Photo by Francesca Marie ‘21
By Jesse Hausknecht-Brown ’25
Features Editor
With the Metropolitan Museum of Art on their minds, 48 Mount Holyoke French students piled onto a bus to head to New York City. The trip took place on Saturday, Feb. 26, with the group leaving around 8 a.m. and returning to campus later that evening.
“The trip was really nice. I’d never been to the Met before, so it was really nice to see the museum. Luckily, I had a couple friends that also went on the trip, so it was nice to go through the Museum in a group,” Anna McGrath ’24 said. “It was really educational as well.”
Catherine Le Gouis, Reverend Joseph James Hilary Paradis Professor of French and chair of the French department, explained that this group was the largest number of students she had ever taken on an outing of this type.
“I thought the trip went extremely well. … It was a very large group of students … [and] they were very interested in what we were doing,” Le Gouis said. “We all appreciate the opportunity, because, of course, they’ve been pretty few and far between because of the pandemic.”
Noemi Vega ’25, a prospective French major, had visited the Met when she was very young and enjoyed being able to go back again.
“[The] value of this trip is that it’s a change of scenery from campus, [and] you see artifacts from across the globe, and exposure [to things] you might not ever get to see in your lifetime,” Vega said.
Three alumni were involved in the trip: one rode with the group to the Met, while two others joined the group at the museum. “Alums are very generous; I’m immensely grateful to our alums,” Le Gouis said. “It’s also a very nice opportunity to see alums, former students, some [of whom] have become close friends.”
Le Gouis is always looking for museum exhibits with a French or francophone theme. This time, the Met had an exhibit on Jacques Louis David, an 18th and 19-century French painter. The exhibit is on display from Feb. 17 to May 15, 2022.
“The first exhibit I went to was the David exhibit — he was a painter in the French Revolution era. That was really cool because they had a bunch of his sketches before he painted, and you [could] see the evolution of his works,” McGrath said. She also enjoyed being able to see paintings done by her favorite painter, Claude Monet.
McGrath is a French and Environmental Studies double major who has been taking French since eighth grade and aims to achieve fluency in the language.
“I think [learning another language] opens up so many other perspectives in the world that you wouldn’t necessarily get if you didn’t study another language. The view of the world from other cultures — you kind of get that when you study other languages, because you’re not just studying the language, you’re [also] studying how they speak, why they speak that way [and] the culture as well,” McGrath said. “It also opens up so many more opportunities, because you can communicate with so many more people.”
Le Gouis echoed this sentiment, and explained that when people learn different languages, they have “that many more sets of eyes.”
“I think it’s something that is an important part of the College’s mission, for us to be helping students to become global citizens,” Le Gouis said. “I think it’s just very important for us to be responsible, global citizens [who are] informed and able to have this extra perspective and able to function in other cultures.”
McGrath believes that it is important to offer students a wide variety of language-learning opportunities. She felt limited in high school, where her school system only offered Spanish, French and German.
“The merging and the cutting of languages is kind of disheartening,” McGrath said. “At least the French department hasn’t had too many cuts that I’ve noticed, so there’s still a variety of classes I can take on a variety of subjects in French, but … I have many friends in other language departments that are having trouble finding engaging classes at Mount Holyoke in those languages, which is just disheartening.”
Le Gouis, who believes strongly in learning by immersion, wants students to have a well-rounded education in not only the French language but the other cultural components as well.
“I think [trips like this] add to the multidimensional [aspect]” Le Gouis said. “Immersion is not just language; it’s culture and seeing art and visiting museums and being with the objects. The culture really helps add to that multi-dimensional experience.”