Elizabeth Mathias
St John's University Jamaica, N.Y.
Teaching Lawrence in Sicily: An Ethnographic Laboratory
D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda lived at "Fontana Vecchia" in Taormina, the seaside town in eastern Sicily , for over two years. The couple visited Palermo and Lawrence gave detailed descriptions of both areas in his travel account, Sea and Sardinia (1921). The author attended the marionette theatre and ended his travel account with a striking description of Sicilian folk theater.
Teaching a one month long summer course, "Sicilian Culture" for American college students in Messina Sicily in June, 2004 gave me the opportunity to use Sea and Sardinia as the primary textbook for my class of eighteen women. The town spaces of Messina, Taormina and Palermo served as our open air classroom and ethnographic laboratory. The class was a great success. Students responded well to the opportunity for such freedom, as they retraced the steps of an esteemed author, seeing places and people through his eyes, comparing his and their own experience and writing about it all in their field notebooks. According to the students the class had the exciting atmosphere of a "treasure hunt." Each student read Sea and Sardinia, then, using the Sicilian sections of the work as the guide, kept a detailed personal field diary in a spiral notebook. Each recorded Lawrence's observations about places, people and things, and each wrote about her own observations, taking account of how things had changed since l921. Some students sketched to illustrate their experiences. Most reported Lawrence's feelings, spoke of their own feelings and sometimes argued with Lawrence. I collected the field notebooks each Monday, evaluated them and wrote suggestions about how to improve the work,. I tried to return the notebooks to the students the next day. Among the places each student re-visited were the cliff descent to the Taormina railroad station, the town squares, and local industries active in Lawrence's day, the lime pits and kilns, and the lemon processing factory. In Palermo students attended a performance of the Marionette theater at the International Museum of Marionettes, Antonio Pasqualino. Luckily the show was similar to that described by Lawrence. It enacted an episode from "Orlando Furioso" with its clashing puppet knights ferociously battling the Moors.
Bringing Lawrence's work alive in the students world in this ethnographic way could be done by any teacher and it could add another vital dimension to teaching his work. A professor would not necessarily need to take the class to the locations described by Lawrence. Tools such as videotapes, photographs, or commercial films could be used.