Jane Awesome

Today, December 16^th, is Jane Austen’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Jane!

Despite Austen’s popularity today in the form of multiple BBC miniseries, Hollywood films, Pride & Prejudice­-themed board games, Jane Austen novel continuations, and a plethora of other Jane Austen awesomeness (like the Jane Austen action figure or Jane Austen toothpaste—spoiler, it’s rose-flavored!), many people have a prejudice against the scribe of Bath.

For many, Austen is little more than romance—it’s frothy, lacy, ephemeral and, ultimately, shallow. Charlotte Bronte maligned Pride and Prejudice, writing in a letter that it was “a carefully fenced highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers—but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy—no open country—no fresh air—no blue hill—no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.”

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Jane Austen’s works became increasingly popular and the term “Janeite” was coined to describe people who adored Austen’s works and everything about them. It may very well be that the zeal with which some adore Austen is precisely what makes others hate her. Modern-day Janeites exist now too, and it’s probably quite easy to make fun of them, as they dress-up in Regency clothing, learn how to dance eighteenth-century country dances, and even travel to England for a “JaneAusten Weekend.”

The idolatry and fandom surrounding Austen can often overshadow her literary achievements; the zeal of some fans seems to put her work in the same category as Star Trek and Harry Potter—things to nerd-out over, but not take seriously.

Of course, I disagree! Austen’s novels are well-crafted, well-written works that comment on a variety of topics, both singular to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as ones more universal and transcendent. In her works, she addresses both “domestic” issues, such as marriage, rules of civility, gender relations, family relations, entertainment, and the running of a household, as well as “worldly” issues, such as commerce, law, economics, nation-building, war, slavery, national character, landscape gardening, architecture, and aesthetics.

This is not to suggest that we can only designate literature as “Important” or “influential” because it addresses this second category of issues or theme. Instead, what I wish to point out is that there is no “domestic” without the “worldly”—and vice versa. Literature by women has, throughout history, been maligned, under-appreciated, discarded, forgotten, or otherwise neglected often because it deals with domestic issues. The same could be said of art or crafts or musical compositions by women. Alice Walker, among many women writers, has addressed this problem in her landmark essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens.”

Similarly, when we study history in high school, it is often a history comprised of wars, battles, elections, economics, and individual “important men.” For some reason, what people ate, how many children they had, how they lived, what jobs they had, how they loved, married and died is not considered history worth teaching and writing. This concept is slowly changing in the academy—but popular conceptions of what count as important histories or significant works of literature still focus on a male-centered story arc.

To get back to Jane Austen, it seems that her novels and her contributions to literature are often under-valued not just because she was a woman, but also because her fans are overwhelmingly women. And because her main characters are women. And because the surface plot line is often “will the girl get the guy?”  (Never mind that the same could be said of countless novels by men!)

Yet, to discard Austen’s works, to read them merely for plot, to suggest that plot is what makes a work great or not, is to miss the entire point of literary study. The best literary scholars are those who are the most open to new views, to new works, to possibilities, ambiguities, silences, and apertures in the works we study. This message is itself part of Austen’s novels, and the crux of her most well-known work, Pride and Prejudice. To be too proud to read Austen’s novel, or too proud to admit to liking it, or, what’s worse, perhaps, to be so prejudiced about a work that you refuse to even read it, is juvenile and shallow: the very opposite of Austen’s work.

 

It's not all about marriage...and even if it is,
well, why does that make her novels less important?

I’ve tried to write this post as logically and rationally as possible, but the truth is, I’m a total Janeite. My roller derby name is Jane AweStun. I would totally go to a Jane Austen Weekend if I could afford it. So, rock on, Jane! Happy Birthday, you badass.

…and to my fellow Janeites: be strong! Haters gonna hate…but it is a truth universally acknowledged that geeking out is a lot more fun than joining the haters…

Thoughtful Grading and Secret Sin

It’s the end of the semester, and that means grading. For many of us in higher ed, this is only a continuation of the grading madness that inevitably seems to engulf the second half of the semester.

My back is aching, my wrists are tired, and my thighs are scorched from too much laptop-on-lap time, yet I have to admit I’m enjoying reading my students’ paper drafts in my American literature class.

I will be the first to voice my concern about rising class sizes
and the detriment they pose to student learning, but grading can also be a conversation.

The course is a survey, which I’ve written about before, and it’s my first time teaching an American literature course. I’ve been in my “BritLit” pigeon-hole for so long, and then suddenly I found myself discussing pilgrims and Puritans, conquistadors and Christians, revolution and social rebellion.

I found myself enjoying the course quite a bit. I still find American literature overwhelmingly earnest, moralistic, and overly didactic, but these qualities also provided excellent fodder for class discussions. The course covered the earliest texts of the Americas up to the Civil War/1865 which meant that, like many survey courses, it contained a little bit of everything.

As we wended our way to the close of the semester, I wondered how my students would approach the final paper, which charged them with choosing two texts by two different authors and discussing them together while also using outside sources. My students had struggled with the first paper of the semester, the first of two shorter response papers. There was significant improvement on the 2^nd response paper, but the final paper requires the students to analyze texts in conversation with one another and to make more complex arguments about them.

I was both pleased and surprised, however, when we discussed the thematic and stylistic connections between authors in class. Students put together texts in innovative and compelling ways—and these connections showed up in their paper drafts as well.

One student put Emily Dickinson’s poetry in conversation with Benjamin Franklin’s essay “To Those Who Would Remove to America” in order to make an argument about how these two very different authors approach the pursuit of happiness. Another student discussed Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s short story “The Two Offers” in order to make an argument about how these authors understand the self. A third student discussed the individual versus society using Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

In many ways, these would not be combinations that I would have put together at first glance. I was less surprised, for example, when students wrote about slavery in Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons” and Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, or death and horror in Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil.” Just when I thought I’d read all the unusual papers, I picked up another unusual combination: Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” as works that both explore characters who wish to escape reality.

