well have said “I am god” since she felt perfectly comfortable putting her books and her ideas in place of his.  In other words, she didn’t ever actually have a problem with the social power and authority of his position as a teacher.  She merely wanted it for herself.

The play doesn’t seem to do a good job to me of reflecting the position of a lower-class or socially divergent student, simply because her character is so maliciously devious and manipulative.  Oleanna is totally unlikeable as a character, and I don’t think she reflects at all underprivileged or social outliers at all.  At least, none of the ones that I know would want to be associated with her!

I understand that we could view the professor as the “bourgeoisie”, and Oleanna as the “proletariat”, but isn’t the fact that she is attending what appears to be a prestigious school actually mark her as a member of the bourgeoisie class, or at least a future bourgeoisie in training?  I don’t actually see a theme of exploitation in Oleanna, other than perhaps the text-book aspect.  The modern cartel system of text-books (twenty editions with no real changes to content) and price gouging is definitely a system of exploitation against American students and the families who food the bill.

I’m not really sure what the author’s worldview is just from watching this one work, because he never judges either of his characters, but rather steps back and let’s you decide for yourself who you hate more.  I wonder if maybe the point of his work was less about social commentary than it was about the art of creating strong emotional reactions in his audience?

2.  In the beginning of Oleanna the professor clearly is in the position of power.  I would argue that his powerful is legitimate though, since he presumably is teaching a subject that he is an expert on, while his students are not.  Also, his students are perfectly free to not attend his class and pay for his services (it is a private college), so his authority, while real, is not coercive in any way, and presumably, his students are voluntarily submitting to his authority.  Oleanna, after filing her complaint has the upper hand for the rest of the play, and actually has her final victory over the professor when he loses his temper and hits her.  The difference is that her hegemony was gained through deceit and manipulation.  She attempted coercion near the end when she made a list of her demands to her professor and offered to rescind her fraudulent complaint against him if he agreed to her hegemony.  I would argue then that her hegemony was complete at that moment, but that it was also illegitimate since it rested on fraud, lies, and coercion.  This brings up interesting questions about what makes authority and power legitimate or illegitimate.  What is ironic, is that if we do view Oleanna’s character as the revolting proletariat and John as the overthrown bourgeoisie, her successful revolution is no real success at all since she is clearly just as much or more of a tyrant than the professor that she accuses of just those flaws.  In other words, it brings up the question, whose tyranny is worse, the tyranny of the bourgeoisie, or the tyranny of the proletariat once he has taken the power formerly exercised by the other?

4.  I do believe that social conflict is very real, but the conflict in Oleanna is so artificial, and the character of Oleanna so unbelievable that I don’t see it as a good reflection of real-world social issues.  I found Oleanna’s constant nagging of the professor about his language to be quite annoying since I saw it as an attack on knowledge and on the beauty of the English language.  My personal perspective is that if you have a poor vocabulary and don’t understand the language being used, it is your problem, not the speaker’s.  I love the English language and I love words, and I think it is offensive to ask someone to dumb down their speech.  Oleanna seemed to take it as a personal insult that John used a large vocabulary instead of taking it as an opportunity to better herself and increase her knowledge.  I found this attack on the beauty of language disturbing.  John’s jargon could be viewed as elitist, but we should change that by helping everyone to speak beautifully regardless of social class.  Why let the elites have a monopoly on the command of the English language?  It definitely could exclude some people from the conversation, but then maybe they should be in a less advanced class?  It does afford him power as well, the power that comes from knowledge, but again the question is whether that power is legitimate or not.

5.  Oleanna in the early part of the play basically lies about not understanding her professors vocabulary, and accuses him of “strutting and posturing”, but we later find that she is actually quite eloquent herself.  So her whole objection to his use of large words was actually just a sinister ploy to fool him into thinking that she was inferior to him and needed his help.  It is interesting to watch her use of language transform throughout the play as she increases in power.  In a sense, she ends the play becoming what she claimed to hate (the eloquent exerciser of power), while John is left stuttering and muddled in his speech, with his final words being nothing more than a dazed “Oh God.”

6.  I really wonder as I said before if the play is more about the art of evoking powerful responses.  If it is a cautionary tale meant to warn professors and teachers, it fails, since John is an unusually foolish teacher, and Oleanna is a unusually sinister student.  As I mentioned before, I find it hard to really pull any real world lessons out of this play since I find both of the characters, but particularly Oleanna to be totally unbelievable.  I wonder if perhaps the scholar Richard Badenhausen was just being opportunistic by weighing in on a contemporarily faddish play (Oleanna) that was all the buzz at the time?  I find it personally difficult to engage in a conversation about social lessons taught by the play since I see it more as a artistic and powerful work of fantasy designed to evoke strong emotions, than as a educational work of social commentary.

7.  Now that is interesting analysis!  That is one lesson we could take from the play; how a person can use false accusations to destroy another person and remove them from a position of power.  Curry quotes the definition of sexual harassment as "Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when submission to such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual's employment; submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for employment decisions affecting the individual; or such conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual's work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment.”  I think his argument that Oleanna is really about false allegations is totally accurate since John’s behavior never met the definition of sexual harassment.

8.  I completely agree with Showalter’s assessment!  Neither character is very likeable, and Oleanna is especially unlikeable and unrealistic just because of her attitude and her lies.  Showalter basically says that Mamet fails to deal with the issue of sexual harassment since the play is really about false accusations of harassment.  I think if I was a feminist I’d be more than a bit annoyed at being represented by Oleanna’s character and would voice the same objections!