As we began exploring last week, Northanger Abbey follows the heroine in training Catherine Morland, a young, unworldy girl obsessed with reading Gothic novels. In the excerpts from Part I, we see her introduction to polite society and, later, in Part II, her visit to a supposedly “Gothic” locale, the titular Northanger Abbey. In the portions of the novel set at Northanger Abbey, Catherine constantly misrecognizes her surroundings, expecting to find herself within a Gothic novel. By the end of the excerpt, Catherine’s “Gothic” flights of fantasy are shattered nd she comes into a more “realistic” consciousness. What are some of the ways we see Catherine’s misrecognition in the excerpts? Does Catherine’s initial naivety and coming into knowledge as a character connect to the “metafictional” aspects of the novel we discussed last week? For the asynchronous assignment, write a few paragraphs reflecting on these questions.

Jane Austen (1775-1817) is rightly famous for “marriage plot” novels that represent the social intrigues of the British landed classes in the eighteenth century. Northanger Abbey, though published posthumously, is actually the first novel that Austen completed for publication, in 1803. Mixing aspects of the social realism her later novels would become known for and a parody of the conventions of Gothic fiction, Northanger Abbey reads in some ways like a statement of artistic purpose. Critiquing the sentimentalism of earlier novels, as well as the sensationalism of Gothic horror, Austen clearly grasps at a different standard of realism. We might even say that Northanger Abbey includes aspects of “metafiction” (fictional writing about writing) that offers a compelling commentary on the ability of the novel form to accurately represent everyday life, in particular the specific social issues and confinements women face.

So: what are some of the moments in our excerpts from Northanger Abbey in which Austen and/or her characters reflect on questions of novelistic form and women’s writing? For the asynchronous assignment, find a passage where Austen gets “metafictional.” Comment here with a paragraph or two discussing what that passage reveals.

You generally can’t trace an entire literary genre to one work by one writer. The Gothic, however, is the exception to this rule: the genre traces directly to Horace Walpole’s singular novel The Castle of Otranto, first published anonymously in 1764. Haunted castles, stalking monsters, sexual deviance, repressed pasts, sublime terror: these and other conventions associated with Gothic horror are all present in Walpole’s novel. The Castle of Otranto can also be contextualized as a reaction to the kind of realistic novels we have read so far. Walpole himself wrote that he intended to “blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern.” By “ancient,” Walpole is referring to the medieval romance tradition; by “modern,” he is referencing then-contemporary realist novels like those of Samuel Richardson, which allowed no supernatural elements. However, despite its setting of a “superstitious” Gothic past, Walpole still imports elements of realism into the novel: for example, he first presented The Castle of Otranto anonymously as if it were a found work that was merely translated. Thus, Walpole attempts to give this “supernatural” tale an air of historical verisimilitude (meaning, giving off the impression that this tale could actually exist in the real world).

[Side note—I’ve actually published an essay on the use of “pseudo-translation” in early Gothic novels, including Otranto. It’s rude to assign yourself, right? But I can send it to you if you’re interested.]

As a form, the Gothic has a preoccupation with “otherness”: that is, “monsters” who threaten the community, whether from inside or outside. It’s no wonder, then, that the Gothic emerges in the 18th century: a time of almost constant war with Catholic nations (especially France) and imperial expansion. The historian Linda Colley famously argued that the idea of Great Britain as a national identity was forged in opposition to the “otherness” of Catholic France and the peoples of a rapidly expanding empire. Thus, it’s no surprise that early Gothic novels featured exactly these “Others.” Very often, as in Otranto and the novels of Ann Radcliffe (the most famous Gothic writer of her day), the “dark ages” of the European continent (especially Italy) provided the time and place, conjuring images of a Catholic Other. Other times, as in William Beckford’s Vathek, we find an “Eastern” Other linked to “Orientalist” knowledges tied to the colonial project. (Beckford himself was no innocent bystander here: as a child, he inherited an estate of Jamaican sugar plantations that ran on the labor of enslaved Africans. Beckford was known in his time as one of England’s richest “commoners,” but that slavery constituted the source of his wealth was hardly ever acknowledged.)

Counterintuitively, then, while the Gothic is associated with all kinds of dangerous transgressions, it can also be one of the most conservative of genres: as, in the end, the Gothic often reaffirms the existing social order against these transgressive Others. For this reason, many aspects of the Gothic—the “medieval” over the “modern,” passion over reason, vastness over proportion, obscurity over clarity—would become associated with a conservative reaction to Enlightenment revolutions. It’s no surprise that Romanticism finds many precursors in Gothic conventions and that an early Romantic poet like Charlotte Smith also wrote Gothic novels.

