Hannah Hecht's Blog

1. During the last class, we discussed Zitkala-Sa’s book of stories. I enjoyed her book the most out of anything that we have read so far this semester, and it really gave me a window to a different world. One of the things that we emphasized during our class discussion was Zitkala-Sa’s audience and the format in which her stories were published. She was really smart in realizing that the newly-enfranchised middle to upper class “club women,” especially the former suffragettes, were hungry for a new cause to fight for; “the Indian problem” fit the bill. Her careful planning and marketing (in order to recruit women to fight for her cause) kind of reminded me of the diligent marketing that Edith Wharton did to sell her books. The other thing that I found very interesting was the Christian symbolism set alongside the discussion of the Sioux religion and culture. Until Jacob mentioned it in class, I completely missed the symbolism of the apple. I wish that we had gone a little further with that, just because I think that the Biblical parallels bring a lot to the autobiographical stories. For example, that story portrays the young Zitkala-Sa as Eve, tricked into going to the land of red apples by the snake-like “palefaces.” Obviously, in the Bible story, the act of taking the forbidden fruit results in original sin, which is pretty much the worst thing ever, but did Zitkala-Sa really think that her decision to go be educated was such a terrible thing? In the end, she ended up becoming the voice of her people, and she seemed pretty proud of that accomplishment, although she often expressed small regrets. I’m not sure where I’m going with this, other than that it would be really interesting to further explore the biblical symbolism.

2. This week, we read both Madame Butterfly by John Luther Long and A Japanese Nightingale by Onoto Wantanna (Winnifred Eaton). I absolutely hated Madame Butterfly and enjoyed A Japanese Nightingale. For me, Madame Butterfly was relentlessly racist and exasperatingly one-dimensional in its portrayal of Cho-Cho-San. The middle and end of the book are written from her perspective (or at least, we are limited to only seeing and knowing things that she sees and knows) and yet, the reader still sees her only through Luther’s scathing caricature of a Japanese woman. It would make a little bit more sense for her to talk in that awful pidgin-English dialect (which was not only untactful, but also really badly constructed) if we were seeing her through an English-speaker’s eyes. As it is, the book paints her as being objectively annoying, stupid, and unintelligible, which is completely unfair since it is from her perspective, and she obviously understands what she is saying, even if she knows her English isn’t the best. Honestly, I have no idea why this book is still being read today. The story, while maybe original at the time, really isn’t all that interesting, and the poorly constructed dialect that dominates the narrative is nails-on-chalkboard grating.

I thought that A Japanese Nightingale was overall a much better story. The Japanese (or half-Japanese, as we find out) female protagonist still speaks in dialect, but it is much easier to read. Overall, the relationship between Bigelow and Yuki is much more multi-dimensional than the obsessive love that we see in Madame Butterfly. Both characters are dynamic, and their relationship is complex. I also thought that the plot was a lot more dynamic and full of suspense.

3. The secondary text for this week was the introduction to the book. The intro set the historical background in which both of these texts were written. The turn of the century marked a widespread fascination with Japanese culture among Americans. Each of these texts fulfilled the demand for more information on Eastern culture, and presented it through the safe and comfortable lens of an American traveler (Pinkerton and Bigelow). The text also gave some background information on each of the authors. John Luther Long was an American who “had never heard a Japanese speak English.” (At this point, I would say that he should have either done some extra background research or decided to write something with which he was more familiar.) Eaton, on the other hand, was actually half-Chinese. However, since Americans were generally anti-China at that time, she decided to pick a Japanese penname and write about Japan. Honestly, from having read each novella and the introduction, I think that each of these books were probably terrible sources of information on Japanese culture.

1. Last week, we had an abbreviated class session. We finished watching Age of Innocence and spent a little bit of time discussing Alexander’s Bridge in order to come up with some discussion questions. One of the things that I found most interesting about Alexander’s Bridge was Willa Cather’s intense dislike of her own novel, a feeling we read about in the secondary text. According to the stuff we’ve learned in class, Cather was more of a prairie novelist, although she would later dislike that label. She would rather characterize herself as an American writer than a regionalist writer. She simply thought that the essence of the American experience was best exemplified through prairie writing. Alexander’s Bridge, however, is a piece of writing worthy of an expatriate. The secondary text said that Cather felt that Alexander’s Bridge was both juvenile and a bit of a betrayal to her Midwestern roots. Here are the review questions that I came up with:

• Do each of the women in the story stand for a different set of ideals?
• Compare/contrast Hilda and Winifred. What do the differences say about the two different countries? Or are they even meant to be symbols?
• Why was the first chapter from the perspective of the professor? What ever happened to him?

