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Makandal and the African Wild Boar: Reprinting and Race Science in the American Literature Classroom

Gordon Fraser
English Department
North Dakota State University
Gordon.fraser@ndsu.edu

What does the story of Makandal have to do with a copperplate engraving of a four-tusked African wild boar? A great deal, as my students and I discovered.

On the day we discussed the “Account of a Remarkable Conspiracy,” I passed out reproductions of the August issue of the New-York Magazine, or Literary Repository, one of the US periodicals in which the Makandal account had appeared. This was the second week of my Nineteenth-Century Fiction course, and my goal had been to grapple with the complexities and idiosyncrasies of print culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century. What might it mean, I asked my students, to imagine “fiction” as a discrete literary genre during a period when the print-cultural public sphere blurred lines of fact and speculation, and when publications mixed poetry, letters, scientific accounts, and visual culture?

But my class had other, perhaps more interesting, questions to pursue.

This depiction of the African Wild Boar was emblematizes numerous accounts from the late eighteenth century. “The African Wild Boar,” *The New-York Magazine, or Literary Repository* August 1796. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

After dividing students into groups and asking each group to characterize the New-York Magazine as a whole, I found that nearly the entire class had turned its focus to the periodical’s single illustration: a copperplate engraving of the four-tusked “African Wild Boar.” Editors Thomas Swords and James Swords had resources enough to print one engraving, my students pointed out, and they had chosen the picture of a pig. The Swords had also chosen to publish an article about the animal. The first essay in August issue of the New-York Magazine is entitled “Description of the African Wild Boar.” To those in my class, who found the Makandal account much more interesting than the boar account, this was a puzzle. Why not an illustration Makandal himself? Or, instead, why not illustrate one of the other essays, stories, or poems? The Swords should have given the reader something more interesting to look at than a pig, my students suggested.

It was here that we benefitted from an idiosyncrasy of the literature program at North Dakota State. Many advanced literature courses, such as my 300-level class in fiction, are open as electives to interested non-majors. As our discussion began, several of the English majors drew from their experience working on the university literary magazine by suggesting that the New-York Magazine editors must have seen this boar as extremely important. It was, after all, the very first article in the issue, and that article provided the subject for the issue’s one and only illustration. Another student—Nick, a STEM major with an interest in the history of science—then told the class that he recognized the description of the boar. This wasn’t just any pig. Rather, it had been central to the Enlightenment-scientific project of speciation and, I would add, racialization.

Indeed, it is not surprising that Nick recognized the so-called “African Wild Boar.” Accounts of the boar, like the account of Makandal, had traced a circum-Atlantic path, and both stories were implicated in the project of explaining African-ness through Enlightenment rationalism. What my science-major student recognized, in short, was the product of an eighteenth-century conversation among naturalists seeking to explain and codify African difference.

The boar account in the New-York Magazine—copied, like the Makandal story, from the Literary Magazine & British Review—can be traced to Anders Sparman’s journey to the Cape of Good Hope. Sparman had in 1775 encountered the “salted and dried” head of a so-called African wild boar, which was anomalous for the disproportionate largeness of its cranium in relation to its body, for its four tusks, and for its supposed viciousness.[1] Sparman’s observations would be repeated and elaborated upon in the Histoire Naturelle (1749-1804) by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. In this study, the French naturalist made much the same argument about boars that he made about human beings. The boar, Buffon suggests, is merely another “variety” of the European hog. Differences between pigs, like differences between people, were produced by environmental influences. Such differences, Buffon writes, are not innate.[2] Thomas Jefferson would attack this environmentalist claim in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), marshalling tables of data to demonstrate that species did not degenerate when brought to the Western Hemisphere.[3] One can easily see why Buffon’s environmentalist claims represented such a threat. For Buffon, the African boar demonstrates that Africa is not a site of innate difference. The boars and the humans of Africa might simply be different varieties of the boars and humans of Europe, and of everywhere else.

