Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 146

February 17, 2021: Non-Favorite American Myths: George Washington

[Given my overall 2021 goal of better remembering all of American history, for this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series I wanted to highlight some of the historical myths of which I’m decidedly not a fan. Share your own non-favorites, historical and every other type, for a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances that’s always one of my favorite posts of the year!]

On three of the many inaccuracies at the heart of our Washington mythos (not even counting that whole cherry tree thing):

1)      He was a great general: I don’t know that I’d go quite as far as Gore Vidal does in Burr (1973), where he has his fictionalized Aaron Burr say, noting Washington’s “military short-comings” and his “eerie incompetence,” that he “was never to defeat an English army.” But certainly Vidal’s Burr is closer to the mark than our predominant narratives of General Washington, whose eventual military triumph in the Revolution was due almost entirely to other leaders, both Americanand European. Yes, he did cross the Delaware—but that’s one successful strategy in the course of an eight-year war!

2)      He was universally beloved: It’s true that Washington’s presidential administration brought together leaders of both major political parties, and that his two elections were uncontested (the only two such in American history). But the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion should put to rest any notion that Washington’s America wasn’t divided, or that his terms were without controversy or division. Indeed, Washington has been far more universally beloved in the centuries since his death than he was during his lifetime—which means we should probably work harder to find the complexities that were evident in his own era.

3)      He freed all his slaves: This one’s seriously complicated, and I’ll mostly leave it to the excellent Mount Vernon website to get into the details. It is true, as the site notes, that Washington freed a portion of his estate’s more than 300 slaves in his will—a number more were subsequently freed by his widow Martha, perhaps (as Abigail Adams argued in a private letter) because she was afraid for her life. But the simplest fact is that Washington owned slaves for 56 of his 67 years, and as far as we know did not free a single one during his lifetime—and indeed, as Erica Dunbar has recently traced so powerfully, he worked hard to keep his enslaved people in that situation and relentlessly pursued those who escaped. We can credit the small moments of racial progress in Washington’s life without eliding, indeed working as with all these myths to better and more accurately remember, this clear and significant fact about our first president.

Next non-favorite tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Non-favorites (historical or otherwise) you’d share?

February 16, 2021: Non-Favorite American Myths: Pocahontas

[Given my overall 2021 goal of better remembering all of American history, for this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series I wanted to highlight some of the historical myths of which I’m decidedly not a fan. Share your own non-favorites, historical and every other type, for a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances that’s always one of my favorite posts of the year!]

On some of the truths behind one of our most mythologized figures.

If, as I’ve argued before in this space, John Smith is relatively unknown in our communal conversations, Pocahontas, daughter of the Virginia chief Powhatan and Smith's continual partner in the historical narratives, suffers from the opposite problem: she's perhaps the most broadly famous Native American figure in our history. More exactly, compared even to other prominent Native Americans such as Sacagawea, Geronimo, or Sitting Bull, the name Pocahontas immediately conjures up (even for relatively non-historically minded Americans) a set of pretty specific images: sacrificing herself to save Smith, developing a pseudo-romantic relationship with him, eventually marrying another Englishman (John Rolfe) and ending her life in England with him, and so on.

Many of those images of Pocahontas have been around since Smith's own narrative, so that in this case, the Disney version of history actually lines up quite closely with the most accepted national narratives (although I don't know that Pocahontas had as good a singing voice as Vanessa Williams in those earlier narratives). As best as scholars can tell from the scanty historical evidence (scanty other than, again, Smith's own somewhat unreliable account), the realities of Pocahontas' life and identity were significantly different, particularly in terms of her relationship with Smith: she was likely very young, something like 13 at the oldest, when they met; and so if she did save him and his fellow Englishmen from execution, it was likely for reasons other than those of romance in any explicit sense. Terrence Malick's film The New World(2005) seemingly attempts to represent those realities more accurately but achieves only mixed results, casting a very young Native American actress (Q'orianka Kilcher) as Pocahontas but still portraying her relationship with Colin Farrell's John Smith in explicitly romanticized ways.

But to my mind, the most interesting and meaningful American truths about Pocahontas don't depend on whether she was 12 or 20 when she met Smith, or whether they loved each other deeply or barely knew each other, or any variation on those questions. The most significant question to me is broader and more complicated still, and is the issue of whether her identity across the centuries of narratives is more stereotyped and limiting or more layered and humanizing, whether she's just an "other" falling for the superior white guy or is in fact an American who has a rich and full an identity as any European American figure. The answer, as with any of our most complicated questions, likely lies somewhere in the middle, and a great illustration of both sides is J.N. Barker's musical melodrama The Indian Princess (1809). Barker's Pocahontas is at once entirely a stereotype and yet a fleshed-out (and not in the Disney sense) heroine, just as his play's Englishmen run the gamut from stereotypical comic relief to complex (at least for an 1809 melodrama) heroes.

