Essays from Spring 2009

Dear Readers,


I'm so glad that the spring 2009 semester is over. I had to write a big paper for each one of my literature classes. The first one is for my "woman power!" class, the second one is for my "Columbus was a jerk!" class, and the third one was for my "Communism is a great idea!" class.

I don't really like any of the papers. They're OK. They allowed me to pass the classes, but that's all they're good for. I don't really believe in what I write for school a lot of times, but I feel as though arguing with the teacher or countering the political bent of the class only frustrates everyone and lowers your grade.


Representations of Gender: Mary Prince, Elizabeth Keckley and Frederick Douglass

Throughout much of Western literary history, men have dominated the publishing establishment. Men have predominantly been the authors, the editors, and the publishers, while women have not been afforded a respected place in the world of letters. Because of this unbalanced power structure, representations of women, both fictional and non-fictional, have been askew. Representations of women have been distorted through the lens of patriarchy. Gradually, though, more and more women have become literate. More and more women have had time to read and write for pleasure and for more pressing concerns. More and more women have fought for the right to write and to be published and to be heard. But what happens to the distorted versions of women and femininity when women are the ones telling the story? Do female writers start to represent themselves in a new, liberated way, or do they channel the voice of the patriarchy, reinforcing the old sexist and often misogynistic stereotypes related to gender difference? When it comes to constructing an identity based on gender, from what sources do women draw their inspiration? This paper will look at how Mary Prince and Elizabeth Keckley, authors of The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave Related by Herself and Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, respectively, portray themselves as women, and what their words have to say about the social, non-biological differences between the sexes. The representations of gender in those two books will be compared with the way that Frederick Douglass portrays himself as a man in his slave narrative, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.


Before a discussion of the specific examples of the representations of gender in the texts is begun, a few general thoughts will be devoted to the increasingly slippery concept of autobiography. Much has been written recently about the way that the Self, rather than being a fixed object ripe for scientific scrutiny, is fragmented. Identity is often considered to be a fluid concept, more or less constructed through countless interactions with others and with the environment. Not even writers of autobiographies can fix their own identities in a hard and fast way, for they do not have an objective platform from which to view themselves and write about their lives. In addition, autobiographers have to fight against problems of memory, bias, a limited first-person perspective, and then communicate their experiences to the best of their abilities through the troublesome medium of language. Elizabeth Keckley writes of the difficulty of writing an autobiography or memoir. She writes, “Hour after hour I sit while the scenes are being shifted; and as I gaze upon the panorama of the past, I realize how crowded with incidents my life has been. Every day seems like a romance within itself, and the years grow into ponderous volumes. As I cannot condense, I must omit many strange passages in my history” (Keckley 18). What “strange passages” did she leave out? What “strange passages” is she incapable of remembering or communicating properly? These questions are not satisfactorily answerable. For even if she devoted years and thousands of pages to recording her life story, even if she tried to write down all the minute events of every one of the days of her life, she would still be offering up to the public only a representation of herself, a representation of identity that is tainted by her notions of gender roles.


Harriet Jacobs is also careful to express early on in her book how she cannot represent through the written word the full meaning of her life experiences, nor can she communicate her rich inner psychic life. In one place she writes beautifully and simply, “But my heart is so full, and my pen is so weak,” (Jacobs 28) and in another point in her text, Jacobs addresses the reader directly and says, “…you can imagine, better than I can describe, what an unpleasant sensation it must produce to wake up in the dead of night and find a jealous woman bending over you” (33). In these asides, these breaks from the narrative, Jacobs invites us not rely so much on the words that she has written down, on the adjectives or nouns she has picked to recount her singular life experiences, but rather to rely our own imaginations to fill in the gaps that language naturally leaves. Jacobs wants her readers to try to transport themselves out of their solitary individual identities, out of the limited views they have from the confinements of their own minds and live inside the deep, thick, mental place where true sympathy is born. Our minds picture Jacobs awakening to the horrid sight of a jealous woman standing over her bed, and we forgive the limited power of words to communicate.


It should be understood then, that, to a reasonable extent, autobiographies are not so much a factual retelling of events, but rather a manifestation of the writer’s ideas about identity, the nature of reality, and gender roles.


That being said, it is clear that there are many differences in subject matter and style between slave narratives written by men and slave narratives written by women. The difference that struck me quickly between the experiences related in female slave narratives and the experiences related in male slave narratives was how often women were the victims of sexual abuse. Male slaves, of course, were the victims of abuse, too- mostly verbal and physical and psychological abuse- but in the male slave narratives that I have recently read, (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass) sexual abuse did not occur.


A sampling of quotes will demonstrate the prevalence of female slaves being sexually abused by their slave masters or other men in positions of power. Elizabeth Keckley covers her experiences of sexual abuse very quickly. She does not want to dwell on lurid details of the sexual violence inflicted on her. Perhaps she glosses over these painful memories because at the point in Keckley’s life when she is writing her memoir, she a well-mannered free woman who had spent many years in the White House, arguably the place where etiquette and social propriety are the most crucial. She had spent much of her adult life associating with ladies of high social status, including the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln. Perhaps she found it improper to give us explicit details about how she was raped. Her tame and sparse account of her sexual abuse reads, “I was regarded as fair-looking for one of my race, and for four years a white man – I spare the world his name- had base designs upon me. I do not care to dwell on this subject, for it is one that is fraught with pain. Suffice it to say, that he persecuted me for four years, and I-I- became a mother” (Keckley 39).


