Mary's Reflections on American Print Culture

One, "An Apparition" from Weekly Visitor or Ladies' Miscellany, July 30, 1803, tells the story of a young gentleman named Barbarosse who lived in France. After he has spent time with a family singing songs and listening to supernatural tales, he returns to his chamber for the evening...after midnight...and is disturbed by strange sounds and the appearance of a black robed stranger, he assumes to be a ghost. After being sent into convulsions, he realizes in the end that he had merely forgotten to shut a window and the ghost was only a black game cock.

The writer starts off rather tongue in cheek, saying, "Let the unbelieving skeptic say what he will concerning the reality of ghosts and apparitions...a man who doubts as to his own personal existence...cannot be expected to have faith in the more abstruse secrets of nature." He then dismisses those "skeptics" and invites the true "believers" to listen to the tale and come to assurance of the veracity of ghosts. Since the tale is obviously a spoof on ghost stories, the writer has no intention of claiming the veracity of ghosts. However, the language he uses against so-called skeptics (I am assuming he is one himself) is similar to the language I found about devils and ghosts in the Christian magazines.

Several pieces in a periodical called The Experienced Christian's Magazine and The Christian's Magazine discuss the battle for the soul that exists between angels and demons or spirits in general. Life here on earth is bound up in the state of the spiritual realm rather than the physical realm. I would assume that this debate over the veracity or truth of spirits was in large due to the beginnings of scientific reasoning and skepticism about faith and spirituality. Even in the language of the ghost story that doesn't even mention Christianity, I see an attack on what many who considered themselves more enlightened thinkers saw as silly or blind faith in the supernatural.

Gross notes that children's books in the mid-eighteenth century developed based on parents' desires to offer instruction in imagination, information, and morals (30). How might these children's books differ from English children's books, I wonder? Did children's books contribute to the call in the 1830s to establish a real national literature? As a child, reading books like The Secret Garden and Little House on the Prairie, I never really thought of either book according to its author's nationality. I do believe that children's identities are shaped by the books they read, but I'm not sure to what extent their sense of "national" identity is shaped. In both those books, as well as my favorite Little Women, as I have mentioned, I was transported to other worlds, whether they be in a mystical garden in Kent, England or the wild, Midwest of America or Concord, Massachusetts. These places all became familiar to me, though they were not my own.

Gross highlights in this introduction the great diversity within the early republic created by the separation of region and space. He says that this distance and localization of the press contributed to an "increasing familiarity" which "bred growing conflict," while still creating a more democratic reading public (only to a certain extent, as Larisa points out in her blog.) I wonder, though, how looking at the development of identity of characters in children's books might affect the way even the regions developed their own identities. I got a good dose of the Yorkshire dialect in The Secret Garden without even knowing what I was reading at the time. I knew these characters were different than me--from a different time, place, culture--yet, I could see through their eyes as I read. A part of me may have grown to appreciate the simple, nature loving family in the book as representatives of the whole Yorkshire community. I wonder if this was happening, intentionally or unintentionally, in American book culture in the early republic. Of course, the idea of regionalism and the technique of writing in the regional vernacular became even more popular in the late 19th century with writers like Mark Twain, but what were children being trained to think about their nation or their region at this time? Did a child from the south read about life in Boston as being as foreign as life in London? Were children being trained to respect and reify regional differences through literature? Just some interesting thoughts that could be explored if we studied more of the children's literature from this early national period.

Just out of curiosity, I did a basic google search for Sandford and Merton and read the short synopsis of it on wikipedia. Of course, I would do more thorough research if I were really critically studying the book, but I was was reminded how children's literature is often so tightly bound to a social, moral code. Davidson made arguments that the novel can be subversive becomes it responds as a voice, as a perspective, not necessarily represented by the government or the Constitution. How could children's books, then, not just deliver moral messages, but be subversive as well? Would it depend on who was reading, again, like Davidson might say? Gross sees the children's novel as existing within the dictates of mainstream American morality. But what determined morality? Gross says that many parents were influenced by Lockean ideas of education, but this popular book by Thomas Day was influenced by Rousseau (according to wikipedia). Perhaps even in children's literature, there were multiple voices, competing with each other and constructing new ideas of morality. Children's literature seems to be an excellent, almost innocent genre in which to explore these questions, quietly under the guise of imaginative literature.

Do we do this today? I think of movie genres--Romantic Comedies, Art films, Dramas, Historical Fiction. What do we expect out of each one? Do we automatically think that a period film about Mary Queen of Scots is of higher quality than another Sandra Bullock movie, built around the ubiquitous "meet cute" plots (Roger Ebert's affectionate term for many romantic comedies)? Do we miss opportunities to discover where beliefs are being challenged or re-ified simply because we do not give credit to a certain genre?

Davidson thinks that the novel was actually given much credit which is why there was so much uproar over it. What in our day is like the novel? What causes uproar in the same way the novel did? or is our society so full of diverse and competing genres that the same type of response to a genre would likely not be repeated? Do the small factions of society who put up a fuss over trend like Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code because of religious reasons carry the same persuasive power that the preachers in the early national period did? What are our most effective pulpits today?

One thing I wonder about today in the same way I suppose people wondered back in that early period of our country--Will people think for themselves or will they be constantly moved by the literature that dominates the society? I was having a conversation with someone about this concept of "ideology," wondering if we can ever distance ourselves as an objective viewer of even our own ideologies. Though it is hard to see a situation in which one could be a disinterested critic of his own views and the views of others, I still see that there is a need for critical evaluation. The problem comes when we try to decide on what grounds we will make our critical evaluations. Davidson reminds us that even as the grounds the aesthetic value of literature changed as books became more available to the public, the grounds on which one evaluated their social value could change too. Is this something always in flux, I wonder? We may be foolishly convincing ourselves that standards for good literature or profitable literature exist when really we are constantly changing these; in fact the production of literature and the creation of genres, if we look through Davidson's lens, significantly affect these changing standards.

I like standards, but with literature, I think that standards and criteria must always be contextual and flexible in the face of economic and social changes. When we learn how to critique, though, based on our socially constructed standards, I think this gives us more agency for producing works which will continue to move, inspire and change. Criticism and evaluation should be a dynamic rather than static, retrograde process.