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Amanda Stuckey
York College of Pennsylvania

 

Our class read Rosa in LIT 313: The American Novel, an upper-level seminar designed for English majors. The class was structured to encourage students to think critically about what exactly makes a novel “American.” Throughout the semester, we explored many angles of addressing this question, from accounting for a novel’s historical context, its reception history, its author’s background, and its geographic settings. Rosa posed some challenges to this question, especially in its anonymity, its often-erratic plot lines, and its diverse cast of characters. In the end, however, Rosa helped us think about the ways a novel’s “American-ness,” in theme, in composition, or in form, may be the result of an author’s deliberate construction of an “American” voice out of the chorus of voices and literary materials within the text.

We read Rosa right after finishing up Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, and in initial online responses and classroom conversations we discussed the two novels together. In particular, students’ responses seemed to center on the differences in narrative voice found throughout the novels; whereas one student noted the “moralizing voice” of Rowson’s narrator, she also suggested that Rosa seems to “mimic a moralizing voice,” perhaps as satire. One student even speculated that “Charlotte Temple is the kind of book Rosa is satirizing.” Our conversations diverged from Charlotte Temple, however, when students noted the “intertextual literary pieces” and what one student observed as the “fight to identify what was American literature” that seemed to distinguish Rosa from Charlotte Temple and that connected Rosa with more contemporary texts we would read later in the semester, even those as seemingly dissimilar as our final reading, Junot Díaz’s 2007 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

When we moved from comparative readings to thinking about Rosa as an “American novel,” we found it necessary to sketch out a very rough map of the characters – and the author’s – peregrinations throughout the text, taking note of the connections made and paths crossed across the novel’s varied geographic and literary terrains. We had created a similar networked map of our overall syllabus during the first day of class, and we found that Rosa charted some of the same geographic spaces of “America” as represented in overall class readings. What stood out to us in particular about Rosa, however, was the way in which the lives of the novel’s diverse cast of characters mimicked the diverse forms, voices, and content of early nineteenth-century literatures. Rosa proved to be especially useful in understanding the early American swirl of print culture, as students immediately noted “the power of the media” as well as the “insatiable hunger for the flowery, the embellished, the sensationalist” that perhaps “represents the absence of a unified American literary culture at the time.” In this way, Rosa allowed us to discuss both the various forms of early U.S. print culture as well as the audiences that were consuming it.

Emily Goff, one of my LIT 313 students, became particularly interested in the mysteries surrounding the novel, and I asked her to reflect on her own experience with the novel in this post. She also completed her final project on the novel, linked here http://exploringrosa.blogspot.com/

 

Emily writes:

Sitting in a college classroom, a space constructed by both fixed and fluid pedagogies, in the 21st century and discussing Rosa, a text with meta-pedagogical layers to it, made me aware of the ever-unfolding struggle to uncover what an authentic American education is. The anonymous author grappled with the question, to be sure, and even explicitly stated how important real-life experience is, above all else, in the shaping of one’s mind and educational background. Nevertheless, it is impossible to ignore the anonymous mastermind behind even the narrative voice; he or she must have been aware of the inevitability of educational institutions in this country, so, throughout the novel, there is an emphasis on characters’ responses to many different influences.

Richard does carve out his own path for himself, indeed, despite his problematic circumstances and heritage, but there is this undeniable, even timeless American-ness to him as a character at all points of his journey (which is the spine story of Rosa, really). His unfailing determination, as a student and writer in nineteenth-century America, to expand his knowledge and skills resonates with me, as a student and writer in twenty-first-century America. I realized, as simple as this may sound, that Americans are individual people, first and foremost. American education, regardless of the era, is about figuring out how to do more than simply exist amidst the mosaic of human voices. American genius is that development of striking individuality that somehow harmonizes with that of the person next to you, and the person next to her, and so on. The author teaches society how to teach something seemingly un-teachable: the art of being a unique American while still belonging to a nation whose principles are deeply entrenched, yet whose levels of diversity increase by the day. We cannot and should not stop the flourishing of all sorts of voices—that would defeat the purpose of having a democracy that guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of the press among many other liberties—but we can try to teach the art of at once celebrating and satirizing elements of the literary landscape. What emerges from an engagement with that creative challenge is freshness, a distinctly American genius.

