Hobomok, by Lydia Maria Child

When I added this book to my list, I was under the impression that it was a captivity narrative gone wrong -- a woman is kidnapped by a savage native and ends up assimilating into his culture. This is not what this book is. It's about 15 chapters of often tedious religious arguments among major and minor characters that drones on and on about how depressing and stressful frontier life was only to kill off the protagonist's fiance near the end of the book only to resurrect him from his ocean grave a few chapters later. The last five or six chapters are the most compelling of the entire book. After Mary finds out that Charles Brown has drowned on a ship in the East Indies, she goes into a state of delirium, marries a longtime family friend Hobomok, the whitest savage around, and, after months of coming to terms with what she did during her grief, actually starts to like Hobomok. We skip over their life together until their son is 2 years old. Hobomok goes out to hunt one day and comes upon none other than Charles Brown who lived, after all. Hobomok is so disgusted with himself for marrying Mary, Charles' woman, that Hobomok runs away to die among strangers, leaving Charles to unproblematically swoop in, marry Mary (Hobomok conveniently signed a divorce decree before he left), and raise little Hobomok Jr, who we learned has been named Charles Hobomok Conant all along. And that's exactly how it goes down: Charles pops the question the same night Mary finds out Hobomok has basically sacrificed himself for her, Mary's a little annoyed, but she says yes, they get married, and little Charles H. Conant Jr goes to Oxford to study when he grows up (seriously -- that's the last paragraph).

I feel disgusted. It's all so white-washed and openly racist.

On the bright side, there's lots of trauma, and as I said, the book does drone on and on about early American trauma. It's complicated, as the trauma of the story's 1600 setting comes to us via a male narrator who has read a much longer, much more tediously detailed manuscript and is now summarizing it for us. It was published in 1824 anonymously as by "An American" who everyone assumed to be male.

Interesting stuff about the difference between male grief, which is silenced and sequestered, and female grief, which is more or less derangement no matter how she plays it. The scene where Mary discovers Charles' death  and the scene where Mary's father finds out she didn't die, but that she instead married Hobomok, are awesome and memorable. I think LMC could have picked up at around chapter 15 and expanded from there. I'm not sure at this point why I needed the first 3/4 of the book except to establish Hobomok and Charles' positions next to the family, the interrelations of the townspeople, the fear with which people lived their daily lives and traveled, etc.

Comps proposal free write

Matt Chandler, a pastor I used to love to listen to when I loved Jesus, said once (and once was enough to sear it into my memory): “I want to chase down all the voices in my head to find out which ones are liars.” Psychoanalysis. The “chasing down” of these voices is a deep, penetrative, intellectual activity that asks much of minds and bodies, bodies and minds. Who’s willing to give enough time and effort? Who’s capable of it? How do we recognize a person who has chased down all the voices in her head to find out which ones are liars?

I study text. I always like to say “I study language,” because since starting this PhD program, I feel like that’s what I’ve done. I’ve been so enamored with and captivated by the ideas I’ve learned that sometimes, I sit in front of my computer for hour on end studying Netflix’s generous offerings, offering them my time in exchange for some culture to analyze. That’s cut it in the past, when, when my mind wasn’t engrossed in a book, I had no one to small talk with (or close to no one, there were phone friends), so the TV became my go-to “small talk.” A way for me to monitor the voices in my head as they come forward to respond to the program I’m watching. A way for me to learn what it is that I’m thinking as I think about what I’m thinking about what I’m thinking about. I somehow need to channel some of that energy into a comprehensive final proposal that explains what I want to study and why I want to study it.

Basically, my field list—the list which creates my primary canon—is all nineteenth-century American Literature. I feel that it’s underdeveloped at this point because I haven’t yet read any of the literary or historical criticism about the literature of the time to know exactly what it is I need to read. I’m thinking of adding some newspapers, magazines, and other periodical literature of the time to the list that I could explore. Asking LDL: Louisville Courier and all the periodical pubs listed near the back of the Bennett C19 poetry anthology. Late C19/C20 critic Fred Lewis Pattee.

