"Significant Moments" and Multimodality

If I were to teach this short story in a secondary school classroom, I would probably do so at the upper secondary level, because a great deal of the emotional weight of the text lies in what is unsaid, or at least implied. Students at the upper secondary level would probably experience less difficulty in relating to the mother/daughter relationship, and its (arguable) thematic concerns like gender roles in early-mid 20th Century America, and the purpose/ power of storytelling vis-a-vis this relationship and these roles. 

While I like the YouTube clip Shu May shared, and would probably use it to help students get a sense of what it might have been like for the narrator's mother, I think I might also include this clip from The Hours (inserted below), to demonstrate two different ways in which women might have responded to their (gendered) social pressures. I would give a brief overview of the relevant characters, and a short summary of the scene leading up to this one to contextualise the clip, explaining that Kitty, the visiting neighbour who appears to have it all, and seems irritatingly self-confident and even boastful of her housekeeping abilities, is projecting this self-confidence and energy to hide her intense fear of her impending surgery, implicitly related to her infertility issues, which she is also intensely depressed over. Students could then relate her management of her depression/ disappointment/ fear to Laura's visible numbness and far weaker attempts at maintaining a happily domestic front, to what is implied about the narrator's mother in the short story, looking specifically at how these three women relate to conceptualisations of themselves as mothers (or, for Kitty, never-mothers). 

Hopefully the visual juxtaposition (as well as the visual representation of a 50's All-American home), and having other characters in similar positions to which to compare the narrator's mother would provide a specific angle into the text, which might otherwise seem a little oblique or too nebulous to get a hold of. 

In general, I think that there is room for multimodality -- in fact, we are probably using/ implementing it/ have experienced it in our own literature classes without having quite realised it. For instance, dramatizing extracts was not unheard of in my literature classes as a student, and we often drew pictures to depict certain scenes. However, I think that multimodality should be used to enhance the teaching of the text -- not to distract from it -- and teachers shouldn't feel compelled to find the one clip or song or artwork that might encompass the concerns of the whole text. Instead, as I have done (and I do hope this is okay), it could be used to address just one aspect of the text that might be better addressed with the help of this multimodal approach than not, while not feeling compelled to overburden the text with multimodality where this might not necessarily aid in the appreciation/ understanding of the text. In this case, close reading and examination of the diction and other authorial decisions (especially with regards to its apparent plotlessness), cannot be replaced by any use of multimodality, although some thematic concerns might be better led into, as it were, with the use of multimodality.