Education is a lifelong journey of the mind as it attempts to sift through the chaos and establish an informed, but unique vision. It is an evolving mindset, in the end, from which there springs not only critical thinking but also creative, energetic work. Our class imagined that the decidedly well-read author was someone who enjoyed walking through the streets, gathering inspiration and weaving together the varying influences in the air. Everyone’s voice mattered then; everyone’s voice matters now. I felt incredibly empowered during this discussion, as I am always trying to figure out ways in which I can connect all of the valuable knowledge I’ve gained from my years of schooling with my passion for writing within a large diverse community of Americans (and human beings, of course). As it turns out, education is that fusion within the self; it has rough edges and confusing elements, but it is American because of that courage to do something risky and unique with all of the pent-up energy. Ultimately, Rosa has become more than a mere story to me; I treasure it as a quirky manifesto.

 

Nicole C. Livengood, Associate Professor of English
Marietta College

 

“Odd,” “chaotic,” and “confusing” were some of the words that my early American survey students used to describe Rosa during our debrief of their thoughts on the novel.  Their one-word assessments were not dismissive.  In fact, many noted that having an actual plot was refreshing after our march from the literature of settlement through the Revolution. However, that plot was disorienting, more of a zig-zagging precursor to the Romantics than a logical reflection of the Enlightenment era we were leaving behind.

Their disorientation was fitting.    One reason I chose to teach Rosa was for the chance to experience a new text along with my students.  Thus, while I had read the novel and determined some key concepts and connections—such as its interest in female education and Judith Sargent Murray’s “On the Equality of the Sexes”—I did not have an agenda or a pre-established framework for presenting the text.  As a result, our reading of Rosa was somewhat scattershot.  We considered Rosa as a didactic text that expanded Judith Sargent Murray’s concerns with female education to the education of men as well; analyzed the characters as types; and had an intriguing discussion of the relationship between the Peruvian Sol’s speech (Chapter IV) and William Apess’s “Eulogy on King Phillip.”

 Our eclectic foray into Rosa meant that we did not have a sustained examination of the novel.  However, one of the rewards of our experiment was that students made unique connections between it and other texts.  These, in turn, have provided me with new frameworks for teaching Rosa.

The first framework focuses on women’s education and empowerment in the new nation. Students noted compelling intersections between Rosa, Elizabeth Stoddard’s “Lemorne v. Huell,” and Margaret Fuller’s “The Great Lawsuit.” For instance, they observed that all three texts were concerned with women’s need for self-knowledge.  Some noted that Stoddard’s character Margaret and Rosa shared socioeconomic disadvantages and had wealthy benefactors.  The difference, for them, was that Margaret epitomized Margaret Fuller’s claims that women are limited by lack of self-knowledge and self-ownership.  Rosa, by contrast, sought to develop intellectually and individually.  Others noted that the author of Rosa clearly focused on the development of women’s voice, and (assuming the author was a woman) saw narrative experimentation similar to that of Fuller.

The second framework focuses on the concept of journeys.  I had an aha! moment midway through our discussion of Rosa, as the class struggled to understand Richard’s story (told primarily in Chapter V) on its own and in relation to the novel.  My aha! moment was this:

That Richard’s story reflects the structure and themes of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Part I.  The more we puzzled through Chapter V, the more I saw that Rosa’s author affirms Franklin’s concerns about the instability and uncertainty of the early United States.  Richard’s journey northward is a geographic reversal of Franklin’s, and as Young Orvaine is tempted, duped, and humbled he must learn to think critically about those he encounters.  His story emphasizes the instability and uncertainty of the early United States, and is a microcosmic look at early Republican concerns regarding personal integrity, authenticity, and social legitimacy in an upwardly mobile, geographically expansive society.   These concerns are evident in the novel’s preoccupation with gossip, insincerity, and—especially—ne’er-do-well Mr. Figary’s alternative facts,  each of which resonated with students in the context of twenty-first century media and culture.