Jacobs is a little more open about the sexual violence inflicted on her and upon her fellow female sufferers. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, we read about the sexual misdeeds of slave masters. “The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition. My master was, to my knowledge, the father of eleven slaves. But did the mothers dare to tell who was the father of their children? … No, indeed! They knew too well the terrible consequences” (Jacobs, 34). Jacobs portrays her fellow female slaves as being locked in humiliating servitude by fear, beaten down by oppression, and kept under control through violence and threats of violence. Even though so many women she knew were raped and impregnated by their white owners, (who, by the way, were being unfaithful to their wives) these women could not come out and say who the father of their baby was. Jacobs implies that even though the facts of parenthood were kept under wraps, many people in the household and in the neighborhood could tell when the mulattoes were born that something was amiss. It probably wasn’t too hard to guess, even without the technology of a DNA test, who the father was. Of course, when Jacobs said these things, she was not tiptoeing around matters to keep up appearances, as Keckley seems to be. Jacobs was a fiery abolitionist who was often more impassioned and sensational in her writing than Keckley was. Jacobs was unafraid to point the finger at the guilty party and expose the truth that many white male slave masters raped and impregnated their slaves, and then never had to fess up and take the responsibility of being the father.


Not only were the female slaves often made the objects of sexual violence and their bodies made to fulfill the lustful and sadistic desires of white slave masters, but women were also oppressed by being kept tightly locked in the domestic sphere. Often female slaves were given duties of tending to white children, which was a never-ending job. Though female slaves may have had more comfortable sleeping conditions in their master’s house rather than in the slaves’ quarters, they were also closer to their oppressors, within their master’s beck and call. Female slaves were often given babies to take care of, which is a never-ending duty; they were always responsible for looking out for the young ones. And if anything bad happened to the babies placed in their stead, the female slaves would be punished severely. Keckley describes, “Mrs. Burwell gave birth to a daughter, a sweet, black-eyed baby, my earliest and fondest pet. To take care of this baby was my first duty. True, I was but a child myself- only four years old” (Keckley 19). At four years old, Keckley was thrust into the duty that would be shared over and over again by a million different female slaves: taking care of children. Think of all the time she could have spent, think of all the things she could have done, outside of the domestic sphere, where she wasn’t bogged down with the duty of taking care of children. Obviously Keckley had a talent for designing and making clothes, and she had a talent for writing. She could have pursued those talents from a very young age, had she had the time. But her position as a slave and her assignment to care for somebody else’s children withheld from her the free time that would have been required for her to develop her talents as well as she would have liked. Indeed, all female slaves lacked what Virgina Woolf’s pled for in her classic feminist essay, A Room of One’s Own: a meager but sufficient living allowance and a private sheltered comfortable space of one’s own.


Much like Keckley’s experience, Mary Prince is oppressed by being forced to take care of children. Mary Prince’s account is the earliest known slave narrative by a woman. It can be safely assumed that her experiences were similar to many other women who lived their lives in bondage throughout the cruel slave trade that flourished in the British Empire. Whereas slave narratives written by males, like the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, recount how the autobiographers are taught “masculine” trades, like carpentry or sailing, slave narratives written by women often explain how women are kept tightly in a domestic grip by being forced into perpetual nanny-hood.


For example, Prince writes, how immediately upon arriving to a new household where she was to work as a slave, “When I went in, I stood up crying in a corner. Mrs. I______ came and took off my hat, a little black silk hat Miss Pruden made for me, and said in a rough voice, ‘You are not come here to stand in corners and cry, you are come here to work.’ She then put a child into my arms, and, as tired as I was, I was forced instantly to take up my old occupation as a nurse” (220). While Douglass had a chisel put into his hand, and Equiano had a compass put into his hands, Prince had babies thrust into her hands. We should not take these examples of women taking care of babies as rare cases, either. When assigning slaves to different jobs, gender was a primary determining characteristic, which helped slave masters decide how to divide up the labor. In fact, Mary Prince herself, obviously a reliable source on the division of labor among slaves and on slave life in general, says that her account may stand as a representative sample of the horrid living conditions of other slaves. She writes in excruciating evocative detail, “Mr. D____ has often stripped me naked, hung me up by the wrists, and beat me with the cow-skin with his own hand, till my body was raw with gashes. Yet there was nothing very remarkable in this; for it might serve as a sample of the common usage of slaves on that horrible island” (Prince 224).


This type of language is often used in slave narratives. The authors want to assure us that their experiences suffering through slavery are not all that unique, but that many millions of other black people were being treated just as badly and suffering just as badly under the cruel system of slavery. Thus, readers sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, whether in America, Britain, or elsewhere, were motivated to do all they could to free the slaves. Unfair treatment based on gender was probably of a secondary concern both to the authors of slave narratives and also to the abolitionists, but the modern reader can see in these slave narratives startling discrepancies between the way women are portrayed and treated and the way men are portrayed and treated. Clearly gender is represented in these narratives not only through the language used to describe and confine the sexes, but by the division of labor. The division of labor among the slaves is so arranged as to enforce an idea that there are fundamental differences between the sexes. That is, that women ought to be in the home, taking care of children, while men are better suited to other tasks requiring physical labor, usually outdoors.


