Well, I made it home safely from Iowa City. Had a great time -- and I have a picture of the University of Iowa's law school. That's one big building, for sure.
As I've been preparing my lecture on literary addresses given at the University of North Carolina in the years before the Civil War, I've been reading Augusta Jane Evans' 1859 novel Beulah -- about an orphan girl in Mobile (it seems, though the town is never quite specified) who struggles with the philosophical questions of her era -- like how much do humans control their own destiny. Beulah's incredibly head-strong, as well as talented, which may tell us about how Evans thinks we can alter our destiny. (By the way, I'm going to talk about Caroline Hentz' time in Chapel Hill at some point. She lived here for a few years while her husband taught French here, before they moved on to Ohio and then some years later to Tuscaloosa! Hentz wrote a novel -- obscure even by the standards of the old South -- that was based in part on her experience here.)
Beulah was written when Evans was 18 years old -- so it may partly be Evans' statement to the world of how much she's read and understands about the contemporary philosophers. Evans drops in lots of references to reading and bookshelves -- and, get this, to the graduation address that Beulah Benton delivers to her female seminary!
Now, I've enjoyed Beulah, though I have to say I don't lavish the praise on it that some have of late. Michael O'Brien uses Beulah in the closing chapter of his magisterial two volume intellectual history of the old South. In some ways a rather odd choice -- to have a young woman, almost a Joan of Arc figure, be the person to anchor such a book is, as with almost everything that O'Brien does, a bold move. I wonder about what that says about the old South that the person we hold up as the capstone of intellectual thought was herself barely out of childhood?
Beulah is a philosophical novel, to be sure. Hey, there's even a discussion of Emerson's Oversoul in there. But it's a southern novel, too -- slaves appear here and there, but only in cameo roles. The book is about such middle class, white southern concerns as family, independence, and evangelical Christianity. Of course, these concerns were by no means limited to the South. However, they were of particular salience to white, middle class southerners of the 1850s.
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Posted by: Neveah | April 07, 2010 at 08:57 AM