LITR 4231 Early American Literature 2012 Student Midterm Samples 3. Web Highlights: Review at least 3 posts from course website's Model Assignments (4-6 paragraphs)

Elizabeth Eagle

The Female Voice:

A Review of Midterm: Women in Early American Literature by Lori Arnold

          The life of any individual in the early history of America was understandably harsh, particularly for women, as Lori Arnold expresses in her essay. Using Anne Bradstreet's works as evidence, Arnold explores the very real possibility of death in what modern Americans view as simply another step in life: that of childbirth. Bradstreet expressed fears of her death in that she worried about the husband and children she will leave behind if she dies during labor. Her acceptance of death shows her religious faith is intact in that she does not fear death because she will then be with God. This acceptance also reveals that such deaths were commonplace in her life and could not be avoided. Death at a young age especially in childbirth was experienced in Bradstreet's life in women she knew and in stories related to her about the dangers of childbirth.

          Arnold also uses the captive narrative of Mary Rowlandson to show that many of the women in early America were actually quite educated and whose experiences in the early part of America's history are now relied upon as factual evidence by modern day historians. Arnold expresses the idea that the narrative of a female sheds more light on King Philip's War than many of the accounts made by men in that the female voice had no military training and so is concerned with the emotionality of their capture, the truth of their experiences, and the relating of that experience to ideologies that the woman already knew such as their own marks of civilization in contrast with that of Native Americans and their reliance on religion to understand and translate their experience with the Native Americans.

          Finally, Arnold rounds out her essay by naming a man to explain the roles and views of women. Cotton Mather's explanation of the role of women and girls in his work exposes the male societal view of women and young women in early America. His views are reveal the shared views of most men at the time and seem to contradict the intelligence and necessity of the female voice as presented by Anne Bradstreet and Mary Rowlandson. However, as Arnold relates Mather's opinions, it makes Bradstreet's and Rowlandson's voices more resilient and far more believable for their stories represent and retell the true life of the early American woman and not the hysterical story of witchcraft wrapped and warped by the narrow religious minds of Salem. Mather's words thus concern themselves only with Salem while Bradstreet's and Rowlandson's words could encompass all of early America.

Clashes in Cultures:

A Review of Creation of Hostilities by Josh Hughey

          “To put it simply, the fact that the Europeans' creation story put great emphasis on power may have led them to assert their own power over the Native Americans. On the other hand, the fact that the Native Americans' creation stories put great emphasis on joint effort and diversity of forces may explain why they generally returned hostility rather than initiating it” (Hughey, para. 5).

          This simple statement encompasses the full idea of Josh Hughey's essay on the contrasting creation stories of the Native Americans and the Europeans. By contrasting and comparing the creation stories of these two groups, Hughey finds that the stories developed the respective cultures he presents and thus explains the interactions between the two cultures upon meeting in America. Hughey makes the connection that the violence between the two cultures stems from their religious views which can be traced to their roots in their respective creation stories.

          Most Native American creation stories involved a male and female deity of some sort that created the Earth. The Native American idea of the “Two Minds” also creates a balance within the creation story and thus in Native American culture. By having a “Good Mind” and a “Bad Mind”, life for the Native American had balance, stability, and an explanation for the happenings of the world and the lives of the Native American. This balance explains the curiosity of the Native Americans on first encountering the Native Americans and their desire to leave the Europeans alone rather than engage in hostilities.

          Conversely, the European creation story of a single male dominated creation followed by the story of Adam and Eve, created a culture driven by male dominance and the desire for power. Hughey explains that this European ideology directly impacted the European mindset when first meeting the Native Americans and colored not only their observations of the Native Americans but also their treatment of the race they found to be racially and religiously inferior. Hughey describes this mindset as the reason Europeans decided to assert their dominance over the Native Americans thus resulting in a clash of very different cultures that found their destruction within one another.

          Hughey's work in describing the cultural conflict of the Native Americans and the Europeans as having its roots in their respective creation stories sheds light on the mindsets of each of the cultures and does a wonderful job in tracing the creation of each group's religion through their creation story and thus their culture which in turn reveals the reason each group reacted to the other in the way that they did and also sets the reader of this essay up for a discussion on the later violence between the two cultures.

A Glance at Early American Learning:

They Had Textbooks Back Then?

          In Allison Evans' second research post, she reveals a question I have often had myself: what were children reading from? What books were used to deliver education to the children of early America? Her research resulted in two websites that showed some of the books the children of early America were reading and the education that followed from those books. Evans finds that the earliest of Puritan primers for schoolchildren taught lessons of morality which is easy enough to understand and accept considering the religious views of the group and the history of their culture.

          What I find most interesting of Evans' research is that the spelling of words was not pushed as a necessary skill but rather handwriting was seen as more important. Evans does not cite a reason for this view but I suppose that most Puritans simply relied on phonetics which allowed the message to get across, even if it was spelled incorrectly. Of course, you could never decipher the message if the handwriting of the individual was horrible. From my own knowledge, I know that the standardization of spelling of words in the English language took some time. Most historians agree that the printing press allowed individuals to read works by authors that repeatedly used the same spellings for their words even if that spelling was not what we would consider “right”. Also, the printing and distribution of the King James Bible in 1611 contributed greatly to the accepted spellings of many words. However, it would not be until the first dictionaries were written in the 1800s that the standardization of spelling would actually manifest.

          Allison Evans' research sheds some light on the education practices of the early Americans, particularly the Puritans. Their primers for schoolchildren reveal much of the culture and its dependence on religion as a founding principle of education not only to read but of moral education as well. This post does much to explain the lives of children in early America which is wonderful in that most literature of the time was written by and for adults. I would be interested in researching Allison Evans' topic further and trace the progression of educational books for children as well as the advent of children's literature that came from the printing of these early primers.