It’s possible these combinations seem so unusual to me because I don’t normally study American literature, but regardless I was excited to note the different connections students made between texts. Maybe the execution wasn’t stellar, maybe they still need to flesh out the ideas or add in more quotations—these papers are still in the draft stage. Nevertheless, I already feel like I have learned a lot from reading these papers and from seeing my students’ improvement. While commenting on drafts before students turn in the final draft can be time-consuming, it does mean that paper-writing becomes a conversation between students and instructors.

When I think back, I realize that I never got as much feedback on papers in college as I give now to my students. Of course, I wish my classes were smaller so the burden of putting comments on papers wasn’t so heavy, but I can’t deny that this process leads to better communication of requirements, better student understanding of the writing process, and, ultimately, better quality papers.

Along the way, I also get to witness the transformation of ideas through writing and re-writing. I might even, sometimes, read something in a student paper that sparks my imagination, as when one of my students wrote that Bartleby perpetrates a type of “metaphysical crime” when he refuses to leave the office and just “hangs around.” The student further suggests that it is because Bartleby’s intentions are opaque that his behavior incites the social unrest.

It's hard to miss the irony of Melville's classic
short story when I sit down to grade stacks
of student papers.

This idea reminded me of our class discussions about “Bartleby” and Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”, and how the behavior of Bartleby and the minister, with his refusal to explain the veil, provoke social unrest—merely by seeming to be so different than the rest of the people who surround them. Both Bartleby and the Hawthorne’s minister challenge social expectations by being unlike others—and by having veiled intentions. Others project their own insecurities, shames, and fears onto them, hating these “different” characters because they remind them of their own inadequacies, their own “secret sins,” to use Hawthorne’s term.

I couldn’t help but connect this discussion in class to what has been happening in Ferguson, MO. Ferguson has been in my classroom conversations all semester, as I discussed the representation of African Americans on screen in my Writing 1 class; as students researched police brutality in my Writing 2 class; and as we discussed the history of slavery, abolitionism, and the fraught nature of personal narrative and the American Dream in my American literature course.

As with many controversial news stories, the events in Ferguson are subject to interpretation; each day we see the war of different perspectives on what happened there. Ferguson is our black veil, it is our Bartleby who won’t leave the office….we each project onto it our own secret sins, our own explanation of why it happened and what it means. But like the minister’s veil, which covers his face even in the grave, sending posthumous shudders through the remaining citizens, there will never be a simple explanation to the events in Ferguson.

How do we interpret the many images, headlines, news clips and
sound-bites coming out of Ferguson, related protests around the US,
or any other news story, for that matter?

And so, it’s the end of the semester, and though I’m tired in body, I feel energized in mind. It’s moments like these that I see clearly why we who research should also teach; the intellectual interactions we have with our students allow us to see things anew, to consider new angles, to question the usual juxtapositions that we rely on for interpreting the world around us—and our research.

Happy Anniversary—to Notes & Petticoats!

It’s been just over a year since I started the blog, so I figure it’s as good a time as any to reflect on the blog and, more generally, my life as a scholar online.

When I first heard about academic scholars in the humanities using Twitter to connect with other scholars, I couldn’t imagine anything stranger. Even now, when it seems the most natural thing to me, I mention it to other non-twittizens, and they bristle a bit. I can see them thinking of me in a different light—I’m one of “those people”; I’m a tweeter!

While I’m sure I could very easily do much of my research without every foraying into the world of e-cademia, I have found so many advantages to being on Twitter.

I have become exposed to all sorts of scholars whom I wouldn’t otherwise have heard of, merely because they mostly write about the Victorian period or the Early Modern period. Or they are from some other discipline that I wouldn’t otherwise come into contact with. And yet their links, thoughts, comments and responses have often brought some interesting issues to my attention.

Though Twitter I have also found more 18^th-century blogs as well as blogs about literature, culture, representation and the body. And occasionally these blogs have actually revealed to me texts, images or historical personages about whom I have heard but didn’t know where to find this information.

I have even met people on Twitter…and then met them in real life—at conferences!

And finally…without Twitter, the readership of this very blog would be much lower than it currently is. I have found that the two platforms complement each other, allowing my ideas and words to become part of a larger conversation—even if I only post once or twice a month.

Even at only a low-to-moderate rate of publication, however, I’ve managed to write about female cross-dressers like the real-life Hannah Snell and the fictional Harriet Freke...

I’ve written about films set in the eighteenth century, like A Royal Affair…

I’ve explored issues of pedagogy, such as teaching eighteenth-century women poets and how to approach teaching literature survey courses…

I’ve even commented on issues of professionalization, such as conferencing successfully and top interview questions at job interviews.

Finally, I’ve had the opportunity to make connections between the 18^th century and our own time period and culture. I’ve discussed bearded women, strong female protagonists, racial representation, and…well…pockets!

The blog form allows for a variety of topics, from the serious to the light-hearted. It also encourages interaction and discussion and open-endedness, as opposed to more traditional forms of academic writing (the dissertation, the journal article, the book), which are about one person making a clearly-defined and supported argument, whose reviewers may engage with the text months or even years after.

A recent article by Anne Helen Petersen, who left academia to write for BuzzFeed, discusses some of these publication issues. Petersen notes that one of the aspects of journalism that she enjoys is that when she writes something, thousands of people can read it—for free—as opposed to academic publications, which are usually only read by other specialists in the field or the occasional undergraduate working on a paper and are often inaccessibly priced.

While in many ways I agree with Petersen, I believe the academic blogosphere is opening up an increasingly-rigorous, exciting, and inclusive space in which to discuss our scholarship and its relevance to the world around us.