Alas, my aha! moment came too late.  I had not assigned the Autobiography, Part I and my students understandably failed to see why I was nerding out at Rosa’s (seemingly deliberate) engagement with it (as well as other Franklin texts…especially “The Way to Wealth”). However, later in the semester they noted that Rosa’s concerns for truth and authenticity extended into the Romantic Era.  They signaled out Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” as texts with structural and thematic similarities to Rosa, particularly regarding the inability to truly know others.

I look forward to teaching Rosa in future survey courses.  It’s a refreshing way of introducing students to the literature of the early Republic.   I will work to provide more deliberate structure by pairing it with Franklin’s Autobiography, Part I as well as Judith Sargent Murray’s “On the Equality.”  Combined, these provide multiple and flexible entry points into understanding Rosa and its unique cultural moment.

 

Lucas Hardy
Youngstown State University

 

My American Literature I students read Rosa, or American Genius and Education for the final day of the fall 2017 semester. Readings for this survey class came primarily from the Norton Anthology, ninth edition, and spanned from Cabeza de Vaca to Walt Whitman. The class consisted of sophomores and juniors; some were English majors and others English Education/Integrated Language Arts majors. We had addressed the revolutionary and early national periods midway through the semester, with focus on Franklin, Equiano, and Crèvecoeur, in particular. I was doubtful that Rosa would be met with excitement, given that I had assigned the text for the final day of class, and since we had left the eighteenth century weeks earlier. I was delighted to find, however, that the novel was enthusiastically received. In a class of 20 students, almost everyone shared insight during our discussion. Part of their readiness to talk about the text was likely owing to the fact that they were required to write short reaction papers in which they worked to situate Rosa among the texts and topics we had discussed for the past 15 weeks (the questions they were asked to consider are included below in this post). Three primary discussion strands emerged in their papers and in class: the question of authorship, the closely connected problem of authenticity, and the issue of sympathy and sentimentality.

The first remark in class came from a student who had remained quiet for much of the semester. She and those who quickly joined the conversation noted that Rosa’s anonymous authorship caused a heightened sense of indeterminacy in their reading. For this reason, they agreed, the novel was fun to read. It hadn’t occurred to me before her observation, but nearly all of the reading we had done to that point was preceded by a substantial discussion of authorship and biography (due partly to the material provided in the Norton and partly to my own introductory remarks each day). Without knowing the identity of Rosa’s author, they were unsure where and how to begin the act of interpretation; if the writer wasn’t clearly biographically motivated by the topics we had so vigorously discussed—religious identity, free or slave status, or even his or her classification as a canonical literary figure, for instance—then what, exactly, mattered in the text?

I was intrigued to find that in the absence of a clear authorial voice presiding over the novel, students turned to Dorinda Charmion, the character they deemed the protagonist (despite the book’s title), for answers. She quickly became a personality from whom they could draw meaning. Since they had become so accustomed during the semester to finding connections among authors, they used Charmion to meet the same ends. The first and most interesting connection to our past reading was made, to my mind, when a student remarked that she saw reflections of John Winthrop and the “Model of Christian Charity” in Charmion’s benevolence toward Rosa. I agreed there was an echo of Winthrop in her generosity, but I was compelled to ask how, at the same time, Charmion and the world depicted in the novel would fail to meet the demands of the “Model.” Very quickly students remarked on the absence of religion—predestinarian religion, in particular—in the text. This observation became a means to consider how deductive assumptions about authorship might be made. It was obvious that religion was not an important topic in Rosa, so presumably the author was not affiliated with a strict religious movement, they reasoned. (The exception in the text, of course, is the Quaker who saves Richard Richardson/Orvaine from jail in Philadelphia). Most importantly, the idea that “some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection,” as Winthrop would have it, is antithetical to the theme of social mobility in the novel (82). Characters move up and down in class throughout, and they are largely self-made, students noted (which is signified also, they found, by the occasional references to Benjamin Franklin in the text). We agreed, at least provisionally, that even as those ideas of sympathy found in Winthrop’s “Model” seem to run longitudinally through early American culture(s), notions of ethics and morality ascribed to sympathetic concern had changed over time.

