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Welcome to the home page for the American Literature I (pre-1900) panel at the 2004 SCMLA Convention. Panel time: Friday, October 29 from 2:15-3:45 Convention place and dates: New Orleans from October 28 to 30, 2004 -- Matt DeVoll, Chair --Jeffrey W. Miller, Secretary  St. Louis Cathedral and Jackson Square, image courtesy of New Orleans On-line |
Panel: American Literature I (pre-1900)
Chair: Matthew W. DeVoll (profile) Secretary: Jeffrey W. Miller (profile) |
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Abstracts
of Presentations
Ann Beebe, Ph.D., "Economic Terrorism in Early Nineteenth-century American Literature: Counterfeiting in Ormond and The Pioneers" In October of 2003 the US Treasury introduced a redesigned twenty-dollar bill. The increased scanning and printing capabilities of international counterfeiters necessitated the changes. Currently one or two out of every 10,000 notes are forgeries, according to the US Secret Service. The American government now believes that it will need to redesign its currency every seven to ten years to keep ahead of garden-variety counterfeiters and economic terrorists. Yet there is a groundswell of opposition to changing the shape, colors, or style of American money. According to David Standish, author of The Art of Money, a country’s currency projects “a certain solidarity and sense of power” and the “longevity of the imagery says something about the strength of the country itself.” For the United States, a nation whose identity had to be consciously crafted and assiduously guarded, counterfeiting has always more than a crime; it is identity theft at a national level. In this paper I will examine the anxiety that equates currency with identity in works of American literature from the New Republic, specifically Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond (1799) and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823). Charles Brockden Brown’s turn of the century novels are known for their dark atmosphere and sense of foreboding. Written in the context of the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), Ormond portrays an early Republic under constant attack from internal and foreign forces. The text is replete with instances of yellow fever epidemics, embezzlements, bankruptcies, disguises, murders, and forgery. While all of these dangers threaten individuals, it is the last that poses the greatest peril to the nation’s identity. Brown’s pessimistic forecast for the United States is evident in his creation of the forger Craig. He creates and distributes his counterfeit American currency without interference from the government. Eventually a far greater criminal kills Craig when the forger’s schemes interfere with his plans. Throughout it all, the nation and its new government is powerless to retain control of its nascent identity, highlighting Brown’s fears for the future of the United States. James Fenimore Cooper, one of the first American authors to support himself by writing, published one of his best-known works, The Pioneers, in 1823. One of the Leatherstocking Tales, this novel has been studied for its treatment of Native Americans, frontiersmen, and the tension between exploiting and preserving natural resources. Interestingly enough, however, there is a counterfeiting theme running through this novel. The text traces the discovery, capture, and escape of a ring of forgers. This thread of the novel can be lost among the clashes between Natty Bumppo and Judge Temple. While the main characters argue about rights and identities, the unnamed counterfeiters go about their business. Their escape serves to undermine the resolutions reached by Natty, the Judge, Oliver, and Elizabeth. The unnamed counterfeiters are free at the end of the novel to relocate to another unsuspecting frontier town and continue to destabilize the nation’s identity. Both of these works by founders of the American novel tradition demonstrate an anxiety about the counterfeiting of American currency and identity. Stefanie R. Bluemle, "'Must our lives depend on these things?': The Displacement of Wildness in Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha" In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), the central figure of Hiawatha willingly bows to the inevitability of white conquest. The poem codes his decision as wise, thereby implying that, if this great Indian leader accepts the Europeans’ invasion, the invasion itself must be justified. Thus, the poem participates in the common nineteenth-century American project of placing Indians in the past, even while establishing their culture as a foundational aspect of Euro-American culture. This paper focuses on another instance of displacement that occurs in The Song of Hiawatha: Hiawatha’s own act of placing wild nature firmly in the past. This occurs in passages such as “Hiawatha’s Fasting,” in which Hiawatha’s defeat of the figure of Mondamin results in the appearance of the first domestic corn, and “Hiawatha’s Sailing,” in which he builds a canoe from the trees of the