Toward the close of the eighteenth century, the Gothic became associated in particular with women readers and writers. Ann Radcliffe, in particular, was perhaps not only the most widely read Gothic novelist of the time, but arguably the most widely read novelist period. As the Norton Anthology’s introduction to the genre states: “By the 1790s, novels trading on horror, mystery, and faraway settings flooded the book market. It is noteworthy that the best-selling author of the terror school (Ann Radcliffe), the author of its most enduring novel (Mary Shelley), and the author of its most effective send-up (Jane Austen) were all women. Indeed, many of Radcliffe’s numerous imitators (and, on occasion, downright plagiarizers) published under the auspices of the Minerva Press, a business whose very name (that of the goddess of wisdom) acknowledged the centrality of female authors and readers to this new lucrative trend in the book market” (577). The Gothic was thus enabled by the emergence of a middle class reading public, in particular women.

Despite being associated with these kinds of eighteenth-century historical specificities, the Gothic remains one of the most popular genres. For the asynchronous activity, write a couple paragraphs exploring why you think this is. Even though the Gothic is preoccupied with “terrifying” depictions of the past, what is it about Gothic images that also remains so contemporary? What are some contemporary media—TV shows, film franchises, books, video games, and so on—that you would call “Gothic”?

Today we’re going to consider some early Romantic poetry. While you will study (or have studied) the Romantic movement in more depth in English Lit III, it does also cut across our timeframe to 1815. In any case, I think the period looks slightly different looking “backward” at the long-eighteenth century than it does looking “forward” to modernism.

What became known as Romanticism both grew out of and rejected aspects of the Enlightenment ideals of the so-called Age of Revolutions. In previous classes we discussed how Equiano’s narrative reflects some of the rhetoric associated with Enlightenment thought: for example, his focus on individual freedom, self-determination, and industriousness. Enlightenment thought is also associated with appeals to “reason” over “passion.” This appeal to reason was especially important to Enlightenment political philosophy, which justified democratic government by arguing for the essential capacity of human beings to know their own interests and rule themselves. (On the flip side, Enlightenment thought often denied this capacity to reason to racialized “Others,” and thus provided “modern” justifications for colonialism and racism.)

Though early Romantics found inspiration from the revolutionary fervor of the period, they rejected the Enlightenment esteem of “reason” over “passion.” In the 1802 Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, often taken as the poetic manifesto of Romanticism, William Wordsworth famously described Romantic poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Indeed, many of the stereotypes we still have about what “poets” are like derive from Romanticism. Any time you picture a poet as a broody, eccentric individual who goes off in isolation to write withering poems about nature, these are basically exaggerated versions of Romantic ideals.

While the work of William Wordsworth and, in particular, Lyrical Ballads (written in collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and first published in 1798) is often portrayed as the point at which Romanticism arrives as a movement, I also want to highlight the sometimes unacknowledged precursors to Lyrical Ballads. Many of these works were historically elided because they came in supposedly “non-literary” forms written, in particular, by women writers. One such writer was Charlotte Smith, a Gothic novelist (another popular proto-Romantic genre we will focus on in more depth in a few weeks) and lyric poet. Indeed, many of the features of Romantic poetry attributed to Wordsworth can be found in Smith’s 1784 Elegaic Sonnets, which predates Lyrical Ballads by nearly fifteen years. Indeed, sonnets like “On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic” and “The Sea View” can be taken as typically representative of Romanticism in general. The question we’ll consider together is how.

If you’re not able to make our Blackboard Collaborate discussion, you can consider this question asynchronously. Choose one of the two poems by Charlotte Smith mentioned above and read it closely. What kinds of literary devices do you see in your reading? How is the poem expressive of Romantic ideas, values, and/or aesthetics? Post a 1-2 paragraph-length response to these questions here on this blog.

1. We will hold “synchronous,” live class sessions every Monday night in two blocks, 6:00 to 7:15 and 7:25 to 8:40. These sessions will be held via Blackboard Collaborate (which is accessible by both computer and smartphone). I’ve attached a screenshot showing where Blackboard Collaborate is located. You can also download the app on your smartphone—either option works.
2. You will only need to sign in to one of these blocks.
3. If you can’t make either block, you can have the option to work “asynchronously” (ie., on your own time). You can take this week by week: some weeks you might need to work synchronously, sometimes asynchronously. Each Monday I will post a blog outlining what the “asynchronous” assignment for that week will be. This assignment is for those who can’t make the live class session. If you’re going asynchronous, I also ask that you get in touch with me at least once per week via email, Slack, or phone so that we can check in.
4. I understand that having so many options can be confusing, so let me just say a little bit about why I’ve structured things this way. Some of you signaled that you preferred holding synchronous classes because you valued being able to continue to work together and work with each other in the class. However, others signaled that you would need some extra flexibility to do at least some of the work “on your own” (though you will still have me and the class as a resource via Slack and other platforms). And I’m sure these needs might change week to week. The name of the game right now is to be flexible and kind with one another. This is a long way of saying if your needs aren’t being met by this structure, don’t just assume that’s the “way things are.” Reach out. You will be accommodated. I want you to succeed.
5. If you have any questions reach out here or on Slack.