2. This week, we read American Indian Stories by Zitkala-Sa. The book consisted of nine short stories and one essay, all concerning the lives of Native Americans in the United States. The first four were autobiographical and showed vignettes of important points in the author’s life. “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” explained what it was like for the author to grow up as a member of the Yankton Sioux, “School Days of an Indian Girl” told the story of her transition to an Indian school run by whites in Indiana, “An Indian Teacher Among Indians” describes her first job, and “The Great Spirit” recounts an episode where a converted Native American Christian preacher comes to try and persuade the author to convert to Christianity. The following stories are all legends that the author grew up hearing or short stories that she wrote to help English-speaking Americans sympathize with the Native Americans. The final installment, “America’s Indian Problem,” is an essay directed at non-natives of the time that speaks in favor of Native American rights.

One of my favorite stories from the group was “A Warrior’s Daughter.” The story reads like a Native American fairy tale with a strong female protagonist at its center. When the main character’s suitor gets captured by enemies, she sneaks into the enemy camp disguised as an old woman and rescues him, killing any enemies who try and stop her. At the end, she hoists her lover onto her back and runs triumphantly home. It is understood that though there are many warriors in the story (her father, the lover, and the warriors who go fight the enemy), the main character, Tusee, is the bravest warrior of all.

I also really enjoyed the nonfiction pieces at the beginning of the book describing Zitkala-Sa’s early life. They gave a window into the life of a Native American in the late 19^th century. For me, the real turning point in those stories is when her mother decides to send her off with the white men to get a white education. The mother knows that her daughter will have to endure unbearable hardship, but education ends up being the thing that allows Zitkala-Sa to become vastly successful.

3. “Zitkala-Sa: The Representative Indian” by Susan Rose Dominguez helps to bring a lot of different themes from American Indian Stories to light. It also is a resource of biographical information which helps readers to put the short stories in context. It especially helped me to understand the meaning of “America’s Indian Problem.” The secondary text explains that “America’s Indian Problem” was published in a women’s magazine in 1921. Zitkala-Sa intended for the newly enfranchised middle-class women to reach out and help the American Indian. She outlined specific points that would allow American Indians to find success as Americans. Her essay was successful, and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs formed the National Indian Welfare Committee.

The essay also filled in some of the blanks about Zitkala-Sa’s life that the short stories didn’t directly address. For example, it explained that her uncle and sister were killed by General Custer and his Seventh Calvary. It also explained that she attended Josiah White’s Institute in Wabash, Indiana. The article also includes information about her musical talent, her husband, and her life after her stint as a teacher, information that is not included at all in the stories. The secondary text for this week provided more background information than criticism, but I found the background information to be very useful and informative.

1. Last week, we learned about Edith Wharton, had a class discussion about The Touchstone, and watched the first half of the Hollywood production of Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. I enjoyed the biographical information about Wharton, especially because she had such an interesting life. She was born Edith Jones of “Keeping up with the Joneses” in New York in 1862, which meant that she lived a life of privilege. Her first book was a nonfiction piece about (and named) The Decoration of Houses. This makes sense with her later writing, since she really likes to focus on the architectural and interior design details in her works, although I noticed it more last semester in Summer. She married Teddy Wharton, who ended up having an affair in London, soliciting New York prostitutes, and embezzling all of the money that Wharton made through her carefully constructed public image. The book The Touchstone, her second published work, featured a man feeling guilty about selling a famous author’s love letters. I enjoyed our discussion and it helped me understand the book with more depth. The movie that we watched focused on a man’s affair with his wife’s cousin, a European countess who was treated badly by her husband. We’re going to finish the movie this week.

2. We read Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather for this week. In the book, Bartley Alexander, a prominent Boston architect has an affair with Hilda Burgoyne, a London-based British actress. He feels guilty about the affair, but has trouble deciding whether to break off the relationship with Hilda or to break it off with his wife, Winifred. While he’s working on his bridge in London and trying to decide which woman he wants to end the relationship with, his bridge collapses and he dies.

When the narrative begins, there is a lot on emphasis on Alexander’s feeling of entrapment. He thinks that his success (especially with that iconic Canadian bridge) has only brought him more obligations, although he had hoped that it would bring him freedom. Later on, he finds that freedom in London and with Hilda. I particularly enjoyed the very colorful depiction of London, partially because I have been there before and knew all of the places that Cather was talking about. Boston was much more dreary. Similarly, although Alexander obviously loved his wife, Winifred was painted much more as an everyday person in an everyday city. Hilda was exotic, expressive, and artistic.

The more literal bridge between his two lives consists of the awful, almost week-long journey from the U.S. to London. The journey first seems adventurous and exciting, but grows to be excruciatingly long and painful. The more figurative bridge between his two lives similarly starts off strong, as he confidently balances the two relationships. However, as the years go on, it takes a beating, and he realizes that he will not be able to maintain his two lives much longer. Just as the London bridge (or maybe the bridge in London) starts to collapse, his internal bridge is also collapsing. He cannot make a decision between the two women, and the issue remains unresolved when he dies at the end.