forest, whose spirit is channeled into this human-made and human-controlled object. A comparison of these passages – particularly “Hiawatha’s Fasting” – with corresponding Indian myths from the collections of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, whose work was the source of much of The Song of Hiawatha, reveals that Longfellow’s tales are considerably more focused than Schoolcraft’s on the repudiation of wild nature. In discussing these acts of displacement, then, the paper turns to what Susan Scheckel, in The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (1998), calls “mourning.” Scheckel identifies mourning with the white man, who regrets the passing of the Indian while simultaneously acknowledging that he mourns that which cannot be revived. Interestingly, The Song of Hiawatha places Hiawatha himself in the position of mourner; this occurs, for instance, when he memorializes the passing of Mondamin in a “Feast of Mondamin.” Thus, the poem establishes a situation in which Hiawatha is both the object and the perpetrator of the act of displacement. An exploration of the consequences of establishing a relationship of this kind between the Indian, the European and wild nature is an important concern for this paper. The immediate function of Hiawatha’s displacement of wildness is to free the land for European colonization: when the white man arrives at the poem’s end, the land has already been subdued, and it gladly recognizes its ultimate purpose as the white man’s servant. But why should the Indian, and not the white European, be represented as the person responsible for the conquest? The violence – in the wrestling match with Mondamin, for instance, or in the building of the canoe, when the trees express feelings of pain – with which Hiawatha subdues wildness suggests that he is also being made responsible for the least palatable aspects of European conquest. The paper concludes, then, by addressing the poem’s representation of white colonization, specifically the image that the poem, through Hiawatha, creates of the history of European colonization. At the time of Longfellow’s writing, of course, many Indians had already been displaced and the initial coming of the white man was centuries in the past. Thus, the significance of the representations in The Song of Hiawatha lie not in their justification of colonization, but rather in their myth-making role, as they employ the Indian and his displacement of wildness in order to fashion an image of white American-ness for the mid-nineteenth century. Anne E. Boyd, "American Women Writers as 'Romantics': The Examples of Louisa May Alcott and Elizabeth Stoddard" American romanticism continues to be construed as a movement
that was comprised of male writers situating themselves against a
popular market of female "scribblers." Although David Reynolds, in Beneath the American Renaissance,
has shown how romantic writers were influenced by low-brow literature,
the split between canonical male writers and popular women writers
remains prevalent in our understanding of American romanticism. While I
do think it is important to recognize the emerging sense of an American
high literary culture during the mid-nineteenth century, I challenge
the notion that a "high literature," during the period of its inception
before and during the Civil War, was exclusively male.
In my examination of Louisa May Alcott's Moods (1864) and Elizabeth
Stoddard's The Morgesons
(1862), I argue that American romanticism was neither off-limits nor
outside the purview of mid-nineteenth-century women writers, as most
scholars continue to assume (see, for example, G. R. Thompson and Eric
Carl Link's Neutral Ground: New
Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy [LSU Press,
1999]). By calling their first novels "romances" and by portraying
Byronic heroes, Wordsworthian encounters with nature, passionate love
between soul mates, and heroines who confront their society's dictates
and accept their own desires, Alcott and Stoddard aligned themselves
with a romantic tradition that spanned the Atlantic Ocean as well as
male and female literary spheres. Their heroines, in particular,
suggest the ways in which these novels participate in and transform our
understanding of American romanticism. By claiming the right of
self-culture and eschewing to a great extent their culture's morality
in favor of an ethics derived from their own internal dictates,
Alcott's Sylvia and Stoddard's Cassandra represent an alternative to
the idealized female characters of contemporary American "woman's
fiction," who "exemplif[y] what every woman . . . may become" (Nina
Baym, Woman's Fiction,
xxxiii). In contrast, Sylvia and Cassandra (like their predecessors,
Jane Eyre and Hester Prynne) can only represent themselves. In this way
and many others, Alcott and Stoddard rejected the example of their
American female predecessors and followed the lead of Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Charlotte Brontë to write romantic texts about women
who stepped outside the bounds of what was appropriate in terms of
sexuality and marriage.