Gender is also represented differently in these narratives when it comes to fighting. All these narratives include relations of episodes of violence. Frequent incidents of violence are not surprising. Indeed, slavery required violence to keep the slaves down, and I would venture to guess that domestic violence was more common in the slavery era than it is currently. But the way that the violence is portrayed is telling of notions of gender in America in the nineteenth century. I want to look particularly at a fight recorded by Elizabeth Keckley and a fight recorded by Frederick Douglass. Keckley describes her long physical struggle with Mr. Bingham, a man who was not her master but who was just a neighborhood man, a member of the church that her master preached at. One day, Mr. Bingham corners Keckley and commands her to take off her dress so that he may flog her. Keckley begins her account of the fight by writing of the impropriety of undressing in front of a man. “Recollect, I was eighteen years of age, was a woman fully developed, and yet this man coolly bade me take down my dress” (33). One can hear the disapproving tone in her voice. Mr. Bingham continues his cruel advances, and Keckley writes, “I resisted with all my strength, but he was the stronger of the two, and after a hard struggle, succeeded in binding my hands and tearing my dress from my back” (34). The confrontation is not portrayed like a sports announcer’s play by play coverage of a boxing match. There isn’t much detail of the struggle at all, really. Also, she does not hesitate to admit that she was physically weaker than Mr. Bingham.


Frederick Douglass, on the other hand, devotes much of his narrative to telling the reader all about his fights with some of his slave masters. One fight in particular is especially long and drawn out. He gives his readers the most-likely exaggerated details of the epic bout between him and an especially cruel slave master, Mr. Covey. Douglass writes:

“Mr. Covey entered the stable with a long rope; and just as I was half out of the loft, he caught hold of my legs, and was about tying me. As soon as I found what he was up to, I gave a sudden spring, and as I did so, he holding to my legs, I was brought sprawling on the stable floor… I resolved to fight… I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose. He held on to me, and I to him. My resistance was so entirely unexpected, that Covey seemed taken all aback. He trembled like a leaf. This gave me assurance, and I held him uneasy, causing the blood to run where I touched him with the ends of my fingers” (845).

Douglass then gives more and more details about the long, drawn-out fight. He then makes sure to assure the readers, in case they were in doubt as to who actually won the fight, “The truth was, that he [Mr. Covey] had not whipped me at all. I considered him as getting entirely the worst end of the bargain; for he had drawn no blood from me, but I had from him” (845). Douglass is actively constructing his own identity as a powerful male by gloating about his physical powers. Rather than give readers a brief glimpse of his bodily conflicts, as Keckley does, Douglass offers the readers a dramatic, detailed play-by-play account of how he beat up another man, and he makes sure that the audience knows who the manly winner is. Douglass puts more emphasis and significance on the confrontation with Mr. Covey than perhaps is entirely honest. Douglass writes that his increased strength and resolve comes mostly from that single fight. He writes of his confrontation with Covey, “This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood… I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact” (845). Keckley, on the other hand, becomes free not through brute force. She does not make a physical confrontation the climax to her narrative. Rather, Keckley becomes free by making dresses in her spare time and saving up enough money until she can eventually buy her freedom- hardly the masculine road to freedom that Douglass claims.


Also, in contrast to Douglass’ masculine bravado, Keckley does not brag about her ability to clobber somebody else. She talks about her fights matter-of-factly, and the way she ultimately “won” one of her fights is also telling. (I have put “won” in quotation marks because, plainly speaking, she lost the fight, but from the struggle Keckley gained a certain amount of peace thereafter.) She wins not through physical prowess, a demonstration of her bodily powers, but through her ability to cause others to feel pity. Whereas Douglass appeals to punches, kicks and strangleholds to persuade his opponents, Keckley uses pathos. Also notice again how little detail Keckley adds to the fight in this passage, as if she is not as interested in the bloody details of fighting as Douglass is: “One morning he [Mr. Bingham] went to the wood-pile, took an oak broom, cut the handle off, and with this heavy handle attempted to conquer me. I fought him, but he proved the strongest. At the sight of my bleeding form, his wife fell upon her knees and begged him to desist. My distress even touched her cold, jealous heart” (Keckley 37, 38). It was only by the pathetic sight of her bruised and damaged body that her masters were persuaded to stop beating her. She was physically incapable of overpowering her tormenters.


From these brief examples, we can see that male and female slaves generally represented themselves in different ways, according to gender. The female slave narratives often told of sexual violence that they underwent, whereas male slave narratives make no mention of it. Though it’s probably safe to assume that the rape or sexual assault of male slaves did occur in the antebellum South or in some of the British colonies, I have not yet encountered a male slave narrative that treats this subject. Also, black enslaved women were more often confined to housework. They were forced to be maids, cooks, and nannies, whereas the males were mostly made to work outside, and were often taught trades, such as carpentry, blacksmithing, or sailing. These experiences of work, this division of labor based on gender, heavily influenced the way that male and female slaves considered themselves and constructed their own identities. For, to a large extent, we are what we do. The labor that we spend much of our lives performing heavily influences our concept of Self. It was no different for Elizabeth Keckley, Frederick Douglass, and others. They were taught that it was “natural” for women to be confined to domestic affairs and that it was “natural” for men to be engaged in work outside the home. How “natural” these gender roles are was not so much based on biological evidence, but on human constructions, social institutions of a bygone era and on mores that subtly and slowly indoctrinate to people the supposedly innate differences between the sexes. Male and female slaves also represent themselves differently when they write about fights. Male slaves tended to embellish fights, give plenty of details about them, and boast about their own strength, while the female narratives haven’t concentrated so much on those things.


