"in a manner that would have delighted the abolitionists..."

8 May 2023: Working on my entry on children's literature today and decided to use "The Boy Who Liked Natural History" by Fanny Fern as my "hook" in the introduction. Six-year-old Hal, engages in a little experiment, determined to find out if his hens can swim. Undaunted by the hens’ resistance, he finally flings one into the creek, only to tumble into it himself. Both the hen and the boy emerge unharmed, rescued by Hal’s older brother, and the boy is humbled enough to “try his experiments from his father’s door-stop” in the future (291). It’s a sweet and silly story, with little lessons about safety and kindness to animals for young readers. One line, though, might stand out to a modern audience: describing the way a black and a white hen interact, the narrator notes the black hen’s refusal to be submissive. She behaves, the narrator writes, “in a manner that would have delighted the abolitionists” (289).

It's such a strange moment for a contemporary reader--a silly story about a boy and chicken with a throwaway reference to the white hot issues of race and abolition. It's extra fascinating to me because it probably wasn't that strange to nineteenth-century readers. It's a reminder that they, too, like Hal and his chickens, were swimming in a societal "creek" where these images, these issues, and these metaphor were the stuff of everyday life. Children's literature was no exception.

Work Cited

Fern, Fanny. Little Ferns for Fanny's Little Friends. Derby and Miller, 1854. 

Indeed, we were all wearing pants...

25 October 2022: "Are we all wearing pants today?" --me, to my Gender and Women's Studies class today. To clarify, we were discussing Fanny Fern's "A Law More Nice Than Just."

Still thinking about volcanoes...

26 May 2022: I guess I am still thinking about Dickinson's volcanoes today; about how we can carry so much just below the surface. By the way, earlier this week, I concluded my entry on Ruth Hall with a riff on Mrs. Hall calling Ruth "a smoldering volcano." And that got me thinking not just about Dickinson's multiple volcano poems, but also this post on Larcom. Nineteenth-century women writers (or at least three of them) liked that metaphor.

Today was very quiet: no meetings, no appointments. I spent most of it in my office reading about Harriet Wilson, typing up notes, sending emails, etc. Came home and got some gardening done. Didn't even really talk to many people beyond a few sentences. 

But all day long...so many thoughts and big feelings in my head, some personal and some (for our country) much broader. And a bit of light in the darkness that is worrying about a dearest friend's health--a glimmer of hope. And, along with that, continued and profound meditations about what her friendship has meant to me. What a gift she is. 

Big emotions. Big thoughts and feelings. And such outward quiet. It feels strange but also appropriate, at least for me, for right now. 

"Keeping Pictures, Keeping House"

21 January 2020: “...what is seen is less a fiction invented by the critic than a textual provocation—a call to which we are solicited to respond. Accordingly, as we dwell in the fold where the material and the speculative collapse, possibilities emerge for rethinking sentimentalism and its attendant scripts of race, gender, authorship, and domestic labor.” --Michael A. Chaney (264)

Spent lots of time today reading some Harriet Jacobs scholarship, including Chaney's piece, an examination of a picture (probably?) of Louisa Jacobs that is among Fanny Fern's papers. The Fern/Jacobs connection is one of my favorites ti think about (and tell students about) and this piece really dives into what makes that connection so thrilling.

Work Cited

Chaney, Michael A. “Keeping Pictures, Keeping House: Harriet and Louisa Jacobs, Fanny Fern, and the Unverifiable History of Seeing the Mulatta.” ESQ, vol. 59, no. 2, 2013, pp. 262-290. Project Muse. 

Random Fanny Fern Greatness 3 and 4

On those who say to "bide the Lord's time": "If there is one piece of advice more bandied about by irresolution, imbecility, and moral cowardice than this, I should be glad to know it. As I take it, the Lord's time is the first chance you get" (qtd. in Walker 108).

On Providence: it is a "convenient scapegoat for all the human stupidity extant...a convenient theology for bad cooks, for unwise school-teachers, for selfish, careless, ignorant parents!" (qtd. in Walker 108).

Work Cited

Walker, Nancy. Fanny Fern. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. Print.

Random Fanny Fern Greatness 2

"I never want to touch a baby except with a pair of tongs!"

A great example of Fern's multiple writing personas--and it made me laugh out loud. She's speaking here in the voice of an "old maid" responding to this sentiment: "FOLLY. For girls to expect to be happy without marriage. Every woman was made for a mother, consequently, babies are as necessary to their "peace of mind," as health. If you wish to look at melancholy and indigestion, look at an old maid. If you would take a peep at sunshine, look in the face of a young mother." As you can imagine, Fern has some fun with this idea. Alternatively, in other pieces, she would glorify motherhood, but that's what makes her so darn interesting. (More of the piece here.)

Summer Tableau II

 Alternate title: "Bing Contemplates Nineteenth-Century American Feminism."

Random Fanny Fern Greatness

"Take your rights, my sisters; don't beg for them! Never mine what objectors say or think. Success will soon stop their mouths" (New York Ledger, 16 July 1870).

(You can expect a lot more of these as I get going on my conference paper.)

Getting to know you...

The "you" in this post's title refers to my newest adventure in research: a long anticipated project on Fanny Fern that I am only just starting. (It's not that big a project--for now, just a paper for SAMLA in November.) Anyway, as I look towards wrapping up one big project (that MELUS article I mentioned here) and get ready to start writing another conference paper (this one on Constance Fenimore Woolson, for the SSAWW conference in October--and the research/note-taking is done on this one), it seems like the right time to start the Fern project. I will confess, though, to having a lot of it already written in my head.