The sentimentality that emerges in the novel reflects eighteenth-century European ideals of fellow-feeling far more than it echoes American Calvinist notions of spiritual belonging. While we did not read sentimental novels this semester, some students had gained exposure to the genre in other courses, and I had mentioned several examples and talked a bit about the tradition when we read Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and other texts from the period. The class members were torn as to whether Charmion’s support for Rosa was a purely altruistic act or one motivated by a sense of socially-motivated responsibility. The majority seemed to agree that given her prominence in her social circle, and inspired by Mr. Derwent’s tutelage of Richard, she was acting—if even subconsciously—out of socially-constructed moral duty, rather than natural human compassion.

Several students segued from this discussion to think about the ways in which Mrs. Charmion and Rosa each emblemize different parts of the debate about genius and education mobilized in the novel. “Nature had indeed done more for [Mrs. Charmion] than education…Her mind was naturally acute and discriminating, but she had not enjoyed perfectly the benefit of a school,” the reader is told early in the text (5). Rosa, on the other hand, is educated formally, both in school and in society. “Mrs. Charmion spared no pains nor expense in her education,” we learn (57). Students were unsure why, if Mrs. Charmion had enjoyed a comfortable life after being raised in a less formal manner, she might be so committed to nurturing Rosa in a different way. The idea surfaced that views about education had changed with the advancement of Enlightenment thought in America. By the time Rosa was in Charmion’s care, there were new, stricter expectations for how a young woman should be trained. Another student wondered about differing attitudes toward education in rural versus metropolitan settings; Mrs. Charmion came of age in the country, but she raises Rosa in Baltimore. Rosa’s race also registered in our conversation about education. Mrs. Charmion was reared with little education, yet she is a member of Baltimore’s cultural elite. The Peruvian Rosa, on the other hand, apparently requires substantial academic and social instruction to reach the same status. One student concluded that Rosa’s formal education was perhaps necessitated by her lower (or mostly unknown) class, more than her indigenous identity.

The notion that Mrs. Charmion, a white woman, is naturally endowed with an “acute and discriminating” mind that permits her to “make close observation of the rules of society” contrasts the idea that Rosa, who is Native American, requires education in a classical sense. Students were perplexed, however, because the novel didn’t appear to be consistent in its suggestion that, in eighteenth-century terms, race and ethnicity were indicators of genius; Rosa’s father, Sol, demonstrates the opposite of what students observed in the education of Rosa. It is Sol’s genius that allowed him to learn about European history and the history of American colonization by reading independently. In fact, in his audience with dignitaries in London, Sol aims specifically to prove that “the natives of the American continent are as acute and vigorous in their intellect as the natives of Europe” (38). Sol’s impressive knowledge of history and persuasive arguments about Native American genius prompted numerous students to assert in their papers and in class that the author may him or herself have been a person of Native American decent.

The sentimental tradition emerges most clearly in the novel in the character of Richard Richardson/Orvaine, who takes a sort of “sentimental journey,” as students observed, from Baltimore to Philadelphia to New York to Boston and back home to Baltimore. They became especially attuned to the novel’s more satirical qualities through Richard’s travels, especially when he recommends that the author of Views by Starlight change the name of the book and attribute it to an acclaimed European writer, rather than an American. The class took this scene as an ironic rejection of European literary superiority—a theme reinforced by Mr. Ecstacy’s vulgarization of the Shakespearean sonnet form earlier in the novel. Richard’s travels through urban centers of cultural and intellectual importance are full of corruption and folly, yet his blunders are constantly rectified, in most cases by his witty and clever demeanor. The tacit message, students identified through both Sol and Richard, is that true genius will allow one to prevail over unexpected and adversarial circumstances.