We're not likely to stop telling the story of Pocahontas, since it, like all of the most engaging American stories, connects to universal and powerful themes and narratives: love and sacrifice, loss and redemption, past and tradition vs. future and change. But it also, if more subtly, reveals much of what is both worst and best about our shared American identities, within and across ethnic and racial communities, and the more we can remember and retell those elements too, the more meaningful our stories of this Indian Princess will be. Next non-favorite tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Non-favorites (historical or otherwise) you’d share?

February 15, 2021: Non-Favorite American Myths: The First Thanksgiving

[Given my overall 2021 goal of better remembering all of American history, for this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series I wanted to highlight some of the historical myths of which I’m decidedly not a fan. Share your own non-favorites, historical and every other type, for a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances that’s always one of my favorite posts of the year!]

This year we commemorate the 400th anniversary of the autumn 1621 harvest celebration that has become known as “the first Thanksgiving.” So it makes sense to start this week’s series by sharing my November 2018 Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on how we can and should push past that myth to explore both the painful and the inspiring histories that contextualize and comprise that complex early American moment.

Next non-favorite tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Non-favorites (historical or otherwise) you’d share?

February 13-14, 2021: Short Stories I Love: Ilene Railton’s Stories

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I’ve shared another batch of great short stories. Leading up to this update on my favorite contemporary writer!]

On the evolving career of my favorite new writer, and why you should all be following it.

I might be wrong about this, but I think the last time I wrote in this space about the post-retirement creative writing career of my mom Ilene Railton, that career was entirely ahead of her, just a glimmer in her mind’s eye. In the seven years since, she has more than fulfilled that glimmer, completing drafts of a YA novella and numerous short stories; most of her works to date (as well as those in progress) focus in one way or another on the lives and identities of young people like those with whom she worked for so many years in the Bright Stars program, while one is a compelling mystery story based on elements of her own autobiography combined with thoughtful, universal themes of memory and loss. This Spring she’s part of a novel-writing class, the next step in a developing writing career that continues to inspire and motivate my own writing.

Obviously I’m not able to be (nor interested in being) an objective commentator on that evolving career, but I would nonetheless make the case for why my Mom’s stories should be of interest to all readers (even if you don’t trust my judgment on their quality, which you should!). As I wrote in that hyperlinked post on the Bright Stars program, the children and families at the heart of programs like that are among the most vulnerable in American society, which all too often (if not indeed all the time) means that they are also among the most frequently overlooked or forgotten in our collective narratives. In this post a couple years back on a book talk for We the People at Shirley Prison, I made the case that incarcerated Americans are the community most consistently excluded from our narratives of national identity; I stand by that assessment, but would say that folks who are homeless or in similarly extreme situations of poverty, disadvantage, and vulnerability are likewise quite consistently excluded from our conversations about American identity and community.

As with any overlooked and excluded community, raising collective awareness is a vital first step in changing those narratives. Through her extensive experiences with these kids and families, my Mom is in a perfect position to help share their stories, or rather to create fictional characters and stories that can help connect readers to them. Obviously works of fiction are only one means for building that awareness and the understanding, empathy, and policy shifts (among other effects) that can come with it—but they are one means, and an engaging and accessible one at that. Which is why I love Ilene Railton’s stories, and will do everything I can to help these stories and this evolving new writer reach audiences as broadly and fully as possible!

Anti-favorites series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Short stories or writers you especially love?

February 12, 2021: Short Stories I Love: 21st Century Stories

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I’ll be sharing another batch of great short stories. Leading up to an update on my favorite contemporary writer!]

In no particular order, posts that feature a whole bunch of really great stories from the last decade or so:

1)      The five I highlighted in this post, from Karl Taro Greenfeld, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Phil Klay, Cristina Henriquez, and Yelena Akhtiorskaya;

2)      The three I highlighted in this post, from Alicia Elliott, Danielle Evans, and Jocelyn Nicole Johnson;

3)      And one more from Henriquez, her bracing and moving “Everything Is Far from Here.”

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Short stories (or other works) you especially love?

