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    French & Italian

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    Professor Gerrard retires after 35 years at IUB

    Charlotte Gerrard
    Charlotte Gerrard
    		 
    When asked about the greatest rewards of her career, Professor Charlotte Gerrard evokes her love of teaching and her many and lasting friendships with former students, with whom she maintains a voluminous correspondence. For instance, one student sends Gerrard a postcard whenever he travels or whenever he sees anything to do with her favorite writer, Jean-Paul Sartre. These many friendships extend to students who never took a course with her and yet say that she contributed importantly to their growth as human beings. Gerrard's devotion to her students and her interest in teaching can be measured by the fact that, in 35 years at Indiana University, she took only two sabbatical leaves.

    Charlotte Gerrard was born in Stamford, Conn., and grew up in New York City. Completing high school at the age of 16, then finishing her BA at Ohio State in two and a half years, Gerrard knew she wanted to continue her studies. Her MA thesis at Ohio State was on free will in plays of Camus and Sartre. At the University of Pittsburgh (where she was the recipient of an Andrew Mellon fellowship), she completed her dissertation on heretical plays from 1950 to 1951 by Sartre, Cocteau, Montherlant, and Thierry Maulnier. In the course of doing so, she became particularly interested in Montherlant, who, before committing suicide himself, had written extensively about the act.

    Gerrard's dissertation led to her book, Montherlant and Suicide (1977). She has also published on Sartre, Ionesco, Boris Vian, and Thierry Maulnier and has an article forthcoming on writer and artist Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, whose works she has researched in the south of France.

    Gerrard considers the most interesting year of her life to be the one she spent in Japan on a Fulbright teaching grant in 1958-59. She became interested in Japan through a friend who had been in Korea and Japan with the Red Cross, and also through Japanese students she had met. Although hired officially to teach English to junior high-school students, Gerrard gave English lessons without pay to adults, including medical students. Many of these remain warm friendships to this day, and Gerrard's friends frequently exchange visits with her in the U.S. and Japan.

    While at Ohio State, Gerrard embarked on her lifelong passion for the theater. She was a frequent performer in productions in Columbus, Ohio, playing Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion and Dollyheart in The Glass Harp by Truman Capote, where she had to climb up a tree-house set on a darkened stage. She performed in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, as well as in The Pleasure of His Company. She is able to laugh about playing the nurse in a "terrible" production of Medea in Wisconsin.

    Gerrard feels that one of her most rewarding roles was that of Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. To this day, she is unable to look at a new moon without echoing Amanda's line, "such a silva slippa of a moon."

    Gerrard came to IU in 1965 and immediately fell in love with a campus that is particularly beautiful in spring and fall. She speaks warmly of having enjoyed a pleasant department and colleagues throughout her career here.

    Yet Gerrard herself contributed much to the life of the department, regularly directing staged-reading performances of such works as Racine's Phèdre, Molière's Tartuffe, Anouilh's La Répétition and Le Bal des voleurs, and Maître Pierre Pathelin. She also regularly organized competitions in French declamation and literary programs on such figures as Proust and Sartre.

    One of the future projects of ever-energetic Gerrard, now that she has retired, is to direct a program devoted to one of her favorite writers, André Gide.

    Margaret Gray and Russell Pfohl

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