It is noteworthy then, that Buffon’s explanation of the boar—which had been translated into English by 1780—is entirely excluded from both the Literary Magazine and the New-York Magazine descriptions of the animal. In both periodicals, the “African Wild Boar” is described only in terms of difference. In fact, the anonymous author is explicit about the creature’s radical African-ness and blackness. The animal’s snout is “broad and flat,” its eyes are closer together “than those of the European wild boar,” its hair is “bristly,” and its coloring is “brown, inclining a little to black.” Significantly, this animal endowed with “formidable weapons” (its tusks), which enable it to struggle against “ferocious neighbours.”[4] This version of the boar might be suited to its environment, but it is not a product of that environment. Rather, it is a singularly terrifying species from an exotic, dangerous continent.

The “Account of a Remarkable Conspiracy” makes similar claims, as my students pointed out during our discussion. As the notes and introduction provided by Duncan Faherty and Ed White reveal, the Literary Magazine account represented a change from the original French version. The English translator heaped condemnation upon Makandal when describing his supposed crimes. While the French original hints that Makandal’s actions might be justified, in that his enemies received “just punishment,” the English account transforms Makandal’s violence into a form of unprompted vindictiveness. In the English versions, Makandal’s enemies receive only “punishment,” without justification (7). Indeed, it is Makandal himself who is justly punished in the English versions of the story. While Makandal’s final, gruesome death is presented without didactic interpretation in the French, the English edition provided here informs the reader that Makandal,

… suffered the punishment which he so justly deserved.

Such was the origin of the devastations occasioned by poison in the island of St. Domingo, where such practices are become more rare, thought they are not yet entirely eradicated. (10)

This English-language version of the story, in which exotic African violence represents a dangerous import requiring eradication, is copied wholesale in the New-York Magazine—just as the account of an exotic and dangerous black boar is copied. Both periodicals report to their readers that Makandal’s gruesome death is “deserved.” Both report that the trade in violent African bodies has been a source of devastation, disorder, and chaos in Africa and in the Western Hemisphere. Note the slippage in the language. Is the “poison” in St. Domingo a reference to the drugs manufactured by Makandal, or a reference to Makandal himself? The “Account of a Remarkable Conspiracy” tells the story of threatening, innate difference, and of the importation of that difference to the Western Hemisphere.

In my class, these observations have led to more questions than answers. Why did the Literary Magazine & British Review eliminate environmental explanations for African difference? When the New-York Magazine adopted wholesale this explanation of Africa as a site of intrinsically violent bodies, were its editors responding to ideology or to the idiosyncrasies of the transatlantic publishing world. In other words, did the Swords brothers have access to alternative explanations of Makandal, or alternative accounts of the differences between boars? Finally, considering the role played by the New-York Magazine in US political culture at the time—George Washington, John Adams, John Jay, and New York Mayor Richard Varick were all subscribers—what might it mean that blackness and African-ness are imagined in the magazine’s pages as sinister, violent, alien, and innate?[5]

Endnotes

[1] Anders Sparman, A voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, toward the Antarctic Polar Circle, and round the world: … from the year 1772, to 1776, Volume II (Dublin: 1785), 25-26.

[2] Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Natural history, general and particular, by the Count de Buffon, translated into English. Illustrated with above 260 copper-plates (Edinburgh: 1780), 250, 256-257. See also Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 138.

[3] See, for instance, Lee Alan Dugatkin, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

[4] “Description of the African Wild Boar. With an Elegant Plate,” Literary Magazine & British Review vol. 8 (1792): 31.

[5] David Paul Nord, “A Republican Literature: A Study of Magazine Reading and Readers in Late Eighteenth-Century New York,” American Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1988): 42.

“Makandal” Reflections

Kelly Ross
Rider University

I taught “Account of a Remarkable Conspiracy” (1787) toward the end of a survey course on Early American literature for sophomore and junior English majors. This course is one of seven options that students can choose from to fulfill a requirement for the major (the literature before 1830 requirement). To entice students to choose Early American literature (over, for instance, Romantic literature), I designed the course to focus on the themes of “Sex and Sin in Early American Literature.” “Account of a Remarkable Conspiracy” fit into the course particularly well, given its focus on seduction, charisma, and revolutionary violence.

