How-To: Use This Blog

This blog will be dedicated to our weekly discussions and assigned posts. In order to see this blog at all, you need to log in. You should also have received an "invitation" to participate from me, at your Marymount email address; this invitation gives you instructions on how to obtain the Google account necessary for access to Blogger. It is all free--it just takes a bit of finger-work to set up.

Once you've successfully logged in to our weblog, you should note that you have been granted "author" status; that means that you can contribute to the blog, help create it and shape its direction. A large part of that collaborative writing will be your individual posts. Each student is required to make at least one substantial post per week, of no less than 500 words. This blog should provide a place for us to test ideas before we commit to them; explore unconventional or unexpected reading strategies; comment on important ideas developing throughout the term; and record our progress through the assigned material.

To make your posts, you may either create a new post or comment on another post. Each posting box has a couple of key features--a space for a title, a rich-text enabled composition box, and a space for post "labels" (think of them as index entries). Each of these three key spaces must be completed.

Titles should be interesting and informative. Think of it as practice for your formal essays. These titles also form the top-level archive entry system for our blog, so we need to be able to tell what any given entry is really about!

The composition box is rich-text enabled, meaning you can bold and italicize, spell-check, add links and pictures, change your font and colors, and so on, much as in Microsoft Word. Here you type the actual content of your weekly posts.

Labels are very important elements of this blog--these allow us to quickly search and organize by "subject heading," as it were. All your posts need to be labeled--you should always label by the last name of the author(s) you're working with (RICHARDSON, HAYWOOD, and so on), but you may add additional broad-subject labels as you see them evolving over time. For instance, if you're very interested in feminist theory and criticism, you might want to label any posts having to do with FEMINISM. As you complete your posts, you will begin to note that possible labels appear magically as you type them--you can accept these, or create new ones. See all the labels in the blog DASHBOARD.

Once you've completed your post, you should PUBLISH it; you can also SAVE it AS DRAFT, and come back later to finish it. You can have many different drafts going at once. You can also go back and edit any previous posts.

A final word on netiquette and classroom decorum

Unless it is necessary for your posts, please do not use any smileys or IM abbreviations. Please do not use all-caps, as in large chunks it is difficult to read and implies that you're YELLING! Please do be considerate of all your peers and their thoughts, as well as your instructor. While this is a space for critique and constructive criticism, it is not a space for flaming. If you are routinely inconsiderate, I will eject you from this blog and a large portion of your grade will be recorded as an "F." All posts must be completed in a timely fashion; late posts will be marked down. And finally, please consider this a semi-formal writing space; please do spell correctly and write in complete, grammatical sentences!

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Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688)

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf notably suggested that:

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn...,for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she—shady and amorous as she was—who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you to–night: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.

Condemned as both a "punk" and a "poetess" (you should look the first word up in the OED if you're not sure how it's being used), she was the first woman author to make a living by the very "female pen" she describes in Oroonoko, the second text we'll be reading this term. Though many of you may have already encountered during your undergraduate career, we will be paying particular attention to the text as an early representative of the modern novel in addition to the complexities of its ideological positions. Information on Behn's biography and cultural/historical context is available via the Literature Resource Center, accessible both to the right of this page and on our Blackboard site.

As you read, consider the following questions:

1. Behn seems to take up a large part of the beginning of Oroonoko with elaborate physical descriptions of both Oroonoko (Caesar) and Imoinda. What do these descriptions suggest to you? Why do you think the narrator describes Oroonoko and Imoinda this way? How are the other slaves described? What are the differences in these descriptions from those of Oroonoko and Imoinda?
2. Who is the narrator of Oroonoko? Is she a character in the novel? What do you imagine her position in society to be? What do you think her attitude toward slavery is? How do you know? Do there seem to be contradictions in her attitude? What are they? How does she characterize her relationship to Oroonoko—and what do you think it actually is?
3. Throughout this novel, the narrator carefully foregrounds issues of accurate representation. Pay attention to the places where the narrator mentions lying, vow-breaking, promises, the historical truth, and her ability to represent the story accurately—or at all. Where does the narrator reference tale-telling, and under what circumstances? Why is the narrator telling this tale? How might names and naming play into this? Throughout the text, consider who has the ability to name—things, people, and so on.
4. In Oroonoko, “wit” and “learning” are frequently discussed. Which characters are explicitly described as witty or learned? How does the text seem to treat wittiness, learning, knowledge? What are the differences between them? Is either Oroonoko or Imoinda treated as particularly witty? Learned? Knowledgeable? What about the narrator?
5. Critics have historically associated “the novel” with the middle class and middle class consciousness; “the romance” with the feminine and aristocratic; “the epic” with the masculine and aristocratic. What elements of this text strike you as “middle class,” and why? What elements are more “elevated” or “aristocratic”? More gendered? With what class—either economic or generic—does the narrator’s conception of value and worth seem to lie?
6. What is the role of violence in this text? Characterize the moments when violence is particularly apparent—what is unique or unexpected about the nature of this violence?
7. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the national economy was increasingly underwritten by traffic in human flesh; wealth was built on the backs of slaves. How does Behn’s narrator seem to treat the traffic in human flesh? As the text was read and re-read over time, and especially during periods invested in abolitionist discourse, it came to be treated as an “anti-slavery” novel—though currently, that analysis is being complicated. What do you think? Is this an anti-slavery novel? Or is the question that simple?
8. After reading the end of the text, go back to the beginning—what insights do you gain? Reexamine question #1. Do you have any new insights?

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Eliza Haywood, Fantomina (1724)

The first reading for this class will be Eliza Haywood's fiction of amorous intrigue, Fantomina, first published in 1724. At the height of her career, Haywood was--along with Daniel Defoe--one of the best-selling authors in England. She was well-known as a writer of "romance" "novels," the nature of which we'll discuss in class. The text of Fantomina is available on our Blackboard site, accompanied by a useful introductory essay by John Richetti. You may also want to see what's available on Haywood in the Literature Resource Center (login required), or read a brief biography. "Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century England," a website put together by students at the University of Michigan, also gives an interactive overview of female authorship during the century, starting with Haywood.

As you read, consider some of the following questions:

1. What different roles does Fantomina take, and how do they seem to relate to or build upon each other? Why do you think she takes these roles, as opposed to any others? What forms of agency or power does each character have or seem to have in the text? Why does she change her name with her identities; do we even know her “real” name?
2. One of the repeated images in this text is experimentation. Where does this occur? What does “experiment” mean to you? In this text? What ideas in the text seem related to experimentation, and why? Look these words up in the OED, or in Johnson’s eighteenth-century Dictionary of the English Language. What useful historical senses do they have?
3. Of what class is Fantomina? Beauplaisir? How is class explored in the text? Keep in mind that possession is often associated with class division, as are labor and work.
4. What role does masquerade play in this text? How does it seem to function? Note that a “masquerade” is also an event, a form of leisure entertainment particular to the eighteenth century.
5. What is the role of the embedded letters (another level of discourse) in Fantomina?
6. What tone does the narrator seem to take towards Fantomina? Towards the events that unfold?
7. When does Fantomina’s mother show up in the text, and what effect does that have? Where is she throughout? Where is Fantomina’s father?
8. Under what circumstances does Fantomina go into labor, and what effect does that have? What is the sex of her child, and why?
9. How does the fiction end? Does the text seem to encourage us to “read” the ending in a particular way, or are there complications, questions? After reading the ending, go back to the beginning—do you learn anything new about the opening?
10. Where, ultimately, does power—class-based, gendered, and so on—seem to reside in the text? How does the action of the plot and/or the narrator’s take on the events she retells confirm or complicate that location of power?
11. Haywood’s fictions were immensely popular in the early 18th century; she and Daniel Defoe were the two bestsellers of the period. What do you think might have made her work so interesting to early modern readers?

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