Gender certainly is represented differently by the authors of these slave narratives. But one thing that the authors of all these narratives have in common, regardless of their gender, is their enormous sense of dignity. Even though they have been abused and subjected to the unspeakable ills of a horrid system of slavery based on race, each one of them has, one way or another, come out of the experience free and strong, ready to fight for the end of slavery. It was necessary to overthrow the cruel system of slavery before a more progressive view of gender roles and identity could be sought after.

Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.” The American
Tradition in Literature. 9th ed. Eds. George Perkins and Barbara Perkins. New York: Mc-Graw-Hill College 1999. 833-845.

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1973.

Keckley, Elizabeth. Behind the Scenes: Thrity Years a Slave and Four Years in the
White House. New York: Arno Press,1968.

Prince, Mary. “The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself.”
The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Vol. 2A 3rd ed. Eds. Susan Wolfson and Peter Manning. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. 219-224.



A Postcolonial View of Ethnographies

The first ethnographies of the New World were not written by anthropologists. The earliest accounts of the native peoples, such as those by Christopher Columbus, were written by European explorers and conquerors. Both postcolonial critics and modern casual readers of early accounts, which can serve as proto-ethnographies, can easily see in those documents the reflections of a racist, imperialist ideology. As the centuries have passed, and as anthropology as an academic discipline has emerged, new accounts of “native” or “primitive” peoples have been created. But how different are the twentieth century accounts from the earlier accounts? Over the years, how much have those racist and backward ideologies been weeded out through academic rigor and a quest for neutrality? How successful have academics been in escaping their own ideologies as they attempt to describe other cultures? Western cultural anthropologists have a long way to go before their ethnographies are free of dominant polarizing ideologies, ideologies that, without actually using the words “civilized” and “barbarous,” reinforce those antiquated notions. If cultural anthropologists who write ethnographies cannot describe indigenous peoples without abandoning or suppressing such ideologies, then they should simply stay home.


The writings of Christopher Columbus are replete with demeaning depictions of Native Americans. He characterizes them variously as being easy to be fooled, easy to be conquered, docile, and as ripe for Christian conversion and enslavement. In short, Columbus characterizes them as perfect human fodder for an expanding Empire. For example, in his log chronicling his first voyage to the New World, in the entry dated October 12th, 1492, Columbus writes about the indigenous people of the Bahamas. “They are friendly and well-dispositioned people who bare no arms except for small spears, and they have no iron. I showed one my sword, and through ignorance he grabbed it by the blade and cut himself” (The Log of Christopher Columbus 76). Columbus also describes the people as being more than willing to give up their possessions to the men from the Old World. “This afternoon the people of San Salvador came swimming to our ships and in boats made from one log. They brought us parrots, balls of cotton thread, spears, and many other things, including a kind of dry leaf that they hold in great esteem. For these items we swapped them little glass beads and hawks’ bells” (76). Not noticing the people’s foreign spirituality, Columbus also depicts the Native Americans as irreligious. He writes, “I think they can easily be made Christians, for they seem to have no religion. If it pleases Our Lord, I will take six of them to Your Highness when I depart, in order that they may learn our language.” (77) It is clear from these quotes, and others not listed here, that Columbus was not very interested in the culture of the people he encountered. He was not careful enough to notice their non-Christian spirituality, but he did manage to find time to notice their domicile character and their bad bargaining abilities. Columbus had no intention of leaving the island and its inhabitants the way he found it, or of staying aloof from the foreign culture that he found. Instead, he seems to have no reservations about taking possession of islands and all their contents, and he expresses no inner moral qualms about taking some of the natives back to Spain, though he cannot understand the natives’ language, and therefore could not get the natives informed consent. Notice that Columbus never considers learning the native language of the people he finds. Rather, he assumes that the natives ought to learn Spanish, in addition to Christianity and submission to the Spanish crown.


The same sort of rhetoric concerning Columbus’ natives can be found in many different travel texts and in many different descriptions of the manners and customs of indigenous peoples of Africa, Australia, North America, South America, hundreds of islands of the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, and just about anywhere that European explorers/conquerors encountered indigenous people. More than three centuries after Columbus described the Native Americans in his log, John Barrow describes the Bushmen in his book, An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa in the Years 1797 and 1798. While European contemporaries of Barrow might have not found anything offensive about the description of the Bushmen in his travel narrative, modern readers have taken issue with the ideology that is reflected in Barrow’s account.


Mary Louise Pratt, a modern scholar operating from a postcolonial perspective, criticizes Barrow’s descriptions of the Bushmen. Pratt explains that Barrow did not describe the indigenous people of Southern Africa as people possessing a fluid, diverse culture, but rather he depicted them as a fixed subject, bound in time and space. Such a description was a stark contrast to Barrow’s representation of his own culture, which was more “civilized,” objective, and free to traverse time and space. Barrow provided for his European audience a product description of his fixed subject, which description consisted of a neatly defined list of characteristics. These enumerated characteristics usually have to do with how simple the Bushmen are, and how easy they are to conquer, much like Columbus’ descriptions of the indigenous people of the Bahamas. Pratt quotes and criticizes Barrow’s description of the quintessential Bushman, “In his disposition he is lively and cheerful.” (An Account of Travels… 119) Pratt explains that, much like other descriptions of native peoples, Barrow reduces the diverse, plentiful population he encounters to a fixed ‘they’ and then reduces the fixed ‘they’ into a fixed ‘he.’ The ‘he’ that Barrow describes is “the standardized adult male specimen” (Pratt 120) and is meant to act as a representative sample of the rest of the population.


