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...by the possibilities this proposed curriculum opens up, Sara, not the least because its point of departure is Rhodessa Jones' dismissal of "magical thinking." Your proposal also takes on directly some of things that have begun to bother me since I began reading  Fraden's account of Jones's work (which I posted about on our "walled women" site). I did want to flag here, in particular, the very direct connection Jones makes between Medea and Sethe in Beloved. In Jones's analysis, "She took ‘em out…And it was an act of love. Something like the slave mother who bashes her children’s brains out so they wouldn’t be sold. There’s something liberating about a woman saying, ‘This I can do’....if she couldn’t be with them, maybe it was better that they were not left alone in the world amongst their enemies….’” Is THAT magical thinking?