[As another
semester winds to a close, a week’s series on some of the moments that have
stood out to me and what conclusions I’d take away from them. Leading up to a
weekend post on some of my summer and fall plans. Share your spring follow ups
or summer/fall plans in comments, please!]
On a moment that
delightfully reinforced one of my longest-held scholarly beliefs.
I’ve loved
Fanny Fern since the first time I encountered her writing, in a few
newspaper columns that were part of my (American) History
and Literature Sophomore Tutorial. I loved her even more when I got to study
her at length in a graduate school class with Carolyn
Karcher, including reading all of Fern’s autobiographically, socially
satirical novel Ruth Hall (1854) alongside
many more of those columns. Since then, I’ve made a couple selected Fern columns
a consistent part of my American Literature I syllabus, reading her alongside
Margaret Fuller and Emily Dickinson in a week dedicated to expanding our images
and narratives of the American Renaissance era to include different women’s
voices and texts. Those two columns have always gone over well with students,
but they’re very short (probably 2 pages total) and far more readable than
Fuller or Dickinson, so I couldn’t use that response as definite confirmation
that my Fern-love was widely shared.
Well, consider
my love shared. Fern’s Ruth
Hall and a collection of many of her columns
comprised one of our six main/long readings in my The
Romantic Era in America senior seminar this semester, alongside Edgar Allan
Poe’s stories and poems, Hawthorne’s The
Scarlet Letter, Whitman’s Leaves of
Grass, Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life
of a Slave Girl, and Stoddard’s The
Morgesons. Each of those other five authors and texts had their adherents
in the class, and if I were to teach it again (this was my first time), I would
probably keep all of them on the syllabus. But there’s no doubt in my mind that
the Fern unit was the clear winner—the students took immediately and
consistently to her wit and humor, her hyperbole and sarcasm, her creation of
outrageous personas and subjects; and at the same time they recognized the
serious issues underlying those stylistic elements (from domestic violence and
abuse to poverty and prostitution, among many others), and appreciated Fern’s
ability to balance those aspects of her texts and engage with her audiences on
many levels simultaneously and successfully.
To paraphrase
the great Jack Nicholson
line from the film As Good As It Gets,
this collective response certainly made me feel good … about me. But it also
and more importantly confirmed the significance of what I would call one of my
most central lifelong scholarly goals: to add into our collective memories and
conversations the figures, texts, stories and histories that have too often
been forgotten or excluded instead. Fern is a great example, one hugely
interesting in her own right but also connected to many other social, cultural,
and historical issues from the period. And the truth, as my students’ responses
amply demonstrated, is that better remembering such figures and voices isn’t
the slightest bit like taking our medicine, forcing ourselves to do something
unpleasant but necessary. Instead, it very frequently helps us connect with
fun, engaging, inspiring works and lives, while at the same time expanding our
collective perspectives in vital ways. Like Fern’s balance of humor and
activism, that’s a very nice combination indeed.
Next conclusion
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this semester conclusion? Ones of yours you’d share?
No comments:
Post a Comment