I must admit that it took me quite a long time to read for today. Though the chapter was brief, I found myself taking my time, marking up my book, and pondering on each paragraph. Granted, this was quite productive, as I have focused much of my attention in the past on the idea of womanhood, not manhood. Perhaps I am admitting my ignorance here, but I will spend more time thinking about and reflecting on my own womanhood/wifehood/motherhood/etc. I suppose my attention to the role of the female in the private and public sphere bears a direct relation to my own gender, and my need to connect or relate to the forerunners of my sex. However, this chapter certainly made me stop and think about the men writing in the early republic, especially in terms of their need to establish themselves as men of a new country.
I found it interesting that in the early years (1790-1840), men crossed the gender line, using pseudonyms for their writing (350). It is fairly easy to understand the rational behind this. These early writers were still attached – though increasingly distancing – to their heritage from England. At this point, authorship was related to a “gentlemanly leisure, distanced from the commerce, conflicts, and profits that secured the social position of many members of the post-revolutionary elite” (351). At this point, writers are still – though I am generalizing here – holding on to this idea of the “gentleman” writer, the notion that to put one’s name on a work was to vulgarize the text and commit the lowest of offenses for a man of the genteel class. Though this is not the idea of authorship that we associate with, it makes sense that using a pseudonym would have been the proper way to approach writing. It is, after all, what they understood as appropriate from their European past.
However, men began to distance themselves from the English tradition of genteel authorship, as they began to conceptualize what exactly it meant to be an American man. While the majority of my interest has been on womanhood, the thought that men now had to situate themselves in a new country, in a new role, in a new society completely unfamiliar with their past certainly deserves attention. Moreover, the very definition of authorship changed with, or as a result, of this increasing movement to define the American man. One of my favorite literary characters is Natty Bumppo, but how did a man/character like this emerge? How did this representation of an American man like Natty Bumppo – wild and competent in the wilderness – develop? How did the American man evolve from genteel heritage to the wilderness?
I do realize that I began talking about authorship, and I have now transitioned to the conceptualization and evolution of the American man as represented by a literary character. However, I think that there is a direct connection here; though, I will surely not get this all fleshed out in this one blog post. What did it mean to be a successful author in America? What did it mean to be a successful man as well? How do we define this? How do we evaluate it? I have no answers, just rampant curiosity at the moment. Fear not; I am not abandoning my interest in women’s studies, especially as I am presenting with Jen next week on “Women Writing in the Early Republic.” But, I do think that I have a new interest here as well.
Callie:
ReplyDeleteThe focus on male authorship is, I think, a perspective on writing, literature, and culture that often gets lost in all the attention we're now paying (and rightfully so) to conceptions of womanhood and the status of women authors in the nineteenth century. It's as if we -- and by "we" I mean all of us interested in literary studies -- just can't do both at the same time: we spent 150 years deifying male authors, and in our attempts to reverse this trend in the last 30 years or so, we've swung in the completely opposite direction. This "all or nothing" picture is, of course, highly reductive on my part; great work has still been done on Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman in the decades since the mid-1970s. But I, like you, found Leverenz's chapter fascinating/refreshing, and I think the primary reason is that it forces us to reconsider much of the "dead white male" mythology we thought we left behind years ago. In returning to these myths with fresh eyes, we see what we once overlooked and (hopefully) are able to construct an even more comprehensive understanding of the forces at play in American culture at this time.
I'm sure we'll all have much more to say about this in class tonight, and then again for your presentation with Jen next week. Looking forward to the conversation!
--Tom
I had the same kind of reaction. I am certainly rethinking how I use the "dead white male" mythology, too.
ReplyDeleteHi Callie, thanks for the interesting post. This is a fascinating period concerning all sorts of gender and text issues. We have the cult of authorship developing alongside the cult of American masculinity, and all of it in the midst of the emergence of marketplace capitalism. The irony about the male writers writing about manhood, or crossing the gender line and writing as women, is that the women writers were generally so much more successful. Certainly the male writers must have felt some level of inadequacy. dw
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