In their short papers, student after student remarked that they “really enjoyed” Rosa, and some mentioned that it was their “favorite reading of the semester.” They deemed the novel funny, odd, and (despite its unclear authorship), easy to connect with other texts we had read. I was intrigued to hear from multiple students that in several ways, the novel seeemd to predict later nineteenth-century literary texts. We had just completed Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener and Whitman’s Song of Myself the week before. More than a few students found the unstable identities of the novel’s characters to emblemize a new sort of shifting American personality embodied in Melville and Whitman. And while student feedback was overwhelmingly positive, many tended to agree with Henri Petter’s analysis, cited in the editors’ introduction, that “the overall plot is ‘implausible’” and that the novel “is structurally very awkward” (2). They grumbled en masse about their frustration with the text’s disjointed assembly—especially the idea that we’re led to believe that we’ll follow Rosa’s coming-of-age, but we leave her for much of the novel to follow Richard, and it’s not really clear why. They were annoyed also by the novel’s didactic character names and its generally unimaginative set of philosophical ruminations (especially Richard’s satiric musings on “The Gossip”).

For my part, the experience of teaching Rosa revealed the advantages in assigning anonymous texts, and so I hope to include this and other similar works on future syllabi. Students, I learned, will explore ideas more feely and make creative connections with course material when less ponderous attention is given to authorship and biography. My only disappointment in class came when I inquired about the character of Francis Figary, the “illiterate [and] naturally cunning” freelance “gatherer of facts” who was “acquainted with the prevailing taste of the times for extravagance” (22). While I read all manner of connections to the current crisis in America of “alternative facts,” “fake news,” and media bias in Figary’s professional conduct, students had not identified him as a character of importance. Where I had hoped a sustained conversation about early news culture, media markets, and American journalism through the centuries might ensue, the attempt to talk about these topics through Figary fell flat.

Included below are questions students were encouraged to consider in their short response papers:

• How would you situate Rosa among the other texts we’ve read this semester? Which writers we’ve read appear to be in conversation with the topics and themes present in the text?
• What are the implications of reading a literary text by an anonymous or unknown author?
• What is “genius” as it’s characterized in the text? With what sort of “education” is the text concerned?
• How do themes of race, class, and gender emerge in Rosa?
• In what ways does this text engage eighteenth-century notions of nature, sentimentality, manners, and morality?

Works Cited:

Rosa, or American Genius and Education, New York, 1810.

Winthrop, John. “A Model of Christian Charity.” The Puritans in America, edited by Andrew Delbanco, Harvard UP, 1985, pp. 81-92.

 

Sarah Salter
Just Teach One Reflection

 

Is Texas a country unto itself? A region? A “state of mind,” as bumper stickers, t-shirts, and country classics proclaim? I teach multiethnic US literatures in an English Department on the South Texas Gulf Coast. This means that my students and I learn together hundreds of miles into what was, in the period I study, often mythologized as The Republic of Texas.

Many students at my university articulate complex regional identities, tied to US institutions and cultures, developed from logics and orientations of borderlands, underwritten by multilingualism. In the American Literature survey where we read JTO’s Fall 2017 offering, an anonymous satirical novel titled Rosa, or American Genius and Education, our syllabus is organized into regional units, each unfolding on their own chronological trajectory. Thus, the Texas/California/Mexico unit moves from Spanish American folktales to Cabeza de Vaca to the US Invasion of Mexico to the carved-wall poetry of Angel Island before we double back, starting again with John Smith in Virginia on the way to Douglass, Jacobs, and Chesnutt. In this context, students are authorized to embrace regional specificity from a range of perspectives: they teach me about local religions and folklores, about Texas public education, about the grade-school mythos of Davy Crockett. Meanwhile, I have (I hope!) curated for them a selection of regional identities can seem beautifully specific in their potentials and depressingly similar in their limitations.

We encountered Rosa, or American Genius and Education at the start of a “Mid Atlantic/Middle America” unit. The unit marked the point in the semester where we began to read more broadly in regional terms and to think more broadly in conceptual ones. Our experience exemplified for me the value and importance of the Just Teach One project. Rosa was, after all, a text that I didn’t know very well. Introducing the novella, I told the students that I too would be reading it through for the first time, having skimmed it in anticipation of the course and of the unit. Faced with this shocking news of professorial experimentation, one of my boldest students asked how, then, I knew it was a worthwhile text at all. That I trusted in JTO editors Duncan Faherty and ED White, that I trusted in the purpose of Just Teach One, that I had faith in scholarly community and collective knowledge making, all seemed to mollify the questioner. The question re-affirmed for me that opening a course to the JTO project constitutes an invitation to share pedagogical authority in a range of generative ways.