I organized the syllabus chronologically, so “Account”—published in the US in the 1790s—fell between part one of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland. This placement was serendipitous, as Makandal bridged the transition from Franklin’s Enlightenment dream of rationalized human perfectibility to Brown’s Gothic nightmare of deception and derangement. After reading “Account,” students were more aware of the dark side of Franklin’s vision and primed to analyze the epistemological underpinnings of Brown’s novel. Rather than simply dwelling on Carwin and Clara’s creepy psychosexual dynamics (as previous classes have focused on), students connected the personal relationships in the novel to larger ideas about empiricism, belief, and democracy. Having a third example to triangulate with Franklin and Brown facilitated a more nuanced discussion about the dangers of charisma and the limits of empiricism in the late-18^th-century US. We compared Franklin’s emphasis on reputation (e.g. when Franklin carries his wares through the streets in a wheelbarrow to demonstrate that he “was not above my business”) to Makandal’s use of a fetish to mystify his own powers. Though Makandal’s reputation rests on belief in and fear of his “supernatural virtues” rather than his character as a frugal and industrious tradesman, the strategies the two men use are similar in their recognition of the importance of public perception and self-promotion.

Moreover, Franklin, Makandal, and Carwin all demonstrate the power and danger of charisma in a society in which public opinion rather than divine judgment underwrites authority. Our conversation about charisma led us to consider the ways in which violence can be framed as either personal animus or systemic rebellion. Students pointed to specific language in “Account” that reduced Makandal’s motive to jealousy or lust, as well as moments that implied a broader political purpose, such as his conspirators’ admission that “Makandal’s intention was to destroy privately the greater part of the planters, or to ruin them, by poisoning all their slaves who appeared to be attached to them; and lastly to exterminate the whole race of white men by a general massacre which would render him the deliverer and sovereign of the whole island” (10). Students imagined how anti-slavery readers might recast the story to highlight revolutionary principles rather than individual desires. These observations enabled us to locate our discussion of the US revolution in terms of the Haitian revolution and the larger Age of Revolution rather than isolating the US as exceptional.

When we discussed Wieland, students returned to “Account” to think through “M[onsieur] de C…”’s depiction of Makandal as a religious fanatic and compare Makandal to the Wielands (elder and younger). Students were particularly interested in the non-Christian religious practices described in “Account,” so when I teach the class again I plan to assign one of the recommended readings on obeah (Toni Wall Jaudon, Kelly Wisecup, and Christopher Iannini) alongside the narrative. Other parallels among the three texts that students explored included the emphasis on the hazards of pride and the importance of education and literacy, as “Account” begins with a paragraph outlining Makandal’s solid education and ability to read and write Arabic.

The narrative also resonated with semester-long concerns about fluid publication histories in Early American literature. As Duncan Faherty, Ed White, and Toni Wall Jaudon eloquently demonstrate in the headnote to the text, “Account” was reprinted and modified in significant ways from its first publication in 1787 to its late US printings in 1823 and 1846. We compared the aspect of “Account” to earlier texts we had read by John Smith, William Byrd, and Franklin, which also appeared in various editions aimed at distinct audiences. For example, students drew on “Account”’s headnote to consider the ways in which politics and racial prejudice influenced the shaping of the narrative in various venues, as we had discussed in relation to William Byrd’s History and Secret History.

Including “Account” in the course provided an opportunity to discuss the ways in which literary studies can move beyond the classroom. After students had read “Account,” I explained the “Just Teach One” project to them and showed them the website. This led to a conversation about canon formation and questions of race and representation in the texts we study. Though many of my colleagues and I raise these issues in most of the English courses we teach, foregrounding the editorial and scholarly labor involved in producing a teachable version of a noncanonical text (including notes and a contextual introduction) helped students to see a concrete example of how difficult it can be to introduce new texts into the classroom and thus why syllabi often remain focused on the same set of texts. Students also reported that reading “Account” and discussing the Just Teach One project expanded their understanding of what English professors do.

My students particularly wanted me to mention that they were glad I didn’t tell them anything about the text before they read it; they enjoyed contending with the (to them) unfamiliar world of Saint-Domingue, and reading the narrative inspired many of them to research the history of Haiti and the Dominican Republic on their own. They agreed that “Account” was an excellent addition to the syllabus and expanded our conception of Early American literature. We are all deeply grateful to Duncan Faherty and Ed White for the opportunity to participate in “Just Teach One” and for their work editing the narrative.

