Annie Besant's Use of Irony

For Phase 3 of the Archival Project, I decided to discuss Besant's use of irony in her pamphlet "Is the Bible Indictable?" and how it further strengthens her argument. In this work, Besant seems to be arguing exactly why the interpretation of obscenity, in reference to her and Bradlaugh's publishing of Knowlton's book on birth control, cannot and should not be tolerated. She does this by reiterating the implications of the law in her case and applying it to other works that were circulated at the time which would never be prosecuted with such a charge.

Victorian Women on Women: Phases Two and Three

For phase two I used the card catalog in relation to Victorian Women in the 19th century. I took down a couple of texts that had interesting titles, two being "Beauty's Triumph" and "An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex." "Beauty's Triumph" had no author, and rightfully so. Its format, argument, and conclusion all show very risky approaches to woman's role in the 19th century. It is divided into three sections with an argument by a woman named Sophia, a response to Sophia by a male writer, and Sophia's conclusion about the superiority of women over men. The concept intrigued me because it sounded so modern in its ways of retort.

Hapgood: Tying Two Issues Together

For the final phase of the archival project overview, I will discuss the topics, organization and prominent rhetorical strategies in Mary Hapgood’s short stories, “Jerry the Mine Mule,” “Big Tim’s Daughter” and “Why Do Intelligent Women Marry?”, to make an argument about women and social reform.

Nightingale on Nursing (Option 1)

Here I continue to further investigate the Nightingale collection that I have been focusing on since he beginning of our archival studies at the Lilly Library. While I am looking at a relatively limited number of materials, still find this collection in particular extremely fascinating in that each phase of the project has allowed me to look for and analyze new information. In doing so, I have found myself most drawn to her shrt handbook, Notes on Nursing. Specifically, the introductory or overview chapter provides a great deal of insight into the purpose and function of the text. I love that Nightingale approaches the subject of nursing so matter-of-factly. She wastes no time jumpling in and explaining that the intention of her work is to improve the field of nursing by shedding light onto the art of it.

Besant Calling for Reforms

In phase two of this project, my partner and I found a website that contained the titles and information of all the Little Blue Books. The Little Blues Books are hundreds of books published by the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company. Emanuel Haldeman-Julius had the idea to get literature and information on almost any subject out to the people at prices they could afford. The Little Blue Books were the result of that idea. On the website (http://www.haldeman-julius.org), a list of titles can be found. The titles include well-known works such as #32 Poe’s Poems and Shakespeare’s “Much Ado about Nothing” as well as lesser known works including many books on self-help, how-to, and self-education.

A Letter in Reply to Whom?

In phase three I looked more closely at Item #15, "Justina's Letters in Reply to Miss Garrett's Defense of the Contagious Diseases Acts," published in 1870. When analyzing the letter in order to look for examples of topoi and strategies used by women writers in public discourse I found that Christian morality and the fear of epidemic were seen as possible bases for the implementation of the Contagious Diseases Acts.

Mrs. Malleson, Morality and Gender

For phase three I looked further at Mrs. W. T. Mallesons "Reply" to Miss Garrett. Though her writing we can see the themes and norms of the time. I will also look at her manor of writing, and whether it would have been acceptable at the time.

Gordimer As A Social Commentator

For phase three, I continued with the works of Nadine Gordimer. I chose option two which asks for me to briefly discuss topics, organization and strategies in Gordimer’s early short stories and play. For this phase, I focused more on her play because many of the same themes kept showing up in her short stories.

Conversation Between Nightingale and Nightingale

As an attempt at constructing an investigative lens, I put Nightingale's "Cassandra" in conversation with a passage from her "Subsidiary Notes". With the passage in "Cassandra", Nightingale speaks of progress, new intelligence, and the formation of a woman's role in society. She seems to marvel at the idea that women desire to enter the man's world and struggle with the thought of men doing the things women are "meant" to be doing:

"But suppose we were to see a number of men in the morning sitting round a table in the drawing room, looking at prints, doing worsted work, and reading little books, how we should laugh!" (Nightingale 1034).

A Call for Civic Education

I chose to look into the preface and the first section in Nightingale's Notes on Nursing. I decided to focus on the beginning of her manual to get a sense of how she is setting herself up, and what she is saying to get her readers attention. I also focused on her tone and how she uses it to connect to her audience.

Morality, Injustice and Ignorant Advocates

For phase three I decided to look in more depth at Justina’s letter in response to Miss Garrett’s defense of the Contagious Diseases Act. I examined strategies and tropes throughout Justina’s text that were common in female public discourse.

