ENGLISH 171:  ROMANTICISM AND RACE

TAKE-HOME MIDTERM EXAMINATION

DUE IN CLASS – MARCH 4, 2004

This midterm is an essay exam, with two essays required.  Each essay should be 3-4 typed pages, with a clear thesis, supporting paragraphs that use specific passages or quotations, and a conclusion that restates your thesis.  Each essay is worth 50%.

PART ONE:  ANSWER ONE QUESTION FROM THIS GROUP OF QUESTIONS.

1. Heavy use of Biblical language and images is one of the most dominant rhetorical strategies used by the slave narratives.  Select two of the narratives (Gronniosaw; Jea; Cugoano; Equiano; or Wedderburn) and compare and contrast HOW they use this imagery and WHAT IT ACCOMPLISHES in their manipulation of their readers.

2. The slave narratives also use anecdotal evidence or the powerful vignette in order to persuade their readers of the evils of slavery.  Select three to four specific vignettes in any of the slave narratives, and analyze them closely for their strategic effectiveness.

3. Wedderburn’s The Axe Laid to the Root is an example of what is called “mulatto discourse.”  Read Helen Thomas’s essay on the subject in our textbook (pp. 409-27) and outline her main points about this discourse.  Then apply her insights to your own reading of Wedderburn.

PART TWO:  ANSWER ONE QUESTION FROM THIS GROUP OF QUESTIONS

1. Olympe de Gouges’s sentimental drama “Black Slavery, or the Happy Shipwreck” can be interpreted through historical, ideological, or psychological strategies.  Choose one of these approaches to the text and provide an interpretation of the drama.  HINT:  research in secondary sources is necessary if you choose historical or psychological approaches.  Several websites on this is sue have been linked to our class site.

2. One of the central debates in abolitionist poetry is the use of appropriation or ventriloquism. Analyze this is sue by examining the poetry of More, Opie, Cowper, and Robinson.

3. Sentimental poetic devices were used in the service of the abolition cause, particularly by white authors, in an effort to humanize slaves.  Choose a constellation of four to six poems and analyze how the poets employ a variety of sentimental tropes (family, mother and child, love of home, interracial love) to advance the cause of abolition of slavery.

ENGLISH 171:  ROMANTICISM AND RACE

TAKE-HOME FINAL EXAMINATION

DUE AT MY OFFICE—COUGHLIN 247 –no later than noon on MAY 7, 2004

This final is an essay exam, with two essays required.  Each essay should be 3-4 typed pages, with a clear thesis, supporting paragraphs that use specific passages or quotations, and a conclusion that restates your thesis.  Each essay is worth 50%.

PART ONE:  ANSWER ONE QUESTION FROM THIS GROUP OF QUESTIONS.

A.     Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin relies on several literary conventions we identified earlier in abolitionist poetry and slave narratives: sentimental idealization of the mother and child bond, the polluting effects of slavery on both master and slave, the precarious position of the mulatto, the complicated use of the Bible to attack or justify slavery, etc.  Select at least three of these devices, and show how Stowe uses these conventions to full advantage in her novel.

B.     Uncle Tom’s Cabin has actually been accused on racism and Stowe has been denounced as perpetuating racist stereotypes throughout the novel.  Summarize the attacks on the book (see particularly pp. Xx-xxi in our book) and then either support Stowe or show how her support of colonization in Africa and her characterizations of blacks are forms of unconscious racism.

Part Two:  ANSWER ONE QUESTION FROM THIS GROUP OF QUESTIONS:

A. S. I. Martin’s novel Incomparable World is an example of a “neo-slave narrative,” a postmodern work that attempts to capture the reality of the slave situation, while still aware that the present can never fully articulate the full complexity of the past.  Neo-slave narratives by necessity have to employ ventriloquism and appropriation.  How successful in your opinion is Incomparable World as a neo-slave narrative?  In other words, given what you have read in the original slave narratives of Equiano et al., how accurately do you think Martin’s portrayal of their situation is?

B.  The Vauxhall incident (pp. 149-165) in many ways represents the core of the novel Incomparable World.  Several events, characters, and revelations are revealed at that incident, all causing the subsequent actions that are taken by a number of characters in the rest of the novel.  Analyze closely that section of the text, and explicate how it works to center the novel around the is sue of miscegenation.

Bibliography

Anstey, Roger, and P.E.N. Hair,  Liverpool , the African Slave Trade, and Abolition.

Warrington : Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire , 1976.

Banton, Michael,  White and Coloured.  The Behaviour of British People Towards

Coloured Immigrants.  New Brunswick , NJ : Rutgers University Press, 1960

Barker, J.,  The Africa Link.  British Attitudes to the Negro in the 17^th and 18^th

Centuries.  London , 1978.

Behn, Aphra,  The Royal Slave (around 1688), edited by Ernest A. Baker.  London :

Routledge, 1913 (adapted for the stage as Oroonoko, 1965, by Thomas

Southern; and others)

Bolt, Christine,  Victorian Attitudes to Race.  London : Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1971.