Editing Revolutionary Materials

Siân Silyn Roberts
Queens College

To introduce the “Account of a Remarkable Conspiracy” into my syllabus, I went with the most obvious pairing: Leonora Sansay’s Secret History. We had already discussed at length how Sansay’s novel uses the language of sexual politics to think through the operations of colonialism, empire, revolution, and slavery. I suggested to my students that something similar might be at work in the Makandal piece, asking them why a figure from an earlier historical moment might have spoken in increasingly urgent ways to readers familiar with the turmoil in the West Indies and broader Atlantic world.

We also paid particular attention (more so than with any other text put out by JTO) to Makandal as an edited text. Starting with the complex publication history, we considered why the change in title (as the text moved from French to English to American publications) potentially changed the reception of the piece. We then proceeded to look at the various editorial changes the text underwent as it was translated from French to English. This meant paying close attention to the details provided in the footnotes (thank you Duncan and Ed!!), and considering why those changes might have been made. This proved particularly productive, as it really asked students to engage with questions about reception, the editor function, and the dynamics of revolution and representation. A great text – many thanks again for such a teachable work!

Discovering Atlantic World reprint culture in the early African American literature survey

Laurel V. Hankins
University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth
lhankins@umassd.edu

I taught Account of a Remarkable Conspiracy formed by a Negro in the Island of St. Domingo in the first half of an African American literature survey. The Account was our final text in the first unit of the course; this unit grouped texts around an Atlantic World theme and included Phillis Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson, and Olaudah Equiano. Our first few weeks of class served as an introduction to important ideas in the history of critical race theory and the literary traditions that emerged out of the black Atlantic. The Account is short but full of opportunities to discuss literary form and genre, theory, and history. I found it an ideal reading assignment for a 75-minute class meeting.

Part of the reason I was excited to teach this text is because both its publication history and its narrative strategies capture the complexity of eighteenth-century Atlantic world networks and conventions. Students did need quite a bit of background information on the Haitian revolution and the history of U.S.-Haiti relations, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that students came into the class excited to talk about the differences they had noticed between the editions. These differences were a wonderful point of entry for our conversation, as they allowed students to produce close readings that were attentive to language and also informed by the temporal and spatial context of the text’s long and varied circulation history. This opening conversation also allowed us to think about early U.S. periodical and reprint culture.

Given our previous discussions of Wheatley, Jefferson, and Equiano, students were well-primed to discuss the contradictions of Enlightenment rhetoric surrounding natural rights and the slave trade present in this text. They recognized the ways that this text’s construction of race is informed by the post-revolutionary politics of the early national period, particularly the hypersexualization of Makandal and the depoliticization of his rebellion. Students also complicated their own initial responses by digging into the text’s contradictions – its moments of sympathy for “the unhappy negroes” for example led to a spirited conversation about spectacle and sympathy that carried into our next unit on the abolitionist movement. Additionally, students linked the text’s fascination with African-Caribbean cultural practices to earlier discussions of the black Atlantic’s contact zones.

The Account remained a useful text for our class moving forward. Particularly when reading David Walker’s Appeal and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, the Account provided an important touchstone for understanding the perceptions of black masculinity and slave resistance that Walker and Douglass are responding to and that their readers would have been influenced by.

One sign of the positive student reaction to this text is the amount of student writing it generated. Six students chose to write their first response papers on the Account. Additionally, a student taking the course for honors credit developed a final research project comparing the portrayal of Haiti in the Account to Alejo Carpentier’s response to such exoticized portrayals in the contemporary novel The Kingdom of this World. A graduate student in our MAT program used the JTO website to develop several sample lesson plans for teaching the Account, The Factory Girl, and Humanity in Algiers to high school students.

This is my second time teaching a JTO text, and both experiences have demonstrated how much students appreciate the sense of discovery the project provides. The students’ interest in Duncan and Ed’s excellent footnotes is a perfect example of why it’s so fun to teach unfamiliar texts. Even if teaching a new text makes me a bit apprehensive, it usually results in a conversation full of productive surprises where students are more confident to take risks because they sense that we’re all in the same boat.