The examples of Alcott and Stoddard can help to redefine
American romanticism as a literary movement in which both men and women
participated.. However, I do not wish to construct another "separate
spheres" paradigm that distinguishes between male and female
romanticism, similar to that visible in many studies of British
romanticism. Instead, I show the ways in which Alcott and Stoddard
could draw on the examples of Hawthorne and Brontë to figure
themselves simultaneously as romantics, American authors, and women
writers—authorial identities that overlap and intersect, ultimately
enabling them to view themselves as artists.
Catherine Michna, "No Room of One's Own: The Displacing Effect of City Planning and Architecture on Women and Minorities in New Orleans During the Late Nineteenth Century as Depicted in Kate Chopin's The Awakening" Edna Pontellier’s decision to seek her own selfhood is marked by the wandering path she makes around New Orleans seeking a place where she can be herself. My paper tracks Edna’s path using historical documents that map out floor plans of homes similar to Edna’s and her creole neighbors’, neighborhood dynamics and business and home ownership histories as well as available public transit lines that would have made up her real life existence had she lived during Kate Chopin’s lifetime. I discuss the various architectural spaces which Edna inhabits in the novel, from the summer cottages at Grand Isle, to her husband’s New Orleans Americanized Creole Cottage home, to the streetcars she rides and the neighborhoods that she wanders on foot, and finally to the tiny house she rents on a street near her husband’s home. I exhume specific city planning trends from Nineteenth Century New Orleans in order to draw parallels between the lives of women and African Americans in the novel: the design of bedrooms and boudoirs that made intellectual space non-existent for all but white men, who had chief ownership of the “study” in every home, the design around the Napoleonic Code which made it illegal for wives to own physical space, the design of servants’ quarters attached/chained to larger houses, the planning of small neighborhoods according to strict lines of social hierarchy, and the racist/sexist design of public transportation that made city businesses inaccessible to both women and African Americans. My analysis shows the barriers that tie both Edna and the African Americans in the novel to a social, and I argue, intellectual existence as the possessions or captives of white men. I postulate that Edna’s suicide at the end of the novel is an escape into the only space that welcomes her: interior space, the space of the soul, which it seems neither women nor African Americans during her day were supposed to have. I ask readers to ponder, in what ways does the architecture of today’s world trap us into pre-established roles, giving us physical boundaries for our inner selves that might not exist were the spaces in which we lived somehow different. Also visit the Power Point version of this presentation. |
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Profiles
of Panelists
Ann Beebe
(curriculum vitae)
Assistant
Professor
Department of
Literature and Languages
University of Texas at
Tyler
3900 University Blvd.
Tyler, TX 75799
(903)
565-5827
Stefanie R. Bluemle (bio) Ph.D. Candidate Department of English Indiana University 442 Ballantine Hall 1020 E. Kirkwood Ave. Bloomington, IN 47405 sbluemle@indiana.edu (812) 331-7625 Anne E.
Boyd (curriculum vitae)
Assistant Professor Department of English University of New Orleans, Lakefront Campus New Orleans, LA 70148 (504) 280-6113 E-mail:aeboyd@uno Catherine Michna (bio) Ph.D. Candidate Department of English University of Rhode Island Kingston, RI 02881 (401) 874-1000 Email:cmichna21@hotmail.com Matthew W. DeVoll (faculty profile) Assistant Professor of English University of Alabama at Birmingham HB 217, 1530 3rd Ave. S. Birmingham, AL 35294 (205) 975-5935 mwdevoll@uab.edu Jeffrey W. Miller Assistant Professor of English University of Tennessee at Martin (731) 587-7299 jmiller@utm.edu |
