Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 435

August 26, 2011: The Indian Princess

If 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.

Those images of Pocahontas have been around since Smith's own narrative (as the excerpts from his text at the first link in yesterday's post illustrate), 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. More Monday, on the most forgotten Virginian Founding Father,

Ben
PS. Three links to start with:
1) The full text of Barker's play: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29230/...

2) A scene from Malick's film featuring Pocahontas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX5dwh...

3) OPEN: Any historical characters whose images you'd challenge or complicate?

August 25, 2011: Not Just Any John Smith

I don't know how much is generally known these days about John Smith, the first famous (English) Virginian with the deeply nondescript name. If anything, our cultural narratives about him probably depend in large part on the Mel Gibson-voiced character in Disney's Pocahontas (1995), or less famously the Colin Farrell version of him in Terence Malick's The New World (2005), about both of which I'll write more tomorrow. But this is one case where the actual historical figure is to my mind significantly more interesting than any Hollywood versions--and where the figure himself had a great deal to do with creating that interest.

Smith's life would already be pretty interesting in its own right, from his early years as a young soldier for hire (ie, mercenary) in Turkey to his ambiguous presence and role on the Virginia expedition (including of course his famous relationship with Pocahontas, about whom more tomorrow as well), and up to his later travels to New England and perspective on that other most prominent English colony and on English America's fledging identity and prospects more generally. But Smith wasn't content to let the details of his life impress posterity on their own terms, and so produced, in his various autobiographical writings--which always represented themselves as broader histories of Virginia and/or the other colonies, but somehow always came back around to Smith himself first and foremost--some of the most overtly and impressively self-aggrandizing texts in American history.

The portrayal of Smith in those texts certainly contributes to those self-aggrandizing efforts, especially in the passages that deal with his many victories of Native Americans, whether military (as when he single-handedly holds off hundreds of angry Natives) or diplomatic (as when, ostensibly a doomed captive, he wows his captors with his compass and then through sheer charisma impels Pocahontas to save him from his fate). But it's actually an even more fundamental narrative choice that really takes the cake here: Smith writes about himself in the third-person, narrating the adventures of Captain John Smith throughout these texts. It's true that he may have had various co-writers at times, but as best I can tell from the evidence--and as certainly lines up with the images of Smith we again get from the texts--it was Smith's choice to write about himself in this way, to make himself the hero of his own narratives in addition to, and in many ways rather than, the author and narrator of them.

Smith's life and identity have a great deal to tell us about not only the Virginia colony but the early settlement era in general, and so I can't recommend these texts enough for their AmericanStudies value. But does the hilarity factor in reading about, for example, the time that Captain Smith used his Native guide as a human shield while fighting off dozens of attackers, hurt my cause? No, no it doesn't. More tomorrow, on two centuries' of images of Smith's eternal narrative counterpart.

Ben

PS. Three links to start with:

1) Many links from Smith's autobiographical writings: http://history.hanover.edu/courses/ex...

2) Perhaps another way that Smith will re-enter our communal consciousness: http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/ki...

3) OPEN: Any surprisingly funny or engaging historical texts you'd share?

August 24, 2011: Cotton Mather's American Legacy

Part deux of my, well, two-part series on Cotton Mather for the Globe and Boston.com Salem "History Time" column is here:http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/salem/2011/08/history_time_cotton_mathers_am.html 

Thanks once again to Maggi Smith-Dalton, the editor and historian who is both the brains and driving force  behind this column. Check it out, and feel free to post any thoughts or comments here or there! More tomorrow, on the most egomaniacal and one of the most interesting Virginians ever,BenPS. Any particularly complicated Americans you think we should remember more accurately?

