Showing posts with label rebecca harding davis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rebecca harding davis. Show all posts
Monday, January 16, 2023
On to Southworth...
16 January 2023: You know, when I have time to work on these darn book entries, they go kind of quickly. Interesting. Anyway, feeling good because I finished my Rebecca Harding Davis entry today and can now focus more fully on E.D.E.N. Southworth. On we go!
Tuesday, June 7, 2022
Today's math...
7 June 2022:
- 10: Hours on campus
- 4: Students advised; 3 virtually and 1 in person
- 500: The amount of money we need to find to cover the furniture Rachael and I want to put on the Knutti porch
- 908: Number of words I've managed to write (so far?) on my "Life in the Iron Mills" entry today. I am still behind where I want to be this week, but given the chaos since Sunday, I will happily take this.
Thursday, June 2, 2022
"She wanted no part of Christian passivity..."
2 June 2022: In my research for my entry on "Life in the Iron Mills," by Rebecca Harding Davis, I came across an article by Janice Milner Lasseter that shows the original text (and an 1865 version) included an extra paragraph that she speculates James Fields removed. Lasseter compellingly argues that if that paragraph is considered, it would more fully explain Davis's view of "social justice" (175).
The whole article is well worth a read, but I find myself drawn to this section, about Davis's view of herself as a Christian writer: “She would articulate their [the people she wrote about] suffering, their pain. She wanted no part of Christian passivity as a way to endure social injustice; rather she strove, as the holograph and 1865 texts illustrate, to create an artistic and rhetorical strategy that would effect structural changes within the capitalist economic system” (Lasseter 184).
So many of the pieces I've read make a similar sort of point--that Davis points outside the text for solutions, that readers need to do more than just read. And here we can see how she truly bridges sentimentalism and realism (though that simplifies both concepts). But it also strikes me as startlingly relevant for Christians today. We have to do more than just talk. We have to do the work of social justice.
I am reminded of this post from last week, about another article that made me draw connections between the nineteenth century and our world today, specifically about how these texts called their contemporaries to actions but also still call us to action today.
Work Cited
Lasseter, Janice Milner. “The Censored and Uncensored Literary Lives of ‘Life in the Iron Mills.’” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, vol. 20, no. 1–2, 2003, pp. 175–90. EBSCOhost.
Friday, March 31, 2017
Full day of convention-ing...
31 March 2017: "A kind of guerrilla feminist..." --Student at a session today, discussing Rebecca Harding Davis. I really loved this idea and the images it brings with it.
It's been a good day at the Sigma Tau Delta Convention, and a day that has given me lots of time to embrace this year's blog theme and just listen. The students here are so bright and energetic and have so much to say. And they are worth listening to. I could have listed any half dozen smart lines like the one above. I just picked that one because it came early--during an 8:00 a.m. session. If these students are representative of what English departments across the country are putting out there, then we can feel pretty good about ourselves.
Of course, I am a bit biased about two of the best: these fabulous Shepherd students and my travel companions.
It's been a good day at the Sigma Tau Delta Convention, and a day that has given me lots of time to embrace this year's blog theme and just listen. The students here are so bright and energetic and have so much to say. And they are worth listening to. I could have listed any half dozen smart lines like the one above. I just picked that one because it came early--during an 8:00 a.m. session. If these students are representative of what English departments across the country are putting out there, then we can feel pretty good about ourselves.
Of course, I am a bit biased about two of the best: these fabulous Shepherd students and my travel companions.
Saturday, March 19, 2016
Back to Wheeling
18 March 2016: Friday found me on my way back to Wheeling, WV for the West Virginia Undergraduate English Symposium, along with my work husband Tim and six of our students. Wheeling is an interesting place, always making me think of Rebecca Harding Davis. I hadn't been there is several years (since the last time the symposium was there), so it was kind of cool to be back there. After we arrived, Tim and I took a walk through an old neighborhood with lots of lovely old homes. That night, we took the students to an Italian restaurant we went to the last time we were there. All in all, a good day.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Rebecca Harding Davis in Boston...
Since mid-December, I've had a Word document filled with notes from Rebecca Harding Davis's 1904 memoir Bits of Gossip sitting on the desktop of my computer. I recently wrote a (very short) introduction to Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills" which will appear in the new volume of the Anthology of Appalachian Writers. (Davis is the second heritage writer the anthology will include--last year's volume included Jesse Stuart's "Split Cherry Tree," for which I also wrote the introduction.) This evening, I am giving myself a little break from other work, and decided it's about time to write about those notes I've had saved since before Christmas.
