Hugh M. McGuire
English 226
Dr. Coronado
November 25, 2014
The
Diaries of Anson W. Buttles
My
father, who attended college in the 1970’s, has told me that the books and
poems for his American literature courses were chosen on the basis of what some
people (mostly men, mostly white) thought were great works of literature. Their
literary greatness was the primary factor in their inclusion; some other works
were chosen because they contributed specifically to the American experience.
The most preferred works were those that combined both criteria. Out of them, America created a three-step
narrative that began with the arrival of Europeans, who looked to their old
world for their cultural ideals. Then followed the emersonian reaction that
called for a particularly American literature. Paul Douglass puts it another
way: “Those who have been recently ‘canonized’ like Emerson and Fennimore
Cooper, stood at the head of a list to which later writers and thinkers would
be added, like rings on the great trunk of the American cultural tree. They
preserved and extended the wished-for tradition” (26). Finally, in the rubric
that my father was taught, American literature, with its own voice, became the
dominant tradition in world literature.
The curriculum of
those 1970’s American Literature courses was exclusionary, as the contents
pages of my father’s copy of The American
Tradition in Literature, 3rd Edition makes plain (Bradley
v-xii). As college English majors, students in that decade were not taught
Phyllis Wheatley, slave narratives or captivity narratives. There was no
discussion of Life in the Iron Mills. In the nearly 800 pages of The
American Tradition, Elizabeth Bradstreet is the only woman whose work is
given credibility.
American
Literature courses are more inclusive today. Wheatley is there and so are the
slave and captivity narratives. Native American poems often show up as well.
And the story of American Literature is no longer the three steps to world
literary domination.
However, some thing is still missing from
American Literature courses. Jefferson, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville and
Whitman are still 19th century male masters, along with their
comrade Emily Dickenson, and the expansion to include narratives of the
marginalized, but where are the other people who lived America. If students of American literature are to
understand the contexts from which captivity narratives differ – and slave
narratives differ – students need to see and read pieces comparable to those
other narratives. It is misleading in
some way to read Emily Dickenson beside “Life in Iron Mills” and it is also
illuminating. But something equally
illuminating might be reading the memoirs of an everyday American who is
earnest but not necessarily as clever or deep as Herman Melville. Such a man is Anson Buttles and his
interesting memoir.
Anson Buttles was
born early in 1821 in Pennsylvania. His
family moved to Wisconsin, and he lived most of his life in Fox Point, a
township just outside of Milwaukee. Mr.
Buttles’ consistent source of income was from farming, however, he also worked
for the city of Milwaukee as Town Clerk, County Surveyor, Justice of the Peace,
School Clerk, and County Superintendent for the County of Milwaukee in Fox
Point, Wisconsin. His life thus was a
combination of rural and urban existence and therefore it is not a life that is
easily categorized. What unifies his
life is that banality is key.
From the years
1856 right up to his death in 1906 he kept a diary. And every day’s entry is part of an
accumulation of the trite things of life that add up to a happy, satisfying
existence. But Buttles also saw and noted a variety of current and historical
events. He did so in two ways. Sometimes he merely noted the anniversary of an
event from the old world or he lamented certain current events. In some
instances he laments us on current events such as the Lady Elgin steamboat
disaster which occurred on September 8, 1860. There are other instances when he
mentions historical events in passing for example on February 8, 1860 he simply
says” Mary Queen of Scots killed 1587” (Buttles )
What this
combination shows is that whilst living the life of a rural urban fellow his
sense of culture isn’t blindly American the way Emerson and the leading writers
of the day wanted to be. He’s still
stuck in the past of Europe so what we’re seeing is a man of the times
responding with the education he received to things that we now look upon in
other ways.
Works Cited
Bradley, Sculley et al. The American Tradition in Literature.
New York: Norton, 1967.
Print.
Douglass, Paul. “Loose Canon on the
Deck: Curriculum Wars of the Nineties.“ Pacific
Coast
Philology 24.1-2(1991):26-34. Print.
McGuire, Patrick. Personal
Interview. 13 October 2014.
Letter PDF Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hOF89Z9Ykyh1evoCD4R8TSOiAo6QZ48oyUNAH7aI9E4/edit?usp=sharing
No comments:
Post a Comment