Tangent #3

I found a fun article on BookSlut, and thought it was interesting enough to post here. It’s about the reading habits of college kids today called “On Campus, Vampires Are Besting the Beats” by Ron Charles. I am willing to admit that I read all four of the Twilight books in less than 5 days this Christmas break, and I don’t think this makes me a “bad” or non-politically motivated student. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to use someone’s reading habits as an index of their intelligence. Anyways, I hope you check out the article since it’s written about our own demographic.



I am also posting a link to this article about Battlestar Galatica and feminism, but please do not read it if you haven’t seen all the episodes so far. The article is called “Chauvinist Pigs in Space: Why Battlestar Galactica is not so frakking feminist after all” by Juliet Lapidos. There are major spoilers as to identity (Cylon/ human) and plot lines in the article. When I was trying to find this link because I had forgotten to save it, I just went to Google and typed in “Battlestar Galatica and feminism” and was shocked by how many links appeared (the Slate article didn’t show up). I both agree and disagree with the article – I think she makes a compelling argument, backed up with evidence from the show. However, even after reading the article, I refuse to give up my “girl crush” on Starbuck (and apparently I'm not the only one because there are "Pieces of Flair" on Facebook with Kara Thrace/Starbuck and the word "girl crush"). There’s just something so compelling about her character; I guess you have to have seen the show to know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t seen the show, you should definitely Netflix it (or run to Blockbuster). There is tons of fodder for literary analysis, trust me.

Proposal for Conference Paper

The Proper Method of the Instructor as presented in Sarah Savage’s The Factory Girl

While scholarship on the education revolution of women in Post-Revolutionary America exists, it concentrates on the role of women as student and/or teacher and how these roles relate to the myth of public and private spheres during the time period of 1820 — 1860. Mary Kelley explores the transformative power of female academies and seminaries on a cultural scale in Learning to Stand and Speak, whereas Thomas B. Lovell looks to the connections between labor, virtue and womanhood through an economic lens and states that factories were the site of transformation and moral incubation. While some scholarship attempts to position distinctive shifts in education transformation in a linear fashion, the novel The Factory Girl includes the past, the present and the future of education in Post-Revolutionary America. My conference paper will concern the evolution of education as portrayed in The Factory Girl through the characters of Mrs. Burnam, Mary Burnam, Mary’s co-workers, the poor factory children, and Mary’s nephews and step-sons that mimic the real changes in education occurring in Post-Revolutionary America. These three different generations each approach education, specifically education of children, in different manners and Savage’s text provides the reader with the promise of new and improved education and instructions of implementation.

The most important evidence for my argument comes from the novel itself. Savage contrasts the learning of Mrs. Burnam, Mary’s grandmother, with the education of Mary: “I did not know how to express it; for I never had much schooling; when I was a young woman, we did not have the advantages they do now” (Savage 33). While Mrs. Burnam did a wonderful job in raising and teaching Mary, her methods are not the future of education in America and she literally dies in the novel, leaving her teaching methods to die out as well. The novel establishes Mary as the ideal teacher of both her own generation and the younger generations, “rul[ing] her scholars by love" (Savage 53). However, even as Mary is the ideal teacher, there is a younger generation, the factory children and her own nephews and step-sons that will experience education in a manner unfamiliar to Mary: learning in the newly established Sunday Charity School. The methods of instruction and motivation for schooling this younger generation is also different from Mary’s childhood experience, because now education has become the “best security for honest industry and laudable exertion” (Savage 38). Other evidence must come from historical records that chart the transformation of education in Post-Revolutionary America. Scholars such as Mary Kelley, Nancy Cott, Mary P. Ryan, and Barbra Welter have looked to private writings of women, in various forms, to provide a more complex and diverse record of Post-Revolutionary America. The works of these scholars, thanks to their interdisciplinary and New Historicism approach, will compliment the textual evidence provided in The Factory Girl.

The Factory Girl was published on the cusp of the educational revolution. There were Sunday Charity schools in existence in 1814, and Sarah Savage herself was educated and an educator. The novel provides a unique expression of the education continuum, rather than presenting the transformation as immediate, sudden and complete. Cathy N. Davidson describes the novel as the nation’s first industrial novel, and Margaret B. Moore calls it the first Sunday school novel. While the novel can function in both of these capacities, the most compelling aspect for me is the concern with education, specifically children’s education, and the way in which Savage presents the future of method and instruction just present on the horizon.