Also, in case you haven’t signed up for Slack, here is the link to access our group chat: https://join.slack.com/t/restthrurevs/shared_invite/zt-crp4bbeo-EMHivKwYd6jf2pig9BTTRg

Since so much of our focus so far has been on how white British writers represented and reflected the transatlantic slave trade and imperialism, it’s important to remember that there were always resistant voices that spoke back to these representations. We will see how they employed sophisticated artistic and rhetorical strategies to defiantly proclaim their humanity in the face of brutal racism and enslavement. Phyllis Wheatley (c. 1753 – 1784) is often cited as the first “African American” writer. She was a young enslaved women when she crafted the poems that would make up her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Her poems displayed an expert understanding of classical verse and used it to both address and resist her unfree condition. Indeed, her work was so learned that the text was accompanied by an “attestation” by the “most respectable characters in Boston” as proof that Wheatley indeed wrote her poems, inaugurating a racist history white people “validating” the veracity of Black artistic productions that would continue far beyond Wheatley’s case. While her writing fame led to her emancipation, she died in poverty at the age of 31. 

Wheatley’s poetry displayed a mastery of poetic form and classical allusion. Together, we will break down a few of Wheatley’s major poems in terms of both form and content. If you make the Bb Collaborate meeting, we will do this work together.

If you are working “asynchronously” this week, in lieu of this activity you can make 5 annotations on Wheatley’s poems—either words you looked up, allusions you chased, or passages you don’t understand. Then, on this blog, post a reply that poses a question you have about Wheatley’s poems. This will help me keep in touch with you individually this week.

To continue our in-class discussions, it is difficult but crucially important to reflect on the language we use to talk about literary texts embedded in histories of enslavement and imperialism. While we all have good intentions in critiquing such language and representations, we must also be careful about whether in our critiques we unintentionally reproduce racialized terminologies and ideologies. Writing as a white scholar of postcolonial studies and African diaspora studies, I want to be as transparent as possible that I include myself in this “we.” I can’t claim innocence here, nor can I claim “mastery” over the “correct” languages with which to talk about texts that reflect and represent histories of human bondage and racism. I can only claim sincere engagement with anti-racist and anti-imperialist works and scholars and a commitment to doing this continual work of listening and self-criticism.

To this end, I wanted to share with you a resource that I have found quite clarifying for understanding, in broad strokes, some of the suggestions scholars of color have offered for writing about histories of enslavement. This resource, titled “Writing About ‘Slavery’? This Might Help,” comes courtesy of Professor P. Gabrielle Forman and includes a number of suggestions for preferred terms and terms to avoid when writing about histories of enslavement. Let’s go over some of these together. Then, a few questions for you: what stands out to you in this resources suggestions for usage and avoidance? How will these suggestions prompt you to revise the language you use in your own writing?

For the next few weeks, we will be discussing two Black writers who experienced enslavement and how their literary work resisted their captivity. Since so much of our focus so far has been on how white British writers represented and reflected the transatlantic slave trade and imperialism, it’s important to remember that there were always resistant voices that spoke back to these representations. We will see how they employed sophisticated artistic and rhetorical strategies to defiantly proclaim their humanity in the face of brutal racism and enslavement. Phyllis Wheatley (c. 1753 – 1784) is often cited as the first “African American” writer. She was a young enslaved women when she crafted the poems that would make up her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Her poems displayed an expert understanding of classical verse and used it to both address and resist her unfree condition. Indeed, her work was so learned that the text was accompanied by an “attestation” by the “most respectable characters in Boston” as proof that Wheatley indeed wrote her poems, inaugurating a racist history white people “validating” the veracity of Black artistic productions that would continue far beyond Wheatley’s case. While her writing fame led to her emancipation, she died in poverty at the age of 31. 