Drawbacks to descriptions like these are obvious. Descriptions that oversimplify a culture, that virtually ignore the diversity among peoples, and that ignore differences among a group of people caused by age, gender, social standing, genetic differences, and by plain individual personalities, do a disservice to the people being described, do a disservice to the people reading or hearing the description, and ultimately do a disservice to the describers.


In addition to distilling a complex culture into a single “standardized male specimen” (Scratches on the Face… 120) Barrow did not devote very many pages to the people he encountered. Much more of the book is devoted to the weather, the natural resources, the environment, the geography, and the course taken by Barrow and his men. An attempt on Barrow’s part to understand the complex social or psychological workings of the people was not made. Barrow wrote about the Bushmen as not being too different than the bushes and trees he took extensive note of, for to Barrow, both the people and the vegetation were both merely products of the natural world. The same complaint can be made of Christopher Columbus’ log. Columbus spends pages and pages writing about the directions he took, the sailing conditions during his journey, and the distances between islands. In one sense, Columbus’ lack of interest in the culture of the people he conquered is not surprising. Columbus wrote about practical matters that would be useful to further exploration and empire-building. He construed his voyages in such a way as to please the sponsors of his journey, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Likewise, Barrow wrote about what would appeal to his European audience, who were less interested in appreciating a foreign culture than they were in hearing about how the British Empire could be expanded.


Pratt points out that nearly no interaction between Barrow and the Bushmen is described. It is as if Barrow, as he writes his account, takes himself out of the equation, and is free to describe, categorize, and assume things about the people he encounters, but does not give himself or his crew the same scrutinizing treatment. The explorers present themselves as free to be the describers of the Other, and as the nearly omniscient narrators of reality. Pratt writes that in Barrow’s narrative, “The cold is presented chiefly as a fact about the weather, not as a discomfort they endured” (123). Thus, even though the book is essentially a personal narrative, a description of a man’s journey through a relatively unexplored part of Africa, Barrow portrays himself as something like an encyclopedia writer: objective, neutral, and scientific. He practically writes in third person and in passive voice, so that Barrow is not percieved as doing the action; rather, he is perceived as just reporting on the action that has been done.


More than a century after Barrow’s exploration into Southern Africa, Franz Boas becomes a pioneer in the academic field of anthropology. Boas attempts to apply the scientific method, previously used for studying the natural world, to the study of humans. As part of his and other anthropologists’ research, it was required to do “fieldwork.” Cultural anthropologists were to leave their university, move to a distant land, and write ethnographies of the people they found. As part of the cultural immersion process, cultural anthropologists doing field work were supposed to learn the language of the people and, as objectively as possible, write a description of the culture.


My question is, with respect to ideology and motivation, how different are the proto-ethnographies of Christopher Columbus and John Barrow from the ethnographies of modern cultural anthropologists? To be fair, the motivations and concerns of the modern cultural anthropologist are obviously very different from the motivations and concerns of colonizers. Columbus and Barrow journeyed to faraway lands because they were interested in making a profit, in building an empire, and in fundamentally changing the culture of the people they encountered. Perhaps subconsciously, colonizers also were interested in creating the Self and the Other. When they interacted with indigenous peoples, wrote about them, and told tall tales about them, the colonizers were comparing their own “civilized” culture to the “primitive” culture they “discovered.” Anthropologists, on the other hand, are not out for a profit, but often find themselves thousands of miles from home in an attempt to gain more knowledge about the cultures of the world and about human nature. They are not interested in changing the cultures of the people they study. Anthropologists are not missionaries or conquerors; instead they are supposed to be passive observers, interfering with a people’s normal lives as little as possible. But the fieldwork of Western anthropologists is also motivated by an egotistical desire to compare oneself to those of a more “primitive” culture. Much like Columbus, Barrow, and others did, modern anthropologists take comfort in defining themselves in comparison to the Other.


Argonauts of the Western Pacific, by Bronislaw Malinowski, is a modern ethnography which exemplifies the type of egoism that enjoys the comparing of one’s own culture to another culture and determining which one is “superior”. In that extensive work, Malinowski reports extensively on the customs of the indigenous peoples of the islands of New Guinea. According to James Clifford, Malinowski’s years-long research among the islanders rejects “a certain style of research: living among fellow whites, calling up ‘informants’ to talk culture in an encampment or on a verandah, sallying forth to ‘do the village.’ The fieldwork Malinowski dramatized required one to live full time in the village, learn the language, and be a seriously involved participant observer” (Travelling Cultures 97,98). Indeed, in Malinowski’s Introduction, he describes how he lived among the natives, learned their language, and, as much as possible, became a part of the tribe he was studying. Malinowski assures his readers that he “acquired ‘the feeling’ for native good and bad manners. With this, and with the capacity of enjoying their company and sharing some of their games and amusements, I began to feel that I was indeed in touch with the natives” (Argonauts of the Western Pacific 8).


In some ways, I applaud Malinowski’s attempt to respect the culture he is studying. Unlike Columbus, Malinowski learns the native language. He does not take an army of men with him to convert the Argonauts to Western ways; rather he goes alone, unarmed. But in other ways, despite his stated intentions for scientific progress and humanistic exploration, Malinowski still carries with him some of the dominant ideology that has motivated colonizers of bygone eras to travel to distant lands. For example, I noticed that Malinowski does not thank the native people of New Guinea in his Foreword or in his Acknowledgements. He thanks those who financially sponsored his research, he thanks some of his past anthropology professors, he thanks fellow researchers who have given him feedback on his manuscript, and plenty of other white men, but he does not thank the people of New Guinea, the people he lived with and studied. Perhaps he did not include them in his expressions of gratitude because he knew that the Argonauts would most likely never read the published book. Still, thanking them would have been a nice gesture. A thank-you would have helped to characterize the Argonauts as people, rather than merely as test subjects, which is how much of the book tends to treat the natives and their village; the village is like a science laboratory and the people are like rats that are experimented upon. Their movements are tracked, and their behavior is meticulously written down. Surely Malinowski would have put the indigenous people under a microscope, if he had had a microscope large enough.