Tangent #2

Watchmen

In case you haven’t noticed all the trailers, commercials and other advertisements, the Watchmen movie is coming out in 3 days on 3.6.09 (go see it on the IMAX screen at Pointe Orlando, you won’t regret it!). I have only read the graphic novel one time, but it was amazing. After this semester is over and I have some free time, I definitely plan on reading it again. Watchmen was created by Alan Moore (writer), Dave Gibbons (artist) and John Higgins (colorist) in 1986-1987. For more background information, you can go to the Wikipedia page but be careful of spoilers! I would also recommend IGN’s page on Watchmen.

I would love to take a graduate level English Literature class that looks at the genre of graphic novels / comics / manga. I know a lot of people tend to think that popular cultural literature, especially comics, is not worthy of literary analysis, but I think ignoring popular literature is a big mistake. It’s popular for a reason, and exploring those reasons of attraction can be highly revealing of that culture. Even Time magazine put Watchmen on its All-Time 100 novels (1923-current), making it the only graphic novel on the list (they have a separate list for graphic novels available here).

So, I decided to look up some scholarly articles on the graphic novel Watchmen and was pleasantly surprised. This is what I found at the MLA International Database:

Fishbaugh, B. "Moore and Gibbons's Watchmen: Exact Personifications of Science." Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 39.3: 189-198.

Goldsmith, J. "The Watchmen: Interview with David Hayter." Creative Screenwriting 9.1: 16-16.

Hughes, J. A. "'Who Watches the Watchmen?': Ideology and 'Real World' Superheroes." Journal of Popular Culture 39.4: 546-557.

Rosen, E. "'What's That You Smell Of?' Twenty Years of Watchmen Nostalgia." Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 35.98: 85-98.

There are plenty of topics to be explored in the graphic novel: the anti-hero, apocalyptical fiction, narrative structure (example: the story of the comic book that keeps popping up throughout the storyline), art structure (go to issue 5, then go to page 14-15 and you’ll see a giant yellow X), binaries, the structures of power / knowledge, the super heroes as “other,” and comics as a genre are just a few that I could think of on the spot. I hope this post inspires you, if you haven’t already, to read and fall in love with Watchmen.

Focused Reading

As I’m working my way through the books and articles I’ve checked out during my “research shopping trips” (Elena’s perfect metaphor), I’ll be posting what sources were useless and which were helpful. The helpful sources might take a little longer to post because I want to either type up my notes or scan in my handwritten notes.

I’m finding that most of my research includes a lot of background information on Post-Revolutionary social, historical and cultural customs, as well as histories on publishing and literary activities. This is both good and bad – good because I have no background in this time period whatsoever except the little I remember from American Lit I from my undergrad years (and I can’t even review my notes from this class because my notebook is missing, ugh!) and my high school history classes.

It’s bad because I feel like I’m wasting my time catching up on background history until I remember that this research will pay off in the long run, and allow me to reference these findings in my conference paper with confidence. I know that it is impossible to become an expert on Post-Revolutionary American literature in a semester, so I’m keeping in mind the limits of our assignment and time allotment while going through all these sources. I’m also grateful to Dr. Logan for pointing me in the right direction in regards to my research, telling me which sources are too old/outdated (Barbara Welter’s Dimity Convictions) and which will help me focus my research (Barbara Welter’s The Cult of True Womanhood, Nancy Cott’s The Bonds of True Womanhood, Mary Kelley’s Learning to Stand and Speak, etc.).


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Useless:

More, Hannah. Cœlebs in Search of a Wife: Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals. Ed. Patricia Demers. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview Editions, 2007.

I didn’t realize that Hannah More was British and not American, and although I know to keep transatlantic cultural exchange in mind for this time period, there wasn’t enough about my proposed topic of education in the introduction or supporting materials. I did however find out the identity of the Mrs. Chapone, who Savage quotes in one of the chapter introductions: Hester Chapone, a British essayist. I will have to do a little more digging to find out more, but at least I have her full name now.


O’Keefe, Deborah. Good Girl Messages: How Young Women Were Misled by Their Favorite Books. New York: Continuum, 2000.