Olaudah Eqiuano’s Interesting Narrative (1745-1797) carries a similar attestation. Equiano, a former enslaved African who was through ingenuity able to buy his freedom, published his famous autobiography in the midst of heated debates in Britain on abolishing the slave trade. Equiano, by this time one of the 10,000-20,000 Black people living in Britain, was active in the Abolitionist movement. Though slavery in Britain itself had been struck down in 1772, the slave trade persisted until 1810 and slavery would continue in British colonies until 1831. His narrative adapted the genre of the “spiritual autobiography” (most famously represented by Augustine’s Confessions), which describes an arc of sin, conversion and rebirth, to one of the “fall” into enslavement and the “rebirth” as a free person. The Interesting Narrative was published in 1789, the same year as the French Revolution, and thus was part of the broader Enlightenment movement and its ambivalent political thinking about emancipation and freedom. So much of Equiano’s narrative concerns the difficulty of being free in a world marked by enslavement. In this sense, Equiano reverses the notion of European colonialism bringing “civilization” and “Enlightenment” to non-Western lands. Together, we will need to consider in more depth the strategies by which Equiano represents the experience of enslavement in order to further its abolition.

Race, Gender, and Empire in Oroonoko

We began an important conversation last week dealing with how to approach a text like Oroonoko with “modern” eyes, but also one that touches on how in historical context Oronooko resists some “linear” assumptions we might have about the novel as “proto-abolitionist.” While Oronooko is clearly critical of transatlantic slavery, it doesn’t ultimately reject imperialism. In fact, the narrator of Oroonoko appears to criticize transatlantic slavery not simply because of its brutality and barbarism, but, she implies, for its failure to actually carry out the so-called “civilizing mission” of English imperialism (which the text never criticizes) and for its economic inefficiency. By depicting Oroonoko as a “royal slave,” Behn doesn’t even really condemn transatlantic slavery in its totality, but rather condemns its indiscriminate reduction of such a “high born” figure as Oroonoko to an enslaved status. This links to the text’s ultimate upholding of the colonial “civilizing” mission, as the duplicity Oroonoko faces in his capture and enslavement leads him to reject Christianity.

In terms of the economics of colonialism, Behn compares the plantation system to an idealized (and inaccurate) description of English trade with the Indigenous peoples of Surinam, which is described as a existing in a state of “perfect amity” and “friendly affection” (1-2). This description not only rewrites violent settler colonialism as a “free” and “equal” relationship, but appears to criticize transatlantic slavery mainly in order to strengthen colonial domination. We will see this seeming contradiction again and again throughout our readings, in particular in the more formally abolitionist writings to come, as British advocates for ending the slave trade and/or enslavement were often, like Behn, not explicitly anti-racist or anti-imperialist. As Philippa Levine argues in the excerpts we read previously: “Many abolitionists saw their role as creating an environment in which Africans could be raised to civilization, a state they believed fully lacking in their life of enslavement and realizable through the redemption of Christianity” (22). Additionally, British abolitionism toward the end of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century actually coincided with the expansion of the British empire, especially in India and the Indian Ocean—a context we will consider in relation to our readings from Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton.

Another aspect of the colonial politics of Oroonoko that we began discussing, but could discuss further, concerns the white female narrator of the text. The narrator of Oroonoko is quite clearly implicated in the plantation system she depicts: she is not a mere observer but an active participant. How does this complicity affect our reading of the gender politics of the text? In other words, how does Behn’s ability to break from the stereotypical gender roles assigned to (white) women depend on participating in the colonial subjugation of racialized Others?

The Novel Form

As also mentioned last week, Oroonoko is a fairly early example of an English novel, a form on the rise during throughout the long eighteenth century. In simplistic terms, the term “novel” can refer to any extended narrative prose fiction, but there is a bit more to it than that. Scholars of the novel have noted that the form is defined by its “omnivorousness”—in other words, its capacity to incorporate and absorb many different forms and genres. Though the novel in some ways grew out of the high epic tradition, it became associated with popular forms and “low” literary style. The “popular” appeal of the novel relates to the emergence of a “middle class” reading public in the eighteenth century—an emergence made possible by the links between the rise of capitalist industry and the transatlantic colonialism Oroonoko itself depicts. Also, despite its links to the Romance tradition, the novel is associated with a new aesthetic of literary realism: in other words, early novels often tied their fictional narratives to the backdrop of real history. In fact, many eighteenth century novels didn’t refer to themselves as novels at all, but instead as “histories.” Oroonoko is an example of this convention, as the full title reads: Oroonoko: Or, the Royal Slave. A True History.

Mercantilism in Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton (1720)

Captain Singleton is one of Defoe’s more obscure novels. In fact, the novel was the follow-up to his most famous work, Robinson Crusoe (1719), which depicts a trader’s colonial cultivation of a desert island after being shipwrecked. While Robinson Crusoe is generally read as an apologia for the colonial project, Captain Singleton is much more ambivalent.