So…thanks for reading! I’m looking forward to another year of musing, writing, and tweeting!

Cropped Out of History: At the Margins of Culture

Currently the Yale Center for British Art is featuring an exhibit called, “Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain.” The idea for the exhibit started when curators at the gallery began examining William Hogarth’s 1735 painting, “A Family Portrait,” and they noticed a black hand creeping into the portrait of an otherwise lily-white family of middle-class eighteenth-century Brits.

 

Middle left: I've circled the servant's hand in red.

Upon further examination and x-rays of the painting, the researchers discovered that the black servant figure included in the original painting had been later cropped out of it—about 100 years after it was painted.

The metaphorical meaning of this act is impossible to ignore, as slavery, the slave trade, slave histories and narratives, and even the visual representations of slavery and non-whites have been routinely “cropped out” of dominant histories. It matters little whether we speak of history generally, or if we focus on literary history, art history, musical history, or any other discipline. These stories are often at the margins of where we are looking, not to mention that these discussions are still marginalized in the classroom.

What intrigues me, however, is how often the stories of slaves or Africans or persons of African descent, enslaved or not, appear in the background of other narratives or images. Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, originally published in 1801, contains a black character: Juba, the servant. In the original version of the novel, Juba marries the (white) daughter of an English farmer—but this element of the plot was cut out in subsequent editions. Again, the story, the character was “cropped out.”

In Frances Burney’s The Wanderer, racial masquerade begins the novel. The main character, the “Incognita,” escapes Revolutionary France in borrowed clothing with darkened features. She has darkened her skin to hide who she really is, and the characters she meets in England initially believe that she really is what she appears to be—a person of African descent.

In the novel, one of the characters asks the “stranger,” “What part of the world might you come from? The settlements of the West Indies? Or somewhere off the coast of Africa?...” Her arms and hands are described as “of so dark a colour, that they might rather be styled black than brown…”

Of course, quite soon we learn that the main character is not black at all—she is French, and the darkening of her skin was one of many ways she attempted to conceal her identity. While Burney may initially be asking us to sympathize with an “apparently black” heroine, she does not require this of her readers for very long.

The idea of “blackening” one’s skin or hiding behind a mask of darker skin color is apparent in John Raphael Smith’s pastel portrait “A Lady Holding a Negro Mask.” Historian Kathleen Wilson recently wrote about this image in the ASECS Fall 2014 newsletter. As she points out, there are many ways of interpreting the image. One thing that seems apparent to me in all of these examples is how integral blacks were to British life throughout the eighteenth century. While they may often only appear in the margins of literature or art, the consistent repetition of these images and references suggest that we are only at the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

 

Is she going to a masquerade? Is she happy about it?
Is the painting about race? gender? beauty? identity? all those things?

One interesting project that is working to change how we think of literary history in an American context is the “Just Teach One” project. Initially it began as a project that would aid instructors of Early American literature in teaching less-taught texts—texts that are out of print, difficult to find, or simply unknown. A parallel project has grown out of that first one, focusing on prints and literature of African Americans.

The name of the projects asks us to consider what happens when we make a concerted effort to teach at least one lesser-taught text, or at least one text by an African American who is, presumably, not Frederick Douglass (mostly because his canonicity has become [mostly] established). Their website caters specifically to instructors and aims to provide easily accessible versions of various lesser-known texts.

Many projects concerned with diversity and inclusivity have taken up the idea of moving things, people, and historical moments from the margins and putting them at the center of the conversation. We can only hope that this conversations keep happening and that more and more projects, exhibits, and syllabuses are put in the service of bringing hidden histories to light, of moving issues from the margins to the center. In the end, perhaps we may also find ways to move the conversation away from the binary of center and margin to other intertextual, multivocal, and less hierarchical modes of thinking and teaching.

Johann Zoffany's Family of Sir William Young, 1770.
The detail of this painting containing the African servant/slave is on my edition of Belinda, by Oxford World's Classics.
Interestingly, the redesign of the cover scrapped this image and chose one of a corset.

Small Pockets, Big Problems

It is a fact universally acknowledged that contemporary women’s clothes do not have pockets. Or, if they do, they are non-functional. This has been an issue for me for a while, now, brought to light in those moments when I find a fancy dress that actually has functional pockets. Recently, women have become even more vocal than usual about this sartorial prejudice due to the change in size of the iPhone 6, of all things.

Jezebel.com writer Tracy Moore, in her piece “Pocket Equality,” sums up the problem succinctly: “No pockets = sexism.” She goes on to explain that lack of functioning pockets in women’s clothing is “a longstanding problem” for all women, a “silent epidemic that has infantilized us all.”

Atlantic Monthly contributor Tanya Basu agrees with these claims in her article “The Gender Politics of Pockets,” explaining,

“A man can simply swipe up his keys and iPhone on the way to a rendezvous with co-workers and slip them into his pocket. A woman on the way to that same meeting has to either carry those items in her hand, or bring a whole purse with her--a definitive, silent sign that she is a woman.”

This debate, and my own consternation at how small my pockets are and how big my purses are getting, has led me to wonder a bit as to how this all happened. Did women’s clothing have pockets in the past? When the pockets disappear? Was there always pocket disparity?

A little bit of online research and some Twitter querying resulted in some interesting information. In the eighteenth century, women almost always had a pair of pockets on their persons--but these were not sewn into the gown she wore. Since women’s clothes of the time period often consisted of petticoats (skirts) with an under-petticoat and a shift underneath, the solution, instead, was to have women tie their pockets around their waists between the under petticoat and the petticoat.

A pair of 18th-century tie-on pockets.

Some of these pockets could be quite beautiful, despite being wholly hidden under the main skirt of the gown. The pockets were then accessible through slits in the petticoat.