February 11, 2021: Short Stories I Love: “Yellow Woman”

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I’ll be sharing another batch of great short stories. Leading up to an update on my favorite contemporary writer!]

On a more problematic kind of ambiguity, and a couple reasons why it’s worth experiencing nonetheless.

As I mentioned in this post on Leslie Marmon Silko’s impressively multi-part career, I’ve been teaching her short story “Yellow Woman” (1981) as part of my First-Year Writing I course (and now also part of the online Short Story class I teach most semesters) for more than 15 years. That means I’ve read Silko’s story at least a couple dozen times by now (pretty closely each time), and yet I’ll admit to still being unable to say with any certainty which of three quite distinct descriptions best captures what is happening to her unnamed 1st-person narrator: she’s having an extramarital affair with a stranger named Silva; Silva has kidnapped her and she has developed a bit of Stockholm Syndrome toward him; or she has somehow found herself within a Laguna Pueblo “yellow woman” legend and Silva is a fellow legendary creature. Given how distinct the tones, meanings, and effects of those very different plots would be (and, for that matter, given the 21stcentury epidemic of missing Native American women), it feels at least a bit problematic that we can’t be sure which of them describes what this fictional woman is experiencing or what we’re reading.

Yet while Silko’s ambiguity might thus be more problematic than that which I highlighted in Monday’s post on Hawthorne’s “Kinsman,” I love “Yellow Woman” at least as much as Hawthorne’s story, and would argue that Silko’s ambiguity serves a couple of significant purposes. For one thing, I think it does capture the perspective and emotions of a character going through a traumatic experience, which is what is happening regardless of how we choose to interpret the precise nature of that trauma. In my First-Year Writing class Silko’s story is paired with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and despite their very different time periods and contexts I think there’s a far deeper connection between the two stories than simply the yellow in their titles: both use an immersive 1st-person narration to capture the multiple, confusing, even contradictory layers to their narrator’s perspectives, consciousnesses, and voices, and in so doing depict a number of distinct yet interconnected psychological and social layers to identity.  

In the case of “Yellow Woman,” one of those layers is the complex question of what it means to be a Laguna Pueblo young woman growing up in late 20th century America. Just as is the case with Tayo, the main character of Silko’s magisterial novel Ceremony (1977), for the story’s unnamed narrator the lines between past and present, tradition and change, indigenous culture and national community, are far less clearly demarcated as we might expect. And seen through that lens, the fact that she might be Yellow Woman experiencing a legendary connection and might be a late 20th century young woman in a fraught sexual liaison with a stranger isn’t just a problematic ambiguity in this particular short story, but also and especially a representation of difficult and crucial questions of identity facing Native American young people like this narrator and many others. Which makes Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Yellow Woman” not just a story I love, but also one we should all read.

Last short story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Short stories (or other works) you especially love?

February 10, 2021: Short Stories I Love: “A Sweatshop Romance”

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I’ll be sharing another batch of great short stories. Leading up to an update on my favorite contemporary writer!]

On romance and realism, and why they don’t have to be at odds.

Although I only made it the focus of one paragraph in this post on additions to my American Literature II syllabus, I believe I laid out clearly there the engagingly multi-layered nature of Abraham Cahan’s short story “A Sweatshop Romance” (1898). So check that out if you would, and then come on back for a bit more on this great American story.

Welcome back! One of the most important aspects of Cahan’s multi-layered approach is captured in his title: realistic settings and themes that focus on the worlds of work and labor activism, combined with a romantic plot that focuses on a love triangle. Those elements could be seen to be competing with one another for the reader’s attention, as Helen Hunt Jackson seems to have admitted when she said of her historical novel Ramona (1884), which depicts such painful historical issues as Native American genocide and Mexican American displacement within the frame of an idealized love story, “I have sugared the pill.” Given that Ramona’s romance and its doomed lovers Ramona and Alessandro have spawned a sizeable Southern California tourist industry, including an annual pageant, it’s fair to say that audiences have frequently focused on the sugar, perhaps to the detriment of their understanding and engagement with the novel’s medicinal, historical themes and contexts.

I don’t necessarily believe that those elements are truly at odds in Jackson’s novel, though (I wrote more about Ramona in my first book, if you’re interested)—and I know for sure that they’re not in Cahan’s short story. For one thing, Cahan’s love triangle isn’t just between three co-workers at the titular sweatshop—it’s between a young woman torn between two men with drastically distinct perspectives on issues of work and labor activism, making the romance very much centered on realistic questions of how workers navigate those worlds and debates. And another, related thing, when it comes to human beings we don’t separate out romance from reality, romantic relationships from workplace ones (or any other ones)—they’re all part of our lives and identities, all part of how we move through and experience and respond to the world. Cahan’s wonderful story illustrates those interconnected elements of its characters’ lives and identities, and in so doing helps us think at least as much about our own moment and world as about its own.