August 23, 2011: Virginia, Cradle of AmericanStudies

Yes, that's literally true, as this AmericanStudier was cradled in the warm embrace of Central Virginia throughout his young life. But here are five additional reasons, one per post-contact century, why Virginia exemplifies America at its complex best (I could have easily gone for the worst, but what kind of way would that be to start a vacation?):1)      Bacon's Rebellion (1676): Back in the dark ages when I took high school American history, this late 17th century revolt was portrayed as a distant predecessor to the Revolution; now, as the essay at the first link notes, scholars see it more as a power struggle between equally elite Virginia blue blood types. But whatever the causes or rationales, one thing has always been clear: the rebellion itself represented an unprecedented collaboration between poor whites (many of them indentured servants) and African Americans, illustrating just how racially interconnected this seemingly divided state has always been.2)      Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in 18th Century Virginia (1988): Bacon's Rebellion might seem to be an isolated and extreme situation, but Sobel argues that when it comes to racial interconnectedness, it was anything but; in this book, one of the most exciting and inspiring works of AmericanStudies I've ever read, she lays out in impressive and convincing detail how much these distinct but equally American cultures influenced each other, and how much every aspect of 18th century Virginian life—from architecture to spirituality, work to worldview—was the result of those mutual influences.3)      The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831): The 1831 Southampton slave revolt led by Turner was one of the bloodiest and most divisive moments in the decades before the Civil War, and thus, despite its justifiable causes, would to my mind belong on a worst-of list. The "Confession" apparently narrated by Turner to a local white lawyer, Thomas R. Gray, from the prison where he was awaiting his execution, is no less fraught with racial tensions and conflicts, not least because it's impossible to know just how much of the text's striking voice is really Turner's and how much was altered in some way by Gray. But that complex and confusing authorship does not elide the power nor the pathos of Turner's perspective—and if anything, it yields a text that extends Sobel to illustrate that even for the worst of Virginian history and community it was by this time impossible to separate white from black with any certainty.4)      William Styron, Confessions of Nat Turner (1967): I blogged about Styron's novel, and particularly its striking and hugely controversial first-person narration by a fictionalized Nat Turner, here, and won't restate those thoughts. While I find many of the direct critiques of the novel to be as fictionalized as anything within it, I certainly know of a great many AmericanStudiers whose opinions I deeply respect who feel similarly inclined to criticize the novel on many levels. But for me, as I wrote in that earlier post, the fact that a Virginian novelist chose to write this novel during the 1960s, and even more so the fact that he tried to construct a version of Turner's voice for his narration, is an inspiring and profoundly American move; whatever we think about the novel that resulted, I believe we can and must agree that such cross-cultural sympathies and connections are worth our respect.5)      Governor McDonnell's Apology (2010): As will surprise precisely no one, I wasn't a fan of Republican Governor Robert McDonnell from the jump, and wasn't at all surprised when his April 2010 proclamation in honor of Civil War in Virginia (aka Confederate History) Month made no mention whatsoever of slavery. But I will admit to being both surprised and impressed when, admittedly after a week or so of angry responses and protests, McDonnell issued a revised proclamation apologizing for the elision. Most impressive to me was that McDonnell did not just apologize to "anyone I may have offended" or the like—he explicitly noted that slavery "led to the Civil War" (far from a given in much of the right's recent historical revisionism). Whatever the motives or purposes of this second statement, it was, as former Governor Doug Wilder put it, the right thing to do, and the way that McDonnell did it added at least a bit of important and accurate historical context into what could be seen as simply a political controversy. Can't argue with that!Virginia, here we come, making some new 21st century memories for the next generation of AmericanStudiers! More tomorrow, my next Boston.com piece,BenPS. Six links to start with:1)      National Park Service piece on Bacon's Rebellion: http://www.nps.gov/jame/historyculture/bacons-rebellion.htm2)      Google book of Sobel's text: http://books.google.com/books?id=O4gbrE1sND4C&pg=PA366&lpg=PA366&dq=mechal+sobel+the+world+they+made+together&source=bl&ots=rd_k0MMM3H&sig=8nmAAwDe5_QTjah_lC7O3M0jbAg&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false3)      Full text of The Confessions of Nat Turner (multiple pages): http://www.melanet.com/nat/nat.html4)      Styron and his novel at the century's end: http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9812/styron.html5)      Story on McDonnell's apology: http://articles.cnn.com/2010-04-07/politics/virginia.confederate.history_1_slavery-apology-confederate-history-month?_s=PM:POLITICS6)      OPEN: Any Virginia moments you'd add?

