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.

Eighteenth-Century Women Writing About Women Writing

Our friend Aphra.

A couple of years ago I had the privilege to teach an upper-level English course at Stony Brook on a topic of my choice. Since the department was looking to run an upper-level course on poetry, I proposed (successfully) to teach a course on eighteenth-century women poets. It was an exhilarating experience in many ways, as the students were mostly unfamiliar with eighteenth-century literature or culture. Together we explored the fabulous voices of female poets starting with Aphra Behn and Anne Finch and ending with Joanna Baillie and Mary Robinson.

One thing that particularly struck me was how often women wrote about writing, specifically, about being female poets and the challenges therein.

Elizabeth Thomas’s poetry is filled with the anger and frustration of being told (apparently) many times over that poetry was not “fit for women,” as in her poem, “On Sir J---- S---- saying in a Sarcastic Manner, My Books would make me Mad. An Ode”:

Unhappy sex! how hard’s our fate,

by Custom’s tyranny confined

To foolish needlework and chat,

Or such like exercise as that,

Lady Mary Chudleigh

But still denied th’ improvement of our mind!

(1722)

In these lines, she reiterates, almost to the letter, the earlier complaints of Mary, Lady Chudleigh in “The Lady’s Defense”:

‘Tis hard we should be by the men despised,

Yet kept from knowing what would make us prized;

Debarred from knowledge, banished from the schools,

And with the utmost industry bred fools;

Laughed out of reason, jested out of sense,

And nothing left but native innocence;

Then told we are incapable of wit,

And only for the meanest drudgeries fit

(1701)

Sarah Egerton’s “The Emulation” (1703), Elizabeth Tollet’s “Hypatia” (1724), Mary Leapor’s “An Essay on Woman” [not an essay…a poem] (1746), and Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “The Rights of Woman” (c. 1795) elaborate similar themes of being withheld from knowledge and education all the while being told that, as women, they were silly, useless or incapable of bettering themselves.

Poems like Anne Finch’s “The Introduction” (1713?) and Esther Lewis’s “A Mirror for Detractors. Addressed to a Friend” (1748) more specifically discuss the problem of being a woman poet:

Anne Finch

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such an intruder on the rights of men,

Such a presumptuous creature, is esteemed,

The fault can by no virtue be redeemed

--From “The Introduction”

…when a woman dares indite,

And seek in print the public sight,

All tongues are presently in motion

About her person, mind, and portion;

And every blemish, every fault,

Unseen before, to light is brought

--From “A Mirror for Detractors”

For those of us who study the literary output of the ladies of the eighteenth century, such sentiments are probably expected from our literary foremothers. For my students, however, they were a wonderful illustration of the limited rights and position of women in the eighteenth century. Even for myself, the anguish, chagrin, frustration and outright anger of these women was palpable in these poems in a way that was immediate and unmediated, and I started using them in introductory women’s studies courses as a way of foregrounding later nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s right movements.

As usual, the past reasserts itself in the present, however, and I find these poems still illustrate the frustrations of women writers writing now. Countless articles have appeared lately about how women writers are constantly belittled and their output discounted by publishers and reviewers, as well as how women’s novels are often marketed with “softer” “more feminine” book covers. All this, despite the fact that women now edge out men in pursuit of bachelor’s degrees in the United Stated. We no longer lack the education, but we are still marginalized when it comes to reviews and marketing.

Similarly, the poetry of women is, in my experience, under-taught at the undergraduate level. When I mentioned to a colleague (a male Romanticist) that I was teaching a course on “eighteenth-century women poets,” he (half-) jokingly replied, “Oh, were there any?” If he looked at almost any general literary anthology, however, he might surmise that there certainly weren’t enough to make an entire course syllabus just on them alone.