english 290: american literature: the myth of the savage in U.S. literature and culture

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wittenberg university, spring 2005  

professor lori askeland

 

 

General Resources:

 

 

 

Week 1: Introduction and Puritan Roots:

Puritanism and “the Savage”: Sin, the Flesh, and the Savage Within                                  January 12-16

NOTE: ALWAYS PRINT OUT AND MARK UP ALL ASSIGNED ONLINE AND E-RES READINGS; BRING TO CLASS FOR DISCUSSION.

FOR THURSDAY:  Read

AND ALL the following ONLINE and HANDOUT SOURCES.  Bring your highlighted (pen-marked is even better!  Write comments!) copies to class:

&

Terms: “Puritanism” “Jeremaiad”

 

HOW TO USE E-RES: go to http://witt-eres.wittenberg.edu/courseindex.asp; find my name; click on “engl 290” type in the password: ask290 , and you should be able to find “Bradstreet Poetry Selections” as well as another way to link to the “To My Dear Children,” and the Winthrop)

Week 2: Puritans and Savagery, continued                                                                           January 17-21

FOR TUESDAY:

FOR THURSDAY:  “3 Native American Responses” (ERES), continued discussion of Rowlandson

Week 3: Jefferson, Wheatley and the New Nation,                                                               January 24-27

FOR TUESDAY:

The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution (BOTH in Grafton)

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, selections: XIV (esp. pp. 140-151) , XVII (all), XVIII (all). (I should have also included VI, pp. 62 [the French part is translated on pp. 305-306]-71.)

 Jefferson and slavery in the Declaration, as quoted from Thomas Jefferson’s Autobiography:

 "Congress proceeded the same day to consider the declaration of Independence which had been reported &  lain on the table the Friday preceding, and on Monday referred to a committee of the whole. The                pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with, still haunted the minds of many.      For this reason those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out, lest  they should give them offence. The clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of  slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others. The debates having taken up the greater parts of the 2d 3d & 4th days of July were, in the evening of the last, closed the declaration was reported by the committee, agreed to by the house and signed by every member present except Mr. Dickinson. As the sentiments of men are known not only by what they receive, but what they reject also, I will state the form of the declaration as originally reported."

 The following passage, which is describing the transatlantic slave trade, was, as a result, removed from the document:  [It was originally located after “—He has excited domestic insurrection amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian Savages . . .” (Grafton 8)]

 He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them to slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportations thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce, determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold.  That this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

 [The passage then continues after “ . . .  In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated Injury.” (Grafton 8).]

 Important Term: “Enlightenment” defined at http://www.philosopher.org.uk/enl.htm

 FOR THURSDAY: Talking Back to the Noble/Savage Myth: Phyllis Wheatley and other Women Speak Up

Phillis Wheatley selections (handout): available in class and via email, or at: Phillis Wheatley

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Declaration of Sentiments” http://www.closeup.org/sentimnt.htm

(See also the list of the signers, at http://www.nps.gov/wori/particip.htm)

Abigail/John Adams letters: http://www.piercecollege.com/usr/hollandk/ps19%5Cremem.htm   

 Read also Terms: "contact zone," "transculturation," and "autoethnography," as defined by Latin Americanist, Mary Louise Pratt (Relate these terms to Phillis Wheatley, Stanton, and the Native American writers discussed above). 

ESSAY #1 ASSIGNED

Week 4:  Fighting  Against the Savage         Myth: The Beginnings of Abolition                           Jan 31-Feb 4

FOR TUESDAY: David Walker’s Appeal:  Read the Sean Wilentz introduction, “The Mysteries of David Walker,” the Preamble and Article I.  Then skim the two pieces in the appendices.

