by Esther Hu

Beginning with Esther, Queen of Persia, who dares to speak to the king without being summoned, this course investigates female protagonists who take risks for the sake of friendship and family, community and conviction.

Thus began the course description of Biblical Women and Other Heroines, a Freshman Writing Seminar offered to incoming Cornell first-years in the fall of 2003. The course’s proposal had received an award from the Department of English; I had argued for a re-examination of stories that teach us how to live as responsible world citizens and stretch possibilities beyond traditional cultural and social norms. The biblical (Esther, Ruth), classical (Antigone), and literary (Jane Eyre) heroines we encountered that semester are inspirational in their unconventionality: as socially and/or politically marginalized beings, they fight for their own convictions and refuse to follow conventional scripts of female behavior or conduct. For instance: Esther, winner of the Miss Persia Beauty Pageant, risks her life to save her people; Ruth, a Moabite, gambles hers by refusing to abandon Naomi, an Israelite. In class, we debated the decisions of our female protagonists, and did not foreclose the possibility of conflicting interpretations.

In preparation for teaching this course in a secular classroom, I consulted the work of both academic scholars (Esther’s a “trickster”) and theologians. However, I knew that God had granted me a unique teaching assignment unlike any that I’ve ever received on the first day of class when a student from Cameroon said, “My parents wanted me to take this course because the word “Bible” is in the title. And, by the way, you remind me of my Taiwanese pastor.”

I realized pretty quickly that at a secular university I’d been assigned to teach a self-selected group of students interested not only in matters of writing but also in matters of faith: while a few of my students had no religious affiliation (and would consistently use the word “fate” as a substitute for “God” in discussing the Esther story), the majority came from Christian or Jewish backgrounds and were practicing believers (and would employ the word “providence” as a substitute for “fate”).

Two weeks into class, a Catholic student volunteered to read her autobiographical response to the Esther story: describing her experience as a first-year living far away from home and in unfamiliar surroundings as a sort of “exile,” she saw Cornell as her Persia, and herself as the Jewish Esther. Yet Cornell, she said, is her “palace to rule,” and her faith is her “beacon of hope and a reminder of home.” What is most important about Esther is that “she overcame…feelings of inadequacy and set her people free.”

Pedagogically, besides teaching students to read and write with disciplined imagination — giving lessons on the rare usages of the “passive voice” in, for example, Esther 8:5 (hence granting the king agency to write another edict, as my student astutely pointed out) — I sought to create a classroom environment where students could discuss religious themes and discourses with freedom and without embarrassment.

We talked openly about Helen Burns’s religious creed, Mr. Brocklehurst’s religious hypocrisy, and St. John Rivers’s egocentric asceticism in Jane Eyre, launching a frontal attack on “what constitutes an authentic faith” as part of one discussion, and taking the religious considerations in Charlotte Brontë’s authorial preface with intellectual seriousness in another. When my course leader (who also happened to be the English department chair) visited class to observe my teaching, it was apparent to her that students were contributing generously and engaging the text with enthusiasm and enjoyment.

First-year students are at a unique juncture during which they are just beginning to imagine (with seriousness) career possibilities and explore what they will ultimately come to care about. It was my unique privilege as a teacher to play my part in the intellectual and literary lives of seventeen first-years that semester, and to include, as part of our discussion, matters of faith, religion, and ethics — of courage, compassion, and reconciliation. It has been a joy to grant my vote of confidence to students who wish to explore matters of belief, and, in the secular classroom, to accept those whose faith is an integral part of their identity.

Esther Hu is currently a doctoral candidate in English Language and Literature at Cornell University. She and her husband reside in Lexington, MA.