Malinowski also readily terms the natives of the islands he visits, “savages,” and calls their homeland “savage countries” (xv). Perhaps we can dismiss that offensive-sounding terminology as only being part of the nomenclature of the 1920s, and not an expression of Malinowski’s bigoted attitudes towards non-Western people.


Another passage, though, from Argonauts of the Western Pacific struck me as reinforcing the supposed superiority of Western, “civilized” culture. Malinowski writes, “the native is not the natural companion for a white man, and after you have been working with him for several hours, seeing how he does his gardens, or letting him tell you items of folk-lore, or discussing his customs, you will naturally hanker after the company of your own kind” (7). In other words, Malinowski emphasizes that there is an inherent difference between “us” and “them,” between “Self” and “Other.” And an exposure to those inherent differences between the native and the white man, Malinowski leads us to believe, encourages one to quickly realize that the culture of the white man’s or anthropologist’s culture is more naturally enjoyable than native culture.


Malinowski’s mammoth ethnography was published in 1922, and since then, fieldwork of cultural anthropologists has continued. The emergence of postcolonial studies, though, has surely helped to refine the attitudes of those who undertake the study of human culture. Cultural anthropologists are starting to turn the scientific eye upon their own cultures. For example, when Dr. Matthews, and English professor at Northern Arizona University, considered majoring in anthropology at the University of London in the 1970s, the admissions counselors told her that she would not be sent to a remote island or a “third-world country” to study so-called “primitive” peoples. Rather, they would send her back to her home country of Scotland, to study her own people. Such was the progressive attitude of the University of London. In a similar vein, Cathy Small, a professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University, wrote an ethnography of the University at which she teaches. She disguised herself as a freshman, lived in a dormitory, ate at the campus cafeteria, enrolled as a full-time student, and otherwise lived as a college freshman at NAU. The book that resulted was My Freshman Year: What A Professor Learned by Becoming a Student. That type of research marks a great departure from the descriptions and “ethnographies” of Columbus, Barrow, and even Malinowski.


In my view, postcolonial studies and a burgeoning general political awareness of the atrocities attendant to colonialism have helped to make the work of cultural anthropologists more ethical. James Clifford has additional suggestions about how ethnographers should study other cultures and write ethnographies in a way that does not perpetuate the binary of “Self” and “Other,” and in a way that is more honest and respectful. In Travelling Cultures, Clifford recommends the inclusion of four elements that are too often left out of ethnographies: 1) transportation; that is, how the researcher got to the “field” or the “village.” 2) the capital city of the ethnographer; that is, the culture and ideology from which the fieldworker originates. 3) the University home of the ethnographer, and 4) “the sites and relations of translation;” that is, a more thorough discussion of the process of how the information was gathered, because typically translators and informants are either minimized or left out altogether of accounts (Travelling Cultures 100). In effect, by asking ethnographers to include these four elements in their accounts, Clifford is asking them to do exactly the opposite of what Barrow did in his description of the Bushmen. Clifford wants ethnographers to include themselves in their narratives, to refrain from feigning an objectivity which often implies Western superiority over “primitive” peoples.


In addition to Clifford’s advice, I have some recommendations of my own for cultural anthropologists who wish to study a culture which appears very different than their own. I do not dismiss the academic discipline of cultural anthropology and the practice of cross-cultural comparison altogether because it has in the past tended to perpetuate colonial idiologies. I, like James Clifford, and like Bronislaw Malinowski, believe that much good information and many good ideas have peacefully spawned from anthropologists doing fieldwork and writing ethnographies. In the words of Malinowski, this work has allowed “students of comparative Ethnology [to draw] some very important conclusions on the origin of human customs, beliefs and institutions; on the history of cultures, and their spread and contact; on the laws of human behavior in society, and of the human mind” (Argonauts of the Western Pacific xv).


I recommend that anthropologists adopt an attitude of humility when approaching another culture. I recommend a willingness to subject themselves and their culture to the same sort of scrutiny that they are imposing on other cultures. An attitude such as this will go a long way in destroying the racist and imperialist discourses of the past and in opening up a more progressive type of anthropological fieldwork. If an attitude of humility is not espoused, then it would be better for all parties involved if anthropologists simply stayed home to either study their own culture or selected a new intellectual hobby.

Works Cited

Clifford, James. Travelling Cultures (I could not find the rest of the citation.)


Columbus, Christopher. The Log of Christopher Columbus. Trans. Robert H. Fuson. Camden,
Maine: International Marine Publishing Company, 1987.


Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.,
1961.


Platt, Mary Louise. “Scratches on the Face of the Country; Or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen.” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 119-143


Pedagogical Gold: Teaching Jews Without Money at the Secondary Level

As far as I can tell, Jews Without Money by Michael Gold has not been taught at the secondary level. It may have been taught in American high schools, most likely in the 1930s or the 1960s, but if it was taught, I have found no evidence for it. However, a very similar book, in content, style, and political agenda, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, has been widely taught in many public high schools, and has received mixed reactions from parents, students, teachers, and administrators. Because of the similarities between the two books, some of the lessons learned from teaching The Jungle can be applied to the potential teaching of Jews Without Money. This paper will explore the possibility of including Jews Without Money in a high school curriculum, and will argue for the positive benefits that would result from such an inclusion.

