ABSTRACT
Michael Rosen’s bravura dramatic monologue, “The Register,” from his 2002 collection, No Breathing in Class, hilariously depicts the unravelling of a teacher’s control over her class during morning registration. The scene exclusively comprises the speech of the teacher, who, harassed as much by the other adults around her (an overbearing parent who will not leave the classroom) as by the ebullient children, is thwarted in her attempts to execute this routine ritual. By requiring us to read the scene through the matrix of the teacher’s spoken words without giving us access to her unspoken thoughts, Rosen positions the teacher as the object, and not the subject, of our attention. What fellow feeling we might muster for her doomed campaign to cling on to some semblance of order thus emerges as a form of sympathy rather than empathy, if, following Nancy Eisenberg, we take sympathy to be “an affective response that consists of feeling sorrow or concern for the distressed or needy other (rather than feeling the same emotion as the other person)” (678). But for all that he invites us to pity the teacher’s plight, indeed, even as he does so, Rosen does not spare this
supposed figure of authority from the full force of our laughter. Her inability to emerge intact from this trial by child renders her ridiculous, and Rosen’s poem licenses us – indeed, positively encourages us – to laugh as her command of the situation disintegrates before our very eyes.