August 22, 2011: Virginia Is For Bloggers

Tomorrow we fly down to Virginia for a week with the parentals, about whom you've heard a good bit—and even from whom you've heard—in this space. To extend this weekend's post, the trip will be a last hurrah of summer in all sorts of ways, and so I fully and happily expect to spend more time at the pool (for example) than blogging. I imagine you'll all find ways to carry on for the week without quite as much AmericanStudies in your lives, although I'm sure it'll be tough. But since I can't quit you, fellow AmericanStudiers—hell, I don't even wish I knew how to quit you—I'll still be checking in more briefly (and most likely more informally) here, and wanted (as much to keep myself on track as for your no doubt insatiable curiosity) to pass along my planned schedule of posts:Tuesday 8/23: Five Reasons Why Virginia is the Cradle of AmericanStudiesWednesday 8/24: My Second Cotton Mather Piece for the Boston.com "History Time" ColumnThursday 8/25: John Smith Was One Cocky DudeFriday 8/26: Images of PocahontasMonday 8/29: Remembering George MasonTuesday 8/30: On Two Bellwether Virginia Senatorial CampaignsWednesday 8/31 (Back in New England): August RecapThat's the plan! More tomorrow,BenPS. What would you blog about your home state/province/town/place?

August 20-21, 2011: Legends of the Fall

I don't meant to rush you and what I'm sure will be another couple weeks of beaches and pools, lemonades and iced teas, baseball games and bbqs, but I'm thinking today about the fall; maybe that's because we'll be in Virginia for the last week of August (more on that trip and what it means for this blog coming on Monday), and when we get back it'll be only one more day until my fall semester begins. In any case, here are five things I'm excited about as the fall approaches:1)      The November release of a French collection of essays on Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1998), including a essay by this AmericanStudier. Apparently Roth's novel is on the current required American lit reading list for French students, and so an enterprising young French scholar, Velichka Ivanova, decided to edit the first French collection on the novel. She was kind enough to ask me if I could revise a portion of an earlier article that focuses on the book, and that's my contribution to the volume. Not sure if I'll have to start wearing a beret and smoking cigarettes once I get translated into Francais, but I'll keep you posted.2)      Stepping up my contributions to the work toward the creation of the American Writers Museum, and specifically my help on the NEH proposal for a traveling exhibition on immigrant literature that will help get that Museum off and running. The AWM is the brainchild of a retired Irish American engineer, Malcolm O'Hagan, and has garnered the support and efforts of a huge number of impressive scholars and librarians, museum administrators and public officials, and many others; I'm honored and incredibly excited to be on board as a scholarly advisor. With a January deadline for revisions to the traveling exhibit proposal, the fall promises to include lots of conference calls, rewrites, bibliographies, and co-writing. Can't wait!3)      The New England American Studies Association conference. I've bombarded you with enough info about this conference, and the corresponding pre-conference blog; if for some reason you've managed to stay blissfully ignorant of their existence or details, I'll direct you to the links at #3 below. The conference will hopefully be a great time for all concerned, but for me—as I'm sure is always the case for the NEASA President in his or her one year of service—that weekend is going to mean the culmination of a year's worth of hard work and almost two years of brainstorming and idealizing. Kind of like a wedding, only I very much hope that the attention is spread much more fully around all of our attendees, not least 'cause there's no way I'm wearing a tux.4)      A new semester at Fitchburg State, and especially my first time teaching our English Department's senior capstone course. This course brings together English majors from across our four tracks—Literature, Secondary Ed/Licensure, Professional Writing, and Theater—and asks them to reflect on their time in the department, to assemble a senior portfolio of their best work, to talk to each other about their respective tracks, and to consider what's next in their lives (professionally and otherwise). I fully expect that these two sections will be different from any other course I've ever taught, and that, however much I plan and prep, I have no real idea what they will entail once they're underway. Sounds good to me!5)      Kindergarten! For my older son, that is. (And pre-K for my younger son, who would rightfully demand to be included here.) The rest of these items generally make me feel a combination of excited and stressed, with an emphasis on the former for sure. This one makes me feel both old (and bittersweet) and young (and nervous/excited) again, if that makes any sense. And if all of the other items are ultimately more about other people's experiences—the collection's readers, the Museum's attendees, the conference's participants, the Capstone's students—this one of course is entirely about my son's next step into, the next season of, his own developing world and life. Bring on the fall! More this coming week, including Monday's transition into my Virginia week,BenPS. Six links to start with:1)      Some info on the Roth book: http://rothsociety.org/?page_id=33&paged=22)      The AWM: http://www.americanwritersmuseum.org/3)      NEASA: http://neasa.org/; and the blog: http://neasaconference.blogspot.com 4)      My home away from home: http://fitchburgstate.edu/english/5)      My son's new home away from home: http://mitchell.needham.k12.ma.us/main/6)      OPEN: What are you looking forward to this fall?