All of this was still practical and fashionable for women of the time because of the fashion for large, voluminous skirts. During the Regency period, when nightgown-like dresses were all the rage, pockets disappeared, only to reappear during the nineteenth century, which took hooped skirts to whole new levels. In the nineteenth century, some women’s pockets were sewn in, while others were still tied on.

The final demise of the women’s pocket, it would seem, happened during the 20th century, specifically in the 1920s, when the flat, boyish figure for women came into fashion. Any lumps, bumps or voluminous skirts were unfashionable, making pockets a fashion no-no.

Men’s pockets, according to the V&A website at least, were always sewn into the lining of their waistcoats, breeches and/or jackets. The sewing in of pockets into such garments might, in fact, have been a result of the tightness of breeches and waistcoats in the eighteenth-century--there would be nowhere to hide a tied-on pocket in such an ensemble. Additionally, the required male dress consisted always of a coat out-of-doors, and eighteenth-century jackets were long and large--almost like a skirt. Presumably a gentleman only had a few of these, so perhaps it was all right to have the pockets sewn in.

Whatever the reason for the difference in men’s and women’s pockets in the past, the similarity between those tie-on pockets and modern purses is striking. Likewise, the few times that I have located articles of clothing for myself that had nice, big pockets, they were usually dresses with big, full skirts, so that the pockets and their contents are hidden. When fashion dictated a less bulky silhouette, such as during the Regency period, pockets were out of fashion as well, and women began using small bags or “reticules” to carry their most essential objects around with them.

Since then, we have managed to get rid of many socially-dictated requirements for women’s clothing. We don’t have to wear dresses and skirts or corsets or girdles, though we are all probably aware of a thousand other ways that the consumer clothing industry is against us. As Tanya Basu points out, “mid-range fashion is a male dominated business, driven not by form and function, but by design and how fabric best drapes the body.” There might be hope on the horizon, as some companies work on new and innovative ways to make pockets both functional and stylish but for now, I suppose I’ll have to continue to rely on my reticule.

18thC Pedagogy: Surveying the Survey Course

This semester I have my first ever chance to teach an American literature survey course, beginnings to 1865. While I have read a fair amount of these texts in the past, many of them are new to me. Prior to the course, which is a sophomore-level survey, I had never read any of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation or Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative. I ended up enjoying both of them, as well as the beautiful poetry of Anne Bradstreet, the haughty rants of Cotton Mather, the polite and loving letters of the Adamses, as well as the irony and wit of Benjamin Franklin.

 The transatlantic approach to literature is a growing trend in literary studies, especially in eighteenth-century studies. Looking at traditional literary anthologies, however, you’d rarely know it. When I taught eighteenth-century women poets, Roger Lonsdale’s anthology did not contain Phillis Wheatley. Conversely, there is no mention of Aphra Behn in American lit anthologies. Yet really, these should be rather obvious inclusions.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano is possibly one of the few works featured in both British and American literature anthologies. Otherwise, these different literatures are quite compartmentalized.

Also of note is how easily the Norton anthology (which I have to use for the American Literature survey) includes texts that were originally written in Spanish until it is no longer useful or “necessary” to do so. The anthology introduction explains that there were many languages spoken in the early American colonies—yet the anthology itself contains few other translated texts once the English show up.

These issues are miniscule when we consider that global literary and transnational approaches to literature and culture rarely make it into the undergraduate classroom. A colleague of mine who teaches African and Asian history as well as courses on Islamic Civilization has pointed out how consistently “World Literature” or “World History” are ghettoized in college curricula. Students in the US rarely have to consider other (Other?) civilizations and world developmental narratives outside the Western one, to our detriment.

On a smaller scale, I always noted, as the daughter of Polish immigrants, that Eastern European history rarely made an appearance in my high school European history classes. It was as if Poland never existed, despite that nation’s dominance on the continent during the 17^th century. Omissions such as these are merely symptoms of larger issues relating to colonial histories that are often at the forefront of our class discussions in the American literature survey.

While preparing lessons for the course has been, in many ways, challenging because it is not “my” area of study, I not only enjoy this opportunity, but I welcome the challenges it brings with it. If nothing else, it has made me more aware of the missing pieces of the puzzle when we teach “British” literature courses.

In English departments, we often consider “survey” courses to be the steady foundation of further literary study. At many universities, students must take a certain amount of sophomore level surveys to get their BA in English or before they can take upper-level courses in literature. I wonder, however, how useful the traditional survey is. Perhaps it would be better to come up with sophomore surveys dedicated to the idea of “surveying” the many different literatures of a smaller time period or, rather than sticking to time period, surveying the development of a literary theme across time and space? Such flexible approaches to foundational literary study may actually encourage greater critical thinking skills in our students while engaging them in ways that the usual chronological approach may not.

Queer Vision(s)

This year, I’ve proposed a roundtable for ASECS 2015 on “Queer Vision(s)”:

Eighteenth-century plays, novels, memoirs and even art and poetry are often concerned with what we know and how we know it. Vision plays a key role in defining and understanding knowledge in this period, especially with regard to knowledge of the gender and sexuality of eighteenth-century persons and characters. Consider the moment in which Fanny Hill looks through the peep hole and watches two young men engaging in a homosexual act only to fall over and faint before she can report them, or how actresses in breeches roles were admired and desired by both men and women for the spectacle they provided on stage. This roundtable solicits papers that will examine the various ways in which vision is queered in the eighteenth-century as well as how vision and the ability to see “queerly” affects who or what is understood to be “queer.”

In the spirit of shameless plugging, I’ve decided to dedicate a whole blog post to the topic in the hopes of promoting the roundtable. I’m hoping to get a really great discussion going at ASECS on the intersections of desire, perception and sexuality. These issues are, after all, deeply tied together.