Next short story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Short stories (or other works) you especially love?

February 9, 2021: Short Stories I Love: “The Tenth of January”

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I’ll be sharing another batch of great short stories. Leading up to an update on my favorite contemporary writer!]

On a short story that combines local color and sentimental fiction—and becomes much more.

I’ve written two posts about one of my favorite 19th century authors, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: this one on the overall arc and significance of her multi-faceted literary career; and this one on her best novel, the feminist, realist, and powerfully affecting The Story of Avis (1877). Throughout her career, Phelps wed sentimental writing (as in her spiritual Gatestrilogy) to local color fiction (as in the New England regionalism of Avis), focusing consistently on the experiences of women within those different frames and settings; she also published a number of young adult and juvenile works, including the very popular Gypsy Brenton books (published when she was only in her early 20s). In the course of that long and successful career, she became one of the century’s best-selling novelists, inspired prominent subsequent writers like William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Edith Wharton, and deserves to be far better remembered and more widely read in our own era.

Yet with all of that said, it’s quite possible that Phelps’ most interesting and important piece of writing was her first published work of fiction for adults: “The Tenth of January,” a short story published in the Atlantic Monthly’s March 1868 volume (when Phelps was only twenty-three years old). “Tenth” fictionalizes one of the worst industrial and workplace disasters in American history, the January 10th, 1860 collapse of the Pemberton Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts. That famous and horrific historical event offered Phelps a perfect chance to combine her two most consistent literary genres in this debut short story, and she does so to great success—opening with an extended portrayal of this Massachusetts mill town and its unique culture and community (“it would be difficult to find Lawrence’s equal,” the narrator notes), and then gradually building a sentimental and highly emotional story about a particular young female worker (nearly all those killed in the collapse fit that description, with most of them recent immigrants), Del Ivory, whose tragic fate (along with those of many other characters, some only children) becomes intertwined with that of the mill.

Those elements alone, in the hands of a master like Phelps, would be enough to create a compelling and moving story out of this striking historical material. But in the voice of her narrator, at once a detached observer and a fiery critic, Phelps adds another complex and vital layer to her story. Consider these back to back moments in the story’s introductory section. First the narrator concludes a descriptive paragraph on Lawrence with these angry lines, “Of these ten thousand [workers] two thirds are girls: voluntary captives, indeed; but what is the practical difference? It is an old story—that of going to jail for want of bread.” And then she transitions into the body of her story with this elegiac paragraph: “My story is written as one sets a bit of marble to mark a mound. I linger over it as we linger beside the grave of one who sleeps well: half sadly, half gladly—more gladly than sadly—but hushed.” This narrative voice is not unlike that of another Atlantic Monthly story from earlier in the decade, Rebecca Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861)—but by wedding this engaging narrator and her multi-faceted literary genres to a real and horrific historical event, Phelps add yet another layer of power and pathos to this unique short story.

Next short story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Short stories (or other works) you especially love?

February 8, 2021: Short Stories I Love: “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I’ll be sharing another batch of great short stories. Leading up to an update on my favorite contemporary writer!]

On the vital value of ambiguities.

It would be a fool’s errand to try to assess which of the literally countless current American debates is the most prominent or significant: but in any case high on multiple lists, including both historical arguments and conflicts over how we define our essential national identity, would have to be the ongoing debates over how we remember and view the American Revolution and its key events and actors. Whether we’re talking about the scholarly and educational contrasts between the 1619 Project and the 1776 Commission, the hotly contested efforts to remove statues of Revolutionary leaders like George Washington, or any number of other unfolding conflicts, Revolutionary memory is at the heart of many 2021 controversies. But while those debates might be more ubiquitous than ever before, they are anything but new, as illustrated by a striking early 19thcentury American short story: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1831).