Revolutionary in many senses of the term

Christopher Apap
Oakland University

Perhaps the best part of working with the female review is the fact that it constantly surprises. It was the final reading of the semester for my fall 2016 Honors Seminar entitled “American Revolutions.” The course looked at a variety of different “revolutions,” from the military conflict to the ensuing political debates to race and slavery to, in the end, gender and the rise of the novel. We questioned, as we read political speeches, pamphlets, newspaper accounts, natural histories, poems, and novels, what words like revolutionary and revolution meant. Yet I found teaching the book revolutionary in many senses of the term.

I had deliberately delayed my own perusal of the book so that my impressions of it were fresh when we discussed it in class. I was almost immediately glad that I had chosen to teach the book at the term’s end. Certain elements of the early chapters struck students as incongruous, or at least unexpected. They knew enough from the introduction to know that the narrative dealt with a cross-dressing woman who fought as a man in the revolutionary conflict, and thus early chapters focusing on the ways in which the protagonist was deeply interested in nature felt out of place. Coming after discussions of natural history, though, the students could at least understand the kinds of cultural work the descriptions of Deborah Sampson’s youthful interest in the natural world was meant to do. Our discussions of Sampson’s decision to enter the war—in particular the disturbing dream in which the serpent representing (students agreed) the British empire followed Sampson from the town square into the domestic sphere of the home—usefully engaged anxieties in Paine’s Crisis No. 1 about the safety of wives and daughters, and Paine’s own fantasies about a Jersey maid acting as a modern-day Joan of Arc. As we looked at Sampson’s letter to her mother (itself a complex performance of misleading double-entendres), we discussed the epistolary tradition that we had recently learned about in The Coquette. The latter novel provided students with a really delightful point of discussion and debate. How, students wondered, could Sampson deviate so widely from ideals of feminine behavior and virtue and be lauded for it? Their answer was fascinating; they approached the issue through questions of ends and means. Eliza’s ends, they claimed, were selfish and thus indefensible in The Coquette; Deborah’s intention was, at least as stated in the female review, entirely selfless, and thus laudable. While our continued discussion complicated such easy, broad distinctions, I was impressed by how a bunch of non-majors had opened up interesting and important interpretive avenues for the book.

The final surprise for me was that my students did not seem nearly as surprised by Sampson’s gender-bending behavior as I might have expected. It made me question my own expectation as perhaps very much the product of a distinct generational gap. My students were much more interested in the narrator’s incessant need to address his reader’s delicate sensibilities and their negative judgments than they were in Deborah Sampson’s decision to choose to live as a man. I found the swiftness with which they accepted Deborah’s choice refreshing. It made our discussion less about mere scandal and much more about how eighteenth-century readers expected gender to function, and how the deviation from gendered norms could be debated and even justified.

Teaching to Teach, with Skype, Willing Colleagues, and The Female Review

Laura M. Stevens
University of Tulsa

I taught The Female Review in a graduate seminar titled “Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Americas”. This course, which had ten masters and doctoral students, asked how the setting of the Americas and the Atlantic shaped early Anglophone novels published in both England and America. We began with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and concluded with Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok, while using Eve Tavor Bannet’s insightful study, Transatlantic Stories (2014), as our main scholarly reference point from beginning to end. The Female Review was not the ideal candidate for inclusion among the other narratives, which tended, like narratives including Aubin’s Life of Charlotta Dupont, the anonymously authored The Female American, and Charlotte Lennox’s Euphemia, to feature oceanic crossings or intensive treatments of landscape and physical setting. Billed as non-fiction, it also isn’t a great fit for a course on fiction. It did however end up resonating in interesting and productive ways with our other readings in its treatment of history as well as of sex and gender.

We read this text after devoting a class to the first volume of Susanna Rowson’s Reuben and Rachel, or Tales of Old Times (1798), which narrates a history of interaction between Europe and the Americas, from Columbus’s landfall through the mid-seventeenth century, through the fictional story of the primarily female descendants of Ferdinando Columbus (son of Christopher) and Orrabella, a Peruvian princess. Having just devoted a class to discussing how a history of contact and colonialism looks when told through a series of women, my students and I were nicely positioned to explore what happens to the history of the American Revolution when told through the story of a female soldier like Deborah Sampson.

