[As another
semester begins, so too does my annual Spring previews series, this time
focused on individual texts I’ll be teaching in spring courses. I’d love to
hear what your spring looks like and holds!]
[Fanny
Fern is a perennial favorite on my American
Lit I syllabus, so I wanted to share this prior semester recap post on some
of the reasons why students, and I, love so much.]
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 autobiographical, 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 in the Spring 2015 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 preview tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this post? Spring previews of your own to share?
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