Rosa acted as an ideal pivot between reading in the survey and reflecting on the survey. “In what terms would you argue for Rosa’s inclusion in any survey course?” I asked them, “What does it add to our learning experience?”

By teaching a text without conventional canonical clout, I enabled my students to explore the terms of their own engagement. Some suggested that the value of the text was its humor. The satirical content and stylistic play offered a welcome contrast to the brutality of Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition and the cruelty of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. Others emphasized the ways that genre indeterminacy spoke across our survey: was Rosa didactic and activist like the work of Harriet Jacobs or Margaret Fuller? Was it darkly funny fiction like “Bartleby,” or oddly fluffy social commentary like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”? A third avenue made use of character elements to imagine cross-regional connection: how does the presence of Sol, a powerful example of indigenous intellect, speak back to Anglo-American expectations of the type articulated by Jefferson? How does Sol’s denunciation of American ambition and political relativism (not to say hypocrisy) remind us of José María Tornel and Frederick Douglass rejecting the 1840s logic of Manifest Destiny or William Apess recounting the history of King Philip? Was the widow Charmion feminist like Angelina Grimké? Finally, what was the condition or context for early nineteenth-century Baltimore? Since our survey proceeded in a kind of circular chronology—starting with regional contact narratives again and again, moving to postbellum social debates again and again, only to start over with contact in a new place—our wide-ranging discussion of Rosa could be both locally specific and transregional, both temporally concrete and transhistorical. My students, some of whom have never left South Texas, seemed to relish the chance to draw connections fast and loose, or clear and indisputable, or undeniably speculative, across the sweep of US literary and cultural history.

We began the course with the literatures of South Texas and the Mexican Republic, exploring histories with which my students were often intimately acquainted. Although our work with Rosa led them to an unfamiliar region, developing inter-regional meaning and exploring the intertextual connections of the text enabled a different iteration of scholarly power. By taking on the job of providing the “final takeaway” for our engagement with Rosa, students could experiment with a version of meta-conceptualizing that offered them educational authority. Naming this authority, and encouraging historically devalued populations (women, indigenous and minoritized individuals, the economically vulnerable) to take hold of it, is part of the educational mission of Rosa; facilitating canon expansion in the classroom is part of the educational mission of Just Teach One; helping create new knowledge structures for individual students and for classroom communities are part and parcel of my own educational mission. I suspect that many of my colleagues and peers feel similarly. For me, the chance to Just Teach One is also the chance to Just Teach with, alongside, and in the good company of Many. It is also the chance to Just Learn from Many—from texts lost to history, from students, from those who will post here their own reflections and responses to this ongoing educational experiment.

Thank you to Duncan Faherty and Ed White, and to Common-Place, for creating and sharing this wonderful educational project for lo these many years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Julie R. Voss, Associate Professor of English
Lenoir-Rhyne University

 

 

Studying early American literature has come a long way since my undergraduate days, when the “Origins to Civil War” survey of American literature pretty much skipped from the Puritans to Nathaniel Hawthorne, with maybe a little dip into works of the Revolutionary period.  Until I got to graduate school, I really thought there was no American fiction until Hawthorne started writing.  Thankfully, scholars of early American culture have brought more texts to light, and projects like this one make teaching early American fiction more accessible.

I included Rosa in an upper-division seminar on early American literature, after reading Cabeza de Vaca’s Relacion, Mary Rowlandson’s narrative, and Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, and before students created their own modern editions of out-of-print texts selected from Early American Imprints.  For this class, the JTO project was a great segway for students between looking at the products of other editors and becoming editors themselves.  They paid attention to the direction the editors take with a little-known text by an anonymous author, and some of them borrowed moves from this project in their own work.

The novel itself also provided great fodder for discussion.  Several of the students had taken previous English or history classes on the 19^th century, and they brought to our conversation the contrast between “accepted storylines” and the novel.  Particularly in the character of Sol, the students saw something different going on in this novel than what they expected.  They also found elements they did expect—like the sentimental daughter fainting away and the coincidences that wrapped things up—but they found interesting how those familiar elements were used differently in Rosa.  As one student wrote in a class forum, “Rosa is such a gem. It is remarkably different, surprisingly progressive, and beautifully written (even though the plot is wonky and sinuous). Its imperfection as a narrative only further endears me to it. Rosa pushes the limits of our genre-boxes and predetermined plot lines as much as it pushes the limits of its society racially, sexually, and intellectually. I am ‘queer’ by the editors’ definition, and as such, I like my books to be queer also—unusual and unique.”