My own research on female cross-dressers led me to the idea of “queer vision.” So often, the bodies of these women would give them away. A flash of boob, for example, and the jig was up—or was it? In Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband, Mary Hamilton’s breasts are exposed at a town dance—yet she retains her male disguise. According to Fielding’s narrator, the Doctor (Hamilton) enters into a dispute with a man at a local dance where she has been wooing her newest conquest, Mary Price. During the scuffle, the man “tore open her [Hamilton’s] wastecoat, and rent her shirt, so that all her breast was discovered, which, tho’ beyond expression beautiful in a woman, were of so different a kind from the bosom of a man, that the married women there set up a great titter” (46-47).

How Hamilton hides her superlatively perfect breasts in the guise of a man is left to the imagination of the reader. According to our narrator, “it did not bring the Doctor’s sex into an absolute suspicion, yet caused some whispers, which might have spoiled the match with a less innocent and less enamoured virgin” (47). It seems that Mary can only see what she wants to see; Fielding, by contrast, is coy as to what exactly he wants his readers to see: do we see Hamilton as a villain? a rake? a misguided criminal weirdo? a beautiful and attractive female husband?

The issue of perception and desire, however, is not limited to issues of cross-dressing or same-sex desires. These same issues play out in various ways on the eighteenth-century stage and in novels where concerns about disguise, class fluidity, “passing,” and masquerade show up again and again. For example, how could Clarissa not “see” Lovelace for what he was? Or could see it, but still desire him despite it?

It seems, perhaps, that despite innovations in visual technology, such as the microscope and the telescope, eighteenth-century writers were still quite concerned with how to see others, and how these various queer visions affect how others see us and whom we desire. The purpose of this roundtable will be to take a look at these issues from a variety of perspectives and through a variety of texts and artefacts. Artists as well as writers explored the notion of vision and desire in visual media such as paintings and cartoons. Other studies in material culture, such as costume studies, might also make some interesting interventions into this discussion.

For more info on submitting a proposal, go to the CFP. Paper proposals are due by Sept. 15, 2014.

For more on boobs, see my article on Maria Edgeworth's Belinda. 

Lovely Oddities: Lesser Known Novels of the 18C

As it often happens, I stumble upon many great links while on Twitter (@KleinUla) relating to my research as well as the greater topics that interest me: the eighteenth-century, clothing, material histories, medical anomalies, gender, sex, etc.

The most recent link which I simply had to share with my readers was from The Toast (the-toast.net):

What were 18th-century folk
reading when they weren't reading
Defoe, Burney or Richardson?

100 Actual Titles of Real Eighteenth-Century Novels

The website lists some of the more ludicrous, eyebrow-raising, confusing, and/or tantalizing lesser-known
(mostly unheard of!?)  eighteenth-century novels.

Since I'm always on the lookout for new texts to incorporate into my research, this list (and the sources of these titles, included at the bottom of the website) will undoubtedly lead me down many a blind alley--but hopefully also down some happy trails.

Atrocities of a Convent and The Nunnery for Coquettes sound like fun reading....but might also be worthwhile to read in conjunction with Diderot's more well-known convent expose, The Nun.

I will definitely have to check out The Polish Bandit; Or, Who is my bride? just to see if it really is about a Polish bandit. There needs to be more Polish in my research!

The Laughable Adventures of Charles and Lisette; or, The Beards piques my interest in, of course, beards--how could it not? I've posted here about beards not once, but twice!

Similarly, The Adventures of an Irish Smock, Interspersed with Whimsical Anecdotes of a Nankeen Pair of Breeches is must for me, given my interest in breeches and eighteenth-century clothing more generally. So too The Charms of Dandyism; Or, Living in Style. By Olivia Moreland, Chief of the Female Dandies has caught my attention for its intimation of female cross-dressing.

I'll let my lovely readers peruse the list at length, and I invite any and all of you to let me know if you've read any of these works or others like them (i.e. unknown but fascinating). Let me know if they're worth a look, where to find them, and what you thought of them.

Of course, lists like these beg the question: What did eighteenth-century readers read, when they weren't reading what we read from the eighteenth-century canon. Publication histories can be difficult to trace in this time period, as the marketplace was glutted with anonymous pamphlets or pamphlets or novels published under nom de plumes. The Victorian period suffers from the same problem; the amount of novels published in that time period far exceeds today's book publications, which means that there are far more novels to be read than those written by Dickens, the Brontes, Gaskell and other syllabus "stand-bys."

It stands to reason, then, that there might be excellent works of fiction out there, largely unread and waiting to be rediscovered, anthologized and popularized. While I doubt that The Freebooter of the Alps is one of them--who knows? Maybe it is. In any case, it might just be worth checking it out.

50 Shades of a Woman of Pleasure

I know it’s not fair to compare 50 Shades of Grey to John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman or Pleasure; or, Fanny Hill. After all, in many ways, they are completely different; yet, as we shall see, there are some compelling reasons to consider them together.

50 Shades of Grey tells the story of a young woman finishing college who is first seduced by a sexy billionaire, only to turn the tables and become the one in charge. While the media made much of the novel’s S&M plot twists, in the end, it is really a novel about how the woman in the relationship, Anastasia Steele, “fixes” her gentle brute, Christian Grey, changing his sexual tastes from BDSM to “vanilla sex.” (That’s what the book calls it—I kid you not.) Additionally, the book initially began as a Twilight fan fic, was written by a woman for other women, and, of course, is a product of 21^st-century America.