August 19, 2011: Writing Wrongs

One of the charges that can, with a good deal of accuracy, be leveled against many of the late 19th century's numerous and important social movements is that they tended to exclude and even to discriminate against each other—against, that is, the beneficiaries of their fellow social movements. So, for example, the National Women's Suffrage Association (the suffrage movement's most prominent late 19th century organization) not only did not include African American women, but made overtly racist appeals to white Southerners in order to bolster its ranks and cause. Similarly, many of the era's most prominent labor unions, including the American Federation of Labor and the Knights of Labor, often relied upon anti-black (esp. the AFL) and anti-immigrant (esp. the Knights) appeals to make their case for the needs of the particular communities of European American workers they mostly served. The practical and political rationales for these exclusions and appeals are clear and understandable, but it's also easy to see how these kinds of circular firing squads among similarly progressive movements could be as practically and politically counterproductive as they are philosophically troubling, not least because it might lead the organizations to expend their energies (and receive attention for) attacking equally disenfranchised fellow Americans.Perhaps social and political movements have to make such frustrating decisions; at the very least they certainly have no choice but to engage with such complex and far from ideal realities. On the other hand, works of fiction—and particularly novels within another of the late 19th century's most significant developments, social realism—enjoy a significantly less limiting relationship to social and political realities. The best works of social realism must indeed acknowledge and engage with those realities, among others (including psychological ones), and must perhaps even create fictional characters and communities that are as constrained by those realities as their real-life contemporaries were. But in their overarching visions and constructed worlds, such novels can at the same time imagine broader and more inclusive communities, can bring together not only the Americans most affected by their chosen thematic focal points but also other Americans—both as characters within the texts and as audiences meeting and responding to them through the works—for whom the stakes of these social questions are of course ultimately just as present and salient as well. Moreover, any individual author can deal with multiple such social issues and themes across his or her works, an opportunity exemplified by the diverse and impressive career of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844-1911).Phelps (Ward was her married name but most scholars refer to her by her maiden name) was best known in her era for a best-selling, career-spanning trilogy of spiritual novels about Christianity, Heaven, and mourning: The Gates Ajar (1868), Beyond the Gates (1883), and Within the Gates (1901). But she was a passionate advocate for numerous social movements, especially women's rights (she famously advocated that women burn their corsets) but also temperance, anti-poverty efforts, and animal rights (among others). And because she published more than twenty novels and dozens of stories in the course of her long career, she was able to explore each of those issues, and particularly those interconnected with women's rights and experiences in America, with an incredible degree of breadth and depth. To highlight just three brief examples of this diversity, complexity, and quality: Phelps contributed, in 1882's Doctor Zay, one of the best of the "woman doctor" novels about which I blogged here; her The Story of Avis (1877) creates in its titular protagonist (a very talented painter) one of America's most detailed and powerful portrayals of the challenges of marriage and family for professional women, while also featuring numerous other distinct and equally nuanced female characters; and in the same year that The Gates Ajar launched her national career she published the short story "The Tenth of January" (1868), a gripping and terrifying rendition of an 1859 Lawrence (MA) mill fire in which dozens of young female mill workers were killed.The social and political issues to which these texts connect are, again, as real and complex as those with which the suffragists and labor leaders engaged. And if the texts are freed from the responsibility of resolving the practical questions that such issues entail, that does not, to my mind, make them any less powerful and important as engagements with those issues; what they are, instead, are a concurrent and crucial collection of voices and sources, combining literary and historical value to produce a body of work which no AmericanStudier should ignore. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      The Story of Avis: http://books.google.com/books?id=-8EVp8Xm9F4C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false2)      "The Tenth of January": http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a1730.pdf3)      OPEN: Any authors of works you'd recommend as great at portraying complex social issues?