The list, as is, is my attempt to do two things: to sample those texts which were popular during the nineteenth century in America as well as those which were written during that period but that which earned a following much later, and to begin to narrow my focus to texts in the mode of life writing composed just before, during, and after the Civil War and through the Reconstruction era. I want to study diaries, journals, correspondences, and periodical literature within their cultural context and with an eye toward close reading them, via psychoanalytic trauma theory (and here’s where my driving thesis falls flat) to, like, you know, see what they say to me. I guess almost everyone is where I am: they have a great idea what they want to read, but unless they’re extremely deductive, they have no idea what they all say when added up. I guess there’s a way they could have been reading all their primary stuff throughout the last 2 years and are now theoretically informed enough to make a pretty good guess what they’re going to find there…

I digress… so I can weigh myself against others. See what writing teaches us?

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I’m reading them to find out what they don’t say. Abraham and Torok’s cryptonomy theory really sets this into motion: they say that there are phantom words which signal to the close reader/analyst the stranger lurking within the Other. The phantom inside the Other that even the Other doesn’t know is there. I’m not claiming to know how to do that exactly, so I will reread (or in most cases, rereread and rerereread) Freud and many who has followed him to see how they conduct the business of reading each other through and into the texts they read. I’ll hope to continue studying the process of how readers are reading one another and the situations around them, intuitively understanding that it is through interacting within this dynamic web of voices that my voices will begin to “make sense.” That’s when I’ll be able to write a dissertation proposal. All this in between is learning to write that diss prop. Srsly.

I also include several texts which I believe will help me situate myself as a twenty-first century reader reading nineteenth-century texts (and bodies) through a primarily twentieth-century lens. The anachrony of simply reading that sentence induces vertigo.

Because much of the popular life writing of the time was written by African American slaves or former slaves, both lists take an active interests in writings from and about both white and black authors without delineating them as such (except in this preface, and then merely to explain what others might call an oversight if I were to leave it out). They were, at that time, seen very differently, and perhaps are still segregated, even if only by one of those voices inside my head. But for my purposes, I want to try, as much as is possible, to read them all as humans writing trauma. Gendered, raced, and classed issues will be situated against trauma rather than against the traditional hierarchies imposed upon them by the era and by so many scholars since then. Slavery was traumatic; still is. But comparing the trauma of slavery to the trauma of restrictive gender controls on a queer person or on the atrocities of war experienced by nurses in Civil War hospitals is like comparing apples to cars. To say one is “worse” than another legitimizes one as justifiably and recognizably traumatic while the other is relegated to less-than. Each are traumatic in their own right, and to the persons experiencing them and reliving them on paper, on a scale from one to ten, were we to ask our witnesses, subjectively they’d report that their trauma was 10/10. Do I need to justify why I’m not necessarily studying “racial trauma” or “queer trauma” or “gender trauma,” or can it suffice to say that many different traumata work in the same way and can therefore be “grouped” for the sake of study under the ideology of trauma rather than the triumvirate race/class/gender ideology critique system?

There are several texts on my list that are simply dead white male canonical, texts I still haven’t studied from Poe, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Alcott that anyone calling themselves an expert in C19 should have under their belt. Ditto with some from the secondary text list, such as the now-classic Imagined Communities by Anderson Benedict, Revolution and the Word by Cathy Davidson, and Sensational Designs by Jane Tompkins, to name a few. Texts I’ve heard quoted and name-dropped in almost every grad lit course I’ve ever taken. You can’t call yourself a serious student of American literature if you haven’t read The Puritan Origins of the American Self, for instance.

Trauma theory is much the same: I have several canonical works that any serious student in trauma theory should have read. I’m reading Freud, LaPlanche, Abraham and Torok, and Deleuze psychoanalytically as a basis for trauma theory. Then reading broadly in trauma theory with the likes of Caruth, LaCapra, Felman, Laub. I stretch the category of “trauma theory” a bit by including within it such authors as Foucault, Barthes, and perhaps Sontag. It feels a bit deficient to me still because it doesn’t yet have any C18 and C19 philosophers that I could read as both primary and secondary text to fill out my knowledge of how the C19 thinkers were thinking. I don’t know a lot about who they might have been influenced by except for maybe German metaphysics, Kant, Hegel. So I’m completely deficient there. I’ll ask Rachman, Watts, and Arch asap.