ESSAY #1 PREWRITING & THESIS DUE

 THURSDAY: Read Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-Soul,” and “The Poet” (in Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays)  Also available with hyper-text links, notations, help, at http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/

 ONLINE: FYI, Nature, the hypertext version by Ann Woodlief at: http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/nature.html

 “American Transcendentalism: A Brief Definition,”  by Paul P. Reuben, http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap4/4intro.html

 Transcendentalism links: http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/

  Important Terms: “Transcendentalism,” (also, remember "typology" from the Puritan era; that kind of thinking is still at work, here, no?); “Romanticism” 

Week 5: Honoring the Savage?: Thoreau                                                                 Feb 7-11

 “I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.”

Walden, 1854.

 READ: Walden. I'd like you to read all of Walden. However, I'm going to require that you pay closest attention to the following sections.

 For TUES: Focus on Chapter 1 "Economy" and Chapter 2 "Where I lived and What I lived For" (1-64).  Bring Emerson to class.

Essay #1 DRAFT DUE: Workshop (last 45 minutes)

 For THURS: Focus on: "Higher Laws" (136-144) and “Conclusion” (200-216).

 Think about:  1) How does Thoreau's experiment grow from Emerson's theories? (Pay special attention to "The Poet"--see especially pp. 76-77.)

 2) HT's writing style, focus, is quite different from Emerson's in some ways. Specify how it differs from E's work, and think about what the significance of that different viewpoint is.

 ESSAY 1 DUE: BY 5 PM FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11

Week 6:  Frederick Douglass: Self-Reliance inside the belly of the beast of slavery

  “We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to the same narrow examination. Silvery-headed age and sprightly youth, maids and matrons, had to undergo the same indelicate inspection. At this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon both slave and slaveholder.”  Frederick Douglass, 1845

2/15 Tuesday: Read Wendell Phillips’ intro and chapters I-IX of Douglass (in Andrews)

2/16 Thursday: Read chs. X-XII and the Appendix

Week 7: Walt Whitman: Honoring the Savage, for real?

2/22 T: Read all of “Song of Myself”  Bearing in mind that the “savage” trope can point to either a childlike, but doomed “noble” savage, or an animalistic “savage” savage, find two passages, from two different portions of the poem that seem to suggest Whitman’s take on this split trope.  Type out each passage and write a paragraph on each explaining why you think it’s significant.

2/24 Th: Whitman, continued.

Here are some additional resources for Whitman:

"Preface" to Leaves of Grass (1855)

Additional Whitman letters and poems

Here's the web resource from which the above two documents were drawn:

The Walt Whitman Archive.  Eds. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price.  March 8, 1998.  Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.  University of Virginia.  17 February 2004.  http://www.whitmanarchive.org/works/

 

Week 8: Nathaniel Hawthorne: Patriarchal Ghosts—Savage Repression.

3/1 Tues: Read “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Birth-Mark”

3/3  Thurs:  Midterm Exam

SPRING BREAK! No class 3/8, 3/10: 

Over break, 1) Read Uncle Tom’s Cabin; ideally finish it, but at least get to chapter 30 by Tuesday and 2) Go to amazon.com and read descriptions and reviews of all the optional/ “recommended” books for the course:

Toni Morrison’s Beloved; Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping; Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine; Phillip Roth’s The Human Stain; Edward Jones’s The Known World. 

WRITE: Rank the novels in terms of your interest in them, and write down your 1-5 rankings.  Include a sentence or two indicating what sounds interesting in each of them.  Turn that in on Tuesday after break.

Week 9:  Harriet Beecher Stowe: Slavery as Savage Law

“For pity's sake, for shame's sake, because we are men born of women, and not savage beasts, many of us do not, and dare not,—we would scorn to use the full power which our savage laws put into our hands.  And he who goes the furthest, and does the worst, only uses within limits the power that the law gives him."  Augustine St. Clair, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

3/15 Tues:  Read chapters 1-30.  Turn in your rankings of the five novels.