3. Most of the article “Alexander’s Bridge: The Other First Novel” by Loretta Wasserman mainly argues that despite critics’ and Cather’s own dismissal of her early novel, it is actually a strong and interesting novel that ought to be studied by Cather scholars and critics alike. I was really interested to learn that Cather tried to completely disregard this book. I haven’t previously read anything by Cather, but after reading the secondary reading, I think I understand her much better. Apparently, she ultimately decided to portray the American experience through Midwestern prairie-life narratives, but this work is completely different. I also thought that it was interesting that Cather, although she would later deny it, briefly considered becoming an expatriate. The central conflict in Alexander’s Bridge, the need to choose between the Boston woman and the London woman could kind of reflect Cather’s own conflicted feelings. To her (or at least to Alexander), London was flashy and exciting while the U.S. was much more customary. Eventually, America triumphed as the setting of her fiction, but this novel shows that she was, at one point, perhaps as fascinated with Europe as her expatriate contemporaries. The article says, and I quite agree, that her painting of London was much more exciting and colorful than her one of the U.S. I would be interested to read one of her more traditional works to contrast it with Alexander’s Bridge.

1. Last week, our readings focused on the importance of literary recovery. The one by Blouin focused on the difference between history and the archive. Because of limited data, history and the archive used to be the same thing. Now, there is more information to draw on, so the narrative that we refer to as “history” cannot possibly include everything in the archive. That’s why the job of the archivist (and why literary recovery) is so important. The archivist has to go back into the past and expand the narrative of history by adding in more pieces of information that may have originally been left out.

The one by Lautner was a historical overview of how minorities and women were systematically left out of the canon in the 1920’s. The professionalization of the study of literature, the privileging of masculine qualities in literature, and the need to compete with the already-established British canon all contributed to this phenomenon.

The article by O’Brien talked about how Willa Cather gained status as a canonical writer in the 20’s, only to lose it in the 30’s. I talked about that in an earlier WordPress post, so I’ll skip this one.

The final article by Bass focused on the idea of hypertext and the new function of the internet which allows author to upload the context along with the story. This article kind of confused me, since it talked about the internet in very primitive terms.

2. The book that we read for today was The Touchstone by Edith Wharton. Before I started the novella, I was really expecting to hate it. Last semester, I read Wharton’s Summer in Women and Literature, and it was one of my least favorite readings. Summer was a love story which gave some insight into women’s roles in the 1920’s, but I thought that the characters lacked depth and that the whole narrative was kind of hazy. To my surprise, I really enjoyed The Touchstone. The characters felt three-dimensional, and I found it to be engaging.

The Touchstone told the story of a man, Glennard, who decides to sell his correspondence with the late Margaret Aubyn, a famous author. Before her death, Aubyn was in love with Glennard, but Glennard never returned the feelings. Aubyn eventually moved to Europe and exchanged hundreds of letters with him.  Glennard decides to sell the letters to Mr. Flamel, who works at a publishing company and publishes them. The book becomes a bestseller, and Glennard has to live with the immense guilt that comes with selling someone else’s private words. His wife, Alexa Trent, knows he supplied the letters, but doesn’t let him know that she knows. The whole situation puts a huge strain on Glennard’s life and marriage.

At the end of the book, Glennard feels terrible about having sold the letters. Alexa explains to him that in feeling that immense remorse, he has become a better man than the man who originally sold the letters.

“’Don’t you see,’ she went on, as his eyes hung on her, ‘that that’s the gift you can’t escape from, the debt you’re pledged to acquit? Don’t you see that you’ve never before been what she thought you, and that now, so wonderfully, she’s made you into the man she loved? THAT’S worth suffering for, worth dying for, to a woman—that’s the gift she would have wished to give.’”

In the end, the touchstone (a flint-like stone used to test the purity of gold and silver by the streak left when rubbed) refers to Glennard’s selling the letters. At first, the fact that he allowed the letters to be published marked him as a bad and impure man. Only a bad person would sell someone else’s private words and reap the profits. But, then, his sin ends up bringing out the best in him, through his remorse.

3. The secondary text, “Publicity and Authorship in The Touchstone, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Woman” by Mark A. Eaton, explains how the novella reflects Wharton’s (or at least, the author-function Wharton’s) view on the publishing industry. It begins by explaining that an author’s personality, or author function, is both more and less than the person herself. Instead, the personality has to be carefully cultivated in order to sell books. The same could probably be extended to modern-day celebrities such as music artists and actors. Because the general public feels as if they know celebrities (although they really just know the author-function version of the celebrity), they feel entitled to knowing everything about the celebrities’ private lives. The Touchstone is an exploration of that idea. The Touchstone also goes into immense detail about various marketing strategies that allow authors to sell both themselves and their books. Books are marketed much more by popular appeal than by their content. This made sense to me, mainly because people like to have read (or seen or listened to) things that their peers have read, mainly so that they have mutual things to talk about. Wharton seems to suggest that people ought to spend their time doing other things that gossiping about the private lives of celebrities.