Published amidst the ongoing 50th anniversary of the Revolution, the period in which some of the most foundational Revolutionary memories and commemorations were first established, Hawthorne’s historical fiction depicts mid-18thcentury Boston in a moment of pre-Revolutionary fervor, something akin (as I wrote in this post) to the outrage against Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Hawthorne’s youthful protagonist, Robin, is related to (and spends the whole story seeking out) the titular, fictional English authority figure against whom the angry colonists have directed their fury, which makes the story’s climactic depiction of the brutal tarring and feathering of Molineux a fraught and ambiguous moment to be sure—and one that’s followed by an even more complex and ambiguous coda dealing with Robin’s enigmatic perspective and uncertain potential future in the aftermath of that outburst of Revolutionary violence. Any reader who has followed the character’s journey, and doubly so any American aware of the story’s Revolutionary echoes, is likely to be frustrated by those ambiguous concluding depictions of the Revolution’s tones and meanings.

And I think that both that frustration and those ambiguities are very valuable and vital effects indeed. For one thing, as I’ve written about multiple times in this space, we tend not to remember at all the large and complex Loyalist community—Americans who likewise had decidedly mixed feelings about the Revolution and its aftermaths (often, of course, overtly negative feelings, but likely mixed as well for many of them as the war wore on). And for another thing, Revolutionary memory in the early 19thcentury was just as contested as it is in our 21st century moment, just as open to different interpretations and arguments, different perspectives on the worst as well as the best of its meanings and legacies. Hawthorne’s story helps us push past the most simplified Revolutionary myths to consider those multiple layers of contest and conflict—while also creating, as do so many of the best short stories, an ambiguous and affecting reading experience all its own.

Next short story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Short stories (or other works) you especially love?

February 6-7, 2021: Sports in 2021: Revolutionary Change

[There’s a lot happening in and around the world of sports these days. So for my annual Super Bowl series, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of such issues. Leading up to this special weekend post on the genuinely revolutionary possibilities of sports!]

On what’s unquestionably true of sports, and what’s possible nonetheless.

The frustrations and perils of life under COVID, the presence of and debates over social and political activist movements, the limits of traditional organizations and structures and the need to rework them, the challenges facing higher education, the difficulty of balancing scientific knowledge with some of our most cherished shared rituals and beliefs—if my topics in this weeklong sports series feel like snapshots of where American (and global) society is overall in early 2021, there’s a good reason. At the end of the day, the world of sports is entirely part of our larger world, and so features and reflects that world’s realities and issues; to those who would argue that sports serve as an opiate of the masses or the like, I would respond that sports have never represented an escape from reality, as they contain it just as fully and inescapably as do all other parts of our society and culture. That doesn’t mean that we’re thinking about the hardest social issues at every moment we’re enjoying sports, no more than we can or should do so in every waking moment overall; just that sports and society are interconnected, always have been, and always will be.

Recognizing that reality might seem like an acknowledgement of sports’ limits, and in some ways of course it is. But the opposite can also be true—seeing sports as entirely interconnected with society opens up the possibility that sports can do more than reflect our world, that they can also (just as I would argue of cultural works) influence and change that world. It’s precisely for that reason that athletes from the Mexico City Olympians, Muhammad Ali, and Jackie Robinson to the University of Missouri football team, WNBA stars, and Colin Kaepernick (among many, many others) have sought to use their roles and prominence to both raise awareness of social issues and help effect social change. Moreover, Robinson’s story—and the influence that it had on the broader Civil Rights movement goal of integration—illustrates that sports communities can likewise model such changes. I would say the same of one of my favorite sports moments, the Chinese Educational Mission baseball team’s final 1881 game; while tragically their athletic achievement did not reverse the effects of the Chinese Exclusion era for most of those students (or many others), it did exemplify an alternative, inclusive vision of American society, one that could continue to affect the hundreds of thousands of Chinese Americans who remained part of that society despite this deeply discriminatory moment.

Those social and political activisms and influences offer particularly overt and striking examples of how sports can help change society. But I would say there are also subtler and equally significant such potential influences, and on this Super Bowl weekend want to highlight one from the world of football in 2021. Less than 20 years ago, the question of whether African American quarterbacks could succeed in the NFL was a frustratingly controversialone; here in 2021, the two prior NFL MVPs have been African American quarterbacks, and some of the league’s brightest young stars (from Kyler to Tua) as well as college football’s most exciting prospects (from Justin Fields and Kellen Mond to the boys’ and my favorite, Michael Penix Jr.) fit that description as well. And that reference to my sons is really the point I want to make here: for them, budding football fanatics that they are, African American quarterbacks are a given, not just a part of football but indeed an integral element of it. The more we see identities and communities represented in the breadth and depth of their realities, the harder it is to maintain limiting and stereotypical narratives—and sports, now as ever, comprise one of the best spaces in which revolutionary representation can be found.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Aspects of sports in 2021 you’d emphasize?