Gordimer: Political Activist and Literary Master

At an early age, Nadine Gordimer began writing short stories and plays, her first being "The Valley Legend" published in the Sunday Express when she was thirteen years old. This already suggests Gordimer's literary ability, which makes it highly plausible that her later works would be written by a highly skilled, matured writer who knew how to use allegory, metaphor, and direct characterization to work to her advantage.

The Morality of Socialism

Overview:

Mary Donovan Hapgood was a woman who was stalwart in her beliefs. After developing her basic beliefs on the socialist agenda and American society on the whole she refused to abandon these ideals and decidedly developed her works based upon these. Perhaps her most informative piece of literature while looking at what she values is her essay “The Vanishing Virtue”. While this has no date attached to it, we can assume that this was written after developing some strong views and making sturdy connections within the socialist party. “The Vanishing Virtue is a very direct piece that is openly scathing of some of the practices associated with the reactions to civil protest that Hapgood was involved in. Out of this criticism, we can see two definitions: crime and virtue.

Morality and Prostitution

For phase three in the London Lowlife Collection, I chose option two which asked me to investigate Mrs. Malleson’s “Reply” more closely in order to discover commonalities during the time it was written and tropes frequently used in women’s writing.

Schedule Change and Symposium #4

Dear ENG L207 Class:

To be fair to Ida B. Wells-Barnett (and the tradition of anti-lynching journalism in which she participated) I think we'll need to work her back into our reading schedule for the fourth sphere "Social Evolution: Sex, Class, and Labor." She makes an interesting transitional figure by bridging some of our nineteenth-century feminist authors' use of gender or race as tropes in both sentimentalist and anti-sentimentalist fiction, with some of our twentieth-century feminist authors' calls to more explicit kinds of activism. So, I announce this change to our reading schedule for next week:

Thursday 3/31/11
Wells-Barnett -- classpak, "Lynch Law"
Truth -- anthology pp. 509-511, 512-513
Gilman -- classpak, "Women and Economics" but only pp. 360-366 (top)
Jones -- cancelled (although this makes a great piece to read on your own)

Additionally, I announce a schedule change for our fourth and final symposium. The symposium will be held on Tuesday 4/5/11 and Tuesday 4/12/11. I am making Thursday 4/7/11 an independent work day at the Lilly Library to work with your collections on the final project.

Many thanks,
Professor Graban

Consultations (Optional) on Critical Essay #3

Hello, everyone.

I post here the consultation schedule for Critical Essay #3, after the spring break. If you have a conflict with the time(s) you have chosen, or have not yet signed up, please let me know. There are still plenty of open slots.

Have a restful spring break,
Professor Graban

Monday 3/21/11
11:00-11:20
11:30-11:50 Emily Taylor
12:00-12:20
12:30-12:50 Katharine Yugo
1:00-1:20
1:30-1:50 Hannah May
2:00-2:20

Tuesday 3/22/11
4:00-4:20 Ariel Daugherty
4:30-4:50 Courtney Rishel
5:00-5:20 Deirdre Hutchinson

Thursday 3/24/11
10:45-11:15 Charlotte Martin
12:40-1:00 Sam Ostrowski
4:00-4:20 Lauryn Roberts
4:30-4:50 Belle Kim
5:00-5:20
5:30-5:50 Alyssa Kennedy

Friday 3/25/11
1:30-1:50
2:30-2:50
3:00-3:20

Deadlines Extended

Hello, everyone.

I am extending deadlines for the next two assignments to accommodate one more working and blogging session at the Lilly Library before April:

Short Critical Essay #3 - deadline extended until 5:00 p.m. Monday 3/28/11
Final Paper Proposal - deadline extended until 5:00 p.m. Monday 4/4/11

All changes are reflected on the documents linked to our "Assignments" page, but please make the changes to your own syllabus or daytimer.

new notice: Finally, to take some pressure off of Phase Three, you may visit the Lilly Library whenever convenient. We had originally suggested that you spend an individual working session there prior to 3/22 so as to ensure that the Reading Room wasn't overwhelmed the week following spring break. However, given the progress you all made last week, you should be fine to go whenever you can. Also, some of you are working with online collections that you can access from outside of the Lilly.

Many thanks,
Professor Graban

Productive Dilemmas in Sphere Three

Hello, everyone.

It seems we have a number of productive dilemmas to consider throughout the third sphere just based on today's class discussion (and we haven't even covered the "trope"!). Here are some of the questions I carry with me into next class:

1. If Campbell's feminist rhetor does not define herself exclusively according to what women are or are not (or according to how women should or should not act), then how else can she self-define?
2. How do we construct a feminist literary subjectivity based on something other than time, or based on something other than how women relate themselves to historical events or as historical subjects? (This is the question underlying Kristeva's "atemporal subjectivity," a term we see her discuss alongside "logic of identification.")