Cadbury, Henry J.,  John Woolman in England .  London : Friends Historical Society,

1971.

Coleridge, Henry Nelson,   Six Months in the West Indies in 1825.  London : John

Murray , 1826

Craton, M., James Walvin, and David Wright, eds.,  Slavery, Abolition and

Emancipation. London : Longman, 1976.

Dabydeen, David, ed.,  The Black Presence in English Literature.  Manchester :

Manchester University Press, 1985.

Davis, Charles T., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,  The Slave’s Narrative.  Oxford :

Oxford University Press, 1985.

Davis , David Bryon.,  The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture.  London :

Penguin, 1970.

Debrunner, M.W.,  Presence and Prestige.  Africans in Europe before 1918.  Basel :

Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 1979.

Equiano, Olaudah, Equiano’s Travels (1789), selected and edited by Paul Edwards.

London : Heinemann, 1967.

Fanon, Frantz,  Black Skin, White Masks.  New York : Grove Press, 1967

(Peau noire, masques blancs, Paris: Seuil, 1952)

Fryer, Peter,  Staying Power.  The History of Black People in Britain .  London :

Pluto Press, 1984.

Genovese, E.,  Race & Slavery.  Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1979.

Hanke, Lewis,  Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice

In the Modern World.  London : Hollis and Carter, 1959.

Honour, Hugh,  The Image of the Black in Western Art (4 vols.), vol. 4 parts

1 & 2.  Cambridge , MA , & London : Harvard University Press, 1989

Horn, Pamela,  The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant.  Dublin : Gill &

Macmillan, 1975.

Jones, Eldred,  Othello’s Countrymen.  Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1964.   

Lewis, M. G,  Journal of a West India Proprietor Kept during a Residence among

The Negroes in the West Indies (1835), edited with an Introduction and Notes

By Judith Terry.  Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999.

Scobie, E,  Black Britannia.  A History of Blacks in Britain .  Chicago : Johnson, 1972

Sherdidan, Richard B.,  Sugar and Slavery.  An Economic History of the British West

Indies 1623-1775.  Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

Shyllon, Folarin,  Black People in Britain 1555-1833.  London : Oxford University

Press, 1977.

Soderlund, Jean R.,  Quakers and Slavery.  A Divided Spirit.  Princeton , NJ :

Princeton University Press, 1988

Stephen, James ,  England Enslaved by her Own Slave Colonies. London : Hatchard, 1826

Vizram, Rozina,  Ayahs, Lascars and Princes.  Indians in Britain 1700-1947.  London :

Pluto Press, 1986.

Walvin, James,  Black and White.  The Negro in English Society 1551-1945.  London :

Mcmillan, 1973.

Walvin, James ,  England , Slaves and Freedom 1776-1838.  London : Macmillan, 1986

Woolman, John,  The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman, ed  Phillips P.

Moulton.  New York : Oxford University Press, 1971

ANOTHER SYLLABUS ON ROMANTICISM AND GENDER:

ENGLISH 235: ROMANTIC WOMEN'S FICTION

Professor Diane Long Hoeveler

Coughlin 247

Office Phone:  288-3466

Email:  "diane.hoeveler@marquette.edu"

Course meets from 1:15-2:50 M/T /W/TH in Straz 456

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray (in reading packet to be purchased at Bookmarq)

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility ( Oxford )

Eliza Fenwick, Secresy (Broadview)

Mary Hays, A Victim of Prejudice (Broadview)

Mary Hays, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Broadview)

The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty Bennett ( Oxford)

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

1.  An oral presentation delivered to the class; worth 25% of final grade

2.  A short written examination; due July 19 and worth 25% of final grade

3.  An extended research paper; due August 12 and worth 50% of final grade

July 6: Introduction to course; objectives and requirements; video introduction to Austen

July 7: Austen, S & S

July 8: Austen, S & S

July 12: Austen, S & S

July 13: Fenwick, Secresy

July 14: Fenwick, Secresy

July 15: Fenwick, Secresy

July 19: Hays, Victim; short written exam due in class

English 235, p. 2

July 20: Hays, Victim

July 21: Hays, Victim

July 22: Hays, Emma

July 26: Hays, Emma

July 27: Hays, Emma

July 28: Opie, Adeline

July 29: Opie, Adeline

August 2: Opie, Adeline

August 3: Shelley, Frankenstein, vol. 1

August 4: Shelley, Frankenstein, vol. 2

August 5: Shelley, Frankenstein, vol. 3

August 9: Shelley, Mathilda, cc. 1-6

August 10: Shelley, Mathilda, cc. 7-12

August 11: Shelley, short fiction

August 12:  final paper due

1.  You have been asked to write a twenty page (ca. 6,000 word) introduction to a college edition of ONE of the works listed below.  You can't do all this here in an hour, but you can lay out a sketch or plan for your essay, telling us what you would like to put into it and an explanation of the order and importance of the topics you would expect to cover.

The following questions (topics) are intended only as suggestions and not as an outline to be followed.  Some may be of little relevance to the work you select.  Other topics than these may occur to you.

