Scopophilia, Charlotte Smith, and Jackass

My biggest challenge as a teacher is to make my topic, literature, relevant to students who live in a predominantly visual culture. As I've mentioned before, most of these students live their day-to-day lives with no interest in dead poets and authors, so I feel like I come into my classroom with a tough sell on my hands. Last class we were discussing the poetic tradition so that they could make sense of all the allusions used in older (i.e. pre-20th century) poetry. We began with "Sonnet I" of Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, because this poem introduces the figure of the Muse, the poetic laurel wreath, the idea of the poet suffering for his/her art, the nightingale, and the issue of publicly performing a private emotion. It's a loaded poem!

I asked them to define the term "scopophilia," which they correctly guessed to be "the love of looking." Critics use this term to describe Smith's work because she engages in marketing her actual personal suffering (legal and financial woes) in the production of her poetry: she needs to sell poems to make money. She plays on her audience's scopophilia, its love of looking at her suffering, and I wanted my students to be aware of her motivations for writing as they learned the poetic conventions, because Smith subverts many of them in order to increase her audience's sympathy.

Then, in the midst of our discussion, I had a revelation on just how I could make the leap from an 18th-century poet to my contemporary audience of students: Jackass: The Movie. That's right; as "low" as Jackass may be, it enacts Smith's same ploy. The movie asks its audience to watch its performance of suffering. The characters make a self-conscious decision to suffer in the public eye, and they take advantage of the public's fascination with spectacle. I asked my students if they had seen the movie or the MTV show, and almost everyone had. Then I showed them the connection. As I watched the "light bulbs" go on in their eyes, I have to admit that I had a slight feeling of triumph. It may have taken Jackass to get them to understand Smith, but I doubt they will forget Smith's project in Elegiac Sonnets or the poetic conventions of "Sonnet I." (Well, at least until after the exam).