And I'll add some bonus questions for you to think about as you anticipate Thursday's quiz on tropes in Wheatley and Grimke:

1. As we read throughout this sphere, how will this concept of "feminine style" rely on, look past, or disrupt the trope?
2. Can race be a trope?
3. Can gender be a trope?
4. (For that matter, can moral superiority be a trope?)
   

As you can see, I'll be readily armed with questions!

See you Thursday,
Professor Graban

The Woman Behind the Socialist

The search for related materials started off to be a very promising one based on the Lilly’s extensive collections of manuscripts that could have possibly related to Ms. Hapgood and her ideas about social reform via the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, the Works Progress Administration, and more. We decided to delve into what might be the most fruitful of our searches first: the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Knowing that this topic made up an entire manuscript collection by itself, we were able to go straight to the Lilly Library’s website to look up the manuscript collections list. Exploring the collection via the search tool under “The Collections: Manuscripts”, we found a collection to be entitled “Hapgood—Sacco-Vanzetti”. This looked promising as the online description mentioned it containing correspondence via letters between both Sacco and Vanzetti and Hapgood. From here we looked up the printed collection in the binders of manuscripts to see if there were any more details that might be of interest in the collection. Upon deciding to look at the collection, we requested the physical materials and were overwhelmed with all the items present.

It turns out that the Lilly Library had divided the collection into two parts: letters both written and printed, and newspaper/media about the trial. Both parts are extremely helpful and mention specifics about the trial, social reform, and Hapgood by name. It was fascinating to delve into the news articles about the Italians and the Mother Mary that they had in Hapgood. The articles became even more interesting when put in comparison with Hapgood’s own memoir, No Tears for My Youth. Within the text, Hapgood uses truly pathos-inducing speeches from Sacco and Vanzetti during the trial:

“‘I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical. I have suffered because I was an Italian and indeed I am an Italian. I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for myself, but I am so convinced to be right that you can only kill me once, but if you would execute me two times and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do again what I have already done. I have finished. Thank you’” (6).

However, the news does not create such a sympathetic view of the entire trial. Big-name news such as The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and more all included articles about “Reaffirming the Sacco-Vanzetti Verdict” or about how “Boston Police Stop Meeting for Sacco”, all portraying the two Italians and all those who support them as the enemy. So, we began to see just what the public saw at the time when the trial was going on. We saw just what Hapgood was up against as she led radical social reform.

The second folder in the collection provided a very intimate look into the thoughts of Sacco, Vanzetti, and many supporters. This was also interesting to juxtapose with the public perception of the trial/aftermath. It is in these letters that many ideas and themes of social reform begin to come out. These letters also introduced us to a variety of other supporters of Sacco and Vanzetti that may have collaborated with Hapgood. For example, there is extensive correspondence between both Italians and a Ms. Alice Stone Blackwell, who clearly advocates her support for Hapgood’s efforts. Overall, this collection was a wonderful addition to our Hapgood research providing both public, and private looks into the well-known trial that our subject was so dedicated to.

Looking into Hapgood’s work with the Works Progress Administration in Indiana, we found an exclusive online exhibit from the Lilly Library. Like before, we simply used the search tool on the Lilly Library’s website to look for information on the WPA. One of the first results that the search yielded was this exhibit (http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/wpa/wpa.html). While it does not mention Hapgood specifically, we do know that she was directly linked to the Works Progress Administration in Indiana, so we can use this exhibit to further our general knowledge of Hapood’s goals and reasoning. The exhibit provides a multitude of descriptions of projects in the Indian area, and photographs of those projects. If the rest of the exhibit is found to be unimportant, at least it gives us a general knowledge of who was inspiring Hapgood, and of what some of her broad ambitions were.

Staff at the Lilly Library let us know that they have a manuscript collection entitled “Labor and Left Wing Related Collections”. Deciding that this could yield some good results, we looked into the collection. Again, returning to the Lilly Library’s website, we searched for “Labor and Left Wing”. Finding it to be the first search result, we clicked on the online manuscript description and found a multitude of collections. Each collection had a date range and a small description of generally what the collection was about. Using these two pieces of information under each collection, we narrowed our search to items that might be relevant to Hapgood. One very interesting collection ended up being the “Columbia Conserve Company MSS” collection. While this does not necessarily apply to Mary Donovan Hapgood directly, it has extremely important indirect affiliation with our subject. This collection tells all about the socialist workings of a cannery where Powers Hapgood (Mary Donovan’s spouse and cohort through the Sacco-Vanzetti trial) was a main stockholder with his two brothers. The collection is housed at the Auxiliary Library Facility and was not present for us to physically look at, but depending on where we decide to take our research, it could be of great benefit to put in a request at the Lilly Library to have the collection delivered there.

Sam and Belle