Important terms:

Domestic Ideology / The Doctrine of Separate Spheres / The Cult of True Womanhood

"The Cult of True Womanhood" is a term term that gained prominence in nineteenth century women's history as a result of the work of Barbara Welter, excerpted here: http://www.pinzler.com/ushistory/cultwo.html.  "True women" of the early Victorian era (1820-1860 are the dates Welter assigns) are characterized by 4 qualities: 1) Piety, 2) Purity, 3) Submissiveness, 4) Domesticity.  These ideals, and their relationship to the ideology  of domesticity and the doctrine of separate spheres are well explained by historian Catherine Lavender, here: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/386/truewoman.html

Jean Boydston, another historian, provides a good critique of this concept on a page related to a PBS documentary of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, http://employees.csbsju.edu/mlewis/EC_325/Cult%20of%20True%20Womanhood.htm .

The American Woman's Home (1869), second edition of a "home-making" book by Catherine Beecher (HBS's sister), & Harriet Beecher Stowe (sort of--she helped a little in the second edition, but mainly CB wanted the celebrity status of her sister's name to give her book "star power.")  This book both supports and values women's work in the home as "proper" to their sphere, and demonstrates how much work it took to keep a home running in the 19th century. Available online by Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=11847&pageno=2

A quick powerpoint on the topic, here, gives a pretty good outline, and includes the typical jobs/professions of women and men during this period, broken down by ethnicity, as many jobs were not available if you were non-white, and certain jobs began to be stereotyped as "normal" for certain groups, partly due to the devlopment of "romantic racialism."

"Romantic racialism," coined by historian George Frederickson in his book: The Black Image in the White Mind.  (Frederickson's book is an important precursor to Toni Morrison's literary critcism, Playing in the Dark, which we'll be reading excerpts of next week.) A history student named Jeffrey Leach reviews Frederickson's book on amazon.com, and provides this accurate description of it:

"Perhaps the most compelling argument in Fredrickson's book is his formulation of romantic racialism. This idea, which posited that blacks were docile, childlike creatures whose attributes allowed them to attain a level of Christianity unavailable to "naturally aggressive" Caucasians, had great appeal among abolitionists in the North who believed slavery was wrong on religious grounds. Moreover, romantic racialism arose as a response to emerging ideas about perceived Anglo-Saxon superiority and the need for a homogeneous white nation. Fredrickson brilliantly develops this idea primarily through a literary analysis of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novels Uncle Tom's Cabin and Dred. The articulation of romantic racialism explodes any lingering myths regarding abolitionists as rock ribbed anti-racists because it shows that these moral crusaders still argued for forcible removal of blacks from American territory."

(You can examine Frederickson's book and read the rest of Leach's argument, here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0819561886/002-7190658-2588044?v=glance )

Racial Stereotypes in UTC:

Chapter 1: Reference to "Jim Crow" in relation to Harry, the young son of Eliza & George.  Who was "Jim Crow?"  http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/who.htm  See also, the antics of Sam and Andy in Chapter 7, like Amos and Andy pictured on that site)

Chapter 2: "The Mother, " Eliza & George "Tragic Mullatos" http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/mulatto/

Chapter 4:  Aunt Chloe, a "mammy" figure: http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/mammies/

and the "Tom" charicature, based on Uncle Tom especially as he developed in "Tom Plays" after the Civil War: http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/tom/

3/17 Thurs:  Read chapters 30-end.  1-2 page reaction paper due by classtime.  Explore your reaction to the novel as a whole, being sure to incorporate one quotation from the latter half of the novel.

Read this argument by James Baldwin:

"It is interesting to consider one more aspect of Mrs. Stowe's novel, the method she used to solve the problem of writing about a black man at all. Apart from her lively procession of field-hands, house niggers, Chloe, Topsy, etc.-- who are the stock, lovable figures presenting no problem--she has only three other Negroes in the book.... Two of them may be dismissed immediately, since we have only the author's word that they are Negro and they are, in all other respects, as white as she can make them.... The figure from whom the novel takes its name, Uncle Tom, who is a figure of controversy yet, is black, wooly-haired, illiterate; and he is phenomenally forbearing. He has to be; he is black, and only through his forbearance can he survive or triumph.... The virtuous rage of Mrs. Stowe is motivated by... a panic of being hurled into the flames, of being caught in traffic with the devil.... Here, black equates with evil and white with grace... if she could not cast out the blacks... she could not embrace them either without purifying them of sin... Tom, therefore, her only black man, has been robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex...."