Fanny Hill, by contrast, tells the story of a young woman who falls in with the wrong crowd but eventually comes into her own (pun intended). Initially, she is picked up by a madam in the hopes that her virginity will fetch the right price; while Fanny is shocked at this idea at first, she comes around (again, pun intended) and learns to love and enjoy sex with men (sex with women being a far inferior proposition—of course, 50 Shades of Grey never even glances in that direction…). Fanny has many different partners over the course of the novel, has sex for money, engages in orgies, and has no career ambitions aside from being the loving and repentant wife of her first sexual partner, Charles, from whom she is parted for most of the novel. The novel was written by a man for other men, in the middle of the eighteenth century, in England.

What with the film version of 50 Shades coming out just in time for next Valentine’s Day and the official trailer finally out, however, I couldn’t help comparing them. Both novels are by far the most influential erotic tales of their own time, and both are written in the voice of a young woman who is entering the adult world for the first time. No matter that Fanny is a teenager while Anastasia is about to finish college; the difference in age is a minor fact. Additionally of note is the tone that the two works use: both works insist on a fairly romantic view of sex and sexual encounters, eschewing words like “penis” or “fucking.” While E.L. James resorts to a kind of bodily synecdoche to describe sex, as in “he entered me,” Cleland makes use of a variety of colorful metaphors for the male member, including but not limited to “weapon of pleasure,” “the engine of love-assaults,” “truncheon,”, “may-pole,” “pick-lock,” “delicious stretcher,” “superb piece of furniture,” and “pleasure-pivot.”

Both authors are also quite adamant that S&M is a lesser pleasure compared to conventional sex between a male and female partner. When asked to flagellate a man who gets off that way, Fanny acquiesces but is puzzled by the pleasure the man gets from this act. While BDSM plays a much larger role in 50 Shades, the novel’s protagonist Anastasia has a similar aversion to such activities.

 

Fanny and the flagellant, Mr. Barville.

Lastly, both novels ultimately champion a single bond between two (heterosexual) people who marry, in the end, and live a rather conventional lifestyle—an interesting ending for works so committed to titillating their audiences. In many ways, however, as a reader, I find Fanny Hill a more stimulating, entertaining, and interesting read than 50 Shades.

Much has been written already about the many different ways we can read Fanny Hill. Fanny enjoys the attentions of Phoebe Ayres, even as she rejects them for not being “substantial” enough. At the same time, she outright rejects sex between two men as immoral. She has no problem, though, participating in orgies and watching others participate in them. She is both a participant and a voyeur, and the voyeuristic qualities of the novel’s heroine, as well as her evident pleasure in recounting her past escapades (which she is meant to be confessing to an unnamed woman….yet another literary question mark) suggest that there are many pleasures to be found in the novel. Even though the novel ultimately resolves Fanny’s problems through conventional means—marriage to the man she first had sex with—there are plenty of different ways to read and interpret Cleland’s pornotopia.

50 Shades of Grey is not exactly simplistic, by comparison, but its single-minded focus on “fixing” Christian Grey and Anastasia’s reluctant dabbling in his BDSM fantasies are both grating and, frankly, not very pleasurable. The novel takes the point of view that Christian wants to dominate his female “subs” only because he was physically abused as a child. Such a point of view is, of course, incorrect. Many mentally- and emotionally-healthy people engage in various types of BDSM-play in their sexual lives, and there is nothing inherently unhealthy about such fantasy play. Of course, the fact that Anastasia cannot “escape” her attraction to Christian and Christian’s attraction to her is yet another problematic aspect of the novel lifted directly from the Twilight series: the male must protect his female object of desire through what basically amounts to stalking even though it is precisely their relationship that puts the woman in danger in the first place.

This online cartoon pokes holes
in the Edward-Bella romance.

It seems almost as if modern women’s sexual and romantic fantasies are predicated on this trope of danger and protection 50 Shades and Twilight and heaven knows how many other romance novels propagate. While Fanny Hill is light-years away from being a feminist erotic novel, its heroine is able to survive because of her quick learning abilities. Fanny learns from Phoebe and the madams how to survive on the streets of London with nothing but her brains and her body to see her through. Like Moll Flanders and Roxana, Fanny is able to squirrel away money for later use. Like Pamela, an unlikely but obvious prototype for Cleland’s heroine, Fanny finally gets what she wants—stability, money and marriage for love—while having a whole hell of a lot more fun than Samuel Richardson’s too-good-to-be-true protagonist.

This is not to say that the eighteenth-century didn’t have its share of dangerous but seductive rakes—cue Richardson’s Lovelace. Or Jane Austen’s George Wickham. The difference is that in the end, Clarissa would rather die than be with Lovelace and Lizzy Bennet lets her dumb sister Lydia fall for the rake.  She doesn’t try to “fix” him; she throws him over and marries the more sensible (and moneyed) option, Mr. Darcy. Our 20^th and 21^st century fantasy, according to money-makers like Pretty Woman and 50 Shades of Grey, is a Byronic hero with money to burn who just needs a woman’s touch to be the ideal Prince Charming. Oddly enough, though Fanny loves her Charles, he isn’t Prince Charming—he’s hardly in the book at all. Instead, Fanny holds first place in her story as the main actor who controls her destiny.

Am I too biased, being an eighteenth-centuryist? Perhaps. But since there’s still another month of summer left, I suggest you read these books and decide for yourself. After all, they are practically the definition of summer reading.

Beach reading!
...though then again, you might not want to read these books in public...

Cross-Dressing Ladies: Maria Edgeworth’s Harriet Freke

Frontispiece to a 19th century
edition of Belinda.

Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda is by far one of my favorite eighteenth-century novels—though, admittedly, it is technically not an eighteenth-century novel at all. The first publishing was in 1801, and subsequent edits and publication dates lead Belinda even further into the early decades of the nineteenth century. It is undeniable, however, that Belinda, in topic, approach and tone is very much an eighteenth-century novel.