The teaching of The Jungle has been challenged in some schools. To be fair, there is much about the book to make parents and administrators wary of an English teacher teaching it. For example, there are gruesome details of the conditions of the turn of the century Chicago meatpacking industry, the criticism of capitalism, the endorsement of socialism, and the “unpatriotic” life of the author. But, as long as teachers handle controversial texts well, there is not much reason for parents to be concerned. By and large, The Jungle has been successfully incorporated into thousands of public high school English classrooms, which leads me to believe that an equally controversial book, Jews Without Money, could also be successfully taught.
Of course, a teacher should not teach a controversial book just for the sake of being controversial. English teachers must have a sound rationale ready for parents or administrators who challenge the worth or appropriateness of teaching material that might push the envelope.

One justification for teaching the book is that, in the hands of a wise teacher, Jews Without Money can help students fulfill state and national standards. The National Council of the Teachers of English(NCTE) and the International Reading Association(IRA) have published twelve standards to guide Language Arts instruction. These standards have been adopted by many English teachers across the country who use these standards to plan and justify curriculums. Among these standards are number two: “Students read a wide range of literature from many periods in many genres to build an understanding of the many dimensions (e.g., philosophical, ethical, aesthetic) of human experience.” Clearly, teaching Jews Without Money provides students with an understanding of a world different than their own. By studying Jews Without Money, Non-Jewish students will begin to appreciate what it’s like to be Jewish, upper-class students will begin to appreciate what it’s like to be lower-class, and rural-dwelling students will begin to appreciate what it’s like to be urban-dwelling, particularly what it’s like to live in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early twentieth century. Jews Without Money also lends itself to fulfilling ninth NCTE/IRA standard: “Students develop an understanding of and respect for diversity in language use, patterns, and dialects across cultures, ethnic groups, geographic regions, and social roles.”

In addition to national standards, the teaching of Mike Gold’s novel can also be used to fulfill state standards for language arts instruction. Standards vary from state to state, but on a certain level, all state standards have the same focus. All the state standards in language arts instruction have to do with reading and writing at a certain proficiency level. Realistically, as long as a teacher is familiar with the state standards, then he or she can use them to justify the teaching of just about any well-written book, because any well-written book provides the raw linguistic material for students to learn from.

Because of the nature of language arts as a discipline, the standards for language arts instruction are less content-driven and more skills-driven. What books in particular are being read in high school classrooms doesn’t matter so much as the fact that books are actually being read. Whereas other subjects, such as history, have standards that require students to learn certain specific subject matter, as expressed in this Arizona state standard for a high school American History class: “Concept 4: Revolution and New Nation PO 1. Assess the economic, political, and social reasons for the American Revolution: a. British attempts to tax and regulate colonial trade as a result of the French and Indian War b. colonists’ reaction to British policy ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence.”

If particular subject matter is not required of English classrooms by the curriculum-makers that be, (e.g. textbook writers, standardized test creators, state and federal standard writers) then individual English teachers and English departments can enjoy the autonomy to choose which books will best help their students meet the standards. That said, the question becomes, “If nearly any well-written book will do, then why should a teacher pick a controversial text? Why don’t teachers stick to texts that are least likely to offend anyone, if all texts have the potential to teach students English?” My response is that English teachers should do all they can to provide students with reading material that is interesting. And “interesting” oftentimes means “controversial”. Also, it’s helpful to look at the justification for teaching sensitive course material at the University setting. Northern Arizona University provides this statement in many of its course syllabi: "University education aims to expand student understanding and awareness.
Thus, it necessarily involves engagement with a wide range of information, ideas, and creative representations. In the course of college studies, students can expect to encounter -- and critically appraise -- materials that may differ from and perhaps challenge familiar understandings, ideas, and beliefs. Students are encouraged to discuss these matters with faculty." The same type of statement could easily be applied to secondary education.

Also, parents and students should understand that reading controversial subject matter does not automatically convert one to a particular ideology. Exposure to controversial texts can actually help to reinforce traditional beliefs. For example, after reading Jews Without Money, a faithful Christian student could just as easily have his faith steadied as he could have his faith waver. Or, his faith could not remain unaffected. Likewise, a proponent of capitalism will most likely remain a proponent of capitalism after reading Gold’s book. (The author of this paper, by the way, is a fan of capitalism, and also a fan of Jews Without Money.)

Jews Without Money is a book that can easily interest today’s high school students. The book brings up so many hot-button issues that would be good to talk about in a high school English class, like race, class, gender, religion, socio-economic status, economic systems, the justification of strikes, government, social mobility, nurture vs. nature, the authenticity of autobiographies, and the list goes on and on. Several essay prompts or discussion questions spring to mind: What does Michael Gold have to say about gender in Jews Without Money? How does he portray and talk about males and females differently? How do Gold’s experiences growing up compare to your experiences growing up? Do you think you would be pretty much the same person as you are now if you had grown up in the same sort of situation that Michael Gold grew up in? What does Jews Without Money say about nature? Find examples in the book of Gold’s thoughts on nature, like the weeds growing between the cracks in the sidewalk, and the whole “Mushrooms in Bronx Park” chapter. Do you think it’s biologically and spiritually healthy for humans to live in tenements in crowded cities, or are humans better off living on a farm or a ranch, or at least in a house with a yard? Gold pretty clearly endorses communism at the end of the autobiographical novel. Does that view hurt the literary value of the book? What are the problems that Gold brings up in his novel? What are the solutions to those problems? How do your solutions differ from Gold’s solutions?