James Baldwin, "Everybody's Protest Novel," Partisan Review, 16, June 1949

Week 10 Harriet Jacobs revises the sentimental tradition

Week 11 Edgar Allan Poe & Toni Morrison. 

Poe's "Philosophy of Composition" is online, here: http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philcomp.htm

THURS: Essay 2: research paper assigned;

Week 12 

April 5, 7 Melville, Benito Cereno.  Read all by Tuesday!  And,

In addition to continued discussion of Benito Cereno, print out and read for class:

“How To Prepare an Annotated Bibliographies.” http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill28.htm, and

“MLA Format for Annotated Bibliographies.” http://www.lesley.edu/library/guides/citation/MLAanno.pdf

Week 13

April. 12:  Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson. 

See the wonderful Pudd'nhead Wilson page at the University of Virginia e-text library (referenced in class):

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/wilson/pwhompg.html, see especially the "sources & pre-texts" page for information on the development of "scientific racism" during Twain's day. 

Essay 2 initial proposals due by classtime on April 12.

April 14: No class: research day: I will be at the national AAC&U conference presenting a paper called "White Teacher/Black Culture" on this date.  This is a research day.  Plan to use this time to read the secondary sources for your paper and to draft your annotated bibliographies.  I will respond to your initial proposals before I leave. 

I will also be happy to meet with students individually about this paper, any time before the 26th.

Week 14

April 19: Continued Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson.  Read the following quotation in preparation for class on the 19th:  Think about: 

What is the How can Hughes make such a claim? What evidence is there for this perspective on Twain's work?

Mark Twain, in his presentation of Negroes as human beings, stands head and shoulders above the other Southern writers of his times, even such distinguished writers as Joel Chandler Harris, F. Hopkins Smith, and Thomas Nelson Page. It was a period when most writers who included Negroes in their work at all, were given to presenting the slave as ignorant and happy, the freedmen of color as ignorant and miserable, and all Negroes as either comic servants on the one hand or dangerous brutes on the other. That Mark Twain’s characters in Pudd’nhead Wilson fall into none of these categories is a tribute to his discernment. And that he makes them neither heroes nor villains is a tribute to his understanding of the human character. "Color is only skin deep." In this novel Twain shows how more than anything else environment shapes the man. Yet in his day behavioristic psychology was in its infancy. Likewise the science of fingerprinting. Pudd’nhead Wilson was a "modern" novel indeed. And it still may be so classified.

--Langston Hughes, Introduction to Pudd'nhead Wilson, by Mark Twain (New York Bantam, 1962)

Essay 2 annotated bibliographies due with extended proposal

April 21: Selections from Zitkala Sa and W.E.B. Du Bois. 

Week 15

April 26: Beloved and Peer Workshop of Essay #2

April 28: Beloved (to PART 2) and Essay #2 Due at the beginning of the hour.  Remember: your essay must include a complete list of works cited.  You should also turn in a revised annotated bibliography and the peer workshop draft and worksheet.

Picture from PBS "Slavery and the Making of America" site: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/experience/living/history.html

Photograph of the scars of whipping

 

Week 16

May 3: Beloved  and Preparation for final exam

FINAL EXAM: May 10, 9-11 AM (I will come at 8 AM for any students who are allowed extra time due to learning disabilities or those who would like the option of taking the full three hours.  The final exam will have exactly the same format as the midterm exam, will cover only texts read since the midterm, and is designed to take 1.5 hours).

on learning disabilities and differing learning styles:

I am happy to discuss learning strategies and styles with any student in this class. Wittenberg University is, additionally,

committed to providing reasonable accommodations for eligible students with disabilities. 

If you are eligible for course accommodation due to a disability, please provide me with your self-identification letter from the academic services office, 208 Recitation Hall, so that we may discuss your learning needs.

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(c) Lori Askeland, Wittenberg University 2004; last update 04/28/2005 01:30 PM