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott (1868)

I mostly listened to this book (and 1/3 of Good Wives) through the free Librivox.org dramatic reading. But I did read a few chapters alongside the dramatic reading and a few chapters on my own. I loved the dramatic reading. The woman who read "Jo" and the narrator was a really great reader, and besides the guy who read for Laurie, whose voice is a bit nasal for my liking, all the primary character actors--those reading Beth, Amy, Meg, Marmee, Hannah, and the father--were pretty good and believable (for a free recording by non-professional readers; had I paid for this and been told it was a dramatic reading, I'd ask for my money back).

Quick summary: Sometimes feeling more like a short story collection, this episodic novel follows the lives of four sisters, their parents, and their live-in nanny, told largely through the perspective of the 2nd-youngest's, Josephine (only once or twice in the text), more commonly "Jo." The larger story arc is that the father is off to war while his daughters go about the business of growing up with the help of their mother, Hannah their servant who seems more like a matronly aunt or unassuming grandmother. A neighbor boy, Laurence, "Laurie," hangs out quite a bit and becomes fellow-friends with the tomboy Jo. The father, away at war, gets injured and is on the edge of death, so the mother goes to him to nurse him back to health; meanwhile, the eldest, Meg, meets (and eventually falls in love with and marries) Laurie's tutor, Mr. Brooks. Beth contracts a serious illness (typhoid?) and is bed-ridden by the time Laurie sneaks and calls her mother back (Hannah forbade the four girls to send for the mother, fearing Marmee would think Hannah couldn't take care of things while she was away). All the while, Jo is writing short stories, working up the courage to submit them to someone other than her family, submitting stories, and finally getting paid large sums of money to write for newspapers. The father recovers; Beth recovers. Meg gets engaged. Everyone's happy. The curtain closes on the little women in the living room, lounging, not fashionably, but comfortably, on the settees and sofas in their drab family home, reveling in the afterglow of all good things.

From what I can tell of the next book, which I accidentally "read" as I drove back from Kentucky, Meg gets married and has twins, Beth dies, Laurie goes off to college, and Jo pursues her writing career.

LMA is as funny and witty as ever, and while I know most of the time this is considered to be more of a children's book, I found it to be incredibly compelling to listen to and engage with. Her sense of characterization is unparalleled. I really feel like I know the three older girls, especially Jo, and I get a strong sense of the way Jo sees her parents and Hannah. She does this by shifting the POV throughout, giving us third-person omniscient chapters that follow Meg or Beth instead of through Jo -- who likely doesn't actually tell any more of the story than the others do... I don't know: I listened to most of this, so the woman narrating the story was the same woman who voice-acted the part of "Jo," implying that the narrator is Jo, and, on my first reading, I'd say I pretty much agree. We get the overall impression that Jo is telling this story, even when we're inside Meg's mind, for example. It might also have something to do with Jo's (a)vocation: writing. We get the feeling that this is just another of Jo's stories that she passes around to her family/captive audience--that as readers we've come a "little woman."

In terms of genre, I've already had difficulty choosing a side between episodic and composite novel, but the text also accepts labels like diary/journal in some places, correspondence in others. The narrator of the text dubs it a "domestic drama." It's intertextual, not just in that it references other texts popular during the CW, like Warner's Wide, Wide World, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, but also in that there are chapters where the four girls literally reenact scenes from Pilgrim's Progress, and understanding some of the irony of Alcott's stories requires an understanding of the Civil War, sentimental/domestic fiction, the romance genre so popular at the time, novels of manners. I find it fascinating that years after the war ended, LMA decides to set her "children's story" inside a civil war. A bildungsroman for little women with a multigenre platform that screams, "why choose when you can have it all?" And in the end, they really do have it all: they're all together, happy, reminiscing on romantic pasts and bright futures, faces wreathed in sunlight, eyes and hearts glowing with love for one another.

I don't know if LMA put the ironic fly in the ointment of this idyllic ending or if that's my own cynical transference, but I have a hard time reading it without cringing a little at the picturesque quality of its perfection. Everyone does what they're supposed to do -- according to God and country -- and all ends well. (I realize it's not the case when you tack on Good Wives, but this is where Alcott ends the story, and so my analysis ends here to retain the distinction between the two.)