Captain Singleton follows an English pirate in the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea. As Lehman’s own Professor Siraj Ahmed argues in his book The Stillbirth of Capital (2013), the novel blurs the line between “illegitimate” and “legitimate” commerce and, thus, comments on the mercantile system of the day. So, we should define mercantilism in order to make what Defoe is doing in Captain Singleton more clear. Mercantilism contrasts with later economic systems in which the state is primarily concerned with creating the conditions for “free” trade (ie., liberalism). Mercantilism worked quite differently. Instead, mercantilist policies attempted to establish a positive balance of trade and aimed to accumulate monetary reserves at the state level. (Put a little more simply, mercantilists really thought of “national wealth” in terms of monetary reserves, usually silver, being accumulated by the state. Contemporary “liberal” monetary policy no longer thinks this way: for example, a nation’s Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, does not refer to amount of money sitting in a vault somewhere, but rather the speed in which money changes hands in the economy.) Mercantilists, therefore, supported the establishment of monopolies over trade in certain products and regions. The East India Company, chartered in 1600 to establish British trade in the Indian Ocean region, is an example of just such a monopoly. East India Company trade also links to the transatlantic histories we considered in relation to Oroonoko, as Indian Ocean trade literally financed the British state throughout the eighteenth century, which was constantly needing money to keep up the perpetual wars that also established British dominance over the Atlantic and the trade in enslaved Africans.

Ahmed argues that the blurred lines between “piracy” and “legitimate commerce” in Captain Singleton traces “both the illicit origins of the wealth that invests the state’s legitimate property and the precise networks in which it was converted from the one to the other along the way” (53). In other words, the novel demonstrates how Britain’s amassed wealth and power in the Indian Ocean (and the world) was based, quite literally, on straight up theft. As is clear in Captain Singleton, the Indian Ocean is anything but a “blank space,” but a multi-ethnic and multicultural space where circuits of trade flourished long before the European colonial presence. While European discourse tends to portray colonialism as a “globalizing” process (that creates links and establishes trade between hitherto unconnected places), this couldn’t be more false. Instead, Captain Singleton demonstrates how Indian Ocean colonialism involved the appropriation (legalized or not) of preexisting Indian Ocean trade between Indian, Arab, Turkish, and Chinese merchants. Ahmed also argues that the narrator’s Christian conversion (depicted toward the end of our selection) acts as a metaphor for the conversion of pirated goods into “legitimate” money, a process that represents the basis of the colonial British state’s wealth.

Dear class—

I wanted to write you this letter as we kick off the work for this class in earnest.

I don’t really subscribe to the “great works” model of literary study and I’m particularly resistant to how notions of “capital-L” Literature often carry dismissive and exclusionary connotations of “high” culture. At the same time, I believe that literary study does not necessarily have to be this way, especially since telling stories represents such an important manner in which we come to understand ourselves, contest imposed ways of knowing the world, and seek to constitute both differently.

I imagine that you have already been reflecting on the challenge of reading and responding to eighteenth century works. The cliché that we read literature in order to expose ourselves to, as the English literary critic Matthew Arnold famously wrote, “the best of what’s been thought and said,” feels to me utterly inadequate given the fact that the relationship of the field of English literature to histories of imperialism has also clearly had a hand in transmitting some of the worst of what has been said and thought—and done. The literary texts we’re beginning to explore in the course, starting this week with Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, reflect—even when they’re contesting—languages of race, class, and gender that will feel, on one hand, completely “dated.” Yet, in some ways they will also feel uncomfortably familiar given the centrality of these categories to the inequalities of our time. I have to confess openly my trepidation that a college-level class like this not “legitimate” problematic languages, stereotypes, and representations that shouldn’t be presented as subjects of legitimate debate.

So, I solicit your help and feedback throughout this semester in working through these issues. I want the assignments for this course to invite you take your experiences as students, readers, scholars—and, well, as people!—seriously as standpoints from which to produce knowledge that will also be useful for future students, who will come to these texts from similar places that you are now.

Therefore, I wanted to check in, but also to hear from you. What life experiences brought you to study English literature at Lehman and/or this class in particular? What questions, interests, and/or trepidations do you still have about either a) the historical scope of the course and its readings; or b) the collaborative work for the course? Ideally, what would you hope to get out of this course? What are your ideas for better fulfilling those expectations?

If you could, write me a letter back (as long or short as makes sense for you) by next week, Feb. 17. Email it to me at my Lehman email (or if you’d rather hand-write your letter, slip it in my English department mailbox). I’m looking forward to hearing from you and continuing these conversations throughout the semester.

Onward,
Prof. Rumore