Open-ended prompts like these will allow students to think critically about a number of issues. Questions like these will get students to read the book closely and learn how to integrate English ideas such as motifs, themes, author’s intent, symbolism, and etc. into their essays. Questions like these will also help students relate their learning to other content they are learning in other classes. Also, for those schools that encourage team-teaching and interdisciplinary collaboration, Jews Without Money could be taught in conjunction with an American History course, or a government/ economics course, social studies, or a journalism course. The non-fiction subject matter of the book lends itself to an interdisciplinary treatment.

A study of Jews Without Money provides students with an opportunity to practice and refine their scholastic skills, and it will help them to become aware of the plight of minorities and lower classes. This is important because part of the purpose of an education is to make people aware of the world outside of one’s immediate surroundings. I feel that it is important that students understand that the events that are chronicled in Jews Without Money aren’t outdated or irrelevant to today’s society. On the contrary, the issues in Gold’s book are current. We still have the poor among us, and we still have immigrants facing challenges in the workplace, but now instead of Jewish or Italian immigrants bearing the brunt of unethical, greedy capitalism, we have Latino immigrants, usually undocumented workers, doing the dirty work.

What Christopher Phelps says about the relevancy of The Jungle can be applied to the relevancy of Jews Without Money: “Today the meatpacking work force once again consists largely of vulnerable new immigrants, arriving from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, in contrast to the Eastern Europe of Sinclair's time. Were The Jungle written today, the name Jurgis Rudkus would have to be replaced by José Ramirez. Would much else need to be changed?”
Jews Without Money, like The Jungle, could be taught as a step in American progress. We can say to our students, when we’ve complete reading the book, “Look how far our country has come since the 1930s. Look how tenement housing has been improved. Look how the process of getting a loan for a home has improved. Look how child labor laws and labor unions have improved working conditions.” We could also use the book to draw attention to the injustices that still prevail in much of the world, both foreign and domestic. Even though the book itself has a political agenda, we don’t have to teach our students to subscribe to the agenda the book puts forth. Teachers can effectively say, “Look, these are the ideas of Michael Gold. There are a lot of other ideas by a lot of other people. Let’s compare, contrast, and discuss them.”

Uncomfortable confrontations can usually be avoided if teachers are ready with a rationale for teaching a potentially controversial book, such as a rationale as outlined above. But there are additional measures teachers can take to safeguard themselves against controversy. One thing teachers can do is establish a reputation as a high-quality teacher before teaching a controversial book. It’s probably not the best idea to teach Jews Without Money during one’s first year of teaching, or during the first year in a new school district. It’s probably safer to stick to materials found in textbooks and anthologies specifically designed for high school, and to teach books that have already been taught by colleagues.

Also, teachers should ensure that they have the backing of the administration before attempting to teach any book.

Teachers can also avoid controversy if they postpone teaching a controversial book until late in the school year, when the students are more prepared for it. Many teachers distribute a list of the books the students will read at the beginning of the semester and have the parents sign a contract saying that they approve of the books their child will be reading. Overall, being upfront, honest, friendly, and transparent will go a long way to help teachers avoid controversy while teaching potentially controversial books. Those positive traits will also help students get the most out of their time in an English classroom.

Teachers can avoid marking themselves as political radicals if they teach controversial texts in addition to books already well-known and accepted, like Lord of the Flies and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It might also be a good idea to incorporate patriotic activities into one’s curriculum, such as having students memorizes the preamble to the Constitution, or having a large portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the wall.

Moving on, what is it in Jews Without Money that has the potential to get parents dialing the principal’s number and demanding an English teacher’s resignation or termination? First off, one of the early chapters, Fifty Cents a Night, is about the work of prostitutes. While it does not detail sex very explicitly, it does deal with prostitution in a very blunt way. Also, the nickname of one of Mikey’s friends is a racial slur, the n-word, and that word was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn being banned in some cases. But perhaps the most controversial aspect of the book, though, would be the ending, with its clear endorsement of socialism/communism and rejection of religion. Gold calls the worker’s revolution “the true Messiah” (Gold 309). It is best for teachers to be aware of the potential issues well ahead of time, so that teachers can be ready to answer any complaints. A list of all the book’s potentially troublesome characteristics in this paper is not necessary.

I would like to close with a larger reason why teaching a book like Jews Without Money is worthwhile. Cary Nelson, in his book Repression and Recovery, says that both McCarthyism and New Criticism sensibilities have silenced so much of proletarian literature that huge portions of left-leaning poetry and prose have been completely forgotten. But that which has been forgotten is a part of our American culture and history. Nelson recommends that in order to see a fuller picture of America, much work needs to be done to resurrect some of the work of wonderful writers from the first half of the twentieth century. It is my opinion that a public high school is a worthy hub of dissemination for proletarian literature.

Works Cited

Gold, Michael. Jews Without Money. New York: Carroll & Graff Publishers, 2004.

Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural
Memory 1910-1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Phelps, Christopher. “How Should We Teach ‘The Jungle’?” Chronicle of Higher Education v.
52.26 (2006): 10-12.

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Heritage Press, 1965.


Sincerely,
Telemoonfa