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St. Herbert and the Man of Feeling

Gillian Silverman

University of Colorado Denver

I taught St. Herbert this past fall in an upper division survey course: American Literature to the Civil War. The course proceeded roughly chronologically, and so we read the novella shortly after covering works such as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, the writings of Thomas Jefferson, and Phillis Wheatley’s poetry. It was a wonderful and productive addition to the syllabus. First, because it originally appeared in The New-York Weekly Magazine, St. Herbert allowed the class to talk about the phenomenon of serialization and the role that newspapers played in the emerging republic (something already touched upon in conjunction with Franklin’s Autobiography). The fact that the novella’s authorship is hazy—the author is identified only as “Anna”—allowed us to discuss the conventions and risks associated with publishing in early America, especially for women. Continue reading “St. Herbert and the Man of Feeling”

It’s Great Upstate: Teaching St. Herbert in Rural New York

Megan Walsh

St. Bonaventure University

St. Herbert (1796) is a short novel about a group of people who visit and live in a remote part of rural upstate New York. Many of them learn important life lessons while there, and often enough, also find romantic love. St. Bonaventure University is a small liberal-arts focused school in a remote part of rural upstate New York. Students come there for education and, if alumni reunions are representative, regularly leave having found lasting romantic relationships. A central character in St. Herbert finds the freedom to practice her newfound Catholicism in the novel’s rural setting; the character names St. Herbert and Julius Cuthbert seem to allude to famous Catholic hermits. Franciscan friars founded St. Bonaventure in the 1850s to provide education and religion to a nearby oil town built a few years earlier. The people who visit George St. Herbert at home are generally from New York City, although a few are country folk. At St. Bonaventure, most students are from the metropolitan areas of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and New York City, but there are also some from the small villages and dairy farms that lie in between these urban hubs. Continue reading “It’s Great Upstate: Teaching St. Herbert in Rural New York”

Lost and Found: Empowering Student Archival Research Through “Just Teach One”

Rochelle Raineri Zuck

University of Minnesota Duluth

When I first heard about Profs. Duncan Faherty and Ed White’s “Just Teach One” project, which provides digital scholarly editions of “neglected or forgotten texts” for classroom use, I was really excited at the prospect of introducing new material into my American novels course (Faherty and White “Welcome”). What proved even more exciting, however, was that participating in this program helped me to empower students to discover their own “forgotten” novels. Working with “Just Teach One” texts such as “St. Herbert—A Tale” (1796) demonstrates to students, perhaps better than any other way that I have tried, that there are new things to be discovered/rediscovered about early America. Continue reading “Lost and Found: Empowering Student Archival Research Through “Just Teach One””

“Not Even New York Was Enough to Lighten Her Mood”: Teaching St. Herbert in Brooklyn

Caroline Chamberlin Hellman

City Tech, City University of New York

I taught St. Herbert—A Tale in an American literature survey (beginnings-Civil War). Embarking with a discussion of the Lenape alongside Eric Sanderson’s miraculous Mannahatta project and concluding with Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, the class covered vast territory. As City Tech is located in Brooklyn, I tend to make the curriculum a bit more New York-centric than I might elsewhere. Our class studied Jacob Steendam’s “Spurring Verses,” one of the earliest real estate advertisements for New Amsterdam; visited the Brooklyn Historical Society to learn more about the early denizens of the borough, then the town of Breuckelen; and paid homage to Walt Whitman at the site of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Continue reading ““Not Even New York Was Enough to Lighten Her Mood”: Teaching St. Herbert in Brooklyn”

St. Herbert in the American Lit Sophomore Survey Class

Derrick Spradlin

Freed-Hardeman University

I taught St. Herbert in my ENG 235 American Literature I course, a sophomore-level course taken primarily by students to fulfill the general education literature requirement, though there are normally a couple of English majors in each 35-person class.

This past semester, I used St. Herbert as the primary text for an assignment that calls on groups of about three students to give presentations to the class in which they make connections (thematic, structural, linguistic, cultural, etc.) between the assigned text—St. Herbert in this case—and either any of the other assigned texts, genres, movements, or themes from the semester or any contemporary text or current event. Their presentations must have a thesis or main point, must make specific references to the text(s), and should be between five and ten minutes long. The assignment falls towards the end of the semester so that students can draw from what they have learned over the past few months. Continue reading “St. Herbert in the American Lit Sophomore Survey Class”

A New “Major Figure”? Incorporating Sarah Savage’s The Factory Girl in the American Literature Survey