Major nerd alert, but it's so true: this first phase of research--hitting the MLA bibliography, ordering ILL materials, printing off articles, picking up books, really diving into the conversation--is just always so exciting to me.

Fern, Feminism, and ENGL 360

I spent a few hours today finishing an abstract on Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall. In the abstract, I argue in part that Fern was (obviously) severely constrained in her writing of the book by widely accepted notions of feminine propriety. While looking through my notes, I came across this excerpt from an 1854 (I think) review of the book from The New York Times that confirms what she was working against:

If Fanny Fern were a man—a man who believed that the gratification of revenge were a proper occupation for one who has been abused, and that those who have injured us are fair game, Ruth Hall would be a natural and excusable book. But we confess that we cannot understand how a delicate, suffering woman can hunt down even her persecutors so remorselessly. We cannot think so highly of [such] an author's womanly gentleness. (qtd in Warren 124)

Please notice what this reviewer is saying: Fern could have written this if she were a man, but she’s not, so she shouldn’t have. How dare she seek revenge against those who wronged her? That’s for men to do. Women who are victimized should just sit there (gently) and take it. Because Fern didn’t just take it, we can’t think that much of her.

All the classic moves of suppressing women’s voices are here: shame, suggestions of a lack of feminity, and silencing. And this is in The New York Times, a mainstream publication in the nineteenth century, too.  Because Fern was awesome, though, she wouldn’t be silenced.

Anyway, this evening, while reflecting on both my abstract and the semester I’ve just completed, I wish I could share this review with some students who just took my ENGL 360: Literature and the Sexes class. For the most part, they did great work, but I was quite discouraged by how many of them were still, at the semester’s end, defending the nineteenth-century patriarchy (and, by extension, its effects which linger to this day). I also can’t believe that some of them still saw the course as engaging in some “male bashing.” It’s as if the clichés about feminism have morphed into clichéd responses from students when confronted by feminist thought.

On day, I could (and did) spend 30 minutes trying my best to eloquently explain how one might be even a bit understanding of Edna’s actions in The Awakening only to have some otherwise bright students say, “Yeah, well, she’s still a bad mother and I hate her.” On another day, I could offer the idea that John, the narrator’s husband in “The Yellow Wall-paper” doesn’t have to be an outright villain for the story to be horrifying. In fact, his rather ordinary (for his time) attitudes about his wife, her health, and his authority over  her make the story more horrifying. And somehow, the only thing some students hear is “John is a great husband!” and proceed to explain why in their final exam essays. “All he wants,” (and I am paraphrasing here from a composite of entirely too many essays that argued this point) “is for his wife to get better. It’s not his fault. And in fact, he’s right. She was sick! Who wouldn’t want a husband like that?”

It’s enough to make one a bit depressed. And I get so tired of the clichéd responses. Give me the benefit of the doubt, folks. Feminism doesn’t equal man-hate. In fact, it does a service to men who are also victims of the patriarchy (one of Gilman’s recurrent arguments). I’m not just making this stuff up or (and these words make any English professor want to scream!) “reading into everything.” So to return to the point above: artifacts like this New York Times review serve to remind us how incredibly pervasive and pernicious patriarchal attitudes were (and are). I’ll add it to my bag of tricks, so to speak, and soldier on.

Work Cited

Warren, Joyce W. Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1992.

Emerson Place

As an English teacher, I find myself wondering every once in a while what difference my work makes in the world. These are only temporary doubts, of course--I am a firm believer in the value of what I do, but it's nice to see results, no matter how unexpected. Today I got an email from one of my former Richmond students. I'll paste most of it below, although I've changed his name and taken out some of the cheesier parts:

"Dr. Hanrahan,

Hello! It's John Smith, one of your students who wishes you were still at Richmond. I just thought you might find it amusing that I'm interning for an advertising and marketing agency in Washington, DC, and we are doing all the brochures and signage for a community in Lebanon, NH called Emerson Place. Inspired, I proposed that the floorplans be named after his contemporaries and those who he influenced, which was approved. So now there are some two-bedroom, one and a half bath apartments in Lebanon called the Alcott, the Poe, the Melville, and the Thoreau.

Also, the art director incorporated a bit of Emerson into the brochures; the quote(s) "Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart" are in an Emerson-looking font around the borders of each page.

I hope everything is going well for you where you have landed. If you have any additional reading recommendations in the vein of anything you had us read in the class (esp. American Gothic like Lippard) please do let me know. Keep up the good work and keep inspiring people!"

Okay, so I left in some of the cheese. Sue me. (This is the spot where my always hilarious mother would jump in and say, "What, did you give him an 'A'?" She says stuff like that any time I tell her anything nice my students say about me. It's so very funny.)

Seriously, though, how strange (and amusing) to think that someday the upwardly-mobile in New Hampshire will be living in rooms named after great nineteenth-century American writers--all because of a class I taught one semester at the University of Richmond. Not exactly my ideal idea of changing the world, but I'll take what I can get. Too bad they didn't take it a step further and name one "The Fanny Fern." I guess that's asking too much. And no, I have no idea what that (wonderful) quotation from Emerson has to do with apartment layouts. I suppose the art director thought it sounded nice and intelligent. Emerson is so very quotable, but lots of times the contexts seem strange.