 Belinda is a complex work that starts out, seemingly, quite conventionally. The novel purports to tell the story of Belinda, a young lady searching for a suitable suitor. Her aunt has attached her to the fashionable Lady Delacour in London, in the hopes that through this connection, Belinda will meet the perfect suitor. Very quickly, however, the reader cannot but admit that Lady Delacour is, in many ways, much more interesting than the eponymous heroine of the novel. Lady Delacour is magnetic, beautiful and witty—and she has a fascinating back story about how she received a mysterious wound on her breast. It happened, in fact, when she was out in men’s clothes, about to duel with another woman with pistols. For more on Lady Delacour’s breast and her bosom friendships, look here.

The brains behind this whole ordeal turns out to be none other than Lady Delacour’s former bosom friend Harriet Freke, who regularly cross-dresses and enjoys playing tricks on just about everyone. Mrs. Freke, whose own name pronounces her strange proclivities, has “bold masculine arms” with “no conscience, so she was always at ease; and never more so than in male attire, which she had been told became her particularly. She supported the character of a young rake with such spirit and truth, that … no common conjurer could have discovered anything feminine about her.”

At one point in Lady Delacour’s reminiscences, she recounts how a young man jumped into a  coach with her. After the initial shock, she recognizes the young man’s laughter and realizes that this “young man” is in fact her friend Mrs. Freke. Mrs. Freke then recounts merrily of the day’s adventures: “‘Where do you think I’ve been?’ said Harriet, ‘in the gallery of the House of Commons; almost squeezed to death these four hours; but I swore I’d hear Sheridan’s speech to night, and I did…Fun and Freke for ever, huzza!”’

Lady Delacour’s eventual betrayal at the hands of her “bosom friend” Mrs. Freke, as well as the latter’s joy in causing her—and nearly everyone else—pain, casts her as the main antagonist in the novel. She plays tricks on Juba, the black servant of Mr. Vincent (one of Belinda’s suitors), as well as on Lady Delacour, leading the latter to believe that she is haunted. Additionally, Mrs. Freke attempts to turn Belinda against her friend; when this fails, she turns her attention to another young lady, a Miss Moreton, whose reputation is spoiled simply by keeping company with Mrs. Freke.

Towards the end of the novel, Mrs. Freke, in attempting to spy on Lady Delacour, is caught in a bear trap while “frolicking” in men’s clothing: “Mrs. Freke’s leg was much cut and bruised; and now that she was no longer supported by the hopes of revenge, she began to lament loudly and incessantly the injury that she had sustained. She impatiently inquired how long it was probably, that she should be confined by this accident; and she grew quite outrageous when it was hinted, that the beauty of her legs would be spoiled, and that she would never more be able to appear to advantage in man’s apparel.”

Maria Edgeworth

Harriet Freke is conventionally read as the antagonist who gets what she deserves, while Lady Delacour eventually repents of her worldly ways, reunites with her daughter and husband, and even manages to find a good husband for Belinda. Meanwhile, Mrs. Freke must give up her cross-dressing ways and find new ways of playing tricks on people. I’ve always found this reading of Belinda a bit reductive, however. Though Mrs. Freke is certainly not a positive character by any means, even Lady Delacour manages to feel pity for her when she is injured. Further, it is only the doctor’s opinion that Harriet Freke will not “appear to advantage” in men’s clothes after her injury.

The doctor’s opinion also glosses over the fact that cross-dressing allows Mrs. Freke much more than simply the option of “looking good” and exposing her legs. (For more on sexy lady legs, see my previous post on the topic.) Cross-dressing gives Mrs. Freke freedom, especially freedom of movement. Like Hannah Snell and other female soldiers, female pirates, and female husbands, cross-dressing allows Mrs. Freke to go where women usually dared not.

By making Mrs. Freke a cross-dresser, Edgeworth has complicated rather than condemned her character. After all, Lady Delacour cross-dresses in the novel as well—and so does Belinda’s lover, Clarence Hervey. Additionally, the novel is full of masquerades and even some mistaken identities. The marriage between Juba and the English farmer’s daughter (a subplot that was cut in subsequent printings) further suggests that the world is not just “black and white”; there are many shades of gray in between, not all of which are wholly evil or wholly good.

Job-Seekers: Prepping for the Fall Job Market in the Summer

In eighteenth-century novels, it seems that all a character needs to get a job is a good reputation and a personal recommendation—a letter from a lord, count, or other patriarch who will vouch for him or her. Unfortunately, today’s process of applying for jobs in academia is increasingly arcane, complex, and rife with opportunities for mistakes. The job market in the fall is fast and furious, with schools advertising as early as August 1^st for the following year, followed by a steady trickle until the flood gates open on the MLA list on September 15^th (at least in literary studies). Many schools have a November 1^st deadline, but some have started to put out October 15^th and even October 1^st deadlines, so it is imperative that you start working on your documents over the summer.

Below is my guide to the key documents you will need for the fall market, keeping in mind that jobs advertised in the fall are mostly tenure-track positions (the spring and summer markets are much more mixed) and visiting assistant professor positions. My own experience is of the English lit job market, so that will define my slant on things. There are many other good sources out there, however, that cover similar ground and are worth checking out for additional help. See my list at the end of this post.