I had such high hopes for this book, stemming mostly from the title! Unfortunately, when I picked the book off the shelf, I only glanced at the table of contents, which did not reveal the time period of the book (1900s and forward). Can you blame me for getting excited when I saw these chapter titles: “Horizontal Heroines,” “Fluttery Girls, Bloody-Minded Boys: Where Girls Fit In,” “What Girls Could Do, without Losing Their Girlishness,” “Girls with Grownups: Loving Authority, Melting Hostility,” “Girls and Their Friends: Civilized by the Group,” “Girls and Boys – Conservative Romance” and “Today’s Terrific New Girl Heroes.” I will definitely be revisiting this book when I have some free reading time, because it looks like a lot of fun and I am attracted to the children’s literature genre.


Vietto, Angela. Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2005.

Even though the title mentioned Revolutionary America, I had hopes that it might include a little Post-Revolutionary writing (Factory Girl was published in 1814). I also thought it would be good to get some background on the literature that preceding writings like Factory Girl. Unfortunately for me, this book explores the “broad spectrum of literary activities” not just the novel, which is of the course the genre of The Factory Girl. However, one of the chapters was entitled “The Pen and the Sword: Women Writing Women Warriors” and dealt with Deborah Sampson, so I photocopied it for Nina.

Abstract

Lovell, Thomas B. “Separate Spheres and Extensive Circles: Sarah Savage’s ‘The Factory Girl’ and the Celebration of Industry in Early Nineteenth-Century America.” Early American Literature 31.1 (1996): 1-24. America: History & Life. 7 February 2009.


Lovell makes the argument that Sarah Savage’s The Factory Girl presents the domestic and private spheres not as separate, but as “mutually enabling and interdependent” sites working toward the same goal: accepting women workers as both producing and maintaining virtue. Those who opposed factories because the supposed threat to virtue in the domestic sphere are mistaken, according to both Lovell and Savage, because factories are “a place of expansion and increasing influence over the lives of others” making them more capable of cultivating virtue than the home. Attempting to locate virtue exclusively in the home is a greater evil than any evil found in factories.

Lovell combines historical textual evidence (writings of Alexander Hamilton, Adam Smith, and Edward Everett) with textual evidence from The Factory Girl to support his argument that Savage’s readers would not support the idea of separate spheres that modern scholars argue existed in post-Revolutionary America. He describes the connections between “labor, virtue and womanhood” that were in development and their relationship to literature and culture. Wage labor enabled nineteenth-century Americans a clear sense of duty and provided an unambiguous gauge of a person’s usefulness. Unlike the Puritans, nineteenth-century Americans did not approve of a sexual division of labor; instead, they applied a principle of usefulness.

Lovell does not restrict his analysis of “labor, virtue and womanhood” to The Factory Girl, and his analysis is enriched by the inclusion of Savage’s entire body of work, historical evidence and mentions of other scholarship regarding separate spheres by Ann Douglas, and Jane Tompkins (his “Notes” includes references to more scholarship in this vein). Lovell argues that economic calculation, rather than the sentimental, guides Mary Burnham throughout the novel. This transition is reflected by real world transformation of America as a primarily agricultural world to one that looked to manufacturing as an expansion, rather than replacement, of production. In other words, manufacturing was not seen as evil, but rather as a necessary step to secure American’s independence from dependence on foreign production. The factory then becomes a site of moral regeneration or a moral incubator according to pro-factory groups, who saw the expansionist potential for factory workers, mostly women, to foster virtue in other people.

Lovell’s claim that separate spheres was a myth to nineteenth-century Americans is well supported by textual evidence from Savage’s novel, and the writings of Hamilton and Smith. The article only mentions briefly the viewpoints of Douglas and Tompkins, but does a fair job at representing their viewpoints before going on to refute them. The section most helpful to my own research concerned Mary’s expanded influence upon the Sunday school children (who are factory workers involuntarily) and their education as contrasted to the social status of her nephews, whom she deems too young and inexperienced to deal with the factory environment. However, when their moral shields are fully developed, she hopes they too will become virtuous workers.

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Abstract Notes:

This assignment, to create a one page, single spaced abstract, was actually more difficult than I initially thought it would be. It was hard to condense a twenty four page article into less than a page, and to decide what was important enough to mention and what could be discarded. I am uploading the three pages of handwritten notes I took while reading the Lovell article, and if you can read my handwriting, you’ll see the information that didn’t make the cut.

I think that as I go through the rest of my resources, I’ll continue to take notes in this manner, pretending like I will have to write an abstract or annotated bibliography for each source. This will make me focus more accurately on major keywords, topics and goals of the article or book chapter, allowing for more efficient and productive readings.


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