Reading a novel with my students with which I was unfamiliar was an enjoyable exercise, as well.  We could approach the novel together, as explorers investigating something new, and students posed questions and speculated about answers on a more equal footing (rather than trying to find the “right” answer that they think I’m waiting for them to produce).  The question of “genre-boxes” became a fruitful avenue of discussion.  When we agreed that the novel wasn’t what we expected, that made us reflect on we did expect and why.  This, in turn, led to a discussion of what gets included in and left out of the canon and how the canon impacts our understanding of any given literary period.

Which brings me back to where I started.  My students left this class knowing that early American writers crafted fiction, of various kinds, even if not all of it has persisted.  They have a sense that there’s a wealth of literature out there that doesn’t make it into their classes.  And they’ve gained an appreciation for what they can glean from texts that maybe aren’t exactly “great literature.”  As much as I enjoyed my American Literature Survey as a college student, I have enjoyed much more the exploration of under-studied texts, and I appreciate this vehicle through which I can share this joy with my students.

 

 

Matthew Teutsch, Ph.D.
Auburn University

At first, teaching Rosa, or American Genius and Education (1810) in an early American literature survey course seemed somewhat daunting. I frame my courses around conversations, typically beginning with David Walker and Thomas Jefferson then moving around through time and region back and forth from the colonial to the early nineteenth century. I do this to show students that even though these texts appear decades, and sometimes even centuries, apart they still connect to one another through thematic issues that repeatedly show up again and again. As the nature of survey course does not allow for an in-depth discussion of very aspect in Rosa, I chose to highlight a couple of important points that had become reoccurring themes throughout the semester.

We read Rosa about a month into the semester after reading Walker, Jefferson, Samson Occom, Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Kemble Knight, William Apess, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, and a few others. As usual discussions began to center around the definition of who gets to be labeled as “American” in these early texts. Along with this aspect, issues surrounding calls for a distinctly American literature surfaced in our conversations. These two topics intertwine with one another to create explorations of constructions of Americanness during the early part of the nineteenth century.

Every two weeks, I have students post to a discussion board. They must ask a question about a reading and then respond to a fellow student’s question. For Rosa, one student specifically asked how the novel attempts to display an emerging Americanness and American literature. At this point, we had only read the first three chapters, and some students responded by saying that the opening chapter and the descriptions of Baltimore showed America as a “melting pot.” One responder, however, noted a sentence that compared “civilized Americans” to the British: “The manners of the civilized Americans, speaking with exceptions, are English.” The students’ questions and comments paved the way for further exploration of Rosa and how the novel approaches questions of Americanness and American literature.

During his travels from Baltimore to Boston, Richard encounters a struggling author. The man gives Richard a prospectus for his novel, “Views by Starlight,” telling the young traveler that the tale is original. Richard asks the man if he has ever printed the book, and the man replies that he had; however, “nobody would buy it.” At this, Richard offers the man some advice. He tells him,

In the first place, In the first place you are wrong to announce, as you have done in this prospectus, that the work was written by an American, or even that it was composed in America. That, I dare say, is what ruined the sale of your former novel. Your title, too, is much too plain. If you would call it “The Jug with Forty Handles” or something of that sort, and insert in the title page, that it is from the pen of a celebrated English or French writer, and that it is reprinted from the one hundred and forty-ninth European edition, you will infallibly succeed.

The man promises to follow Richard’s guidance and departs. Later, Richard hears that the man heeded the advice and “people had purchased up his books as fast as he could have them printed.”