1.      CV: Every job you will apply for will ask for an academic CV. This is the one constant. I used Dr. Karen’s Rules of the Academic CV, so I highly recommend it. Some jobs will require you to fill out an online job application where you must list all the same information that is on your CV in addition to asking for a regular CV. Why is this? I can only surmise that it is because at some universities, HR departments screen all the candidates first before forwarding on their credentials to the search committee. The HR people use the website form & the committees look at the actual CV, so just be prepared for lots of redundancy. This is also a good reason to have the following on hand:

a.       A list of past & current jobs, plus titles, addresses of the main office, name of your supervisor and a phone number (good idea to contact past supervisors and let them know you’re listing them on applications!)

b.      A list of places you have lived in the past 10 years, including addresses (this has come up for me on several applications!)

c.       A list of the universities/colleges where you received your degrees, the credit hours logged for those degrees, the date of graduation

2.      Cover Letter: Another constant. Every job will require one. For the fall market, you don’t really need to worry about a teaching oriented letter; focus on the research letter (on letterhead if possible). Again, I’m going to direct you to Dr. Karen (aka “The Professor is In”) for her words of wisdom on how to avoid sounding like a graduate student in your letters. There are plenty of example academic letters floating around, so I am not going to belabor the minutiae of the letter. However, it is relevant to emphasize that you need to:

a.       use the word “dissertation” as infrequently as possible (unless you are still working on it & are ABD at time of application); focus instead on your book project or simply “the project”

b.      don’t talk about what you’re “going to” do; discuss everything in the past or present tense. Even if technically you haven’t started working on the book; choose phrases such as “this project explores….” rather than “I plan on exploring” or “this project will explore…” You want to sound like you are already a scholar rather than a student.

c.       don’t overly flatter the school you are applying to but do try to tailor your letter at least a little bit—especially if the ad mentions certain preferred qualities (interdisciplinarity, for example)

d.      create a “master template” letter—or 2 or 3. Look at last year’s job list and figure out which kinds of jobs you might apply to and then make your master template—a cover letter with the spots for the address of the school, the name of the chair & university, and anything else school-specific left empty. This way when you want to improve your letters mid-stream, you just update the template. When you apply to each school, you save it as a new file with the name of the school. This method will save you a lot of time!

3.      Teaching Philosophy or Statement of Teaching: Not all schools will ask for this, but enough will that it is worth your time to create one over the summer. This can be anywhere from 1 to 2 pages single-spaced, though some schools may be more specific about this requirement. Basically, the teaching statement should showcase the variety of courses you have taught, whatever methods you use that set you apart from other instructors, and specific examples of interesting things you have done in the classroom. The best case scenario for the teaching statement is that someone will read it and say, “Wow, I want to try that in my classroom, too!” You also need to emphasize how your teaching methods relate to your research methods. If you are a feminist scholar, then how does this methodology affect your teaching style? Avoid lists; focus on specific examples of classroom activities and try to include a key word or two that define your teaching style.

4.      Research Statement or Research Interests: While this is not frequently required, it might be a good exercise anyway to help you figure out your teaching philosophy and maybe even help you formulate parts of you cover letter. And of course some schools do require it. This is the place where you can discuss past, current and a little bit of future research. You can mention conference presentations, articles, and discuss the book project in more depth. If you are involved in larger research projects (like digitization projects) or if you have organized conferences, panels or writing groups with other scholars, this would also be the place to mention it. Again, avoid listing; try to sound put together by focusing on your key terms that define you as a researcher.

5.      Transcripts: Some schools will ask for official; most will ask for unofficial. It is important, however, to get this all figured out as soon as possible. A portfolio service like Interfolio will get official transcripts for you (for a price of course) and keep them on hand to send out whenever you need, so get the ball moving on that asap. Getting your unofficial transcripts and scanning them is also a good idea. Additionally, I recommend using PDF Merge to merge all your transcripts into 1 PDF for schools that desire them this way. If you just got your PhD, you may need to wait a bit for your doctoral degree to appear on your transcript. It can take up to 8 weeks after you actually graduate toyou’re your transcript updated, so keep an eye on it!

6.      Letters: DO NOT WAIT to ask your recommenders for letters of recommendation. Be aggressive; people will tell you they don’t have time over the summer, but don’t ask anyway. Some great school might have an October 1^st deadline, and you don’t want to miss out because they want letters and yours aren’t ready. Start bugging your committee (nicely) for those letters over the summer; send them your cover letter, CV and whatever else they ask for. Don’t just focus on your committee, either. Get a teaching letter from someone you worked for who has seen you teach or get someone to observe you. Get a letter from an outside reader. Just don’t wait; and after asking, bug them every 2 weeks in the summer, and every week as the semester gets closer.

7.      Student Evaluations: Yes, some schools are going to ask you for student evaluations from courses you have taught. Get your hands on them, scan the best ones, get a variety if possible. Save them both separately and as a merged PDF. Then merge that with your teaching philosophy. Then merge that document with corresponding syllabuses. Have any many different versions of these documents on hand, because some schools will want a “teaching portfolio” while others will want just the evaluations. Still others will ask for “evidence of teaching excellence,” so you might want to send the whole thing—or maybe just the evaluations and syllabuses.

8.      Dissertation abstract: Many job applications don’t require this, but if you have some extra time at the end of the summer, it might not be a bad idea to whip one up. Again, try to minimize the word “dissertation” and focus on the main arguments and what you are contributing to the field with this project. Usually about 1.5-2pp. single-spaced.

Wow, long post today…well, this should give you an idea of how much work it is to be “on the market.” The more you can do over the summer, the happier you will be come September. Everyone is going to try to give you advice; my advice is take their advice for a while (with a grain of salt, as you will undoubtedly get conflicting advice), and then do what works for you.  Your letters and statements of teaching will no doubt change and get updated as time goes by, and so will your CV as you have more things to add to it. Having somewhere to start, however, will make everything much easier. Remember also to make time for proofreading and copy-editing. Any time you change the content of your documents, double-check that there are no typos or other editorial issues.

Here are some more resources. Good luck!

“Preparing NOW for Next Year’s Job Market” from ProfHacker

Dr. Karen’s Page on Academic Cover Letters

More Useful Resources for the Academic Job Market on the Chronicle

Brown University list of Job Market Resources

UCSD Academic Job Search Survival Handbook for Graduate Students