Early Ninteenth Century: 1800-1865
Myths, Tales, and Legends
These two sections continue the exploration of the creation of myths
of national and personal identity that followed the emergence of the political
entity known as the United States. Whereas the depth and specificity of
scholarly knowledge that any given set of students will have about U.S.
history is unpredictable and inconsistent, students will bring to class
mythic or legendary senses of those cultural constructs called "America"
and "American history." Pedagogy can begin with an examination
of this historical consciousness on the part of the students--the "myths,
tales, and legends" students bring with them into the class.
The selections in this first section can thus be read in terms of both
historical connections with our various contemporary historical imaginations
and also their performative dimension as rhetoric intended to shape and
create a specific sense of the past. Class can begin by asking what expectations
and assumptions are created in a reader by the words "myth,"
"tale," and "legend." What are the differences between
the collectively produced legends and tales of an oral tradition (The "Tales
From the Hispanic Southwest," the Native American stories retold by
Schoolcraft, or the texts found in the section on Native American oral
narratives) and the individualized performances of Washington Irving, Edgar
Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick? In what
ways does a play like Mordecai Manuel Noah's
She Would Be A Soldier,
with its careful attention to theatrical detail and spectacular performance
history, represent an intersection between the public and the private,
the oral and the written? What are the strategies behind deliberately creating
a "legend"? These texts also demonstrate how the creators of
legends competed and debated with one another over questions of national
purpose and identity, whether in Irving's deflation of self-aggrandizing,
Eurocentric historians (
A History of New York), Noah's playful blend
of melodrama, gender-switching, and patriotic chauvinism (
She Would
Be A Soldier), or Cooper's (T
he Pioneers) and Sedgwick's (
Hope
Leslie) alternative versions of pioneer and Indian experiences.
Explorations of an "American" Self
This section changes the focus on mythmaking from the national to the
personal level. The word "exploration" suggests the rhetorical
dimension of these textual performances, as each writer strives to find
or create consensus among a diverse national audience in order to construct
a sense of personal identity at once collective and individual. From this
perspective, Emerson's creation and invocation of an "aboriginal Self"
in "Self-Reliance" can be seen as alternative rather than definitive,
as one of many claims to articulate a national sense of mission based on
the construction of a particular "American" identity. While Emerson
brought to his performances an access to cultural authority based on his
race, gender, and class status, other writers--Frederick Douglass, Harriet
Jacobs, Margaret Fuller, and George Copway--had to work hard simply to
establish a right to speak because of these same social factors. The class
can highlight the stakes involved in the debate over national identity
by asking questions about purpose, audience, and strategy: what was each
writer trying to achieve; who did each seem to be talking to; and why did
each think the strategy he or she used would work? Such an approach helps
focus critical attention on not just how an American identity might be
constructed, but for what ends. These questions can also apply to contemporary
constructions of the "American Self" and they look forward to
the section on "New Explorations of an `American' Self" in Volume
2 of
The Heath Anthology.
Issues and Visions in Pre-Civil War America
Most anthologies of literature published over the last fifty years have
relied on criteria derived from traditional New Critical models of literary
analysis. Those models valued what was taken to be the inherent formal
complexity of individual texts, a complexity seen as separate and separable
from the historical and cultural circumstances of the production of the
text. As a result, many pedagogical arguments over the canon have centered
on whether certain texts were "complicated" enough to sustain
extended classroom discussion or analysis and thus merit inclusion in an
anthology or a course syllabus. The implication was that some texts were
somehow self-evident in their meaning and intent, and therefore "simple,"
while other, seemingly more complicated texts, demanded and therefore deserved
close scrutiny; for example, what can you say about a novel as supposedly
straightforward and uncomplicated as
Uncle Tom's Cabin? But the
ambiguous, self-referential
Benito Cereno provides plenty of material
for class discussion.
As many instructors will testify, however, classroom experience often
tells a different story, where few if any nineteenth-century texts, no
matter how supposedly "simple" or "straightforward,"
are experienced as self-evident by first-time readers in the class. There
are at least two other pedagogical problems stemming from an emphasis on
"formal complexity" as well: the circularity of the argument--very
often definitions of formal complexity were based on the same texts they
were supposed to define--and, even more important to literary studies,
such a critical model failed to account for a large number of texts considered
significant by nineteenth-century readers, and thus prevented a richer
understanding of cultural history.
The "Issues and Visions" approach to grouping texts addresses
these concerns in the classroom by recognizing that literary and linguistic
complexity resides not apart from but within the historical and cultural
context of a text. Such an approach emphasizes texts as rhetorical performances,
performances as complex as the rhetorical demands and contingencies to
which they respond: A Christian Indian appealing to a dominant culture
audience responsible for both his religious faith and the subjugation of
his people (Elias Boudinot); a Northern single mother writing satirical
denunciations of male dominance for a popular press dominated by male editors
and publishers (Fanny Fern); an ex-slave demanding both racial justice
and gender equality before an audience of white women (Sojourner Truth).