When covering Sarah Kemble Knight, I make it a point to highlight for students the fact that her journal did not appear until 1825 when Theodore Dwight had it published. Five years before the public appearance of Knight’s journal, Sydney Smith inquired, “In the four corners of the globe, who reads an American book?” In the introduction, Dwight tells readers, “The object proposed in printing this little work is not only to please those who have particularly studied the progressive history of our country, but to direct the attention of others to subjects of that description, unfashionable as they still are; and also to remind the public that documents, even as unpretending as the following, may possess real value, if they contain facts which will be hereafter sought for to illustrate periods in our history.” Dwight’s objective is to highlight the rich literature of America, and by choosing Knight, he shows that that literature has a more significant background than some may have thought.

However, even after 1825, questions about whether or not America had a distinct literature continued to abound. To set America apart, writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, John Augustus Stone, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and more, turned to the colonial past, most notably King Philip’s War, to help construct and define an American literature separated from Europe. In her 1830 short story “Chocorua’s Curse,” Child describes Mount Chocorua by telling readers, “Had it been in Scotland, perhaps the genius of Sir Walter would have hallowed it, and Americans would have crowded there to kindle fancy on the heart of memory.” However, that was not the case. European literature still reigned supreme.

In class, we trace these movements in the calls for a distinctly American literature and we work to define what exactly that literature entailed for the early nineteenth century. Even when we get to William Apess, I have students think about this issue. For Apess, we read An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man, and during my lecture, I bring up his Eulogy of King Philip (1836) for a couple of reasons. The main reason is because he mentions Rowlandson and challenges how we read her narrative. The other motive for bringing up Apess’ speech is the subject matter. For a myriad of reasons, Apess would call attention his ancestry as being tied to King Philip. Yet, I contend there is one main reason he does this rhetorical maneuver, to add to the ongoing debates centered around the construction of what constitutes American literature because most of the authors mentioned above turned to King Philip as a subject, beginning with Washington Irving in the Sketchbook (1819).

Along with this connection, the incorporation of Apess in relation to Rosa calls upon students to think about who is an American according to individuals in the early nineteenth century. Reading Jefferson, de Crèvecœur, John Adams, and others, students begin to see that American became defined as white, landowning males of European descent. Walker, Apess, Child, and more challenge this definition through their writings, and the anonymous author of Rosa does as well with the introduction of the Peruvian Sol into the narrative. The plot hinges, essentially, on Sol’s “experiment” to prove that as an individual native to the New World and of Incan descent that his daughter Rosa is just as capable of intellectual growth and expression as Europeans.

This aspect, particularly his speech to the committee in England who asked him questions in order to judge “the extent of his intellectual capacity,” correlates to the continued conversations that sought to outline who gets classified as American. Sol answers all of the inquisitors’ questions sufficiently then launches into a speech that calls to mind the fiery rhetoric of Walker, Apess, and Frederick Douglass in both tone and scope. Notably, Sol deploys arguments related to the history of Europe and the Incas, beginning by describing how the history of America and the defining of an “American” comes from those ultimately in power. If you would like to see ore about Sol’s speech, I have written about it in depth elsewhere.

Rosa, ultimately, ends with an egalitarian representation of America, sans individuals of African descent. The novel works to try and define Americanness both in terms of citizenship and cultural production. What stands out in the former construction arises not necessarily when Sol speaks in front of the committee but when he tells everyone about why he burned the house down and placed Rosa in the field. At the end of the novel, the narrator defines Sol as American even though he is from Peru. The narrator says, “[Sol] had wanted to convince the world that the faculties of the native American were as susceptible of improvement and embellishment s those of the natives of Europe.” Obviously, this reference relates to individuals in the New World; however, after this statement, the narrator drops “native” and when stating, that Sol’s experiment to prove “the equality of the American mind with that of Europe” became problematic when he lost some of his money.

We did not come to a clear, concise answer about the author’s labelling of Sol as American, but the topic warrants discussion in relation to a myriad of factors. For one, we need to think about it regarding how authors of the Early Republic sought to define the term American. As well, we need to consider it in relation to debates about Native American removal that began to reach a zenith during the 1820s and 1830s. Apess, Elias Boudinot, and others worked tirelessly to highlight the humanity of Native Americans in the context of an American history and culture. While these are not the only aspects of Rosa that one could cover, they present important components of a nation working to construct its identity separate from the rest of the world.