Alongside The Female Review my students read Greta LeFleur’s article, “Precipitous Sensations: Herman Mann’s The Female Review (1797), Botanical Sexuality, and Queer Historiography” (Early American Literature 48 [2013], 93-123), which considers how the late eighteenth-century popularization of botanical taxonomy, seen in publications like Erasmus Darwin’s poem Love of the Plants (1789), made possible new ways thinking about sexuality. We also of course made use also of Jodi Schorb’s wonderfully informative preface to the JTO edition of Mann’s text. In spite of the prominence of relationships and sexualities we today would categorize as queer, my students were struck by the pains Mann took to stress Sampson’s heteronormativity through emphasis on heterosexual romance and Sampson’s status as a “lady”. Even more, though, they were interested in the degree to which this narrative dwelt on the mundane details of an infantry soldier’s existence, with more ordinary activities ranging from building fortifications to burying the dead, alongside the more exciting accounts of combat. The minutiae of these accounts, peppered with references to Washington, Lafayette, and other heroes of the war, along with Mann’s detailed descriptions of Sampson’s physical appearance, add up to a fascinating treatment of the question of veterans’ merit. That is, what do compensations and commendations do veterans deserve from their countries, how are their struggles and achievements documented, and what happens when they are overlooked? Given that part of Mann’s purpose was to win a pension for Sampson, this text can show us much about how early histories of the Revolution were inflected by discussions about the status and rights of a veteran – and more broadly, the place of the military — in a republic.

The most exciting part of this three-hour class, though, was the time we devoted to pedagogy. When Duncan and Ed sent out the first emails to the people who had volunteered to teach this particular JTO text, I realized that most of my colleagues would be teaching it to undergraduates, and I decided to see if I could draw on their experiences to teach my graduate students a bit about teaching. I asked over email if any of the other JTO participants might be willing to have a teleconference with my students about the approaches they had taken, and I was thrilled when Caroline Wigginton at the University of Mississippi and John Havard at Auburn University Montgomery quickly agreed. I moved my class into a room set up for big-screen teleconferencing and scheduled 30-minute Skype calls to both of them. Caroline and John each sent me a syllabus for their course and some supplementary materials, which I asked my students to read beforehand in order to prepare some questions for our remote guest speakers.

The conversations were immensely helpful for my students in their professional and pedagogical training. Caroline and John both spoke eloquently about the courses within which they were teaching The Female Review, and their sense of how this late eighteenth-century publication fit within and advanced the goals of these beautifully designed courses. This attention to the specifics of pedagogical context was, to my mind, hugely beneficial to my graduate students. They gained much from learning how both Caroline and John had developed entirely different approaches to this text as they integrated it into their courses, and how they pondered the abilities and needs of their own students. What most impressed me were the assignments both had developed. Caroline had designed highly structured “Context Reports”, which required that students analyze the day’s reading in dialogue with other primary and secondary readings, all connected in some way to the course’s topic of transatlantic bodies. John had required that his students develop their own edition of The Female Review, with explanatory notes and other annotations. This approach of course brought students into more actively engagement with the text while they also pondered the intricacies of editoral theory. The question of what to do with a text in a classroom seems obvious, but it’s actually tricky and crucial; it gets at the heart of a teacher’s ability to leverage texts in ways that actually build students’ interpretive and writing skills while also helping them learn complex material. My students learned a great deal not only from seeing what two professors at different institutions had done with this fairly obscure narrative in their classrooms, but also from listening to Caroline and John think out loud about the process of deciding what to do with a text in a pedagogical setting, essentially putting it to work for their students’ learning experiences.

I asked my students right after the Skype conversations what their biggest takeaways had been. Several of them expressed gratitude for the seriousness and detail with which Caroline and John had addressed questions about teaching a text that contains some sexually explicit material and invites queer readings. Were their students comfortable with this material? Did the narrative’s treatment of cross-dressing, sexuality, and gender, with arguably feminist and pro-queer rhetoric, provoke silence, discomfort, or vocal homophobia? What to do if two students in a class start arguing with each other or take offense at what a peer has said on these topics? What to do if a student dismisses this material as not “real” literature? Caroline and John each had useful suggestions to offer about how they introduce their students to a topic or text that might challenge or upset them, how they model for their students ways of talking about sex and sexuality with scholarly detachment but sensitivity, and how they respond when students express discomfort with material that challenges their world view or even their sense of moral rectitude.

