Late Nineteenth Century: 1865-1910
The Development of Women's Narratives; Regional Voices, National Voices
The conjunction/contradiction of the terms "regional" and
"national," along with the focus on gender indicated by
women's
narrative, both suggest a turn away from a deductive approach to literary
categorization and analysis based on assumptions concerning what is universal
or central about the human--and more specifically the national--experience
and a move toward an inductive approach that recognizes the value of regarding
the specificity of cultural context in understanding how a text works.
Rather than
a priori assuming certain texts or cultural experiences
to be marginal because they foreground issues of region and gender, and
thereby assert the centrality of other texts supposedly free of such "ancillary"
considerations, we can instead expand the possibilities for classroom discussion
and pedagogical practice by regarding all human experience and cultural
expression as profoundly "regional," as intimately concerned
with questions of region and gender, as well as race, social class, and
other crucial processes of social definition. To group together, either
in the anthology or on a syllabus, Henry James and Charles Chesnutt, African-American
folktales, and
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is not to argue for
the "equivalency" of these texts according to some external standard
of literary evaluation, but to invite a consideration and comparison of
their regionalness--the unique cultural contexts of their productions--as
well as the dialogue, debate, and competition going on among them. Instead
of using a set methodology for the reading of all texts, the conjunction
of the texts in these sections asks students and teachers to consider how
different texts signal different audience expectations, how they indicate
or counter-indicate a desired audience, how they speak to a variety of
audiences and audience expectations at once, how "regions," whether
regions of gender or geography, race or class communicate with each other.
If we regard all texts as regional, from the perspective of pedagogy
the primary region for class investigation is the classroom itself, where
the particularity and "regionality" of each student's response
to the literature occurs. As a preparation for a discussion of terms like
"central" and "regional," "major" and "minor,"
"representative" and "marginal," students can explore
their own responses to see what they find familiar and foreign in these
texts. Here again the inductive approach works well, for while such reactions
will obviously vary from student to student and from class to class, they
provide us with a region-specific context for the consideration of the
reception history of these works. Following Judith Fetterley's lead in
The Resisting Reader, not only women in the class can explore the
traditional experience of reading texts that assume the centrality of male
experience, but all students can consider the difference represented by
texts that assume the definitiveness and centrality of female experience--the
texts in the section on women's narrative and Kate Chopin, Grace King,
and Alice Dunbar-Nelson in the section on regional literature. Similarly,
students from outside the Northeast can discuss what it's like reading
texts that take the geography, climate, and culture of New England as a
norm, or that figure the West as someplace wild, exotic, and mysterious.
Clearly, this approach allows for a variety of cultural configurations
and can be adapted to the specific demographics of the individual classroom.
Late nineteenth-century women's narratives, because they were long dismissed
as merely "regionalist" writing, are in many ways now central
to this regional approach to pedagogy. In her essay on "Regionalism
and Woman's Culture," Marjorie Pryse suggests that the women writers
traditionally classified as "regionalists" (writers such as Mary
Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett) used the idea of region rhetorically
as a means of demonstrating that supposedly universal terms like "mother,"
"home," "black," and "white" are in fact
socially constructed, while at the same time negotiating a cultural space
to make such demonstrations. These texts thus raise the question of how
to get to center stage from the margins. Such a question functions both
as a means of interpreting a story like the chapter entitled "The
Actress" from Louisa May Alcott's novel
Work and a way of understanding
Alcott's position as a writer. Such a manipulation of center and margin
can be applied equally to Paul Laurence Dunbar or Charles Chesnutt, who
write of the African-American experience in the language of formal European
literary traditions (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s work on the African-American
cultural tradition of "signifyin(g)"--of both appropriating and
ironically transforming forms and values from the dominant culture as part
of an originally African rhetorical tradition--is especially applicable
here as well as suggestive of rhetorical strategies used by any marginalized
group), and to Samuel Clemens, who uses dialect and satire to write about
a middle-class white world he both despised and aspired to.
Issues and Visions in Post-Civil War America
The "Issues and Visions" section in Volume 1 defined four
initial contexts for the study of literary texts as rhetorical performances:
"Indian Voices"; "The Literature of Slavery and Abolition";
"Literature and the 'Woman Question' "; and "Voices from
the Southwest." One initial point of departure for classes using either
one or both volumes of
The Heath Anthology is the question of what
difference the Civil War makes, both in general historical terms and in
relation to these particular issues. Many institutions still structure
their survey classes in American Literature using 1865 as the dividing
line between old and new, the past and the modern, and this division reflects
and reinforces widespread, if often conflicting and loosely defined, beliefs
about the Civil War as the seminal event in American history. Again, the
versions of this general historical sense that students bring to class
can create the context for the reading and discussion of these post-Civil
War texts, beginning with considerations of how different interpretations
and representations of the Civil War serve different social, political,
and cultural purposes (the Ken Burns documentary, with its aestheticized
presentation, the attendant controversy over its romanticizing of the Confederate
military and political leadership, and its current status as fund-raising
cash cow for PBS can be one starting point.)
