Lifelong Learning at Swarthmore: Gender Dramas

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“What does a woman want?” Freud’s famous question has been asked — and in strikingly different ways illuminated — by writers well before and after Freud. We shall explore dramas of yearning and desire in three remarkable novels of the 19th and early 20th century: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1851), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878), and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). The heroines in these novels memorably confront and engage gender norms operative in their culture. What light does each novel shed on the struggles engaged? How do the novels’ embodied stance toward such gender arrangements affect that light? Perhaps a third question as well: how does their way of dramatizing these issues provoke questions of your own? “Gender” serves as the fulcrum in this course description, but our aim goes beyond any set of “prescriptions” or “proscriptions.” Rather, it is to do justice to each writer’s creative take on the drama of yearning and desire.

This virtual class will be held on the following Tuesdays: Sept. 8, Sept. 22, Oct. 6, Oct. 27, Nov. 10, Dec. 1, Dec. 15

Philip Weinstein joined the Swarthmore College English Department in the early 1970s, teaching there until his retirement in 2015. He has published nine books of literary criticism, with special interest in Faulkner (his Becoming Faulkner won the Hugh Holman for the best book on Southern Literature published in 2010).

A regular contributor to LLS classes, Phil has continued to teach and to write, post-retirement. His most recent book — Time’s Bounty (2026) — examines several dramas set in motion by our entry into old age. In literate but jargon-free language, Time’s Bounty seeks to shed light on a phenomenon shared by a very large audience indeed: the phenomenon of aging.

Read more about the program on our website.

About Lifelong Learning at Swarthmore:
These seminar-style classes are offered virtually and taught by distinguished or emeritus faculty. Courses span a broad range of disciplines and welcome alumni and friends of the College from across the nation and around the globe.

Questions? Please contact Mary Carr at mcarr1@swarthmore.edu.

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