 

August 18, 2011: Why We're Here, Tea Party Edition

There are two entirely distinct, and in some ways even opposed, ways to interpret the name "Tea Party" (for the contemporary political organization, not the thing in Boston Harbor). The more "official," or at least more widely disseminated and accepted, narrative is that the organization represents a grassroots, non- or widely bi-partisan rebellion against taxation, spending, and other forms of government interference; evidence for this narrative would include TEA serving as an acronym for Taxed Enough Already, the first organized protests occurring on or around April 15th (Tax Day) of 2009, and a variety of other symbolic statements of libertarian resistance to government. In this narrative, the organization's likewise symbolic use of a historical event (that Harbor thing) is meant as a direct parallel, another occasion on which put-upon citizens, fed up with taxation and government interference in their lives, rebelled and helped begin a revolution (hence the references, for example, to Tea Party favorite Scott Brown's senatorial victory in Massachusetts as "The Scott Heard 'Round the World"). That vision of the historical Tea Party is certainly over-simplified, neglecting for example the event's substantial component of mob violence, but the real historical problem here is to my mind significantly deeper and more subtle. As historian Jill Lepore (among others) has thoroughly documented, the Tea Party has depended on Founding-era symbols and rhetoric for far more than just its name, has in fact utilized Revolutionary reenactors and costumes, Founders' quotes and perspectives, and any and all other references to this historical era in constructing many of its overarching narratives, positions, and events. These historical references have often been, like the libertarian impulses, narrated as something bipartisan, broadly American, nationally shared: a desire to respect the Constitution, to live up to the ideals of Washington and Jefferson, to be the city on a hill, and so on. But I would argue precisely the opposite, that it is in their historical vision that the Tea Partiers reveal most explicitly their profoundly conservative and extreme perspective, an embrace of the traditional, Christian historical narrative that is as full-throated and mythologized as any our national discourse has ever witnessed.I have believed that to be the case of the majority of Tea Partiers since the movement's origins, but a recently released, five-year-long study of American political attitudes by two political scientists—many of the relevant results of which are discussed in the article at the first link—goes a long way toward quantifying that belief. Of the study's many findings that could be marshaled in support of my prior paragraph's last sentence, I will quote just the most salient one: "Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics." I would take that statement one step further and argue, based on virtually every relevant statement and utterance and fact (such as the hugely prominent role that Glenn Beck and his favorite American "historian" David Barton, on whom see for example here, here, and here, have played in the Tea Party's rise), that Tea Partiers believe that religion, and more specifically of course Christianity, played precisely such a prominent role in our government at its origin, just as they believe that America was from its origins centrally defined by white, Anglo, Christian, English-speaking inhabitants. This historical vision, encapsulated succinctly and thoroughly in the battle cry "I want my country back!," is to my mind the most overarching narrative at the heart of the Tea Party's identity and aims.The real problem here is not that our media narratives of the Tea Party have tended to minimize this historical emphasis in favor of the small government one; it's that as wrong as the Tea Partiers are about many of their economic beliefs (such as that Obama has raised all of their taxes), they are more profoundly mistaken still about American identity, both on the specific issue of religion and government and on the broader questions of our communal composition. I dedicated my whole second book to making that case, and so the seven "Book Posts" here (available under that category to the right), as well as these two "Meta-Posts," elaborate my contrasting take on American identity. Here I'll just stress that, of all the reasons to counter the Tea Party's influence on American politics and culture, this historical one might just be the most serious and crucial. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      A New York Times article on the study: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/opinion/crashing-the-tea-party.html?_r=1&hp2)      Gordon Wood's review of Lepore's book The Whites of Their Eyes; Wood takes a more favorable view of the Tea Party's use of history than do I, or at least treats it as one among many such uses more than I would: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/no-thanks-memories/?pagination=false3)      OPEN: What do you think?

August 17, 2011 [Special]: Vote Early and Often!

Well, I think you can only vote once, but  ... this blog is nominated for a CBS Boston Most Valuable Blogger Award for 2011 (under the Miscellaneous category). If you get a chance and want to vote for me, here's the link:

http://boston.blogger.cbslocal.com/most-valuable-blogger/vote/misc/

Thanks!

Ben

August 17, 2011: Cotton Mather's Invisible Tragedy

Is the title of my second contribution to the Boston.com Salem History Time column, as part of a series on the witch trials:

http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/salem/2011/08/history_time_cotton_mathers_in.html

Thanks as ever to Maggi Smith-Dalton, the series' editor and all around impressive AmericanStudier, for the opportunity. Part 2, also on Mather, will be next Wednesday! More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Any thoughts on the witch trials, Mather, good men doing nothing in the face of evil, or anything else?