The bits from Bits of Gossip were beyond the scope of my introduction, but I saved them anyway, especially the parts where Davis recounts her 1860s visits to Boston and her meetings with various American literary luminaries including Bronson Alcott (she was not a fan), his daughter Louisa (more about her below), Ralph Waldo Emerson (she was quite a fan, but felt he was hopelessly out of touch and felt his deep respect for Bronson Alcott was "almost painful to see"), and Nathaniel Hawthorne. These memories are especially interesting for someone studying 19th-century American literature, because they show us an "outsider's" perspective on the sometimes very insular world of the Boston literati.
I'll share just a few parts here. First, on Louisa May Alcott:
"During my first visit to Boston in 1862, I saw at an evening reception a tall, thin young woman standing alone in a corner. She was plainly dressed, and had that watchful, defiant air with which the woman whose youth is slipping away is apt to face the world which has offered no place to her. Presently she came up to me.
'These people may say pleasant things to you,' she said abruptly ; 'but not one of them would have gone to Concord and back to see you, as I did to-day. I went for this gown. It's the only decent one I have. I'm very poor;" and in the next breath she contrived to tell me that she had once taken a place as 'second girl.' 'My name,' she added, 'is Louisa Alcott.'
Now, although we had never met, Louisa Alcott had shown me great kindness in the winter just past, sacrificing a whole day to a tedious work which was to give me pleasure at a time when every hour counted largely to her in her desperate struggle to keep her family from want. The little act was so considerate and fine, that I am still grateful for it, now when I am an old woman, and Louisa Alcott has long been dead. It was as natural for her to do such things as for a pomegranate-tree to bear fruit.
Before I met her I had known many women and girls who were fighting with poverty and loneliness, wondering why God had sent them into a life where apparently there was no place for them, but never one so big and generous in soul as this one in her poor scant best gown, the 'claret-colored merino,' which she tells of with such triumph in her diary. Amid her grim surroundings, she had the gracious instincts of a queen. It was her delight to give, to feed living creatures, to make them happy in body and soul.
She would so welcome you on her home to a butterless baked potato and a glass of milk that you would never forget the delicious feast. Or, if she had no potato or milk to offer, she would take you through the woods to the river, and tell you old legends of colony times, and be so witty and kind in the doing of it that the day would stand out in your memory ever after, differing from all other days, brimful of pleasure and comfort.
With this summer, however, the darkest hour of her life passed. A few months after I saw her she went as a nurse into the war, and soon after wrote her 'Hospital Sketches.' Then she found her work and place in the world.
Years afterward she came to the city where I was living and I hurried to meet her. The lean, eager, defiant girl was gone, and instead, there came to greet me a large, portly, middle-aged woman, richly dressed. Everything about her, from her shrewd, calm eyes to the rustle of her satin gown told me of assured success.
Yet I am sure fame and success counted for nothing with her except for the material aid which they enabled her to give to a few men and women whom she loved. She would have ground her bones to make their bread. Louisa Alcott wrote books which were true and fine, but she never imagined a life as noble as her own. "
It seems to me here that Davis is especially insightful and sensitive to so many important factors: what drove Alcott in her work, what it was like for women like Louisa who really did wonder what their place in the world was, how she very nearly did write herself to death to support her family. Yes, it is a bit sentimental, especially towards the end, but I find the whole sketch quite moving (especially her description of "that watchful, defiant air with which the woman whose youth is slipping away is apt to face the world which has offered no place to her.")
Davis's recollections of Hawthorne reveal her deep admiration for him and his work, not surprising since he was a life-long influence on her own work. She writes of her final meeting with him, a few months before his death. They walked around Concord, and sat down on the grass in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery:
"...In a few months he was lying under the deep grass, at rest, near the very spot where he sat and laughed, looking up at us. I left Concord that evening and never saw him again. He said good-by, hesitated shyly, and then, holding out his hand, said:-- 'I am sorry you are going away. It seems as if we had known you always.' The words were nothing. I suppose he forgot them and me as he turned into the house. And yet, because perhaps of the child in the cherry-tree, and the touch which the magician laid upon her, I have never forgotten them. They seemed to take me, too, for one moment, into his enchanted country. Of the many pleasant things which have come into my life, this was one of the pleasantest and best."
That reads a bit like a fan-girl's dream come true, right? To have one of your favorite writers--someone who has influenced you so much--share such kind words with you? Good stuff. As a side-note, I like this little memory of late-in-his-life-Hawthorne because so much of what I came across while writing my Marble Faun paper indicated how unhappy and unpleasant he was late in life. It's nice to see that there might have been some exceptions to that general mood of dissatisfaction.
You can read more of Bits of Gossip here (the whole thing's on Google Books!) or just look at the "Boston in the 1860s" section here.