To start off this first journal of the semester, I guess I’ll introduce myself by saying that I am a senior majoring in English because I want to eventually work as an editor for a publishing company. I really enjoy messing around with sentence structure and grammar, along with basic story elements, so I think a career in publishing would be a lot of fun. Over the past three years, I’ve had a lot of fun with literary criticism, and I look forward to doing some more of it in this class. For me, criticism makes literature much more than just a story. It can allow the literature to tell you ultimate truths about society or culture or socioeconomics or a historical moment, that the author may have never intended. My main goal for this semester is to learn more about archival research, and to bring to the surface a deserving, but understudied, text. I guess my past experience has mainly dealt with works firmly inside the established literary canon, so it will be cool to study writing that is closer to the fringes. Plus, such literature will probably illuminate other whole facets of life that the canonical texts gloss over.

Last class, we pretty much learned the purpose of literary recovery. Recovery involves finding old texts which aren’t considered part of the canon and demonstrating their worth and worthiness. This class will mainly focus on women’s texts, which were largely glossed over or forgotten by history. We spent a lot of time discussing the word “canon.” Pretty much, the canon is the group of texts with which a literarily educated person ought to be familiar in order to participate in educated discussion. It also consists of those texts that are deemed worthy of being taught to high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. When writers of the past are excluded from the canon, their work pretty much loses its readership. When an entire class of authors (on the basis of socioeconomic status, race, gender, etc.) are excluded from the canon, we lose out on a whole facet of human experience. That is why literary recovery is important work.

One of the texts that we read for class today was “Becoming Noncanonical: The Case Against Willa Cather,” by Sharon O’Brien. It was really interesting to see the fluctuations in Willa Cather’s readership across time. Near the beginning of the article, O’Brien explains that while most people see the list of works in the American canon as objective, it simply isn’t. In the past, people would always defend the canon by saying that the books in it are simply the best because they have “stood the test of time,” but they instead have actually stood the test “in which publishers, reviewers, editors, literary critics, and teachers structure the interaction between the text and the reader.” (O’Brien 111). O’Brien offers Cather as a prime example. At their first publishing in the late 1910’s and throughout the 1920’s, Cather’s works were critically and popularly acclaimed. But, then, with the publishing of One of Us, a novel about a soldier in World War I, H.L. Mencken and other critical scholars began to categorize her as a “lady novelist” (114). From that point, her reputation fell and she eventually limited the reproduction of her own books, so to keep students from “hating her” after studying the increasingly negative reviews of her work (121). While I really enjoyed the article, especially as a case study for how women writers were (are?) written out of the canon, there was one part of it that kind of bugged me. On the last page, O’Brien says that “Cather herself did not fully recognize that… we simply do not read writers whose work has not yet been published, evaluated, preserved, and transmitted by social, economic, and literary institutions of some sort” (124). I thought that that whole quote was kind of belittling to Cather. When she made the conscious decision to keep her books from being printed in anthologies and in cheap paperback form to keep them from being read in classes, I highly doubt that she didn’t understand the implications of her actions. From the article, it seemed as if Cather was embarrassed of her work, especially when she wrote to H.L. Mencken, asking him to give her an honest review, especially if it ended up being a bad review. If she really was that embarrassed, either of her work or of its reception, then she kept it from being published so that people wouldn’t “grow up hating her.” She didn’t want to be remembered as another example of a woman whose writing didn’t measure up to men’s writing. If she couldn’t break the curve by being great, then she’d rather not add her name to a long list of “inferior” women’s writers. It seems as if she would rather not be known as a writer at all. I think that the article is being very condescending in saying that Cather didn’t realize that not publishing her work to the masses would keep it from being read by students. Obviously, I don’t really know very much about Cather, but her idea to keep her writing from the masses seemed like a very conscious and personal act.

Another article that we read for this week was “Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon: A Case Study for the Twenties” by Paul Lauter. I found this article particularly interesting because the fluctuations in acceptance of woman writers seemed to coincide pretty well with the fluctuations of acceptance of Willa Cather’s work from the other article. I also though that it was really interesting toward the end where he talked about literary periods, such as “Puritanism,” “The Frontier,” and “Urbanization.” Here, he said that such periods often encompass only the male experience, as the female experience of home life contains more continuities than discontinuities across time. I also thought it was interesting when he talked about how the professionalization of academia ended up completely excluding women. Where before, women’s book clubs helped determine which texts were widely read, the role switched over to professors who were largely male. The readings for today really helped me to understand why literary recovery is important work.