The title alone of Angelina Grimké's "Appeal to the Christian
Women of the South" suggests the complexity of the rhetorical situation
she faced (and hence makes a good starting place for class discussion),
balancing issues of gender, race, religion, region, and class in arguing
for the abolition of slavery.
By challenging the notion of "background" material, the interrelationship
of text and context in this rhetorical approach has important pedagogical
implications for the question of how much historical information students
need to understand any text, whether its author is Ralph Waldo Emerson
or Sojourner Truth; Abraham Lincoln or Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. Students
can be encouraged to explore the historical context
through the
text by raising questions of rhetorical strategy. Beginning with the ideas
and assumptions about slavery and abolition, the struggle for women's rights,
the Indian experience, or the history of the West that students bring with
them, the class can then explore how a particular text confirms, resists,
or otherwise complicates those ideas and assumptions. Exploring the students'
reading experiences of the texts can lead to questions about why writers
use a certain vocabulary, set of references, or set of rhetorical strategies,
and these questions in turn involve thinking about who the contemporary
audience(s) for that text were and what expectations and values they held.
Elaine Sargent Apthorp's teaching guide for John Greenleaf Whittier contains
excellent examples of assignments designed to focus students' attention
on the complexity of Whittier's performance as a public poet dedicated
to political activism.
The Flowering of Narrative
The pedagogical Introduction to the "Issues and Visions" section
suggests that students should be encouraged to regard texts not as static
set pieces but as complex rhetorical performances embedded in cultural
debates over race, gender, political legitimacy and economics. While this
"cultural rhetoric" approach seems especially suited for the
consideration of "noncanonical" material that doesn't fit neatly
into the traditional genre categories of poetry, drama and fiction (for
example, newspaper columns, personal letters, memoirs, political speeches),
it represents not a special technique to use with "unusual" materials,
but a means of seeing all texts--and all acts of reading--as performative.
Instead of regarding the textual performances in the sections in narrative
and poetry as standing apart from earlier, less "literary" selections,
instructors can use a cultural rhetoric approach to raise questions about
the differences in motive, impact, and strategy in such works on race and
slavery as Frederick Douglass' autobiography, Harriet Beecher Stowe's openly
polemical novel
Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Herman Melville's elusive
Benito Cerano. The class might, for example, analyze Nathaniel Hawthorne's
allegorical meditations on gender, aesthetics, obsession, and domination
in such stories as "Rappaccini's Daughter," "The Birth-mark,"
and "The Artist of the Beautiful" in the light of the arguments
regarding the political and social status of women in the nineteenth centuruy
raised by Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Depending on the background and training of individual instructors,
the names found in "The Flowering of Narrative" will represent
a mix of the intensely familiar with the radically new, the canonical with
the noncanonical. This mix will also be true for some students; for others,
however, "familiarity" may indicate little more than name recognition
and carry few if any implications of "greatness" or "classic"
status. For the instructor unsure of how to approach the new, and for the
students to whom almost every nineteenth-century text is strange and remote,
the first step may be the question of the canon itself, and specifically
an expansion of the question Judith Fetterley reports her students asking
in regard to Caroline Kirkland: Why haven't we heard of these writers before?
(For other writers the question would be the reverse: Why
have we
heard so much about them?) As the class reads through these selections,
they can classify or reclassify the writers in terms of technique, subject
matter, or audience appeal. Such discussions can provide the foreground
for considerations of how canons have been constructed historically (it
can often be illuminating to look at copies of tables of contents from
anthologies from the nineteenth century to the present).
The Emergence of American Poetic Voices
If many students come into class with the assumption that "poetry"
is necessarily distant and obscure, the section on "Songs and Ballads"
can lead to discussions both about definitions of poetry and where these
definitions come from. This in turn can involve discussions about the different
kinds of cultural work poems do, from self-expression to the ritual building
of a sense of communal solidarity, from self-examination to social protest.
Equally important is the inclusion of song lyrics, for they remind students
that not only is poetry still an active part of contemporary cultural life
in general, but part of many students' lives in particular.
If the texts in the "Issues and Visions" sections provide
cultural context for these poems, then the inclusion of poetry and fiction
in the "Issues and Visions" sections themselves gives students
practice in discussing issues of genre and style from different perspectives:
How would we read Whitman differently, for example, if he were included
in the section on abolitionist literature? If Whittier were included with
Bryant and Longfellow (as he often is) rather than with William Lloyd Garrison
and David Walker? If Emily Dickinson, Frances Sargent Locke Osgood, or
Lydia Howard Hunt Sigourney were included in the section on the "The
Woman Question"? These exercises in classification and reclassification
can also work within this section: many anthologies and syllabi have grouped
Whitman and Dickinson as opposed to Longfellow and Bryant. What other possibilities
are there, and what do they reveal? And again, such questions lead back
to a consideration of the processes and purposes of canon formation.
