English 320

Welcome to English/ Women's Studies 320: Women Writers and Women's Experiences

Toni Morrison′s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved (1987) is in part a fictional re-imagining of the Margaret Garner child-murder case of 1856, and is based more generally on Morrison′s extensive readings in nineteenth-century sources.  Geraldine Brooks′s novel March (2005), which also won a Pulitzer in the U.S., is explicitly based on the nineteenth-century classic Little Women (1868).  Both Brooks and Morrison have written esteemed works that bear witness to their literary foremothers: nineteenth century American women writers.  This course examines three of the most significant nineteenth-century American women writers–Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Harriet Jacobs–and traces their literary ″legacy″ in the works of two contemporary women writers.  Yet this course also asks students to delve into the legacy by exploring the vast field of nineteenth-century American women writers, as well as developing the tools to think critically about these literatures, culminating in a term paper.  In so doing, we will examine the unique tensions faced by American women writers who wrote in a time before women were fully enfranchised in the U.S., and discover how those tensions are present in literary works across two centuries that interrogate such issues as aesthetics, authorship, motherhood, class, gender, sexuality, race, and writing.

Syllabus
List of Women Writers & Artists 
Click here for an on-line guide to MLA style citations
An example of plagiarism; or, when dishonesty doesn't pay.
What did Nathaniel Hawthorne have to say about his female colleagues? 

Choose your Primary Source for your Research Day Report, 11 October 2006.

Primary Sources, Electronic Databases:
The University of Virginia's Women Writers Site
Early American Authors at the University of Virginia
The Making of America (MOA) Database (large)
19thC Periodicals: MOA
19thC Books: MOA
19thC Sunday-School Literature
Mothers in the America of Uncle Tom's Cabin
The American Verse Project (poetry--large)
Godey's Lady's Book On-line (year: 1850)
Society for the Study of American Women Writers--19thC Archives
African-American Women Writers of the 19thC.

Primary Sources, Hard Copies:
See Books on Reserve at the UCCS Kramer Family Library for our course.
 

Secondary Sources:
The MLA Bibliography should be the first database you use: it indexes articles, chapters in books, and books.  Access the database through the UCCS Kramer Family Library homepage (the MLA Bibliography is a "periodical index").  Another bibliography that's more historically focused is the America: History and Life database.  Access it just like the MLA above.  

Many articles in periodicals are now available on-line.  Check for articles in J-Stor and Project Muse (sometimes the bibliographies above will have embedded links to these articles, but not always, so it's worth checking).  Check on-line and print resources using the Library's "print and electronic journal holdings" link.  

Occasionally you'll need to order books or articles.  BOOKS can be ordered through Prospector (very fast).  If ARTICLES are not available on-line or in our print collection, you may need to order the article through Interlibrary Loan (ILL--rather slow but worth it if you need a particular work).  Click on "Interlibrary Loan" on the Library's homepage to use this service.  

  
Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1811-1896

 
Don't miss the University of Virginia's excellent site, Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture.  Here's a small section from this extensive site on the intersections between abolitionism and women's rights. 

The evolution of an antislavery image:
Josiah Wedgewood, England, 1787Attached to the American antislavery poet Whittier's poem, "My Countrymen in Chains!," 1835.
From George Bourne, Slavery Illustrated in its Effects on Women, 1837.  "The Afflicted Mother," from an 1836 edition of the children's antislavery magazine The Slave's Friend.  Some American women writers wrote for this publication, but they often signed with initials or pseudonyms, which makes it difficult to determine authorship with certainty.  

Harriet Ann Jacobs, 1813-1897.  Click here for another site on Jacobs. Here's a new site on Jacobs that includes original primary source documents.
Dr. Jean Fagan Yellin will be presenting a lecture entitled "Writing Harriet Jacobs" at 7p. on the UCCS Campus. 

Jean Fagan Yellin, Distinguished Professor of English Emerita at Pace University, is best known for her authentication of the work of Harriet Jacobs, a former slave who published a narrative in 1861 that stunningly critiques the racial and sexual double standards of her day.  Long considered a spurious narrative, Dr. Yellin′s painstaking work has elevated Jacobs′s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl into the most frequently read female slave narrative both inside and outside of the academy. Recently featured in the PBS documentary Slavery and the Making of America (broadcast February 2005), Yellin is recognized as the world′s foremost authority on Harriet Jacobs.  Best known for her edition of Jacobs′s Incidents (Harvard UP, 1987, 2000), Yellin has recently published a celebrated biography of Jacobs, entitled Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Basic Civitas Books 2004), which was the winner of the 2004 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University′s Gilder Lehrman Center for the for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition.  Dr. Yellin′s visit to UCCS coincides with the publication of Jacobs′s papers (UNC Press), the first scholarly edition of the papers of an enslaved African-American woman ever published.  Dr. Yellin is also the author of numerous critical studies including Women and Sisters (Yale UP 1990) and The Intricate Knot (NYU Press 1972), and has edited editions of such classics as Stowe′s Uncle Tom′s Cabin.  On Wednesday 18 October 2006, Dr. Yellin will be presenting a public lecture at UCCS entitled ″Writing Harriet Jacobs.″  Please join us for this exciting event.

