Veronica Ramirez

An Insight into Early American Literature Through Women’s Literature

When I signed up for Early American Literature this semester I came in knowing a little about early American literature since it has presented in other courses as the background for the founding of America, usually the texts surrounding the Founding Fathers. This semester has been very interesting though, besides gaining general knowledge about the development of early American literature, what has extended my knowledge the most was the discussion and my research posts on early women authors and by extension, the views on women’s education and how women’s education in early America influenced literature.

Studying women in early American literature has increased the breadth of authors that I had previously encountered and I have learned about the issues specific to texts by women, for women, and about women’s education. The texts presented in this course, for example Sor Juana’s poems, Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Thomas Jefferson’s “Letter to Nathaniel Burwell on Women’s Education” all help to demonstrate the objective which tries to “reconcile the culture wars over which America is the real America and Which America to teach? " Even though the founding fathers receive a large amount of exposure, there are issues in early America that are not addressed directly through the founding fathers’ point of view that are just as important to understanding the issues of early America.

The history of women’s education that was presented by previous students in their midterms and research posts, combined with my midterm made me value the works of women even more because the types of texts that women created provided valuable information that have become for us a link to what life in early America was like. Life for early American women was very hard and education for women was not regarded as a necessity and in my midterm titled “The Importance of Women’s Education in Early American Literature” I summarized that “the education of early American women and literature boils down to those who were educated were then enabled to leave a record of their life” and able to use their education to develop texts beyond traditional texts. Traditional stories, such as oral stories or letters, and captivity narratives morphed into novels which resonate with the course objective of “Emergence of ‘Literature’ as we know it today from earlier genres like letters, pamphlets, public documents; spoken and written literatures and cultures”.

One of the most interesting texts in the course regarding the education of women was Thomas Jefferson‘s “Letter to Nathaniel Burwell on Women’s Education” written in 1818. Jefferson “thought it essential to give [his daughters] a solid education, which might enable them, when they become mothers, to educate their own daughters, and even to direct the course for sons, should their fathers be lost, or incapable, or inattentive.” This seems to imply that women should be educated but not for their own good but for their children’s future wellbeing, but at least Jefferson is promoting educating women, but he also thinks it should mixed with “dancing, drawing, and music” along with “household economy.”

Thomas Jefferson in the same letter, stated that he believed that novels were “a great obstacle to good education” and though they were a “mass of trash” they were not however “without some distinction; some few modelling their narratives, although fictitious, on the incidents of real life, have been able to make them interesting and useful vehicles of sound morality”. Thomas Jefferson’s comment on novels conflicts with our current view of literature today, because most people connect literature with novels. I don’t think that Thomas Jefferson would have approved of Susanna Rowson as a popular novelist, but she did take the novel and make it a tool of “sound morality” by her authorial intrusion as the narrator’s voice in Charlotte Temple.

Susanna Rowson intrudes the opinion of the narrator of Charlotte Temple in order to make sure that her moral message gets across. As a text illustrating proper behavior, it is unique in that instead of showing positive role models, Rowson shows the outcome of a good girl swayed by her emotions and peers instead of her duty and propriety. This novel also provides some information about the importance of the education of women, but is geared more towards educating the women in morals and proper behavior. Charlotte Temple also wishes for a better education for her daughter, mostly to avoid her own fate, but is important that she wishes her daughter to be instructed at all. Charlotte Temple uses her education from back in England to write letters to plead for help and at the end she does get to see her dad because of letters.

Even though educated women authors were able to write and publish, women’s outlets to expand their search for knowledge were limited. I studied Sor Juana as an author and as an educated woman more than her works, and she was very well educated but her choices in life were restricted by her own pursuit of her education. In my first research post I set out to find why Sor Juana is relevant to modern readers and I concluded it was “because her subjects are so modern and her reactions to her status of being a woman were so public” and she focused “on modern and progressive issues that are still relevant today, such as equality, women's education, and especially men's view of women.”  In my second research post, Maria Luisa Bemberg, director of the film “Yo, la Peor de Todas,” summarized Sor Juana’s appeal through time and through cultures as “Sor Juana is more than Mexican, more than a Spanish colonial subject, more than Latin American, that the wings of her spirit transcend all borders” (Bemberg 81).

Learning early American texts brings up these types of unique examples of what women authors had as outlets, what they were exposed to, what they had to bear, and as Adam Glasgow stated in his midterm “delving into less known texts from sources that we are not as comfortable reading about proves an effective way to understand what was previously foreign.” I would expand on what I have learned in this course and read more early novels especially by women authors. Thomas Jefferson mentioned Miss Maria Edgeworth and Madame Genlis, and even though they are both known for writing children’s book, or books on how to educate children, they both have a couple of novels that I think would complement the treatment of the novel that we did in class.

Even though I already had some background in early American Literature, the part of the course that I enjoyed the most was the fact that course reached out to capture the few women that were writing during this time. This really helps to be able to place women’s writing in the overall structure of early American literature. Women’s literature in early America presents some of the concepts of future literature in its infancy and allows you to see how literature evolved or devolved.