• What sort of biographical matter would you include?
• What account would you give of the social background of the work economic, political, religious, legal, etc.?
• What philosophical or literary traditions (sources, infulences) lie behind the work?
• To what genre or sub‑genre does it belong, or to what fashions?
• What of its stylelanguage, tone, structureis worth special comment?
• What is the history of its reputation? 

• What are its important issues?
• Would you make especial use of any one or more definable theoretical approaches?

2.  Romantic women's fiction has sometimes been seen as serving a quasi‑political or philosophical function; it has attempted to provide not entertainment so much as political and philosophical instruction, "values formation," or even a kind of secular salvation.  Discuss this aspect of the fiction of TWO of the following: Hays; Opie; Austen; Shelley.

3.  Georges Gusdorf has recently argued that autobiography arose in the eighteeenth century out of a combined Christian and Romantic belief in the value and uniqueness of the individual life.  Structurally, he asserts, "autobiography requires a man to take a distance with regard to himself in order to reconstitute himself in the focus of his special unity and identity across time" and is thus "a second reading of experience," one that "is truer than the first because it adds to experience itself consciousness of it."  Apply Gusdorf's formulation of autobiography as "a second reading of experience" to the writings of Mary Hays or Mary Shelley.

4.  Anne Mellor has stated that "Romanticism" as a literary movement will only be fully understood when we have examined both what she calls "masculine Romanticism" and its counterpart "feminine Romanticism."  The latter movement, she asserts, is characterized by a belief in a self that is fluid, responsive, with permeable ego boundaries, an emphasis on the family as the grounding trope of social organization, a commitment on an ethic of care (as opposed to an ethic of individual justice), and the sense of Nature as a friend or sister.  Mellor chooses to depict Keats as an exponent of "feminine Romanticism" and Emily Bronte as an exponent of "masculine Romanticism."  Can Mellor's theory be applied to the fiction of Austen, Hays, Fenwick, Opie, or Shelley.  Can you make a case for the distinctively "feminine" characteristic of their fictions?

5.  Alan Liu has noted that where the Romantic writer says "I" he really means "history."  How does the personal attempt to cover over or displace the social, political, and cultural in Emma Courtney?  Discuss at least four specific examples of the "personal" in this text and then analyze its full "historical" contexts.

4.  Ann Radcliffe and the gothic novel tradition were pervasive influences on all of the the Romantic women novelists.  Discuss how gothic images, themes, and concerns emerge in Secresy and Mathilda.

5.  Sensibility as a literary tradition spans the eighteenth century, reaching a mock apotheosis in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.  Review the critical positions on the novel's history and reception, and then present a clear position on the novel by reading it within the rich and ambivalent tradition of Sensibility.

6.  Gary Kelly argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers participated in their society's broad cultural project: the construction of the bourgeoisie.  Specifically, he claims that women writers attempted, like their middle-class male counterparts, to create a professional middle-class discourse system that would supplant the aristocracy at the same time that it gained control over the lower classes.  According to Kelly, women writers produced works that "constituted a certain technology of the self that we now recognize as 'virtue' and 'reason.'"  Apply this insight to a group of texts written by women during this period--Mary Hays, Eliza Fenwick, Jane Austen, or Amelia Opie--are all possibilities, but the choice of authors and titles is yours.

1.  Jane Austen as a "feminist":  this debate has been raging for several years now.  See Marilyn Butler's JA and the War of Ideas for one side of the issue

2.  the epistolary novel tradition:  its decline and fall.

3.  sensibility as a literary concept; sentimentalism as a literary concept

4.  the instructive, admonishing maternal narrative buried in the primary narrative

5.  character typology: Lucy Steele as extreme embodiment of sentimentality; Marianne as extreme embodiment of sensibility; Eleanor as sense; Austen as an allegorist?

6.  Mary Hays as propagandist of Wollstonecraft's ideas

7.  Emma Courtney as document of erotic obsession and unresolved mourning

8.  "Free love" as ideological banner for Jacobin women writers

10.  Secresy and the epistolary tradition

11.  abolitionist activities and Adeline Mowbray

12.  Amelia Opie as politically conflicted: her history of shifts that coincide with popular opinion

13.  landscape gardening and literary world views (Augustan vs. gothic)

14.  the trajectory of the French Revolution and its effect on literature in England

15.  biographies and career summaries of any woman writer studied in the course

16.  MS's use of the German ghost story collection, Phantasmagoria, as a source for F

17.  F as psychological study

18.  F as religious allegory

19.  F as political and social commentary

20.  F as autobiography

21.  comparative analysis of film versions of F:  "F"; "Bride of F"; "The Bride"; "Haunted Summer"; "MS's F"; "Gothic"; "Rowing with the Wind"; "Gods and Monsters"; "Dark Half"

22.  F and scientific advances at the time of its composition

23.  Mathilda as veiled autobiography

24.  the theme of incest in M and/or F

25  Kubler-Ross's theories of mourning and/or F and M

26.  allusions to other myths and literature in F and/or M

27.  theories of trauma and fantasy and M (see my book Gothic Feminism for a discussion of this topic)