Louisa May Alcott, 1832-1888.
First tour Dr. Campbell's excellent Alcott page.
Take a virtual tour of Louisa May Alcott's home from 1858-1877, in Concord, MA, known as "Orchard House."
Brief biography from PBS.
Brief essay on the Fruitlands commune.
E-texts of works by Louisa May Alcott (scroll down to "e-texts").
Little Women on line.

  Here's a brief biography of Toni Morrison, in honor of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. 

Beloved: Haunted by History

   This image was displayed as part of an article in Harper′s Weekly of 4 July 1863.  You may view the page for free by accepting Harper′s terms. 

Original newspaper account of the Margaret Garner tragedy

The Garner case in the words of abolitionist Levi Coffin

Thomas Satterwhite Noble, 1867

For further reading on the Margaret Garner, see Steven Weisenburger, Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998). 

Toni Morrison on Beloved, its opening sentences, its style.
″124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom.″   

Beginning Beloved with numerals rather than spelled out numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate from the street or even the city; to name it the way "Sweet Home" was named; the way plantations were named, but not with nouns or "proper" names--with numbers instead because numbers have no adjectives, no posture of coziness or grandeur or the haughty yearning of arrivistes and estate builders for the parallel beautifications of the nation they left behind, laying claim to instant history and legend.  Numbers here constitute an address, a thrilling enough prospect for slaves who had owned nothing, least of all an address. And although the numbers, unlike words, can have no modifiers, I give these an adjective−spiteful....
     Whatever the risks of confronting the reader with what must be immediately incomprehensible in that simple, declarative authoritative sentence, the risk of unsettling him or her, I determined to take. Because the in medias res opening that I am so committed to is here excessively demanding. It is abrupt, and should appear so. No native informant here. The reader is snatched, yanked, thrown into an environment completely foreign, and I want it as the first stroke of the shared experience that might be possible between the reader and the novel's population. Snatched just as the slaves were from one place to another, from any place to another, without preparation and without defense. No lobby, no door, no entrance--a gangplank, perhaps (but a very short one). And the house into which this snatching--this kidnapping--propels one, changes from spiteful to loud to quiet, as the sounds in the body of the ship itself may have changed.  A few words have to be read before it is clear that 124 refers to a house ....and a few more have to be read to discover why it is spiteful, or rather the source of the spite. By then it is clear, if not at once, that something is beyond control, but is not beyond understanding since it is not beyond accommodation by both the "women" and the "children." The fully realized presence of the haunting is both a major incumbent of the narrative and sleight of hand. One of its purposes is to keep the reader preoccupied with the nature of the incredible spirit world while being supplied a controlled diet of the incredible political world.  
 ....Here I wanted the compelling confusion of being there as they (the characters) are; suddenly, without comfort or succor from the "author," with only imagination, intelligence, and necessity available for the journey. ....No compound of houses, no neighborhood, no sculpture, no paint, no time, especially no time because memory, pre-historic memory, has no time. There is just a little music, each other and the urgency of what is at stake. Which is all they had. For that work, the work of language is to get out of the way.   
 --From Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature," Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 1-34. ©1989 Toni Morrison. Rpt. in Angelyn Mitchell, ed., Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (Durham: Duke UP, 1994), 368-398.  Internet source.

"Mixed in with the voices surrounding the house, recognized but undecipherable to Stamp Paid, were the thoughts of the women of 124, unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" (235).

More Notes on Morrison's Beloved

″Did you speak to him? Didn′t you say anything to him? Something!″

″I couldn′t, Sethe. I just....couldn′t.″

″Why!″

″I had a bit in my mouth.″(82).

"I didn′t care nothing about the measuring string. We all laughed about that−except Sixo....Schoolteacher′d wrap that string all over my head, ′cross my nose, around my behind. Number my teeth. I thought he was a fool" (226). "I was about to turn around and keep on my way…when I heard him say, "No, no. That′s not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And don′t forget to line them up" (228).

This portrait of Schoolteacher speaks to nineteenth-century racial pseudo-science, especially phrenology and physiognomy. These theories are put in the service of racist ideas in a report about the Amistad uprising, published in 1840.

″Denver left, but not before she had seen, sitting on a shelf by the back door, a blackboy's mouth full of money″ (300).

Some of the imagery in Beloved's section speaks to the horrors of the middle passage.

For further reading on the Margaret Garner, see Steven Weisenburger, Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).

  Geraldine Brooks is the Australian-born author of March.