The issue of race and the struggles of African-Americans in post-Civil
War America found in the section on "Regional Voices, National Voices"
find representation here in the work of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, while
the majority of the texts in this section focus more on the evolution of
the women's movement and the efforts of both Native American and Latino
cultures to survive the continuing expansion of the U.S. empire. Again,
the idea of cultural rhetoric can serve as a pedagogical entry into these
texts by asking how these writers positioned themselves amidst various
and often conflicting cultural identities related to gender, ethnicity,
social class, religion, and region.
The question of empire--political, economic, and cultural--is particularly
important to the historical study of post-Civil War America and can provide
entry to these texts as well. Henry Adams's famous, and now canonical,
use of the image of the Virgin and the dynamo to signify the cultural difference
of modernity can be paired with Upton Sinclair's metaphor of "the
jungle," along with his harrowing depictions of the meat-packing industry,
as contrasting, yet not necessarily contradictory, visions of the impact
of the expanding capitalist economy. In both cases, asking students to
consider the perspectives from which these accounts are written (that of
a member of one of America's elite families versus that of a crusading
socialist journalist) can lead to discussions that integrate issues of
political philosophy, rhetorical purpose, audience, tone, diction, and
structure.
For example, Adams's scholarly allusions and ornate prose style, which
are often alienating for students, can be studied as strategies meant to
register with different members of the reading public in specific ways,
so that questions about the difficulty of his style can lead to questions
both about the audience he wants to reach and the audience he doesn't,
and about why a writer would deliberately aim for a narrow readership while
making claims for the universality of his analysis. The students can then
examine where they feel they stand in relation to Adams's intended audience.
The same questions, of course, can be posed in relation to Sinclair. In
his case, the strategy is to reach a wide readership and incite moral outrage.
Such questions of audience and rhetorical purpose lead to questions of
canonicity, questions of which styles and strategies come to be considered
"literary," which styles merely instrumental. Seeing and reading
Adams in terms of his particular cultural and social position extends this
discussion of canonicity to considerations involving the supposed universality
of certain texts and the equally supposed limited appeal of others. Why,
for example, has the skillfully rendered mid-life crisis of an upper-class
New England intellectual been seen as universal in significance while the
carefully constructed portrayal of the social practices leading to the
nervous breakdown of a middle-class woman (Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The
Yellow Wall-Paper") has until recently been ignored or thought of
as interesting only to a limited group of readers? Just as important, why
have attitudes changed regarding "The Yellow Wall-Paper"? The
purpose of such questions is not to insist that students adhere to a new
version of the canon or simply to discredit an older version, but to understand
that all considerations of literary merit and cultural significance take
place in the context of changing social and cultural values and as part
of ongoing debates about those values, debates that include college students
as both observers and participants.
New Explorations of an "American" Self
While earlier in American history, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Hector
St. John de Crèvecoeur, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederick Douglass
can be seen to have engaged in a highly self-conscious process of creating
models for a national identity, the texts in this section can be read as
attempts to assimilate, negotiate, and restructure established myths of
national identity. Students can prepare for reading these texts by exploring
their own received versions of these myths and by discussing various myths
of immigration and assimilation, including the implications, desirability,
and undesirability of the "melting pot" and other metaphors.
Beyond this examination of cultural mythology, the class can ground
their discussions by compiling their own individual and family immigration
histories. This project can include oral histories and research into various
immigrant experiences. These immigration histories, along with the texts
in this section, can then be approached in terms of how they do or don't
fit into stereotypical models of the American self and the immigrant experience;
more specifically, students can discuss the strategies these writers--as
well as students and their ancestors-- used in confronting these models.
Rather than simply reacting to a cultural situation, these texts attempt
in various ways to alter and revise that situation. How did the large influx
of Russian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, for example, adapt to
and transform the American cultural landscape? Finally, Gertrude Bonnin's
text continues the tradition among Native American writers of turning the
immigrant myth inside out by addressing the question of how members of
indigenous cultures deal with the experience of finding themselves strangers
in their own land.