Fiona McWilliam
Florida State University

This past Spring I had the opportunity to teach Sarah Savage’s The Factory Girl in my Major Figures in American Literature course at Florida State University. This 3000-level course, aimed primarily (but not exclusively) at English majors, centered around the theme, “Nineteenth-Century American Authors in Context.” My aim for the semester was for students to engage with cultural artifacts from the nineteenth century and thus develop a more nuanced understanding of our assigned texts and authors. More broadly, I wanted students to think about how and why an author becomes a “major-figure” and consider why we read some authors and texts but not others – Sarah Savage’s The Factory Girl seemed like the perfect opportunity to have students consider these questions. Continue reading “A New “Major Figure”? Incorporating Sarah Savage’s The Factory Girl in the American Literature Survey”

Patching a Hole in the History Canon

Whitney Martinko
Department of History
Villanova University

The call for participants for this term’s Just Teach One text came at a fortuitous moment for me, just as I was struggling to put the finishing touches on a syllabus for an undergraduate History lecture course entitled “Building a New Nation, 1800-1850.” I had resolved to assign a reading load almost exclusively of easily accessible primary sources. But in scanning several piles of primary document readers, textbooks, and colleagues’ syllabi, I noticed a curious feature of what might be called the early American history canon: it seems to include far fewer sources from the years 1800 to 1820 than it does for previous and following decades. Though this feature appears as a thin spot in the fabric of a course covering colonial North America to the Civil War, or even the Revolution to Reconstruction, it became a series of holes when I stretched the material from 1800 and 1850 to fill an entire semester. The Factory Girl (1814), as prepared by Duncan and Ed, seemed to offer a patch for my syllabus that made the mended piece far more interesting than the original. Continue reading “Patching a Hole in the History Canon”

Roosters and other ways of waking up

Emily Ogden
University of Virginia

I taught Savage’s The Factory Girl in a course called “Sex and Sentiment.” The Factory Girl landed on the syllabus just after Catharine Sedgwick’s A New England Tale (1822)—”sentiment”—and just before the anonymous Ellen Merton, the Belle of Lowell; or, Confessions of the G.F.K. Club—”sex.” In general the course tacked back and forth between stories of seduction and stories of successful female bildung. The Factory Girl falls in the latter category about as squarely as can be, and before we started reading it I had gotten interested in something that was for me a previously overlooked element of your basic antebellum good-girl profile: time discipline. In Hannah Foster’s The Boarding School, the pupils wake up at 5 am, but for no discernable reason: “the young ladies arose at five, from which they had two hours at their own disposal, till the bell summoned them at seven” (139, in the recent Norton edition of The Coquette and The Boarding School edited by Jennifer Harris and Bryan Waterman). I lectured about scheduling for scheduling’s sake—timetables as a way of organizing the soul—and read to my students from the punishment of Damiens and the rules for the house of young prisoners at the beginning of Discipline and Punish. Continue reading “Roosters and other ways of waking up”

Sarah Savage in Women’s Literature

Sarah Salter
Penn State University

This spring semester at the Pennsylvania State University, I was slated to teach “Women Writers,” a cross-listed English/Women’s Studies course geared toward a generalized undergraduate audience. Content requirements were minimal. The course catalogue’s broad account described for curious internet surfers a “wide-ranging study of works by American, British, and other English-speaking women writers” before providing a daunting partial list of authors: “Bradstreet, Wollstonecraft, C. Rosefti, M. Shelley, Austen, C. Bronte, E. Bronte, G. Eliot, D. Wordsworth, Dickinson, Wharton, Stowe, Freeman, Jewett, Fuller, H.D., Moore, Sitwell, Bishop, Brooks, Plath, Cather, Woolf, Stein, Lessing, Bowen, O’Connor, Welty, Porter, Oates, Olsen, Sarton, Gordimer, Atwood, Morrison, Kinkaid, McCarthy, and Churchill.”

Familiar or not as the writers on this list may have been to my incoming students or to me, it was certain that Sarah Savage, author of 1814’s The Factory Girl, was not among those suggested. Continue reading “Sarah Savage in Women’s Literature”

Deconstructing Binaries in Sarah Savages’s The Factory Girl

Leigh Johnson
Marymount University

The Factory Girl by Sarah Savage replaced Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills on my spring syllabus for EN 350, The American Dream, a liberal arts core advanced literature class for non-majors. Students found Mary’s story less than thrilling, but by the end of our discussion, we had mined the text to fascinating results.

Clearly, the story is didactic literature at its finest, and students grasped the values on offer. Breaking the text into the binaries helped students to structurally organize the elements of the text. Brianstorming such binaries as prosperity/debt, piousness/immorality, work/leisure, youth/age, and education/ignorance among others allowed students who had been confused by the nuances of Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson (which we had just finished) to comprehend the ways that one half of a binary is often privileged in a text. Examining this underlying structure served to clarify the moral teachings of the text and opened up space for us to explore how these binaries might not be as stable as the text suggests. Continue reading “Deconstructing Binaries in Sarah Savages’s The Factory Girl”