The bits from Bits of Gossip were beyond the scope of my introduction, but I saved them anyway, especially the parts where Davis recounts her 1860s visits to Boston and her meetings with various American literary luminaries including Bronson Alcott (she was not a fan), his daughter Louisa (more about her below), Ralph Waldo Emerson (she was quite a fan, but felt he was hopelessly out of touch and felt his deep respect for Bronson Alcott was "almost painful to see"), and Nathaniel Hawthorne. These memories are especially interesting for someone studying 19th-century American literature, because they show us an "outsider's" perspective on the sometimes very insular world of the Boston literati.
I'll share just a few parts here. First, on Louisa May Alcott:
"During my first visit to Boston in 1862, I saw at an evening reception a tall, thin young woman standing alone in a corner. She was plainly dressed, and had that watchful, defiant air with which the woman whose youth is slipping away is apt to face the world which has offered no place to her. Presently she came up to me.
'These people may say pleasant things to you,' she said abruptly ; 'but not one of them would have gone to Concord and back to see you, as I did to-day. I went for this gown. It's the only decent one I have. I'm very poor;" and in the next breath she contrived to tell me that she had once taken a place as 'second girl.' 'My name,' she added, 'is Louisa Alcott.'
Now, although we had never met, Louisa Alcott had shown me great kindness in the winter just past, sacrificing a whole day to a tedious work which was to give me pleasure at a time when every hour counted largely to her in her desperate struggle to keep her family from want. The little act was so considerate and fine, that I am still grateful for it, now when I am an old woman, and Louisa Alcott has long been dead. It was as natural for her to do such things as for a pomegranate-tree to bear fruit.
Before I met her I had known many women and girls who were fighting with poverty and loneliness, wondering why God had sent them into a life where apparently there was no place for them, but never one so big and generous in soul as this one in her poor scant best gown, the 'claret-colored merino,' which she tells of with such triumph in her diary. Amid her grim surroundings, she had the gracious instincts of a queen. It was her delight to give, to feed living creatures, to make them happy in body and soul.
She would so welcome you on her home to a butterless baked potato and a glass of milk that you would never forget the delicious feast. Or, if she had no potato or milk to offer, she would take you through the woods to the river, and tell you old legends of colony times, and be so witty and kind in the doing of it that the day would stand out in your memory ever after, differing from all other days, brimful of pleasure and comfort.
With this summer, however, the darkest hour of her life passed. A few months after I saw her she went as a nurse into the war, and soon after wrote her 'Hospital Sketches.' Then she found her work and place in the world.
Years afterward she came to the city where I was living and I hurried to meet her. The lean, eager, defiant girl was gone, and instead, there came to greet me a large, portly, middle-aged woman, richly dressed. Everything about her, from her shrewd, calm eyes to the rustle of her satin gown told me of assured success.
Yet I am sure fame and success counted for nothing with her except for the material aid which they enabled her to give to a few men and women whom she loved. She would have ground her bones to make their bread. Louisa Alcott wrote books which were true and fine, but she never imagined a life as noble as her own. "
It seems to me here that Davis is especially insightful and sensitive to so many important factors: what drove Alcott in her work, what it was like for women like Louisa who really did wonder what their place in the world was, how she very nearly did write herself to death to support her family. Yes, it is a bit sentimental, especially towards the end, but I find the whole sketch quite moving (especially her description of "that watchful, defiant air with which the woman whose youth is slipping away is apt to face the world which has offered no place to her.")
Davis's recollections of Hawthorne reveal her deep admiration for him and his work, not surprising since he was a life-long influence on her own work. She writes of her final meeting with him, a few months before his death. They walked around Concord, and sat down on the grass in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery:
"...In a few months he was lying under the deep grass, at rest, near the very spot where he sat and laughed, looking up at us. I left Concord that evening and never saw him again. He said good-by, hesitated shyly, and then, holding out his hand, said:-- 'I am sorry you are going away. It seems as if we had known you always.' The words were nothing. I suppose he forgot them and me as he turned into the house. And yet, because perhaps of the child in the cherry-tree, and the touch which the magician laid upon her, I have never forgotten them. They seemed to take me, too, for one moment, into his enchanted country. Of the many pleasant things which have come into my life, this was one of the pleasantest and best."
That reads a bit like a fan-girl's dream come true, right? To have one of your favorite writers--someone who has influenced you so much--share such kind words with you? Good stuff. As a side-note, I like this little memory of late-in-his-life-Hawthorne because so much of what I came across while writing my Marble Faun paper indicated how unhappy and unpleasant he was late in life. It's nice to see that there might have been some exceptions to that general mood of dissatisfaction.
You can read more of Bits of Gossip here (the whole thing's on Google Books!) or just look at the "Boston in the 1860s" section here.
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