The Female Review did several things for my class that I had not predicted. It resonated in fascinating ways with the place of women amidst several other narratives dealing with nation-formation and war. As a non-fictional account it called attention to the mechanics of narratives, the nuances of truth claims, the texture of realism. It compelled deeper scrutiny of the various types of love and affection expressed between women, and between men and women, in other narratives from our syllabus. Most of all, though, this text introduced a vibrant and useful discussion for my graduate students about teaching, especially teaching a relatively obscure and historically embedded text.

A Poor Review

Caroline Wigginton

The University of Mississippi

I taught Deborah Sampson Gannett’s The Female Review this past fall as part of a senior research seminar for English majors. My students didn’t understand it, didn’t like it, and didn’t write on it: only two students featured it in their capstone papers. The only text they liked less was J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), and they lobbied (pretty persuasively) for me to replace these two texts with full-length versions of the anonymous Narrative of Lucy Brewer (ca. 1815) and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), both of which they had read excerpts from, in future iterations of the course.

I typically organize my upper-division seminars around a theme and then choose six major texts to focus on, adding supplementary primary and secondary readings for context. This particular course’s theme was “Transatlantic Bodies in the Long Eighteenth Century.” After briefly introducing them to ideas of the body found in such sources as John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Jonathan Edwards’ Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), Carl Linné’s Systema Naturae (1735, 1758), and William Blackstone’s Commentaries (his explanation of coverture in particular; 1765–1769), we began a sustained engagement with our core six texts. We read The Female Review fourth, and by then students had already explored eighteenth-century bodies in terms of colonization, religion, race, class, and sex in our discussions of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative (1682), Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), and Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina (1724). Unlike with other texts, which had inspired students to offer their own enthusiastic readings and analyses, just as one would hope from confident, soon-to-be-graduating majors, The Female Review returned them to callow uncertainty. Rather than making statements or offering opinions, they asked me basic questions. What is going on? Where is Sampson? Why did Sampson do that? What is real and what is fiction? Did early Americans think this was good writing? The primary and secondary pairings I gave them for our third day of discussion didn’t enliven their approaches, though they did all agree that everyone must read Anne Fausto-Sterling’s “The Five Sexes, Revisited.” Admittedly, their opinion of The Female Review was somewhat buoyed once they read their fifth book, the loathed Crèvecoeur, but it was all but forgotten by the time they had read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). As mentioned above, only two students even mentioned The Female Review in their final papers, one (unpersuasively) understanding it to signal women’s empowerment through writing (Sampson didn’t write it) and the other using it to launch a comparative paper of other cross-dressing narratives. This last student identified a conservative message about gender in these tales of adventure that end in domesticity, and did offer a unique interpretation of Mann’s convoluted prose and plot. Such complete opacity makes gender transgression seem complicated. Why not adhere to the clarity and simplicity of patriarchal expectations.

The question becomes, then, would I recommend teaching The Female Review. Perhaps. Its biggest issue, at least in my classroom, is that suffers by comparison to other texts. Rowlandson’s wilderness images and biblical allusions provided more fodder for close reading. Oroonoko’s characters were more clearly drawn. The sex in Fantomina was easier to spot. Frankenstein is, well, Frankenstein. The way to teach The Female Review and to have students explore with more interest and discovery its themes of early American adventure, transgression, revolution, and performance might be to foreground comparison. The sole student in my class who had an interesting insight was the one who read other cross-dressing narratives. If I teach it again, that’s the kind of course I will assign it in: one where we can think about its prose and plot and confusions alongside other cross-dressing narratives, early American or otherwise.

