A Visit to Hell
English teacher Ms. MaryJane Rice guides her students through Dante's Inferno after her own study last summer.
“I’ve got to get out of hell,” wrote Montrose teacher MaryJane Rice in her application essay for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study Dante’s Divine Comedy in Siena, Italy last summer. She has been teaching Dante’s Inferno for years, and after five weeks of text-crawling through the Purgatorio and Paradiso this past summer, she has finally emerged.
Ms. Rice was selected as one of only 16 teachers nationwide to participate in Dante’s Divine Comedy NEH Summer Seminar with world renowned Dante scholar Ronald Herzman. She brought back rich experiences and a deeper knowledge of Dante to share with her students - not only as they read The Inferno, but also as they uncover meaning in all of the texts she teaches.
As 11th grade students at Montrose know, in The Inferno, Dante and his guide Virgil journey through hell and meet popes, politicians, conspirators, and even young lovers along the way. With Ms. Rice as their classroom guide, the girls not only study the text but consider the political and social context and the larger questions of good and evil, which it presents. “Sin, punishment and conversion are all present in the text,” said Ms. Rice.
Natalie Montalbano ’17 said, “Ms. Rice is really excited about The Inferno, and that gets students excited to learn about it. Not only does she help us understand The Inferno within the larger context of the whole Divine Comedy, but she ties it to all the other works we are reading this year. She really helps you see the parallels.”
Ms. Rice works to make the text accessible to the students. “I try to make it as manageable as possible.” she said. “The foundation the girls have in Western Civilization and philosophy from the Montrose curriculum is tremendously helpful.”
In Ms. Rice’s AP Literature class, each student writes an original canto inspired by The Inferno, with the same poetic structure, explains a student reporter in The Looking Glass. “The particulars of these [cantos] is up to the choice and imagination of the students.”
According to Ms. Rice, ”These cantos become some of the students’ best work, because of the inspiration.” She cited Mary Glynn ’17's original canto, praising its use of light imagery:
He continued, “they see themselves in everything. The world is a self based geocentric system, that neither Copernicus nor Galileo could disprove. They think they can create their own light in the world.
They rejected God's light, the light and joy of selflessness, of salvation. Now they drown in it. But it is received on unable eyes, thus torture.
Here it is a cold, penetrating, evil light -- to them at least.”
“Being a student again gave me tremendous perspective into my students’ experiences when confronting a challenging text, something you can forget as a teacher,” said Ms. Rice. “Being immersed in Dante’s ‘world’ with other high school teachers really reaffirmed the universality of the text and the importance of its perennial themes.”
An independent school for girls in grades 6-12
Inspired by the teachings of the Catholic Church
Inspired by the teachings of the Catholic Church