Hospital Sketches, Louisa May Alcott, 1863

Alcott's Hospital Sketches is, in the Bedford edition edited by Alice Fahs, a 6-chaptered memoir of Alcott's two months spent nursing for the Union Army in Georgetown, outside DC, during the Civil War. I add the disclaimer because Fahs mentions in her introduction that the sixth "chapter" is actually a letter tacked on after the publication of the original five-chaptered Hospital Sketches. And it shows. I didn't shudder or cringe at anything Alcott wrote in those first five chapters even though one of them, "A Night," describes the slow, sentimental death of her beloved John. But in that final letter, the entire tone of the book changes from tragicomedy, dark and gritty, to the grotesque, all but describing the sounds arms make when they're being sawed off by a rougher-than-necessary Dr. P.

Chapter one, "Obtaining Supplies," covers how it is that Alcott made up her mind to (all but) join the Army as a nurse. It establishes a tone of playful cheeriness that pervades the novel? memoir? journal? -- especially in light of difficulties, such as all the gender-related obstacles she faces when trying to get a rail pass from Concord, MA, to Washington, DC, as well as all the other permissions a woman of her time needs to travel alone.

Chapter two, "A Forward Movement," recounts her trip to DC and then onto the hospital, which she dubs The Hurley-Burley House, with stops in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore along the way. Her first view of Washington, DC, "a spacious place, its visible magnitude quite took my breath away, and of course I quoted Randolph's expression, 'a city of magnificent distances,' as I suppose every one does when they see it," so squared with my own experience that, had I not been already endeared to LMA, she would have had me right there. We also see quite a bit more development of her alter ego, Tribulation Periwinkle, in this chapter, whom I believe LMA uses to call attention to the sentimental irony of her usually gendered or classed situations -- as well as to contribute to the sense that LMA is more aware of what's going on than a simple retelling would allow.

Chapter three, "A Day," takes us through a day-in-the-life of a quirky, intellectual, sarcastic Army "Nurse" -- and we begin to see just how loose a term that actually is, as the methods used in these hospitals seem so illogical and foreign to a germaphobe like me or any contemporary reader.

Chapter four, the most sentimental and, appropriately, dark chapter, is "A Night," in which she recalls the night that John dies. This chapter is fascinating for a number of reasons. It's the first time in the book that she actually addresses PTSD (though not called that at the time) outright in the fevers and reactions that soldiers reli(e)ving the war produces. It relies on the very dichotomy between woman and mother than the nineteenth century is so good at keeping separated in LMA's transformation from maternal caretaker to man-sensitive woman then back to maternal--even grandmotherly--caretaker. And it ends with two men kissing each other goodbye, "tenderly as women." Chock-full of intimacy, but Fahs contends that, when compared to other first-hand accounts of John's death, we find that LMA actually over-sentimentalizes the scene by adding the final goodbyes series and by playing up the homoeroticism of the final farewell between John and Ned.

Chapter five, "Off Duty," explains that LMA was relieved of her duty after contracting an illness that killed another woman working in her ward then details her return to her family home, but not before one last action scene wherein LMA rushes from room to room of the hospital in order to save a dying soldier's life (actually, it's a sardonic parody of the hospital's poor organization and implementation of care, a recurring theme in the narrative). It's remarkable, still, for its inclusion of LMA's brief encounter with a black family and the responses given by those around her to LMA's genuine concern for and acceptance of them. The chapter also details some of LMA's duties after she was no longer in contact with the bodies as well as what she enjoyed paying attention to now that her mind wasn't constantly occupied with wounds and dying.

The postscripted chapter, as I hinted at earlier, goes back through her time in a hurry but adds to it some gruesome details she left out in the first, original five chapters. I get the impression that she's been asked so much about those details that she felt compelled to, from the perspective of her alter ego Tribulation Periwinkle, tell the dirty underside of being a nurse... while also taking a backhanded stab at the way things were done at the Hurley-Burley House.

This was my first LMA reading, so I'm going to say only that I was surprised by the comedic tone she took up early on and maintained throughout. I'm also intrigued by the adoption of the alter ego, as though she required someone else to shift the responsibility to when things got gruesome or disgusting or plain ridiculous. Suggests to me a kind of splitting that she might have observed others doing, maybe her (then) larger-than-life father (whom she would come to overshadow in fame and fortune, as she details in the final letter). That's me psychoanalyzing LMA through her book, but if it's a memoir, I'm welcome to. Even if it's fiction, I can if I want. :)