Sincerity and Captivity

Laura M. Stevens
University of Tulsa

Given the title of this text, I suppose I should be, well, sincere about how the class went. The students were great, the text was great, but I did not quite meet my own expectations for this particular teaching endeavor. It was not a disaster by any means, but the four 50-minute classes I led on this novel felt more like the rough draft of the classes I would like to teach in the future than ones I was proud to have taught. Continue reading “Sincerity and Captivity”

Cultures of Marriage

Eric Norton

Marymount University

I taught Susannah Rowson’s Sincerity in a 200-level early American literature survey course of 30 students in our core curriculum. Marymount is a small, liberal arts college with a sizeable business school, school of education, and a school of health professions, so in our core classes there tend to be only a handful of English majors alongside a majority of students coming from a wide variety of disciplines and perspectives. I was pleasantly surprised by how compelling the novel was for most students in the class. Not only that, the text helped them grasp a number of cultural particularities of the early nineteenth century—the structures of feeling around sexual morality, for example—and it was an excellent example of how a literary text can simultaneously help to sustain and challenge powerful ideological formations. Continue reading “Cultures of Marriage”

Sincerity’s Gothic Turn

Michelle Sizemore

University of Kentucky

I taught Sincerity in an upper-level course for English majors on the American Gothic in the long nineteenth-century. The reason for this unusual placement was to get students to think more deliberately about the parameters of the gothic and questions of genre more broadly. My more targeted plan for teaching Rowson’s novel on this syllabus was to examine the relationship between sentimental and gothic literature.

Our initial discussion focused on extreme suffering as an established point of connection between the sentimental and the gothic. Students immediately seized on comparisons between Sarah’s first-person narration and that of the Governess in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Edgar Allan Poe’s narrator in “The Black Cat,” and Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” While I anticipated the connection between Rowson and Gilman, whose story we read in the same unit only the week before, the connections to James and Poe, whom we studied at the beginning of the semester, came as a welcome surprise. This gothic trio, after all, has much more in common than a distressed first-person narrator; each narrator contends with an obtrusive and inexorable superegotistical judge that she or he projects outward: onto a master, a cat, a woman in the wallpaper. These persecutory doubles aid in the destruction or disintegration of the self. While we similarly positioned Anne, Sarah’s correspondent in this epistolary novel, as a figure of externalized conscience, we were more equivocal about Anne’s role in Sarah’s self-formation.

In another discussion, our investigation was guided by Eric Savoy’s insights in “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of the American Gothic,” an essay that establishes how the gothic must be understood as “fluid tendency rather than a discrete literary ‘mode,’” as an impulse rather than a literary artifact.[i] Through this assertion about the gothic, Savoy underscores motion and incipience rather than a static set of properties or conventions, a tendency he names “the turn.” His concept of “the turn” likewise changes, accruing multiple meanings over the course of the essay. For our purposes, the turn referred to the “change in course or direction” of the sentimental toward the gothic, and further, to the colloquial usage, the “momentary shock caused by sudden alarm, fright, or the like.”[ii] Pulling these two definitions together, we perceived that the unexpected turn from one set of generic expectations to another, from the sentimental to the gothic, had the effect of startling the reader. We noted, moreover, that this disturbance or unsettling also occurred at the level of uncanny resemblance. Both sentimental and gothic narratives take up the issue of domestic discord; but if the former “imagines the happy home as the acme of human bliss,” as Nina Baym puts it, the latter rejects any hope of domestic fulfillment.[iii] The sentimental veers toward the gothic when the unhappy home becomes the unhomely home, when the field of social affiliation becomes the field of the asocial or antisocial. Such moments occur throughout the novel, perhaps most evidently in the section where the Marquis imprisons Sarah, she escapes, wanders on the open road, and someone mistakes her for a ghost.

I thought Sincerity worked really well for exploring the intersections between the sentimental and the gothic and for creating a reflexive structure that allowed us examine how genres often confront their own limits. I would certainly consider including the novel (or even certain sections) on an American Gothic syllabus again, the next time taking up questions of transatlanticism and circulation more explicitly.[iv]

[i] Eric Savoy, “The Face of the Tenant,” American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, eds. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1998), 6.

[ii] “turn, n.”. OED Online. December 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.uky.edu/view/Entry/207668?rskey=YhRuUo&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed January 15, 2016).

[iii] Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993), 27.

[iv] See Siân Silyn Roberts’ Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individuals in American Fiction, 1790-1861 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).