Interpretation of "Resisting Geometry"

(Click here for text of Hostetler's poem.)

Ann Hostetler’s “Resisting Geometry” is a brilliantly playful poem about her battle with logic and reason, one in which she is ultimately triumphant. There are two distinct levels to this poem. Although we do not know for sure that the poem is autobiographical, the author speaks in first person, and from being in Dr. Hostetler's class I know she is an “English person” through and through, so it is conceivable, and in fact rather likely, that the poem is chiefly about young Ann Hostetler’s struggle with geometry. On another level, the poem is about the author’s relationship with her father, depicted and described through the story of a barely passed math class. The two levels are intertwined, and bits and pieces about the author’s father and her relationship with him are strewn throughout the story of a young girl wrestling with the philosophical nature of geometry.

The first stanza sets up the background for the rest of the poem, as well as providing a brief glimpse of the author and her father. The poet paints a picture of a disappointed father, who for the first time is confronted with his daughter’s academic struggles. Her image of the raincoat over one arm and the other arm around the young girl’s shoulder shows a father consoling a child who is not used to having difficulty in school. He relates to her his own troubles with math, but for the young girl it is not that kind of problem. She struggles with the idea of taking mathematical laws strictly on faith. Hostetler provides us with a number of examples: parallel lines will never intersect, a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, no two points can ever be in the same space at the same time. Such assertions appear to be true as far as she can see, but it all just seems too easy. She captures that feeling of doubt with that marvelous line, “But such self-evidence troubled me.”

The young girl who tells this story is obviously a deep thinker. She is not willing to accept the age-old mathematical truths simply because her teacher tells her they are true. Rather she must test the boundaries of mathematics. Lines 19-20 illustrate this defiance wonderfully. Hostetler writes, “Imagining exceptions, I felt called / to test the axioms, to wage a battle / against givens, resisting at the root.”  This resistance takes its form in tangible ways as she contrasts herself with the boy who is engaged in logical argument with the teacher, while she sits in the back of the classroom imagining and drawing shapes that do not conform to the rules of mathematics. Interestingly enough, the young girl’s ‘logically astute’ counterpart is male, possibly Hostetler’s way of underscoring the gender stereotypes when it comes to math in the classroom.

The poem’s crucial moment comes amidst James Taylor and doodling, when the young girl realizes what her mathematical hang-up is:


         “what was at stake for me was the axiomatic quality
         of reasoning itself, the ways in which our assumptions
         construct reality, become paradigms that organize our vision.” (lines 30-33)

The problem for her is that we assume too much, and these things that we’ve assumed but can’t really even prove become the building blocks for so much of the rest of what we then hold to be true. The next lines, in which she figures out the key to getting past her stumbling block, are hilarious:

        “I realized that no one took geometry
        as seriously as I did–at least no one
        who was failing, that is–and that
        in order to get on with life
        I would have to get beyond axioms,
        memorize theorems, prove hypotheses.” (lines 34-39)

The brilliance of this stanza is that if indeed we were to take geometry very seriously, we would arrive at precisely the same point that the author did, a point at which we wrestle with how we can take such fundamental principles on faith. The realization that she was taking geometry too seriously finally allowed the young girl to understand that math was merely a game, and she could learn the rules well enough to play and pass the class. The most beautiful part of the poem comes in the final two lines, after the young girl has received a D in the class by sheer will-power, forcing herself to adhere to rules that she does not ever truly accept. When she explains her grade in terms of triumphing and conquering something bigger than test scores and percentage, her father is seemingly not much impressed. The way in which Hostetler revisits the theme of taking things on faith betrays her sense of humor. She writes, “Even at fourteen I saw that he was weighing / how much he could take on faith.” The young girl’s father does not exactly rejoice with her at her profound discovery of how to conquer math.

The poem is at first glance about a young girl’s first challenging math class. Looking more closely, we can see that the poem is broader than that. It tells the story of a young girl who is not content with easy answers, a young woman who thinks profoundly. In this poem we glimpse something of the young Ann Hostetler, who, whether she ever wrestled with geometry or not, certainly has wrestled with questions of faith and what we can and cannot simply trust. This poem is about faith, mathematical and otherwise.


Greg Yoder
gregoryjygoshen.edu
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