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LITR 4231 Early American Literature |
Final Exam Essays 2014 Sample answers
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Sarah Robin Roelse
2 May 2014
Essay 2 D: The Founding
Mothers of Our Nation
Throughout the world’s history, women have been held down and tucked away
from education. It hasn’t been until recently (within the past four or five
centuries) that we have really began to develop true voices of our own, even if
it meant going against the suggested social norms and values of our culture.
With the ever growing development of women in the educational and
literate world, I think that it is certainly worth mentioning and exploring how
far we, as a group of people, have come.
As a female literature major, I have to say that learning about these
extraordinary women was exciting, not only because their stories rocked, but
because I personally had never had the chance to learn about them before (and
let’s face it, by the time students reach college courses, they think they’ve
already heard it all; so it’s refreshing to learn new material!). In this course
we focused on several female revolutionaries, artists, and writers; this is very
important because it shows students that it isn’t impossible for customs and
societal norms to change, and it enables female (and male) students to recognize
some of the lesser known heritages that our country was formed from.
Moreover, including female history into the course curriculum where we
have, in the past, focused primarily on male influences on our country’s
formation, provides insight to the many struggles that women have faced and
overcome to achieve the status where we are now.
One woman, whom I’d never even heard of before this class, completely
went behind the back of her family and national law in order to educate herself
was Sor Juana Inez de Cruz. Coming
from a prominent Spanish background, Sor Juana had the chance to do something
that women wouldn’t get much of a chance to do for quite some time to come:
Learn to read and write. Sor
Juana was seen as a fantastic woman and even considered the “Tenth Muse” in her
culture; it is unfortunate that most of her writings and instruments were seized
by the Spanish church simply because it was unacceptable for women to read,
write, and create art at the time.
I would consider Sor Juana to be up there with female figures such as Joan of
Arc for having the will and the courage to go behind the backs of Spanish rules
to further her education – not every woman would have had the courage to do so,
and most didn’t even have the opportunity if they’d wanted to – so her presence
as a “female rights activist” is legitimately validated; she only wanted for
herself to be able to have the same abilities as any man would.
Considering the fact that women have made such headway in the past few
centuries, I think it was nice to hear
and not only read or see some of the progress that we made in our endeavors
through the class lectures. In the
Romantic Movement women made extensive amounts of progress in the arts, as well
as literature. One such artist was
composer Amy Beach, who wrote concertos, operas, sonatas, and songs.
Amy Beach is important to mention because even after her husband passed
away, she continued to tour the world and play music – this shows that she was
comfortable and confident enough in her ability to not
need a man.
While this concept can be a harsh reality for men sometimes, I think that
it is something that needs to be addressed so that women can feel that they
do have the ability to make it on
their own. It is women like Amy
Beach who can be realistic role models for women today who don’t have men in
their lives; and for lots of women, this is the kind of role model that can be
the most important.
Focusing on another female that we often hear about but never really
know about is Abigail Adams, the
lesser known of the Adams family.
Growing up in America, we all take social studies courses and hear about our
founding fathers, but this class made it easy and applicable to hear about our
founding mothers as well. Abigail
Adams was an important woman for her time because she openly suggested to her
husband, John Adams, that women should have equal rights too.
As an early mother of feminism and the women’s rights movement, she may
be one of the most important because she was of prominent social stature; she
could reasonably have made a greater difference had men not been so keen to keep
women in ‘their place.’ Through the
letters that were discussed in the lectures, we see that even though she was
avid about receiving equal treatment as a woman, she also had a loving and
passionate relationship with her husband, which I think a lot of people forget
can be done -- there is no rule stating that a feminist can’t be married to a
man and have a good relationship with him, while all the time being opinionated
and well educated to the social matters at hand.
While these aforementioned ladies are all respectable and worth learning
about, the woman that I was most interested in during our class was oddly
enough, writer, Susana Rowson. In
her book, Charlotte Temple, she
managed to not only write one of the first American novels, but she also focused
the novel towards women and designed it to be a moralistic and heeding book to
her female readers. This kind of
literary genius is not something that all writers are able to achieve; many
popular novelists in the modern world such as Danielle Steele simply write the
same book over and over with a change in location and character name without
doing anything, but Rowson really
touched her readers (in the past and present).
As a female literature major, I appreciate Rowson’s effort that she put
into her novel not only because it blended effects of drama, melodrama, and
morality into a juicy read, but because it had an effect on me when I
legitimately thought it wouldn’t. I
figured that the book would be dry and boring, but it was pleasantly humorous in
the right places and tender when needed; it appealed to my feminine side by
making me feel empathy for the hero(ines) and hatred for the villains.
This, in my opinion, is what makes a novel great!
As a non-feminist woman in this class, I feel that I have learned to
appreciate my gender quite a bit more than I initially had; of course I realize
and know that there have been females in the past that have enabled
me to be where I am today – in a
college level class with male peers and having the ability to make my own
choices (and even voting!)-- but
learning about new personalities and women who have put their lives at risk in
order to better themselves really makes me proud to be a woman.
Each of the women mentioned above, Sor Juana, Amy Beach, Abigail Adams,
and Susanna Rowson each have a certain appeal to them that make me literally
smile when I think about the trials and tribulations that they must have
overcome to be the women that they were.
I am glad that this class introduced me to some of our country’s founding
mothers and female artists because without them I wouldn’t be the woman I am
today; in fact, there’s a great possibility that none of us might be.
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