Maybe its just me but it would seem nearly impossible to write a paper on Charlotte Temple using anything other than the New Historical approach, if we have two options to choose from. Writing about Rowson’s novel with the approach of New Criticism would lead to a paper no longer than a page or so, since the narrator tells the reader everything and there is very little for the reader to try and analyze or figure out. Not only does Rowson tell us exactly what the characters are thinking and feeling but exactly how we should feel about them.
The Tempest, on the other hand, could be approached with either criticism. One could simply look at the text and ignore everything else, or one could approach it with an historical persepective by examining the role that British colonalism plays.
Just trying to work a few things out.
This is a fascinating post, Drew. I’d like you to think more deeply about why a New Critical approach seems incompatible with a novel like Charlotte Temple. In particular, I’d like you to rethink your implicit claim above that this incompatibility has more to do with defects in Rowson’s text (“that there is very little for the reader to try and analyze or figure out”) than it does with the assumptions and biases of New Criticism itself.
As I discussed in my lecture during our first day on Charlotte Temple, the feminist criticism of the latter twentieth-century often had to fight through New Critical assumptions about the “unity” and “coherence” of literary texts in order to make a case for significance and value of women’s writing — which many critics dismissed as overly obvious or mawkish (please note: I’m not suggesting that you were trying to dismiss women’s writing — merely that your argument bears certain similarities to those used to dismiss it). As Terry Eagleton points out in “The Rise of English,” the New Critics perceived poetry as “opaque to rational enquiry as the Almighty himself: it existed as a self-enclosed object, mysteriously intact in its own unique being” (40). This entailed a separation of the poem from both its authors and its readers — an approach that, as Eagleton remarks, “went hand in hand with disentangling it from any social or historical context. . . . literature was a solution to social problems, not a part of them; the poem must be plucked free of the wreckage of history and hoisted into a sublime space above it” (42).
As feminist critics have sought to return our attention to nineteenth-century sentimental literature, they have made a number of powerful arguments:
* That the aesthetic values prized by the literary scholars who have determined which pieces of literature are “great” or “classic” are not transcendental or transhistorical, but instead are derived from the biases, assumptions, and socio-historical contexts of the very critics making those determinations (New Criticism, as a movement of literary criticism, was dominated by Southern white men);
* That literature generally, and sentimental literature in particular, cannot be separated from its social, historical, and political contexts because sentimental novels were written, at least in part, to alter those social contexts (to criticize, for instance, structures of power that disenfranchised women);
* That, when sentimental literature is considered within its historical context, it becomes clear that the very aspects of that literature that previous critics had deplored (e.g. plainness of style, mawkish sentiment) were, in actuality, not aesthetic defects, but rather important aspects of the “cultural work” that the novels were trying to accomplish.
Jane Tompkins put forward many of these arguments in a book entitled Sensational Designs. In her introduction, Tompkins wrote:
Tompkins argues here for a new way of understanding literature, one that redefines what the literary work is and how it should be taken into account. She might argue, then, that the narrative “obviousness” in Rowson’s novel was there for an important reason: Rowson was trying to “provoke a desired response” in her readers.
If feminist critics began to revive an interest in nineteenth-century sentimental literature by reconnecting it to its historical contexts, more recent critics have gone a step further, and have sought to claim value for those texts on an aesthetic level. For a recent consideration of many of these issues, you might check out Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “Sentimental Aesthetics,” American Literature 76.3 (Sept. 2004): 495-523.
Thanks for a great post that has brought up a number of intriguing issues.
Comment by Prof. Matt — February 24, 2007 @ 7:48 pm